In praise of messiness

I liked and disliked bits of both sides in the "monkeywrenches -v- hammers" debate (PN July 1997), but believe that there are many more options for action than the two polarised ones presented to us. I’d like to speak in praise of messiness, of those actions where arrest or escape is fairly incidental to your intent, where you are neither martyr nor masked hero, but where you have something you think it is necessary to do, and, well, when you get caught, you make what political capital you can out of court and prison, and cheer yourself up with the thought of all the stuff you got away with.

I’m as keen as the next woman to cut the fence and run away, and be free to cut the fence another day, yet the thought of doing actions where I knew I mustn’t get arrested at all costs — uuurrgh, horrible, I’d have been desperate, and therefore less effective as an activist, when I eventually, inevitably, got caught. (I am speaking from the point of view of a white woman considering a relatively short stretch in a Western European or North American prison. When the stakes are different the rules change.)

So, this messiness can be a positive option, one where your acceptance of the possibility of arrest frees you to concentrate on the action you want to do, but where you aren’t necessarily condemned to the long haul of court and prison absolutely every single time you take action. However, you certainly do have to be prepared for the long haul of court and prison absolutely every single time you take action, which applies whether you favour covert, open or messy actions. It worries me that "Sam Bombadil" seems to be saying that covert action is good for people who don’t want to go to prison because they have family commitments, jobs, or whatever.

It is stating the obvious to say that covert action isn’t risk-free — otherwise the prison population would consist entirely of Ploughshares activists and the falsely-accused, and competent burglars would be very happy people.

I don’t know if it is true, as "Sam Bombadil" says, that a movement cannot sustain itself with large numbers of activists in prison, but whenever I’ve contemplated getting entangled with the English legal system I’ve had in mind that the level of punishment doesn’t necessarily bear any relation to the effectiveness of the action. The risk of arrest and sentence also varies wildly from action to action: sheer numbers can make an open action as safe/risky as a covert one. When it became really important to me not to get arrested, I mostly stopped doing really arrestable things (and I still regard myself as an activist).

Whatever strategy you choose, you always need to know what strategies everyone else intends to follow. Although there are ethical as well as strategic issues involved in whether or not you choose to get arrested (when you have a choice), I think a lot of the problems come from not thinking through how each personal choice affects everyone else. I don’t think it is on, for example, for covert activists to roll up at an established action site, tear half of it down, and then roll off again with absolutely no thought of how it affects the activists who live there. Resident activists may well be thrilled that the base/road site/runway has been dug up/torn down/carted away and dumped in Whitehall, but, unless everyone is specifically told different, the resident activists may well be less thrilled by the extra attentions of the police, or the disrupted relationships with local people. Action sites certainly don’t "belong" to any one group of activists, and fresh energy is usually very welcome indeed, but talking to each other lets everyone know what they are letting themselves in for. Anyway, there are so many potential action sites that no covert activist need feel themselves in the least bit constrained in taking as much nonviolent action as they please.

And finally, it is, of course, very irritating to do a fabulous, effective, empowering action with a dozen gorgeously together activists, only to discover that they have all given false names, and intend to abandon the remaining few to face a glowering magistrate minded to give them sentence enough for the missing twelve. The departing activists are then, no doubt, equally irritated at the guilt trip then laid upon their heads. Messy I may like, but not that messy.