Much Lulz, Love and Kudos! x

it appears GEOgroup website has gone bye-byes now...never mind, you can still view all the lulz at this mirror site :  http://zone-h.org/mirror/id/17107967

and in my haste to spread the news, I left out this crucial part of the #Antisec & #Anonymous statement contained after all the technical data related to the hack which I left out as it wouldn't be of much interest to the average indykid...

****************************************************************************************************


God Only Knows What Devils We Are


an apologia for the black bloc from the community that has no community


courtesy of the Institute for Experimental Freedom



Have you ever worn the mask one-two one-two,

(M) to the (A) to the (S) to the (K)

Put the mask upon the face just to make the next day,
Feds be hawkin me 
Jokers be stalking me,
I walk the streets and camouflage my identity,


My posse in the Brooklyn wear the mask.

My crew in the Jersey wear the mask.

Stick up kids doing boogie woogie wear the mask.
Yeah everybody wear da mask but how long will it last.
-The Fugees

That’s why I live illegal
All my life I live illegal
Don’t give a fuck bout the law

When my pockets reaching zero


I’m fresh out the ghost town similar to your town

I’m probably where it goes down

He pretends he tolls down

-Ski Beatz & Freddie Gibbs


For thirteen years, for over a decade, I have donned the black mask. “
Seattle”—that word still means “the days the world stood still” to me. “Genoa”
still holds more terror and perversity than the North American September 11. In
experiencing anonymous collective force, I have gained far more than a diversity
of tactics in my tool box. The black bloc is not merely a tactic, as so many
anarchist apologists claim; it’s more of an aesthetic development in the art of
street confrontation. The black bloc is a methodology of struggle; it goes
beyond a single color, and its intelligence reaches beyond the terrain of
protests. The black bloc is irreducibly contemporary because only in its opacity
can a ray of light from the heavens finally reach us. Allow me to explain.


I.



It’s the summer of 2000. Many of us have given up on both Democrats and
Republicans. The sense is that “anti-globalization” poses the only alternative
to advanced capitalism. The Democratic National
Convention: I am marching, drenched in sweat, through the catacombs that
hosted the Rodney King riots. Sadly, the only remnant of those fateful
days is a militarized police force that anticipates our every move.


We walk into an enormous play pen—the “free speech zone”—surrounded on all
sides by a sea of navy blue wielding pepper balls and batons. Amid the most
dreadful speeches and rebellious rock music, we find each other: the stupid,
isolated, alienated, and utterly lost children of capital, just beginning our
downward spiral—just beginning a precarious life, without promise and without
hope.


We organize ourselves at the center and proceed to the margin, where things
are unpredictable. Someone climbs the tall fence, reaching the limit of free
speech; and then another, and another. A black flag is unfurled, and a figure
waves it with pride, claiming this as a site of freedom with that stupid
gesture. The pepper balls crash against your skin; they collide against your
frail bones, exploding on impact and releasing a furious burning that traps
itself in your oily clothes and sweat. The crowd collectively gains intelligence
and transforms the signs bearing socialist slogans into shields for cover. We
brace each other and press the signs against the fence. Shot with pepper balls,
a figure falls from the apex of the fence; arms and femur bones snap against the
concrete.


That putrid smell, the eyes glossed over in tears, the stomach churns and
nausea overwhelms you. Vinegar-soaked rags help to soak up the poisonous clouds,
but you can hear screaming everywhere as the blue tide comes rushing in, and
your nerves twist and vibrate as the CS gas and police mutate into a single
hostile terrain.


Suddenly, I am with six or ten people. I don’t know who. We’ve
found a large road sign and we’re lifting it slowly. Plastic bottles soar
impotently overhead. A small rock or two hits an officer. We press with what was
once our labor power, straining to hurl the worthless product of our
grandparents’ toil back at our overseers. The object tilts over the fence and
falls to other side: clong. We cheer and revel in our functionless
gesture. “Fuck the police” resounds throughout the night, however foolishly. A
few bank windows collapse in glittery confetti. Spray paint decorates a wall. We
journey to the end of the night; at its perimeter, we share drinks and laughs
over our absurd gestures. Finally, back at the union hall, we crash in our
sleeping bags, exhausted and dehydrated, to dream of the abolition of
capitalism.



I am irreparably transformed.


II.


Lets rewind. Sixteen years ago, I am an adolescent teenager. I have entered
Alcoholics Anonymous—somewhat earlier than most of my family. There, I witness
one friend’s overdose, another friend’s relapse and subsequent incarceration for
manslaughter, and the spread of methamphetamines throughout my neighborhood. I
watch Requiem for a Dream some years later, horrified by the cinematic
juxtposition of “normal” and “marginal” addiction—it feels so familiar.


I am watching 20/20, an episode exposing Nike sweatshops. Through some
extended leaps of logic, I recognize a link between those exploited by
sweatshops and my own condition. With this heightened sensitivity, I conclude
that


1) addiction has an economic function


2) the economy includes industries that tend to harm people—through
exploitation, alienation, and immiseration, the reproduction of addiction being
a subset of the last of these



3) the economy tends to hurt people generally.


My initial moral indignation passes; my sensitivity shifts from a moral
compass faulting individuals for their choices to something more like class
consciousness. The broke-ass cars in the yard appear starker. The drive-by
shootings in our neighborhood gain a new meaning. The empty refrigerators’
sad grumble reverberating in our empty stomachs, my many stepbrothers’ sweet
mullet haircuts—these bring me a certain revelation: I am white trash.


Seattle: the anti-globalization summits and corresponding riots. The
beautiful rhythm: work, misery, chaos. They kill Carlo and we meet at the intersection of Colfax and Broadway
to block traffic, frantically trying to show our tears and rage. The war. My
sister is deployed to Iraq. We wear helmets and anachronistically chant “Bring
the war home!” We spray slogans and burn effigies. We block the flows of the
metropolis. As if to baptize our newfound agency, we are showered in pepper
spray. Tear gas spreads across entire continents. We go from basement hardcore
shows to warehouse parties. Our friends learn to DJ. Cocaine comes back into
style and claims two victims; heroin gets a few more. The boredom and stupidity
is suffocating. We attempt to wrest the noose from our necks. Democracy sweeps
Bush back into office. We’re trashing a gentrified district of Adams Morgan. My friend
records an MP3 of her heartbeat, shouts and heavy breathing accentuated by
shattering glass and anxiety.



In the US, we hit a lull. Everywhere else the world burns.


As we get older, we find new ways to survive. A small meeting of coworkers
transforms into an
ambitious conspiracy. Without making any demands of the boss, we increase
our pay and our quality of life. We eat well, we can afford cigarettes, we
travel where we want to: Scotland and France, Italy and Germany.
Can’t stop the chaos.



In Europe, the black bloc means “no media!” I watch a snitch in a tie go down
among the kicks and punches of the hooded ones. A car burns. As the police
battle two thousand rock throwers, a couple hundred advance through the
marketplace, smashing everything. “Tremble Bourgeoisie!” is scrawled across a
temp agency service.


Back home, our own temporary involvement in the economy—our precarious
life—is reflected in the windows of the temp agency, the retail shop, and the
café. The image of our desire is captured in the commodities to which we have no
access. Our needs are displayed in advertisements that sell us happiness and
grocery store aisles that mutate our tastes and relations to other living
beings. Smashing, burning, and looting make sense to us in this context like
nothing else could.


III.


What Chris Hedges fails to understand about black bloc activity
is that it arises from a real need. The “cancer” that Chris finds so
disturbing—the contagion of an anonymous collective force—is precisely why and
how it continues to outlive every social movement from which it emerges. These
generations—we who fantasized about Columbine and now only know metal detectors
at school; we who expected September 11 and now only know the politics of
terror; we who grew up as the world crumbled all around us and now only know the
desert—we need to fight, and not just in the ways our rulers deem
justified and legitimate.



As workers, we’re excluded from unions, from collective arrangements of any
kind. When we manage to find employment at all, it is meaningless labor that
corresponds to our own superfluousness in the economy. We were raised by a
generation so thoroughly defeated that it feared to pass on its history. We are
the inheritors of every unpaid bill, of every failed struggle, the products of
the insanely selfish individualism of advanced capitalism in North America.


Our entire environment feels hostile. Hence our hostility.


Chris Hedges cannot understand this because he misses the real historical
conflict expressed in contemporary struggles. As David Graeber points out, his exhumation of the decrepit
journal Green Anarchy shows how out of touch he is. The black bloc
spreads because of a real need to take back force, which has been
monopolized by the police. The black bloc spreads because it is a living
practice of collective intelligence, redistribution of wealth, and
improvisation; it spreads because it interrupts the ways we are confined in our
identities as subjects within capitalism. The black bloc is tuned to
the uneasy pulse of our time.



A paradigm of life is coming to an end. The black bloc is irrevocably
contemporary because our age of unrest is reflected in this gesture. Populations
everywhere are becoming ungovernable and doing so by casting off the fundamental
assumptions of government, the techniques of policing, and laws of the economy.
The paradigm of sovereignty is collapsing.


To see what is changing, we have to understand the nature of sovereignty. The
modern state is founded upon an anthropological fiction of human nature and the
surgical extraction of violence from living beings. Thomas Hobbes
argued that the establishment of the civil state conveyed the human being from
the state of nature—a war of each against all—to the loving arms of the
sovereign, rendering him a citizen-subject on the condition that he leave
“nature” at the door. But this discourse separates each being from collectivity:
the subject of sovereignty is always already an isolated individual. And the
arrangement keeps war at the center of the state, as the sole dominion of the
sovereign. Ironically, what the subject lays down in return for security—the
capacity to use force—is precisely what the sovereign must wield in order to
ensure it: and this is wielded above all against subjects.


The form of sovereign power shifted as democratic governments replaced
autocracies, but the content of state sovereignty remains. The modern state has
shifted from techniques governing territory to techniques governing populations.


It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between totalitarian and
democratic governments, as policing is identical under both. The police
have the power to let live or take life—biopower—and the distinction between democratic and
totalitarian becomes even more muddled as management and medicine also gain this
power, determining who can access fundamental human needs. The mediation of
capital creates a hellish environment in which practically everyone is
integrated into a single hostile terrain, subject to its violence and its
justice. If the cause du jouris enunciated as “fuck the
police,” this is because the police are the living embodiment of Hobbe’s
Leviathan, the state that keeps us at arm’s length
from our own potential.



“The police” includes all who police; policing is an array of
techniques, not all of which demand uniforms. Hedges’ cancer metaphor exposes
his penchant for order, translating it explicitly into the language of biopower.
Remember how Oakland’s Mayor, Jean Quan, and other authority figures used
the discourse of health and risk to justify the repression of occupations around
the US? Hedges continues this work of policing with his metaphor of an
unhealthy social body in need of surgery. Whenever the basic
assumptions of sovereignty and capitalism are called into question by those who
defy state violence and the sanctity of property, the police are mobilized to
discipline them. This disciplining is carried out by both the armed
wing and the necktied wing of the police. It’s not a coincidence that Hedges
invokes biopolitical language just as a portion of the population is beginning
to discover the power of their bodies.


Less than seven years ago, in New Orleans an entire population was forced
into a concentration camp by militarized police forces acting on a juridical
state of emergency. The ones who did not obey this order could be gratuitously
shot down. The justification given during Katrina was the health and well-being
of the population. One can’t help but notice this same paradigm at work,
albeit with less racialized brutality, in the violent evictions of the
occupations. Safety, Health, Security: Necessity knows no law. These
police actions only deviate slightly from the norm in terms of intensity,
frequency, and grammar of “protection.” The deaths of Oscar Grant and Sean Bell
attest to the murderous day-to-day operations of the police. The other
casualties, the forgotten, continue to haunt every city block, where the police
function to eliminate useless surplus—either out of economic utility or
biopolitical necessity.



There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document
of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin spells out in Theses on the Philosophy of
History. It is terrifying to face the wreckage of history that constitutes
the present. One loses count of the tragedies. Despair, recoded as “happiness,”
runs through every aspect of social life, increasingly reflected by Hollywood
and ironic television sitcoms as if to anesthetize us.


The arguments for orderly, passive demonstrations by Hedges and other liberal
pundits miss all this. One doesn’t sweep the floor in a house falling
off a cliff. In a world that feels absolutely hostile and alien, every
element of social life acquires a sinister glow. In this light, the black bloc
appears as a ray of optimism because it creates an opening that leads through to
the other side of despair.


The new struggles increasingly take place outside of legitimate and
traditional venues. When the factory was the contested site, the workers’
movement was the most vibrant and decisive space of contestation. During the
shift from a factory-centered economy to an economy integrating social life, we
saw the emergence of social movements contesting social spaces. Now that social
life has been fully subsumed within capitalism, the mutant offspring of the
proletariat and the counterculture is appearing outside the legitimate
parameters of the old movements. This explains the spread of anti-social
violence, anomic play, self-destructive revolt, irony. Chris Hedges may
wish to turn away his gaze, but society is imploding.



We accept our conditions and get organized accordingly. Compared to the
fatal and fatalistic strategy employed by school shooters, terrorists,
and isolated individuals marked as insane, the black bloc, rioting, and
flashmobs are collective and vital forms of struggle. The Left is
obsolete—rightfully so, as it still clings to this collapsing society at war
with its population. Society is decomposing and nothing will or should bring
back the the good ol’ days—the days of slavery, hyper-exploitation of
women, apartheid, homophobic violence, Jim Crow. We wager that organizing our
antagonisms collectively and attacking this society where we are positioned,
without anything mediating our force, is our best chance for a life worth
living.


Remarking on how the black bloc assaults the sanctity of property, Chris says
“there’s a word for that: criminal.” Even here he is behind the times.
Once, it seemed that crime designated specific transgressions of the law, such
as breaking a window. Today, this fiction is evaporating as crime is openly
integrated into the economy. The black market, the gray market, the war on
drugs, the war on terror. Branding criminal is not simply a maneuver in a public
relations war—though it is that too; crime is the excess of law.
Security cameras and Loss Prevention are not there to stop shoplifting
and workplace theft any more than borders exist to stop illegal immigration. The
designation of criminal is simply one more tool for managing populations,
another line along which to divide and exploit.



The cynicism of the justice system is surpassed only by capitalism itself.
There’s not enough money circulating any more for us to be fully integrated, so
entire economies of ultra-flexible, superfluous, and precarious work have
arisen. We don’t do anything that appears to matter, but somehow we have
to do it all the time. Just to count as people, we have to
gain all sorts of stupid commodities—a cellphone, a laptop, a specific knowledge
of culture. Because our wages are so low and we work so much, our only options
are illicit. Petty drug dealing, sex work, and pirating movies and music have
become at once a normal practice for us and a constant opportunity for the
police to rein us into the justice industry. The black bloc makes sense to us
because it offers an intelligent way to do what we always have to be
doing without getting caught.


If Chris Hedges is really concerned about crime, perhaps he shouldn’t praise
anything in the movement of occupations. What attracts us to the black
bloc is exactly what draws us to the occupation of a public square: all the
different people with different experiences coming together to steal back the
time stolen from us by work and the spaces stolen from us by ownership and
policing, the collective crime of revolt. Hum the national anthem all
you want and sing “dissent is patriotic” to the media, but the reality is that
anything that breaks with the way things are is categorized in the same sphere
of crime as “violence” and treated accordingly. So why not do it
together and with intelligence?



IV.


Above all, the black bloc is contemporary because it is a site of
self-transformation. Even the abused corpse of Gandhi is in accord: if we want
to change the world we must change ourselves. To take this further, we might say
we have to abolish
ourselves.


Capitalism has only managed to stave off revolution by constantly reordering
and diffusing social antagonism. At the center of the economy, it is
increasingly difficult to distinguish between citizens and police, yet at the
same time they appear to be at war with each other. At the margins, everything
that once made antagonistic groups into “revolutionary subjects” is
extracted—think of the fate of the Black Panthers—and the remaining husk works
to gain entrance to the center or manage the disorder of the margins. Only an
immediate break with the process by which we become subjects can open a window
of potential. This self-transformative gesture is where tactics and ethics meet.
If liberal commentators can’t handle the implications of this, this just
shows the widening abyss between those who would defend citizenship and those
who refuse to be governed.


Allow me to elaborate from our side of the barricades.


The black bloc is an anonymous way of being together. Anonymity allows me to
shed the mask I have to wear at school, at work, in your parents’ house, in
casual conversations at the bar. The black bloc enables us to interrupt the
processes that make us into subjects according to race, gender, mental health,
physiological health. Here, we can cease worrying about how power will extract
the truth from us, and we can reveal truth to each other.


The black bloc assumes an intense ethics of care. Hedges alleges that it is
“hypermasculine.” Not everyone who dons the black mask reads feminist and queer
theory—Bell Hooks, Judith Butler, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Guy
Hocquenghem—but these are extremely influential on our discourse. Had Hedges
taken the time to research his subject, he would have found multiple discussions about the gender of anonymity.



Via the black bloc, we open the space to play with power. We radically
reverse its operations on our bodies. Casting off the assumption that our bodies
need to be protected, that we should give them over to the care of the state, we
collectively re-inscribe them as as source of power. We also reverse the notion
that freedom ends at the boundaries of individuals. I want you to put me at
risk: in this axiom, we find the basis of love, friendship, and death, the
three irreducible risks of life.


The black bloc is the site for a new sentimental education: a
political reordering of our sentiments. We learn new sensations of love,
friendship, and death through the matrix of collective confrontation. In the
obscurity of the black mask, I am most present in the world. This
unfamiliar way of being compels me to focus and intensify my senses, to be
radically present in my body and my environment.


In the black bloc, I have to reconceptualize geographies. The event of the
riot gives us a new mobility and space, a laboratory in which to experiment with
public space and the relations of property and commodities. Moving through a
one-way street backwards, I note how a slight displacement causes the flows of
capital to malfunction. The metropolitan environment ceases to appear as a
neutral terrain: suddenly I can identify all the ways it functions to channel
all activity into a very narrow range of possibilities.


Drifting thus through urban centers, I become attuned to all the apparatuses
at work and to how they can be caused to break down. Newspaper boxes and
dumpsters can be moved into the street, blocking police from entering the space
we are creating. Cars—the individualizing apparatus par excellence—can
be put to collective use. All the pretty commodities in the window, usually the
breadth of an entire social class away from me, are now a mere hammer’s distance
from my proletarian hands. I can move through these spaces in which I am not
authorized to be, transforming them. I can dance with mannequins or use them to
smash out the windows of a storefront. I can trade the insanity of everyday
misery for a collective madness that devastates the avenues of wealth.



For those of us who were excluded from the community of good workers, there
is the black bloc. Like the myth of the historical proletarian community, it has
no single organization, no membership, no written constitution. Through the
black bloc, we find collective power, a sense of camaraderie, a historical
tradition of living and fighting. It offers the possibility of immediately
changing our conditions and immediately changing ourselves. Those who say it
doesn’t act in the workplace misunderstand the forms work takes today and
where it takes place. The black bloc has been instrumental in the recent port
blockades on the West Coast and in the occupations of universities through
Europe, the UK, the US, and Chile; the method is constantly being appropriated
and adapted. When coworkers outsmart the cameras to take money from the register
to share—when the hungry pocket goodies from an expensive health food store—when
Anonymous strikes the credit card companies—wherever we use
anonymity offensively, there is black bloc.


As I write this, Greece burns yet again, and more of the flexible,
unemployed, and immigrant populations appropriate the tactics of the hooded
ones—and vice versa. The black bloc can’t be cut out of the
movement of occupations: there is no surgery that can extract the need for
redemption from history, and there is no method better tuned to that task than
this vital opacity. On the contrary, the so-called cancer will grow,
spread, and mutate—and the movement of occupations, like other movements, will
increasingly be indistinguishable from the black bloc.

From the Norfolk Community Action website  https://norfolknonaligned.wordpress.com

February 17, 2012 David Graeber responds to *“The Cancer in Occupy,” by Chris Hedges


I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York.

I am also an anarchist who has participated in many Black Blocs. While I have never personally engaged in acts of property destruction, I have on more than one occasion taken part in Blocs where property damage has occurred. (I have taken part in even more Blocs that did not engage in such tactics. It is a common fallacy that this is what Black Blocs are all about. It isn’t.)

I was hardly the only Black Bloc veteran who took part in planning the initial strategy for Occupy Wall Street. In fact, anarchists like myself were the real core of the group that came up with the idea of occupying Zuccotti Park, the “99%” slogan, the General Assembly process, and, in fact, who collectively decided that we would adopt a strategy of Gandhian non-violence and eschew acts of property damage. Many of us had taken part in Black Blocs. We just didn’t feel that was an appropriate tactic for the situation we were in.

This is why I feel compelled to respond to your statement “The Cancer in Occupy.” This statement is not only factually inaccurate, it is quite literally dangerous. This is the sort of misinformation that really can get people killed. In fact, it is far more likely to do so, in my estimation, than anything done by any black-clad teenager throwing rocks.

Let me just lay out a few initial facts:

Black Bloc is a tactic, not a group. It is a tactic where activists don masks and black clothing (originally leather jackets in Germany, later, hoodies in America), as a gesture of anonymity, solidarity, and to indicate to others that they are prepared, if the situation calls for it, for militant action. The very nature of the tactic belies the accusation that they are trying to hijack a movement and endanger others. One of the ideas of having a Black Bloc is that everyone who comes to a protest should know where the people likely to engage in militant action are, and thus easily be able to avoid it if that’s what they wish to do.


Black Blocs do not represent any specific ideological, or for that matter anti-ideological position. Black Blocs have tended in the past to be made up primarily of anarchists but most contain participants whose politics vary from Maoism to Social Democracy. They are not united by ideology, or lack of ideology, but merely a common feeling that creating a bloc of people with explicitly revolutionary politics and ready to confront the forces of the order through more militant tactics if required, is, on the particular occasion when they assemble, a useful thing to do. It follows one can no more speak of “Black Bloc Anarchists,” as a group with an identifiable ideology, than one can speak of “Sign-Carrying Anarchists” or “Mic-Checking Anarchists.”


Even if you must select a tiny, ultra-radical minority within the Black Bloc and pretend their views are representative of anyone who ever put on a hoodie, you could at least be up-to-date about it. It was back in 1999 that people used to pretend “the Black Bloc” was made up of nihilistic primitivist followers of John Zerzan opposed to all forms of organization. Nowadays, the preferred approach is to pretend “the Black Bloc” is made up of nihilistic insurrectionary followers of The Invisible Committee, opposed to all forms of organization. Both are absurd slurs. Yours is also 12 years out of date.


Your comment about Black Bloc’ers hating the Zapatistas is one of the weirdest I’ve ever seen. Sure, if you dig around, you can find someone saying almost anything. But I’m guessing that, despite the ideological diversity, if you took a poll of participants in the average Black Bloc and asked what political movement in the world inspired them the most, the EZLN would get about 80% of the vote. In fact I’d be willing to wager that at least a third of participants in the average Black Bloc are wearing or carrying at least one item of Zapatista paraphernalia. (Have you ever actually talked to someone who has taken part in a Black Bloc? Or just to people who dislike them?)


“Diversity of tactics” is not a “Black Bloc” idea. The original GA in Tompkins Square Park that planned the original occupation, if I remember, adopted the principle of diversity of tactics (at least it was discussed in a very approving fashion), at the same time as we all also concurred that a Gandhian approach would be the best way to go. This is not a contradiction: “diversity of tactics” means leaving such matters up to individual conscience, rather than imposing a code on anyone. Partly,this is because imposing such a code invariably backfires. In practice, it means some groups break off in indignation and do even more militant things than they would have otherwise, without coordinating with anyone else—as happened, for instance, in Seattle. The results are usually disastrous.

After the fiasco at Seattle of watching some activists actively turning others over to police—we quickly decided we needed to ensure this never happened again. What we found was that if we declared “we shall all be in solidarity with one another. We will not turn in fellow protestors to the police. We will treat you as brothers and sisters. But we expect you to do the same to us”—then, those who might be disposed to more militant tactics will act in solidarity as well, either by not engaging in militant actions at all for fear they will endanger others (as in many later Global Justice Actions, where Black Blocs merely helped protect the lockdowns, or in Zuccotti Park, where mostly people didn’t bloc up at all) or doing so in ways that run the least risk of endangering fellow activists.

All this however is secondary. Mainly I am writing as an appeal to conscience. Your conscience, since clearly you are a sincere and well-meaning person who wishes this movement to succeed. I beg you: Please consider what I am saying. Please bear in mind as I say this that I am not a crazy nihilist, but a reasonable person who is one (if just one) of the original authors of the Gandhian strategy OWS adopted—as well as a student of social movements, who has spent many years both participating in such movements, and trying to understand their history and dynamics.

I am appealing to you because I really do believe the kind of statement you made is profoundly dangerous.

The reason I say this is because, whatever your intentions, it is very hard to read your statement as anything but an appeal to violence. After all, what are you basically saying about what you call “Black Bloc anarchists”?



they are not part of us
they are consciously malevolent in their intentions
they are violent
they cannot be reasoned with
they are all the same
they wish to destroy us
they are a cancer that must be excised



Surely you must recognize, if laid out in this fashion, that this is precisely the sort of language and argument that, historically, has been invoked by those encouraging one group of people to physically attack, ethnically cleanse, or exterminate another—in fact, the sort of language and argument that is almost never invoked in any other circumstance. After all, if a group is made up exclusively of violent fanatics who cannot be reasoned with, intent on our destruction, what else can we really do?

This is the language of violence in its purest form. Far more than “fuck the police.” To see this kind of language employed by someone who claims to be speaking in the name of non-violence is genuinely extraordinary. I recognize that you’ve managed to find certain peculiar fringe elements in anarchism saying some pretty extreme things, it’s not hard to do, especially since such people are much easier to find on the internet than in real life, but it would be difficult to come up with any “Black Bloc anarchist” making a statement as extreme as this.

Even if you did not intend this statement as a call to violence, which I suspect you did not, how can you honestly believe that many will not read it as such?

photo | via In my experience, when I point this sort of thing out, the first reaction I normally get from pacifists is along the lines of “what are you talking about? Of course I’m not in favor of attacking anyone! I am non-violent! I am merely calling for non-violently confronting such elements and excluding them from the group!” The problem is that in practice this is almost never what actually happens. Time after time, what it has actually meant in practice is either (a) turning fellow activists over to the police, i.e., turning them over to people with weapons who will physically assault, shackle, and imprison them, or (b) actual physical activist-on-activist assault. Such things have happened.

There have been physical assaults by activists on other activists, and, to my knowledge, they have never been perpetrated by anyone in Black Bloc, but invariably by purported pacifists against those who dare to pull a hood over their heads or a bandana over their faces, or, simply, against anarchists who adopt tactics someone else thinks are going too far. (Not I should note even potentially violent tactics. During one 15-minute period in Occupy Austin, I was threatened first with arrest, then with assault, by fellow campers because I was expressing verbal solidarity with, and then standing in passive resistance beside, a small group of anarchists who were raising what was considered to be an unauthorized tent.)

This situation often produces extraordinary ironies. In Seattle, the only incidents of actual physical assault by protestors on other individuals were not attacks on the police, since these did not occur at all, but attacks by “pacifists” on Black Bloc’ers engaged in acts of property damage. Since the Black Bloc’ers had collectively agreed on a strict policy of non-violence (which they defined as never doing anything to harm another living being), they uniformly refused to strike back. In many recent occupations, self-appointed “Peace Police” have manhandled activists who showed up to marches in black clothing and hoodies, ripped their masks off, shoved and kicked them: always, without the victims themselves having engaged in any act of violence, always, with the victims refusing, on moral grounds, to shove or kick back.

The kind of rhetoric you are engaging in, if it disseminates widely, will ensure this kind of violence becomes much, much more severe.

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Perhaps you do not believe me, or do not believe these events to be particularly significant. If so, let me put the matter in a larger historical context.

If I understand your argument, it seems to come down to this:

OWS has been successful because it has followed a Gandhian strategy of showing how, even in the face of strictly non-violent opposition, the state will respond with illegal violence
Black Bloc elements who do not act according to principles of Gandhian non-violence are destroying the movement because they provide retroactive justification for state repression, especially in the eyes of the media
Therefore, the Black Bloc elements must be somehow rooted out

As one of the authors of the original Gandhian strategy,I can recall how well aware we were, when we framed this strategy, that we were taking an enormous risk. Gandhian strategies have not historically worked in the US; in fact, they haven’t really worked on a mass scale since the civil rights movement. This is because the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as “violence.” (One reason the civil rights movement was an exception is so many Americans at the time didn’t view the Deep South as part of the same country.) Many of the young men and women who formed the famous Black Bloc in Seattle were in fact eco-activists who had been involved in tree-sits and forest defense lock-downs that operated on purely Gandhian principles—only to find that in the US of the 1990s, non-violent protestors could be brutalized, tortured (have pepper spray directly rubbed in their eyes) or even killed, without serious objection from the national media. So they turned to other tactics. We knew all this. We decided it was worth the risk.

However, we are also aware that when the repression begins, some will break ranks and respond with greater militancy. Even if this doesn’t happen in a systematic and organized fashion, some violent acts will take place. You write that Black Bloc’ers smashed up a “locally owned coffee shop”; I doubted this when I read it, since most Black Blocs agree on a strict policy of not damaging owner-operated enterprises, and I now find in Susie Cagle’s response to your article that, in fact, it was a chain coffee shop, and the property destruction was carried out by someone not in black. But still, you’re right: A few such incidents will inevitably occur.

The question is how one responds.

If the police decide to attack a group of protestors, they will claim to have been provoked, and the media will repeat whatever the police say, no matter how implausible, as the basic initial facts of what happened. This will happen whether or not anyone at the protest does anything that can be remotely described as violence. Many police claims will be obviously ridiculous – as at the recent Oakland march where police accused participants of throwing “improvised explosive devices”—but no matter how many times the police lie about such matters, the national media will still report their claims as true, and it will be up to protestors to provide evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes, with the help of social media, we can demonstrate that particular police attacks were absolutely unjustified, as with the famous Tony Bologna pepper-spray incident. But we cannot by definition prove all police attacks were unjustified, even all attacks at one particular march; it’s simply physically impossible to film every thing that happens from every possible angle all the time. Therefore we can expect that whatever we do, the media will dutifully report “protestors engaged in clashes with police” rather than “police attacked non-violent protestors.” What’s more, when someone does throw back a tear-gas canister, or toss a bottle, or even spray-paint something, we can assume that act will be employed as retroactive justification for whatever police violence occurred before the act took place.

All this will be true whether or not a Black Bloc is present.

If the moral question is “is it defensible to threaten physical harm against those who do no direct harm to others,” one might say the pragmatic, tactical question is, “even if it were somehow possible to create a Peace Police capable of preventing any act that could even be interpreted as ‘violent’ by the corporate media, by anyone at or near a protest, no matter what the provocation, would it have any meaningful effect?” That is, would it create a situation where the police would feel they couldn’t use arbitrary force against non-violent protestors? The example of Zuccotti Park, where we achieved pretty consistent non-violence, suggests this is profoundly unlikely.

And perhaps most importantly at all, even if it were somehow possible to create some kind of Peace Police that would prevent anyone under gas attack from so much as tossing a bottle, so that we could justly claim that no one had done anything to warrant the sort of attack that police have routinely brought, would the marginally better media coverage we would thus obtain really be worth the cost in freedom and democracy that would inevitably follow from creating such an internal police force to begin with?

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These are not hypothetical questions. Every major movement of mass non-violent civil disobedience has had to grapple with them in one form or another. How inclusive should you be with those who have different ideas about what tactics are appropriate? What do you do about those who go beyond what most people consider acceptable limits? What do you do when the government and its media allies hold up their actions as justification—even retroactive justification—for violent and repressive acts?

Successful movements have understood that it’s absolutely essential not to fall into the trap set out by the authorities and spend one’s time condemning and attempting to police other activists. One makes one’s own principles clear. One expresses what solidarity one can with others who share the same struggle, and if one cannot, tries one’s best to ignore or avoid them, but above all, one keeps the focus on the actual source of violence, without doing or saying anything that might seem to justify that violence because of tactical disagreements you have with fellow activists.

I remember my surprise and amusement, the first time I met activists from the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt, when the issue of non-violence came up. “Of course we were non-violent,” said one of the original organizers, a young man of liberal politics who actually worked at a bank. “No one ever used firearms, or anything like that. We never did anything more militant than throwing rocks!”

Here was a man who understood what it takes to win a non-violent revolution! He knew that if the police start aiming teargas canisters directly at people’s heads, beating them with truncheons, arresting and torturing people, and you have thousands of protestors, then some of them will fight back. There’s no way to absolutely prevent this. The appropriate response is to keep reminding everyone of the violence of the state authorities, and never, ever, start writing long denunciations of fellow activists, claiming they are part of an insane fanatic malevolent cabal. (Even though I am quite sure that if a hypothetical Egyptian activist had wanted to make a case that, say, violent Salafis, or even Trotskyists, were trying to subvert the revolution, and adopted standards of evidence as broad as yours , looking around for inflammatory statements wherever they could find them and pretending they were typical of everyone who threw a rock, they could easily have made a case.) This is why most of us are aware that Mubarak’s regime attacked non-violent protestors, and are not aware that many responded by throwing rocks.

Egyptian activists, in other words, understood what playing into the hands of the police really means.

Actually, why limit ourselves to Egypt? Since we are talking about Gandhian tactics here, why not consider the case of Gandhi himself? He had to deal with what to say about people who went much further than rock-throwing (even though Egyptians throwing rocks at police were already going much further than any US Black Bloc has.) Gandhi was part of a very broad anti-colonial movement that included elements that actually were using firearms, in fact, elements engaged in outright terrorism. He first began to frame his own strategy of mass non-violent civil resistance in response to a debate over the act of an Indian nationalist who walked into the office of a British official and shot him five times in the face, killing him instantly. Gandhi made it clear that while he was opposed to murder under any circumstances, he also refused to denounce the murderer. This was a man who was trying to do the right thing, to act against an historical injustice, but did it in the wrong way because he was “drunk with a mad idea.”

Over the course of the next 40 years, Gandhi and his movement were regularly denounced in the media, just as non-violent anarchists are also always denounced in the media (and I might remark here that while not an anarchist himself, Gandhi was strongly influenced by anarchists like Kropotkin and Tolstoy), as a mere front for more violent, terroristic elements, with whom he was said to be secretly collaborating. He was regularly challenged to prove his non-violent credentials by assisting the authorities in suppressing such elements. Here Gandhi remained resolute. It is always morally superior, he insisted, to oppose injustice through non-violent means than through violent means. However, to oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing anything to oppose injustice at all.

And Gandhi was talking about people who were blowing up trains, or assassinating government officials. Not damaging windows or spray-painting rude things about the police.

*  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/

Original NCAG post  https://norfolknonaligned.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/concerning-the-violent-peace-police-an-open-letter-to-chrishedges/

 http://www.archive.org/web/web.php you can look at websites as they were , even ones taken down.