I have ambivalence about blogging events that I have had a direct hand in organizing. Partially this is because I prefer hearing other people's perspectives on these things, especially when they are big things, and partially I have a little bit of trepidation about creating a reality distortion field where my own high hopes are writ large and return to me as echoes. Since I've heard so little outside of the comments of a small group of (non)organizers and (anti)participants I guess I'll at least make a few comments about this years
8 days of anarchy.
If you are not familiar with
8 days of anarchy I'll give you a little bit of back story. After the SF Anarchist Bookfair went on for a couple of years and was generally seen as a success by everyone involved it was natural for other events to pop up over the weekend of the Bookfair. The first of these (to my recollection) was the Anarchist Cafe Night that was thrown by a group of people loosely connected to the
Martin de Porres House of Hospitality (Catholic Workers). This event can best be described as leftist chaos. It's a benefit (usually for some acronym laden group doing vaguely-defined-but-generally-accepted-to-be good work), it is a meal (of what can best be described as mass-produced vegan food units), it's a dance party (imagine many young sweaty bodies dancing to the hits of five years ago), and it's a performance space(read: spoken word poetry) all in one. At the very least it is a spectacle and for people who are turned on by such things it's great but it really isn't for me. Perhaps one quarter of it would be for me but I don't need to pressed together with hundreds of my closest frenemies to be annoyed, entertained, "fed", and shouted at.
ambivalence + venom = bay area @
A couple years after the start of the cafe was the first BASTARD (http://sfbay-anarchists.org) conference. I attended the first year of the conference but it was only after it that I started attending the Anarchist Study Group that is largely responsible for putting on the conference. This year was the Eighth Annual BASTARD Conference. The idea of the conference was as the natural counter-point to a Bookfair. While the bookfair provides a way for people to be introduced to Anarchist ideas, people, and culture (such as it is) the idea of the conference was to discuss these ideas. To -do- what anarchists do. It was always intended to be an anarchist theory conference and that is its strength and weakness. For the first few years it was held at the New College in the Mission district of SF which brought with it packed rooms and a
Mission District crowd. We lost easy access to that space and the conference moved to the East Bay where is has been since. The upside to the move is that the conference reflects the (non)organizers more accurately but the downside is that a lot of the crowd that could barely make it as far as the mission no longer attend.
After BASTARD went on for a couple of years it seemed like the whole series of events had some sort of glue to them, referred to loosely as "anarchy week" at the time. The premise that, extending the BASTARD mission of taking anarchist ideas seriously, anarchists could take themselves seriously enough to declare a block of time theirs was appealing. It is appealing. Out of these thoughts and resulting discussions grew 8 days of anarchy, a series of events that are based on the premise that anarchists can, and should, take themselves if not seriously, then consciously. A few years have passed since the first 8 days...
2008 is a bleak time for anarchists. Five years after the start of the latest war, nine years after
Seattle, and seven years after the Day That Changed Everything the best way to describe the anarchists left standing is exhaustion. There is nothing more hopeful on the horizon than busting up the RNC & DNC. Even the venom we have for our enemies (or frenemies) seem to spend itself in a toxic stew that we simmer in rather than actually being directed toward something or someone. Even commerce, the kind of commerce that started this whole series of events, seems to have exhausted itself.
The crowds at the SF Anarchist Bookfair were much smaller than in years past and while some tables (the usual suspects) seemed to do well the general consensus is that there are decreasing consumers of Anarchism (TM). A greater percentage of the attendees were the usual suspects, glaring at each other, making veiled threats, and, apparently, moving around deck chairs on a slowly sinking ship.
Eight Days reflected this mixture of venom, ambivalence and dissipating numbers. More of our events were scheduled in the East Bay than in SF this year which partially explains the smaller crowds, but they were smaller. The
game night was particularly small with even some people who would normally have been expected to be there there preferring to socialize with friends at the bar. The derive was better attended this year than in year one but that was probably because the (non)organizers of the derive carried a bit more enthusiasm for the event than the ones from year one (myself largely to blame for this lack of enthusiasm). The conference was smaller but, I felt, more engaged than last year. All in all the crowds were smaller and the energy was... less.
To engage in the most (hypothetically) responsible criticism of 8 days will require a quote...
It's hard to not sneer at the endlessly narcissistic character of this series of conferences (events - ed.). Like most of the rest of what's called anarchism in the contemporary US, this conference is of no conceivable interest to anyone other than people who have an intense emotional stake in applying the label "anarchist" to themselves. The conference organizers are probably quite aware of this, since they always set it up to be this way.
This does present an interesting binary that isn't what I (as someone involved in making these events happen) have intended in the course of events but I do think is worth reflecting on. The binary, which is false, is between organizing events by anarchists that concern anarchist politics AND organizing events that are of "interest to anyone other than (anarchists)". But it does have a point. 8 days of anarchy is too conservative in its scope and as a result is not reaching people who could be interested and interesting. Furthermore, although I'd call it a sidebar rather than a biting criticism, nothing appears to be happening in the direction of anarchist social change. 8 days isn't changing this lack of event and the people around 8 days, the BASTARD conference, or the SF Anarchist Bookfair don't seem to have any idea how to make such a thing happen.
I'll leave this for now as there are a bunch of things that have happened since then that also deserve some reflection... like the new issue of the magazine!
