Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

One more hint: during the preparation process, on top of everything else you have to do to get ready, let your collaborators know you will be bringing a special surprise to the event. Challenge them to reciprocate.

Account

Reclaim the Streets 426

In DC, we have had two Reclaim the Streets actions (and a few other actions that were not specifically billed as RTSs, but fashioned similarly.) This is an account from the first DC Reclaim the Streets, which took place on Saturday, June 23, 2001.

A small group of us started planning for the action a couple of months before the action date. During the first two meetings we talked about our vision for the event and how to organize it. In the second meeting we broke into working groups: outreach, tactical (and blockading, which in this case meant cars), art, and fiin and games. The groups met independentiy and shared information with the other groups on a need-to-know

basis. For example, I was in the core organizing group, but not in the tactical group, so I didn't know until the morning of the event what the final destination was?and only learned it then because I needed to drop off some supplies in advance. Others in the core groups did not know the location until we arrived. This was very important: for our plan to succeed, we needed the element of surprise so we could set up roadblocks without the police knowing what was happening.

The outreach group made hundreds of full-color posters and fliers. The front of the fliers read, "Street Party! Converge at Dupont Circle, 3 p.m., Saturday, June 23, Featuring: DJs [followed by the names of the five DJs], Free! Reclaim the Streets!" and featured our web address and a picture of people dancing. The back read, "Featuring live DJs, dancing, music, street theater & soccer. Bring chalk, toys (especially water toys and Frisbees), boomboxes, banners, signs, and costumes. Stepping ojEf the sidewalks and into the streets brings us together and allows us to challenge the dehu-manization of our lives. A street party is a liberated zone, where we can practice life as we'd like it to be?full of color, community, and mutual aid." We wanted the poster to be appealing to a broad range of people, from rave kids and activists to parents and children. We also made 11" x 17" posters and hung them on lampposts all over town using wheatpaste (see Wheatpasting, pg. 598).

The tactical group was in charge of deciding where to hold the event, what route to take to get there, and how to blockade the road so we could hold the area we wanted for as long as possible. In our larger group, we chose the meeting point for the action, Dupont Circle. This convergence point was publicly announced on the fliers. We chose Dupont because it was a public park where a large number of people cotdd converge on a summer day without attracting too much attention, it was accessible by public transportation, and, as a number of roads departed from the circle, it would be diihcult for the police to block our exit from it.

PVC pipe is breakable, structurally unsound, environmentally destructive, and inferior in countless other ways. You can use bamboo, wood, or meta! pipe to do just about anything it can do, and better.

Reclaim the Streets 427

A subgroup of the tactical group was the car group, who were responsible for finding and getting old cars that could run enough to get a few miles but were such junkers that it would be no loss to leave them behind. They ended up paying a couple hundred dollars, in cash, for two cars. The previous owners signed over the titles to the cars to the fake names the buyers gave them; for a later action, we were able to get cars for free with a Httle more time and searching. It was also members of the car group who, on the morning of the action, drove the cars to the two ends of the street we were to reclaim, acted as if the cars had broken down in the middle of the street, and then pretended to look to see what was wrong with the cars while actually disabling them so they would be difficult to move. Later, their tires were slashed, too. Only the tactical group knew who was in the car group, since the car people were in a high-risk position.

The arts group spent the months leading up to the event making beautifiil banners and flags, which were carried in the march to the RTS destination and hung over the broken-down cars and at the entrance to the party. They also made large paper mache props?including a huge sun, moon, and lightning bolt (the RTS symbols), which were carried in the parade and used to decorate the party.