What if the black bloc have the right idea?

I'll bite.

How about some examples of violent attack - particularly in the context of a developed nation like Canada -  which produced lasting change?

(I can think of a few; almost all of them committed BY police and the right wing)

And yes, I have heard the theory that nonviolent protesters are just benefitting from the hard work of brick-chuckers because the authorities are simply terrified by the prospect of broken shop windows. I don't buy it.

And speaking of working within a certain system, what does the black bloc do other than show up at large-scale protests of international events? Do they do anything that isn't within the constraints of that particular stage?

ArghMonkey wrote:

Btw your observation that if we fight back they might come down on us, and do what?

I don't think I made my point clearly enough.

If "we fight back" by being vandals and assholes, "they" [b]WILL[/b] come down on "us". "They" are my neighbours, friends, and workmates. "They" are the wise people of Canada. "They" hate the black bloc bullshit. The cops luvvv it.

At the risk of sounding like 6079 I agree with both sides simultaneously.  First off I agree that no real fundamental change is possible under our current liberal democracy.  I however also believe that when the guns come out the people's voices get silenced by the bullies on both sides. 

Civil disobedience is an effective tool to stop specific actions like the tuition hikes or logging Clayoquot Sound but it will never overthrow the rule of the 1%.  However all real social change has been enacted in the face of police brutality.  Our union history highlights that all real change must be taken it is never given.

Violence breeds violence and besides for that the capitalists own most of the guns and all the heavy arms and have the cash to buy more legally at the drop of a hat.  Any group that could beat those people in a straight up armed conflict would have to be as brutal as their oppressors. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. 

I will however note again that all our social benefits came after WWII when the troops came home and demanded them.  I suspect that the ruling elite took the demands of the battle hardened civilian army seriously and the proof is in the fact that every single political party including the Tories were more left wing on economic issues than the NDP is today. This is the era when "right" wing governments across the land where nationalizing utilities and other essential services. When that generation got older the elite started the claw back.  A 25 year old vet in 1945 was in their early 60's when the elite started to push back hard in the '80's. 

We need to stand in solidarity and not let ourselves be drawn into a violent struggle that good people will never win.

Both clueless violent activists and agent provocateurs are a reality. 

It is usually impossible to figure out  which is which because the end result is the same.(media/state/public vilification of the action, state violence, suppressing or vilification of the facts of the actual movement and its broader support).T

The agent provocateurs operate by a realistic plan, the others comprise useful idiots doing their job without pay.

ArghMonkey: What do you mean by the left "taking control"? And what do you mean when say "force our hand"? In short, what, if anything, are you proposing?

Our liberal democracy is limited, yes. However, anyone who proposes that "we" should seize power by force to impose ideas that are not supported by the population is no democrat in any sense whatsoever. The only alternative to that, it seems to me, is to work at building a broad-based grassroots movement. But that involves talking to people, and listening to people too. Too many people on the Left prefer to mix only with people who think like them, and value ideological purity above all else. Instead of talking with people, they preach at them. And they get angry at everyone: "Why isn't anyone listening to me!?"

As for the Black Bloc, all they do is theatrical violence to show people how angry they are. It's a show. It does nothing to rally large numbers of people behind progressive ideas.

But I suspect that what you are actually proposing is to throw your arms up in cynical disgust, and say "There's no point in trying to change anything! I would if I could, but all these other people are sheep!". I consider that attitude to be self-indulgent.

contrarianna wrote:

Both clueless violent activists and agent provocateurs are a reality. 

It is usually impossible to figure out  which is which because the end result is the same.(media/state/public vilification of the action, state violence, suppressing or vilification of the facts of the actual movement and its broader support).T

The agent provocateurs operate by a realistic plan, the others comprise useful idiots doing their job without pay.

Yes and everything in between. I believe right-rightists have been making use of a range of violent and non-violent tactics, from what was essentially terrorism and "strategy of tension" employed in Europe and former Soviet republics during the cold war and even today, as well as the non-violent teachings of Jesus, Gandhi etc evident in various NATO Spring uprisings in the Middle East  supported by the western intelligence agencies today.

Caesar Augustus through Hitler were two of the most bloodthirsty dictators of history, but few people revere them today as much as Gandhi and Jesus. Like Gandhi and Jesus I think we should not meet violence with greater violence, but we should not entirely acquiesce to power, either. I don't think they want to be creating martyrs of any of us because imperialists understand that brute force works for so long before a Spartacus, Jesus, or Gandhi demonstrate for people that it's better to die on their feet than to live on their knees. It tends to spell the beginning of the end of empires based on slavery and rule by force.

The Pope gave a speech in Santiago de Chile in 1986 or so, and he spoke about the need for Chileans to rise up and work toward change. Chileans were encouraged by a spark of hope that Pinochet's thugs were unable to extinguish by torture and executions. At some point Chileans no longer feared the army's bullets and began pouring into the streets. I think the right fears non-violent protest more than anything and especially today with world-wide expansion of telecommunications. WHat the left needs today are subversives in the style of Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ. That kind of mass influence could be the last straw for a vicious empire.

I've seen the Black Bloc as very detrimental to protest movements, and I'm certainly not against militant, disciplined contingents that are able to resist police violence. One prominent example of the harm done by Black Bloc type action is the year after year degeneration of the Journée contre la violence policière into a pitched battle between punks and cops, often with mass arrests (well, not a big mass, but big in proportion to the size of the demos). This theatre also means that the racialised people most affected by police brutality never show up at those demos. After Fredy Villanueva was killed, the people in his neighbourhood specifically called for all-ages, non-violent marches against "les bavures", that is, the odd tendency for stray police bullets to hit young men of colour.

That does not go to say I have much regard for bourgeois "liberal" democracy, unlike my fellow Montréal poster Paul (hi, Paul). There is a difference between defending hard-won democratic rights (many of which were won by the labour movement, and other social movements such as the women's movement and struggles for racial equality) and fostering illusions in a system owned and managed by the ruling class.

Building mass movements, such as our student movement and all the other red squares around them, takes time, patience, but also the ability to sense and seize the moment.

And Paul, I think you are very much stereotyping "leftists". All human groups congregate in tribes where they feel comfortable; why should the left be different in that regard? Concrete examples of reaching out to people who may not be particularly politicised or class-conscious include, other than union organising of course, the development of community groups such as tenants' associations and the very dense network of women's groups found in Québec (some of these had old Catholic origins, but broke with misogynist Church dogma over the decades) that made possible la Marche du pain et des roses and the later World Marches of Women.

Aristotle, hurting very small businesses and not really harming well-insured corporations only furthers monopoly capitalism and its monopolisation of the public space.

Fidel, careful with the CIA Spring stuff. Secret police (not only the CIA) are everywhere, but Western powers were quite happy with Ben Ali and Mubarak for decades. Of course the spooks will try to put their spin on the protests (so will the Muslim fundamentalists), but the movement began as a cri du coeur among the peoples of Tunisia and Egypt. Important not to see people as ciphers.

"CIA Spring" or whatever would be better applied to the "colour" revolutions in Eastern Europe. Once again, it isn't the whole picture, but it is somewhat less inaccurate in those cases.

Slumberjack wrote:

finding solidarity here would be as rare as finding hen's teeth.

You know it's sad but true.

onlinediscountanvils wrote:

Slumberjack wrote:

finding solidarity here would be as rare as finding hen's teeth.

 

You know it's sad but true.

Just because it hasn't happened in ways some recognize, or produced the results that some want doesn't mean that people here don't act in solidarity.

And "a few broken windows", k? Probably not such a big deal for the Bay, but I'm not so sure about places without insurance, or people who might not be so sympathetic with having their public space smashed up and burned. I might be a bit more sympathetic if it actually accomplished anything other than giving some guys a chance to get their testosterone up and pretend they are powerful. But I don't see anything different than those hockey fans tearing up the streets.

Though I have to confess, there are some who did it with a bit more style, like the WImmins Fire Brigade.

Well if you want me to get specific k, "Look over there, someone else is doing something worse" is probably the most worn out argument on these pages. We're talking about violence as a tactic, and it's not just childish.

I had a most lovely moment of solidarity this afternoon. I was cycling past a busy corner (of the very busy Jean-Talon métro station) and firefighters were holding out boots, helmets etc to solicit funds for les grands brûlés (severely-burnt people). Alas I had NO cash on me and asked if they would be out again tomorrow. One of the firefighters saw my red square and said they wanted to wear them but management aka the Tremblay administration said they would be severely sanctioned. So I said I understood, and that I had signed their petition against the closing of la Caserne de la Petite-Italie (we won, but must remain wary). I knew one of the firefighters from another mobilisation altogether - something involving Indigenous cultural expression.

And I think we have seen absolutely remarkable demonstrations of solidarity here in the protracted Spring of the Red Squares.

Our tactics in any given situation need to reflect the conditions of the moment. There are times and places when targeted violence makes sense as part of social movements, and there are times when it doesn't.

An example of when it makes sense would be the torching of the headquarters of the National Democratic Party (Mubarak's party) during the Egyptian uprising of Jan/Feb 2011. People understood why the building was torched, and they by and large supported the action, which also helped to convey to the world that the people of Egypt were determined to get rid of Mubarak.

At the other end of the spectrum, the smashing of windows at The Bay and the TD Bank during the 2010 Heart Attack demo against the Vancouver Olympics, was a serious tactical error. Prior to the demo, somewhere around 64% of Vancouverites were opposed to the 2010 Olympics. 5,000 of us held a rally and march the previous day, and we got largely positive media coverage. After the much smaller Heart Attack demo, opposition to the 2010 Olympics dropped to about 20% of Vancouverites, and a large degree of animosity developed between activists who had worked together in the previous years but found themselves on opposite sides of the Diversity of Tactics debate that raged for a period of time afterwards.

It's as I've been suggesting for some time, that this zeal for policing oneself and others coincides and functions in tandem with the police proper.  Having a 'we' sit together to decide tactics is all well and good, but there are many 'we's' that would prefer and have just as much reason under today's circumstances to determine their own tactics.  Denying agency and freedom of action to others constitutes little more than a reduction to a mutual preference among social democratic politics and corporate governance for maintaining the state and its institutions, where the real decision making takes place.

Meanwhile, the security apparatus knows better than anyone that every peaceful protest carries with it the potential to become something else.  Sustained peaceful protest, where it manages to achieve its narrow victories in rolling back unpopular decisions, or putting a stop to some corporate maneouver, can't very often be counted on to give due consideration to this simmering potential, which may randomly reveal itself here or there against property, toward which government itself gives serious consideration to more than anything else, judging by the spare-no-expense posture it assumes when confronting all forms of civil unrest.  As the rare victories occur, peaceful persuasion covets all accolades onto itself with little or no acknowledgement of this potential for violence, which more or less resonates within every mass assembly in the street.  Instead they'll say that the power of ritual and repetition alone carried away the favours, despite all the hooligans who may have been present in gesture and in spirit all along, but who become universally spat upon as orphans as a reward for their troubles, by the state and by social democratic organizers alike.

Ultimately however, I think a review of the last ten years alone is sufficient in demonstrating the ineffectiveness of both overt violence and traditional forms of protest.

@ SJ

Yeah. Pacifism as Pathology. I didn't agree with that line when Ward Churchill spun it because frankly, I think he took a cynical and ignorant view of the concept. And I think that he was wrong. and I don't agree with it now.

While I agree with Unionist in principle, and certainly when it comes to specific people organizing specific actions, I don't think anyone ever can have top-down control in all things. I agree with Left Turn that there are certain times when people are going to resort to violence or tactics I disagree with, right or wrong, and there are degrees of justification and effectiveness. That is not the same as a group whose sole purpose is the calculated use of force and shock.

To get back to the original question - what if the black block are right. Well, I can think of historical situations in which their tactics worked, for a time. But they aren't very flattering comparisons. And just because something has an effect does not make it right or productive.

And besides, once you open the door to real violence, you'll probably find that there are groups that are far better at it, far less inclined to play by any rules (and I presume the BB imagine there are "rules" here, right?) and not at all interested in change for the better.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

That is not the same as a group whose sole purpose is the calculated use of force and shock.

Which group(s) are you thinking of?

I'm talking about the black bloc, but really any group which uses force as its main gambit.

And if it is a cartoon image it's not mine. What do you imagine was beng put on the table in the OP? Seems to me it was the proposal that we should resort to the use of force and violence, based on an assumption that other methods have not worked. And I'm not the one who mentioned the black bloc in association with that.

Was that not clear?

Or I'm sorry. Am I making the BB look bad because I forgot to mention all the bake sales and puppy and kitten adoptions they organize?

Cross posted with you, k

And to talk about the other side of it, yes, I know the BB do things like help thwart the cops, first aid, and other battlefield tactics.

But in terms of solving problems, it's rather like the same dilemma that faces cops or armies. If the only situation you are trained to work in is a violent confrontation, what sort of methods are you going to find for accomplishing goals?

And if you do that wearing groovy black outfits and walking around in a powerful gang, and smashing and vandalizing, what sort of message is that going to send to people who are impressionable, and wondering what the best way is to change the world?

I can imagine that looks way more exciting than most of the work involved in improving things, which can often be boring, slow and decidedly un-sexy.

(edit)

k, go back and read the OP. As I just said, near as I can see we are talking about the use of violence because of the presumed failure of peaceful methods of resistance and change.

One of the problems I see with the BB tactics is the alienation it causes. If I work in a coffee shop and I need the job and some jerk trashes it as part of a demo and it causes my place of employment to shut down, I might not be too kindly disposed to the BB or its message.

Since about 1983 if you want to put a time frame on it.  It was in the '50's and '60's that my parents generation fought and won decent wages and pensions and medical benefits.  Often times they were vilified for their illegal activities. I grew up in a mining town where one of the traditions was that before negotiations started large amounts of explosives would go missing from the underground magazines.  In one of the strikes in the '60's the company tried to keep the power on to make it faster to restart operations by flying people in by helicopter and they stopped because people shot at the chopper.

There is no doubt that the generation that is in their twenty's today have it way worse than the people who were in their twenty's in the late '60's and early '70's.  But then no generation has received much from the elite by going cap in hand with head bowed.

The black bloc has always had the worst possible idea(assuming they weren't ALL police academy kids getting "extra credit" by givng the boys'n girls in blue an excuse to break heads).  Destroying things for the sake of destroying things isn't revolution.  A TRULY radical act(using the WTO protests in Seattle, for example)would have been to TAKE OVER all the Starbucks and serve everybody free lattes for a couple of hours, setting up a temporary work committee to make decisions democratically until the cops showed up(if time permitted).

Ken Burch wrote:

The black bloc has always had the worst possible idea

I'm sure if you gave it a bit more thought you could probably think of at least a few ideas that would be worse than a group of folks agreeing to dress in similar looking clothing in order to make it harder for cops, bosses, landlords, etc to identify and target specific individuals... to collectivize the risks associated with public protest... for those with more privilege acting in solidarity with other individuals in the demo with less privilege.

I [i]wish[/i] that were the worst idea I had ever heard.