hippies || punks || skinheads || skaters

I was in a conference call this afternoon to talk about Oakland. Inevitably, the question of violence was at the heard of the conversation -- what is violence, what do we think about it, and how does what happened in Oakland affect the wider movement?

For context, Occupy Oakland tried to do a big move-in this past weekend, taking a vacant building and throwing a festival to initiate stage 2 of the occupation. It didn't go well. Lots of arrests, lots of protesters beaten up, a non-negligible number of felony charges stemming from police violence. Some protesters broke into City Hall and vandalized some stuff. Stupid shit, and a pretty awful display of militarized police force. The press, on the other hand, has been writing about nothing other than the "violent turn" the protests have taken.

The call was pretty heavily mediated, and seemed like more of an opportunity to just give people space to talk about this, rather than to develop movement-wide strategy for how to respond to Oakland. Midway through the call, Starhawk, a longtime activist who has been involved in just about every major mobilization over the last thirty years, got on the line to talk about her experiences at Seattle, and about broken windows.

What she said is, I think, pretty true -- which is that it doesn't matter what you think about violence -- or how you define it -- or even whether you choose to define it at all. When people break windows or throw things at police, it immediately distracts from *anything else that could possibly be happening at that moment.* It becomes about the spectacle, rather than the act - and because it is in may ways quite a romantic spectacle - the brick through the window, cobblestones pried up - it sucks the air out of the room for any other tactics that might register on the collective radar.

I bring it up because, in the differential spectrum between "hippie" and "punk," the vision of the militant young anarchist throwing a brick through a window is about as romantic as you get.

It's mostly a fiction, of course -- most of the anarchists I know at occupy work in the library, and are peacefully fucking shit up doing childcare for militant housing organizations or putting together theatrical programs for teens. Violence or nonviolence also takes a whole different resonance when put up next to non-Occupy cases of police brutality -- like Ramarley Graham, the Bronx teenager who was shot to death in his bathroom after being chased into his house by a phalanx of New York's finest.

And yet, the stereotypes hold -- when we talk about violence, we're still, to date, mostly talking about Seattle, bricks, black-clad anarchists, black blocs, punks, and their differentiation from hippies. I wish I knew how to push this conversation in a more productive direction -- to take into account a definition of violence, to talk about people vs. property, to get beyond the paradigm of marches, and to talk - really talk! -- about the systemic violence of capitalism, which is supposedly why we're all here.

It's a nonstarter. Masks and bricks. Punks and hippies. That's where the conversation is invariably going to stall out, and it's where we'll be for awhile yet.