Rhinocrisy

But it is, of course, not the youths who throw bricks who promote their own division into “violent anarchists” as against the rest of the “peaceful protesters”; it is the corporate media which separates out the “anarchists” and labels them “violent.” It doesn’t really matter what happens - the corporate mass media will always be on the look-out for any “anarchistic violence.” And if there is no “anarchistic violence” it will make it up. And if it can’t make it up it won’t report anything. It is not true that anarchists destroy the message of the so called peaceful protesters - without the anarchists there would not be any coverage at all. To think otherwise is to be grossly naive concerning the function of the corporate media.

These facts mean that it is hopeless to try to control the media. But it was a bad plan in the first place - always calculating how a message is to be received, etc… It is fundamentally hopeless because the plan to “control the message” agrees from the start that language is essentially an instrument to be manipulated for the sake of power. We lose the capacity to say and do what we mean - freely. Our speech loses its capacity to prophecy - to promise a better world. The prostrating of leftists to the structural demands of the media is a grotesque mistake. Besides, language exceeds our desire to control - and no matter what the corporate mass media attempts to do - there will always be an excess (in an image or a word) which doesn’t conform to their spin. The images of “anarchistic violence” trafficked by the corporate media contain within themselves the seeds of a radical criticism. (Obviously this would need to be demonstrated. It is true that whole university departments have been set up to articulate just this sort of criticism; but the excess of which I am speaking is available to anyone who has the desire.)

Acknowledging the hopelessness of the media situation should fill us with joy. We don’t have to speak or act in that ridiculous stupid way - we can say what we want with all the force of our desire. We want a better world; we want to destroy Capitalism. And acknowledging the limits of our power to control the media doesn’t stop us from attempting to fuck it up.

It has been said “the anarchists destroyed all our effective plans for change.” This is making the young demonstrators into scapegoats for our failures. We should acknowledge that we don’t have any good plans for change. The 20th century is a vast wreckage of our greatest hopes. Sartre supposedly said in the last century that Communism was the horizon of our times. This is absolutely not the case now. To pretend that we simply need more of the same after the fall of the USSR and the current Commu-Capitalism in China is patently absurd. And these last two examples are only emblems of a vaster disintegration - which is difficult to summarize here. The young people who smashed the windows of Starbucks live in this harsh world where very few, if any, organizations have anything vital to say regarding their present reality - or their desire to live better. And yet they still persist and resist - stupidly perhaps - but thank god for their stupidity. We need less of the hackneyed words of those who know exactly how to reproduce the situation of the last two hundred years and more youthful stupidity that puts bricks through the windows of banks. (By the way this is not to say that Marx or the revolutionary thought of the past is useless. I believe that we need our past more than ever - just that we need to be responsible for it. I think that there may be a revolutionary future for Marx - it may have much less to do with Marxism.)

By disavowing the youths who put bricks through bank windows we disavow something vital in ourselves. We destroy the possibility of a vital link between the past and present. And we abandon our youth. We should support the young people who want to destroy banks - we should explain to them how their desire relates to what people wanted in the past. We should show them how they are not alone. I imagine this is how they experience themselves - “we are alone” - there is no need to make this more real than it already is. Especially now when everyone wants put them in jail or just get rid of them. We need to interpret them in the best possible light. This could be our power - as adults who care. And in order to do so we need to recognize something in them in us. It is a grave error to abandon these young - to sacrifice them in order to prove the efficacy of our failures. At the very least we have a moral duty to support them.