The revolution will be televised and it will be a blast

>> Shit disturber Patrick Borden says anarchists have more fun

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

All in all, 1997 was a year of anarchists big and small. Big anarchists included the high-level negotiators for the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, who set about the task of dismantling nations' identities, social security provisions and basic rights, all in the name of profit.

The small anarchists fought back. With a millionth of the budget of the big guys, they protested, plotted and then pulled off events like the fleeting but thorough takeover of the massive "Complexe G" government nerve centre in Quebec City. This year, the small anarchists trained, prepared and tested their powers and found them more solid than they'd ever dreamed.

For both its big practitioners and its small in 1997, anarchy never looked so potent. Governments, whose political imaginations, in Canada at least, seemed to begin and end with a referendum or unity declaration of some sort, never, ever looked so laughable.

Which is why Patrick Borden, one of the underdog anarchists who helped pull off the one-day takeover of Complexe G last November, will likely be a noisemaker in 1998. Already Borden and the group who masterminded the Plan G takeover are plotting a Plan H: the takeover of a building like the Hydro-Québec building or Premier Bouchard's office in Montreal, or the Montreal Stock Exchange. This time, too, the duration could be longer than a mere day.

Whose idea was Plan G? "It didn't really matter whose idea it was," says Borden a little dreamily. (He is now writing his Master's thesis on chaos theory and anarchism). "It was just a beautiful idea."

As Borden tells it, all people need is information and the connotations of dissolution and wickedness attached to the concept of anarchy will fade away. "I have people coming up to me all the time and saying, 'What is anarchy anyway?' and I tell them them a bit about it and they say, 'Oh really? I think the government is stupid. I believe in democracy. I guess I'm an anarchist."

Borden says he and 600 other activists plan to pull off a day-long takeover of the World Trade Organization building in Geneva in May. The Complexe G action, he says, was widely discussed around the world on the Internet's anarchist sites.

"I think in one way it reminded the world that it's possible to do that kind of thing. When there's too much civil obedience, too many things go wrong. We have to create another current, one that says people have a right to say no."

And will Borden's brand of civic mindedness ever catch on beyond activist circles? He's confident it will. "Even the middle class now, who are the last people supposedly to support something like anarchism, are beginning to see there's something wrong with the system. It may have dawned on them, for example, when their children moved home because they can't make it in the world."

The challenge, Borden says, is to identify the ways in which people can change the world. The traditional left, he adds, has been doing a pretty bad job of it for the past 20 years.

The pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters at the Vancouver Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, along with the prohibitions against demonstrating forced on hunger protesters in Montreal, are further examples of how governments have quite anarchically tossed away enshrined rights when they deemed it expedient. These events, Borden says, "expose the myth that Canada is a good country. Those kinds of tactics are inherent in the system. The elites saw control being threatened and they got upset."

Borden is a published writer. His first novel, Empyreal Press's The Space, was published last year and sold 300 copies. He describes it as being about the way drugs are used to prop up the system, a conclusion he came to after a brief flirtation with heroin.

He plans to write another novel in 1998 on what he describes as the fulfilment of desire through revolution. He sniffs a bit as he refers to the old Marxist versions of revolution, with their preoccupation with production and proletarians. The revolution of the future, he says, will be more about fun.