Re: Fwd: AUT: Re: Re: [barricada] Account and Analysis of Inauguration Day RAAB

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With Seattle, i can't really say anything.  I missed it, much to my chagrin.
However, in Mumia work and anti-police brutality work in Chicago I have
noticed a few things from people who take their cue from Black Block (as
well as the Refuse and Resist Maoists from the RCP who hang on to try and
get some of the anarchist youth to buy into authoritarian politics by
burning a flag and yelling "It's right to rebel.")

I have mixed feelings about it politically.   I appreciate the energy those
folks bring to a demonstration and the level of courage and combativity they
have.  They have made some of the demonstrations much better.  From what I
saw in Seattle, I only have contempt for the liberal and social democratic
types who tried to protect Starbucks and McDonalds, especially since those
attacks began after the cops started assaulting people.  They wanted to
'respect property'.  Screw that.  Those people targeted capital, and rightly
so.  Should the workers in those places have been given a few seconds
warning to get out of the way?  Yeah, in my opinion.  But I have no qualms
with targeting Starbucks, McDeath Burger, etc.  The pathetic displays of
'protecting property' merged with the police violence.  I have no arguments
with raab on that.

On the other hand, the lack of any perspective beyond running down the
street and starting 'spontaneous' altercations with the police has caused
serious problems.  For example, at a recent Free Mumia rally and demo, we
had about 350-400 people show up, we had a good, energetic rally, and we
started to march.  However, it was cold and people began to leave near the
end of the rally.  By the time we hit Lake Shore Drive (a very major
thoroughfare that runs the length of most of Chicago's lakefront and is
high-visibility), we had dwindled to about 100-125 people.  We faced about
100 cops.  At that point, about 15 people decided to sit in the middle of
Lake Shore Drive and do civil disobedience.  No one had been told about this
or warned about it, even though the march organizers literally begged to be
warned so we could be properly prepared to fend off the cops.  The
relationship of forces was VERY bad, and several people got hurt and
arrested for no purpose and endangered the rest of us, so that when we
arrived at the march end, the cops surrounded us, took off their badges,
distributed wrist straps, and pulled out their nightsticks.  I have no doubt
they intended to use them and we had no means of self-defense since the
police basically had as many people as we did, while some of our marchers
included parents with kids who were not prepared for this.  They came out to
support Mumia.  The anarchist youth who did this, along with a few R&R
people, basically endangered everyone in the march with no thought other
than 'confronting the police'.  This smells to me of bravado, dangerous
bravado and chest thumping.

I find it no accident that the same people do not show up for marches with a
large Black presence or even more so on the South or West sides (almost
entirely Black and Latino communities), and they certainly don't act the
same.  They basically feel they can fuck up a Mumia demonstration and
endanger people, but they don;t do that if a large Black and Latino presence
is at the march.  Then they have no perspective.  Zero.

Not surprisingly in my experience, these youth are almost lily-white (1 in
50 might be African American, but in the 'actions', i have only seen one
African American youth.)  The African American and Latino youth who show up
take a different attitude.  And they have a different presence.  The cops
are not scared of the white middle class kids (mostly from rich private
schools and yuppie public schools).  The Black and Latino kids scare the
cops.  The mood changes radically and so does the level of tension.  If
anyone doubts the problems of race and class, just get a feel for two
different marches with different compositions (and I will stand fast by the
existence of a middle class because these kids have privilege oozing out of
their pores.)  See how different people act.  I have seen militant
demonstrations with African Americans and Latinos, and it isn't the same.
It isn't about 'being radical', 'fucking shit up' or 'confronting the
police'.  People who could live their whole lives in privilege and never
have to be confronted by a cop have to manufacture 'confrontations'.  The
Black and Latino (and less often on our side, white workers) working people
have daily confrontation with the cops, in deadly ways that they don't need
to manufacture.  Its a different kind of 'Black' block, if you will.

At the same time, when it works, i know African American activists who
appreciate the energy and vitality of the young (white) people, in part
because they know those young people come out there by choice, not because
the cops are coming for them.  That gives them hope, too.  So it is a mixed
bag.  It has caused problems when it is done stupidly, thoughtlessly, and in
a manner that smacks of spoiled brats relying on their white, middle class
privileges to save their asses from much worse violence.  Sometimes, it
sends a charge through everything and lights it all up, turning a bad (read:
boring) action into something worth talking about.  Sometimes it works.

But an essnetial problem of everything from Seattle forward, in my opinion,
has been its failure to resonate in the Black and Latino communities.  The
Black Block has a weird resonance to me as a long-time
anti-racist/anti-white privilege activist, especially when it is so white.
I may not be formulating this well, but it seems to me that at least in the
united States, if the problem of race and the whiteness of the current
struggles, their separation from Black and Latino and immigrant struggles
(which have also spilled into the workplaces in strikes like the dry
wallers, the custodial strikes in Chicago, Justice for Janitors, etc.),
represents a major problem.

I hope this kind of ties a few threads together here and takes the
discussion in a useful direction.  I also do not want to say that because
some Black people are not ready to engage in violent marches against the
cops that that justifies being passive.  The Black population is no more
homogenous than any other.  But we should be attuned to the differences in
struggle, in presence, in the meaning of certain choices, and the social
foundation of certain ways of approaching politics.  for me, the struggle
against racial privilege forms a central part of any communist politics of
any worth.  A communist politics which cannot grapple with that problem is
not worth shit.

Not because race and class are intertwined, as I have poorly put it, but
because race, like class, is a central form of the fetishization of human
relations.  I may privilege class because it flows directly from the
separation of doing from done, because that polarity in my opinion forms the
nexus of all other social relations, but if we take the idea of
fetishization as our starting point, then any fetishized form of social
relation of any human relation forms an essential moment of struggle against
capital.  I am sorry if this is lame, but I think we have a long way to go
in extending and developing a serious understanding of the relationship of
race, class, gender, etc.  And I am trying in my pathetic way to draw this
out.

Anyway, enough rambling.  Sean, I hope this offers an angle on Black Block
that has not been touched upon (though I wish it was.)

Cheers,
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean Fenley" <satellitecrash@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: AUT: Re: Re: [barricada] Account and Analysis of
Inauguration Day RAAB


> Hello everybody,
> I wasn't at the anti-inauguration protest so i'm
> finding the discussion of RAAB pretty interesting.
> Although it hasn't been to in depth, basically any
> discussion of it is worthwhile for me, since i know so
> little about it.
>
> but the reason i'm replying to this message is b/c
> when i was in seattle i got a sense that most of the
> progressives/social democrats/liberals in the crowd
> didn't support the black bloc, moreover they condemned
> it. This was most noticeable in the large bands of
> liberals who were cleaning up graffiti protestors had
> sprayed on the streets of seattle.  In addition many
> likened the tactics used by the black bloc and more
> radical elements of the crowd to mistakes made in the
> sixties or as sending "not the kind of message we are
> trying to get across". there have been a number of
> books that i have seen recently on the events in
> seattle (one which i seem to see all around town was
> written by alex cockburn) i wonder if anyone on the
> list has read any with a thorough analysis of the
> black bloc.  i don't think the black bloc had massive
> popular support; in fact i can't get a good sense of
> what kind of support or criticism it received. my
> first inclination is that both most activists and the
> general public actually didn't like it. probably lower
> income people were more tolerant and perhaps even
> supportive of that kind of action though.
> later on,
> -Sean
>
> --- Chris Wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Well, I am glad if I was wrong about the size of the
> > Block, but it seemed
> > that everything they did happened a long way away
> > from the main
> > demonstrations, and at 400 people, well, that isn't
> > much.
> >
> > But I also think there is some underestimation of
> > the degree to which the
> > cops were told to play it super-cool.  A major
> > disruption at J20 would have
> > meant a big smear on an inauguration which was
> > already the most contested
> > since Nixon in 1973.  i think the cops allowed
> > certain things to happen, and
> > the events at K and 14th would have been much
> > nastier (well out of the
> > limelight) if those two marches had not luckily come
> > in when they did.
> >
> > Again, I am glad people felt they achieved a good
> > presence and reached
> > people.  But I also think we need to be very
> > realistic about the action of
> > small groups largely isolated from mass
> > demonstrations.  Black Block had an
> > impact in Seattle that centered on it being a
> > massive event with a lot of
> > popular support.
> >
> > Then the question is, what next?  I don't have a
> > sense of is coming out in
> > terms of organizing outside of demo actions.  Here I
> > am simply asking to
> > know what is being done.  We can quibble about J20
> > or we can talk about
> > politics and perspectives.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Chris
>
>
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