In the aftermath of the protest the city has a strange sense of abandonment. The trademark busy stores and bumper-to-bumper traffic are gone. You walk through abandoned streets in search of any sign of the demonstration, but the faint moan of sirens off in the distance is the only sound to be heard. The sudden drumming of a vehicle approaching makes you jump. You spin around startled by a police car with its lights flashing heading straight towards you. You quickly dismiss the thought of fleeing down an empty street on foot and watch as the cruiser pulls up right beside you and stops. Two officers get out of the car.
“Put your hands against the hood,” one of them commands you.
“Why? Am I under arrest?”
“You are being detained, now put your hands against the hood.”
“What for?”
“You are a suspicious character leaving a crime scene. Put your hands against the hood NOW!”
“I’m leaving a protest not a crime scene”
But one of the officers already has a Taser levelled at your chest and you feebly comply. They empty your pockets but you’re not carrying anything other than some pamphlets and fliers. They throw you in the back of the car, where they take turns questioning you about your activities, friends, employment, and whether or not you belong to any organizations. But even with your basic understanding of the law, you know better than to answer anything. They switch back and forth between accusation, sympathy, threats and even insults, but they’re obviously just fishing. They don’t have a clue about anything. The part of you that isn’t scared is furious that they’re just picking up random people off the street.
Eventually they bring you to a temporary mass detention center, part of their billion dollar security budget. You are “processed” and led to a chain-link cell where dozens of other detainees are being held. There are row upon row of these cells and though dividers prevent you from seeing the whole space you get the impression there must be hundreds of people locked up is here. Conditions are as bad as you could have imagined. The cells smell of urine, and there are no bathrooms. Worst of all some people have been pepper sprayed and clearly have not received any medical treatment. Inside the cell there are all types of people young and old, basically anyone foolish enough to leave the march without a group or a plan. A middle aged person with greying hair and a t-shirt with a Naomi Klein quote printed on it is rattling the cages screaming “This is against our rights you know! You can’t do this to us!”
“They clearly can do this to us. They already have,” responds a black clad anarchist from halfway across the cell, “and you can forget about your rights too. We don’t have any.”
“We all have rights protected by the constitution! Even you.”
“Oh really? Then how come we’re all locked up in here? The constitution is just a piece of legislation. Rights are given to you by the state and they can be taken away.”
“That is the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Not at all. I have freedom that gives me the responsibility to honour myself, and subsequently the earth and my community. These are things that I have and they can never be taken away, no matter what is done to me.”
Rolling their eyes “Look, I really don’t feel like discussing political philosophy with you right now.”
“Why? Are you going anywhere?”
“Alright. But the Constitution protects people from abuse. What would stop corporations from dumping toxic chemicals or stop people from owning slaves if there weren’t laws to prevent them?”
“First off, slavery requires the centralized power of a state in order to exist. And secondly we only need rights and laws when society has become so unequal that there is a difference between those who have and those who have not. Workers don’t need labour laws to protect them when they’re co-operative members of a non-capitalist economy.”
“I’m a member of a co-op,” adds another prisoner wading into the conversation. “It’s a housing co-op. We’re all tenants and the co-op owns the building. But we’re all voting members as well.”
“Do you ever have problems with your landlords?”
“Well sometimes,” they say as a smile spreads across their face. “But my landlords are also my neighbours, we usually work things out. Anyway we certainly don’t need the protection of the landlord tenancy act.”
“I’d bet you’d call the police if someone broke into your house though, or assaulted you on the streets. Face it some people are greedy and lazy, they prey on the vulnerable.”
“It has been proven time and time again that crime is a social problem, and that a punitive response is not only ineffective, it often contributes to the imbalances that breed criminal behaviour. If people are greedy and lazy why create systems of hierarchy that allow the powerful to prey on even more people?”
“But how could you ensure that minorities wouldn’t get abused by a populist majority? The Constitution & Charter act as a safeguard against that, even in our own system.”
“I think people understand the importance of individual liberty & the dangers of hegemony, and they would make provisions against discrimination in the charters that form their co-ops.”
“Our co-op does.”
“Well who would build the hospitals and schools? Who would ensure they’re built correctly and won’t fall down? How does public infrastructure like clean tap water and sewage get done? Who’s going to pick up the garbage?”
“We’d need to form co-ops based on the principles of mutual aid to perform the function of public services, and federations of co-ops for really large scale projects.”
“And what if people can’t agree on how to do things? What if the goals of one co-op directly conflict with the goals of another? How would you resolve conflict?”
“People would have to negotiate I guess. Look, no system will ever eliminate conflict. We’re all just too different, and isn’t that the wonderful thing about diversity. The important thing is that negotiations happen on an even playing field”
“So if public works are done by co-ops and the co-op charter protects people from oppression, haven’t you just destroyed the state to rename it the co-op?”
“Not really. There are key differences. The state has supreme authority over all matters within its borders. We have been arrested by the same establishment that decides how to share public resources and what to write in the school curriculum. Now that’s a lot of power. Co-ops on the other hand can only make decisions concerning the single issue they were formed to address. The state is a system of hierarchies, where elected officials make the laws and the police wield greater power than citizens. With co-ops, power is decentralized and non- hierarchical. Anyone can become a voting member of any co-op and we are all law makers. And then there is the issue of borders and all the racist, nationalist militarism that comes with them. Co-ops exist within an overlapping patchwork of jurisdictions, where the limit of the co-ops authority is defined by its function, people are free to move between them, and there are no armed divisions between us and them. ”
“There isn’t anything inherently racist about the state. In fact there are federal laws against racism.”
“Are you kidding me? Borders are what make ‘us’ and ‘them’ possible. What else is a border other than a line that keeps ‘those other people’ where they belong. It’s easier to move money around the world than it is for a human being to walk across a national border.”
“Well, it sounds like a lot of meetings!”
“You got me there,” the anarchist laughs. “I hate bureaucracy. But you might be better at it. I think most assemblies would only be attended by technocrats and people who are really passionate about the issue. Everyone one else would be just as happy to stay home, unless there was a really big problem.”
“Well right now we all have one really big problem: how are we going to get out of here?”
“They’ll have to let us out eventually.”
“Yes but under what conditions? If they try and make us sign release papers we should all refuse. We’ll accept nothing short of our total liberty. No stipulations about not attending protests in the future. But it’ll only work if we all participate. Are you in?”
Your cellmates burst into another lively debate but before the group is able to reach any kind of consensus two officers barge in and start pushing people around, ruining any opportunity to continue the discussion. One of the guards looks directly towards you and demands to see your ID.