We Are a Vision of the Future, On the Black Bloc: Part I
We Are a Vision of the Future, On the Black Bloc: Part II
This is the intro, it’s where all the stuff about the black bloc being in the news and everyone freaking out about how they’re ruining The Movement or The Party or maybe just distracting from a protest goes. It really amazes me how in lock step folks are on a lot of these things when it comes to the black bloc. I attribute it to the general lack of knowledge about the black bloc as a tactic and about the various groups who use the tactic, mostly anarchists and other anti-authoritarian leftists.
Disclaimer: Before I get into the meat of the diary here let me say what this isn’t. I’m not trying to convince anyone here that they should go out and break windows and burn limos. The goals these folks are pursuing aren’t your goals. These folks are allies to progressives in many ways, but are also at odds with progressives in other ways. And they are very much against the conservative wing of the democrats. This is an attempt to explain the misconceptions about those who take these actions and the effects of property damage. Hopefully y’all will learn some stuff.
The first and most common criticism of property destruction at protests is that it hurts the cause. It's never quite clear what “the cause” is exactly, but for our purposes we’ll say it’s social justice broadly construed. So the claim here is that breaking windows and starting some fires, and maybe throwing some stuff at the police, sets back broad advances in social justice. How does it do that? Well, these are the most common reasons I hear.
It gives the right wing propaganda ammo.
By breaking things anarchists play into the law and order narrative of the right wing thus empowering them to implement their agenda against social justice, rolling the clock back decades and all but re-enslaving women and people of color. A bit of hyperbole, but more or less that seems to be the argument. The problem with this is that it isn’t true at all. The right wing virtually never points to anarchists breaking things as a justification for heavier penalties and a more draconian justice system. They don’t do so because they are incredibly racist and they motivate their base by pointing to black and brown people as the source of crime and thus as the target for police.
The reactions to Black Lives Matter is a pretty clear indication of that. The movement has been non-violent the entire time and yet it’s nonviolent actions are painted as violence. Yes, the right claims that any riot with black people in it is an example of violence by BLM, but it also claims that merely blocking a freeway is violence. Anything other than complete passivity is used by the right for their racist agenda. A few broken windows at a protest by people of generally indeterminate race, given their anonymity, isn’t helping the right because they just outright lie.
The right wing doesn’t need the actions of a few hundred anarchists to justify their racist agenda. This agenda existed well before anarchists were breaking windows and will continue to exist even if anarchists stopped completely.
It alienates potential supporters
In this case there is a kernel of truth. There are a good number of people who won’t come out to a protest if they think there will be violence. That’s pretty reasonable given that most people don’t want to deal with violence. The problem is that this goes beyond supporting a specific protest. People claim that violence will cause people to abandon their belief in whatever cause it is that people are protesting. There’s simply nothing showing this to be true, and in all honesty the idea that Americans are somehow shrinking violets when it comes to violence is an absurd claim. Americans aren’t turned off by violence at all.
Look at some of the more successful movements in US history. Almost all of them had both a violent and a non-violent wing. Contemporarily we can see the successes of the forced birth movement as a great example of how little Americans care about violence by people who support a cause they support. Yes, there are exceptions. Bombing a church in the name of racial segregation is a far cry from breaking windows in protest of a war or fascism. Was there a single person who saw a broken window in the lead up to the war in Iraq and said “Man, I guess I was wrong about this whole bombing the shit out of Iraq thing. I’m totally for it now!” No, there wasn’t. There were hand wringers and fence sitters who took the opportunity to tell people how concerned they were and how much it hurt the movement, but there weren’t people actually switching sides.
That’s because people don’t work like that. We chose sides based on a variety of things, some reasonable, most emotional or instinctual. People have already made up their mind on whether they support Trump, and that’s based mainly on what groups they belong to not on whether one side or the other was violent. And let’s not forget, Trump is the least popular incoming president in the history of polling. That’s not going to change because liberals are insufficiently vocal in denouncing anarchists. Were we going to get Single Payer until that anarchist riot? Did the Supreme Court flip on the TV and see a burning trash can and decide that was the last straw and that they were overturning the Voter Rights Act? No, they didn’t.
It wastes valuable resources dealing with people in jail
This is one of the biggest negatives of these sorts of actions. People always get arrested and then people have to spend time and resources helping them through the legal system. As a criticism coming from people who aren’t anarchists this doesn’t make much sense though. None of these meager resources are coming from anything that would be pushing for liberal policies, so why would it matter?
Violence at protests is infiltration
The biggest point against this is that there is absolutely no evidence of this happening in the US in the last 40 years. The police certainly infiltrate movements, and they do entrap radicals by inciting them to attempt violence, but not rioting. The police don’t want rioting, it makes them look bad and doesn’t help them at all. The FBI does set up hapless radicals by paying informants to entrap them by making the plans and providing all the resources, including fake "bombs". But none of these things happen at protests. At protests infiltrators point out the people they think are leaders so the cops can arrest them.
And why would the cops incite a riot? They don’t need a riot to arrest people, they do that plenty when there’s no property damage. The local PD doesn’t gain anything from it, and in fact just looks bad when all the footage of them hurting unarmed people comes out after the riot. It makes them look incompetent, which is often the case, and they don’t want to encourage it. Similarly, the feds have nothing to gain from inciting riots. Do they think that the anarchist movement is going to be destroyed because of some broken windows and a burnt limo? That would be absurd. Past property damage has only served to broaden the audience for anarchist ideas, whether people agree or not. It’s been a hundred years since anarchists have been as visible as at this time, and a big part of that is because of the news coverage from riots and property damage.
“Law and Order”
Additionally, these riots are never big enough to cause a real political problem. These aren’t riots like we saw in the 60s, they aren’t normally even as big as a sports riot. Just as importantly, the right uses the racist boogeyman of black people coming for the suburbs, or something, not a few hundred leftists who burned a limo. Law and order is now and has always been a racist formulation that plays on the racist fears of white people. The only people who are afraid of anarchists are those who are already so afraid of black folks that a little more fear isn’t going to affect their politics at all, unless it makes them question whether white people are part of the problem too, which isn’t a bad thing.
Of course, no one even mentions “law and order” when there’s a sports riot. No one ever worries that this will be the sudden onset of fascism because there’s some burning couches in the street. Because that would be absurd. Again, “law and order” is now and always has been a racist formulation that is about oppression black folks and isn’t affected at all by riots perceived as white.
Just as importantly, the right outright lies if there’s no violence. They’ll literally take picture from years ago and pretend they’re current. If they could find color photos of Watts riots I’m sure they’d be using those for fear mongering. If there were nothing else they’d just photoshop something together.
Politics is not a popularity contest
The first and most enduring misconception that many of these ideas are based on is that politics is about getting people to agree with you. It’s not. It never has been. Politics is about power, who has it and who uses it. Popular support for a policy is a good thing but as we see with the Democratic party it doesn’t mean you win. Most Americans support what the Democrats want in broad policy terms, and yet they’re still out of power. That’s because the GOP, and anarchists, know what the Democrats don’t seem to know: Politics is not a popularity contest. Anarchists take part in mass property destruction because it helps their cause, not because it makes them popular. Vocally denouncing property destruction get the rest of the left nothing. It doesn’t stop the right from calling the left violent, even though it is the right that commits murder after murder for political reasons. It certainly doesn’t win favor from independents to the left of the party, and ever growing cohort. It actually does nothing.
Here’s the bottom line, we need left unity. There’s a fascist in office and we need to work together. No, that doesn’t mean that Democrats need to be out there handing bricks to anarchists, if you don’t support a tactic then step away from the actions where people use that tactic. These are fascists we’re dealing with, they want you to denounce everyone to your left and turn them into the cops. Liberal cities have been shutting down spaces of resistance to fascism since the fire in Oakland. These are all groups who have experience fighting state repression, experience everyone on the left, and in the center, is going to need in the up coming years.
If you don’t support these things, fine, I’m not going to convince you otherwise and I wouldn’t try. But please, don’t attack the folks who have been fighting fascists for years.