Anarchist Bicycle Rally: Confidential Mad Libs & The Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance [reviews]

Portland community organizer Emma Allen asserts lifestyle hacks such as cycling subculturism make little longterm political sense, particularly as they relate to class consciousness.

“They don’t make a dent in halting the human exploitation and environmental devastation that defines life under the profit system,” she writes of the new lifestyle aesthetics. “They feed the illusion that harmony without justice is possible. And they foster rugged individualist behavior that suits capitalism just fine.”

Allen’s views are worth considering as, more frequently, progressive political scenes adopt “bike activism” as a sustainable lifestyle choice. Astute organizers can’t read Anarchist Bicycle Rally: Confidential Mad Libs (Cantankerous, 2010) by Joe Biel and The Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance (Microcosm, 2010) by Shelley Jackson and Ethan Clark without considering these emerging debates, both in terms of similarities and divergences.

Anarchist Bicycle Rally is one of a small crop of books on Critical Mass or, more accurately, law enforcement’s overreaction to the cycling group’s occasionally dubious decisionmaking.

Retrieved through a Freedom of Information Act request, memos, email and incident reports tell the story of Portland, Ore. police and run-ins over half a decade or so. While some of it is unintentionally amusing — Biel’s total rejection of any legitimate concern over potential issues created by Critical Mass in an urban area, and breathless police accounts of writing tickets among them — the behavior of officers is all the more surreal. Reports of what read to be dozens of police wasting thousands of tax dollars to direct and monitor a handful of cyclists sound like right out of a Republican talking point on public employee waste. By the time one reaches the close of this short read, you almost have to wonder why either side is bothering with what seems to be a futile exercise. On the one hand, reputed anarchists have reduced their political struggle to the legal use of a bicycle, in a moment that likely has Albert Parsons turning in his grave. On the other side, cops do themselves no favors by harassing cyclists and making them stop at red lights, giving the rest of the public the impression that they should be worrying about “real” crime instead. The absurdity of it all will likely not be lost on readers, and Anarchist Bicycle Rally gives a good glimpse to such history, while lending credence to Allen’s words.

The Chainbreaker Bike Book has some of the bike lifestylism leanings inherent in Critical Mass, while offering some practical guidance.

In many communities, cycling is more a matter of economics and legal status than it is sustainability. In the Third World, as the book notes, bicycles are used for all sorts of practical matters. Various rather uncomfortable passages talk about bikes in India and Latin America, implying a hint of nobility to simple lives where bikes are used every day. No one points out, though, that poverty, hastened by First World exploitation and globalization, is a primary reason why cars are hard to come by. In this respect, bikes are not a badge of honor or valorous nod to sustainability; they are a necessity, not a choice, because imperialism and privilege, internationally and in their home countries, keep working people poor and automobiles a status symbol for the well-to-do.

For those who use bikes as their regular transportation, help in avoiding damage and maintaining them from wear are very important things. Although The Chainbreaker Bike Book has various day-to-day advice to help, it is bogged down a bit by bike identity politics that confuse choosing to ride a bike with political organizing, struggle, history and culture. Sometimes, as with those instructionals, it is enlightening. At other moments, the narratives are enough to make one politically queasy. There are certainly kernels of truth. Yet for those pondering what Allen suggests — addressing not the drivers of cars but the drivers of profit-mad free-market fantasies as a question of political obligation — both books are just the start of a more needed step in a process of change.

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