At the end of show celebrating May Day a statement condemning the local business association’s attempt to target anarchists was read by Chewbacca, and a brief march occurred where a leaflet was handed out (see text of statement and leaflet below). Accompanying the march were roman candles, a noise cart and a banner with Calvin peeing on a security camera and reading “Happy May Day.” Though it was raining and only 30 people marched, spirits were high and the event was overall energizing.
STATEMENT READ BEFORE THE MARCH
Over the past decade more and more of a destructive element has moved into this neighborhood. They’re only a handful of individuals, but they impose their will on a neighborhood of 1000s. They live off of and exploit this neighborhood; making the most despicable alliances with politicians, police and media. At times some of them have gone so far as to refer to their intentions for the neighborhood in the racist and classist language of “weeding and seeding” it, that is to say kicking out people they see as undesirable and replacing them with proper residents. This same group – that allies itself with some of the most powerful organizations in St. Louis – will, at the slightest demonstration of someone standing up to their bullshit, play the victim.
As anarchists, we oppose anyone or any entity that’s based on the inherently exploitative relationship of boss/worker, landlord/occupant. We are against anyone who cares more about increasing the value of property than the people who live in it. Whether these dynamics play out at rent-a-center or any of the coffee shops and galleries along Cherokee St., we are against it and the people who profit from it.
Recently an assembled body of these individuals – the Cherokee St business association – has decided to spend $5000 (1/6 of their annual budget) on cameras to watch the rest of us. This same group arrogantly invites people they see as potential criminals to their meetings to help make decisions. But if we look closer we can see how this invitation embodies the myth of democracy. Any of us can go and try to influence this group that gets to make the decisions, but ultimately it’s still this small group – not everyone else in the neighborhood – that gets to make the decisions.
This same invitation ignores the existing dialogue between those who try and live off the neighborhood and those within it that deface and redistribute that class’s wealth. Since they can’t stand a fair fight, the business association’s gone running to the media to spread rumors and lies.
One business owner in particular (who’s leading the witch hunt) has tried to hide how powerful he is. He tries to blur the divide between his wealth and the rest of us by appealing to our shared interests of music and art – an Achilles’ heel of ours. We need to remember if he gets his way our dreams and ideas will only be allowed as pretty, toothless, decorations. He claims he’s small-time in his exploitation, but anyone who visits his company’s website can see he owns dozens of properties along and around Cherokee St. When a developer owns dozens of buildings and runs a development business, their priority will always be to up property value and remove the undesirables – working people, immigrants, people of color, the homeless, anarchists and anyone who resists or doesn’t fit neatly into their planned misery. Our circles of friends should have no room for him or his class.
Too often we are shown only one side of the class war – their side – and it’s portrayed as normality. We, and those who fought back in 1877, those who fought back in 1886 (125 years ago tonight), those since and those who still do fight, are the other.
We invite everyone who is worried about the creeping surveillance, the rising property values and the general insidiousness of a society divided by class, to join us outside for a short demonstration. Our intention this evening is to show our opposition to their plans and express our solidarity with those of our comrades who the business association is trying to make an example of.
Leave our friends alone.
Happy may day, and may the force be with you.
TEXT OF LEAFLET HANDED OUT AT MARCH
Playground or Prison Camp: Some thoughts on the city, surveillance and social control
“You bang your head against the bars of the prison society, which stretches all over the planet, confining adventure within its mean corridors, always the same… Is this your story reader?”
-Italo Calvino
The question of what our city should look like is on the tips of many tongues as of late. From Paul Mckee’s scandalous “Northside Regeneration” to the burgeoning hip district on Cherokee Street, urban development is on the rise. But what is lost in all this chatter is the essence of what that “urban renewal” actually means: gentrification, displacement, policing, surveillance and an ever-increasing tendency towards control by society’s elite.
The real substance of this conversation cannot be boiled down to a choice between, on the one hand, muggings and anti-social violence or, on the other, the ruthless competition of the marketplace; a false debate in which the terms have already been set by those who run the show.
If we look from a different angle, we can see that the true question before us is whether or not we want to live in a controlled society with Orwellian aspirations (cameras recording every step down the street, citizen-police, and the pre-emptive suppression of every discordant emotion and desire).
We are not naïve enough to believe that the forces behind this transformation of our environment are either benevolent supporters of human creativity or evil dictators in training. Like all bosses and owners, they are motivated first and foremost by the quest for money and the power that it can buy. Their ability to engage in that pursuit is directly linked to their status as hoarders. A business, small or large, exists only where there are those who have more than they need amidst those who do not have enough.
This relationship of disparity exists primarily because it is upheld through force: the deadly violence of police and imprisonment alongside their reflections in the grinding brutality of work and poverty. Surveillance is simply one more buttress propping up the façade of normality, behind which the violence of the state and the economy constantly lurk.
The cameras which are always watching our movements turn us all into potential criminals, potential inhabitants of this country’s massive prison system. Even more sinisterly, the spread of surveillance throughout the urban terrain creates conditions that, more and more, resemble those inside the prisons themselves.
The so-called “community” being developed along Cherokee Street is really only the community of business, erasing as it does the social fabric of the neighborhood which existed before it (inter-dependence between neighbors, solidarity in the face of a racist and violent police apparatus).
The creation of a genuine, human community would first of all entail the unraveling of any allegiance we may hold to those who are profiting off our work, our creative energy, and our desires for revelry and festivity (namely, our bosses and landlords as well as the owners of the bars, coffee shops and art galleries…) In their place, we can weave together alliances of solidarity based on our refusal to submit to the impositions of wealth and money, power and authority.
The dreams of the wealthy are our nightmares. May our visions of a world that doesn’t want or need them in it, forever haunt their sleepless nights.
