What’s Left?
The guy who helped the most in the campaign was like one of the big anarchists in San Diego.
Bob Beyerle, interview, MRR #102
“Hello, I’m with the Bob Beyerle for Mayor Campaign,” I say to the over sixty-year-old Latino man standing hesitantly in the front door of his house. “I’d like to talk to you about the horrible job Chula Vista’s City Council is doing. Not only are they subsidizing the construction of a bayfront yacht club, a luxury fourteen hundred room hotel, fourteen hundred condominiums and twenty-eight hundred exclusive housing units in a bayside tourist mecca, they’re rapidly expanding the city east of Interstate 805 with gated, guarded upscale housing developments like Eastlake, Rancho del Rey and Otay Ranch. Meanwhile, the city west of 805 is deteriorating. Eastlake is using a million gallons of water for a scenic lake that you’re not even allowed to use unless you live in this exclusive community while the rest of us are forced to live with between 20% and 50% water cutbacks. The City Council is catering to the wealthy when what we need is more funding for public services and new affordable housing developments with parks, schools, and emergency services. Bob Beyerle is for controlled growth and the environment, promoting local business and curtailing big business, and encouraging citizen involvement. Please vote Bob Beyerle for mayor on election day.”
I’m average height but the man barely reaches my shoulder. His more diminutive wife hovers behind him, clearly concerned. Both are suspicious as I hand them some campaign literature. Bob and I are precinct walking for his mayoral campaign in a sweltering May afternoon in 1991. I’m wearing a bright orange “Pedro Loves You” t-shirt while Bob Beyerle (aka Bob Barley of Vinyl Communications fame), wearing a sports coat and dress shirt, is talking local politics a few houses down the block. As the front man for the punk band Neighborhood Watch whose signature song is “We Fuck Sheep,” Bob goes on to do press interviews, candidate forums and house parties.
Bob’s campaign also puts on a fundraiser at La Bella Pizza Garden featuring Jello Biafra. My personal first impressions of Biafra are operatic; diva, prima donna, bürgerlich. Better to call his 1979 San Francisco mayoral campaign a publicity stunt, with its prank platform demanding that businessmen wear clown suits within city limits and paying the unemployed to panhandle in wealthy neighborhoods. Biafra gripes that some of his proposals—to ban cars citywide, legalize squatting in vacant tax-delinquent buildings, and force cops to run for election in the neighborhoods they patrol—were serious. But then, Jello is always the consummate showman who never walked a precinct in his life. Biafra’s politics are a joke because he’s a dilettante whereas Beyerle’s politics are punk because he’s the real deal. Both lost their respective mayoral campaigns but placed in the middle of their crowded fields.
I’ve been called a class traitor, a scab, a rat, a collaborator, an undercover cop by many of my comrades on the left of the Left—left anarchism and communism specifically—once they learn that I vote and engage in electoral politics. Electoral politics is a politics for fools they contend as they spout the usual slogans: “Don’t vote! It only encourages them!”, “If voting changed things, it would be illegal!”, “Vote for nobody!” and “Freedom isn’t on the ballot!” Funny thing is, I’ve always voted, even when I was a stone revolutionary anarchist. I never thought it was an issue as voting takes all of ten minutes, and a single ten minute act once or twice a year doesn’t legitimize the entire bourgeois corporate state apparatus. To assert otherwise is either mysticism or moralism. As for electoral politics, I considered it neither the only valid be-all-end-all nor the ultimate bamboozling evil. Rather, it’s harm reduction for mitigating the worst and making piecemeal of the best in politics. I’ve always lived by the sentiment “I vote, and I riot.”
When the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, I ran for Ventura School Board on a Summerhill/Free School platform alongside a democratic socialist City Council slate, both organized by a member of the New American Movement. None of us won any elected positions in the 1972 city elections, but our leftwing programs and political campaigns did eventually push the City of Ventura to build a municipal bus system. And just two years before, in 1970, I traveled to the student ghetto of Isla Vista next to UCSB for three riots in which a Bank of America branch was burned to the ground. I’ve had a personal politics that endorses and attempts to combine parliamentary and revolutionary components, a political strategy built on integrating multiple tactics.
Which is not the same thing as diversity of tactics.
I devote most of my time to politics outside of the electoral/parliamentary realm, which I define broadly. That can range from writing to rioting, although at my age I don’t do much of the latter. As for the much narrower electoral/parliamentary arena, I prefer to engage in local over national politics, and with issues and propositions over personalities and candidates. And I try to make connections—be they principled or personal, through practice or theory—between the various aspects of my politics.
Diversity of tactics by contrast acknowledges the validity of different tactics but refuses to make linkages let alone work out common ground between them. Perhaps the most famous example of diversity of tactics involves the St. Paul’s Principles:
1. Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.
2. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.
3. Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.
4. We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.
Adopted prior to the 2008 Republican National Convention, the agreement allowed different groups with different protest tactics (conventional street protest, guerrilla theater, civil disobedience, black bloc, etc) to act side-by-side without denouncing each other as counterrevolutionary reformists or ultraleft adventurists. But it also didn’t allow the individuals or groups in question to get together to potentially synthesize their diverse tactics into a common strategy. An atomized diversity of tactics became the strategy, and an ineffectual one at that. The 2008 RNC was not shut down, and the movement opposed to the 2008 RNC grew no more unified, stronger or effective. It was a live and let live strategy that was simultaneously a political devolution. At best, diversity of tactics is a stopgap, never a solution.
I was thrilled to learn about Italian Autonomy in 1984. My politics were evolving from left anarchism to left communism as I studied more Marx. I devoured Autonomedia’s volume Autonomia and enshrined Sylvere Lotringer’s formulation of “Autonomy at the base”:
In biology, an autonomous organism is an element that functions independently of other parts. Political autonomy is the desire to allow differences to deepen at the base without trying to synthesize them from above, to stress similar attitudes without imposing a “general line,” to allow parts to co-exist side by side, in their singularity.
Little did I know at the time that most Marxists, including many Autonomists, considered that the “desire to allow differences to deepen at the base without trying to synthesize them from above” was not Autonomy’s singular strength but its profound weakness. It’s like realizing you’re a profound asshole, but then deciding to call that your singular virtue.
I’ve since realized that “to stress similar attitudes without imposing a general line’” rarely results in bridging ideological divides, moving forward politically, or successfully working together to accomplish things. Used to be, a political party or a trade union or some similarly organized (hierarchical, centralized) association could be depended on to step in and finagle the unity and commonality people desired. But since the goal is to come up with alternate ways of organizing ourselves—presumably non-hierarchical, decentralized, and anti-authoritarian—it’d be nice to come up with a new way to overcome our differences to achieve tactical, strategic and theoretical unity to defeat our enemies and attain our goal of a liberated society. However, having once spent two days virtually nonstop trying and failing to achieve consensus in an organization over whether to codify a two-thirds versus three-quarters alternative voting structure once consensus breaks down, I don’t have high hopes in this regard.
I don’t have solutions to the problems posed here. This means I feel another series coming on, perhaps with discussions of democracy or frontism or populism. This whole subject is really quite broad.
SOURCES:
(1) Personal recollections
(2) “He Didn’t Kiss Babies, and He Didn’t Kiss Asses,” interview with Bob Beyerle, Maximum RocknRoll #102, November 1991
(3) Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis by Ryan Moore
(4) Autonomia: Post-Political Politics ed. by Lotringer & Marazzi, Semiotext(e)