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May 5, 17

Portland, OR May Day: A Response to ‘The Oregonian’

“No doubt, this was sheer vengeance for the November uprising. The message: if you exercise your rights to protect your identity and demonstrate in public, we will hurt and kidnap you.”

Last Monday, a black bloc formed up at Shemanski Park in order to reclaim the streets while protecting their identities from reprisal by the State. Some, but by no means all, of these people engaged in minor corporate property destruction, burnt an American flag, and threw some harmless smoke toys within the crowd. The Portland Police Bureau responded by declaring the entire march a riot, shooting stun grenades toward crowds with children in them, and rushing at people indiscriminately with batons, all while spending workers’ stolen wages to fly a police helicopter to surveil the crowd. In response, the crowd yelled, threw soda cans at the military forces in the street, and burned some construction cones in an intersection as many retreated from the absurd onslaught. 25 people, including three minors, were arrested. No doubt, this was sheer vengeance for the November uprising. The message: if you exercise your rights to protect your identity and demonstrate in public, we will hurt and kidnap you.

Today, the editorial board of Oregon’s oldest capitalist news outlet, The Oregonian, defended this unbelievably violent behavior. In an Orwellian twist, the editors labeled the antifascists handing out literature and marching against the brutality of the capitalist state as “violent punk fascists.” They published the names of 22 of the arrestees, and attempted to goad them into submitting one-sentence bumper-sticker explanations for the entirety of their politics. The fact that they suggest such a situation can be addressed in a pithy sentence displays the staggering depth of intellect they bring to current events.

As is typical for authoritarian capitalists, they attempt to divide their enemies (e.g. most people) against each other. This is nothing new. The Oregonian, initially begun as a conservative Whig Party political paper by Thomas J. Dryer, has historically defended the interests of property over people, and failing that, of reform over justice. Dryer was also a legislator, as well as a member of Oregon’s 1857 Constitutional convention, which made Oregon the first State to outright ban the existence of free black people & bar Chinese immigrants from holding property. In fact, he unsuccessfully pushed for the document to prohibit and expel Hawaiian, indigenous & Chinese people as well.

It is significant that the 50-organization May Day coalition, far from assigning blame to the black bloc, held the police entirely responsible for their unconscionable actions. If the editors truly respect the coalition’s legitimacy, they would have noted their perspective instead of feebly attempting to co-opt their narrative.

“It is significant that the 50-organization May Day coalition, far from assigning blame to the black bloc, held the police entirely responsible for their unconscionable actions. If the editors truly respect the coalition’s legitimacy, they would have noted their perspective instead of feebly attempting to co-opt their narrative.”

Moreover, this Oregonian described the black bloc as “parasites” upon “legitimate Constitutional assembly.” This laughably ahistorical argument is obvious to anyone who knows the modern history of May Day as first and foremost an Anarchist holiday, marking the massacre of our people by police in Chicago’s Haymarket Square over a century ago. The bloc had every right to demonstrate that day, and it was perfectly legal to protect themselves from reprisal by the State by donning masks. And as for the broken corporate windows? The profits to build them were stolen from workers, especially in the case of the large banks. Those who broke them have every right to do so if it reclaims some of their irreplaceable dignity.

Frankly, this behavior barely impacts the material conditions of our world. This author will state something that may be unpopular among their comrades: to assert that any march, regardless of the level of property destruction that occurs, will upend the social order is sheer fantasy. The primary purpose of these demonstrations is to build confidence, a sense of possibility, and bring people together in a life-positive, property-negative way. The main reason we do this is to allow our souls to survive in an increasingly hostile world. At the risk of bitter cynicism, this author advances that the owners and bosses should be rather pleased their enemies have resorted to such symbolic tactics, rather than more direct action.

Non-violent property destruction has long been a mainstay of political protest in the United States. One doesn’t have to venture far from Haymarket Square to visit the site of the Boston Tea Party, one of the earliest and best-known examples of American working class destruction of corporate property. Then, as now, radicals disguised themselves in order to protect themselves from corporate-sponsored State retaliation. If you condemn those in the Black Bloc this May Day, have the intellectual consistency to condemn the Patriots as “violent punk fascists” for their steeping of Boston Harbor.

“What do we want? A world without private property, hierarchies, and military occupations to defend them. Don’t pretend you don’t already know.”

To support the beating and incarceration of living, breathing people over some fucking glass windows and plastic cones that can be easily replaced is disgusting. To call those who destroy property fascist, while ignoring the material support and protection those that assault them give to actual self-avowed fascists, is intentionally deceitful. To whine and moan about the rights of companies being violated by radicals while the police execute our neighbors in the street and plant replica weapons at the crime scenes to justify it, shows the true colors of those propertied imbeciles concerned with “Law and Order” in Trump’s America.

Anarchism opposes coercive, top-down institutions like governments and marketplaces, where power is concentrated among very few people. Instead, anarchists propose that we run society on directly democratic lines, establishing popular assemblies, neighborhood councils, and other peer-to-peer structures to that end. Anarchists are suspicious of “representative” systems, where corruption is the norm. Far from espousing chaos, anarchists seek to resolve the internal contradictions that produce the war, crime, inequality and oppression that are characteristic of contemporary society.

The Oregonian claims anarchists “have nothing to do with democracy.” If your democracy exists, we cannot see it through the condensation of your tear gas and the precipitation of your rubber bullets.

The Oregonian claims we “have nothing to do with work and equity, either, as their obstructionism robs wages from workers and costs employers and taxpayers.” If anyone is robbing wages, it is certainly the capitalists who never pay us the full value of our labor, and the government that taxes us to pay for wanton violence in the streets workers build.

The Oregonian and mayor Ted Wheeler ask the arrestees what anarchists want, as if we are infants to be condescended to. What do we want? A world without private property, hierarchies, and military occupations to defend them. Don’t pretend you don’t already know.

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