The Black Bloc tactic has many advantages, but it is also undermined by some significant shortcomings, so a number of apparently well-intentioned criticisms coming from the left and far left are worth considering. Specifically, Black Blocs are accused of fetishizing their own violence; of practising a sexist form of action, one that favours men while excluding women; and, finally, of antagonizing the working class and of drawing attention away from the legitimate demands of major non-violent social movements.
Fetishism
“Fetishism” refers to the notion that the use of force is a “pure” form of radical activism, politically superior to other types. The Black Blocs are threatened internally by the tendency for far left circles to develop a “radical” hard core to which individuals gain admittance—as well as an aura of “purity”—by “serving in battle.” This process resembles in some ways a religious initiation: an individual strives to display and affirm a political identity whose purity depends on the execution of prescribed ritual acts, such as highly visible confrontations with the police, which are valorized in and of themselves, regardless of their political impact.
Violent direct action becomes a means for a would-be militant to affirm his or her political identity in the eyes of other militants. This makes it very tempting for that person to look down on and exclude those who do not equate radicalism with violence.1 Here, anarchists behave no differently from the adherents of other ideologies: they resort to lofty principles—liberty, equality, justice, and so on—to rationalize their thirst for violence, prestige, and power. Indeed, anarchists have sometimes exploited the same arguments as liberal politicians or representatives of the armed forces who claim to be waging war in the name of “liberty” and “peace.”
Many anarchists are aware of the dangers of fetishizing violence and stress the importance of not equating it with radicalism. A participant in the Quebec City Black Blocs asserts: “I have no patience with dogmatic pacifism, but there is also dogmatic violence, which sees violence as the one and only means to wage the struggle.”2 Another Black Blocker adds that it is a mistake to believe that “the demo is the ultimate political thing or that rioting necessarily means you’re radical.”3 This outlook, voiced by North Americans, is shared by French activists like Didier, who points out that a demonstration is not a goal in itself, nor is it the only available political practice: “What I do is different! Political commitment just for the ‘speed’ and pleasure it brings you is worthless.”4 Finally, Sofiane, who has resorted to force in demonstrations, notes: “We don’t advocate violence; it’s not a program … Because you can easily acquire a taste for violence, you get used to it … But when it comes to doing militant work, not many people show up.”5
A member of the Confédération nationale du travail (CNT)—a revolutionary, anarchist-identified labour union—who went to Genoa with a group of 15 young activists, framed the issue in these terms: “The point was to plunge [the young activists] into a truly tense situation, where they would have to deal with their adrenaline and understand how it works. For militants, militants who, in addition, claim to be revolutionary, this sort of situation is important … What’s more, to feel that you showed some ‘mettle,’ that’s important.”6 Here, violence plays a part in the simultaneous construction of two identities: an anarchist identity, associated with an ethic of violent struggle, and the warrior identity, associated with a macho ethic whereby a man must learn to control his adrenalin and fight with honour.
Yet this attitude can lead quickly to disillusionment. A decade after participating in several Black Blocs, including one in Genoa in 2001, a veteran activist drew the following conclusion:
The Black Bloc in Genoa was pathetic, as it was easily routed by some fifty police officers. It split into two groups: one dashed off and attacked a prison and a supermarket, the other fell back with the Tute Bianche. I was in the second group. We quickly changed our clothes, switching from black to the T-shirts of the Greens, for instance, and began smashing windows, with some members of the Tute Bianche following suit. From a military perspective, the Black Blocs in those days were pathetic because they didn’t really succeed in holding the street in the face of the police. So it was a marginal, almost insignificant phenomenon.7
Fetishization of the Black Bloc also explains the discomfort that many Autonomen in Berlin feel with regard to the “activism tourists” who show up every May Day having no ties with the local militant network, wishing only to take part in a “big” Black Bloc and a “nice” riot, and giving no thought to what this action signifies for the community.
A related consequence has been the emergence of a “Black Bloc spectator” phenomenon—more specifically, demonstrators dressed in black who join the Black Bloc but slip away at the first signs of trouble. The Black Blockers who do not break ranks subsequently find themselves caught off guard. As was noted in an Internet communiqué: “People who are afraid of heights obviously should not join an affinity group that hangs banners from the tops of buildings. By the same token, if someone is not prepared to assume, if necessary, at least one of the functions that the members of a Black Bloc expect to see fulfilled, it is probably not a good idea for that individual to join.”8
Denunciations of the Black Blocs have also referred to “summit hopping.” This sort of militant tourism is often viewed as not being conducive to a revolutionary perspective, and as leading instead to purely symbolic responses to the demonstrations of power that the summits embody.9 What is worse, rioting at these events has become ritualized, with the two parties—the Black Bloc and the police—replaying the same roles on stages that vary little from one summit to the next. This is something that annoys the anarchist activist and writer Randall Amster10 and the political philosopher John Holloway.11 For their part, David Tough12 and Naggh severely condemn “the local riot … that goes hand in hand with ‘alterglobalization’ ideology”:
There, we see riot activists moving about and fighting in cities where they are viewed as invaders and strangers, and where, despite two or three attempts each year, they never succeed in rallying the local poor, who are quite disgusted with the phoney rages they have no part in. This riot tourism, easily planned and staged for the enemy, has the advantage of venting frustrations … and presenting a tailor-made image of the riot, that is, unattractive, sad, sinister, and hopeless. Because these matches, in cities completely locked down by the police, are not the kind whose outcome keeps us in suspense.13
This discourse, which runs through the whole anarchist tradition, consists in denouncing everything that does not appear to maximize the revolutionary potential of a situation. It is an attitude found even within the Black Blocs, some of whose members like to believe that a violent demonstration opens up revolutionary perspectives. Fortunately, a large number of Black Blockers adopt a more realistic outlook. The unnamed author of the preface to the Black Bloc Papers put it this way: “I’m not saying that the Bloc will end the world’s problems. I am, however, certain that physically confronting authorities which physically uphold a rotten system and reminding the rest of the populace that such things can be done is healthy.”14
In sum, many activists who apply this tactic are fully aware of its limitations. They do not believe that the great rising will take place when they turn the next corner,15 and they may even admit to moments of pessimism about the possibility of a global revolution.16 A Québécoise woman who participated in several Black Blocs lamented: “We are in a period when there is no possibility of a revolution.” Then she added: “We do what we can to radicalize the debate and to reach people so a more radical politicization can come about.”17 A resident of Strasbourg, France, with many demonstrations to his credit and no illusions about the great rising, affirms that “I am an ‘insurgent in search of an insurrection,’ to borrow an phrase from the movement of the unemployed. [That means] taking action against the expulsion of a refugee or helping a family whose electricity has been cut off; responding with outrage to the death of a protester, to the repression of a whole people.”18 In fact, there are many anarchists—Black Blockers and others—whose primary objective is not to bring about the revolution but rather to convince the greatest number of individuals of the relevance of anarchism, or to strengthen the anarchist movement. Or it is to help people take control of their lives, develop a sense of community solidarity, mobilize to resist the various systems of domination, and work to improve the living conditions of underprivileged groups, here and now.19
Sexism
“We’re here! We’re queer! We’re anarchists! We’ll fuck you up!”,20 chanted the Black Bloc during the Pittsburgh G20 Summit in 2009, implying that the Black Blocs’ aesthetic statement makes it possible to mask gender identities and erase sexual differences. “You can’t do gender in a riot,” claims A.K. Thompson, author of Black Bloc White Riot.21 Indeed, when observing a demonstration or riot, whether in person or in photos and videos, how can anyone discern the sex of a stone-throwing Black Blocker? Echoing the words of Mary Black,22 a member of the Black Bloc in Genoa in 2001, Krystalline Kraus, writing in 2002, commented on her experience in Canada:
“Blocking up” to become the Black Bloc is a great equalizer. With everyone looking the same—everyone’s hair tucked away, our faces obscured by masks, I’m nothing less and nothing more than one entity moving with the whole. Everyone is capable of the same. And the politics of “nice girls don’t throw stones” is suspended, and I’m free to act outside of the traditional “serve tea, not Molotov cocktails” rules. It’s once the mask comes off, the problems begin … Sure, women are gaining popular ground in the movement, but some topics are still taboo for us. And with machismo still ruling the streets—especially during a riot—what women have to say, often gets lost in the tear gas fog.23
Many critics of Black Blocs have contended that this type of brutal action partakes of a macho mystique and does not encourage women to join in.24 Others suggest that expressions of anger through destruction simply confirm and amplify aggressive masculinity.25 Addressing themselves to women and men in militant networks, some feminists have denounced men’s monopolizing of Black Blocs and encouraged women to take part in them. For example, to articulate their desire for inclusion and diversity in this type of collective action, Tute Nere, a group of Italian revolutionary feminists, came up with the slogan “Black Bloc—not only for your boyfriend!”
Thus, the question of women in the Black Blocs is complex, particularly if it is framed in terms of sexual and gender identities. In Germany, women belonging to queer communities are generally reluctant to join Black Blocs, which they see as the incarnation of a macho-style activism; women in the anti-fascist networks participate in greater numbers. There is an apparent paradox at work here, given that the queer movement aims in principle to deconstruct conventional sexual and gender identities. One might expect queer women to be attracted to a militant practice commonly identified as masculine; yet they are more reticent about joining Black Blocs. Conversely, female anti-fascist militants, who, unlike queer women, may not propose to upset the order of gender identities, are more likely to take part in a Black Bloc. Perhaps because they work in a macho-style activist environment, getting involved in this sort of action—whether they are heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian—has the advantage of bringing recognition from male comrades.26
Meanwhile, Women in the Black Bloc, a communiqué from the Black Women Movement (BWM) based in the United States, criticizes activists who consider women fundamentally passive and demands acknowledgment that it is possible for women to use political force: “It is up to us to remind those who doubt our ability and strength that we are just as capable. We can be tender, so can men, we can smash a window, so can men, we can cry, so can men, we can throw a brick, so can men.”27 Recall here that historically, women have often participated in riots to protest a political or economic system or to demand their rights, and that feminist groups such as the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade in Vancouver and Rote Zora in Germany have firebombed sex trade businesses to express their opposition to the economic and sexual exploitation of women.28
A statement by a small group of activists in Boston asked its readers to “support direct action and the Black Bloc as a tactic for empowerment,” while at the same time denouncing “Manarchy,” that is, “aggressive, competitive behavior within the anarchist movement that is frighteningly reminiscent of historically oppressive male gender roles.” Two of the statement’s authors reported that at a meeting to plan a Black Bloc in a forthcoming protest, “one man declared: ‘If you’re not willing to take a hit [to the head with a baton] and you’re not willing to go to jail, don’t march with the Black Bloc.’” But the authors’ statement went on to say:
In 1989, feminist writer Ingrid Strobl was arrested for supporting the Revolutionary Cells and Red Zora. This February 1989 solidarity demonstration in Essen, Germany, was attacked by police.
We also understand that people in different situations have different needs. In other words, not everyone can and wants to get beat up and sent to jail for an act that may or may not be perceived as tactically useful … For example, as four white, college students, it’s pretty easy for us to be militants at mass actions. In addition to easy access to lawyers, the cops and courts treat us better than classes of people who are traditionally victimized. It is much harder for people of color, the economically disadvantaged, and people who are not physically capable of intense physical confrontation to take such a position … We are not the Navy Seals. We are not heroes. We are anarchists, building a space that is empowering, accepting, inclusive, accessible, communicative, and community oriented.29
Yet male activists on the far left, be they anarchists, communists, or environmentalists, have made very little effort, beyond fine words, to abandon their privileges as members of the dominant male class, even within the Black Blocs. In spite of anarchists’ avowed adherence to principles of freedom and equality, Black Blocs have been known to reproduce a sexual division of tasks. A woman who took part in several Black Blocs during the Quebec student strike of 2012 observed that women did the shopping, for example, when fabric was needed to make flags and banners.30 More than a decade earlier, during a meeting to prepare a Black Bloc in Montreal, the men ended up in the backyard of an apartment honing their slingshot skills while the women were in the kitchen making Molotov cocktails.31 A woman who had joined various Black Blocs in Quebec deplored the fact that “inside the anarchist movement there is prestige attached to being on the front line, taking part in the confrontation, breaking windows. I find this unfortunate, because there are lots of other people doing lots of other things that are just as important.”32 Her own participation in Black Blocs involved reconnaissance and surveillance missions. She noted that less value was attached to this work than to direct confrontations with the police.
It seems that women’s participation in Black Bloc actions is greater during the organizational work preceding them than during the actual confrontations on the ground. This, however, depends on the particular activist network. There are no doubt a few small Black Blocs where women are completely absent, but elsewhere they sometimes represent half the contingent,33 while some Black Bloc affinity groups are composed mainly or exclusively of women.34
The situation varies with the context and the specific event. In 2000, an activist who had been part of a Black Bloc in Washington, D.C., during a march against the IMF and the World Bank estimated that about half its members were women and that the Bloc was not ethnically homogeneous. She concluded that “the Black Bloc may have been more diverse than the mobilization as a whole.”35 Vittorio Sergi, an Italian activist who participated in the Europe-wide co-ordination of mobilizations against the 2007 G8 Summit in Rostock, observes that there are more women in Black Blocs in Germany than in Italy.36 In Canada, there were fewer women in the Black Blocs in the early 2000s but many more toward 2010, during the protests against the Olympic Games in Vancouver and the Toronto G20, where—it is worth pointing out—they were not restricted to logistics, support, and first aid. During the Quebec student strike in 2012, female Black Blockers were often quicker than their male counterparts to graffiti the walls and to break the windows of banks and army recruiting centres.
There is no easy explanation for the place of women in the Black Blocs, but some hypotheses are worth considering, despite their shortcomings. It seems that the number of women Black Blockers is higher in places where feminism—radical feminism in particular—is more robust, such as Germany and Quebec, than in France or Italy, for example. In Montreal, anarchist networks include a very high proportion of women; among the visitors at the 2012 Anarchist Book Fair in Montreal, for example, women represented roughly 60 percent. Finally, because women are discriminated against and, on the whole, poorer than men under capitalism, it should come as no surprise that a great many of them feel anger toward banks and international corporations.
During the 2010 G20 protest in Toronto, Black Blockers smashed the windows of an American Apparel store and even threw feces at the mannequins. As one woman Black Blocker explained about women in Black Blocs: “Obviously, they are more sensitive to targets associated with patriarchy, such as shop windows displaying sexist advertisements.”
Still, one woman who joined a number of Black Blocs over the course of the prolonged social conflict in Quebec regards the Black Bloc as “a boys’ club.” Women were initially admitted because of “a relationship with a man, either a boyfriend or a lover.” She notes, however, that in the end a large number of women joined Black Blocs during the student strike and estimates that 80 percent of them were in all-female affinity groups. In her view, women’s actions “are more thorough, more successful”; also, their “relationship with the target is more thought out” so that they sometimes acknowledge that the most reasonable choice is “to forget a particular target.” She adds: “Many women hear the call of the brick, but not anytime, anyhow.” Obviously, they are more sensitive to targets associated with patriarchy, such as shop windows displaying sexist advertisements. Finally, women “are more mindful of the other members of the group” and “don’t leave anyone behind when people scatter and run.”37
An all-women Black Bloc during the 2012 Montreal May Day demonstration in Montreal.
This testimony is borne out by that of another woman who joined various Black Blocs during the Quebec student strike, though in a different network. She identifies herself as anarchist and queer rather than feminist. According to her, women accounted for between 60 and 70 percent of Black Bloc membership during the conflict. Also, she preferred to plan and carry out actions only with women, because “the plans are less formal, less controlled”:
We talk more and generally leave more room for living the moment. There are fewer preconceptions of what we aim to accomplish and more discussion of how to go about it. We stick together and there’s much more communication when decisions are being made in the street. Men are more individualistic. They don’t feel obliged to come back to the group and can take off without warning. It’s “My top priority is me!” I call them “lone wolves,” whereas women form wolf packs.”38
Thus, the Black Blocs can be a space where there is not always a clear distinction between masculine and feminine (whatever those terms mean), or between what is “efficient” and what is not. It is therefore possible with such collective action to challenge conventional sexual identities, and to demonstrate that there is not necessarily a contradiction between fighting and co-operating, or between caring and being violent.
Yet other women Black Blockers also expressed concerns, such as the anonymous author of the letter Après avoir tout brûlé (After Having Burnt Everything), who participated in several Black Blocs in Europe, including the one in Strasbourg against the NATO Summit in 2009. She complained about the “petty macho dog-fights” between male activists who were trying to “impose the hierarchy of the day”: “As a woman in our milieu, I worked hard to earn my stripes, to say the right things, to show my mettle to others and to myself by regularly taking part in skirmishes … Violence, whoever uses it, has consequences on emotional ‘health’ … I have no sympathy for pacifism as an ideology. But we need to help each other to fight with determination over the long term and to stay healthy individually and collectively.”39
Moreover, female activism does not prevent misogyny and sexist behaviour, including harassment and even sexual assault. Regrettably, both occurred in radical and anarchist networks during the Quebec student strike of 2012. The anonymity provided by black clothing allowed a man who had sexually assaulted women activists to join a protest, until some of his former comrades recognized him despite the mask, and kicked him out of the crowd. Similar incidents had occurred during the 2003 EU Summit, when anarchists occupied Aristotle University in Thessaloniki,40 and during the mobilizations in Seattle and Quebec City in 1999 and 2001 respectively.41
Anarchists are usually very quick to denounce police brutality and violence against activists or “ordinary” citizens, or neo-Nazis assaulting people of colour, yet they seem far more hesitant when female militants are abused by their male counterparts. Referring specifically to the Black Bloc tactic, T-Bone Kneegrabber notes:
You can easily round up 500 black clad anarchists to fuck shit up at a frat house where rapists live, but someone points a finger at a “progressive” man and all of a sudden there’s a process; all of a sudden she [the survivor] is being divisive … We, as “anarchists,” hold a society (that we do not have faith in) to a higher standard than we hold our friends to! … Just because a man identifies as radical, does not make him an angel.42
In 2013 in Egypt, most of the Black Bloc participants apparently were men, though some women may have been directly involved. In the words of one observer, “when women were being brutally attacked [by state-backed ‘rape squads’] in Tahrir Square … beyond the ability of groups like Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment to protect them, Black Bloc activists literally appeared out of nowhere to take on the often armed groups of attackers and protect the women and other activists.”43
The Politics of Criticism
According to many activists in progressive movements, including the anti-austerity, Occupy, and alter-globalization movements, the greatest drawback of the Black Bloc tactic is that it prevents the public and the elites from hearing the legitimate messages of progressive organizations. The police themselves use this argument to undercut the legitimacy of Black Blocs, as indicated in a statement by Toronto police chief William Blair, extracted here from a review conducted by the Toronto Police Service in the aftermath of the 2010 G20 Summit: “Last June, we saw levels of violence we had never seen before in Toronto. People came to the G20 Summit, not to engage in debate or discussion or demonstration, but to infiltrate lawful, peaceful protests, and use them as cover to commit vandalism and violence.”44 This apparently commonsensical outlook also finds expression in letters to the editor, such as those concerning the student strike in Quebec: “The students need to wake up and realize that letting the Black Bloc and other anarchists or masked vandals infiltrate their ranks does nothing to advance their cause.”45
It is very common for mainstream journalists to take up and disseminate this sort of censure. During the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, for example, a Toronto Sun reporter wrote that “legitimate protesters who work within the law, who attempt to get their voices heard through less controversial means, may feel that their concerns won’t be heard above the chaos.” He then quoted Ella Kokotsis, director of external relations of the University of Toronto’s G8 and G20 Research Group: “When this kind of thing happens, it just diverts the entire world’s attention to what’s going on in the streets [and] takes away from what G8 leaders have done.”46 Interestingly, another article in the same newspaper was subtitled, “Prime minister boasts of G8’s success, vows to carry on meetings, but not much is accomplished”47 (not a surprising result, given that the German chancellor and the British prime minister took time out to watch a World Cup soccer match48). Almost ten years earlier, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalist covering the G8 Summit in Genoa had quoted German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as saying, “it should be acknowledged that due to a few hundred or a few thousand violent protestors, the cause of those concerned with the consequences of globalization who demonstrated peacefully was completely discredited.”49 The German chancellor did not indicate how the G8 decision makers’ actions would have been in any way different had there been no riot. Would they have, then, taken seriously the concerns of those who demonstrated peacefully? And why do a few Black Blockers have the power—by smashing some windows—to divert the G8 leaders’ minds from important concerns about globalization?
Journalists do not hesitate to amplify this theme. “Antiglobalization will not survive with any credibility unless it breaks with these infiltrated vandals,” wrote an AFP reporter, commenting on an article in Madrid’s El Mundo.50 This is a recurrent idea. After the 2012 May Day demonstration in Seattle, where the Black Bloc smashed several windows (Wells Fargo, Starbucks, the Federal Court building), a Seattle Weekly blogger commented: “The organized speeches on police brutality, immigration, social justice and capitalism went mostly unheard by the public watching and reading yesterday’s and today’s media reports: most coverage was in-depth windows-breaking news”51 (a point illustrated, actually, by this very blog post). A few weeks later, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times chimed in, using the same terms, once again without discussing precisely the issues that the Black Blocs’ actions must not be allowed to eclipse: “Their antics stole attention from the thousands of peaceful protesters who may have had serious things to say about the expanding divide between rich and poor.”52 Editorialists, reporters, and columnists have been chanting this same mantra for over ten years. In 2001, for instance, after the EU Summit in Göteborg, Laurent Zecchini of Le Monde concluded straight away that “the danger, of course, is that being lumped together [with the vandals] obscures the message of a ‘civil society’ whose legitimate concerns are drowned in the fury of the confrontations.”53 There is something rather ironic in the stance taken by media professionals like these: they could very well choose not to cover the “violence” and to focus instead on the “real issues,” if those issues truly mattered for them, instead of berating the “vandals” for diverting the attention of the media (including themselves).
Furthermore, the media relay the assessments of the reformist movement’s spokespersons, such as C. Hutchinson, an activist in the British group Drop the Debt, who opined: “We don’t want the movement to stop because there is too much violence. We need peaceful demonstrations so we can get across our messages.”54 Significantly, Fabien Lefrançois, of the French group Agir ici, allowed that the Black Blocs’ rough stuff had apparently produced such a shock wave that it helped reformists “force negotiations to get underway, open debates, and be heard.” But he also noted: “It’s true, the violent actions of the Black Blocs served our purpose at a certain point in time … But they can do us a disservice in the long run.”55 According to the head of the French section of Greenpeace, Bruno Rebelle, “our work is discredited by this violence.”56 The message of the progressive elite is crystal clear: its work should be the priority, and the radicals had better calm down, toe the line, and behave themselves. Susan George, vice-president of ATTAC-France, has taken up the same refrain: “Because of a few unmanageable idiots, we come across as simpleminded anticapitalists and violent anti-Europeans.”57 Referring to the EU Summit in Göteborg in June 2001, she lamented that the street actions had drawn the public’s attention away from a televised debate involving European politicians and seven representatives of the movement, including herself.
Even peaceful demonstrations are often reduced to a few anecdotal images.58 Concerning the alter-globalization movement, for instance, French journalists have repeatedly used the expression “bon enfant” (friendly, good-natured) to describe peaceful demonstrations, highlighting the innocuous aspects of these events.59 In a TF1 news report from Genoa on July 18, 2001, the atmosphere at the demonstrators’ headquarters was described as “good-natured”; in the next day’s report, the term “techno-parade” was used to describe the first demonstration in that city, a non-violent event. In December 2000, a journalist for the Paris daily Libération referred to peaceful actions carried out in Nice, where the EU Summit was under way, as “antiglobalization folklore”: “The Spaniards brought out their drums, the Catalans their fifes, and the Galicians their bagpipes.” It was a “festive happening” during which dozens of activists jumped into the Baie des Anges. A nine-metre-long “financial shark” that was supposed to have travelled from Marseille to intrude on the bathers never arrived. The article continued: “‘He got deflated,’ one swimmer quipped.” With the subtitles “Bagpipes” and “Deflated shark,” the article eschewed all political references.60 Only rarely is the political significance of demonstrations, violent or not, taken seriously by the mainstream media.
The fact is, the mass media are eager to cover the spectacle provided by “rioters,” and they generally give a higher priority to a “violent” demonstration than to a calm, “friendly” march. I can attest to this personally, having served several times as a guest analyst and commentator for RDI, Radio-Canada’s 24-hour French-language TV news network, when it was covering alter-globalization demonstrations. During production meetings, decisions on the placement of cameras and vehicles were based in part on the potential for “vandalism.” Thus, a correlation developed between the media’s coverage of alter-globalization demonstrations and the direct actions of the Black Blocs. By way of illustration, the marches held in November 2001 against the IMF, the World Bank, and the G20 Summit in Ottawa, and then in January-February 2002 against the World Economic Forum in New York, were referred to as “non-events” by members of the teams I was a part of, precisely because not enough havoc was generated at those events to satisfy a certain audience. Six months later, in the absence of any violence despite the participation of a small Black Bloc, the G8 Summit in Calgary presented the same problem for the society of the spectacle.
The media hope to capture scenes of violence, which for them are highly profitable.61 They have been far more attentive to alter-globalization demonstrations since Seattle because of the presence of Black Blocs; as a result, they have also been more attentive to the alter-globalization discourses. The participants in the Black Blocs are fully aware of this dynamic and have often asserted that their actions draw media attention to mobilizations and rallies, that they “[spark] discussions and debates, [get] people to take a position; whether or not they are for or against this kind of action hardly matters to us, because we know why we do it.”62 Indeed, the possibility that Black Blocs and their allies will carry out sensational actions has enabled the movement for some years to remain highly newsworthy. Scholars who have systematically analyzed the relationship between the media and violent demonstrations concur that the use of force helps generate significant media coverage, at least initially (though when violent demonstrations become routine, media interest may fade).63 These scholars do not agree, however, when it comes to determining whether recourse to violence has a positive or negative effect on media coverage.
Photographers scramble for a closer shot of a burning police car at the Toronto G20 Summit protest, June 2010.
The attitude of mainstream journalists toward violence depends greatly on who is employing it. They are generally quite tolerant when violence is used by local police forces or by the country’s own military, or that of allies. Their tolerance stays relatively high with regard to “respectable” protesters, such as students in a foreign country demonstrating against an authoritarian regime, or homegrown, middle-class trade unionists. Usually, though, they condemn the violence of “others”—police and military personnel of enemy states, “suburban youths,” Black Blockers. This condemnation is expressed through pejorative labels—“young extremists,” “brutes,” “thugs,” and so on— and in almost total silence with regard to their political motives.
Antagonizing Public Opinion and the Working Class
Given this media environment, it seems logical to expect the Black Blocs’ use of force during demonstrations to damage the protest movement’s public image. At best, they attract the attention of the cameras, but the resulting media coverage never portrays them in a sympathetic light. Yet this implies a homogeneous movement, one from which the Black Bloc is excluded. It also implies that “public opinion” is uniform. Chris Samuel analyzed the Black Bloc tactic in the light of the 2010 Toronto G20 Summit; he concluded that “activist attempts to impose a new definition of violence or even to open up the question of violence in the minds of the watching public” were doomed to fail because the Black Bloc lacked “sufficient symbolic” power “to impose a new definition” of violence on a “neoliberal public.” The assumption here is that a few hundred activists breaking windows in downtown Toronto were convinced their action on its own had the “power to modify conscious beliefs about property and its relation to capitalist exploitation”; and, furthermore, that “the public” is of one mind.64 In reality, however, civil society and public opinion are heterogeneous. As a member of the Black Bloc in London during the “anti-cuts” demonstrations asserted: “We are not in any way setting out to terrorise the public. We are the public.”65 A Canadian woman and veteran Black Blocker was asked: “How would you respond to those who say the Black Blocs give a poor image of the antiglobalization movement as a whole?” Her reply: “Whose image? I think the assumption is that people are not inspired by rebellion. And also that the audience is white and middle-class.”66
It would be more accurate to speak of civil societies and public opinions. Some public opinions judge the actions of the Black Blocs and their allies harshly. But there are also those who feel inadequately represented by progressive organizations, which they believe hamper the movement against capitalist globalization and impede social justice; these people look positively on Black Bloc actions and perceive them as politically significant. Of course, this analysis of public opinion is not shared by the detractors of the Black Blocs, such as Mario Roy, an editorialist for Montreal’s La Presse. In late July 2003, after demonstrations against the WTO in Montreal, he penned this reductive assessment: “Vandalism … is abysmally stupid and perceived as such by the entire population.”67 Sweeping generalizations like this ignore the existence of independent media networks—independent radio stations and print and Internet publications—and the punk and hip hop countercultures, among others, all of which abound with far more nuanced debates about Black Bloc actions than can be found in the mainstream media.
Lynn Owens and L. Kendall Palmer studied the after-effects of the media’s coverage of Black Bloc actions in Seattle, and found that it boosted public interest in anarchism. They identified a threefold dynamic: (1) The mainstream media gave the Black Blocs a very high profile, but a negative one, presenting them as the embodiment of anarchy, in the sense of chaos and violence. (2) The media attention generated a marked increase in the number of visits to anarchist Internet sites, including those (such as news.infoshop.org) providing information and forums for discussions on the Black Blocs. (3) The mainstream media subsequently showed more interest in other facets of anarchism, such as anarchist soccer leagues, book fairs, and so on; meanwhile, stories about the Black Blocs sometimes included one or two texts (often based on anarchist Internet sites) explaining their motives and political rationale or dealing with a range of topics.68 So it happened that during the Quebec student strike of 2012, after months of demonstrations with an ongoing Black Bloc presence, the Montreal Anarchist Book Fair, held in May of the same year, saw a considerable rise in the number of visitors, who were curious to learn more about anarchism. Sales of books, especially introductions to the subject (including this one, in its earlier French edition), increased significantly.
It seems that within the alter-globalization movement, many activists and protesters do not reject political violence, and thus are not necessarily disturbed by the Black Bloc. During the 2012 Quebec student strike, a protester expressed to a journalist his opinion of the anarchists who were smashing bank windows and battling the police: “I never threw anything, I never smashed anything, but I am with them. I am a casseur in my heart.”69 Even the American eco-feminist Starhawk, a hard core pacifist, declared: “I like the Black Bloc … In general, I think breaking windows and fighting cops in a mass action is counterproductive [but the participants in the Black Bloc] are my comrades and allies in this struggle and … we need room in this movement for rage, for impatience, for militant fervor.”70 Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, two analysts of social movements, interviewed some 800 protesters during the G8 Summit in Genoa in 2001 and found that only 41 percent of them were prepared to condemn all forms of violence.71 At the demonstrations against the G8 Summit in Évian in June 2003, 16.7 percent of the protesters stated that damaging property can be “effective,” 40 percent thought that physically resisting the police can be “effective,” and over 66 percent said that they themselves had physically resisted the police at some point or were prepared to do so.72
Yet the leaders of progressive organizations, hoping above all to mobilize the trade unions, are still not convinced of the usefulness of Black Bloc actions.73 Susan George, for her part, points an accusing finger at the Black Blockers in Genoa in 2001 for acting irresponsibly toward others:
Are you happy, protesters? … you, the genuine Black Blockers, who never participated in any of the preparatory meetings that went on for months, who don’t belong to any of the 700 responsible Italian organizations that had decided democratically to practice creative and active non-violence. Are you happy with your unilateral actions, to have infiltrated groups of peaceful demonstrators so that they too got gassed and clubbed … ? Are you happy we’ve finally got our martyr? His name was Carlo Giuliani…. A man has died. If we can’t guarantee peaceful, creative demonstrations, workers and official trade unions won’t join us.74
The implication, then, is that a demonstration is a kind of private space—a view embraced wholeheartedly by an editor of Rouge, the organ of the LCR, who accuses the Black Blocs “of squatting demonstrations and obliging them to take on a type of confrontation that they do not want.”75 Such allegations, however, fail to mention that many Black Blockers are also involved in mobilization campaigns and that the demonstrations they take part in are organized in the main by radical groups. Yet even some on the far left and in the anarchist movement assume that the Black Blocs alienate the “working class”76 with their clothing and lifestyle choices, which are associated with the anarchist counterculture (which is stronger in Germany and North America than in France or Greece).77 For insurrectionary anarchists, such distinctions are specious and conceal a form of political manipulation:
We are of the exploited and excluded, and thus our task is to act. Yet some critique all action that is not part of a large and visible social movement as “acting in the place of the proletariat.” They counsel analysis and waiting, instead of acting. Supposedly, we are not exploited alongside the exploited; our desires, our rage and our weaknesses are not part of the class struggle. This is nothing but another ideological separation between the exploited and subversives.78
Others point out that this critique glosses over the fact that members of the working class take part in Black Blocs, as suggested by numerous Black Bloc communiqués and declarations published over the years. In particular, the communiqué “Who Is the Black Bloc? Where Is the Black Bloc?”, released in 2010 by the Italian Autonomous University Collective in the wake of some student protest actions, asked:
Do you want to see the faces behind the scarves, helmets, balaclavas? They are the same faces that pay your rent for derelict houses; the faces you look at when asking to sign work contracts of 500 euros a month … They are the faces that submit dissertation proposals and are obliged to reference your boring texts … they make your cappuccino with froth … They are the ones whose life-blood is being sapped by financial insecurity, whose lives are shit, and they are tired of putting up with it.79
This quotation offers a portrait of Black Blockers as respectable citizens, as good workers and diligent students. It also indicates that their revolt is legitimate because they are dominated by an unfair and inegalitarian system.
Furthermore, many statements made by wage earners who are not Black Blockers convey their sympathy for direct action in general and for anarchists using the Black Bloc tactic in particular. To quote a worker who was present at the Battle of Seattle:
Isn’t there anyone who will defend the anarchists? … These young men and women, aren’t they our comrades rather than saboteurs of our movement? Shouldn’t we, on the contrary, thank these revolutionary spirits for expressing a righteous anger and refusing a globalized social order based on greed, systemic violence, and the oppression of the majority? … In response to police brutality, the nonviolence advocated by most organizations has proved totally inadequate … Finally, demonstrations were not the exclusive property of the pacifists, ecologists, unions, and religious groups any more than they were the anarchists’. No one has a monopoly on the streets … And yet, as a man of colour and a member of the working class, I consider it an honour to have shared the company, during the dark days of Seattle, of these young and valiant idealistic rebels.”80
For another observer,
The true heroes of the Battle in Seattle [were] the street warriors, the Ruckus Society, the Anarchists, Earth Firsters, the Direct Action Media Network (DAMN), radical labor militants such as the folks at Jobs With Justice, hundreds of Longshoremen, Steelworkers Electrical Workers and Teamsters who disgustedly abandoned the respectable, police sanctioned official AFL-CIO parade and joined the street warriors at the barricades in downtown … A few rebellious steelworkers, longshoremen, electrical workers and teamsters did disobey their leaders, push into downtown and join the battle. The main march withdrew in respectable good order and dispersed peacefully to their hotels … Fortunately the street warriors won.81
At the demonstrations against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001, many individuals left the Peoples’ March, organized and supervised by reformist institutions, at the invitation of activists encouraging them to join the crowd that was defying the police. The Peoples’ March, some 60,000 strong, was supervised by the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ: Quebec Federation of Labour) corps of marshals and confined to the basse-ville (lower town), even though the official Summit was taking place in the haute-ville (upper town). People waiting for the march to get under way needed only look up and see the haute-ville swathed in thick clouds of tear gas in order to realize how nasty the situation must be for the protesters up there. As planned by the organizers, the People’s March turned its back on the dramatic events, moving farther away from the haute-ville and deeper into a residential neighbourhood, eventually ending up in a vacant lot several kilometres from the confrontation and the official Summit.
But not all union members agreed with the position of the labour bureaucracy, which tried to control labour’s role at the protest. For example, members of local 3903 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), representing teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and contract faculty at York University (Toronto), along with York undergraduate students, had hired school buses to travel to Quebec City. Most of the members of CUPE 3903 who came were organized in affinity groups and had taken direct action training, legal training, and safety training. Some of these affinity groups had prepared for direct action with locks, chains, and other hardware, and at least one group was effectively a Black Bloc. Others joined Black Bloc actions when they got there. CUPE’s national leaders had stated in an official press release that they would support civil disobedience and would be “on the front line,” though it is doubtful they had Black Bloc-style direct action in mind.82
Then, as one CUPE member recalls,
during the People’s March on the second day of the protests, many of the rank and file were furious that labour officials were leading them away to the middle of nowhere … We had planned to head up the hill ourselves and to try to encourage others to follow. All of the CUPE Ontario leadership went up the hill with us … There may have been CUPE leaders from other provinces there as well. People from other unions went up that hill too (lots of members of the Canadian Auto Workers) and were gassed and abused by the cops. At the top of the hill we saw Black Blocs and union members (mostly big burly Canadian Auto Workers) working together with a grappling hook and a rope, trying to pull the fence down. They faced gas and water cannon … After the Summit, at the CUPE Ontario convention in Ottawa in June, CUPE national President Judy Darcy gave a passionate speech to the members in which she said that labour would not abandon the young people at the wall again, that every local would get direct action training, and that every local would be sent gas masks … So, all this is to say that the division between labour and Black Blocs is not so clear.83
In the Quebec City neighbourhoods where the confrontations took place, a number of residents supported the activists by giving them water, cheering them on from their balconies, or opening their doors when they needed to take refuge. Similar scenes were witnessed in Genoa in 2001.
Another example is provided by Mohammed Chikkaoui, a spokesperson for Oxfam-Québec, who commented on the four windows broken in downtown Montreal during an anti-WTO demonstration in 2003: “When we see the ongoing obstruction and incoherence in international institutions, and we watch people, young people in the street with expectations for the future who see that the future has nothing good in store for them … If I were their age, I might have done the same thing.”84
Addressing several hundred people at Vittorio Square in Turin, Italy, on July 8, 2011, Alberto Perino, for twenty years the spokesperson of the No TAV movement in Val di Susa, declared, “Siamo tutti Black Bloc” (We are all Black Blocs), and was cheered by the crowd.85 The slogan Siamo tutti Black Bloc even appears on T-shirts sold in that region to support the No TAV movement.
At an October 2013 assembly, in response to a clash between police and demonstrators, members of Brazil’s State Union of Education Professionals (SEPE) expressed unconditional support for the Black Blocs. Many teachers said that they had been protected by the Bloc and a general coordinator for SEPE stated that “the Black Blocs are always welcome” in their demonstrations.
In sum, there is no truth to claims that the operations of the Black Blocs necessarily widen the gap between anarchism and “ordinary” working-class citizens.
This Is What Democracy Looks Like!
Representatives of progressive movements and organizations accuse the Black Blocs and their allies of not respecting the “democratic” process. This was the central argument advanced by Michael Albert after the events in Seattle in 1999 in his article, “On trashing and movement building.”
The assumptions underlying these criticisms of Black Blocs stem from a homogeneous vision whereby a social movement should be unified and march in a single direction determined by enlightened leaders who are comfortably installed at the head of organizations that are supposedly “responsible,” “democratic,” and “representative” of “civil society” as a whole. But the Black Blocs are based on a very different political rationale. They have no “respectable” personalities ensuring that their discourse is taken up by the mainstream media, nor do they wish to be financed by the state and invited to discussions with members of the G20, the G8, or the participants in the World Economic Forum in Davos. Black Bloc activists declare instead: “We are not looking for a seat in the discussions among the masters of the world; we want the masters of the world to no longer exist.”86
Clearly, the frictions that have developed within the alter-globalization and anti-austerity social movements reflect two different conceptions of democracy. The self-proclaimed “representatives” of the movement defend representative democracy. For a community—be it a nation or a social movement—to be “represented,” it must be perceived as homogeneous and as able to express itself through a single voice (that of its representatives). This approach is exemplified by Patti Goldman, managing attorney with Earthjustice, founded as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Seattle in 1971, who stated in 1999, in Seattle:
We condemn the violence. We are a legal institution that works through the law to protect the environment. There are valid arguments to be made to the WTO and the Clinton administration about a critical need for fundamental reform of trade rules to protect our health and our environment. Violence only obscures our message. A handful of anarchists should not drown out the message of thousands of peaceful marchers.87
What her words actually show, however, is that there is no unified movement; instead there are power relationships, in the course of which social movement elites try to distance themselves from the “anarchists,” to shut them out without the slightest acknowledgment that the anarchists’ message may somehow be relevant.
Regarding the “diversity of tactics,” Susan George asserts that this approach cannot work because “there will be no unity in the demonstration and no clear message for the outside world.”88 The implication is that George can speak for the entire movement, from which she has excluded the deviant elements. As for the Black Blocs, she dismisses them as “a handful of individuals who, in effect, have nothing to propose.”89 In reference to the anti-G8 Summit demonstrations in Évian, she adds that the “vandals” belonged to a “minority subculture … the ‘black leather heavy metal spike hair’ unwashed of Zurich, whose sole aim in life is apparently to smash things. Only a qualified psychologist or anthropologist could say if they have any interest whatsoever in politics.”90
The Black Blocs and their allies are described as products of cultural deviance combined with psychological pathology. In this way, they serve as foils for the leaders of institutionalized groups, who, by dissociating themselves from the “vandals,” hope to project a calm, respectable, and homogeneous image of a movement that can speak with one voice, that of its elite.
By contrast, anarchists and the majority of those who participate in Black Blocs view a social movement as something heterogeneous, as a movement of movements, and hold that the multitude cannot be “represented” without its will being oversimplified by the representing elite. In other words, that the delegation of authority undermines the principles of equality and freedom, because representatives invariably develop personal interests at odds with the “common good” of the community they claim to represent. The members of the Black Blocs favour pluralism and autonomy of choice, whereas progressive elites seek to discipline “their” demonstrations and publicly condemn the Black Blocs’ actions. Feeling that they have been betrayed, Black Blockers sometimes intentionally disrupt the speeches of high-profile leaders of the movement. An incident like this happened in Nice in December 2000, in the prelude to the EU Summit there. A French activist recounts what happened at gatherings held prior to the demonstrations:
There were about 200 of us sleeping in the basement of a carpark. I experienced the horror familiar to itinerants who sleep on cardboard, with the cold burning your back. I was there because we could talk about violence. We had excluded ourselves from the gymnasium, where people like Susan George and Alain Krivine91 were speaking. That was the first time I realized you could disrupt people. Usually, they are the ones—on the issue of “illegal immigrants” or other topics—who cut us out, who co-opt us, who appropriate movements by sending their youths to our general meetings, but this time we shouted insults at them and hooted them down.92
Here, the “representatives” of the movement were being faulted for denying its diversity and for refusing to take its radical, anti-authoritarian components seriously.
Yet at the same time, and even worse, the elite endeavours to link up with popular movements and co-opt their militant energy for its own benefit or for the benefit of institutionalized organizations. The musician Midge Ure, organizer of the Scottish Live8 in 2005, was asked by journalists whether he feared that the anarchists would co-opt Live8 (a series of music events with a lineup of stars demanding debt cancellation for the poorest nations). He replied that in fact, he was turning the anarchists’ event to his advantage.93 Yet after the demonstrations, he told the anarchists to “go home.”94
Those who join Black Blocs do not view their political commitment solely in relation to, for example, an alter-globalization movement with a single, clear, and specific goal. This is mainly because that movement is composed primarily of institutionalized progressive organizations. In this connection, a member of an affinity group allied with the Black Blocs explains: “We are anticapitalists first, before being opponents of globalization; we are against globalization because we are anticapitalists.”95 This is why the Black Blocs often criticize the progressive elite for being wishy-washy. So each side accuses the other of sapping the movement’s effectiveness and credibility.
The elites of reformist organizations constantly chastise “young rioters” and “anarchists” in the belief that this will make the reformist leaders worthy of the state’s and the media’s attention. The mainstream political arena is under the sway of a full-fledged normalizing apparatus, which consists of government policies, official communication channels, grants, criteria for inclusion (or exclusion), and so on. The dependence of progressive political actors on this apparatus encourages them to dissociate themselves from groups that might tarnish their respectability. Indeed, the financial and political fate of the spokespersons of various institutions often depends as much on government subsidies as on the success or failure of their actions.
Representatives of the state have openly asked the spokespersons of reformist organizations to publicly dissociate themselves from the “rioters.” In the wake of the disturbances related to the G8 Summit in Genoa, in 2001, Guy Verhofstadt, Prime Minister of Belgium and President of the EU, demanded: “I want to hear the representatives of all democratic movements and parties, throughout the world, to distance themselves from the rioters.”96 This injunction was taken up by commentators like Dominique Von Burg, editor-in-chief of La Tribune de Genève, in his front-page analysis of the demonstrations against the G8 Summit in Évian in June 2003. He depicted the “vandals” as no more than “a handful of imbeciles”: “A few hundred rioters … managed to steal the show from a peaceful and important protest … As they did during the demonstration, the opposition forces must resolutely reject all those whose arguments add up to crowbars and Molotov cocktails.”97
The progressive elite appears to be amenable to calls like these. When he was in charge of international relations for ATTAC, Christophe Aguiton, though more radical than Susan George and ready to denounce police violence, declared that the Social Forum organized by reformist groups and associations in Genoa in 2001 “was legitimized, in Italy and far beyond, by its ability to differentiate itself from the acts of violence committed by certain groups of demonstrators.”98 The same point was made during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City by Françoise David, spokesperson for the Peoples’ Summit (subsidized by the governments of Canada and Quebec), who said “no to the violence,” which according to her had been orchestrated by “a very small group” of vandals.99 Finally, here was Bob Geldof’s response, as spokesperson for the Live8 campaign, to the “violent” activists protesting the G8 Summit in Scotland in 2005: “You’re a bunch of losers.”100
The “Peace-Police”
In return for publicly denouncing the Black Blocs, the spokespersons of the progressive movement hope to be rewarded politically by the authorities. Specifically, they hope to be recognized as legitimate players and to receive invitations to discuss, and perhaps negotiate, with people in high places.101 The reformists’ desire to project a respectable image of themselves leads to the self-disciplining of street demonstrations. Of course, implicit even in peaceful demonstrations is the idea that a civil war or a revolution is possible. The French philosopher Yves Michaud observes: “In democratic countries, the mass demonstration is a ritualized form of confrontation. The adversaries show their numbers without the intention of using force but letting it be inferred that they could.”102 Reformist leaders who are concerned about their public image clearly intend that this potential clash be forever deferred.103
The question arises, however: What political relationship is being established when the progressive elite asks the authorities for permission to demonstrate, discusses the route of the march with them, and has the protesters supervised by a corps of marshals? The political scientist Olivier Fillieule refers to a “spirit of complicity”104 between organizers and the police. Isabelle Sommier, also a political scientist, notes that “the requirements of internal order of a march” organized by the major militant institutions coincide with “the requirements of public order,” because “both [are] threatened by ‘uncontrollable’ ‘disruptive elements,’ or ‘vandals’ of one sort or another.”105
This being so, politicians and progressive spokespersons are on exactly the same page. “We firmly condemn this type of violent action, which is totally foreign to the alterglobalization movement,” said Juan Tortosa, one of the co-ordinators of the Geneva-based Forum social lémanique, in response to actions carried out during the G8 Summit in Évian. In Genoa, José Bové, a member of the Confédération paysanne and undoubtedly the most renowned spokesperson for the alter-globalization movement in France, declared that “today, over 200,000 people have assembled here, refusing the rationale of the G8, the rationale of globalization, despite police provocations and despite the attempts at destabilization of a certain number of uncontrolled groups.” The gist of these remarks, made on the public network France 2 on July 21, 2001, was reiterated the same day on TF1, where Bové again referred to “uncontrolled groups.” Uncontrolled? By whom? The police? Or movement organizers and spokespersons such as Bové himself? A moot point. What is clear in all of this, however, is the idea that everything would be fine if all the demonstrators behaved in a “controlled” manner. As Christophe Aguiton of ATTAC bluntly stated: “It would be better if we could control everything.”106 Susan George, meanwhile, has declared it necessary “to impose overall non-violence in our ranks” in order to achieve “disciplined activism.”107
For those who present themselves as the movement’s spokespersons, what is at stake is controlling the rank and file, even to the point of acting as police auxiliaries. Hence, the protesting institutions’ deployment of marshals in Seattle, Quebec City, Annemasse, Toronto, and elsewhere.
Following the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, who had clearly changed his tune since marching up the hill with CUPE members in Quebec City in 2001, wrote a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star denouncing the “cowardly actions” of the “hooligans.” Concerning the large People First demonstration organized by labour unions and civil society organizations, Ryan stated:
The rally organizers, including the Ontario Federation of Labour, worked diligently to ensure that our democratic right to lawful assembly would be respected … To this end, we liaised with the Toronto Police and cooperated at every turn. On the day, hundreds of volunteer marshals facilitated what was an extraordinarily successful event, given the tension that had pervaded the city in the days before.108
In his view, the People First protest “told world leaders—including our own Prime Minister Stephen Harper—to put the needs of human beings and the environment ahead of all other considerations as they deliberated over the weekend.”
Chris Samuel examined the “distinction between People First and Get Off the Fence” at the Toronto G20 protests. Get Off the Fence was a demonstration called by the Community Solidarity network in which a Black Bloc took part. Samuel concluded that “by demonstrating that People First was not Black Bloc, People First organizers accumulated symbolic capital at Black Bloc’s expense … They used their institutional stability to maintain relations with police and thereby portray those relations as supporting legitimate protest.”109 But Samuel also noted that while this approach certainly harmed the Black Bloc’s public image, it did not strengthen the impact of the People First demonstration on the G20 Summit discussions in particular or on global capitalism in general. As a rule, the political and financial elites that run the G20 show little interest in any demonstration that does not represent an actual threat to social stability.
A few progressive personalities have gone so far as to suggest that the police should move quickly to arrest members of the Black Blocs. For example, Judy Rebick, a progressive feminist intellectual in Canada, criticized the Black Blocs after the demonstrations and mass arrests during the Toronto G20. A few months earlier she had commented on the Black Bloc’s action during the demonstrations against the Olympic Games in Vancouver: “If diversity of tactics means that people who aim to commit vandalism and sometimes violence can come into the middle of a demonstration with black face masks and break up whatever takes their fancy when the vast majority of people involved don’t want them to, then I draw a line.”110 With regard to Toronto, given that the Black Bloc withdrew from the mass demonstration and dashed away in the opposite direction, one might have expected Judy Rebick to be satisfied. Instead she wrote,
I believe the cops could have arrested the Black Bloc right at the beginning of the action but they abandoned their police cars and allowed them to burn … I disagree with torching police cars and breaking windows and I have been debating these tactics for decades with people who think they accomplish something. But the bigger question here is why the police let it happen and make no mistake the police did let it happen. Why did the police let the city get out of control? … It is the police that bear the responsibility for what happened last night. They were responsible for keeping the peace and they failed to do it.111
This statement, which is ambiguous to say the least, suggests that Rebick would have preferred to see the police arrest members of the Black Bloc.
About ten years earlier, Lori Wallach, an American lobbyist and director of Global Trade Watch, which is affiliated with Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen organization, told an interviewer that on November 29, 1999, the day before the direct actions in Seattle, “anarchists” had wanted to break windows during an event where José Bové was distributing Roquefort cheese in front of a McDonald’s:
Our people actually picked up the anarchists. Because we had with us steelworkers and longshoremen who, by sheer bulk, were three or four times larger. So we had them literally just sort of, a teamster on either side, just pick up an anarchist. We’d walk him over to the cops and say this boy just broke a window. He doesn’t belong to us. We hate the WTO, so does he, maybe, but we don’t break things. Please arrest him. And the cops wouldn’t arrest anyone.112
The next day, Medea Benjamin, who heads Global Exchange, based in San Francisco, and who campaigns against the sweatshops that supply Nike, intervened to protect the windows of Nike, McDonald’s, and Gap against the “vandals.” She told the New York Times that she had wondered, “Where are the police? These anarchists should have been arrested.”113 It is more than a little troubling to see reformist spokespersons sharing this desire for discipline with politicians, police officers, and even the heads of multinationals. In September 1998, 450 of the latter signed the Geneva Business Declaration, which contained a statement that José Bové, Susan George, and other reformist leaders would not dispute: “Business is accustomed to working with trade unions, consumer organizations and other representative groups that are responsible, credible, transparent and accountable and consequently command respect. What we question is the proliferation of activist groups that do not accept these self-disciplinary criteria.”114
In her study of the demonstrations against the Summit of the Americas, Isabelle Saint-Armand has noted that the “cartoon portrait of the vandal, poles apart from that of the peaceful protester, helps to split the demonstrators on grounds of morality and legitimacy.”115 Moreover, politicians, police officials, and representatives of the state know how to express their gratitude to the leaders of progressive organizations for effectively supervising demonstrations and observing previously negotiated agreements on meeting points, starting times, and routes. Concerning the mass demonstration against the G8 Summit in Évian in June 2003, Laurent Moutinot, president of the Swiss State Council, offered bouquets as well as brickbats: “With regard to the demonstration itself, it is difficult to find fault with the organizers … They adhered to the agreements arrived at with them. But they were confronted with people who use this type of event for their own purposes. It is a phenomenon akin to the hooligans.”116
Christophe Aguiton, who was in charge of liaising between a number of militant organizations and the police during the Évian Summit, received a gift of two beautiful knives from the chief of police for having played by the rules established largely by the authorities. This little ceremony was broadcast by the media, of course, which gave the chief of police the chance to project a friendly image of the police in front of the TV cameras.
Clearly, out of an unhealthy desire to co-operate with the authorities and to be seen as reasonable and responsible, some radical and dynamic activists find themselves playing walk-on roles in a show that benefits the very authorities they claim to be opposing. In this connection, the French militant Patrice Spadoni, a former postal worker and the organizer of the Marches Against Unemployment in Europe, explains, “What frightens the powers that be is the conjunction of radicalism and mass movements.” He adds: “The powers that be seek to divide the protest movement, which has more and more support. On one hand, they want to criminalize the combative wing of the social movements. On the other, they try to integrate the most moderate wing.”117
Politicians and police officials appreciate it when protesters discipline themselves and organize their own parapolice corps in the shape of marshals. The Marche des peuples (Peoples’ March), held during the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, is exemplary in this regard. Having been informed that Black Blocs intended to join the demonstration, one of the FTQ’s union marshals declared on that organization’s communications network: “Okay, I’ll send you some muscle! We’ll deal with them in short order.”118 This soon gave rise to a series of congratulatory remarks. After the Marche des peuples, Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien said: “I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the QFL, which had its own security guards.”119 The comments made by Bernard Landry, then Premier of Quebec, display the same political bias:
The demonstration of the Peoples’ Summit was exceptionally peaceful and exemplary. I am told the labour unions’ corps of marshals fulfilled their roles very well. We know that, traditionally, the Quebec Federation of Labour and the Confederation of National Trade Unions are able to ensure order in demonstrations. They did this successfully, but it should be recalled that demonstrations can be infiltrated by vandals whose behaviour is antidemocratic and antisocial, who are not angels and deserve none of our sympathy.120
“It was organized by serious-minded people. It was impeccable,” was how Robert Poeti, spokesman for the police, expressed himself.121 But a demonstrator who had taken part in the very calm Marche des peuples vented his disappointment in an open letter. He was less enthusiastic about the organizers, who he felt had fooled him: “I played the game by participating in the peaceful demonstration … I decided to put my trust in nonviolent protest and to continue along the planned route, even though it led straight to a suburban wasteland … How naïve I was! We played the game, but we were the only ones. The media hardly mentioned our march.”122
