My Life as an Anarchist
Description
When I was twenty, I moved to Montréal, a city 4500 km from my hometown outside of Vancouver, BC. Pretty quickly I fell into a group of friends who were activists like me, and we biked around the city, attending writers’ talks and documentary screenings, climbing into dumpsters to salvage food, and participating in various protests and demonstrations. I hung from the top of a tripod to block the front doors of a bank that financed Alberta’s tar sands; we blockaded a highway with our bicycles to protest a proposed pipeline; we travelled to Ottawa a couple of times, once to show solidarity with the Barriere Lake Algonquin First Nation and once for a Free Palestine rally. We made shoplifting into a sport, cooked vegan food for homeless people under the banner of Food Not Bombs, and sang labour songs to the thrum of an acoustic guitar. Before long I discovered that my new friends were anarchists, and I started to wonder if I was one, too.
Before leaving Vancouver, I’d found myself disillusioned after my employer, Greenpeace, published a press release congratulating Coca Cola for using green refrigeration technology at the 2010 Olympics. Not only had Greenpeace avoided saying anything about the significant environmental damage caused by the construction of Olympics facilities, but Coca Cola had been embroiled in controversy not too long before that for contaminating drinking water in Kerala, India. In this context, Greenpeace’s endorsement of Coca Cola felt unprincipled, to say the least, and I started to question the merits of the organization and the nonprofit model in general.
This created the perfect context for me to absorb the anarchist argument. I picked up a book called Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, which defines anarchism thusly:
“‘Anarchism’ is often wrongly identified as chaos, disorganization, and destruction. It is a type of socialism, and is against capitalism and landlordism, but it is also a libertarian type of socialism. For anarchism, individual freedom and individuality are extremely important, and are best developed in a context of democracy and equality. Individuals, however, are divided into classes based on exploitation and power under present-day systems of capitalism and landlordism. To end this situation it is necessary to engage in class struggle and revolution, creating a free socialist society based on common ownership, self-management, democratic planning from below, and production for need, not profit. Only such a social order makes personal freedom possible.”
Right as I started exploring these ideas, activists across the country were preparing to converge on Toronto for the G20, an event hosted by our Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper that would encourage visiting nations to slash public services in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the subsequent bailouts of the banks. The air at the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair was buzzing with anticipation less than a month before the summit; I looked around at the sea of black-clothed, pierced, stick-n-poked attendees and felt a warm glow of belonging.
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The G20 was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since: the downtown core was transformed into a militarized zone for the weekend, with droves of police stopping and searching people at random, and dragging anyone they deemed suspicious from public buses and trains. A fleet of burgundy and navy blue mini-vans filled with plainclothes officers roamed in circles, snatching people from the streets and speeding off. On the last day of the weekend summit, I was shot by a police officer with rubber bullets, shoved into the pavement, arrested and charged with obstructing a peace officer (we protestors were in retreat when I was shot, and the charge was later dropped). Nearly every friend who attended the G20 with me was either arrested, injured by police, or both. From threatening rape to groping to executing midnight raids and beating activists in alleyways, the police did not exercise restraint.
This encounter with uni-directional violence targeting not only rioters but also peaceful protestors—and even regular people who had the misfortune of walking down the street at the wrong time—shook me deeply. A hatred for the state and its monopoly on violence was no longer abstract to me. I felt that I’d had my rose-coloured glasses ripped from my face and was finally seeing the world for what it was: a sinister place riddled with violence and injustice. Although my physical wounds healed quickly, my existential wounds did not: I became paranoid, fearful and hostile. I did not conceive of the G20 as a horrible yet anomalous event—rather it revealed deep truths about the government and its armed enforcers.
I came by my paranoia honestly: in the aftermath of the summit, we discovered that police had been staking out activists prior to the G20, and that undercover cops had infiltrated activist groups and lived among its members for over a year prior in some cases. I personally knew someone who was sentenced to 13 months in prison, based on information attained through infiltration and surveillance. The policing apparatus has long been known to be hostile to leftist social movements, but trust me when I say they reserve a heightened level of wrath for anarchists.
My friends and I doubled down on “security culture”, which was meant to minimize the chances of having our communications intercepted by police. It included using an encrypted email service run by an anarchist collective, taking out our cell phone batteries when discussing anything sensitive, covering our faces at protests, and maintaining a code of silence against the police. The most famous and visible expression of anarchist security culture is the Black Bloc, a protest tactic where a group of people wear black clothing head to toe in order to blend in with each other and avoid being personally identified while committing potentially illegal forms of protest.
There were two loose factions of anarchists among the people I knew: insurrectionary anarchists and mass anarchists. Insurrectionary anarchists believed in forming a revolutionary vanguard that would carry out armed actions known as “propaganda of the deed” that would shock the public out of their complacency, and inspire them to join a spontaneous revolution. They rejected all hierarchy and formal organization as authoritarian, and were hostile to reforms, because they believed that reforms decreased the likelihood of total revolution. Insurrectionary anarchists tended to organize within affinity groups, which were small autonomous cells that would carry out clandestine and often anonymous actions. Sabotaging machinery, destroying property, inciting riots, blockading ports and railways, and fighting police in the streets were some of their chosen activities (although I should say that not everyone who participates in these actions is an insurrectionary anarchist).
Mass anarchists (also known as syndicalists) believed in the power of mass movements, and in building them by engaging people around basic material issues such as wages or working conditions. Syndicalists believed their role in such movements was to push them to become more revolutionary in order to create drastic change that could never be achieved through electoral politics. The mass anarchists I knew were involved in grassroots organizations and coalitions. They were often nurses, social workers or frontline staff who worked directly with people experiencing poverty or addiction. Others were involved in arts programming or
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