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CULTURE

Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Gorilla
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Rabble-rousing ... better than vitamins

By Katherine Stapp

New York, New York, Jan. 17 (IPS)— Taking to the streets to protest can help relieve stress and boost self-esteem, says a recent study done in England.

Joining street demonstrations creates a feeling of empowerment, concluded University of Sussex lecturer John Drury after in-depth interviews with nearly 40 activists from a variety of backgrounds.

Drury, a lecturer in social psychology, focused on labor strikes, mass protests and social movements, often known as “collective action.”

“Many published activist accounts refer to feelings of encouragement and confidence emerging from experiences of collective action,” said Drury. “But it is not always clear how and why such empowerment occurs, so we aimed to explain what factors within a collective action event contribute most to such feelings.”

Participants recounted more than 160 experiences of collective action, including demonstrations, foxhunt sabotages, anti-capitalist street parties, environmental direct actions, and industrial mass pickets.

“The main factors contributing to a sense of empowerment were the realization of the collective identity, the sense of movement potential, unity and mutual support within a crowd,” said Drury during an email interview.

“However, what was also interesting was the centrality of emotion in the accounts. Empowering events were almost without exception described as joyous occasions,” he added.

“Participants experienced a deep sense of happiness and even euphoria in being involved in protest events. Simply recounting the events in the interview itself brought a smile to the faces of the interviewees.”

Psychologists have become increasingly interested in the role of positive experiences and emotions not just in making people feel good but also in promoting psychological and physical health.

Uplifting experiences are associated with a variety of indicators of well-being, such as speed of physiological recovery from illness, ability to cope with physical stressors and the reduction of pain, anxiety and depression.

“Collective actions, such as protests, strikes, occupations and demonstrations, are less common in the United Kingdom than they were perhaps 20 years ago,” said Drury.

“The take-home message from this research therefore might be that people should get more involved in campaigns, struggles and social movements, not only in the wider interest of social change, but also for their own personal good.”

The interviewees were activists from a range of backgrounds. Many had participated in recent “anti-capitalist” events, such as the Jun. 18 Carnival Against Capital, the anti-G8 demonstration in Genoa in 2001, and the recent Maydays in London.

Drury said most had a background in direct action, although some came from a more traditional socialist background.

“Collective action is a form of social therapy, not in the office or as a paid employed professional, but in the street with people sharing the same conditions in the real world,” said James Petras, a long-time activist and author who recently spent two years working with the unemployed movement in Argentina.

“Social movements, particularly the popular assemblies and unemployed workers’ movement, provide a framework for transforming individual private problems into collective social response,” added Petras in an essay published last month by the web-based magazine Rebellion.

“Demonstrations around programatic demands provide direction and purpose, helping to overcome the sense of impotence, isolation and anomie,” he said.

These sentiments were echoed by other organizers in the environmental movement.

“I’m an activist and I haven’t taken Ritalin (a drug often prescribed for hyperactivity or attention deficit disorder) since 1994,” said John Watterberg, who works with the Fund for Public Interest Research in New York. “My mom is a conservative Christian and she takes Paxil (an anti-depressant).”

“Activism keeps you young,” he said. “Maintaining my mental health is one of the reasons it’s imperative that I go to Washington on Saturday.”

On Saturday, Jan. 18, hundreds of thousands of anti-war activists are planning to converge on the White House to urge US President George Bush not to invade Iraq.

Taylor Black, who also plans to go to Washington, recently participated in protests in New York City against oil giant Exxon-Mobil — which has aggressively lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gases — at which several activists were arrested.

“It was my first direct action,” Black said. “It was really invigorating. I definitely feel like I added two or three more years to my life.”

Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla

By Jonathan Slyk

Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla by Ann Hansen (Between the Lines, 720 Bathurst St, Suite 404, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2R4, Canada, www.btlbooks.com; and AK Press, 674-A 23rd St, Oakland, CA 94612-1163) 493 pp. $19.95 paper.

From the opening pages describing the spectacular arrest on a winding mountain highway to the finely-grained portraits of daily existence within the claustrophobic world of underground sabotage, this sprawling adventure reads at times so much like a plot lifted from an espionage thriller that it’s hard to imagine such remarkable events occurring in a young, white, idealistic woman’s life. But for the author, living the dream as an urban guerrilla was anything but glamorous, even though there were occasional thrills and moments of triumph.

In the early 1980s, Ann Hansen was part of a west coast anarchist group that would go on to engage in the most notorious anti-authoritarian armed resistance in Canadian history. Calling itself Direct Action, the five-member cell began a D.I.Y. lifestyle that included shoplifting, dumpster diving and auto theft before stepping up to what culminated in the bombings of both a B.C. Hydro substation on Vancouver Island and a cruise missile guidance system manufacturing plant in Toronto. This was back in the days when direct action meant something more than giant street puppets or going limp at demos. A time when punk, peace, anti-nuclear and environmental protests all converged in a way not dissimilar to today’s anti-globalization movement. The exploits of Hansen, Brent Taylor, Doug Stewart, Gerry Hannah and Julie Belmas, later dubbed “The Squamish Five” by the media (after the nearby logging town where they were eventually arrested), reached national cult status by the time of their capture and subsequent trial, but within a few short years had receded into relative obscurity. All received lengthy prison sentences. Hansen, the eldest, got life and did seven years of hard time before being paroled.

Expecting a tough-talking, streetwise ex-con, I was somewhat surprised to hear a warm voice sounding like a children’s librarian on the other end of the phone. “What do you think of the cover?” she asked me nervously. “Do you think it’s, you know, too similar to those planes and buildings in New York?” As fate would have it, the first copies of Direct Action landed on the Toronto publisher’s desk the morning of September 11. Not surprisingly, the book’s release was delayed for a month. Also previously receiving the manuscript were three of the other four former members—who gave their approval. Hysteria over terrorism and the current fear surrounding dissent have kept publicity and speaking engagements low profile.

Several weeks after our initial conversation, at an all-day grill in downtown Vancouver, Ann Hansen and I are wolfing down breakfast and talking about politics, running a small business and the book that finally spells out what really happened all those years ago. Hansen, who by law cannot receive money from the book, says the writing experience was cathartic. “When I got out of prison, my whole political identity was disintegrated. It took me ten years just to recover emotionally. It was only after my cabinetmaking business ended, when I was mentally more free, that I started to think about that period in my life again.”

The memoir, she says, was intended as both an historical document and a cautionary tale for would-be guerrillas. Yet it can also serve as a basis for discussion around tactics (which are explicitly detailed), since it highlights the uneasy relationship between pacifists and more militant activists and discloses some of the righteous condemnation that often divides the wider milieu in general.

The sense of time and place in British Columbia are accurately conveyed, as is most of the political dialogue, reflecting a local anarchist scene that was strongly influenced by eco-feminism. Direct Action’s critique of civilization was at least as sophisticated as any other of the time, which, considering it was largely an intuitive grasp of Leviathan by individuals in their early twenties, and Perlman’s classic work Against His-Story had yet to come out, is a tribute to their nascent understanding. Access to thousands of pages of police wiretap and bug surveillance transcripts allowed Hansen to literally recreate verbatim much of the psycho-dynamics among the group members, producing a slice of reality that is dramatic without being maudlin. And the narrative device of interspersing the cops’ perspectives, whose characters are fictionalized, helps to heighten the sense of jeopardy. My only problem with the book is it seems overly drawn-out, with the entire last quarter devoted to preparation for a Brink’s robbery, and no less than three pages elsewhere concerning a haircut at a beauty school. Meandering details tend to make this otherwise extraordinary and intensely moving account drag in places. “But that’s what our lives were like toward the end,” explains Hansen. “I wanted to describe the action, but also those times of monotony and boredom we faced.” The story’s denouement is handled in the epilogue, where, in the sagacious final paragraphs, the author’s own hard-won thoughts on tactics affirm an unwavering militancy.

Written with passion and a fearless honesty, Direct Action will likely set the gold standard for contemporary anarchist memoirs, if not for its superior writing then for its relevance for today’s struggles around globalization, eco-defense and the “war on terrorism.” Reading about the promise and perils of direct action, the personal doubts and the philosophical contradictions reminded me of Derrick Jensen’s poignant line: “Every morning when I wake up, I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” Ambivalence over choosing the pen or the sword is not an uncommon feeling for many of us. Of course it doesn’t have to be either/or, and our gift is that Ann Hansen—a real life warrior princess—has now done both.

Source: Anarchy Magazine

BRIEF REVIEWS

BOOKS

Collective Liberation On My Mind
By Chris Crass (Kersplebedeb)
I’ll come clean right off: Chris Crass is a friend and collaborator, and I’m not an objective observer of his life and work, both of which I unabashedly admire. Chris calls me a mentor, but it goes both ways. Furthermore, I wrote a blurb that appears on the back of Collective Liberation On My Mind, the collection of seven essays by Chris, published in pamphlet form by Kersplebedeb. The blurb reads:
“This collection of essays by a young anarchist probes the issues of white supremacy and sexism as he observes them not only in the society at large but also in our social justice movements and in himself. Rarely do we find anyone dealing equally with race and gender from an anti-racist, feminist point of view, least of all a young, white male, but this is precisely what Chris Crass does. The essay on African-American lesbian feminist Barbara Smith and the interview with Chicana feminist and veteran movement organizer, Elizabeth Martínez, take interlocking issues beyond the familiar, progressive rhetoric.”
I want to go further in recommending his work as essential for every activist.
Chris Crass, now in his late twenties, has been engaged in anarchist organizing since his high school and junior college days on the border of South Central Los Angeles and infamous (for its rabid white supremacy and reactionary Americanism) Orange County. Soon Chris joined Food not Bombs, to which he dedicated his considerable energies and intelligence for eight years. Currently, he works with the Direct Action Network, the Colours of Resistance, and the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop.
The essays in Collective Liberation On My Mind focus on the past three years since the Battle of Seattle during which Chris has evolved into a skilled anti-racist activist, organizer, and trainer.
Each of these concise and jargonless essays is six to eight pages in length, except the final one, “Looking to the Light of Freedom: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement and Thoughts on Anarchist Organizing,” which is an ambitious 18-page essay that also serves as a summation of lessons from the period 1999-2002.
Above all, these essays reflect a passionate and determined, yet genuinely modest and generous, young thinker and activist with a great gift for writing. Chris has taken the slogan, “The Personal is Political,” of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement that was implemented by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the later 1960s, and applied it to today’s social, economic, political, and cultural realities, and the result is a powerful tract reminiscent of the classic anarchists’ offerings. (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Clamor)

Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century
Edited by Herb Boyd (South End Press)
Harold Cruse pointed out in his controversial volume The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that Africans in America suffer from what he called historical discontinuity. Simply put, Black people continue to make the same mistakes over the generations.
Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century is a great attempt to address the issue of historical discontinuity. In this 206-page book, Boyd attacks a wide variety of issues confronting Africans in North America and the world. Boyd has assembled a wide variety of activists, scholars and academics that address the burning questions of the Black liberation struggle.
Boyd’s book deals with the issues confronting Africans now. Reparations, hip-hop and be-bop, the prison industrial complex, cyberspace, Black feminism, the role of the Black Radical Congress, the Black church, and the scourge of HIV/AIDS that is decimating the African community in the United States. The work features a who’s who in Black America: Amiri Baraka, Salih Booker, Todd Burroughs, Yvonne Bynoe, Ron Daniels, Angela Y. Davis, Bill Fletcher, Jennifer Hamer, bell hooks, Joy James, Clarence Lang, Julianne Malveaux, Manning Marable, Sonia Sanchez, Paul Scott, Johnita Scott-Obadele, Charles Simmons, Alice Tait and Phill Wilson make contributions to Race and Resistance.
This book should be recommended reading for intergenerational study groups. It provides powerful political ammunition for the young and not so young — the hip-hoppers and the be-boppers — and is a must-read that should be in your library. (Norman Otis Richmond, The Pan-African Research and Documentation Center)

Anarchist Intellectuals, Workers and Soldiers in Portugal’s History
By Joao Freire (Black Rose Books)
This book is a disappointment. It fails as a portrayal of the history of Portuguese anarchism. Rather, it is a snapshot of that movement during its peak (the 1900s to 1930s) and a somewhat unconvincing “sociological analysis” of it, backed up with copious data. Which is a shame, as a book on Portuguese anarchism is sorely needed. However, saying that, the book does present an often fascinating picture of an anarchist movement which rooted itself in working class life and struggle. Unlike Spain, social-democracy dominated the early labor movement. The anarchists successfully undermined this and by the 1920s the main union federation was anarcho-syndicalist in nature with around 90,000 members enrolled in it. This movement had a healthy interest in theory as well as action, with unions regularly discussing not only day to day issues but also revolutionary goals such as the socialization of industry. Needless to say, similar discussions took place in the substantial number of anarchist groups and federations that existed. What strikes the reader is that the Portuguese movement got its strength by applying its ideas in practice.
The unions and their struggles were organized in libertarian fashion by mass assemblies and bottom-up federations. The anarchist groups, like the unions, federated from below upwards, organically growing wider and wider as time went on. Both the unions and the anarchist groups spent time creating centers, libraries, schools, and other forms of mutual aid.
Sadly, the book is badly translated. While most of the text can be understood, sometimes the more turgid “sociological analysis” can be unreadable. Some editing would not have gone amiss, and not only to correct the poor translation. Moreover, it desperately needs an introductory essay to place the main text in context. For example, while numerous insurrections and strikes are mentioned they are not discussed in detail. This means that critical events such as the 1934 insurrection against the fascist regime are mentioned in passing, with no attempt to discuss what happened. For a book claiming to be a history, such an oversight is astounding.
This lack of historic context makes the author’s conclusions seem even more superficial than they already are. As the book ignores the repression of the resistance to fascism, it ends up blaming the decline of anarchist influence on anarchism’s inability to “learn from experience.” Incredibly, the possibility that the repression after the defeated insurrection of 1934 together with 40 years of fascism may have played a role in this decline is not discussed.
What strikes the reader is that an anarchism that is not rooted in working class life and struggle is doomed to wither and, worse, become theoretically bankrupt. At the peak of its influence, Portuguese anarchism was capable of organizing an extensive network of organizations, social projects and class conflicts. By 1987, “anarchists” in Portugal could write that “the ‘perfect society’ does not exist, fortunately, since it would probably be one of total oppression for the individuals. Therefore we do not believe in any type of ‘anarchist society.’” How a once mighty movement had fallen!
This book is for those with the patience to handle the bad translation, who are not seeking a history of Portuguese anarchism but rather want a book which discusses it within its social context. Sadly, anarchism in Portugal still awaits a book to do its struggles justice. (IM, Black Flag #222 Reviews, A-Infos News Service)

AUDIO

Five Days Over Seattle: An Audio Document of Free Radio Station Y2WTKO
Cascadia Media Collective (www.cascadiamedia.org)
On Nov. 29, 1999, pirate radio station Y2WTKO took to the airwaves from a treetop perch on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Its goal was to broadcast a street’s eye view of the protests being staged against the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle.
Y2WTKO vanished from the radio dial five days later, just steps ahead of the FCC and other federal types. What it left behind amounts to a time capsule, a heady mix of rants, music, opinion, and news that captures the experience of a major city shutting down under the combined voices of people determined to be heard.
Under the circumstances, the surprise is not the quality of Five Days Over Seattle, but that the team of guerrilla broadcasters managed to pull it off at all. There are only a couple of spots where pops, crackles, and other glitches threaten to completely obscure the speakers. Most of the activists were experienced hands from Free Radio Cascadia in Eugene, OR. The CD’s liner notes could be used as a how-to manual for those who would like to duplicate their efforts.
In the notes, “Miscreant” described turning herself into a human broadcasting station disguised as a member of the press corps. A dual band VFH/UHF transceiver dangled under her long skirt while a flexible whip antenna poked up under her shirt to her armpit. Her shirt also concealed a tiny microphone and a push-to-talk button. The slick vinyl backpack contained another antenna made especially for the occasion out of scratch materials.
Across Puget Sound, another team perched 65 feet up a hemlock tree. From their hilltop roost, crammed with transmitter, electronics, and survival gear, they pumped out a signal that could be heard as far south as Tacoma and into the eastern suburbs. The only serious shutdown came not from federal agents, but from Mother Nature, who hammered the activists with enough high wind and driving rain to set a veteran treesitter’s nerves on edge.
Five Days Over Seattle is more collage than narrative timeline. “Monsanto,” a toe-tapping ditty about genetic manipulation and corporate profits, is sandwiched between a DJ skewering the mainstream coverage of police actions and a press conference with the mayor and police chief. A KING 5 news report describing police tactics to move people off the streets is overdubbed with the refrain, “rubber bullets.”
The overall mix parallels the daily jumble of police action, political speech, and protest marches that brought together locked out steelworkers with dreadlocked puppeteers.
When the station lost contact with its own crew, it shifted to live reports by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, and shortwave news broadcasts on Radio Havana Cuba and Radio for Peace International. Anarchists, whose legitimacy was alternately dismissed or ignored in mainstream coverage, are included in the range of anti corporate globalization voices coming together.
If the collection has a shortcoming, it’s the lack of international voices. Protesters converged on Seattle from around the world. My clearest memory involves a group of Korean farmers in white shirts and ties holding up their banner in support of French farm activist Jose Bove. (Irene Svete, Clamor)