In March 2003, millions took to the streets worldwide to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. Despite their numbers, the efforts proved in vain. The war went on; the protests dwindled. But however attenuated, there are still protests. In Minneapolis/St. Paul this August, some 10,000 marched against the Republican National Convention. But as organized rallies gave way to irrational violence, the inadequacy of five years of failed Anti-War activism and Left opposition came into sharp relief.

Most of the confrontations amounted to simple, momentary blockages of traffic. By all accounts, the police grossly overreacted: harassing journalists, brutalizing protestors, arresting the innocent. But more fringe elements in activist culture were also on display. Some hurled bricks through the window of a bus transporting delegates; others sprayed delegates with unknown irritants. These actions may seem excessive and irrational, beyond the objectives and attitudes of the wider movement. But their deeper motivations lies within the mainstream of activist culture today.

The helplessness of the anti-war movement has turned the Left’s disappointments and frustrations into pathology. Energy is directed, not towards revolutionary change, but against social integration. For college-aged youth this means the transition from parental authority to working life. The anxiety and fear built up around this process of socialization creates a political imagination directed at forming ruptures and breaking points in society — everything, from organizational meetings to attending protests, centers on creating a wall of resistance against one’s own inevitable absorption into society.

As seasoned anti-war activist Alexander Cockburn pointed out last year, “an anti-war rally has to be edgy, not comfortable. Emotions should be high, nerves at least a bit raw, anger tinged with fear.” (“Whatever Happened to the Anti-War Movement?” New Left Review, July-August 2007). Such emotionalism points to the way present forms of helplessness have been naturalized into one of the anti-war movement’s core assumptions, turning trepidation into a political program.

Naturalizing helplessness, today’s protesters celebrate simple altercations with the police as victories. Violence seems to cleanse the individual of their ‘bourgeois’ conformity. Attending a protest means breaking with the decadence of consumer society, creating a ‘prefigurative’ space, trying to ‘create the new world in the palm of the old.’ Each blow of the truncheon dramatizes the difference between protestor and police. The rougher the conflict, the more the protestor feels free from the burden of society.

Yet, young protesters only elicit a police beating in order to sensationalize their own submission to authority. And, ironically, this is coupled with a clear awareness that the tactics employed are utterly inadequate in addressing the issues these protests propose to be fighting. In the age of Predator drones, blocking a highway will not stop American military might.

The Left’s helplessness, on full display in Minneapolis, has eroded the very function of protest. Once, protest demonstrated the vitality and relevancy of the demand for social transformation. Thousands in the streets could not be ignored. But protest has devolved into an insular subculture of self-hatred, frustration, and anxiety derived from a pathological attitude towards social integration. Activists who equate social domination with their experience with tear gas, tazers and rubber bullets block the development of a more serious and effective Leftist politics.

I decided not to participate in any illegal protests at the RNC.

There’s a simple, material reason: Had I been arrested I would have been accountable for bail money (or unhappily relying on legal defense funds that I truly feel have more value elsewhere) and possibly a day’s worth of income. I have been and continue to be a member of the working class. I grew up with a single mother who worked two low-paying jobs, and for the past five years, living on my own, I have survived well below the poverty line. I am also currently uninsured and without health care. Culturallyspeaking, the working class community might not see me so equitably; I am, after all, college educated and on my path towards the ivory tower. But still, getting arrested was not financially feasible for me. I have rent to pay.

The other reason is a little more complicated. I was afraid that I wouldn’t agree with the whole agenda. I was proved right. I support: blockading the GOP buses, blocking intersections, radical dance parties in public space. I don’t support: smashing windows/cars, violent hate rhetoric (“What do we want? Bush Dead!”), and, most importantly, making abstractions out of human beings.

It is not surprising or necessarily regrettable that not everyone has the same version of anarchism. And so I am not angry that there are those who choose to interpret and perform it differently, but I am angry when that performance goes so blatantly against some of the fundamental elements of this “new world in our hearts” that so many radical/anarchist/progressives claim to want. And I am angry when—even if people aren’t moral pacifists—that a “movement” that claims to want the revolution can’t even see the relevance in strategic pacifism. To use the most obvious and simple example: the protesters during the Civil Rights movement did not fight back, the media captured it all, and they gained the vast majority of support from our nation. I’m not trying to say that the fight against capitalism is the same as the fight against racist legislation, but I am certainly not above borrowing tactics that actually worked.

True, I was a Peace Studies minor and am chock full of stories of peaceful victories. But I am no longer a blind pacifist. Given tangible goals, sometimes destruction makes sense. The Autonomen, the original Black Bloc, protected their squats through aggressive confrontation. This is a real, concrete goal. Fighting to end ‘Republican’ ideology is not. Breaking a Department store window will not end American conservativism.

The violence at the RNC seems to me completely goal-less. Worse, it stands in opposition to the solidarity we claim to embody. Macy’s windows and those smashed up cop cars are going to be fixed by working class men and women, probably pissed that they have to spend extra time replacing what was in perfectly good condition a day ago. Similarly, when anarchist groups participate in illegal action at Immigrant’s Rights marches, they do so with complete disregard for their “comrades” who would be deported were they to be nearby someone who was instigating the police. How’s that for solidarity?

When polarization occurs within the “movement” itself, we become weaker, more divided and further and further away from the revolution. I don’t think the solution is utopia- group-think. Cultural identity can motivate individuals towards greater and greater participation. But there needs to be an idea big enough for everyone to agree on, an idea that takes precedence over the fun of diverse tactics.

Imagine for a moment that the RNC Welcoming Committee decided to declare a complete commitment to non-violence. More Americans will participate in nonviolent actions that have less potential for getting them arrested than violent action that will, imagine that instead of figuring out how to hide hammers in their pants, the RNC Welcoming Committee went out and organized every single group that attended the mainstream march. Imagine now that those 50,000 people sitting in the intersection, blocking the GOP buses. The cops wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. The world would watch, and the radical left would gain sympathy and support.

A comrade noted that she thought we were supposed to be protesting the violence and hate perpetrated by the Bush/McCain regime, not re-enacting it. How can we, as revolutionaries dedicated to a just and peaceful world, create that through violence and hate? I believe in the power of temporary autonomous zones present in the spirit of political action in the streets, the creation of our new world in the ephemeral but blissful moments of united rebellion… but my new world has no smashed glass. My new world has no fear of attack. My new world has dance parties and kisses and laughter and music and vegan food and chants that make you feel so warm n’ fuzzy that you become physically incapable of causing harm to another!

My new world is not “us” taking over “them.” When the oppressed seek to overcome opression by becoming themselves oppressors, absolutely no one wins. When one attacks another human being who seems inhuman[e], the attacker too becomes inhuman[e] in that act. It is impossible to be fully present and human[e] in violence. As Paulo Friere wrote: “How can the oppressed, as divided unauthentic beings, participate in the pedagogy of their liberation? As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible…. Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one.” A childbirth, he writes, because it will be new and unlike anything we’ve seen before. We’ve seen violence before, we’ve seen things smashed and people hurt. But we haven’t yet seen our liberation….