The Black Bloc: Anti-Capitalist Idiocy
Recently I signed out The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill from the library. I felt a great deal of ambivalence towards it. On the one hand books like this deserve to exist, and they illustrate a worldview we can learn from. On the other hand, the book irritated me on multiple levels.
I did not find the "comic book" aspect that strong. The art is passable but not very good; Gord Hill would benefit from some lessons in proportions and figure drawing. The book also suffers from a weakness of "tell, don't show": in many cases the narrative is driven by textual captions with illustrations tacked on, instead of the illustrations and text working together to move the story together. I am not saying that I could come up with anything better, but as a consumer I felt dissatisfied.
The book documents several mass political protests I remember: Seattle in 1999, Quebec City in 2001, the Vancouver Olympic protests in 2010 and the G20 in Toronto, also in 2010. The 2001 Quebec City protests in particular dredged up memories; I was not at those protests (and I had misgivings about them at the time) but I knew a lot of people who did attend. While visiting my mother in Mississauga I followed the newspaper accounts closely, and after the protests I heard a few stories involving lots of tear gas.
The book made me angry. It reminded me of how much those advocating violent resistance have done to undermine and neutralize whatever good mass political protests could have achieved. Hill does not share that view; he glorifies the Black Bloc, portraying them as heroes who are cheered on by the regular protestors, who smash things up and make cops and businesspeople cower in fear.
I disrespectfully disagree. The Black Bloc is stupid and ineffective. It does a great job of playing right into the hands of the media and police, and a lousy job of class warfare, political protest, or solidarity.
I am not a Black Bloc member. I am not even sure exactly what the Black Bloc is -- my best guess is that it is an organization in the same sense that Anonymous is an organization: a loose collective of activists that get together to cause havoc. Mostly, the Black Bloc shows up at political protests dressed in black. They attempt to violently resist the state by lobbing tear gas canisters back at police and via property damage: smashing windows of businesses, torching cars, and in one memorable case pushing a section of fencing around.
If the goal of the Black Bloc is to smash capitalism and/or the state then their tactics are pretty terrible. Even if you grant them victory in the Seattle 2001 protests (where they had the element of surprise) their record has been spotty since.
Are they actually trying to smash the state? Then why do they show up at political protests where the police are expecting them? Why do they try to confront an enemy face-to-face that has better equipment and better training than they do? Why do they think that causing property damage is going to make the wheels of capitalism grind to a halt?
Instead of smashing the state, they play right into the hands of the enemy. Both the state and the media love the Black Bloc:
The state can (and does) easily infiltrate political resistance organizations. Those infiltrators agitate actual protestors into committing more property damage, and then conveniently lock up the ringleaders before the actual protests begin.
The state can also set up convenient diversionary targets for the Black Bloc. I am not arguing that the police intentionally planted cars for the protestors to burn at the Toronto G20, but the police could not have done a better job of neutralizing the legitimacy of the protests if they had.
The state can justify its ridiculous spending on "security" at conferences like the G20 by pointing at the violent fringe of the protest movement. Given the billion dollars the federal government spent for the Toronto G20 summit, maybe this is an effective tactic to bankrupt the state, but I doubt that this is an explicit motivation for the protestors.
The media loves the Black Bloc because it means they can ignore its job. Smashed windows sell papers, so instead of covering the actual issues being protested, reporters just have to wait for the Black Bloc to show up, photograph some smashed windows, and then file their reports. Time and time again, the majority of coverage at political protests has to do with the violent element.
As Gord Hill's book demonstrates, some fraction (including him) of the Black Bloc movement consist of "professional protestors" who travel from protest to protest causing havoc. This allows the state to spin stories about these movements lacking political legitimacy and broad political support.
Beyond its helpful assistance to its supposed enemies, the movement does an enormous amount to damage any effect that non-violent protest can accomplish:
The presence of the Black Bloc gives the police greater excuses to oppress protestors with tear gas and "free speech zones". Then governments pass laws banning facial coverings and gas masks at protests, so protestors cannot even defend themselves passively.
Note that this is probably one of the Black Bloc tactics -- to use nonviolent protestors as collateral damage so that those nonviolent protestors hate the police as much as they do. But the tactic does not work -- instead of turning violent the protestors just get shocked into staying home.
The Black Bloc hides behind a pretense of "diversity of tactics" (that they don't actually believe) but they serve to reduce diversity, not increase it. In particular they scare away the vast sections of the population that support the causes being protested but is not willing to deal with the violence and the tear gas and the oppression. Social movements are not won by the fringe element of hardcore protestors. You need the masses participating. To the extent that the Occupy movement (which was explicitly non-violent) was successful, it did so because it attracted mainstream elements (including former activists who had grown up and had established their lives) to its cause.
When the mainstream sees the way that police oppress legitimate, non-violent protests, they start to get a sense of how the machine works. (Witness Steve Paikin's reactions at the G20 protests.) Then there is a possibility of change.
The purpose of political protest is twofold: to raise awareness of an issue and to let those in power know that protestors are aware of injustices and willing to inconvenience their lives to protest said injustices. The Black Bloc subverts both of these purposes. As mentioned above, they steal all the media attention and cripple attempts at public education around the issues. And since they are easily labelled as fringe elements, those in power can easily dismiss the concerns of the protest as illegitimate.
And finally, many elements of the "violent resistance" crowd are cowards and hypocrites:
They hide behind non-violent protestors to carry out their hooliganism. They show up to protests in street clothes, but instead of smashing windows in ways that would identify them, they change into their black uniforms during the protests.
Many of those protestors would argue that they are deeply involved in organizing the protests (which I suspect is true). That's fine, but I do not think subverting their own causes is an effective tactic.
The publisher of Gord Hill's book (which I am guessing is the same one who paid his way to Toronto to participate in the G20 protests, as documented in the book) receives money from the Canada Council of the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Canada Book Fund, and the BC Book Publishing Tax Credit Program -- all instruments of the state that Gord Hill is trying to violently resist. Allan Antcliff (who wrote a foreward for the book) is a university professor and a Canada Research Chair. They might argue some claptrap about using the tools of the state to strangle it, but they are hypocrites.
This is not limited to the people involved in the publication of this comic book. Many many anarchists either live comfortable middle-class (or comfortable middle-class student) lives, or are refugees from such circumstances who spend their carefree twenties living like poor people for fun and solidarity. They are not willing to sacrifice much for their causes -- they want to have their fun at political protests, and then go home. (Yes, I am being unfair, because some of these protestors go home to lower-key activist activities. Deal.)
On a similar note, the anarchists are rarely willing to carry out long-term undercover actions to achieve their goals. Hill documents some "continuous resistance" actions in 2007 (ie torching cars), but for the most part the violent resistance predictably shows up during these protests. So how dedicated are these activists to actually resisting the state -- violently or otherwise?
Antcliff's foreward has the audacity to quote from the "Statement of Principles of the OAS Shutdown Coalition", which includes such hilarious statements as "We are against violence" followed by "By violence we do not include property damage or swearing, but do include comments or behavior that is sexist, ageist, homophobic, racist, classist or otherwise oppressive." I do not want to live in a world where property damage is okay. Maybe the Black Bloc is okay with property damage when it happens to their political enemies, but I bet they are not so happy when their own property is damaged.
I do not actually believe that the Black Bloc has any long-term goals when they engage in their "violent resistance", which is why their actions are so ad-hoc. Mostly I think they enjoy smashing stuff up.
I have no interest in seeing the Black Bloc succeed in its tactics. I do not want to live in their world. Instead, I want to neutralize them, and take away the incentives they have to undermine political protest. Given that I am not actually a political protestor I have no legitimacy in giving advice, but if I was looking to neutralize the effectiveness of the Black Bloc and other violent protestors then I would consider the following:
Explicitly declare protests to be nonviolent, and put this nonsense of "diversity of tactics" to rest. Those who wish to organize protests involving "diversity of tactics" can do so on their own time (and make much better targets for the police in the protest).
Note that I am not against actual diversity of tactics: pickets and direct action and giant puppets and marches can coexist. But the only time you hear the phrase "diversity of tactics" is when it is being used as a euphamism for violent resistance.
Embrace "diversity of tactics" by including self-policing as a tactic. Announce publicly that there will be groups of non-violent protestors who are trained in filming violent protestors committing acts of violence, and then unmasking them and destroying their property -- namely, the masks that grant them anonymity. Exposing the identities of these hooligans will go a long way towards shutting down their actions.
That does not mean that the police will be nice to political protestors. It does mean that protestors have a better chance of showing they deserve public sympathy.
As a bonus, some of the so-called violent protestors are actually undercover cops. Exposing them appears to be illegal (!) but doing so would go a long way to illustrate the ways that the police intentionally drum up violent protest so it can be suppressed later.
I am sure that many political organizers already take these tactics into consideration. I worry that they are paralyzed by political correctness and so-called "respect for diversity" to put their feet down.
This is not my fight. I do believe that rallies and mass political protest have a role to play in political discourse, and I have attended a few local rallies. But I have deliberately avoided the big protests (I'm afraid of tear gas too), and I will probably continue doing so. It still frustrates me that so many well-meaning activists put in so much time and energy into these protests only to have their efforts go to waste, with few hooligans getting their jollies smashing cars and shop windows. And I am irritated that Gord Hill's book glorifies such hooliganism by spinning a story where such tactics work. If you want to read this comic book then go ahead, but if you do I advise you to hold some healthy skepticism for the narrative.