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8 Responses to “Black Bloc Clashes with Cops at G20”
i find it a little odd the way Marxists in the US always associate militant action with anarchists almost exclusively, i know the (Canadian) RCP is strongly in favor of aggressive street action, for one.
sometimes it seems insurrectionist anarchists are more “Leninist” then the Leninists themselves these days.
Given how little political support we have in North America right now, these sorts of tactics are probably extremely counter-productive. They alienate many people, possibly most people in the communities they take place in, and give the police an excuse to crack down on all protesters, which can have a negative impact on the growth of movements. Furthermore anarchist groups who engage in this are forced to spend a large amount of time and money on work with their comrades in prison, who could have easily avoided arrest and be doing other forms of activism.
You aren’t going to start a revolution by breaking a few things. You need to build mass support, which takes time and slow often difficult and boring work. Education and working with the most promising activist movements are the most important things at this point in time. The point of attempting to win reforms is to make life suck less for workers and other oppressed people. It is also valuable because it can teach working class people their power and show them the inherit corruption of the system. It can give activists training in many important organizing skills which may be useful later.
If Lenin were alive today I doubt he would elevate one tactic to the point where it is viewed as the only appropriate tactic in any context. I think he would base his strategy on a careful analysis of the objective situation in society. Anarchists have history of elevating tactics to almost religious status, from the days of ‘propaganda by the deed’ through the syndicalists to the current insurrectionists. The only one of these techniques that has ever had much success at overthrowing anything or coming close to it is syndicalism.
Since Black Bloc tactics were used in Vancouver in the protests against the Winter Olympics much of the left here in Canada has been involved in discussing the usefulness of such tactics, by way of discussing so-called “diversity of tactics.” It’s become quite a controversial issue with a small but vocal crowd in favor of it, which includes the small but well known Kitchener-Waterloo anarchist collective Anti-War @ Laurier (AW@L)and two of it main leaders Alex Hundert, Dan Keller and Adam Lewis, as well as Native militant Gord Hill, aka Zig-Zag.
The issue became more intense after a group simply calling itself FFFC (Ottawa) firebombed a Royal Bank of Canada branch in Ottawa, apparently in solidarity with Native struggles as RBC is a main sponsor of the Olympics and the Tar Sands. Major indigenous groups, like the Indigenous Environmental Network, disavowed the incident, while the same people who backed the Black Bloc in February under the rubric of diversity of tactics did the same when this happened.
I am sure there will be much discussion of this topic again in the wake of the Black Bloc at the G8/G20 and the largest mass arrests in Canadian history.
I’ve followed the discussion pretty closely, so here are some links for those who are interested:
I don’t think its so simple. Lets stipulate that the Black Bloc doesn’t generally think its actions through in terms of their strategic consequences and that the elevation of trashing to a strategy in its own right is foolish. That said, we shouldn’t measure the effects of these actions simply in terms of how they are popularly received. Strikes can also be unpopular and “alienating.” Indeed many many people don’t approve of political demonstrations at all.
The tactics we use are not just for passive consumption through the mass media, they are also about developing our capacities. One of the capacities any revolutionary movement needs to develop is a capacity to fight. This isn’t just about knowing combat tactics. Its also about breaking down the culture of deference to private property, the authority of the police and courts and so on. It is entirely to be expected that at the outset only small numbers of people will be interested in doing this and that it will be widely unpopular (though we should not underestimate its potential immediate resonance among the more excluded and outlaw sectors of the people who only cheer when they see a cop car on fire).
The point here is that these things don’t develop in a strictly linear way. Its not like the masses all come to the conclusion that the system must be overthrown and that requires a willingness to fight its authority in the streets at the same time. Indeed it is actions like those of the Black Bloc that put these questions to people in a concrete way, that compel many people to discuss “what it will actually take.” There are countries (Greece, for example) where a fairly large layer of mainly young people have become quite experienced fighting the police. The existence of such a layer can be decisive not just in revolutionary situations but in moments when huge numbers of less experienced people are drawn into what prove to be reform struggles.
None of this is intended to put the Black Bloc actions beyond criticism. Anarchists often have very bad relations with other currents in mass movements, making these actions self-limiting insofar as they are unable to draw others into them. There is a fetishizing of certain tactics (window breaking for instance) without much regard to their appropriateness to particular situations. And frankly the anarchist allergy to any kind of discipline or authority severely limits the actual fighting capacity of the Black Bloc, at least as practiced in North America (Germany is another story). Police have largely figured out how to disperse and contain them.
All that said, we need a fighting movement and our approach to the Black Bloc should not be to tail the masses or the ideology promoted through the capitalist media that shapes their response. Rather we should be asking how the combative impulse that the Black Bloc represents can be better organized so that it draws more and more people into a political culture of resistance.
Well I can speak more about how such tactics were received by people in Pittsburgh after the last G-20. A lot of people felt that the black block was attacking them. (Bash Back attacking a McDonald’s with customers in it didn’t help.) Even though the way the police reacted was so extreme most people were really pissed off at them too. I mean like white working class folks who usually have no idea about police violence in the Hill against blacks. This was particularly surprising given that there was a huge amount of sympathy only a few months before when that white supremacist murdered three cops. Of course the media manipulated people’s impression of the events. The affiliates of the big networks all went out of their way to do this for weeks. But I think in general it created a really bad reaction amongst people here. Other actions actually gained a lot of sympathy. The really big march the last day was the biggest rally in Pittsburgh since the civil rights and Vietnam war era, but most of the people there were apparently locals.
I don’t think these techniques are effective until there is mass support for the actions. And we can’t build that by alienating people. Between the economy crashing, the unpopular wars continuing and environmental problems expanding (especially the gulf oil spill) so many people around here are really angry at elites and powerful people. This is really almost a perfect series of events for the rapid expansion of the left. I don’t know if we will be able to do this or not, but it is a potential.
And I didn’t really feel like I was trying to attack all anarchists, just the ones who fetishize action of any sort. Have you ever read some of the stuff groups like Crimethinc. puts out? They are really clearly doing this. I don’t think these people in the US really do have enough experience fighting cops to be useful anyway. Like the last Crimethinc. conference was attacked by members of Philly APOC but there was apparently no resistance. These kids aren’t really preparing for street battles with cops.
I still think what we need now is mostly education. We have to convince more people our ideas are correct and offer solutions to the major problems we are now facing. Since ABC and CBS aren’t exactly going to give us a platform this will mean a lot of education types of events and working with protests which don’t alienate the communities we are working in.
I don’t doubt that the Black Bloc has on more than one occasion alienated a whole hell of a lot of people and I’m not indifferent to that.
But I don’t think there is a tidy sequence that goes: First, win the mass over to the need for street militancy, then engage in it. I think things proceed in a more spiral fashion of small numbers experimenting with different militant tactics and acquiring through practice the ability to judge when escalations are appropriate and when they are counter-productive. Inevitably this involves making mistakes and there are certain ones the Black Bloc seems determined to make over and over and that is very frustrating to watch. But even if they won’t learn from their mistakes, we should, and we should encourage others to as well. But that means not just criticizing them, but also recognizing what is good in their actions and upholding that, in particular the understanding of the need to develop a fighting capacity, even if they haven’t been very good at it yet. To my mind the persistence of the Black Bloc even during a period in which movements have been weak, is overall a very positive thing, and their more dysfunctional tendencies have been largely a consequence of the overall weakness of the movements that make it hard for them to grow, producing a sort of encapsulated culture that has gotten a little too comfortable not paying attention to anybody else.
Well TNL there have been times when the black block seemed like a good idea. For example, one year at the School of Americas protest in Georgia a black block contingent attempted to pull down the fence which blocked off Ft. Benning. Father Bourgeois somehow convinced them to stop. I was on the other side of the march at the time so I am not sure exactly how it went down, but it seems like it was a good idea. This kind of action really shows how the religious pacifists who controlled the march were essentially protecting an important component of US imperialism.
I don’t think all militancy is bad even now. I think more factory and school occupations would be a good tactic to develop at this moment. But they don’t always work. They need to have a fairly broad base of support. Another more militant tactic which could be useful is the attempts to blockade military shipments in port cities. I think that might be a good thing to develop in the anti-war movement. What I am trying to argue against is the way so many anarchists fetishize tactics without ever thinking about larger strategy. Some Anarchists have been doing this with occupations lately too. I also want to criticize the counter cultural views, which likely lie behind these views.
Every person I have ever interacted with on a personal basis who supports this sort of mindset comes out of the hardcore punk movement. It is connected to politics of elevating all kinds of lifestyle choices to a political status. You know dumpster diving, squatting, etc. It is essentially a form of the same liberalism which tells us we can save the environment if only we buy the right toothpaste. Well that is wrong, capitalism is what is causing these problems and we need to get rid of it to solve this. If we are serious about getting rid of Capitalism we will need long term strategies and to adopt our tactics in different periods. The current incarnation of the Anarchist movement is incapable of doing this.
I think the black block tactic has not proved very useful in North America in the past decade, especially when employed by summit hoping folks who have no connections to the local community. What happened in Pittsburgh is a good example of this. The folks who support insurrectionary Anarchism often take a position that their actions will some how inspire the masses into rebellion if they just do them more or better. This is not the case and should be pretty clear to anyone actually analyzing what has been happening at these protests. In one neighborhood in Pittsburgh residents took the side of the police and attacked the anarchists!
I addressed other issues of weakness of this ‘strategy’ such as wasting money on bail and lawyer’s fees when funds for legal problems could be saved for something more useful and giving the state an excuse to crack down on other people who may not be ready for it.
anarchist said
i find it a little odd the way Marxists in the US always associate militant action with anarchists almost exclusively, i know the (Canadian) RCP is strongly in favor of aggressive street action, for one.
sometimes it seems insurrectionist anarchists are more “Leninist” then the Leninists themselves these days.
Nick R said
Given how little political support we have in North America right now, these sorts of tactics are probably extremely counter-productive. They alienate many people, possibly most people in the communities they take place in, and give the police an excuse to crack down on all protesters, which can have a negative impact on the growth of movements. Furthermore anarchist groups who engage in this are forced to spend a large amount of time and money on work with their comrades in prison, who could have easily avoided arrest and be doing other forms of activism.
You aren’t going to start a revolution by breaking a few things. You need to build mass support, which takes time and slow often difficult and boring work. Education and working with the most promising activist movements are the most important things at this point in time. The point of attempting to win reforms is to make life suck less for workers and other oppressed people. It is also valuable because it can teach working class people their power and show them the inherit corruption of the system. It can give activists training in many important organizing skills which may be useful later.
If Lenin were alive today I doubt he would elevate one tactic to the point where it is viewed as the only appropriate tactic in any context. I think he would base his strategy on a careful analysis of the objective situation in society. Anarchists have history of elevating tactics to almost religious status, from the days of ‘propaganda by the deed’ through the syndicalists to the current insurrectionists. The only one of these techniques that has ever had much success at overthrowing anything or coming close to it is syndicalism.
Nick R said
I don’t want to break the capitalist’s property. I want workers to take control of it.
rowlandkeshena said
Since Black Bloc tactics were used in Vancouver in the protests against the Winter Olympics much of the left here in Canada has been involved in discussing the usefulness of such tactics, by way of discussing so-called “diversity of tactics.” It’s become quite a controversial issue with a small but vocal crowd in favor of it, which includes the small but well known Kitchener-Waterloo anarchist collective Anti-War @ Laurier (AW@L)and two of it main leaders Alex Hundert, Dan Keller and Adam Lewis, as well as Native militant Gord Hill, aka Zig-Zag.
The issue became more intense after a group simply calling itself FFFC (Ottawa) firebombed a Royal Bank of Canada branch in Ottawa, apparently in solidarity with Native struggles as RBC is a main sponsor of the Olympics and the Tar Sands. Major indigenous groups, like the Indigenous Environmental Network, disavowed the incident, while the same people who backed the Black Bloc in February under the rubric of diversity of tactics did the same when this happened.
I am sure there will be much discussion of this topic again in the wake of the Black Bloc at the G8/G20 and the largest mass arrests in Canadian history.
I’ve followed the discussion pretty closely, so here are some links for those who are interested:
Discussing Tactics, Part 1: In Defense of the Black Bloc
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/discussing-tactics-part-1/
Discussing Tactics, Part 2: Understanding “Violent” Protest
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/discussing-tactics-part-2/
Discussing Tactics, Part 3: Breaking Windows is Not a Revolutionary Act
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/discussing-tactics-part-3/
Building Blocs: Olympics Resistance Chooses a Diversity of Tactics
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/building-blocs-olympics-resistance-chooses-a-diversity-of-tactics/
Asessing the Anti-Olympics Protests
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/asessing-the-anti-olympics-protests/
A Diversity of Tactics: A Diversity of Opinions
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/video/2916
The Fire This Time: Burning Bridges
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/the-fire-this-time-burning-bridges/
The Ottawa Bank Bombing
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/the-ottawa-bank-bombing/
The Black Bloc and the 21st Century anti-Colonial Movement at the Olympics
http://alexhundert.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/a-response-to-judy-rebick/
Tell No Lies said
Nick,
I don’t think its so simple. Lets stipulate that the Black Bloc doesn’t generally think its actions through in terms of their strategic consequences and that the elevation of trashing to a strategy in its own right is foolish. That said, we shouldn’t measure the effects of these actions simply in terms of how they are popularly received. Strikes can also be unpopular and “alienating.” Indeed many many people don’t approve of political demonstrations at all.
The tactics we use are not just for passive consumption through the mass media, they are also about developing our capacities. One of the capacities any revolutionary movement needs to develop is a capacity to fight. This isn’t just about knowing combat tactics. Its also about breaking down the culture of deference to private property, the authority of the police and courts and so on. It is entirely to be expected that at the outset only small numbers of people will be interested in doing this and that it will be widely unpopular (though we should not underestimate its potential immediate resonance among the more excluded and outlaw sectors of the people who only cheer when they see a cop car on fire).
The point here is that these things don’t develop in a strictly linear way. Its not like the masses all come to the conclusion that the system must be overthrown and that requires a willingness to fight its authority in the streets at the same time. Indeed it is actions like those of the Black Bloc that put these questions to people in a concrete way, that compel many people to discuss “what it will actually take.” There are countries (Greece, for example) where a fairly large layer of mainly young people have become quite experienced fighting the police. The existence of such a layer can be decisive not just in revolutionary situations but in moments when huge numbers of less experienced people are drawn into what prove to be reform struggles.
None of this is intended to put the Black Bloc actions beyond criticism. Anarchists often have very bad relations with other currents in mass movements, making these actions self-limiting insofar as they are unable to draw others into them. There is a fetishizing of certain tactics (window breaking for instance) without much regard to their appropriateness to particular situations. And frankly the anarchist allergy to any kind of discipline or authority severely limits the actual fighting capacity of the Black Bloc, at least as practiced in North America (Germany is another story). Police have largely figured out how to disperse and contain them.
All that said, we need a fighting movement and our approach to the Black Bloc should not be to tail the masses or the ideology promoted through the capitalist media that shapes their response. Rather we should be asking how the combative impulse that the Black Bloc represents can be better organized so that it draws more and more people into a political culture of resistance.
Nick R said
Well I can speak more about how such tactics were received by people in Pittsburgh after the last G-20. A lot of people felt that the black block was attacking them. (Bash Back attacking a McDonald’s with customers in it didn’t help.) Even though the way the police reacted was so extreme most people were really pissed off at them too. I mean like white working class folks who usually have no idea about police violence in the Hill against blacks. This was particularly surprising given that there was a huge amount of sympathy only a few months before when that white supremacist murdered three cops. Of course the media manipulated people’s impression of the events. The affiliates of the big networks all went out of their way to do this for weeks. But I think in general it created a really bad reaction amongst people here. Other actions actually gained a lot of sympathy. The really big march the last day was the biggest rally in Pittsburgh since the civil rights and Vietnam war era, but most of the people there were apparently locals.
I don’t think these techniques are effective until there is mass support for the actions. And we can’t build that by alienating people. Between the economy crashing, the unpopular wars continuing and environmental problems expanding (especially the gulf oil spill) so many people around here are really angry at elites and powerful people. This is really almost a perfect series of events for the rapid expansion of the left. I don’t know if we will be able to do this or not, but it is a potential.
And I didn’t really feel like I was trying to attack all anarchists, just the ones who fetishize action of any sort. Have you ever read some of the stuff groups like Crimethinc. puts out? They are really clearly doing this. I don’t think these people in the US really do have enough experience fighting cops to be useful anyway. Like the last Crimethinc. conference was attacked by members of Philly APOC but there was apparently no resistance. These kids aren’t really preparing for street battles with cops.
I still think what we need now is mostly education. We have to convince more people our ideas are correct and offer solutions to the major problems we are now facing. Since ABC and CBS aren’t exactly going to give us a platform this will mean a lot of education types of events and working with protests which don’t alienate the communities we are working in.
Tell No Lies said
Nick,
I don’t doubt that the Black Bloc has on more than one occasion alienated a whole hell of a lot of people and I’m not indifferent to that.
But I don’t think there is a tidy sequence that goes: First, win the mass over to the need for street militancy, then engage in it. I think things proceed in a more spiral fashion of small numbers experimenting with different militant tactics and acquiring through practice the ability to judge when escalations are appropriate and when they are counter-productive. Inevitably this involves making mistakes and there are certain ones the Black Bloc seems determined to make over and over and that is very frustrating to watch. But even if they won’t learn from their mistakes, we should, and we should encourage others to as well. But that means not just criticizing them, but also recognizing what is good in their actions and upholding that, in particular the understanding of the need to develop a fighting capacity, even if they haven’t been very good at it yet. To my mind the persistence of the Black Bloc even during a period in which movements have been weak, is overall a very positive thing, and their more dysfunctional tendencies have been largely a consequence of the overall weakness of the movements that make it hard for them to grow, producing a sort of encapsulated culture that has gotten a little too comfortable not paying attention to anybody else.
Nick R said
Well TNL there have been times when the black block seemed like a good idea. For example, one year at the School of Americas protest in Georgia a black block contingent attempted to pull down the fence which blocked off Ft. Benning. Father Bourgeois somehow convinced them to stop. I was on the other side of the march at the time so I am not sure exactly how it went down, but it seems like it was a good idea. This kind of action really shows how the religious pacifists who controlled the march were essentially protecting an important component of US imperialism.
I don’t think all militancy is bad even now. I think more factory and school occupations would be a good tactic to develop at this moment. But they don’t always work. They need to have a fairly broad base of support. Another more militant tactic which could be useful is the attempts to blockade military shipments in port cities. I think that might be a good thing to develop in the anti-war movement. What I am trying to argue against is the way so many anarchists fetishize tactics without ever thinking about larger strategy. Some Anarchists have been doing this with occupations lately too. I also want to criticize the counter cultural views, which likely lie behind these views.
Every person I have ever interacted with on a personal basis who supports this sort of mindset comes out of the hardcore punk movement. It is connected to politics of elevating all kinds of lifestyle choices to a political status. You know dumpster diving, squatting, etc. It is essentially a form of the same liberalism which tells us we can save the environment if only we buy the right toothpaste. Well that is wrong, capitalism is what is causing these problems and we need to get rid of it to solve this. If we are serious about getting rid of Capitalism we will need long term strategies and to adopt our tactics in different periods. The current incarnation of the Anarchist movement is incapable of doing this.
I think the black block tactic has not proved very useful in North America in the past decade, especially when employed by summit hoping folks who have no connections to the local community. What happened in Pittsburgh is a good example of this. The folks who support insurrectionary Anarchism often take a position that their actions will some how inspire the masses into rebellion if they just do them more or better. This is not the case and should be pretty clear to anyone actually analyzing what has been happening at these protests. In one neighborhood in Pittsburgh residents took the side of the police and attacked the anarchists!
I addressed other issues of weakness of this ‘strategy’ such as wasting money on bail and lawyer’s fees when funds for legal problems could be saved for something more useful and giving the state an excuse to crack down on other people who may not be ready for it.