Dying for Beginners

            Activist and Writer Daniel Burton Rose Learns Balance Through Crisis

 Interview by Aaron Shuman

I met Daniel Burton-Rose lurking among the back tables at a political event. Judging from the way Daniel lingered at the back of the room—where you can watch the crowd and individual reactions, in addition to the speakers—I figured him for a writer before I met him. And once I learned he was Daniel Burton-Rose, I knew him immediately from his work as co-editor of anthologies that have become treasured texts of the Newest Left. They include The Celling of America, which some say coined the term “prison-industrial complex”, and last 2002’s The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization. Daniel’s journalism—for publications such as Vibe, Counterpunch, Dollars and Sense, and Z Magazine—is so well-researched, so dense with fact yet assured in its ability to tell a story, that I’ve chipped teeth trying to digest it and felt coddled by it at the same time.

 Yet an essential part of Daniel’s story is about the struggle of writing. With his first book completed at the age of 19, a policy wonk’s dream job (researching a book for major Left publishing house Verso), and a peer-like ability to drop the names of Left icons of investigative journalism such as Cockburn (Alex) and Silverstein (Ken), Daniel developed symptoms of carpal tunnel. He tried to ignore it, until his body crapped out. Now he tries to avoid the physical act of writing whenever possible, while continuing to publish with the assistance of friends who receive tapes and transcribe them, and are often his hands and ears. The way Daniel tells it, his projects—such as his long-awaited history of 1970s revolutionaries the George Jackson Brigade, and the sequel of Battle of Seattle, out now under the title Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from the Global Movement—were always supposed to be quick books. Now they’re taking years to come to fruition. As the quick hits of youth have become long marches, Daniel’s story is about reaching your limit as a writer and adapting, while the movement he’s chronicled reaches and adapts to the political limits of war. It’s also about turning his identity as a writer into his own personal prison, and learning how to break out.

 This interview appeared abridged as “Writer’s Block” in the November-December 2003 issue of Punk Planet.

 AS: It’s easy to trace your background as a writer in your publishing credits, but it’s harder to trace your background in political organizing. I’m curious what you’ve done in that respect.

DBR: Writing came out of being an activist and an organizer. The first year I was in college, I started out with a group called Oberlin Action Against Prisons. I was drawn to them because they were very visible on campus, and obviously dedicated to the cause. They were older students, some of whom had gone away from campus and come back with organizing experience. They were anarchists, direct action-oriented and intellectual. OAAP wasn’t a missionary group, in that we genuinely worked with the people—prisoners—whose plight we were trying to get the word out about. I found it powerful to make contact with people who had lives so different than mine, to become friends with them, and I enjoyed it. I’m still close to one of the politicized prisoners I worked with in OAAP.

            The writing came from having incriminating information about the prison system which wasn’t being detailed or exposed. But I’ve considered myself a writer since I was ten. When I was on the cusp of doing activism, I realized I was about to go off a precipice. I knew I wouldn’t be doing any creative writing for a while, that politics would take over. I’m just now bridging that divide, using a first person voice which includes the politics that drive me and the people I’m close to.

 AS: It seems like the prison issue is the one you’ve stuck to. Why?

 DBR: There’s something about prison activists when the image of such extreme isolation as a metaphor appeals to you and resonates in you. It certainly implies something about you. And so much as that’s true, I think I actually have been lessening on the prison activism, and that orientation.

            I talk to a lot of prison activists who start to realize that the more time they have for prisoners, the more they start living as if they’re in prison themselves. You’re alone in your room, writing letters. You may be connecting through email, connecting to people at meetings, but much of the work is isolating. Sometimes there’s even guilt in enjoying pleasure when you’re close to people who you perceive are denied it. None of this is the fault of the prisoners or their outside allies: it’s the warping system we’re up against. But we need to be conscious of potentially damaging dynamics. Part of the learning process for me, coming out of prison activism, was how to enjoy life while continuing to fight for other people’s ability to enjoy it as well.

            Part of the injury I’ve had over these last five years was metaphysical in many ways. It manifested strongly in my body, in terms of continuous and constant pain, but it’s a symptom of inner distress. Part of which came from not being able to handle how distressing all the things were in the prison system that I’d been writing about—from rape to extreme isolation in control units. I didn’t have a sufficient base inside myself to be able to deal with constant exposure to the jailhouse horror show.

AS: I want to plot your injury against your intellectual development. What were you working on?

DBR: It started out when I was 19, when I was putting together the first book, The Celling of America. I’ve always had a very independent, self-isolating instinct. Part of the reason I began to do more writing, as opposed to other organizing, was because I could follow my interest in a way I had control over. Maybe at that time, we’ll say, I wasn’t so good at coordinating with other people. [laughs]

            I worked on that book a lot. I started getting this pain in my wrist, which I knew was bad, because I was a writer and I wanted to keep writing. The injury kept crawling up my body: forearm, shoulder, radiating throughout my back. But it was at an exciting time when my first book came out. I was writing for publications I really liked and was impressed by. I didn’t know what my options were, certainly in terms of not writing, but also leaving college and entering the world.

            So I just pushed the injury until I collapsed. I spent a year researching Private Warrirors in DC. That project, as with the prison stuff, was in an extremely alienating environment. I was in the administrative center of the empire, tracking down nuclear intellectuals, the people who wrote articles advocating a first-strike policy in the 80s and 90s, the people who are being drawn on again with the new Bush Administration. My days included going to the suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, or Institute for Land Warfare breakfasts in hotel conference rooms, sitting with representatives from Lockheed-Martin and the U.S. Army. That was the emotional environment of the place.

I also had a hard time connecting with political peers in DC, because they were either white kids in internships, or nonviolent punks. I was living in Columbia Heights, a primarily black neighborhood next to Howard University. I didn’t get out enough to make more than a few friends there. If I was there now again, I’d interact with people differently, but I was in a very polarized mindframe then.

From there I moved to Seattle to research a book on the George Jackson Brigade, an anarcho-communist guerrilla group that did a number of bombings and bank robberies in the Pacific Northwest in the 70s. Seattle was the first place where I felt at home with the community, where I could bridge between the political kids and the people I had fun with, which had been a split since college. It was best of times and worst of times, because I was totally losing my life, but I also was grounding out in a community in some very satisfying ways.

AS: I didn’t realize you had started working on the George Jackson Brigade book that early...

DBR: I started working on it in the summer of 98, and then I got this call from Ken Silverstein. He said, “Are you free? What are you up to?” and I was like, “Why?” He told me there was an opening researching a book he was writing on arms dealers and mercenaries. Ken’s a very impressive investigative journalist, in terms of getting information, putting names and faces with institutions. So Private Warriors was a good opportunity to keep learning, and to save money to support myself while I did the George Jackson Brigade book.

I had plans for travelling and promoting The Celling of America more, so I didn’t initially pursue the opening more. I was living with Barbara Curzi, who was one of the Ohio Seven, as the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Bombing Unit, then United Freedom Front—the longest running of the communist guerrilla cells in the U.S. that came out of the 70s—was called after its member was arrested. And she said, “Are you crazy? You have the opportunity to go to DC and expose these people. We did bombings to try to bring attention to this; you’d be crazy to miss that opportunity; you have the power to reach way more people than we did, in a less destructive way.” And so, I was like, “Well ok, if she’s telling me to do this, I’d better do it.” Ken hired me because he knew I’d do something with the opportunity, which was cool of him.

AS: So when did your body finally shut down?

DBR: It was crapping out in D.C. I didn’t do as much for him as I would have liked. It quit when I went to Seattle to do interviews, oral history, for the George Jackson Brigade book. I was able to collect all this information but I wasn’t able to process it. It was tremendously frustrating, the material running through my fingers.

            In some ways I’m glad, because the issue of armed struggle and guerrilla tendencies is a very dangerous one that should be taken more seriously than I was taking it at the time. I would have been glamorizing it more than I will be. I was drawn to do the story of radical prisoners, how they dealt with their situation, and the combustion when people who are confined in a very authoritarian environment are released into relatively open society. I’m interested in how the political situations developed in those two different environments interact and change.

            There are isolating effects of choosing the path the Brigade did, and right now, I’m excited to be a part of a movement that is maintaining militancy and a popular presence. Guerrilla struggle is one of the deadend pathways that could be opted for, which I don’t see people opting for right now. Which is good.

AS: Were you surprised by Seattle 1999?

DBR: Immensely. It was wonderful and elating.

AS: What was your connection to the organizing?

DBR: I was living with Jeff Perlstein, who’s the person who thought up the idea of the IMC and made it happen, and is now the Director of Media Alliance. He and I actually did a day in jail together a couple months before the WTO protests, because of another protest. We opted for jail time because we didn’t want suspended sentences hanging over us when the circus came to town. I was also close to people in the Infernal Noise Brigade, whose creative injection was really inspiring.

            Some people have asked me, “Isn’t it frustrating that you did activism for five years in relative isolation, and then as soon as things picked up, you had to drop out?” It didn’t bother me. It was like a relay race: another grabbed the baton. I felt better about crashing. Other things were going on, and other people were organizing. It’s always sad when Old Lefties die in times when the world looks dismal and grey.

            And though I was jacked up, I wasn’t isolated anymore. As much as I’m in constant pain, when I’m in the streets at a demonstration and there’s real liberating going on, I don’t feel the pain. And then that moment recedes, and we move back inside, and the pain starts up again. [laughs]

AS: How did you hook up with George Katsiaficas in the first place?

DBR: He was coming to Seattle, and I organized an event of him speaking at Left Bank Books, the anarchist bookshop, which was an information distribution place leading up to the WTO protests. On the night that he was scheduled to speak—the 31^st—Left Bank Books closed due to martial law, so we had the talk at a coffeeshop friendly to activist folks.

            George had just gotten into town that afternoon, and he’d flown directly from South Korea, so he had a completely different perspective. My mind was blown by the militancy of the protesters, and people throwing back tear gas canisters, dismantling storefronts, etc. But he had just come back from Korea, so he’d be looking at a street and there’d be four cops, and people would be running, and he’d say, “Why are people running? It’s only four cops!” I appreciated that.

            [Co-editor] Eddie [Yuen], George, and I were in Seattle together. George went home really amplified. He teaches a Social Movements class at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and put together a reader for his students, with the title The Battle of Seattle. Which was kind of excusable, because it was just about Seattle, and was right afterwards. It was never intended to be used as the title of our anthology, because the phrase was a cliché even before the protest took place. But that was the exemplar that he gave to Nick Momatas at Soft Skull. And then Soft Skull didn’t want to change it; they insisted that Seattle be in the title. I was embarassed, because they had a fast idea for the timeline when it was gonna come out. It was supposed to be a quick cash-in book, and I knew we weren’t really capable of that. But I didn’t really have the ability to fight to change the title at the time.

AS: And so once your body shut down...

DBR: I’m taking a certain pleasure in building a base, and whenever it becomes apparent that I don’t have a base, I go back to constructing it. Continually going back to the foundation until it’s solid. I’ve been learning that in several ways, including martial arts. You don’t wanna be waving a sword around when you don’t know how to walk. And it takes a long time to learn how to walk differently, with a root! I was all into militant direct action stuff (or at least advocating it) and it’s painful to brush my teeth! What’s wrong with that picture? [laughs] So I’m working on recreating my life—continually building power—in a way that we can use in our communities of resistance as well. It’s better than my body deteriorating in my late teenage years! [laughs]

            I consider my injury a result of isolation, because isolation is a constriction from the world around you: the world will replenish you when you’re connected to it. I’ve been learning how to be more open, and to draw in more sustaining energy from what’s around me, from people, communities, and the outside world.

AS: We’ve talked about novelist William Vollmann before, and he developed his carpal tunnel by writing 18 hours a day and just sitting in one place and eating candy bars.

DBR: It’s pathetic. Go outside.

AS: Was that the kind of shit you were doing?

DBR: I had a life and there were people I enjoyed. I lived in collective housing, but I often kept myself somewhat isolated, and I had somewhat of a destructive dynamic where there were some people that I deemed interesting and valuable who often lived in other cities, and then there were a lot of other people near me I dismissed without getting to know. And yeah, all the politicos were vegans, so I had a tofu and pasta vegan diet, which didn’t help, if you’re gonna ask dietary questions. [laughs]

AS: It seemed to me that most of your work had gone into compiling material and editing as opposed to writing.

DBR: No, I’ve always done writing, too. I like editing, because you can amplify people’s work. If something exists already, you don’t need to write it again. Ideally, an anthology isn’t compiled by people too lazy to write a book; it’s a way of presenting a collection of perspectives. The three anthologies that I’ve co-edited were able to do that, with a broad range of prisoners in the first one, and the best selections of the militant anti-capitalist movement with Battle of Seattle and Confronting Capitalism—be it primitivist, purely intellectual, pacifist, or organizers trying to identify the dynamics they’re immersed in.

AS: The sense I have of your work is that it has a documentary quality, and that you’re writing from a context of being within a movement, that supports movement-building...

DBR: Class-wise I was basically bred to be a professional. So I have the skills to express the ideas of a movement in a conventional format. My instinct isn’t to write a zine; it’s to do an investigative piece and get it published where hundreds of thousands of people can read it. But I also do writing primarily aimed at fostering dialogue among ourselves. So many activists chase around the uninitiated. I’m like, “Don’t forget we have each other.” Let’s deepen our understanding, and apply our perspectives. I want to take our ideas to a place where when we have the opportunity to exercise power, we’re confident in doing so.

            The anarchist community reads a lot. It really is a very literary tradition. I’m glad to be in a community that refreshes itself with ideas. When I hang out with performers, I envy the direct connection they have with their audiences. But a lot of what I do is working alone.

Then again, another way this injury has been a gift—and there are a few—is that because I can’t write on my own now, I need to work with other people. It’s a pleasure to make writing less of a solitary act, if it’s someone helping me, or a contributor to a project I’m working on. I’m in the company of others, which is a positive difference.

AS: I can understand that. I was going to ask, how do you write critically within a context of movement-building? Is that an issue that becomes problematic for you?

DBR: It hasn’t been, because I haven’t been involved with real party line people. I’ve always been able to find intelligent activists to interview, to present critical and self-aware perspectives. I’ve never had the instinct to hide information, as if it was in the movement’s best interest that I do so. I do believe in open information.

            With this book about guerrilla warfare and direct action, I’m very close to the participants, but they’re also willing to be self-critical and discuss what other options exist or didn’t exist. They’re capable of disagreeing with me, and I’m capable of representing those disagreements on paper.

            And honestly, I haven’t done much organizing since I did stuff with OAAP in college. Organizing is work too, and while I was injured, I couldn’t do it. It’s phone calls; everything’s on email, which I can’t touch; it’s calling people, while it’s painful to use the phone. But I do feel like inasmuch as I am an organizer, I pull together people who should be in contact, to try to facilitate chemical combustions.

            After I was injured, when I was in Seattle at the time of the WTO protests and down here in Oakland, I felt like all the organizing I needed to do could be like having conversations with people while doing dishes. Cuz I’m in communities that are all activists; it’s the sea I swim in. Having conversations about how to keep it from drying up is important.

            A big piece of this injury is that as a result, I began practicing Chinese medicine and martial arts. As a medical system, the Chinese one contains metaphors that resonate much more with the values of our communities. Being a practitioner would serve these communities. Activists tend to be pretty bad at taking care of ourselves. The world is on our shoulders, and we’re always being pushed into crisis situations. We treat ourselves like an endlessly renewable resource, with the resulting internal damage that this outlook has inflicted on the outside world. So as much as I’m any kind of organizer, it’s going to be dialoguing with others to improve this situation. That’s a part of it.

AS: Your connection to anarchism, when did that start developing?

DBR: The first time someone explained it to me, I was like “ok, I’m that!” I had the same reaction when I was 15, and somebody explained Daoism. “Ok, I’m that!” There’s a natural order, and you can follow it, and there are a lot of things going on in the world that are in direct opposition to it, and they’re going to continue to cause tremendous tumult until they stop fighting the natural order. Obviously, the “natural order” is a pretty loaded concept, which we can discuss elsewhere. [laughs]

            When I was 18, I got one of the organizers from OAAP, the prison group at Oberlin, to stop and explain to me what anarchism was. He explained it in terms of illegitimacy of the state, its monopoly on violence, consensus organizing, and such things. But from living in co-ops, I’ve never had a cushy view of consensus process, because I took part in situations where people—including myself—were ejected from community houses due to conflicts. Those situations were painful, but necessary. I’m ok with pain being part of the picture.

All this is to say my image of anarchism in practice is not totally idealized. I’ve been living in communities organized on anarchist principles for the last seven years. So when I hear people criticizing the current anti-capitalist movement for not voicing an alternative clearly enough, I agree that maybe there are some things we could be saying more loudly, but people could also be listening better. We’ve got clear ideas and some experience putting them into practice.

AS: So it wasn’t so much a matter of saying “Fuck the Marxists” as it was the culture that was there at Oberlin.

DBR: Yeah. My Dad’s a pinko Commie, which is fine. He’s very intelligent, and I’ve benefited trememdously from our discussions. But he uses the word “contradiction” too much. I have a visceral reaction to it, in the same way that I do to opera, which he listens to a lot.

What people say about Marx—which is true—is that he was describing capitalism, and he has a lot of very astute observations of how that system works. The end goal Marx describes is compatible with some anarchist utopia, as far as I understand it. His goal was the eventual dissolution of the State. But he said it needed to be maintained after the revolution to chase off the counterrevolutionists. He never addressed how you get people with power—those holding it after the revolution—to give it up without another fight. And he reacted hostilely to those who brought up the question, such as Bakunin.

I like anarchist theory; it’s very direct. Once I was with a friend of mine, Bo Brown, who was in the George Jackson Brigade, when someone asked her if she was a Communist. She deadpanned, “No, I haven’t read enough books.” Some people say anarchism is undertheorized, but I like that a lot of its ideas are simple and non-obfuscating. For example, what’s the anarchist position on prisons? Tear em down!  There’s no place for them in a free society. And there were anarchist movements in the Ukraine in the 10s and Spain in the late 30s, in which anarchists had power and they controlled areas, they destroyed the prisons while the Bolsheviks and Stalinists, respectively, were doing their best to fill them up. So in Spain, you literally had a town that was divided, anarchists on one side of the river, communist on the other: one is full of checkpoints, and the jails are full; in the other one, the jails are empty; the industrialists, the petty industrialists of the bourgeoisie, have fled. Again, I feel strongly that these ideas can exist in practice and do exist in practice.