acts that seek to contest and cast doubts on the way that power works under current arrangements, and especially on those aspects of it directed at calling capitalist property relations into question. I do not look at the striking increase in right-wing violence, or at the proud tradition of “armed self-defense,” or specifically at anticolonial violence, except to briefly discuss its differences from the subject at hand. Although capitalism and modern settler colonialism have been historically co-constituted and interdependent, they present somewhat different challenges to those trying to contest them. I hope understanding these relatively discrete systems of rule can help us better respond in those complex realities (like the contemporary US) where, in practice, aspects of both nearly always appear tangled together. I do look briefly at those times in the history of social movements when guns have come out into the open, in order to try to figure out why they aren’t doing so now.
Much of this book began as my PhD dissertation, researched and written in 2012–2013. During this time, I interviewed approximately thirty participants from Occupy Oakland and Occupy Seattle in order to help me work through these ideas. I was very active in these movements as well, as what academics euphemistically term a “participant observer.” While I was conducting my research, the FBI was also conducting its own investigation into these same movements and into some of the same episodes I was interested in—such as the 2012 May Day riot in Seattle, which did some $200,000 of damage to the downtown business core. Because of this, I was obliged to carefully avoid asking any specific questions about people’s involvement and also to make all my interviewees completely anonymous. Although some narrative coherence might be lost as a result, I hope the wider personal dramas, struggles, and victories come through the words of the people I spoke with. These things are never experienced individually anyway; therefore, somehow this jumbling strikes me as more faithful to the experience. Given the limited pool of participants in these movements, I was also reluctant to give away much demographic data, regardless of how obviously important intersectionalities of race, gender, sexuality, region, etc. are. I have refrained from mentioning very many identity markers, and only when it seems absolutely necessary to the meaning of the comments. In general, I can attest that those I interviewed were diverse in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, although perhaps less so in terms of class (I am thinking in particular of the large contingent of street kids who were difficult to track down once the Occupy camps were dispersed).
While turning my original research into a book, I was also a very active participant in a number of other movements, such as the Block the Boat actions against Israeli shipping companies and the Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle. Even though I was not conducting “research” as a participant in these movements, I could see that the tendencies I was writing about had only become more pronounced. Examples and extrapolations from these more contemporary struggles found their way into my manuscript in what I think are productive ways, despite the less formal nature of the research.
My goal in this book is not to advocate violence or to prescribe nonviolence; it is, in fact, to move beyond the politically obstructive dichotomy of such prescriptions. If I am successful, we will learn to hesitate when we use these words, to pause until we actually have some idea what we’re talking about—or perhaps until we’ve managed to come up with more helpful terminology. If, as Randall Amster says, “the sum total of people killed or physically injured by anarchists throughout all of recorded history amounts to little more than a good weekend for the empire,” then why are arguments about violence and nonviolence within our movements so acute?2 Why do the stakes seem so high? More often than not, we are not even sure what we’re talking about when we debate nonviolence and rioting. This book, in its small way, hopes to add a bit more clarity to the discussion by helping us understand, when our rioting bodies enter the streets, what they are saying and how successful they are at articulating it.
1 Global Riot Control System Market, 2016–2020, quoted in Nafeez Ahmed, “Defence industry poised for billion dollar profits from global riot ‘contagion’,” Medium.com, May 6, 2016. Accessed June 20, 2016, https://medium.com /insurge-intelligence/defence-industry-poised-for-billion-dollar-profits-from-global-riot-contagion-8fa38829348c#.c3qc3z5ol. All remaining quotes in this paragraph are also from Ahmed’s overview.
2 Randall Amster, Anarchism Today (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 44.
Chapter 1: Why Did It Take So Long for People To Riot?
It’s about power, because capitalism is about a struggle over agency. To live a life of capitalism, for absolutely anyone, is to be perpetually unstable in your own agency…cause there’s this outside structure of money that governs it beyond you. That sort of power play is at the core of the capitalist psyche. Playing with that power is so key…taking it for yourself is so key, because that is in the end the fundamentally anticapitalist thing, is to do something that expands your own agency.… That’s why [these protests] are a threat, because they’re people being like, oh yeah, there’s way more of us than there are of you. And we can do whatever the fuck we want.
—Occupy San Francisco participant3
Sometime in the last decade, the fear broke. Perhaps it was in the strip malls of little Ferguson, Missouri, or Hong Kong’s intersections, or Istanbul’s Gezi Park, or Brazil’s buses. Perhaps it was in a Tunisian fruit market, or on the rooftops of Tehran, or in Athens’s dusty little Exarchia park. The year 2011 alone witnessed the most disruptive wave of contention to occur on a global scale since at least and perhaps before 1968, with uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Israel/Palestine, Greece, Italy, Spain, Chile, the UK, Canada, and nearly every major city in the United States, to name only some. None of these places had experienced such unrest in decades, at least. Not only the number, but also the very character of these uprisings was something new. Lancing the rancid bitterness of generations stricken by suffocating passivity, isolation, and social depression, the relief and rage finally embodied in these global explosions was notable for a vehemence that could sometimes justifiably be called violent. These protests consistently demonstrated an undeniable intensity and confrontational scrappiness, rising up from the love of strangers drawn together in intimate risk and hope. At the same time, with the eventual exceptions of Syria and Libya, the intensity of these revolts was also almost universally nonlethal, on the demonstrators’ side at least. Little love was felt by the insurgents for police and ruling elites, and though their uprisings often went well beyond what has come to be called “nonviolence,” the millions in the streets were still reluctant to take out their rage on the bodies of their opponents. Why? Why were they so consistently violent, at least in some senses, and yet so consistently nonlethal? And why is it that we lack words for this kind of violence, if that’s what it is?
This eruption came seemingly out of nowhere. But this scrappy intensity was long in the making and can be directly ascribed to decades of increased inequality under the policies of neoliberalism.4 The neoliberal era has overseen the greatest unequal redistribution of wealth in human history, and this inequality has been, and remains, an all-pervasive form of violence. As Harvard psychiatrist James Gilligan argues, relative poverty—that is, poverty in the face of wealth, measured by the gap between rich and poor—is not only itself an endemic form of massive structural violence but also the direct cause of more visible forms of violence. Summarizing his findings from three decades studying violence in American prisons, Gilligan states that “structural violence is not only the main form of violence, in the sense that poverty kills far more people (almost all of them very poor) than all the behavioral [individual] violence put together, it is also the main cause of violent behavior. Eliminating structural violence means eliminating relative poverty.”5 So, rather than wondering why recent protests have been so intensely conflictual, one might initially ask why those most affected by neoliberalism’s inequalities remained quiet for so long instead of responding with a violence analogous to that of previous eras. Where was what E. P. Thompson describes as the “moral economy” of riots, as in the eighteenth-century, when citizens smashed up and expropriated flour stores
