Playing Revolution

The dirty kids who show up for the gathering all agree: things are fucked. Not just in a tinker and fix-it kind of broken, but fucked from the inside out. They aren't all self-described anarchists, not by far, but most of them are sick of seeing people hurt and made miserable by the people with power. It might be better to live without power at all, they figure. So they came here to build a model of a society that isn't fuelled by commerce or exploitation.

They came to build a magical, impossible machine.

A perpetual revolution machine.

###

There is a police car parked outside of Anarchist HQ. It's about three or four hours into the week-long Active Resistance gathering, and The Man's already got his nose in.

I walk past the crusty punks clumped outside and into the dingy hall. There's two cops and a guy with them. "Building inspector," someone tells me. They look here and there, taking their time, despite the small crowd of Active Resistance participants and organizers asking them questions and getting their responses on camera. One of the cops looks over the stuff Anti-Racist Action has on their table and buys a button from them. It's a classic "see, I'm down with the cause" move. People roll their eyes, and even his partner looks a bit impatient.

They leave Symptom Hall, AR media buzzing around them until they're entirely off the grounds. Bestowing him with unlikely wit, I imagine the impatient cop looking back and pondering if this is the symptom, I shudder to consider the disease!

###

It must be admitted -- the dirty kids are angry. Their tastes more often run to a stiff molotov cocktail than the milk of human kindness. Injustice is everywhere. The governmental control that infuriated anarchists in the past pales in comparison to how corporations today profit off of anxiety and banality and death. It's no wonder the kids want to raze it all and start building at the grassroots.

In a time when Coke sponsors their university, the perpetual revolution machine is logo free.

###

The agit-prop committee meets at midnight.

"Did you see that?" J. says, pointing at a billboard far above. It's an ad for a breakfast cereal, a Canadian flag with the maple leaf replaced by a Shreddie. The Shreddie has been, in turn, replaced by the circle A.

"That was one of the things they did last night," J. says, meaning the agitation-propaganda committee.

We're hanging out on Queen St. West. I go inside the Big Bop, where a large crowd of white kids listens intently to a black activist from the States. He's telling them that more has to be done in outreach to black activists, that just saying "Blacks are welcome" isn't enough: "Capitalists say it's an open door, too." When I leave, J. tells me the speaker's done time for his politics, a remark that impresses me but also distresses -- too often in anarchist circles, this is the most valuable currency of credibility.

J.'s a plainclothes activist from Montreal, his only concession to anar-chic unfashion is a day or two of stubble. He rubs it ruefully when he recounts his run-in with TV cameras, saying that he hopes his mom doesn't see it.

"She'll have no problem with me being at an anarchist gathering -- no conception of it, really -- but she'll complain that I haven't shaved."

And J.'s no newcomer to this scene, either. Last I heard of him he was culture jamming in Vancouver, and had just attended a summer camp for hardcore troublemakers put on by the people who do the Chomsky-affiliated Z Magazine.

One of the other guys hanging out on the street says something about his workshops being at the same time's as J.'s. J. adopts a boxing stance and the other guy, a head taller and a few ribs wider than J., gets into it a little too enthusiastically, and I watch as J. gets a few serious tips on where it's good to punch someone.

After he extricates himself from this, J. introduces his boxing partner.

"This is M.," he says.

From nowhere, a small punk guy with glasses comes up to M. and melts into his big arms. The small punk has a gas station name-patch with bumboy stitched on it, and M. is tenderly caressing his shaved head. "M. is the squatting king of Toronto," J. continues. "Right, M.?"

"Squatting queen, maybe," he concedes in his deep voice. "Since '83." M. and bumboy part, sharing a glance as brief as the hug was lingering. I smile, I hope, in a supportive and non-specific way, thinking about sixteen years of fugitive existence. M. tells me a lot of things, unasked, about his transsexuality and science fiction and his job but I can only think about how some of us have to work at being rebels, and others have no choice.

The next time I see him is at the parade, in his dress, blowing plumes of fire. His mouth is so full of kerosene it dribbles out the sides.

###

A little while ago, dirty kids in Toronto made a small perpetual revolution machine: a store without a profit-motive. A volunteer-charged store without a boss made the capitalists smirk like they do when they drive by a sweating cyclist. Nothing will get done.

But things did. Two years later, Who's Emma is still in anti-business. Voluntary cooperation wasn't against human nature, after all. The bosses were wrong. The teachers were wrong. The experts were wrong. The perpetual revolution machine did work.

###

I am shocked at how many nerds there are at Active Resistance. I do a workshop about breeding a new kind of visionary by splicing radical politics with science fiction and almost 25 people showed up to discuss their own experiments. I figured at the very least it would provide a legitimized context for people to think about the transformative power of utopian and dystopian stories, but at the end a bunch of people are interested in actually forming a Toronto-based group. It's quite gratifying.

At the end a guy comes up to me and tells me how much he enjoyed my questions. I was pretty happy with them, more actually than the bombastic diatribe I began the workshop with -- I'm more comfortable asking questions than giving answers, I suppose.

We head over to Symptom Hall for dinner together, and he tells me he has made a film on freighthopping. I am amazed he's been able to do it with a camera in tow when I have failed three times -- maybe it's easier in the States, I suggest, since he's from Chicago. Nope, the Canadian freights are easier to hop, he says, and we talk about that for a while before we run into a girl who I had seen wearing a Submission Hold patch earlier on. She's also going to dinner, and I talk to her for a while about the band on her patch. She's a singer for a band in Calgary, still in high school. My friend S. is giving the freighthopper constructive criticism on his film, which it turned out she'd already seen when she was visiting Missoula earlier this summer. The community of people who do weird stuff is a borderless one.

Symptom Hall has a backyard and it's packed with scruffy food eaters. There's a few Hare Krishnas doling out channa, and I go to get some of the savoury chickpea stew. I'm not surprised to see the Krishnas, even though the Food Not Bombs crew is supposed to be serving food -- punks and Krishnas have vegetarianism in common. There's even a few Krishna hardcore bands.

I run into someone I met at the Librairie Alternative in Montreal, who, when he wasn't volunteering there, was a musician in a huge ensemble that he also lived with. "Oh, you came! Good!" I say, shovelling food into my mouth. When I met him a few months ago he asked if I thought AR 98 would come together, and I said yes. I feel vindicated.

"Yeah," he says, "There's, like, fifty of us here from Montreal."

I go out front to find somewhere to sit. J., an eighteen-year-old girl who I know from the punk store, rolls up on her bike. We go back for more food together.

She sort of stops at the entrance to the back yard, taking it in. There's people everywhere, talking about zines they love and complex regional scene gossip and that guy who just wouldn't shut up in the workshop.

J. doesn't look at all out of place here, being female. The difference between the scene now and ten years ago is stunning. This is the legacy of the Riot Grrrl who booted in the door of the boy's club and made a decent amount of room for herself and her friends.

"There's a lot of girls here," I say.

"Yeah," J. said.

That wasn't the whole truth, though, so I revise. "Lot of cute girls here," I say.

"Yeah," J. says, her eyes roving, a finger twiddling at her lip ring.

###

Destroy, create. Destroy, create. Destroy, create. This is the cadence of the perpetual revolution machine. Its music appeals to people who attack the state while bringing communities together. Who throw art parties and paint bombs. A movement that acknowledges and uses both creative and destructive sides to the human spirit instead of denying or suppressing them.

The perpetual revolution machine's music is a siren call for bright young misfits. The dirty kids finally have something they want to dance to.

###

I think it's all about a willingness to sit on the floor. It's difficult for me to imagine being involved with a subculture unwilling to hunker down and sit elementary school style.

It's Film Nite and the floor density is already pretty high but I manage to squeeze in. People are watching videotaped footage of a cycling action, in which a busy downtown Toronto street has a bike lane painted in. Following the footage is the media coverage, and the participants interviewed make their points about the city's responsibility to cyclists. It's a simple but well done action; the creative element not only makes it fun to do, but more likely to be covered in the news. The crowd laughs as the cars automatically follow the new lanes, and a broader point about the malleable nature of reality is made. Most of the crowd are from out of town, and you can practically hear synapses firing. Hey, we could do this...

The next film, Free Ride, is made by the Chicago freighthopper I met earlier. What was interesting to me was the style of dress -- overalls and handkerchiefs and beards -- something I didn't pick up in my extensive reading of freight zines. The people interviewed in the film mostly justified freighthopping in defiance-to-the-system kind of terms, but the similarity in style confessed other, more romantic, motivations.

The moment that got the most laughs was a reference to the anarchist black flag, an in-joke -- it shocked me to realize that I was in a room full of people who got it. A trio of eco-warriors were being interviewed at a blockade about why they freighthopped. At one point they realize it's July 4th, and burn a flag to celebrate. As they watch it go up, one scraggly-bearded wag says "Ain't it cool how it turns black?"

After the film is over, the guy who made it talks about how people have got to tell their stories, how it's fun and how it's important: how significant parts of cultures of resistance disappear without documentation. It sounds vaguely familiar, and I realize I made a similar exhortation at the beginning of my workshop, and that I probably wasn't the only one. This plea was probably made a hundred times through the week of the gathering: speak your story. Tell your history. Mythologize yourself. Without the anecdotes and legends, we will fade.

###

The status quo tells its young that the idea of a perpetual revolution machine is a baseless rumour put forth by cranks. It doesn't exist, and don't bother looking for it, because our system works just fine. It doesn't exist, and what's more, it wouldn't work if it did. It doesn't exist, even when it generates a parade that a thousand people take part in.

###

It's a moment of degentrification when the freaks take Queen Street West. Having long ago gone from quirky to commodified, the street is jubilantly taken over by those that originally imbued it with outcast hipness.

It's the "Hands Off Street Youth" parade. Mel Lastman isn't in attendance, despite him being one of the main reasons we're marching -- his war on squeegee kids has intensified the alienation and fear street kids feel already. All the media whoring about him going/not going to the Gay Pride Parade -- it's all about this year's scapegoat, isn't it? Ten years ago it was bathhouse raids...

People hanging outside the Gap watch as someone squeegeeing the window of a completely stopped car is beaten to the ground by a multiple armed octocop with six batons. A man fuming in his red convertible is told that everything is under control and not to worry by a parody of a cop on horseback -- an oversized cubist police cap, stilts and a splaytoothed horse attached to his waist complete the joke.

There's dozens of puppets, and hardly any of the boring words-on-a-stick things. People on the street are smiling. People in the cars are not, except for a few good sports.

We stop near Lettieri, the cafe at Queen and Spadina that first lodged a complaint about the squeegee kids -- a fact that I, and all the people here, learned at the beginning of the parade. I am worried that Lettieri will be receiving a complaint from the squeegees, perhaps in the form of a brick through the window, but it doesn't happen. Instead, a bit of street theatre is performed, showing the badgering cops repelled by unified youth.

We head north, and I start to think about '88, perhaps spurred by my worries about brick-throwing. The 1988 Anarchist Unconvention that was held in Toronto had a spontaneous demo to protest the downing of an Iranian jetliner by U.S. forces that resulted in altercations with the police. The media called it a riot, and 36 people were arrested. I hadn't gone to the demo (only the punk shows) and so I don't know the full story of how the tension escalated.

But when I realize we're headed to 52nd Division, my tension certainly escalates. Some greasy loser in front of me lets his dog shit on the ground where someone's bound to step on it, and a wave of cynicism washes over me -- what would he get away with in an anarchic society? Then I start talking to a woman who spent twenty hours making a beautiful puppet, a broad faced purple monolith with a nosering, and I'm inspired again by the time we get to the cop's lair.

There's already blockades set up with walls of policemen; as the parade caterpillars to a stop, there's the tangible feeling of being surrounded. The street theatre that was performed at Queen and Spadina is repeated here, except now it seems incredibly satirical -- the colourful faux-cops with their moronic horses are now metres away from what they're brutally parodying.

A friend leaves. "I don't like this. Cops are nothing if not territorial."

There's a few speeches, impassioned but bogged down by being a cliched mode of commentary. We seem to be holding the space, waiting, making the point that we have a right to be here. I notice a few of the organizers, and they all seem a little anxious, speaking into their walkie talkies.

After the speeches, we move on. But the parade-caterpillar stops in front of the phalanx of cops on horseback, and the drumming gets louder and faster, and the chants are along the lines of "cops suck, cops suck" and I wonder why we're not going anywhere and I can hardly look at the cops, so sure am I that I'll be able to actually see the hate brewing in their hearts, and the drums get louder and faster until they sound like war drums... and then we move on. A few blocks later, we end up in a park beside the Eaton Centre, and it's over.

The cops are here to affirm the power of the status quo. We're here to deny it. Two metal wheels spinning with incredible force in opposite directions, moving within a fraction of the friction that will ignite a riot. It's not comfortable to get that close, but we can tell by the heat that we're doing our job.

###

The perpetual revolution machine defies the common wisdom of the status quo; refutes all current understandings of human nature and social science; and continues to inspire the dirty kids who don't fit into the system, as undefeatable as the imagination.

The '96 Chicago Active Resistance sowed the seeds for the one in Toronto, and the word is it'll be Austin for '99. Only intangible things link these events; the energy needed to organize them appears from no recognizable power source. The perpetual revolution machine gets bigger, encompassing more parts of everyday life, as people see with their own eyes how it can create social space that is fairer and more interesting than life in authoritarian or profit-motivated systems.

At the end of it, the dirty kids ask each other: If we can live like this for a week, why not a month? Why not a year? Why not our entire lives?

###

Sidebar: Build it and they will come

Number of days of the '88 gathering: 4

Number of days of the '98 gathering: 7

Number of participants expected by the police: 400

Number of participants according to the Globe and Mail: 1000

Number of participants according to the organizers: 700

Number of workshops: 72

Number of venues booked for them: 11

Number of possible programming hours per day, not including committee meetings or meals: 10

Cost for a week's worth of cheap meals in Toronto: $105 (@ $5/per)

Cost for a week's worth of cheap meals, workshops, entertainment, and a good chance of crash space in Toronto with Active Resistance: $35

Approximate % of people from out of town: 80

Approximate % of people from another country: 60

Number of people attending from Australia: 1

Number of people at "Non-Monogamy and Anarchist Relationships" and "How to Silkscreen," the two best attended seminars: over 70

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This article originally appeared in This Magazine, November 1998.

The fab fotos were taken by David Meslin.

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