The Politics of Creativity and The Politics of Destruction

These days it seems like everybody wants to build something--this is an impulse that is entirely revolutionary, exciting, and captivating. From community gardening projects, independent media centers, no-waste food distribution programs like Food Not Bombs, thousands of active independent arts projects, community health collectives, culture centers, alternative economies, cooperative agriculture, and bicycle collectives. Building things is good. It helps us create a livable world.

While these projects are vital to environmental and economic sustainability, the pleasures of living, and the growth of community, I am concerned that many have so thoroughly renounced a politics of negation, of the ability to say "no," of the necessity of creative, life-affirming direct action that tears down institutions of oppression in spectacular and useful ways that they have bunkered down in a metaphoric nuclear shelter before the metaphoric buttons have been pushed and given up the right to defend ourselves against the violence of this brutal system. They take for granted that the apocalyptic destruction of the earth and its people is an inevitable outcome of our system. Such cynicism often sneaks into movements in the trojan horses of pacifism and performed positivity and denies the possibility of destroying that which is killing us.

Can horizontal networks of trans-local, productive, communities stop wars? Can localized organizing end occupations? Perhaps, if relationships become strong enough to resist the violence of mass marketing, so-called "social networking" data-mining, and the bombardment of propaganda in the public and private spheres. But I hesitate to fully believe that we can renounce mass demonstrations, forceful actions of negation, the physical destruction of the machinery of capitalism that threatens the land, air, the water, and our survival. To steal an old I.W.W. cliche, we can build a new system in the shell of the old; however, we cannot deny that the beast of oppression still thrives in its shell and that the beast must be destroyed.

Together I want us to garden, eat delicious meals, create spectacular community support systems, culture, art, healing practices, and media that satisfies our desires in a sustainable way.

Still, from my vantage point, pitting politics of negation and destruction against these beautiful local creative initiatives is unwise. We need a diversified arsenal to attack the system and a diversified culture of productivity to sustain ourselves and build stronger networks. If we entertain a false opposition between these modes of survival, both self-defense and the destruction of the machinery of capitalism and additionally self-preservation and the creation of a better way of living, we will either be destroyed by the system or kill ourselves.

Happily, this is not necessary. We can continue to renounce, protest, negate, and dismantle systems of violence while experiencing joy, liberation, health, vitality, and community.