In Consideration of Property Damage as a Tool for Social Change

This is an article from the New People, a progressive newspaper in Pittsburgh, writen in response to outcry from the more liberal elements of the local activist community to an emergency protest against the massacre in Haditha.

In Consideration of Property Damage as a Tool for Social Change

By De'Anna Caliguri

All social movements have a raison d’ètre; we are nothing if not a group of people united around some broad and general unity of purpose. Social movements arise in order to move a given situation to where we want it to be. We accomplish our goals through careful consideration and formulation of an overall strategy capable of achieving our objectives. This strategic plan on how to create change relies on utilization of a variety of tactics. These tactics compliment each other, feed off of each other, and the occurrence of one, in many ways, determines the effectiveness of the others. Not everyone will agree or feel comfortable with every tactic, much less personally engage in every tactic. The point of this article is not to try and guilt people into choosing different tactics, but to argue that a strategic plan to end the war or create systemic social change necessitates an ethically based/humanist plan relying on a diversity of tactics. Property damage may sometimes be a legitimate part of this plan. Hopefully this article will also clarify some of the reasons why some people opt to engage in property destruction.

In the current political climate, activists are seeking ways to escalate the level of urgency and intensity of their actions in order to take a bolder stand and to bring conflicts to the surface where they can be confronted. People in some movements see property damage as one effective element of a well thought out strategy to win. It is nothing new. Movements from labor struggles, gay rights, the women suffragists in England, global justice, environmental, anti-nuclear and anti-war movements have used property destruction, sometimes focusing specifically on an institution already being targeted within a campaign, or sometimes working in a less concentrated way with a more disruptive spirit in protests or riots. In the context of a single target, property damage can be carried out with a number of intents depending on context: economic damage, halting or limiting the institution’s ability to function, as a form of escalation (another element to social change that’s a necessary occurrence in any campaign that wants to achieve its goal) or as a symbolic act to bring to light anger at injustice.

Ploughshares Philip and Daniel Berrigan chose to use property destruction as a means of resistance during the Vietnam war and the anti- nuclear movement. In what is perhaps one of the most often remembered acts against the war, the brothers broke into a draft office to steal and burn hundreds of draft records. This act effectively disrupted the draft process, and made it take longer to get people to Vietnam to fight. This meant fewer people on both sides were killed and made it harder for the U.S. to keep the war going. In addition to its direct effectiveness, such an act also escalated the bounds of possible and acceptable tactics, and forced the anti-war movement into the spotlight.

To give a more recent example, David Segal, and in a separate incident, Brendan Walsh, both attempted to burn down military recruiting stations in order to stop recruitment in their cities, in order to lessen the amount of young people in their cities who were recruited into the military.

After the women suffragists in England went through meetings with members of Parliament, then rallies and demonstrations, and still were met with indifference in their demands for the right to vote, they formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, ready to use more confrontational tactics, under the slogan “Deeds not Words.” They engaged in wide-spread property destruction after they came to the conclusion that other tactics were not going to be enough to win the right to vote. These women smashed shop windows and burned mail boxes and the empty homes of politicians. They poured acid on gulf courses, destroyed works of art and smashed sculptures, all to raise the stakes and create a situation that could no longer be ignored.

Traditional civil disobedience and direct actions, such as the famous lunch counter sit-ins, or any march through the streets, also are means of disruption, and their level of effectiveness is in part because of this disruptive element. As Martin Luther King stated, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

Disruption of everyday life can be a part of a strategy to win. Is this not one of the purposes of large marches? One local, and likely familiar, example of disruption was the day after the Iraq war officially started, 1,500 people took part in an act of civil disobedience by taking over downtown Pittsburgh’s streets in order to disrupt the flow of traffic and bring attention to the opposition to the Iraq war.

I want our movements to be considered a threat, to create a hostile environment for the culture of militarism and profit, racism and oppression, of which we’re all a part. I want to make it difficult—no, impossible—for our society to continue as is. Isn’t it long past time to match our words with action? Shouldn’t there be room for people to resist this war, this culture and system of power which produces wars, to express outrage and start attempting to demonstrate a resistance that allows for a greater variety of actions, both inside and outside the system, to put pressure on those in power?

I wish I were writing this in defense of a riot. While I understand that many would probably disagree with me, I personally feel that our government deserves a response on the level of riots for the actions it carries out daily. Sadly, I’m writing in response to the breaking of a single corporate store window, the tossing of some street signs and a relocation of a dumpster to the middle of an intersection at an emergency march on June 7 to protest the (then) recently revealed massacres in Haditha and Ishaqi, and demand an end to the war in Iraq. Without a doubt, it is incomparable to the devastation our government, and all governments for that matter, inflicts, both abroad and here at home. To say that Haditha was something different is to pretend the rest of the murders the U.S. government carries out each and every day are acceptable. But the surfacing of such horror served as a reminder, at least to me, of why it’s so important that we not only continue but seek ways to escalate, our resistance to the government and its wars in whatever ways we can. And it’s why many people felt it necessary to engage in direct action by marching through the streets of Shadyside and Bloomfield without a permit. And why some opted to throw street signs into the streets, move a dumpster into an intersection to block traffic, break a corporate retail store’s window and throw rocks at the windows of other corporations.

The large-scale marches are needed, and should not be abandoned. But has a social movement ever won with these alone? I am by no means suggesting that we should abandon pickets and vigils and permitted events. Far from it, these are crucial elements to any movement which takes into consideration the necessity of building a larger base of participation and support. Nor am I suggesting that everyone needs to participate in every imaginable form resistance. But there are other tactics that can aid in the success of any struggle. Within any framework that is fighting for positive social change, not every action or tactic has the same goal, or at least prioritizes goals differently. Sometimes the goal of an action is to bring more people into the struggle, but sometimes the measure of success for an action is more direct, sometimes it is to create a disturbance. Often, tactics used to meet goals won’t be those that are the best media stories, or viewed in a positive light in general, but sometimes that’s not the point of an action. The suffragists were ridiculed and deemed “insane” by many for their choice of tactics, but in the end, that is what eventually forced the government to acknowledge and cede to their demands.

Utilizing property damage is not inconsistent with the goals that social movements are trying to achieve, with what values we seek and want to shape in society: a world free from all forms of oppression and exploitation, one based instead on self-determination, equality and justice, where everyone has a part in the decisions that affect them. Ask people who support certain acts of property damage and they will tell you that it’s not about destruction for destruction’s sake anymore than sitting in at a lunch counter was about disrupting the lives of people who just wanted a meal. This is not about attacking family-owned small businesses, destroying peoples’ cars or messing with peoples’ homes. Targeted property damage, against those institutions that are counter to these aims, is within the realm of living in the world we want to create. It is not putting people or animals in physical danger; it is attacking those entities that inflict harm.

It’s not that everyone needs to start smashing windows, or that property damage is the only effective tactic, and that alone will end the war. But property damage and other forms of disruption need to be respected as legitimate forms of protest and dissent; they play a role just as relevant as the myriad other tactics necessary for a movement that seeks results, and they shift the political landscape to aid in the creation of a crisis which can’t be ignored.