Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Fortunately, we had cased this area for a more serious action, so I had a route already worked out. I ran along a pedestrian walkway between two construction sites, then across a major street?reheved not to encounter any cars to speak of?and along the side of a dormitory. I climbed a short slope, tossed my spray paint can into a bush from which 1 retrieved it the next day, then ran a couple more blocks through parking lots and driveways. A poHce car passed on the street across the lot to my left, but the driver didn't see me, as I disappeared quickly between two buildings. I made it to a bicycle path that bore me through a wooded area into a residential neighborhood; here, I took off my jacket and ridiculous hat, and began walking at a moderate pace, trying to get my breathing under control after sprinting half a mUe.

There was one more long stretch I had to cross before I was out of the area, a major thoroughfare that would have gone swiftly on a bicycle but took some time to walk. Had this been a more serious situation, I would have laid low in the wooded area for a while, but I figured I was pretty much in the clear. I stayed on the shadowy side of the street for most of it; a pohce car passed by once, slowly. As I approached the end of the street, where I would have to cross it, the pohce car returned and slowed to a crawl. There was no way around it, I had to cross the street, and if I panicked and ran again I would reveal myself to be their quarry, this time out of disguise. I walked as slowly and nonchalantly as I could, right in front of the police car that had now stopped. The officer scrutinized me through the vvindshield, but I didn't match the description on the radio. I got to the other side of the street, and switched to another car-free bicycle path that led out of downtown. Fuck those motherfuckers, I was outta there.

The moral of the story? Always spray paint the circle-A ^rst, so even if you're interrupted mid-sentence, people will know where you're coming from!

Evasion 240

Festivals

Promotion (optional) Entertainment and activities

People

A staging location

Ingredients

So you want to throw a festival! Maybe you want to have a good time, in a way that shows Instructions what a better time we could all be having. Maybe you want to get people together, and you've noticed how many more people will come out for a party than for a protest. Or maybe you're trying to provide for the needs of your community directly, in the longstanding tradition of direct action, and you figure togetherness, excitement, and amusement are human needs as much as food and shelter. If we can't dance, who's going to be part of our revolution, right? And there's something to be said for making friends during peacetime, so there will be people looking out for you when war is on.

What will the theme of your festival be? It could be "anarchism," but then it might only attract people who consider themselves anarchists. Better, hold a street fair organized according to anarchist principles, or a music festival exploring anarchic aesthetics, or a dance party with anarchist implications. If you must be topical, try demonstrating your thesis in practice, rather than just talking about it. For example, if you want to address alternative economics, you could hold a "Really Really Free Market," to which people bring gifts and resources to share without money changing hands or count being kept, and thus present a working example of a gift economy. 241

What will the structure of your festival be? Will you script events to be staged for spectators, or establish a framework that enables groups to contribute autonomously? A core group can envision possibilities and coordinate complex plans a less organized mass cannot, and in a civilization based on spectatorship it can be dangerous to rely too much on the spontaneous contributions of others. On the other hand, there's no reason to limit your event to what you and your fellow organizers can imagine. Leave room for others to bring and deploy their own ideas, and brainstorm about how different groups could be involved; the more points of departure within your event, the more these can bring people together and complement one another. Just like revolutions, the very best festivals are open-ended, encouraging groups to organize within them as they see fit in ways that add up to a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.