Hamilton anarchist spasm: target local shops?

WHAT SORT OF HAMILTON DO THEY EXPECT TO RESULT? — COLBY COSH

Icome not to bury The Ungovernable, but to praise them. The scene created by masked anarchists who rampaged down Hamilton’s Locke Street on Saturday night was extraordinary: has there been anything quite like it in the recent history of Canada? Normally it takes a pretty special occasion, an antiwar protest or a political summit meeting or a hockey playoff, to create the critical mass of humanity necessary for a street gang to have a bash at storefronts and luxury cars. Or, at least, to do it with impunity.

But from a tactical standpoint, this incident, believed to have involved about 30 hooligans, came out of nowhere. It was an ordinary late-winter Saturday; people were quietly enjoying latenight coffee and dessert in a shopping district, which is regarded as a sin crying to heaven for vengeance only by opponents of “gentrification.” The Hamilton constabulary obviously had no reason to expect trouble.

According to the official account, the gang, which carried a banner declaring “We are the ungovernable,” was initially confronted in Durand Park by a couple of beat cops. These early-responding unfortunates were successfully driven off with thrown rocks ( damn! These guys really are ungovernable!), and by the time their colleagues could arrive in force, the masked group had raced through the shopping district throwing eggs and other missiles, smashing windows, and terrorizing business patrons. There were no arrests: none of the black- clad vandals so much as tripped and fell over their own bootlaces long enough to be detained.

Perhaps one ought to say “There have been no arrests yet”; Hamilton’s police will certainly not want to leave this incident on the scorebooks as a loss. The thought of the police laboriously dusting eggshells for fingerprints, in pursuit of masked suspects, does not inspire profound hope. It has been widely observed that there was an anarchist book fair and teach- in going on over the weekend. I suspect the local, identifiable organizers and attendees will probably be given every chance by Hamilton officialdom to demonstrate how well the vaunted solidarity of the direct-action black-flag left holds up under pressure.

Hamilton residents made a point of supporting Locke Street businesses on Sunday, turning out to spend extra cash and scribble kindly messages on boarded- up windows. Haters of gentrifi- cation, which is a word meaning “a neighbourhood becoming nicer and thereby more expensive,” will sneer at such gestures of bourgeois solidarity. Perhaps they were hoping for the violence upon which private property and social order undoubtedly rest to express itself more efficiently on Saturday.

Instead, the people of the area produced a demonstration of community spirit — tainted a bit, no doubt, by the free chicken that the corporate seducers from Swiss Chalet were handing out. But it does looks a little more like an ideal of community than racing down a street in disguise, smashing things, and dispersing before you can be confronted.

Any confrontation involving radicals is an opportunity to ask the question “What sort of world are these people hoping to create?” The affray left glaring hints of participation by non-Hamiltonians, or so Hamiltonians seem to feel. There are neighbourhoods in the city that are being rapidly “gentrified,” but Locke Street has been just what it is for quite a while. The anarchists, in their haste, seem almost to have targeted local businesses specifically.

To be sure, gentrification itself, considered as some abstract vector of economic cruelty, is not concerned with distinctions between the locally owned cupcake shop and the sinister mermaid of Starbucks. The cupcake shop is surely all the more vulnerable to going out of business, with the building perhaps becoming an attractively squattable derelict, because someone smashed a $ 5,000 window.

But if that is the premise upon which the Ungovernables are acting, what sort of Hamilton do they expect to result? I notice that leftwing street vandals never, ever go after a Walmart, even though they make a tremendous purely verbal display of hating Walmart. Walmarts, you’ll notice, rarely even have half- decent access to bus stops, let alone acres of fancy exposed glass to be smashed in a moment of cretinous ecstasy. They are designed, not coincidentally, quite like prisons. If you stormed one it would not be so simple to melt into adjacent side streets afterward.

Don’t mistake me — I like Walmart. What they save in shoplifting losses from their architectural principles, they pass straight on to me as a customer. But the idea of a world that is all Walmarts, where buying and selling may only be done in a brutalist/ institutional setting, is less attractive. Isn’t it?