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Anarchy
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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215 Anarchy KIRSTY ROBERTSON AND J. KERI CRONIN “This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over.” Call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on 16 May 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party.1 Allan Antliff notes, “the downfall of the state and capitalism through working-class struggle is important, but … anarchism has always aspired to be far more than this. It demands an end to oppression in all its forms.”2 Though anarchism has had a living presence in Canada for far longer than the focus of this case study,3 its importance to activism globally and in Canada came into sharp focus in the late 1990s with the alter-globalization movement. Although the “movement of movements” was often regarded by the popular press as anti-globalization, as radical anthropologist David Graeber points out, protesters were not against globalization per se, but rather against the vagaries brought about by the globalization of capital, and the expansion of the neoliberal economy through trading agreements and bodies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) and the World Trade Organization.4 Between 1994 and the present , alter-globalization activists gathered in massive, carnivalesque and anarchist-inspired actions that came to public attention in 1999 when protesters shut down the WTO meetings in Seattle. In fact, the presence of the alter-globalization movement had been noted long before, primarily around concerted, internet-organized global support for the Zapatista Rebellion in the Chiapas region of Mexico, but, more locally, in protests in Vancouver in 1997 against the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings (see chapter 15, by Ruth Phillips, in this volume). Though often promulgated through the pages of cheaply produced, lowtech ’zines, pamphlets, and underground newspapers,5 the performance of anarchism in street level protests that took place in a number of Canadian locations, most notably Vancouver (1997), Windsor (2000), Quebec City (2001), Calgary (2001), and Montreal (2003), brought the idea of protest to a new level. Alter-globalization protests were characterized by confrontation between activists and police and were often marked by the use of tear-gas and pepper spray, rubber bullets, and increasingly Imagining Resistance 216 technologized riot gear versus generally unarmed protesters holding posters, large-scale papier maché puppets, making music, chanting, shouting , and generally performing the chaotic politics of affinity groups (small groups sharing a common purpose within the larger framework of the protest). The colourful performances of protest, combined with a need to record protest both for posterity and for protection (one is less likely to be beaten, arrested, or otherwise abused if the action is being recorded) resulted in innumerable (largely amateur) film and photography projects around protests, particularly those against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Quebec City in April 2001. Films such as View From the Summit,6 The Blah Blah Blah Collective: (Re)Viewing Quebec,7 and Tear-Gas Holiday8 documented the protests there, giving them a life long after the protest had passed and negotiations for the FTAA had collapsed.9 In many ways, the politics of anarchism fit comfortably with creativity and the production of art—so long as that production takes place outside of the institutional logic of the art world. There are, nevertheless, a number of artists working in this way, among them Rocky Dobey, who has been described as “metal worker, artist, street installation legend,” and whose metal interventionist sculptures, installed anonymously around Toronto, speak to indigenous politics, prison liberation issues, and memorials to cyclists killed by cars and others forgotten by mainstream society. Dobey’s Carnival Against Capitalism poster became one of the best-known images of protests in Quebec City. A number of other artists fall into this category, among them musician, poet, writer, and sex-positive educator Norman Nawrocki, Freda Guttman, whose lengthy career has seen her making installation work concerning feminism, peace activism, and work on behalf of the Jewish Alliance against the Occupation of Palestine, and Luis Jacob, whose socially committed work ranges from performances and public interventions to photographic and sculptural works. In a recent interview, Jacob noted “We already collaborate, but under capitalism we collaborate too frequently in situations where our labour is exploited. We each are already part of several communities at once, but again too often ones that limit us rather than allow us to expand.”10 In Montreal, the Anarchist Book Fair continues to grow each year, as does...