Are You the Baddies?

On the assault at the anarchist bookfair in Montreal

Another year, another miserable and embarrassing fiasco at the anarchist bookfair in Montreal. This year, presumably taking a break from updating their lists of things their friends aren’t allowed to say and arguing about whether astrology is racist, an anonymous group of “““anarchists””” at the bookfair took it upon themselves to beat up a local activist in public. They subsequently distributed a zine, complete with art depicting a black and pink fist, solemnly explaining their totally normal and reasonable motivations for doing so.

This guy, they explain, was a ‘manarchist’, something which cannot be tolerated and should be met with unapologetic physical violence. His list of crimes includes taking up a lot of space by doing a lot of activism, sending an eggplant emoji to a girl he was dating, calling identity politics distracting, and doing not one but two accountability processes of some sort (the zine calls them ‘interventions’) without changing sufficiently. As punishment, he needed to be physically beaten, then banned from all anarchist spaces and organizations, as well as banned from dating, indefinitely, or I guess until this anonymous group of vigilantes decides he’s allowed to fuck again. I assume they’ll let him know.

The zine features a kind of introduction entitled ‘Why We Jump’, as in, assault people in public. It starts,

Call it “street justice”, call it consequences, but when transformative justice fails (given the inherent centring of the abuser), shit is gonna go down. Call it ‘escalating the accountability process’. What do you do when accountability processes fail, again and again? Well some folks decided to jump an abuser. And before you decry it as “violent”, is abuse not also violence?

In some ways, I’m almost impressed that these people have finally moved on from endlessly putting their friends on trial in directionless, dystopian kangaroo court ‘accountability processes’ and have just cut directly to the chase: beating people up. Frankly it simplifies things, and getting jumped by Montreal anarchists is probably less painful than watching them trying to organize one of their transformative justice nightmares. But still, it is fucking insane that this happened.

Obviously, they use the words ‘abuse’ and ‘abuser’ every five seconds in the zine. I’ve written before about the way the overuse of this word has made it effectively meaningless. In documents like these (this zine is part of a whole genre), it functions less as a descriptor of the target’s behaviour and much more as a securitarian thought-terminating cliche which justifies the behaviour of the attackers. Securitarians in the government use the word ‘terrorist’ to mean someone who should not have any rights, someone who can be dealt with summarily, someone with whom it is politically forbidden to empathize. Securitarians in the ‘social justice’ milieu use ‘abuser’ in a very similar way for a very similar purpose, albeit obviously with different stakes and on a different scale.

Now, clearly if we are talking about somebody who beats up his girlfriends or roofies girls in bars or something, nobody is going to cry much over him getting jumped. That’s the point of repeatedly using the word ‘abuser’ to describe your target. But, true to the genre, the zine – even though it includes no less than 8 testimonials of people who were ‘harmed’ – doesn’t actually accuse him of anything of the sort. The closest it gets is in this passage:

I had an intimate relationship with this man. From the beginning, I set sexual boundaries and they were repeatedly tested and violated, knowing my vulnerability as a survivor. I gave him many chances to take accountability yet instead he chose to deny it and gaslight me to the point I barely believed myself.

This is kind of a callous thing to say but I’m going to say it: who knows what that means? It’s meaningful that in an anonymous document exclusively dedicated to justifying vigilante violence against this man, it doesn’t simply use the word ‘rape’. This kind of document is always purposefully written to make the accused seem as awful as possible and the alleged offence as egregious as possible. Events are recast to establish ‘patterns’ of ‘harm’, anything that can be seized on is used as evidence, and everything is worded for maximal reputational damage. For example, elsewhere in the zine, him going to the Anarchist Library after anonymous people ordered him not to is described as a “breach of boundaries, something he willfully crosses often in a test of power.” In another place, him glaring, later that day, at the people who beat him up is described as being abusive and making people feel unsafe (yes, really). So given that the language used in the document is already being stretched to its breaking point, and nowhere does it accuse him of rape or even of the slightly more vague term sexual assault, what can we assume is being described in the passage above? I don’t know, because it doesn’t say, but I find it hard to imagine that it is the kind of thing most people would imagine when they hear the word ‘abuse’. I wish I wasn’t so cynical about this kind of thing but at this point, I’ve simply seen it too many times.

Much of the rest of the zine is taken up by complaints that the man in question is, basically, an annoying guy. He is said to take up too much space in the organizations he is part of, to react badly when criticized, to be dismissive, and so on. I don’t know if this is true because I don’t know the guy personally, but I also don’t think it matters, because it’s not a crime to be an annoying guy, especially when you’re in your early 20s, as I believe this guy is. And even if you don’t believe in crimes because you’re an anarchist, let’s be clear that if the punishment among anarchists for being annoying was summary assault, the streets of Montreal would be running with blood.

One thing I think the zine gets right is where it explains that people being too conflict avoidant can lead to bad outcomes in anarchist scenes. This is absolutely true; where it goes wrong is by apparently forgetting that there is an entire range of interactions available to adult human beings in between the two extremes of being a pushover and getting together with your friends to railroad and/or jump somebody you don’t like. For example, if somebody in your organization is being fucking annoying, you can say so. If you’re dating a fuckboy, you can stop. If somebody you’re organizing with tries to get you do something you don’t want to do, you can refuse – a noted benefit of being an anarchist. The zine uses the term ‘coerce’ repeatedly, for example in the passage, “His lack of consent extends into organizing spaces. For example, by coercing people to take tasks they are not comfortable with”. But it is not explained how he accomplishes this ‘coercion’. Coercion is when you force or threaten someone into doing what you want. Someone needs to tell these ‘anarchists’ that they’re sovereign beings who are masters of their own destiny and they’re allowed to say no to some keener being bossy at the meeting.

I’m sort of kidding but mostly not. I think one of the most important things we can do to interrupt this type of thing is teach people about their power and sovereignty. I’ve been in settings where very bossy anarchist men tried to make me do things I thought were stupid; I just didn’t do those things. What’s he going to do? Worst case scenario he leans on me more and I tell him to fuck off. This was easy for me because I’m kind of naturally inclined to ignore bullies, and because I’m confident in my ability to stand up for myself, and because of my socialization and so on. It’s not as easy for everyone, in particular for many women, and that’s a fact worth keeping in mind. But let’s be clear that we’re talking about volunteer activist organizations here, and informal anarchist affinity groups, and subcultural scenes and so on. There’s no bosses. Nobody can use their position of authority to hold your income over your head and force you to do stuff on pain of homelessness. Nobody has access to any real power because it’s all a bunch of skinny punks with part time jobs and no drivers license. And the only person threatening to beat anybody up is you.

Forget the ‘radical consent workshop’ the zine insists this guy must be forced to attend; we need radical fuck off workshops where we train people to say fuck off. I’m not saying this guy said anything like the following because I don’t know him, but let’s say he’s the most insufferable variety of lefty bro imaginable: tell him to fuck off. “Hey babe the only reason I want to also date your best friend is because I’m soooo radical”? Fuck off. “Hey comrade we just really need you to lend the organization 200 bucks”? Fuck off. “Hey pal can you take care of the dishes real quick, me and the boys just really need to finish this important discussion”? Fuck off. “Well if you loved me you would do this weird fucked up sex thing with me”? Fuck off. Fuck off fuck off fuck off.

Obviously people are responsible for their actions and if you’re being an insufferable fucking bro you should be told so. And I’m glad that mean feminists in like 2011 told me what ‘taking up space’ means because, even if the phrase can be overused, sometimes I’m confronted with men in political contexts who haven’t heard of this concept and I just have to kind of gape in astonishment as they waste everyone’s time gabbling on for 25 minutes about nonsense as everyone visibly winces and wilts. But this is the point – people who do this kind of thing need to be told. And they need to be reminded, and interrupted, and ignored, and made fun of, and verbally confronted, and elected out of positions of power and so on if they can’t get their shit together. And we, the collective we, are all responsible for that. And anarchists, of all people, should be the first to understand this. You can’t let yourself be ‘coerced’ by some 23 year old activist kid who has no conceivable method of forcing you to do anything. This is something we desperately need to be instilling in people.

Anyways, this assault and this zine are part of a bit of a resurgence of this kind of stupid shit noticed by myself and others recently. Ideas and attitudes that a lot of people on the radical left have quietly been abandoning over the past couple years because they are fucking insane are being pushed again, loudly, by those who are worried that they may be losing their clout. In this case, the perpetrators of the assault are happy to spell it out directly: “join us or get out of the way”, they write at the end of the introduction, giving us the two options of participating in their crazy antisocial behaviour or submissively accepting it. Their goal is, after all, to create a climate of terror in their scene where people fear being marked as deserving of physical violence from masked assailants. But participation or submission are not our only options.

Anybody remotely connected with this world should actively condemn this attack. I don’t accept the authority of this gang of anonymous losers to assault people they don’t like, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It sets an absolutely awful precedent, it isn’t okay at all, and we don’t have to accept it. If you’re a leftist in Montreal and you know about this and don’t say anything, you’re ‘getting out of the way’ – and you don’t have to. You can intervene in some small way on violence in your community and refuse to be terrorized into silence by these fucking creeps. They want the message to be that they can make the rules and enforce them with violence; we can remember our training at the radical fuck off workshop. Our message, that we don’t accept their bullshit and won’t let it happen again, should be broadcast widely enough that they hear about it even on whatever loudly echoing Mastodon server they’re lurking on, and have to at least briefly wonder if they might be the baddies.

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