This weekend I spent some time with Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott (whose Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which I read as a student in Chicago, was a seismic event for my young brain).

This passage is in a chapter about how rules can be exercises in futility—improvisation, experimentation, stumbling, and mistakes are how people actually behave, from the time they learn to walk and talk to the time they're in the bloom of their lives. We get stuff done, he argues, precisely because we break the rules on a regular basis.

Workers have seized on the inadequacy of the rules to explain how things actually run and have exploited it to their advantage. Thus, the taxi drivers of Paris have, when they were frustrated with the municipal authorities over fees or new regulations, resorted to what is known as a greve de zele. They would all, by agreement and on cue, suddenly begin to follow all the regulations in the code routier, and, as intended, this would bring traffic in Paris to a grinding halt. Knowing that traffic circulated in Paris only by a practiced and judicious disregard of many regulations, they could, merely by following the rules meticulously, bring it to a standstill.

I love the idea of a protest based on the principle of scrupulously following rules to show how unnecessary and counterproductive they can be. Since May Day, I've also been talking with people about the idea of "Black Bloc community service."

For example: a pack of masked demonstrators amassing at Westlake, attracting a thicket of police in SWAT gear and nervous TV anchors, then calmly and efficiently conducting a free medical clinic. (Perhaps they could pull some support from the folks at Country Doctor.) Or leading a march that splits—one to a smashup downtown, the other to an underserved neighborhood, where the demonstrators do the heavy lifting to help built a community garden. Balaclavas, bandanas, furious weeding and tilling, wheelbarrows full of manure. (It would be hot as hell, but it would look good on the evening news.) Or a Black Bloc protest in which the windows of malfeasant banks were smashed while residential windows are lovingly washed.

Those might be impractical ideas. But something along those lines could be attractive to people who equate anarchism with nothing more than petulance and the kicking over of trash cans, and would merrily upend the usual public narrative about what anarchist demonstrators—particularly those in Black Bloc clothes—really stand for.