Even if, like me, you are unable to read French, you can still understand the contrast here between Anders Breivik and Mohamed Merah. According to Le Figaro, one is a terrorist, the other is not. Guess which one is which?

Hat tip to the Angry Arab.

Labels: Europe, France, Islamic Fundamentalism, Political Violence, Racism, Religion

UPDATE 2: So why are they making it seem like Uganda is one big hellhole because of Kony, because it's not.

UPDATE 1: This is the same narrative about Africa that we have seen for centuries.

Hat tip to Jews sans frontieres.

INITIAL POST: Blissfully, I live outside the universe of viral videos, so I only heard about the Invisible Children one about Joseph Kony and the Lords Resistance Army indirectly. I admit that I am late to the story, but I will share my responses: First, if Americans really care that much about gruesome, militaristic violence, they should confront the brutalities inflicted upon others around the world by their own government, instead of supporting a call for more US military assistance for a Uganda military known for its own human rights abuses.

Second, I thought, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Over the course of my life, Americans have flocked to claims that leaders of color are one of the primary sources of global violence. Mao, Castro, Arafat, Gaddafi, Noriega, Aidid, Hussein, Bin Laden, Ahmajinedad . . and, now, Kony. With the passage of time, succeeding figures have been described in more and more lurid terms that highlights their foreign, uniquely perverse character, paradoxically in contradictory ways, contrast, for example, the hedonism of Gaddafi, Noriega and Hussein with the puritanical extremism of Bin Laden and Ahmajinedad. If we could just get rid of these evil demons, the world would be such a wonderful place. The root of this phenonmenon go all the way back to the extermination of Native Americans by, first, the Spanish, and then, the US, with the whites of the time condemning the indigenous population for the interwoven existence of these seemingly oppositional attributes within their non-Christian cultures. As then, anyone who suggests that we should understand the circumstances that give rise to them and seek to address these conditions, instead of putting them on wanted posters, is frequently maligned as an apologist. Callum McCormick has aptly observed that any effort to comprehend the current situation in Uganda as anything more than a binary moral opposition is rejected as an unnecessary complication.

Predictably, one rarely encounters powerful white political figures presented in this way, consider, for example, Donald Rumsfeld, who, as Secretary of Defense, approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against Guantanamo detainees, personally monitoring the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani. People like Rumsfeld are able to escape such condemnation because their violence is displaced by modern communications technology and allegedly objective processes for developing information and making administrative decisions, much in the same way that CIA officers evaded responsibility for the mass killings and torture associated with the Phoenix Program and Operation Condor. In the end, the outward appearance of rationality associated with the modernist effort to transform societies still afflicted by the residue of primitivism exonerates them. If Kony had come from an elite Uganda family and attended Harvard or Oxford prior to returning to Uganda to impose austerity with the assistance of a repressive security apparatus, he would be praised in the US media as an exemplary example, regardless of the number of child victims.

Curiously, the Israelis, perceived in a Eurocentric way, also avoid such a characterization, despite a documented history of calculated state violence in Lebanon and the occupied territories. Of course, it is not the fault of Invisible Children that many Americans reflexively respond in this way, but it is, whether consciously or not, exploiting a fundamentally neoconservative, racist discourse that privileges the state sanctioned violence of the US and its allies over others. If the objective is to truly help the people of Uganda, then an approach different from the failed, purportedly humanitarian interventions of the last 25 years should be considered. Otherwise, the arrest and trial of Kony, as sought by Invisible Children, is likely to be noteworthy for giving someone an opportunity to take his place. It would also be conveniently consistent with the rules of the game, whereby violent political figures in opposition to US interests risk finding themselves being prosecuted in The Hague for crimes against humanity, while similarly situated US allies have received billions in assistance.

Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb.

Labels: "War on Terror", Africa, Alternative Media, NGOs, Political Violence, YouTube

UPDATE: On Twitter, laurenriot engages in an ongoing debate, tweet by tweet, with the signatories of the statement. Here is a sample of them, expect more to come at the hashtag #laurenriot:

58m lauren riot @laurenriot
I wonder if these folks actually spent any time in the days we laid down roots at Oscar Grant Plaza. I remember ferocity! Militance!

59m lauren riot @laurenriot
Do they mean taking a building after 10s of 1000s took to the streets only 4 weeks in?

59m lauren riot @laurenriot
Do they mean the roots of masked folx building barricades 2 weeks in to protect from cops?

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
Which roots exactly? OO was never an OWS satellite.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
As the Oakland Commune evolves and finds its legs, these folks want to return to its roots.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
And yet this group is most concerned about a handful of people who organized a *single* *action* they didn't like.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
An aside, the "radical inclusivity" of OO has us organizing w/ holocaust deniers, unapologetic racists, rapists, misogynists and homophobes.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
and seriously, just LOL at the reference to riot porn, an expression they no doubt learned from a sarcastic insurrectionary anarchist.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
The link to the Bay of Rage article (& other language) says to me that one organizer in specific is being targeted, and that's fucked up.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
The GA voted 2 keep many parts of the organizing of #J28 closed, while allowing the majority of the work to be done openly. Quite democratic

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
The critique of undemocratic processes seems to be another complaint about the organizing format agreed on my consensus at the GA. Ironic.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
When you consider downtown residents opening their homes to strangers for teargas/OC decontamination on #J28-again, I see massive support!

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
When you consider 1000s on #J28 willing to commit trespassing, at least hundreds willing to commit burglary - speaks to massive support

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
What I see in the community is that the support for #OO is still very strong, if not stronger than it's been.!

Hat tip to Richard Crary of The Existence Machine.

INITIAL POST: An excerpt from a statement by four people involved in Occupy Oakland from the inception:

In our individualistic culture, it is rare when radical activists are able to pitch a big tent and draw in masses of people to the cause. The early days of the Occupy movement provided one of those rare opportunities. Occupy was the spark for the emergence of a broad wave of anti-corporate, anti-repression sentiment in our society. We are concerned that the inclusivity that began this movement and contributed to its rapid growth is dying in OO as a result of the dominant insurrectionist tendencies and the vanguardist maneuvering and manipulations of some of its proponents. Dramatically shrinking numbers reveal that this ideology and organizing style either misreads the real political situation in Oakland, or else underestimates the importance of consolidating and advancing a broad, united and popular front. We all collectively must take responsibility for this hardening and shrinking of the OO ranks, and we must recognize that in trying to re-make OO in an ideologically purist vision, we are destroying our ability to garner the wide base of support and goodwill that will be necessary to successfully resist corporate and state domination.

Occupiers who have begun to question the decision-making processes involved in recent actions like J28 are being asked, in the name of unity, to maintain silence. We have been told that our concerns will be dealt with, that there’s nothing to worry about, and that we shouldn’t speak publicly about them. Yet we feel that without transparency and open dialogue, the problems will only get worse. We are speaking to everyone who still believes in Occupy Oakland, but especially to those most active in the GA and various committees who have the ability to help us make the kinds of changes that would reassure the larger Bay Area community that Occupy Oakland is still a wise place to invest its energy.

The four of us decided to speak out because we have each been pushed to the margins of OO by ugly, ideological purification behavior that often now takes place at the GAs and in groups like the Move-In Committee, where dissenting voices are booed and jeered and group speak and in-group relationships now dominate. Please do not mistake our concerns as yet another attack on anarchism or Black Bloc; it’s not about that at all. It’s about the exclusionary strategies and tactics that alienate those of us who are interested in a slower, more solid, more inclusive approach of mass movement building.

Please consider reading the statement in its entirety, as well as the comments in response to it. They provide insight into the urgency of adopting inclusive practices that will expand the reach of Occupy.

As Cheryl Kohler, one of the signatories to the statement, says:

We are arguing against a strategy of full-blown insurrection and asking those who seem to be pushing in that direction to reconsider the strategy.

Let's hope that the participants in Occupy Oakland do so. As Bifo more generally observed in After the Future:

The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Halliburton, secret services, mafias?

For those committed to the creation of alternative forms of collective organization and resistance, the answer to this rhetorical question is obvious. As I said on Thursday, socially and economically vulnerable people, and, for that matter, most people, whatever their background, are not going to commit themselves to a movement centered around high profile direct actions that present a higher probability of confrontation with the police. They are not going to participate in actions where, through the unilateral decisions of others, they suddenly find themselves subject to police assault. Such an experience is not going to result in a mass movement directed towards the dismantlement of governmental authority and police power in Oakland. If anything, it is more likely to lead to the imposition of a state of emergency.

As noted in my replies to Richard Crary's comments about my post yesterday, there are other ways of carrying out direct actions that incorporate the concerns of the community and reduce the prospect of a violent confrontation. For example, consider Jan Gilbrecht's explanation of how the seizure of the Kaiser Center, otherwise known as J28, could have been carried out:

Some of the proponents and proposers kept adding anything goes to the list of what would happen in the building, like for example child care, without consulting the childcare committee or having that be part of the initial proposal, or housing without addressing the serious issues with violence at the old encampment. I pointed out that it was hubris for the Move-In committee to decide on behalf of the community what would happen in the building. My proposal was to build for a very large Move-In action and community festival for the weekend, with a mass GA to be held each night, where members of the community could make proposals for the future of the building and then make decisions and commitments together. Rather than a distraction, many many people agreed with or also proposed this type of an approach, and a committee actually came up with a list of proposed housing guidelines to present to the GAs. Someone was identified to facilitate these mass GAs. Actually, it was one of the central proposers and planners of the action who told me personally that he didn’t care what we said would happen in the building, because it wasn’t about holding the building anyway, that would never happen. He thought we should say whatever people wanted to hear to get them out that day. That is exactly the kind of dishonest approach that caused me to withdraw from the Move-In action.

Interestingly, even Gilbrecht did not perceive the peril in a public mass action to seize the Kaiser Center, but, at least, she did recognize the need to place the facility at the service of the community. If this approach had been adopted and communicated to the people of Oakland prior to the action, it may well have generated a larger turnout of support, deterring the police from responding with such extreme force. If not, Occupy Oakland might have received more broad based community support after the subsequently kettles and arrests. Her claim that she was told by someone that Occupy Oakland never expected to hold the building points towards another serious issue, one beyond mendacity. If true, it highlights the arguable assumption that people can be best organized through theatrical protest spectacles, where the activists and the police all play their assigned roles.

Unfortunately, in this instance, the police didn't, a fact echoed in subsequent statements by some organizers to the effect that they expected the police to allow marchers to enter the Kaiser Center and arrest them later, as with past encampments. They expected to be allowed to, in effect, briefly squat the Center, conduct a couple of GAs and have a dance party before being evicted. There is nothing wrong with that, other than the failure to inform everyone of this purpose, except that, once the police stepped outside of their assigned role, and refused entry, a few protesters did so as well, responding with bottles, rocks and firecrackers. In other words, it was on. On J28, the Oakland Police Department displayed its ability to evolve and more effectively respond to the tactics of Occupy Oakland, catching it flat-footed. Furthermore, had something like the Gilbrecht approach been adopted, Occupy Oakland might have discovered that people in the community were not very enthusiastic about it, while suggesting modifications, such as, say, a more initially covert seizure, or something else entirely instead in the spirit of democratic discourse.

Beyond this, there is the troubling possibility that such violence facilitates the current harsh transformation of global capitalism, one centered around the accumulation of surplus by means of the provision of surveillance and security services, as explained by Stephen Graham during this Democracy Now! interview:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Stephen Graham, what’s the market? You’re talking about a growth industry. What are we talking about here in terms of investment of dollars by—because there are so many, obviously, municipalities in the United States with their own police forces?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, I mean, globally speaking, the so-called homeland security market is a real—is in real boom town—boom time, excuse me. I mean, in a world where actual defense contracts are often being reduced, a lot of the big companies are moving into civilian applications. They’re moving into these non-lethal weapons, moving into all of the technologies of crowd control and civilian disturbance control. And that has to be added to, of course, the much bigger markets that are growing in terms of broader questions of surveillance and security for buildings, for cities, for special events, as we see these systems established more and more in terms of everyday spaces and everyday bits of cities. So, I haven’t got figures at hand, I’m afraid, but it’s multibillion-dollar markets that are projected to grow globally at very, very high rates over the next 15 years, according to some of the recent market research reports.

For more about Stephen Graham, and his pathbreaking work about the militarization of the city, go here and here.

Hat tip to Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Political Violence

t at Pink Scare demonstrates, yet again, that he is one of the most incisive critics of Chris Hedges' condemnation of the Black Bloc, and the evasion of the true challenges facing Occupy:

So, the question of Black Bloc: Pro or Con? is not one that can be answered abstractly. It should only be answered by direct participants in a mass movement who collectively debate and deliberate together in an open, democratic spirit. To think that a few self-appointed experts could answer this question for everyone in a couple of widely-publicized internet debates misses this crucial point.

As I responded in the comments to his post:

Curiously, both Hedges and those who practice violent Bloc tactics want to impose their approach on everyone else. In this, they are reverse sides of the same coin.

In each instance, the people are absent. Both approaches will shrink the movement instead of expanding it, because, even though Hedges has the right result for current conditions, non-violence, it is being dictated from above with no opportunity for discussion.

As I posted yesterday, there are many people living in distressed conditions that should be gravitating to Occupy. One reason is that they are not doing so is because they are legitimately frightened of the terrible things that can happen if they are subjected to police violence. But there is a bigger problem, they are also hesitant because the movement is not sufficiently open enough to them, not yet able to devise ways of incorporating their experience into it.

Neither Hedges nor the defenders of Bloc tactics have anything to say about this, about the need to focus our attention on the people who are not already part of Occupy.

Only through an emphasis upon the most rigorously inclusive, anti-authoritarian practice can the participants within Occupy induce the victims of the existing social order to collectively resist it. For leftists and progressives who come from privileged backgrounds, like Hedges, this is a disconcerting prospect, one that requires them to relinquish the exercise of hierarchical authority to which they have become accustomed if they are going to continue to remain a positive influence within the movement.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Marxism, Occupy Wall Street, Political Violence

The police have raided many of the encampments across the country. Protests and actions called by Occupy are declining in number, with reduced participation. Workers and marginalized people, like the homeless, who were initially drawn to Occupy have, in many instances, departed. It is discouraging, and someone or some people must be responsible.

Chris Hedges has the answer: Occupy has a cancer known as the Black Bloc that must be aggressively treated before it becomes terminal. According to Hedges, the Bloc, its violence, its contempt for collective social organization and its hypermasculinity are turning the public against Occupy. If Occupy is to survive, the Bloc must be expelled. His answer has a superficial allure especially given his skillful elaboration of it. As a consequence, his article has been posted all over the Internet. For those with a legitimate grudge against the Bloc, like Louis Proyect and other Marxists, it is a golden opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of it. Perhaps, that would be a good thing, as I've never been very enthusiastic about people who knowingly put others at risk by precipatating violent confrontations with the police. Anyone who does that, Bloc or not, has no place in Occupy or any other movement for social justice.

But it's all just a little too convenient. Preliminarily, there's a conceptual problem. Contrary to what Hedges, and even Proyect, would have you believe, the Bloc isn't nearly as monolithic as they suggest, as this perceptive comment by Black Bloc at Pink Scare demonstrates:

There is no the Black Bloc. A black bloc is a tactic, not an organisation, engaged in by anarchists (yes, even us boring old neo-Platformist anarchocommunists, not just Insurrectionists) in which anarchists show up en masse at a protest, take steps to preserve their anonymity (as defense against state profiling), band together, ignore demands from illegitimate authority (i.e. the cops) and act together to defend participants' bodies and autonomy against state violence. It does not necessarily include sabotage-style direct action nor confrontation with cops (except for the fact that cops in general *seek* that very confrontation with any black bloc that forms on the ground). In fact there have been numerous black blocs on the east coast that I have been a participant in and that did not result in any property damage nor violent confrontation with cops whatsoever.

If you require a more detailed, even more convincing explanation of Black Bloc practice, consider reading David Graeber's response to Hedges at n+1. Given the decentralized, transitory nature of what anarchists describe as the Bloc, periodic Bloc groups come into existence around the country, sometimes for violent purposes, sometimes not. Graeber even states that participation in these blocs is not limited to anarchists. Accordingly, the question becomes less about the Bloc, and more about why some people gravitate towards violent forms of political activity, and the consequences of such activity for Occupy. As such, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to treat Occupy consistent with Hedges' diagnosis. There are few readily identifiable people that can be characterized as Bloc (for example, consider this photo of the Occupy Oakland Tactical Action Committee, promoters of the weekly Fuck the Police marches, who's Bloc and who's not?), and, even if there are, they may or may not be involved with the violent police confrontations associated with some occupations, like Occupy Oakland. One can read the comment of Black Bloc as an implicit approval of Bloc violence in self-defense, but, if so, it is hard to rely upon it to justify a characterization of such Bloc behavior as cancerous, although such an interpretation does raise thorny, but less polarizing, issues of personal responsibility within a collective movement. Possibly, for this reason, Hedges prefers to expound upon Zerzan and Bloc ideology to avoid engagement with them.

Indeed, Occupy Oakland, an occupation that appears to be the target of Hedges' polemic, illustrates the lack of factual support for his theory. On November 2nd, I participated in one of the several marches during the general strike. Some masked people broke windows at a couple of bank branches, a Wells Fargo one and a Chase one. Interestingly, the media gave little attention to these incidents, perhaps because the vandalism was so trivial in nature. Instead, the media was much more engrossed in the attempted takeover of the Traveler's Aid Society Building near Oscar Grant Plaza later that night, as the police responded to ineffectual efforts to take the building and defend it with tear gas and flash grenades. A large crowd of young people, still out in the streets, participated, and, as the situation with the police escalated, some of them looted a Tully's Coffee Shop. Hedges describes them as Groups of Black Bloc protesters.

But were they? I have looked in vain for pictures of the people who did it, but I did find this article about the episode, which questions the utility of describing it within the confines of Bloc theory and practice accessed over the Internet by Hedges:

At the Oakland encampment, Hale Nicholson, who described himself and others as pacifists, said he participated in Wednesday's demonstration and march to the port and then went to sleep at the camp around 9:30 p.m. Around 1 a.m., he said, he was awakened by the sound of flash-bang grenades.

A group of protesters broke into the former Travelers Aid building in order to, as some shouting protesters put it, reclaim the building for the people. They voiced anger over budget cuts that forced the closure of a homeless aid program.

They blocked off a street with wood, metal Dumpsters and other large trash bins, sparking bonfires that leapt as high as 15 feet in the air. Several businesses were heavily vandalized. Dozens of protesters wielding shields were surrounded and arrested.

They voiced anger over budget cuts that that forced the closure of a homeless aid program. Think about that for a moment. Doesn't sound very Bloc like, does it? Instead, it sounds like a group of people influenced by a variegated mixture of direct action principles, motivated to do something spontaneous by their involvement in the strike. Of course, such behavior can be damaging to a social movement, but it is not something that can be so easily addressed by subsuming their behavior within the repository of a Black Bloc, specifically designed for this purpose.

Susie Cagle, in an article posted at Truthout, refutes Hedges even more categorically:

Hedges condemns property destruction in political protest by condemning black bloc tactics, regardless of the facts. The local coffee shop vandalism Hedges contends was committed by black bloc was in fact one window of a corporate coffee chain smashed in that post-strike fog of war - and by someone not wearing a mask, not wearing black. The people who broke into City Hall on January 28, and many of those who destroyed property there, were also largely unmasked. And both of these acts came immediately after, as in within minutes of, violent mass kettling and arrest actions.

As Cagle relates elsewhere in the article, the challenge presented by some involved in Occupy Oakland is their willingness to embrace more and more confrontational forms of protest, forms that make people like Hedges uncomfortable, at least when they aren't happening in Greece:

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

My, my, Hedges comes across here, does one dare say it, as very much like his characterization of the Bloc, or close to it, certainly more so than the people who attempted to take over the Traveler's Aid Society building. Here, it seems, we have on old activist stereotype, one who exoticizes political violence in other places, usually lesser developed ones, but finds himself alarmed when it emerges close to home. Proyect, in a post otherwise sympathetic to Hedges, perceptively observes that, to date, the riots, general strikes and attacks upon businesses celebrated by Hedges have failed to stall the ruthless imposition of austerity measures upon the Greek populace.

Consistent with this, while Hedges confined his condemnation to the Bloc, I suspect that the popularity of the piece, the reason why it went viral, is because liberals and progressives, non-socialists, in other words, have become fatigued with the direct action ethos of Occupy. For example, read through the comments to this post, written by someone who participated in the January 28th attempt by Occupy Oakland to seize the vacant Kaiser Center Auditorium and convert it into a community center. Numerous people, who, because of their local knowledge, appear to be Bay Area progressives, posted hostile comments, showing no sympathy for the people who were attacked and arrested by the police, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority were not among the few who threw rocks, bottles and firecrackers at the cops. Confronted with an excessive police response, especially at the end of the day, when officers kettled protesters, subjected them to a barrage of tear gas and flash grenades, and then arrested over 400 in front of the YWCA building, the commenters were either silent, or dismissed it as predictable. Clearly, they objected to the attempt to seize the building just as much as they did the people who threw objects at the police.

The reason for this hostility is simple: they, like Hedges, are alarmed at the increasing intensity of the confrontations with the police. Hence, liberals and progressives will be critical of any action, even non-violent ones, like property seizures, if they degenerate into street violence between protesters and cops, while conversely, ones that actually involve property destruction, without a violent police response, like the windows broken during the day of the general strike, or, more recently, the windows broken at an upscale car dealership on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco during the evening of the Occupy Wall Street West action, generate much less comment, except by those who learn of them during the real time livestreams and Twitter feeds or subsequent YouTube videos.

Such a response exposes the fault line that runs between older progressives and the young militants of Occupy. Older progressives live within existing institutional structures, unions, universities, schools and the public sector, and have become, in many instances, middle and upper class. Overall, they have a positive opinion of the police, even as they believe that officers should stop treating poor people and peole of color so badly. In other words, they believe that the police are necessary to preserve social order, and that they can be reformed. Conversely, many of the young militants of Occupy now consider the police to be an implacable enemy, a bulwark of the existing system of social oppression. And, in Oakland, they knew about the predations of the police prior to Occupy, which explains the intensity of the conflict there.

Here, finally, we begin to recognize some of the challenges currently confronting Occupy. On the one hand, we have people who purportedly want to support it, and may have even done so in the initial period of occupations, but cannot do so now because of the violence they perceive associated with it. On the other, we have others, rightly outraged over the conduct of the police, who risk substituting confrontations with law enforcement over direct challenges to crony capitalists responsible for the economic distress experienced by so many. Occupy also initially attracted marginalized people, but they seem to have departed.

Is there a path out of this dark forest? If so, it may lie within the processes of Occupy itself. As Pham Binh and others have observed, Occupy is a direct action social movement where those who dedicate the most time and energy disproportionately influence the outcomes. There is nothing unique about this, it is true of most institutions in this society. But such an approach will not work for a movement that seeks to represent the 99%. As Tiny, also known as Lisa Garcia-Gray, wrote about her experience during a march and bank occupation in San Francisco:

POOR Magazine was in the march on this day, sadly with only three members, we did have four family members but several of our poor parents are houseless and jobless and so our fourth member had his phone cut off the night before and so we couldn’t find each other in the masses of people, and all of our other family members were working one of several jobs and hustles and so they didn’t even have the privilege to be there at all.

At first I was taken by the almost flawless organizing by Bay Area non-profit organizations. From the emcee to the turn-out from group after group, the whole event was wound tightly as a rope on a drum. Each act of civil disobedience, set-off at the mouths of Wells Fargo bank branches, were beautifully orchestrated stages of theatre and action. It was obvious that funded organizations with time and paid staff had organized this event down to the last balloon, slightly like a party we at POOR Magazine had never received an invitation to.

As we left the protest to get our young kids to school on time, Tony and I spoke about the power of the resistance that we had just been part of. I brought up how although I am excited and about all of the issues peoples were speaking and acting on I remain vexed by the fact that as poor peoples of color and indigenous peoples we are constantly in battle, in protest about the genocide and violence perpetrated on us and yet it is a struggle for us to get 50 people to show up for protests, so what is the difference? and what really is our role in all of these resistance occupations as poor peoples of color in struggle who are also in struggle with the occupation of our time due to no-wage and low-wage work, system abuse and ongoing criminalization and why do our resistance movements stay at the margins of what is important to show up for?

At last, Tiny, not Chris Hedges, has revealed what ails Occupy, the difficulty of reaching and empowering the people most victimized in this capitalist society. By targeting the ephemeral Bloc as the source of the illness, Hedges evades this much more challenging social and political dilemma. Accordingly, Occupy should evaluate its internal processes and future actions by the extent to which they bring these people into the movement, and not by simplistic bright line rules about violence and non-violence.

For now, and, perhaps permanently, that means trying to avoid violent confrontations with the police as much as possible, not because the conduct of the police should be considered acceptable, far from it, but, rather, because many of the people that might embrace Occupy most enthusiastically are terrified, and for good reason, of being beaten, arrested, and, if undocumented, deported. I actually accidentally had the opportunity of seeing Tiny request Occupy Oakland support for an immigrants rights march during a general assembly in mid to late November, and someone asked, because of the attempted Traveler's Aid Society takeover, whether there would be any violence. She emphatically said something like . . No . . No . . absolutely not . . we are going to have families with children with us on the march. In relation to the attempt to take over the Kaiser Center, such considerations might suggest an initially more covert effort to seize it, with a subsequent display of public support, as occurred at Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley in November 2010, instead of a mass attempt to storm police lines at mid-day. Similarly, the manner by which Occupy Oakland organized in advance of the port shutdown, and provided picket line support for striking workers might serve as good examples as well. All three constituted effective efforts to support workers at the base.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Liberals, Occupy Wall Street, Political Violence

UPDATE: Please consider reading t's highly original and provocative objections to the methodology of Chris Hedges' condemnation of the Black Bloc over at PInk Scare.

INITIAL POST:

For now, I am posting this for your personal evaluation. I have some thoughts about the subject of Occupy and the Black Bloc, and I expect to post them soon.

Hat tip to Louis Proyect at the The Unrepentant Marxist.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Marxism, Occupy Wall Street, Political Violence, YouTube

UPDATE 4: According to historian David Starkey, the riots have confirmed the prophecy of Enoch Powell as the whites have become black. Of course, the BBC allowed him to express his racist perspective about blacks and black culture unchallenged by the moderator, in marked contrast to the treatment of Darcus Howe when he attempted to explain the social context of the riots.

UPDATE 3: More, from Peter Oborne:

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption. This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be reclaimed by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption. Yes, this is why it is difficult to ascribe a leftist social ethos to many of the rioters. Instead, they participated in a populist embrace of the values by which they have been governed for decades. They did, however, collectively organize themselves in ways common among anti-authoritarians. Perhaps, this is a seed that can germinate into a rejection of the hierarchical world of commodity consumption that they sought to enter, however fleetingly, in the last few days.

UPDATE 2 Novelist Hari Kunzru gets it:

In a society that has abandoned or devalued most forms of mutual assistance in favour of a solipsistic entrepreneurialism, it's hardly surprising that, faced with the end of the good times, people help themselves. Fear and greed are our ruling passions. That's true of the kids smashing shop windows to steal trainers. It's also true of the MPs fiddling their expenses, the police officers taking backhanders, the journalists breaking into phones. Why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't any of us? The example has been set by our new masters, the one per cent for whom and by whom we're governed. The ability of powerful actors in the financial markets to socialise risk while privatising profit appears, to the financial peasantry, indistinguishable from organised crime. No reason for the rest of us to stand on ceremony.

Kunzu hits the nail on the head when he highlights the importance of the devaluation of mutual assistance. If the English unrest is to have any possibility of developing into a rejection of the existing social order, the rehabilitation of mutual assistance is a necessary precondition.

UPDATE 1: Oops, the Internal Police Complaints Commission make a mistake:

The police watchdog investigating the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked the first bout of rioting in London on Saturday, has said it may have inadvertently misled journalists into believing the Tottenham man had fired at police.

Responding to inquiries from the Guardian, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said in a statement: it seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to believe that shots were exchanged.

Someone over at Lenin's Tomb described this process as lie immediately, recant at leisure, as manifested in other notorious episodes such as the killings of De Menezes and Tomlimson.

INITIAL POST: Prime Minister David Cameron rambled on and on about responsibility in relation to the London riots:

The prime minister revived his pre-election concerns about a broken society as he said that one of the main lessons from the riots was that too many children grew up not knowing the differences between right and wrong.

This is not about poverty, it's about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. In too many cases the parents of these children – if they are still around – don't care where their children are or who they are with, let alone what they are doing. The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.

The fact that many children ended up in gangs would be the subject of renewed ministerial interest. The prime minister said: At the heart of all the violence sits the issue of the street gangs. Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes. They earn money through crime, particularly drugs, and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates with gang-on-gang murders and unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders.

Much of the left response will probably be about the cause of the conditions condemned by Cameron, leaving aside the question as to whether he has exaggerated them. But there is another issue here that deserves more attention. For example, consider this statement: A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. And who are some of the avatars of this culture? Let's identify them.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, former President George Bush, President Barack Obama and, yes, Prime Minister David Cameron, not to mention French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, among others. All of them have perpetually emphasized violence as a means of achieving their objectives, regardless of any legal, institutional or international impediments. Bush and Blair are, of course, notorious for their invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, wrapped in the cloak of human rights. Neither acknowledged any responsibility for the death and destruction that they inflicted upon Iraq and Afghanistan, except as a profit making opportunity for US and UK corporations supposedly involved in rebuilding the country.

Meanwhile, Obama has expanded US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, participated in airstrikes in Libya, and relied upon covert operations in Yemen. Sarkozy and Cameron have played leading roles in the Libyan debacle. As for Netanyahu, do will really need to chronicle his brutalities in the occupied territories? Barely a week passed when one of these leaders did not either engage in military attacks upon other countries or threaten them. In making these remarks, Cameron indicted himself as a cause of the riots.

Leaders like Bush, Blair, Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama have sent a clear message to young people: violence works. Or, to put it differently, might makes right, a message that has been most effectively reinforced by the conduct of the police in their neighborhoods. So, when the young people of north and south London discovered that the police could not prevent them from looting and burning businesses, they went for it. Just like Bush and Blair went for it in the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2003. A culture of imperialist state violence gave birth to a culture of collective violence against property. It remains to be seen whether this imperfect collective culture, a form of contemporary nihilism, is transitory, one that can be exploited by capital, as discussed yesterday, or one that has the potential to evolve into a challenge against the global capitalist order.

Labels: Barack Obama, Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

UPDATE 2: A glimpse of the variegated participants in the riots:

And as multi-ethnic areas from London to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol burned, a myth was being dispelled: that so-called black youths are largely behind such violence.

In Tottenham on Saturday many of those who gathered at the police station to protest against the shooting of Mark Duggan were, like him, black. But others were Asian and white.

By the following day, as the looting spread to other north London suburbs, there appeared to have been a slight shift in the demographic, which started to look younger. In Enfield most of those who gathered in the town centre were white. The youngest looked about 10-years-old.

Those taking part in the battles in Hackney's Pembury estate on Monday included many women. Teenage girls helped carry debris to form the burning barricades or made piles of rocks.

One, with a yellow scarf across her face, was seemingly at the forefront. She helped set a motorbike alight, walking away with her hands aloft. Other women shouted instructions from the windows of nearby flats and houses.

Croydon is burning down, shouted one woman who looked about 40, from her flat above a shop. Another warned the crowd when police were spotted nearby.

UPDATE 1: An anarchist group, the North London Solidarity Federation, has issued a statement about the riots:

Over the last few days, riots have caused significant damage to parts of London, to shop-fronts, homes and cars. On the left, we hear the ever-present cry that poverty has caused this. On the right, that gangsters and anti-social elements are taking advantage of tragedy. Both are true. The looting and riots seen over the past number of days are a complex phenomenon and contain many currents.

It is no accident that the riots are happening now, as the support nets for Britain's disenfranchised are dragged away and people are left to fall into the abyss, beaten as they fall by the batons of the Metropolitan Police. But there should be no excuses for the burning of homes, the terrorising of working people. Whoever did such things has no cause for support.

The fury of the estates is what it is, ugly and uncontrolled. But not unpredictable. Britain has hidden away its social problems for decades, corralled them with a brutal picket of armed men. Growing up in the estates often means never leaving them, unless it's in the back of a police van. In the 1980s, these same problems led to Toxteth. In the '90s, contributed to the Poll Tax riots. And now we have them again - because the problems are not only still there, they're getting worse.

Police harassment and brutality are part of everyday life in estates all around the UK. Barely-liveable benefits systems have decayed and been withdrawn. In Hackney, the street-level support workers who came from the estates and knew the kids, could work with them in their troubles have been told they will no longer be paid. Rent is rising and state-sponsored jobs which used to bring money into the area are being cut back in the name of a shift to unpaid big society roles. People who always had very little now have nothing. Nothing to lose.

And the media's own role in all of should not be discounted. For all the talk of the peaceful protest that preceded events in Tottenham, the media wouldn't have touched the story if all that happened was a vigil outside a police station. Police violence and protests against it happen all the time. It's only when the other side responds with violence (on legitimate targets or not) that the media feels the need to give it any sort of coverage.

So there should be no shock that people living lives of poverty and violence have at last gone to war. It should be no shock that people are looting plasma screen TVs that will pay for a couple of months' rent and leaving books they can't sell on the shelves. For many, this is the only form of economic redistribution they will see in the coming years as they continue a fruitless search for jobs.

Much has been made of the fact that the rioters were attacking their own communities. But riots don't occur within a social vacuum. Riots in the eighties tended to be directed in a more targeted way; avoiding innocents and focusing on targets more representative of class and race oppression: police, police stations, and shops. What's happened since the eighties? Consecutive governments have gone to great lengths to destroy any sort of notion of working class solidarity and identity. Is it any surprise, then, that these rioters turn on other members of our class?

The Solidarity Federation is based in resistance through workplace struggle. We are not involved in the looting and unlike the knee-jerk right or even the sympathetic-but-condemnatory commentators from the left, we will not condemn or condone those we don't know for taking back some of the wealth they have been denied all their lives.

But as revolutionaries, we cannot condone attacks on working people, on the innocent. Burning out shops with homes above them, people's transport to work, muggings and the like are an attack on our own and should be resisted as strongly as any other measure from government austerity politics, to price-gouging landlords, to bosses intent on stealing our labour. Tonight and for as long as it takes, people should band together to defend themselves when such violence threatens homes and communities.

We believe that the legitimate anger of the rioters can be far more powerful if it is directed in a collective, democratic way and seeks not to victimise other workers, but to create a world free of the exploitation and inequality inherent to capitalism.

INITIAL POST: The Independent Police Complaints Commission determines that Mark Duggan, the man whose death at the hands of the police ignited the London riots, did not fire upon the officers:

Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked London's riots, did not fire a shot at police officers before they killed him, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said on Tuesday.

Releasing the initial findings of ballistics tests, the police watchdog said a CO19 firearms officer fired two bullets, and that a bullet that lodged in a police radio was consistent with being fired from a police gun.

One theory, not confirmed by the IPCC, is that the bullet became lodged in the radio from a ricochet or after passing through Duggan.

Duggan, 29, was killed last Thursday in Tottenham, north London, after armed officers stopped the minicab in which he was travelling.

The IPCC said Duggan was carrying a loaded gun, but it had no evidence that the weapon had been fired. It said tests were continuing.

The officer who fired the fatal shots has been removed from firearms duties, which is standard procedure, pending the IPCC investigation.

Officers from the Met's Operation Trident and Special Crime Directorate 11, accompanied by officers from CO19, the Met's specialist firearms command, stopped the silver Toyota Estima minicab in Ferry Lane, close to Tottenham Hale tube station, to arrest Duggan.

He was killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest, and received a second gunshot wound to his right bicep. He was pronounced dead at the scene at 6.41pm.

Would this information have been released in the absence of the riots? One wonders. I do know that out here in California, in Oakland in January of 2009, the Alameda County District Attorney's Office displayed no interest in prosecuting BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the killing of Oscar Grant, until after the riots in downtown Oakland.

Laurie Penny also has an interesting insight about this:

The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

Yes, said the young man. You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?

Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Penny touches upon an important subject here, the inability to bring about any progressive or radical change through socially acceptable political activity. Elections? Please. Protest marches? Largely ignored as in the instance described by the man in Tottenham. Civil disobedience and direct action? They have either been reduced to a form of street theatre, or, alternatively, when effective methods have been used, they have thereafter been criminalized and broken up by the police through preemptive surveillance, raids, and, once initiated, mass arrests.

Penny hints at the real question, which will go unanswered by the media: what is the alternative to riotous violence for the young people of the lower middle classes and the lower classes of Britain? And, the answer is, of course, none. Antonovich succinctly addresses the subject in a comment over at Lenin's Tomb:

One can tut tut about the efficacy of the riot, but really its one of the few forms of fighting back left to people in the face of one of the most serious ruling class assaults in decades and in the absence of any meaningful union action, reformist party or effective revolutionary party.

In the short term, the riots are likely to reinforce the power of capital, and this is probably one of the reasons for the ambivalence on the left towards them (see, for example, the comments on both Penny's and lenin's blog). The government is likely to increase spending on the police, while further empowering officers in regard to their ability to arbitrarily detain, arrest and even inflict violence upon people. It may even distribute some crumbs in the form of social assistance, which can be conveniently rationalized as an anti-recesssionary measure. But not so much as to repudiate the neoliberal trend of leaving the people of these communities at the mercy of the market and intensified surveillance.

Meanwhile, the long term is less clear. My educated guess is that anarchists see hope in the explosion of spontaneous anger over the killing of Duggan and the treatment of people in lower income communities, as it presents the possibility of the emergence of a collective resistance to the police, and, ultimately, capitalism. Even some Leninists appear to believe that some resistance, however turbulent, is better than none, although they seem to find the lack of any political connection to the participants in the riots, as noted by Antonovich, unnerving. In London and elsewhere, the riots have exposed the class separation, and the lack of understanding that goes along with it, between the residents of the affected neighborhoods and their allies on the left, a separation given a powerful emotional expression by Penny.

Accordingly, while the organizational efforts of the rioters have been impressive, outflanking the police in many instances, the ideological orientation is less so. As mentioned here yesterday, the looting of stores for goods in order to sell them is not a leftist act, rather, it is a type of conversion of goods for profit that has long been associated with capitalism. Similarly, the destruction of buildings used by corporate retailers and local merchants can facilitate the implementation of pre-existing gentrification schemes. Don't be surprised if Cameron, Clegg, and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, announce a fund for rebuilding neighborhoods damaged by rioters, with the beneficiaries being large development groups. As in the US, residents of these neighborhoods will be dispersed, so as to reduce their ability to collectively organize themselves in the future. Riots can easily be incorporated into the narrative of disaster capitalism, and avoiding such outcomes is the challenge facing people in these communities.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Dubstep Rebellion, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Police, Political Violence, United Kingdom

UPDATE 4: Masked youths confronted the police in east London during the afternoon:

For three hours mayhem ruled in Hackney's Pembury Estate, the centre of the violence in east London. The police were there, but there was no doubt who set the law in the estate, comprised of local authority mansion-blocks of flats.

Masked youths – both men and women – helped carry debris, bins, sticks and motorbikes, laying them across the roads to form a flaming boundary to the estate.

The crowd in Hackney – numbering at least 300 – appeared larger than any from previous nights of rioting.

In one of the most shocking incidents, a police officer in a solitary parked vehicle was attacked shortly before 9pm.

His windscreen was entirely smashed as a young man scaled the roof and pounded down with a brick. Others attacked from the sides with sticks and bottles.

Trapped, and unable to see out, the officer accelerated through the crowd, and a hail of missiles.

UPDATE 3: The young take their revenge of the corporations that have so brazenly marketed to them?

On much of the footage of the widespread theft after the riots, looters can be seen brazenly taking the goods they want, some without taking the precaution of covering their face. In one video shot early on Sunday morning in Wood Green, people can be seen leaving H&M with a haul of goods, with others standing around JD Sports apparently waiting for their turn to take goods.

One north London resident, who wanted to be identified only as Tiel, described a conversation: I heard two girls arguing about which store to steal from next. 'Let's go Boots?' 'No, Body Shop.' 'Hit Body Shop after it's dead [meaning empty].' The girl came out of Boots nonchalantly, as if she'd done her weekly shop at 4:30am, he added. He described others, holding up clothes to themselves in the broken windows of H&M. They were just so blasé about what they were doing.

In Wood Green about 100 youths targeted shops, including electrical stores and clothes chains such as H&M. I've got loads of G-Star, said one teenager, emerging from a clothes shop. Other teenagers were seen with suitcases filled with stolen goods, and in the early hours of Sunday residential front gardens were used to sort and swap them.

If the elites can loot, why can't they? Is this what happens after the neoliberal expediency of transnational capital is exposed in the public square for all to see? There are accounts of kids as young as twelve years old involved in the looting of these stores.

UPDATE 2: Locations of confirmed riots in the United Kingdom.

UPDATE 1: lenin engages the ongoing riots and their social implications:

So, even if politicians are in denial, the rich aren't. You may well say, bollocks, they're not taking on the ruling class, they're just destroying their own nest, hurting working class people and small businesses. I can hear this, just as I can hear the sanctimony in its enunciation. The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people. There's no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound. There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics. That still doesn't mean that the riot doesn't have a certain political focus; that it doesn't have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality. The rioters here, whenever they've been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are - most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.

INITIAL POST: For the third day, there is widespread rioting in London, and reports that it has spread to the city of Birmingham. British youth, many of color, are no longer limiting themselves to non-violent protest and direct action, as they did in December 2010. Initially erupting in Tottenham, after the shooting death of Mark Duggan on Thursday, August 4th, the riots have spread throughout north London and Brixton. The police prevented Duggan's family from seeing his body for 36 hours, and forensics evidence has contradicted the initial police account that Duggan fired at them from a minicab.

As with the Los Angeles riots in 1992, the London ones have expanded into an all out assault upon the symbols of affluence and police power. Officers have been shocked at the level of violence directed against them, and cannot keep up with the mobility of the rioters. Meanwhile, looting is organized and widespread, reminiscent of a 1992 account about how people went into a leather goods store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley after the Rodney King verdict and marked the items that they came back and seized a few hours later. It is tempting to address the rioting in sociological terms, as Alexandra Topping did in this eerily anticipatory article published on July 29th, but there is probably more to it than the social work calculus of austerity equals crime. Austerity is the issue, but in broader terms than examined by Topping.

In Europe, especially, France, the United Kingdom and Greece, as well as the United States, young people live, in most instances, in conditions of poverty, with less and less opportunity to escape it. Racial divisions become acute during times of austerity, with, for example, unemployment in the US markedly worse among young African Americans and Latinos. To be poor is bad enough, to be poor and black, poor and Latino or poor and African American and Latino is even worse. Austerity, and the accompanying concentration of wealth within elites, disproportionately concentrates poverty among people of color, whether in the banlieues of Paris or the northern estate towns of London. In Paris in 2005, the electrocution deaths of two teenagers of color chased by the police ignited the riots, while the shooting death of Duggan has done so in London.

Not surprisingly, people respond by ransacking local businesses that sell goods that they would otherwise struggle to purchase. Unable to find a place within the classless society promoted by figures as disperate as Blair, Cameron, Bush, Sarkozy and Obama, they seize what they can only purchase with great difficulty, if at all. Others, acting upon the neoliberal entrepreneurial ethos, loot stores and fence the goods, turning a nice profit on transactions with a zero investment cost. Lost in the condemnation of gangs, animals and thugs by the middle and upper class media is the fact that many rioters have actually internalized capitalist values. Like the great oligarchs, they don't hesitate to use violence to achieve their ends, and, also like the oligarchs, they expropriate the property of others.

In other words, the social nihilism of the elites has been embraced by some of their victims, to strikingly impressive effect. Furthermore, just as these elites have exploited new communications technologies to manipulate markets and financial transactions, the rioters have relied upon encrypted Twitter and Blackberry messages to organize themselves, select targets and evade the police, resulting in pathetic condemnations of these social networking platforms by the police. Possible ideological differences aside, anarchists no doubt appreciate the success of the decentralized communications methods of the rioters against the centralized CCTV network monitored by the police. Like those in the media, Scotland Yard public relations officers persist in claiming that gangs and thugs are responsible for the riots, but such perjorative terms have little meaning in a world where hundreds of people, many of whom do not know each other, can be organized for an attack upon a commercial district within a few hours. If it were merely a gang problem, the police could contain it, but it is the willingness of hundreds, and, probably, thousands of people, throughout London and Birmingham, to respond to such calls that makes the riots impossible to contain at this time.

For the left, the riots present a quandary. On the one hand, the rioters are from communities where many are victimized by police brutality and the austerity of neoliberal capitalism. There is a refreshing spontaneity to their actions, and they have shown a remarkable capacity for social organization on the fly. But, on the other hand, in the absence of additional information, it appears they have chosen their targets rather indiscriminately, with the result that many merchants of their own communities have been attacked, which stands in marked contrast to the calculated actions of people like the Greek anarchists, and possibly the youth of Lyon last fall, who have targeted transnational banks, luxury goods stores and surveillance firms. Accordingly, while many in their communities understand their sense of grievance, many are dismayed at the property destruction carried out by the rioters. Of course, there are personal and generational reasons for this, but it does point towards the urgency of developing a more coherent ideological motivation for the riots, beyond the mimicry of the powerful by the powerless (a subject masterfully examined by Fassbinder in many of his films), if they are to serve as the inception of an ongoing challenge to the neoliberal order.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Neoliberalism, Police, Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, United Kingdom

Today, the Greek socialist parlimentary majority, PASOK, approved a rigorous plan of austerity and privatization in order to facilitate a bailout from the IMF and the ECB. It is pretty much acknowledged that, if implemented, the plan will consign a generation of Greeks to poverty. Police were unrestrained in their use of tear gas in an attempt to clear away protesters from nearby Syntagma Square:

Protesters fought pitched body-to-body battles with riot police, toxic levels of tear gas filled the air and Syntagma Square, the nerve centre of Greece's new resistance movement, descended into chaos.

Within minutes, the plaza resembled a war zone, more reminiscent of Gaza than the flourishing hub of a western capital with the detritus of battle everywhere: in its burning barricades, smashed pavements, shattered masonry, looted shops, destroyed kiosks and trees.

Dangerous amounts of tear gas are being used to terrorize people, said Athanasios Pafilis, a communist MP as parliament wrapped up two days of debate on the debt-reduction measures. It's an intolerable situation … what we are seeing is chemical warfare and it has to stop.

Unprovoked riot police were firing it all over the place, said Andreas Skourtis, an architect demonstrating against the measures.

They were clearly working to a very well-organised plan. This is a government that has gone out of its way to not only keep crowds away but pass the measures no matter what. People are really angry. Civilians have been attacked not only in Syntagma but all over the city centre.

Other accounts convey the eruption of violence throughout the central city of Athens:

18.25 GMT+2 About 20 DELTA motorcycle cops rushed through the crowd situated in Ermou Street near Kapnikarea. A clash between groups of protesters and joined DELTA, MAT forces followed. One of the DELTA cops crashed with the protesters and got badly beaten right afterwards.

18.18 GMT +2: The use of tear gas inside Syntagma metro continues; the cops invade now. The people disperse in all directions at the risk of being trampled.

18.15 GMT +2: The cops moved from the surrounding streets and have invaded Syntagma square. The people are encircled. The cops hit brutally, throwing chemicals and stepping over the demonstrators’ tents.

18.05 GMT +2: The forces of repression are shooting rubber bullets at Stadiou and Voukourestiou streets.

18.00 GMT +2: People have gathered in Propylaea, responding to the gathering call at 6 pm.

17.53 GMT +2: Attempted arson at the Agrotikil Bank on Panepistimiou Street. People are smashing the surrounding banks. The protesters who tried to burn the bank stopped when they realized that there were people inside.

17.20 GMT+2: Street battles now in Filellinon Street. Continuous reports of severely wounded protesters. A municipality pillar was burned. Everybody demands the withdrawal of cops; great fatigue and anger of the people. Apart from the merciless chemical warfare, the cops are throwing stones back against demonstrators since hours.

Beyond the ongoing struggle on the streets, there are some obvious lessons. First, there is no government on the European continent that will resist the dictates of international capital as given expression through the World Bank, the IMF, the US Federal Reserve, the Bundesbank and the ECB. Democratic processes exist for the purpose of legitimizing policies imposed by them. Second, social democratic parties, like the PASOK in Greece, stand ready to preserve state authority by acting as the intermediary by which these policies shall be approved and implemented. lenin has identified the problem:

One might expect social democratic parties to take a different approach, to mobilise their constituencies around a defence of public services and social security. But their long years of complicity in managing neoliberalism means they are unable to think of an alternative to spending cuts. In opposition, they offer gradual and responsible austerity, but they still mean to cut, and cut deep. In government, the emphasis shifts from gradual to deep.

This process doesn't only threaten the major parties. At stake is the very legitimacy of the states carrying out these measures. Hitherto, they have relied on two key sources of public support. One is the ideology of prosperity, in which great inequalities of wealth are tolerable so long as the economy keeps growing. But in the last 30 years, that has depended on record private debt, which is no longer sustainable. The other is welfare, in which the government will provide a basic minimum of nourishment, health and education so that, in theory, all can participate in the opportunities of a market economy. If the market fails, the government will be there with a safety net. This is now under unprecedented attack.

lenin recognizes the severity of the situation, but refuses to draw the obvious conclusion: social democratic parties in Europe, with Marxist, Leninist and Trotskyite influences, cannot conceive of a future in the absence of the state institutions by which which they have sought to create a more egalitarian society. Terrified of a collapse of state authority that would make it impossible to use the state's administrative apparatus to provide social welfare in the form of public services, universal education, health care and social security, they are willing to eviscerate these programs in the hope that future generations can revive them. Forced to choose between continued fidelity to neoliberal policy and alternatives that risk permanently reducing the authority of the state, if not fully eliminating it, they will always act in defense of the state. Here, in the US, we experience a peculiar variant of this in regard to the liberal embrace of the state as necessary to protect civil rights and people of color, thus rationalizing support for Democratic party policies that impoverish much of the country in much the same manner as previous Republican ones have done.

Despite the vote, Greece is stalemated. The government has obtained the legal authority to impose more merciless austerity measures upon the populace, but lacks the capability to effectively implement them. Accordingly, as already mentioned yesterday, foreign investors are already seeking to induce a Greek Pinochet to come forward and enforce workplace discipline because Papandreou, PASOK, and the labor unions associated with them, are rapidly losing the ability to do so. An attempt by PASOK affiliated transit unions in Athens to disrupt protests through the ruse of participating in the general strike failed as many workers, at the request of the movement, reported to work to operate the subway system.

Meanwhile, the left, despite its great successes, has not developed a sufficiently broad based coalition capable of rendering Greece ungovernable under conditions imposed by the EU, the IMF and the ECB. Such a coalition will be necessary as Greece enters a new phase of conflict. The centers of confrontation will be the workplaces of public sector workers and publicly owned resources, such as the port of Athens, which is designated, along with other public assets for privatization, as well as the banks and other European institutions that will adminster the Greek economy. We can anticipate a coordinated campaign, with violent and non-violent features, for the purpose of making it impossible to carry out the mass firings and asset sales mandated by the austerity plan. European bank branches in Greece, especially German and French ones, are going to be the targets of ongoing vandalism. But it is important to note that, as far as we know, the police are standing steadfast with the government.

The anti-authoritarian movements of Greece face a great challenge, the urgency of participating in a broader coalition of resistance in which many of the participants either do not understand or do not fully share their ideological vision of society. Hence, criticism of the protesters in Syntagma Square for their fetishization of non-violence is not particularly helpful, but engaging them about the synergy created by a movement with violent and non-violent features can release a tremendous radical potential. It is precisely for this reason that a reformist media outlet like the Guardian insists upon placing violent and non-violent protesters in opposition to one another in its coverage, characterizing the violent ones as hooligans, without a base of support, so as to maintain the spiritual purity of those who resist non-violently. Of course, it is not very persuasive, because, after all, there are a lot of people resisting the attacks upon the square and taking the initiative by vandalizing banks and corporate businesses in downtown Athens. And yet, there is, dare one use the word, some sectarianism that must be overcome. Ultimately, the question is not so much one of violence and non-violence, but, rather, the effectiveness of various forms of resistance against this onslaught. In other contexts, social movements have been able to bridge the violent, non-violent direct action divide, as was done during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Such an approach requires a willingness of all involved to recognize the possible consequences of their actions in relation to those undertaken by others.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Greece, IMF, Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

A moving obituary by Max Ajl and an exploration of a life of activist commitment as well. For more background about Arrigoni, consider these reflections by Daniela Loffreda, as well as this apology by Mohammed Said Alnadi.

Labels: Activism, Islamic Fundamentalism, Israel, Obituaries, Palestine, Political Violence

Yemen:

At least 35 people have been shot dead and hundreds wounded in Sana'a after soldiers and plain-clothed government loyalists opened fired on protesters trying to march through the Yemeni capital.

The death toll, which is expected to rise, is the highest seen in more than a month of violence in Yemen, with protesters demanding that President Ali Abdullah Saleh step down.

The protest on Friday had started peacefully. Tens of thousands filled a mile-long stretch of road by Sana'a University for a prayer ceremony mourning the loss of seven protesters killed in similar violence last weekend.

As the prayers came to an end, however, the sight of black smoke from a burning car caught the attention of protesters, who began surging towards it.

Witnesses say the first shots were fired by security forces trying to disperse the protesters and they were joined by plain-clothed men who fired on the demonstrators with Kalashnikovs from the roofs of nearby houses.

Bahrain:

On Friday, the family of Ahmed Farhan, 30, who was killed on Tuesday by security forces in Sitra, an island south of the capital, received the body of their son, with its shotgun pellet wounds to the back and gaping hole in the skull. The family had been trying to bring him home to this activist Shiite village and bury him here, but permission was withheld.

In Bahrain, the Arab spring turned to winter in less than a week. Martial law was declared on Tuesday. It is now illegal to hold rallies. Tanks remain outside the central hospital and Saudi troops are here as back-up. Still, on Friday the Farhan family buried their son and, despite the ban on protests and gatherings, some 5,000 people helped them do it in their home village of Sitra. The village, once an island, is now linked to the mainland by landfill and causeway. It turned into a sea of raised fists and tearful wailing, piety and political indignation, the core of what has been driving the Bahraini protests since mid-February.

The Farhan family is poor, like many in this village, and like many of the 70 percent of the country that is Shiite. Ahmed Farhan, who never married, lived with his family in a ramshackle structure around a courtyard, having lost his job as a fisherman some years ago after harbor construction made fishing impossible. He was taking part in a protest demonstration when he was killed.

If I may be permitted one criticism of the revolutionary movement in the Arab world, as someone comfortably esconsced in California, it is this: the participants have been naive about the implacable US opposition to their liberation. They have believed that the imperial power of the US can be neutralized through massive, non-violent mobilizations. Sadly, they are learning a hard lesson, one already understood by the Iraqis, Palestinians and the people of Afghanistan. The US, and its most stalwart allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, will utilize whatever level of violence that they consider necessary to suppress a perceived threat. In this instance, they consider the revolutionary movements in North Africa and the Middle East as an existential one to their continued hegemonic control, and the US and Saudi Arabia have responded accordingly.

If Salih in Yemen and al-Khalida in Bahrain succeed in suppressing public protest, they will then proceed to impose even more severe authoritarian measures of social control, with the assistance of private contractors recommended by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. As with the current violence, the US will issue public denunciations without adopting any measures to induce Salih and al-Khalida to ameliorate their repressive measures, indeed, as noted, it will instead provide covert aid to intensify them, hidden from public view through the black box of war on terror programs. The poor populace of both of these countries are going to soon find themselves subject to the sort of technological surveillance and violence inflicted upon people in the occupied territories and Afghanistan. The need to economically exploit these people for the benefit of the elites will be the only contraint upon it.

My guess is that the people of these countries will adapt, and develop new ways to resist based upon the need to confront the US and the Saudis, as well as their kleptocratic rulers. They may initially limit themselves to non-violent practices, but they will be prepared to respond to violence with violence, and they will direct any such violence towards targets designed to inflict the greatest possible hardship upon their enemies. Indeed, we should not dismiss the possibility that the future resistance will, from the inception, embrace violence as the means for their liberation. While it is far too soon to say that the revolutionary movements of 2010 have been effectively suppressed, it is likely that, if they are, they will reemerge in a much more violent manifestation with severe global consequences.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Bahrain, Gulf States, Neoliberalism, Political Violence

UPDATE 2: Richard Perle and the many neoconservative friends of Muammar Gaddafi:

Perle traveled to Libya as a paid adviser to the Monitor Group, a prestigious Boston-based consulting firm with close ties to leading professors at the Harvard Business School. The firm named Perle a senior adviser in 2006.

The Monitor Group described Perle’s travel to Libya and the recruitment of several other prominent thinkers and former officials to burnish Libya’s and Qadhafi’s image in a series of documents obtained and released by a Libyan opposition group, the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition, in 2009.

The Monitor Group did not return phone calls left at its Boston offices Monday. But Monitor describes, in a series of documents published by the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition in 2009, an action plan to introduce and bring to Libya a meticulously selected group of independent and objective experts who would be invited to Libya, meet senior officials, hold lectures, attend workshops, and write articles that would more positively portray Libya and its controversial ruler.

A 2007 Monitor memo named among the prominent figures it had recruited to travel to Libya and meet with Qadhafi as part of the Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi Perle, historian Francis Fukuyama, Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, famous Nixon interviewer David Frost, and MIT media lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of former deputy secretary of state and director of national intelligence John Negroponte.

Hat tip to Louis Proyect

UPDATE 1: Meanwhile, in Bahrain:

More than 100,000 protesters poured into the central Pearl Square here on Tuesday in an unbroken stream stretching back for miles along a central highway in the biggest antigovernment demonstration yet in this tiny Persian Gulf kingdom.

The protesters, mostly members of the Shiite majority, marched along the eastbound side of Sheikh Khalifa Bin Salman Highway in a wide, unbroken column of red and white, the country’s colors. Men of all ages walked with women and children waving flags and calling for an end to the authoritarian government of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

In a nation of only a half a million citizens, the sheer size of the gathering was astonishing. The protest, organized by the Shiite opposition parties, began in the central Bahrain Mall, two miles from the square and seemed to fill the entire length of the highway between the two points.

INITIAL POST:

lenin explains:

Even at this late hour, it would be foolish to underestimate Gadaffi's ability to just hang on, to clench Libya in a rigor mortis grip. As crazed as he manifestly is, he has demonstrated considerable shrewdness in his time. For example, as soon as the Islamist opposition started become a real threat to his regime in the late 1990s, he started to look for ways to be accepted by the US-led caste of 'good guys'. The collapse of the USSR as a supplier of military hardware, trade, and ideological and moral leadership for Third Worldist states, would also have had something to do with this. The transition was made easier after 2001, and completed in 2004 partially at the best of Anglo-American oil. Gadaffi went so far, in his attempts to win over his erstwhile opponents, as to participate in anti-Islamist counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines with international support, lavish intelligence on US agencies and even compensate the victims of Lockerbie for a crime that Libya had not committed. The Bush administration might still have resisted such serenading were it not for the eager rush of European capital into Tripoli. So, Bush and Blair turned it into a story of Gadaffi seeing the light and giving up his non-existent WMD programmes, which charade Gadaffi duly participated in. This whole sequence of events was bizarre and improbable, but it worked: the subsequent oil contracts, amid a global oil price spike produced by Bush's wars, made him and his regime very wealthy. He was also able to hang opponents in public under the pretext of a fight against 'radical Islamists'. Joining the camp of American client dictatorships enabled Gadaffi to survive until this moment.

lenin further asserts that the US and the UK find Gaddafi preferable to the revolutinary alternative. If so, that might explain these live updates today from Al Jazeera:

8.34pm: Al Jazeera's White House correspondent Patty Culhane noted that Barack Obama has himself been silent about Libya for a few days, even though he had made public statements during Egypt's similar unrest.

8.32pm: John Kerry, a US politician, called the Libyan government's use of force beyond dispicable. He called on Barack Obama to reconsider sanctions against Libya, and said he hoped these were Gaddafi's last hours in power. Kerry said the international community must send a message to Gaddafi that his cowardly actions will have consequences.

8:29pm: PJ Crowley, US department of state spokesman, calls on Libya to respect rights of the thousands of US citizens in the country. He said the White House has grave concerns over the Libyan government's response to protests.

Grave concerns. Now, that's a strong condemnation. And, what precisely are these concerns? Concerns over the brutalities inflicted upon the protesters, or concerns about the extent to which the Libyan government's response increases the prospect of a successor regime more independent of the US? Note that, as in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain, the US has failed to call upon leadership of the country to step down, sticking with the political line of reform to be administered by them. Policymakers can't seem to grasp the the notion that Gaddafi, like Mubarak, no longer has the legitimacy to carry out reforms because of his recourse to violence.

There is also the possibility that Libya is perceived by Gulf states like Saudi Arabia as a test as to whether protests in Bahrain and, potentially, even on the peninsula itself, can be effectively suppressed through violence, if necessary. For now, the jury is still out as to whether the alternative strategy of draining the energy of the revolutionaries through negotiation and the implementation of innocuous reforms, as is currently being attempted in Egypt and Bahrain will ultimately succeed. Hence, the importance of the uprising in Libya. In Libya, unlike elsewhere, Gaddafi and his apparatus have nowhere to go, they must stand and fight or die. So, Libya becomes an example of what the ruling families of the Gulf can anticipate if they believe that they can only retain power through the ruthless suppression of the populace. Gaddafi's reliance upon mercernaries is particularly significant in this context. So far, the results from Libya are not encouraging, even if the outcome is far from clear.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Gulf States, Libya, Neoconservatives, Political Violence