Occupy Tactics: Violence and Legitimacy in the Occupy Movement and Beyond

[antiquie]

1. Interesting analyses here:

http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/debate-tactics-violence-vs-nonviolence-hedges-vs-crimethinc

and

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_debates_the_black_bloc_20120918/?ln

Journalist Ari Paul, writing in The Indypendent, had this to say about the Black Bloc, both in the streets and at the debate:

[T]his kind of entitlement to be at once disruptive and immune from accountability is emblematic of the kind of dish-it-out-but-can’t-take-it attitude they have displayed in reaction to Hedges’s original article. If they’re still having a tantrum about Hedges’s article, how can we expect them to hold up against the 1 percent shock troops?

This is why I think it is ultimately wrong to classify this particular group as anarchists—that would sully the names of various movements past and present that have used and currently use non-hierarchical structures in anti-capitalist organizing. This particular clique is explicitly and actively against the left, and there’s a reason the CrimethInc book Days of War, Nights of Love reads like the ideological bastard child of Karl Marx and Ayn Rand. It rails against corporate control, but replaces class struggle with libertarian individualism. Capitalism and the state are oppressing you, and their flavor of anarchism is your struggle to liberate yourself from the mediocrity of the bourgeois state. You have to do whatever you can to do to save yourself.