hydrarchist writes: "The following article has recently been published in Red and Black Revolution produced by the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland.

Bashing the Black Bloc?

We believe that part of the purpose of this
magazine is to address issues that anarchists may find controversial.
This essay represents the opinion of one member of the WSM - we hope
this will add to the debate, and would like to receive responses from
other anarchists.

Although the basic idea of the Black bloc has been around for
years, it only really entered the public consciousness after the
Seattle demonstrations. But after two years of Black Blocs at all the
major summit protests, has the Black Bloc tactic reached the end of
its usefulness? What role should anarchists play in the
anti-globalisation protests? Are they still relevant at all?

The four main summits of the last four years - Seattle, Prague,
Quebec, and Genoa - have all been different, and the Black Bloc has
been different at each one. The Seattle protest, though it involved
far fewer people than some of the later protests, was probably the
most effective. Because it was the first protest of its kind the
police and the summit organizers weren't prepared, and protestors
were able to block access to the summit for most of the day, causing
major disruption. The Black Bloc played a relatively small part in
the blockade, but received a major part of the news coverage. The two
types of action - blockades and property destruction - pointed to a
new kind of protest, protest that was visible, illegal, and more
concerned with getting results than with making a symbolic point.

Since Seattle, summit organizers have been more prepared, and they
know that they'll have to deal with protests, so each summit has seen
an increased level of security. In Prague, all entrances to the
summit were guarded by the police, making it impossible for the
protestors to mount an effective blockade. Different sections of the
protest had different reactions. One group, the Pinks, marched around
the conference center, and didn't try to breach the perimeter (though
they did enter the summit area when they found an unguarded section).
Another, the Yellows, were led by Ya Basta, and chose to take
symbolic action. Their attempt to simply push their way through the
police lines could never succeed, but was intended to show that they
were going beyond simply passive demonstrations. The third block, the
Blue block, wanted to take more direct action, and tried to punch
through the police lines to get to the summit, or at least the subway
station that would be transporting the delegates, blockading them
inside the conference center. In their willingness to destroy
property, and actually fight the police, this group consciously
thought of themselves as an anarchist Black Bloc.

In Quebec, the level of security increased again, and again the
situation changed. The erection of the perimeter fence, and the raids
on squats in the days before the summit, raised the stakes even
higher. Like in Prague, the protestors responded by dividing the
protest area into zones, so people could choose the level of
illegality and confrontation with which they were comfortable. Here,
as in Seattle, there was a separate Black Bloc, though unlike in
Seattle this Black Bloc concentrated on attacking the summit,
confronting police and trying to get through the perimeter fence.

Most recently, the Genovese protests, on the day of direct action
at least, operated on the understanding that different tactics would
be used by different groups of protestors, each in different areas.
Although poor advance co-ordination was a factor, the major problem
protestors faced in Genoa was the large, and very active, police
presence. As well as having formidable perimeter fencing, the police
attacked the protestors on their way to the perimeter, stopping some
groups from getting near the fence and forcing other elements of the
protest together. The Black Bloc, which intended to try to break into
the summit, ended up destroying banks and shops in the streets of
Genoa.

With every summit, with every escalation of security, the
conditions that made Seattle possible are getting further away. In
Seattle it was possible to have large numbers of people taking part
in an action that wasn't especially illegal or confrontational (any
more than a Reclaim the Streets or Critical Mass) and yet directly
achieved its aims of closing the summit. But now that the barricades
have gone up, protestors seem to be left with two alternatives -
return to symbolic, peaceful protests, that have no (direct) effect,
or move on to very illegal and highly-planned protests that might be
directly effective. (And every time summit security is increased, the
level of illegality and planning required to breach that security is
also increased.)

Alongside this growing problem there is the constant question of
the Black Bloc. Its difficult to even define what the Black Bloc is,
let alone to decide what part it could play in the summit protests.
It may have started out as a purely anarchist grouping (though one
which many anarchists avoid) but it's not a permanent grouping, it's
just something that comes together at protests. Being in the Black
Bloc just means being willing to break the law, destroy property, or
fight with the police to achieve the aims of the protest. As such,
many non-anarchists will happily join the block, to the extent that
one of the Black Blocs in Genoa contained a group of Maoists.

The Black Bloc's willingness to destroy property may be what sets
them apart from other protestors, but there is also some division
within the block about what this should mean. On the one hand, there
are those willing to use 'violence' for a particular purpose, to take
down a fence or barricade, or get past police lines, as part of
disrupting a summit. At the other extreme are those who think that
opposing global capitalism means opposing all of its manifestations,
and attacking shops, cars, and the police whenever possible. Most
people seem to be somewhere in the middle, not having a problem with
people attacking banks or chain stores, but sometimes questioning
whether it's being done at the expense of more important things, or
thinking that people should take more care in their choice of
targets.

The continuing increase in the level of summit security is going
to particularly affect the Black Bloc. We saw in Genoa that the
police are ready to stop large, amorphous groups like the Black Bloc
from getting close to a summit. So, added to the choices of symbolic,
peaceful protests, or highly planned, very illegal protests,
anarchists can also join a Black Bloc which, from the outset, won't
be able to do any more than attack shops and banks.

Revolutionary cells?

There is already an activist tradition of going underground to
carry out actions. Arson attacks on corporate property generally
aren't advertised in advance, any more than Animal Liberation Front
raids. If secrecy is the price of effective action, then plenty of
people are willing to pay it. But is it worth it?

What made the Seattle blockade effective? At first glance, Seattle
- and all of the summit protests - have been important because they
used direct action. Protestors didn't restrict themselves to polite
lobbying of politicians, or to polite demonstrations that stayed
within the approved routes - they set out to stop the summits
themselves. But stopping the summits isn't much of a goal in itself.
No-one believes that stopping the WTO or G8 from having these large
meetings will actually stop them from operating. Nothing happens at
these meetings that couldn't be organized some other way.

The summits are themselves symbolic acts - opportunities for the
powerful to assert their authority, publicise and legitimize their
institutions, and reinforce the belief that their way is the only way
for the world to run. This means that the protests against the
summits are also symbolic actions, no matter how effective they are.
In themselves, they don't change the world, any more than the summits
do. But they demonstrate an alternative - they show that you don't
have to leave decisions up to others, that it's possible for large
numbers of people to come together and organize themselves, that
direct action and direct democracy are possible.

That is the real point of the summit protests, and that's what we
must remember when we work out how to deal with future summits. Mass
democratic participation is not just a tactic to be adopted or
discarded - it's the most important thing about these protests.
That's what's wrong with, to take one example, some of the plans
being circulated for stopping the G8 summit in Alberta. It's all very
well to suggest that groups of anarchists should live in the woods
for the month before the summit, planning various acts of sabotage -
some of the plans may even be workable. But why bother? What is the
possible gain from a tiny group of people adopting tactics that, by
their nature, exclude the vast majority of people? It's not going to
stop any decisions being made by the G8, because those decisions will
be made anyway, somewhere else if not there. And there is no 'public
relations' victory to be won - that was won the day the G8 admitted
that they had to meet in such an isolated location.

The same arguments can be made when the summits are in more
accessible locations, protected by lines of fences, armoured cars and
riot police, rather than miles of wilderness. By their adoption of
such extreme security measures, the G8/WTO/World Bank admit that they
have lost a lot of public support. The summits no longer function as
self-congratulatory press conferences when they are held in a
militarized zone, to the extent that even people who support the
World Bank or the G8 wonder what purpose the summits serve. So we
have to ask what we would be gaining by disrupting them, especially
given the tactics that would be required.

For all that activist cells and secret societies have long been
part of the revolutionary tradition, they are deeply problematic for
anarchism. While Leninists and authoritarians of all descriptions
have no problems with decisions being made by an elite minority, a
central tenet of anarchism is that decisions should be made by the
people affected by them. That kind of democratic control is ruled out
if the movement, or the anarchist part of it, goes underground -
we'll be left with small groups doing what they think is in
everyone's interests, instead of everyone getting a chance to make
their own decisions.

It would be disastrous for anarchism in the long term too. Again,
the Leninists think it's possible for a small group of people to take
control, and usher in a better society, but it's not that simple for
us. Anarchism has to be the free and conscious creation of the
majority of people in society, which means that a lot of people are
going to have to be convinced that it's a good, workable idea. That
work is almost impossible if we can't show our faces in public, if at
every demonstration the anarchists are hidden in the crowd. The
bourgeois media will always be happy to portray anarchism as mindless
violence - if we don't show that there's also a positive side to
anarchism, no-one else will.

That doesn't mean that we have to become absolute pacifists, or
that we have to rule out all violence/property destruction, before or
during the revolution. There may still be cases when 'violence' is
the best solution to the problem - fighting fascism for example. But
there are costs to this course of action, and all too often they seem
to be ignored. The decisions about which tactic to use isn't based on
what's best for advancing anarchism, its about how exciting it is to
mask up and break things, against how boring it is to try to persuade
people. If the Black Blocs continue at summit protests, will it be
because people have weighed up their pros and cons and decided they
are the most effective tactic, or because people like to dress up in
gas masks and bandanas?

Of course there's another reason for the Black Block. As well as
using violence/property destruction as a means to an end, to try to
break police lines and close down a summit, there's an argument that
destroying corporate property (or just private property) is a useful
goal in itself. (Though it can also end up advancing other goals -
I'm sure one reason so few cities are keen to host summits these days
is because of the level of small-scale destruction they can expect to
endure. They can seal off the conference centers, but they can't
barricade every business in the city). How could it be alright to
attack a World Bank meeting, but wrong to attack a high street bank?
They are both elements of the same system, just operating on a
different scale. How can it be wrong to attack a summit that paves
the way for sweatshops, but wrong to attack a company that is
directly involved in those same sweatshops? Or to attack a shop that
sells sweatshop-made goods? Or sells food produced in equally
horrendous conditions?

There is some legitimacy to these arguments. Sure, breaking up a
McDonalds isn't going to stop global capitalism, but neither is
breaking up a summit meeting. We don't accept that damaging property
is the same as injuring people - in fact, it's a pretty sad
reflection of our current society that the two are equated - so why
is this even being argued about? If a company participates in, or
just supports, the oppression of actual, existing people, what's
wrong with breaking their windows? Why should we shed tears for Nike?

On the other hand, what does it actually accomplish? Smashed
windows won't even dent the profits of a multinational, especially
not if they can pass the cost on to someone else. Broken windows
don't convince anyone either. If they come at the end of a long
campaign, people may understand why a particular shop was attacked,
but otherwise it's just seen as random. (And, in Genoa at least, some
of it was completely random) So it comes back to the same question
again - are we choosing based on our wish to see an anarchist
society? Or are we just blowing off steam?

It's not quite that simple, because there's something to be said
for blowing off steam. There are so many restrictions on life in
capitalist society that it's worth taking the chances you get to
throw off those restrictions. Being an anarchist activist shouldn't
mean sitting through endless meetings and paper sales, we also have
to seize our freedoms when we can, and if a demonstration can be
turned into a party, that's great. But one demonstration isn't going
to change society, and no matter how good the party is - or how
destructive the riot is - as long as capitalism continues all our
victories can only be temporary. So we've got to keep a balance,
making sure our short-term gratification isn't making our long term
goals harder to reach. We're fighting for the whole world, and not
just for a week.

Perhaps the biggest challenge the anti-globalisation movement
faces at the moment is to realize that this first round is over, and
we've won. Summits will never be the same again - instead of open
displays of power and confidence, staged in the major cities of the
west, the World Bank, WTO, IMF, and G8 have to meet in the Canadian
wilderness, or in a repressive state like Qatar. They've been forced
onto the defensive - they're the ones that have to justify their
existences, and they have to do so from behind lines of barricades
and riot cops.

As they've withdrawn, we've gained in confidence. The world is
full of networks of activists, sharing information and working
together on a scale few would have dreamed of a few years ago. And
these networks have been built democratically, from the ground up.
Delegates and spokescouncils, ideas that few had heard of a couple of
years ago, are now common currency. Many new groups organize without
leaders as a matter of course, and more and more people are
questioning the idea that people need rulers at all, whether they
call themselves capitalist, socialist, or communist.

But things can't continue as they are for much longer. We can't
continue to use the same tactics against the same targets and expect
to keep being successful. So what's going to change? So far the
movement has been open, democratic, and has mostly used fairly
peaceful direct action. As these tactics prove less successful there
will be calls to change. To prevent police infiltration, some will
cry for appointing small groups of leaders who will decide how
demonstrations will be run, rather than having open discussions.
Others are withdrawing from discussions altogether, preferring to
stage their own actions. And if these trends catch on the result will
be that most demonstrators will be reduced to passive participants,
cut out of the important decisions, reduced to spear-carriers in
someone else's army.

The alternative is to change targets. Instead of focusing on the
major summits, take smaller actions against a broader range of
targets. Military installations, corporate AGMs, refugee detention
centers ..... the list goes on. All of these things are important to
oppose, and they can't all have as high a level of security as the
summits, which means we don't have to resort to undemocratic tactics
to take them down. And for the big, spectacular actions? Cities
themselves. J18 or Seattle style tactics still work fine if you don't
have to get past serious barricades, which means that people can get
involved - and involved in making decisions, not just following
orders - with a minimum of training and experience.

As anarchists, we have to remember why we're involved in the first
place. We need to improve the situation immediately, taking what
victories we can whenever we can. That's part of the reason we
emphasise direct action, because it should have immediate positive
effects. But we're also in this for a larger goal, to create an
anarchist society. That means convincing people that anarchism is
possible, not just by argument, but by showing how anarchist
decision-making can really work, how people can make decisions
themselves without relying on experts and professionals to do their
thinking for them. So we have to remember the importance of making
campaigns accessible, and keeping them democratic. This is not a
revolutionary situation, and most of the people protesting with us
aren't about to devote their lives to living in squats or going to
meetings. So we have to make sure that this doesn't stop people from
having a say in our campaigns, that we're not putting up barriers
that end up creating an unofficial leadership that's as bad as the
Leninist 'official' one. And that means fighting to continue the type
of campaign, and the sorts of organizations, that really involve
people, rather than allowing ourselves to be pushed into a ghetto.

Additional writings on globalistion and reports from some of the
European black blocs will be found at
http://struggle.ws/wsm/global.html