Read & Riot Page 5

  Nothing will change if we prefer to sit around and complain that politics is boring and because it is boring we don’t want to take part in it. It’s up to us to reshape what politics is. Take it back. Bring it back to streets, clubs, bars, parks. Our party isn’t over.

  Heroes

  1968

  Can a period of history be heroic? I absolutely think so. There was something in the air in 1968 that made people use their imaginations to find new ways to revolt. Thinking about that year gives me chills. People knew how to dream about social justice, peace, and equal opportunities. There were labor unions, the civil rights movements in Russia, France, Japan, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, America. Words and deeds came together in new and inventive ways.

  The world today is heavily influenced by events that happened in 1968.

  MAY 1968, PARIS

  It was a year when everybody realized that it was time to rebel against the conservative archaic world. They felt that the ruling aesthetics, political regime, and official cultural codes did not represent them anymore.

  Charles de Gaulle was president of France in 1968. He was one of those paternalistic, patriarchal leaders. Women were not allowed to wear pants to work. Married ladies had to get a husband’s permission to open a bank account. Abortions were illegal. Homosexuality was considered a crime. Workers did not have rights, and unsatisfied ones could simply be fired. The education system was rigid and conservative. There was just one TV channel in France, and all information was subject to government censorship.

  For young people from the baby boomer generation, it was not enough to believe in utopia, that another world is possible. They were keen to experience utopia, to live in it.

  It began as a series of protests and occupations by students. The agenda was a polyhedral constellation of anticonsumerism, anarchism, pro-imagination. . . . Students occupied the Sorbonne and said it was now the “people’s university.”

  Students were joined by striking workers who staged wildcat strikes throughout the French economy. Up to 11 million workers took part—a huge number that represented about a quarter of the population of France at the time. The strike was the largest in French history and lasted for two weeks.

  In a wildcat strike, workers walk off the job with no warning and often without authorization or support from the union. In this sense they are “unofficial.” (By the way, “wildcat strike action” is the best name ever, isn’t it?) Wildcat strikes have been considered illegal in the United States since 1935 (of course). In 1968, they were the main tactic of the protesting workers.

  The workers’ demands were serious and structural. They wanted to see a change in how things worked, how things were governed. It was a radical agenda—not better wages and conditions but a plan to kick out the government and President de Gaulle and to have the ability to run their own factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a one-third increase in minimum wages, the workers occupying their factories refused to return to work. It wasn’t enough. It was a sellout. After union leaders made the deal, workers started to treat their own leaders as traitors and collaborationists.

  “The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history; revolutionary occupations and the beginnings of direct democracy; the increasingly complete collapse of state power for nearly two weeks . . . —this is what the French May 1968 movement was essentially, and this in itself already constitutes its essential victory,” proclaims an article titled “The Beginning of an Era” (Internationale Situationniste 12 [September 1969]). The piece goes on to say that 1968 brought all the criticisms of existing ideologies and the old way of doing things into a single holistic unity. This was a new world—there was no need for the concept of property when everyone had a home everywhere. In the free, open spaces where the participants of 1968 met, there was genuine dialogue, completely free expression, a real community in the common struggle.

  * * *

  Take a look at the slogans here. They appeared as graffiti, chants, and posters during revolutionary events in Paris 1968. To me they seem to be a perfect manifestation of rebellious collective consciousness, precisely the kind of group action that makes regimes uncomfortable.

  When I’m trying to formulate what would be perfect poetry to me, I think about these words.

  They are (a) a result of collective effort, (b) eclectic, made using a collage technique, and (c) anonymous. They are highly ambitious and question the very basis of existing society, but they’re not about anybody’s personal ambitions. You would never suspect that these words were spoken with an intention to only appear to be radical and to push, say, T-shirt sales (like today). They smell like a revolution, with all its insanity and unknowability. This spirit cannot be sold, because it cannot be quantified.

  Another thing that strikes me when I read these slogans is their wholeness and coherence. Created by different authors, together they look like a solid, powerful piece of art. Everybody knows how hard it is to write something with anyone else, especially a big collective. Collective writing is liable to destroy the artistic soul of each author. Take a look at the lifeless monsters created by the entertainment industry. The slogans of 1968 teach us that there is another, miraculous form of collective writing: when all your thoughts are genuinely focused on achieving progressive and poetic changes in your culture, crowds start to write communal street poetry.

  Find three slogans that don’t belong to Paris 1968:

  For the answers go here.

  For all the hope that 1968 brought, there have been many events in the following years that beat back progressive causes around the world. Just to look at a few of the changes in government . . . Nixon was elected that same year and again in 1972. There was the overthrow and death of President Allende in Chile in 1973, the right-wing coup in Argentina in 1976, the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Reagan (1980, 1984); the Bushes (1988; 2000 and 2004) and of course Putin (2000 and 2012) and Trump (2016).

  Okay, Chris Hedges says in this same book that you are holding or reading on your phone that Nixon was the last liberal president of the United States (here). Chris’s point is that nothing ever changes without people exerting pressure. Emmeline Pankhurst makes the very same point in this book (here). It’s a universal fact. Ask Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or W. E. B. DuBois, or Margaret Sanger.

  The pressure has to be maintained, because the opposing powers are massive and they’re not used to losing. Even if society has changed for the better—thanks to 1968 in many cases (racism is illegal, voting rights are protected, free speech is enshrined in law)—the movement to return society to what it was around 1868 gathers momentum. (Actually to 1862, just before the Emancipation Proclamation.)

  This is why we have to remember 1968 fifty years later. No gain is secure.

  The lasting impact of what was gained in ’68 was the belief around the world that if the government wouldn’t listen, you had the right and obligation to make yourself heard. It happened in Paris; it happened in Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring, when people took to the streets to support their government’s reforms and were met with a full-scale Soviet invasion. It happened on American university campuses with protests against the Vietnam War and in Chicago when police and the National Guard were sent to deal with demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. It happened in Tokyo and Berlin and Mexico City. The circumstances may change, but there is still latent potential in the world like there was in 1968. It just needs to be ignited . . .

  Rule № 4

  MAKE YOUR GOVERNMENT SHIT ITS PANTS

  * * *

  Those who have power need to live in fear. In fear of the people. Meet the main characters of this chapter: power, courage, laughter, joy, belief, and risk. The main characters may well also be inspiration, fairness, struggle, heretics, witches, dignity, faith, masks, and mischief.

  * * *

  Think back 120 ye
ars ago, when workers in this country were forced to work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. . . . Think about the children—ten, eleven years of age, losing fingers in factories, and what the working people of this country said. Sorry, we are human beings, we are not beasts of burden. We are going to form trade unions and negotiate contracts.

  BERNIE SANDERS, SPEECH IN CARSON, CALIFORNIA, MAY 17, 2016

  This is why it is important to remember that the New Deal did not come only from kindly elites handing it down from on high, but also because those elites were under massive popular pressure from below.

  NAOMI KLEIN, QUOTED IN HUFFINGTON POST, DECEMBER 3, 2008

  Words

  question the status quo

  Your job is to ask annoying questions.

  Socrates did it. He was a bizarre bearded creature who’d approach people on the street to ask them, “What is life, dignity, and love?” These were fair questions, but the government didn’t feel like letting Socrates do his thing. The government rarely approves of the sort of dangerous, subversive activity that’s called thinking. The government always feels suspicious when someone behaves like a free person. And Socrates ended up being sentenced to death and forced to drink poison.

  There is power in asking simple questions. Dear Mr. President, if you’re so powerful, rich, and smart, why are your people living in poverty? Why is the snow in my hometown black? Did journalists who report on pollution deserve to be beaten to death?

  Their goal is to make you believe that it’s in your best interests to maintain the status quo. Your goal is to make them scared. Force them to share with you what they have—power, capital, and control over natural resources.

  Elites don’t enjoy resistance, and they respond by getting angry and taking revenge. By not accepting their rules, we cause them greater damage than their revenge causes us, because it starts to dawn on everyone in your vicinity that the emperor really has no clothes.

  We must reclaim language and ideals that the government has stolen from us. Those in government claim to be “the real patriots,” but they lie, cheat, and steal. They claim to care about religion, but they break every commandment. They say they represent the people, but they care only about their own wealth. They judge, condemn, and kill. “It is important for people to consider that authoritarianism, though it claims all the national symbols, is not patriotism,” notes the historian and Yale professor Timothy Snyder.

  Pussy Riot started doing political punk because our state system was rigid, closed, and dominated by castes. In Russia, current policy is dictated by the narrow corporate interests of a handful of officials to such a degree that the air itself hurts us, making us feel as if we had been skinned.

  What we were looking for was real sincerity and simplicity, and we found them in our punk performances. Passion, candor, and naïveté are superior to hypocrisy, deceit, and feigned modesty. Take childish, anarchic freedom with you wherever life carries you. Take it with you to the streets, take it to dusty prison cells. Humor, buffoonery, and irreverence can be used to reach the truth. The truth is many sided, and many different people lay claim to it. Challenge your government’s version of the truth, tell your own, and if you can, damn the consequences.

  Deeds

  don’t talk baby talk

  We looked around us and did not see a willingness to sacrifice, to be humble, to be aggressive and fight, that combination of extreme and dissimilar states of being in whose absence humans would differ little from tapeworms. We examined the art world, where I had expected to see madness and the search for the absolute. We found hundreds of people leading a comfortable existence, people who knew how to do nothing except play at being bohemians without being real bohemians (if the authenticity of bohemians is measured by the degree of their internal dissent, their anguish, and the sharpness with which they perceive reality).

  So if it didn’t exist, we sought to create something that can have at least the tiniest resemblance to what we were looking for in the art world.

  Here are a few of the earliest actions.

  THE STORMING OF THE WHITE HOUSE, NOVEMBER 7, 2008

  LOCATION: RUSSIAN WHITE HOUSE

  SIZE OF THE SKULL PROJECTED ON THE RUSSIAN WHITE HOUSE: 60 × 40 METERS

  We have our own Russian White House. It stands on the banks of the Moscow River. In 2008, Putin, who was then the Russian prime minister, controlled the White House, the seat of the Russian government. We set ourselves a goal. On Revolution Day, November 7, we would project a gigantic Jolly Roger, sixty by forty meters, on the White House with a laser cannon, and then a team of us would storm the White House by climbing over the six-meter-high fence surrounding it.

  We taught ourselves to evade the police by rolling under a car in three seconds. We could jump into Dumpsters while on the run and cover ourselves with garbage at one fell swoop. We were ready for the eventuality that when we climbed the government’s six-meter-high fence, we would be zapped with a high-voltage charge.

  About eight hours before the practice run, we realized that most of the participants had wimped out. One person had diarrhea; another was having her period. Someone was found drunk. We had to find people to replace the wimps. We split into groups and began combing the city.

  I asked students at a contemporary art school, the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia. It was my first time there. I approached a group of students sipping tea on the stairs.

  “Who is going with us to storm the White House today?”

  “What would we need to do?”

  “We are going to go to the White House, project a skull and crossbones on it, then climb over the fence onto the grounds.”

  “Has this been cleared with the administration?” a female student asked me.

  “Of course not. That’s the whole point.”

  The students remained silent and continued to suck on their tea. I threw on my coat and headed for the door.

  “I’ll go with you. When and where do we meet?” said one of them, suddenly approaching me. His springy gait, like that of a wild animal, gave him away as someone who had physical training and stamina.

  “Come with me now.”

  We left the Rodchenko School together. I traveled to the White House with this guy, whose name was Roma. That evening we gave him a new name, Bomber. He was one of three people who managed to get over the six-meter-high fence that night and, after dashing across the grounds of the Government House, successfully disappeared amid Moscow’s courtyards and squares.

  At four in the morning, the dark canvas of the Russian White House was flooded with green rays from the roof of the Hotel Ukraina, opposite the White House on the other side of the Moscow River, and the Jolly Roger was traced on the building. The group of shock troops ran across the porch of the Government House and, after jumping from a height of six meters, fled the scene.

  Several minutes later, burly government security guards appeared on the grounds of the White House, scouring everything in the vicinity with long-range searchlights looking like dozens of pillars of light bustling around the building.

  CLOSING OF THE FASCIST RESTAURANT OPRICHNIK, DECEMBER 2008

  LOCATION: THE MOSCOW RESTAURANT OPRICHNIK, OWNED BY PRO-PUTIN, ULTRACONSERVATIVE JOURNALIST MIKHAIL LEONTYEV

  The restaurant Oprichnik opened in Moscow. We immediately set ourselves the goal of closing it by welding a metal plate to the front door. Why?

  In the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible used the oprichnina to advance his policies in Russia. To wit, he stabbed, hacked, hanged, and poured boiling water on his enemies. Ivan and his oprichniks used red-hot frying pans, ovens, tongs, and ropes. This reign of terror was called the oprichnina. In Russia, calling a restaurant Oprichnik is like naming a nightclub Auschwitz in Germany.

  We practiced welding doors in the tank-strewn back alleys of Victory Park in Moscow. Day by day, a handful of people learned how to weld in the freezing December weather amid garages and snowdrifts.

  Our act
ivist collective had split into two parts.

  The first was the industrial workers. We were in charge of the physical work—finding a huge pile of metal and welding it to the door of our restaurant. We had a wide range of engaged citizens: anarchists, social democrats, feminists, advocates for transgender rights, and those who simply shared our general irritation with Vladimir Putin. Weirdly enough, years afterward I found out that one of those anti-Putin activists was secretly super-conservative, and the nature of his disapproval of Putin was that Putin was not tough enough. Well, shit happens.

  The second half of our group was a distraction group. Their role was to enter the restaurant and play a drunken crowd to attract the attention of security workers. The action was to happen at the end of December, close to New Year’s eve, so the distracters were dressed as bunnies, kitties, and Santa Clauses. We rehearsed a song that our crew would start to sing when welding started. They had to sing super loud, otherwise security would hear the welding and prevent the action.

  Finally, one more activist, a prominent organizer of LGBTQ prides in Moscow, had to stand on the street corner, close to the restaurant, to hand passersby stickers on LGBTQ issues. His mission was to distract potential secret or not-so-secret police officers.

  And you know, we did it, we did it successfully—we closed that shameful restaurant. We came back there after the action, at night, after a few hours had passed, to take a look at them trying to tear our welded sheet of metal from their door and open it.

  Now the restaurant is completely gone. Sometimes I walk down that street and wonder whether that’s connected with our action or not.