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Ten Reasons to Go Hard on January 20
Why Break Windows?
First, as
countless others have argued, because property destruction is an effective tactic. From the Boston Tea Party to
the demonstrations against the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, property destruction has been an essential part of many struggles. It can pressure or punish opponents by inflicting an economic cost. It can mobilize potential comrades by
demonstrating that the ruling forces are not invincible. It can force issues that otherwise would be suppressed—we would certainly not be having a nationwide conversation about race, class, and policing were it not for the courageous actions of a few vandals in Ferguson. Finally, it conveys an uncompromising rejection of the prevailing order, opening space in which people may begin to imagine another.
Property destruction charges don’t look good on a résumé or in a campaign for city council, but perhaps this is a good thing. It means that political vandalism is usually a selfless act—and even when it isn’t, it has to be its own reward. There is more reason to suspect paid nonprofit activists and aspiring politicians of ulterior motives than to question the motivations of vandals. This may explain why activists and politicians cast such aspersions on them.
Shop windows represent segregation. They are invisible barriers. Like so much in this society, they simultaneously offer a view of “the good life” and block access to it. In a polarizing economy, shop windows taunt the poor with commodities they cannot afford, status and security they will never attain. For millions upon millions, the healthy food, medicines, and other goods they need are the breadth of an entire social class away from them, a gulf they will not cross in a lifetime of hard work—a gulf represented by half an inch of plate glass.
To smash a shop window is to contest all the boundaries that cut through this society: black and white, rich and poor, included and excluded. Most of us have become inured to all this segregation, taking such inequalities for granted as a fact of life. Breaking windows is a way to break this silence, to challenge the absurd notion that the social construct of property rights is more important than the needs of the people around us.
One reactionary argument goes that vandals are wrecking “their own neighborhoods,” but this is a disingenuous way to speak about those whose names do not appear on any deeds. Indeed, when developers speak of “improving” these neighborhoods, they mean the de facto expulsion of the current population. The problem in Ferguson and everywhere like it is not that the economy has been interrupted; the problem is the routine functioning of the economy itself. In a profit-driven society, the more that poor people work and pay rent, the poorer they will end up relative to those who are profiting on their labor—that’s where profit comes from. It is dishonest to blame the victim here, as if more submissiveness could produce a different result. In a pyramid scheme, somebody has to form the bottom tier, and ever since the colonization of the so-called Americas that has always meant black and brown people.
