Two Aspects of Power: Consciousness and Physical Force

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Left: A Freedmen's school, a place of learning established by New Afrikans who had escaped the slave-system in the south of the united states. Right: a mob of euro-americans burns a Freedmen's school to the ground.

It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the social world that conceives of social relations as relations of physical force and a "cybernetic" or semiological vision which portrays them as relations of symbolic force, as relations of meaning or relations of communication. The most brutal relations of force are always simultaneously symbolic relations. And acts of submission and obedience are cognitive acts which as such involve cognitive structures, forms and categories of perception, principles of vision and division. Social agents construct the social world through cognitive structures that may be applied to all things of the world and in particular to social structures... (Pierre Bourdieu, Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field)

War in its literal meaning is fighting, for fighting alone is the efficient principle in the manifold activity which in a wide sense is called War. But fighting is a trial of strength of the moral and physical forces by means of the latter. That the moral cannot be omitted is evident of itself, for the condition of the mind has always the most decisive influence on the forces employed in War. (Clausewitz, On War)

... colonialism is a comprehensive system, operating on all social levels (economic, political, cultural), and is not a mere expression of military aggression, i.e., “violence” in physical forms.
In most cases, colonial violence in armed/physical forms is preceded by unarmed and nonphysical forms of aggression, in the guise of traders, academics, missionaries—who seek not only to lay hold of the land and labor of the peoples, but also to lay hold of their minds, their customs, and their languages. These violent actions suppress, distort, injure, frustrate, infringe, profane and unduly alter the targeted peoples and their social orders, and cripple the people’s ability to resist and to regain their independence! (James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings, p. 199)

The above passages are all getting at the dual nature of power and counterpower. Despite the differences between the authors -- a 20th century French Marxist philosopher, a 19th century German military theorist, and a leading member of the Black Liberation Army-Coordinating Committee who passed away in 2008 after spending most of his life in prison -- they are all really touching on the same thing. The fact that liberation and oppression each exist physically and on the level of consciousness.

Ignoring this duality dooms us to failure.

The above passages also parallel the distinction between a "war of position" and a "war of maneuver" made by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who was persecuted by fascists under Mussolini. The war of position being about winning over people and accumulating forces, the war of maneuver about actually attacking the enemy and seizing power.

Gramsci's ideas are often interpreted in a very conservative way, to argue that the time is not right for physical confrontation - be in in the form of a Black Bloc, a blockade, or armed attacks - because the war of position has not yet been won, i.e. because radicals do not yet enjoy enough popular support. According to this argument, the war for consciousness and social power must precede the latter physical conflict, a proposition that i am not sure is in line with Gramsci's actual thought on the matter.

But even if one holds that the "war of maneuver" should only commence once radicals enjoy popular support, this conservative interpretation ignores the fact that physical activity, including violence, constitutes a necessary part of the "war of position". Just as power exists and can coerce through both physical force and the force of people's consciousness, the process of negating oppression must proceed both on the level of physical force and on the level of consciousness.

Indeed, according to many practitioners of armed struggle, the goal of physical attacks is not to be found in the material damage done, but in the changes in consciousness that they can occasion. For instance, as the Red Army Faction put it:

The propaganda target of anti-imperialist action is the dialectical relationship between being and consciousness, because the masses’ loyalty to the system is based on their accepting its pretty exterior, its promises, and its lies. Their loyalty to the system is based on its capacity to discourage all spontaneity in its quest to completely assimilate the masses into the “the silent bondage of the relationship” (Marx), which it forces the masses to accept as if it were only natural. Anti-imperialist action rips apart the system’s facade and manipulation, along with the loyalty of the masses, and forces it to admit the truth, about which the masses say, as always, “This is not what we wanted.” (RAF, The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the struggle for Anti-Imperialist Struggle)

Although perhaps overly optimistic, this is clearly a strategy of intervening on the level of consciousness.

The dual material/symbolic nature of power is also one reason why political insurgencies can only ever be defeated politically. A military defeat will constitute a political challenge, and one that the insurgency may not be capable of overcoming, but in and of itself it cannot put an end to an insurgency. Likewise, a successful military operation will constitute a political opportunity, but one that can be bungled - bad political content or lack of follow-up can transform any military victory into a critical defeat.

Keeping in mind the dual nature of power, of oppression and liberation, is essential to our ability to decide what course of action is called for, and how best to respond to the circumstances around us.

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Fire and Flames, Black Blocs, and Militant Resistance

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On KPFA's Letters and Politics show featured an interview with Gabriel Kuhn, on the subject of the West German Autonomen, and the book Fire and Flames (which Kuhn translated into english). i have mirrored the interview here; it is well worth listening to. i found his comments on the evolution of the Black Bloc to be of particular interest, and so i have transcribed the relative passages here:

GK: The history of militant resistance is a long one; i think the particular form that the Black Bloc took on in Germany during the 1980s was determined by the conditions of political conflict at the time, the level of policing, the level to which you could take militant resistance as protest in the streets. i mean what is also interesting if you look at it, what we understand as the Black Bloc tactic has also changed in the course of the last  thirty years. Because today very often we see smaller groups that, kind of guerilla-tactic-like, move from place to place, who act quickly, who do a direct action maybe also making use of an area that at that point in time has no security forces and then you try to disappear before the security forces arrive and get to the next point where there are none. So its a kind of cat and mouse kind of thing.

Whereas in the 1980s for the Autonomist movement, it was the opposite. The Black Blocs were formed actually as a force that could confront the security forces head on. So it was a sign of showing strength in street battles, of showing the strength and the will to take on the security forces. Now there are several reasons why this has changed over the years, but as i said, i think it was a form of militant protest that was suitable to the conditions in Germany at the time.

Q: And the importance of taking on the security forces?

GK: Partly it was to demonstrate strength. State power and the security forces as the agents of State power were seen as a major factor in upholding an order than the Autonomist activists saw as problematic in many ways. So there was this symbolic aspect to it. But at times it was also very concrete. The squatting movement was big then1980s it was a very big part of the Autonomist movement. Squats were threatened by eviction and were ready to defend themselves militantly. So if you in a very concrete way demonstrated that it wasn't that easy to evict Auomomist squats because there was a militant tactic of resistance that was ready and able to take on police assaults, that of course influenced the decisions by politicians and by the people calling the shots within the police whether such an assault would be undertaken or not.

Q: Do you think tactics then over the years changed in part just because of the weaponry that police have now?

Yeah, i definitely think that is one aspect. If you look at the equipment police had in the 1980s in Germany for example compared to what they have now, also the weaponry and things that the police is allowed to do and is now allowed to do, it has become harder in many ways to have this head on confrontation because i think the differences in the resources and the use of power have become even bigger. So this is one factor i think why Black Bloc tactics have changed a little but, from this head-on confrontation to this more guerilla tactics and trying to find the right place at the right time where you can do your direct action. So this is certainly one of the reasons.

Fire and Flames:
A History of the German Autonomist Movement

The timing of Kuhn`s interview is fortuitous for this little blog, as i was just about to post the following talk that i gave earlier this week as part of the book launch that we held for Fire and Flames, at the Belle Epoque anarchist space. Here it is:

Hello everyone, and thanks for coming - we're here tonight to launch and discuss this book, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement.

This is a movement history, in two sense of the term. It is written by a guy under the pseudonym "Geronimo", a longterm Autonomist and who was involved in many of the events he describes. And it is a history of a movement, not so much of the debates and theory within it. This may even make sense, as the West German Autonomists were famously hostile to political theory, but it is also unfortunate, because there were ideas behind the tactics and campaigns described in this book. Luckily, while Geronimo does focus on actual campaigns and actions, he does also tell us about the debates and discussions that surrounded them, so it’s not as if theory is completely absent, more like it comes through incidentally rather than being at the center of our story.

Reading this book has been an educational experience, not only in terms of the subject-matter itself, but also in terms of the process of reading history. The last time i read the book prior to its publication was in February, and at that time it seemed like an incredibly inspirational but also otherworldly story, about a movement and a conflicts that far surpassed anything i had ever seen. Now, rereading the book over the past weeks since i received my box from the publisher, it is a completely different experience. The kinds of battles may be different, but the tactics, and the scale and intensity of struggle, no longer seem out of reach. In fact, reading some of the accounts of riots and resistance in Germany in the 1980s, i now find myself thinking, “Huh, we’re doing better than that.” i had never expected to feel this way. [For those out-of-towners who are not sure what i am talking about, check out this Report on Quebec's Student Strike.]

This points to the importance of this book, not just as a historical account, but as a story of battles similar to those happening today, of a movement not unrelated to the ones many of you may belong to. In other words, this book should be useful. Not in terms of tactics so much – this is not a technical how-to guide – but rather in helping to prepare comrades for the arc that struggles are likely to travel, and for the political and organizational challenges that are likely to confront us in the months ahead.

Rather than going on about how useful this book is, i’m going to briefly go over the history it covers. And then we can watch a video and have a few readings from the book, to be followed by a discussion.

OK, first off, this is a book about the German Autonomen in the 1970s and 80s. Autonomen is the German word, one could also say the “autonomists” – i tend to use both terms. There were Autonomist movements in several European countries in the 1970s, and they often varied greatly from one place to another. To understand the differences, and the specificities, you really need to look at the context in each country, both in broad terms and also in terms of the left. To do so i’m going to backtrack a bit to the 1960s.

So in Germany, or actually West Germany at the time, the sixties were a time of revolt, much as they were elsewhere in the world, a revolt that hits its high-point in the unsurprising year of 1968. This West German revolt was known as the “extraparliamentary opposition,” and as in many countries, it was centered in the universities. This initial surge met a series of challenges in 1970: splits within the movement between anti-authoritarians and Maoists, a lot of dissatisfaction among women activists due to sexism in the movement, and the election of a Social Democratic-Liberal coalition government that passed an amnesty for over 5,000 student protesters who had been arrested in the previous years, and that also passed legislation responding to many of the students demands, ushering in a period of what has been referred to as "reform euphoria".

The result was that the movement fragmented. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the Social Democrats. Of those who remained committed to more radical ideas, many found a home in various Maoist Communist parties. While in terms of numbers, this may have been the largest section of the radical left in the early 70s, it would really have no influence on the Autonomen, except as a negative example of the kind of politics they were not interested in. Meanwhile, other people remained committed to antiauthoritarian and anti-system ideas, most notably the Spontis, or spontaneists. For the Spontis, personal liberation, creativity and humour, as well as militant resistance, were all important themes. Many women formed groups and movements separate from the male left, most importantly in opposition to Paragraph 218, which criminalized abortion. There was also a tiny urban guerilla, with perhaps hundreds of people directly involved, but which had a support scene of tens of thousands, and which constituted an important political reference point.

Last but not least, about mid-way through the 1970s, there developed what was initially a very reformist anti-nuclear movement. Ironically, it was out of this movement that the Autonomen would emerge, though not immediately. Initially, various anti-nuclear protests appealed to members of all sections of the rest of the left for a variety of reasons, not least because it was “new territory” and provided a place where you could reach out to people and enjoy some popularity with so-called “ordinary folks”. Even better, pacifists and middle-class forces were unable to take complete control of the movement, which meant that it became a laboratory where different groups could try out different tactics. Militant battles with police, and attacks on nuclear plant construction sites, became a regular feature. If the older sixties-era left provided a lot of the infrastructure, what was most important was the political effect that this had on a new generation who became politicized through these protests.

As Geronimo explains, “Nonorganized activists—who would later form the bulk of the Autonomen—were an important element of the militant wing and emerged as a strong political force in their own right.” (87) and “The core principle of the nonorganized activists was “practical resistance,” by which they meant that each individual could partake in the struggle self-determinedly. For them it was crucial that the protest of the BIs was not purely rhetorical, but that practical steps were taken to meet the demands, even if this required breaking bourgeois notions of morality or the legal framework of the constitutional state. This approach was particularly popular since the decentralized character of the antinuclear movement provided a certain level of protection against state repression. It was in this context that the term “Autonome” began to signify a particular strain of activists.” (89)

So it was within the incubator of the antinuclear movement that the Autonomen developed as a potential movement. However, if they had not broken out of the confines of that one movement, it is unlikely that they would have developed the significance that they did.

In the late 1970s all the sections of the left that had emerged from the 1960s entered into crises. The Communist groups essentially imploded, largely due to the unbearable internal culture, both in terms of demands on the individual, and also in terms of authoritarian structures. The Spontis retreated into lifestyle politics, dubbed the Alternative Movement, when their militant forms of protest proved unable to cope with heavy police repression. The urban guerilla groups likewise went into crisis as they attempted to out-escalate the State on the military level, and failed. In fact the only movements that fared relatively well were the antinuclear and womens’ movements. Not coincidentally, each of these movements had developed their own understanding of the importance of “autonomy”, although the women’s movement was severely hampered by a strong pacifist wing. Also in this context, strong Autonomist movements in Italy, France, and Switzerland caught people’s attention, drawing on aspects of anarchism and anti-Leninist Marxism to make something new.

This was the context in which the West German Autonomen first appeared. In May 1980, an anti-military protest in the city of Bremen turned into a major riot, military vehicles were set on fire, cops were attacked with Molotov cocktails, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage was done. This inspired people, and was the first sign that things had broken out of the antinuclear shell.

Later on that year a militant squatters movement developed in West Berlin. Here too, it was not the sixties left that was in the lead, but young people, who had often cut their teeth in the antinuclear movement. Or, increasingly, were joining the movement for the first time. By 1981, 160 buildings were occupied, and over three thousand people were living in squats in West Berlin alone. Police attacks were often met with barricades and rioting. Beyond the actual numbers involved, the fact that West Germany was in an economic crisis with unprecedented youth unemployment, led to widespread sympathy with the squatters. The nature of the squats – where people were living collectively in illegally claimed spaces, having to organize defense against the police, but also developing physical structures out of which to base other forms of activism – all this was conducive to the politics of the Autonomen, who were clearly the political center of this movement.

At the same time, in the early 80s NATO and the united states were stationing thousands of nuclear missiles in West Germany, and so anti-war activism became a very important field of activity for the entire left. Here too, the Autonomen got involved, and were notable for their use of militant tactics during demonstrations. Notably, this is the origin of the Black Bloc. Also, this is a period when one of the urban guerilla groups, the Revolutionary Cells, succeeded in connecting to this new movement, and so you had a guerilla group that was carrying out numerous attacks – bombings and the like – as a complement to Autonomen campaigns.

Fire and Flames goes through this history, not in a seamless narrative arc, but in a series of reports on different aspects of the struggle, highlighting not only the tactics employed, but also the debates between different Autonomists groups about how best to bring the struggle forward. Very usefully, this book describes not only the high points of struggle, but also the dynamics that led to the defeat or at least neutralization of each of these forms of struggle. While repression often plays a part in defeat, repression always relies on our own weaknesses to do its work. As these weaknesses are difficult to identify beforehand, this kind of after-the-fact overview of what went wrong can be very useful in training us to see these kinds of problems while there is still time to fix them.

Of course no book is perfect, and this book in fact has some major weaknesses. George Katsiaficas, in his introduction, points out two of these. First off, as i mentioned earlier, there were Autonomist movements that emerged in a number of West European countries at this time, however Fire and Flames only really deals with the Italian movement, which in a sense is the “original Autonomist movement”. This is unfortunate. Secondly, and far more importantly, Fire and Flames ignores the women’s movement as a source for Automonist politics, and ever worse, ignores those Autonomist campaigns and debates that were centered on women’s politics and struggles. This is a really incredible omission, as according to everyone i have spoken to, women often formed the backbone of Autonomist scenes in various cities, and struggles around abortion, around sexual violence, and also around other issues – for instance war, and genetic engineering – are impossible to fully understand (or even notice) without taking women into account. Katsiaficas’s own book, The Subversion of Politics, is much better in this regard, however unfortunately it has its own problems, namely his hostility to militant resistance. So we are unfortunately left with this big gaping hole in our account.

Nevertheless, i think that this book can be helpful to us, especially in the context that presently exists here in Quebec. We are at the beginning of a political surge forward that might last for several years, and that is a wonderful thing. Checking out the lessons of others who have similarly tried to develop a culture of resistance without authoritarianism or reformism will prove well worth the effort.

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Report on Quebec's Student Strike

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Reposted from the excellent signalfire blog:

We are now in the 13th week of a Quebec student strike against a 75% tuition hike - the longest student strike in Quebec history - the conflict has become a rallying point for any and all opposition to austerity here, and clearly represents a political milestone, perhaps (we can hope) a real turning point.

The following is an incomplete overview of what has happened so far. It is not a history of the Quebec student movement, or of protest in Montreal, or even a partially complete account of this strike. It is really just an attempt to provide a sense of what has been happening for comrades outside of the province, as well as a sense of the context in which some of this resistance has been occurring.

The three main student organizations involved in this conflict, the FEUQ (Quebec Federation of University Students), FECQ (Quebec Federation of CEGEP Students - cegep is an intermediary school system between high school and university unique to Quebec), and the CLASSE. (There is also a fourth, the TaCEQ, a split from the FEUQ, but it only represents 3% of the strikers, mostly in Quebec City.) The CLASSE has the best demands of the three, it's the group where anyone on the left would likely be found - it is in fact a "temporary" structure set up to deal with the struggle against tuition hikes this winter, by a smaller group the ASSE, which is left-wing in orientation, committed to fighting for universal access (i.e., free education), and has a structure inspired by syndicalist principles of direct democracy and decentralisation. The media says that CLASSE represents almost 100,000 students, which is calculated by how many students are represented by the student associations which have voted to affiliate with it. There is a good background article (though the analysis is left-soc-dem) here: http://rabble.ca/news/2012/04/massive-student-movement-Quebec

The Parti Liberal du Quebec (Quebec Liberal Party) currently controls the Quebec government, with Jean Charest as premier. The Liberals are the most right-wing of the two main political parties in Quebec. It is also the province’s federalist party; that is to say, it opposes Quebec independence. The party is currently implicated in a variety of corruption scandals, heavy graft, etc. The key opposition party is the Parti Quebecois, which in the 1970s was social democratic in orientation, but now oscillates between right- to left-of-centre, depending on which way the wind seems to be blowing on any given issue. The PQ is pro-independence and, as such, stakes out the nationalist vote; historically, it had tight connections to the three major trade union federations, though these have diminished over the past twenty years. The caveat to this right-left characterization is that on issues having to do with racism, the Parti Quebecois is normally worse than the Liberals. There are two smaller third parties, Quebec Solidaire (which has 1 member of parliament, from Montreal’s Mercier riding in the heavily gentrified and trendy Plateau neighborhood) and the Coalition Avenir Quebec (7 MLAs). The latter is more stridently neo-liberal, pro-business, hostile to immigrants, etc., whereas the former is a left social democratic, soft nationalist party, with a sprinkling of trotskyists and others eager to pin their hopes to whatever.

Things have been escalating constantly throughout the months of March and April - daily demonstrations, militant actions of economic disruption, etc. In fact, many days have seen multiple demonstrations and actions in Montreal alone - as well as other things in other cities - and pickets at universities and cegeps.

This unparalleled student mobilization has been buttressed by unprecedented public support. For the first time ever, there have been non-student demonstrations in support of a student strike. CLASSE organised two specifically "family" demonstrations, on March 18 and April 9, with as many as 30,000 people participating, and where students were in a minority. And of course, this has been accompanied by the regular left noise; i.e., i was at two events, very different, in the first week of April - a Philippino political prisoner event, and a memorial for Madeleine Parent, a feminist and labour organizer/icon who died in March - at both, everyone was wearing the student's red square symbol, mention was made of the strike, and at Parent’s commemoration reps from the CLASSE gave the speech and got the loudest applause.
Within a context of daily protests and actions, on March 7 a student, Francis Grenier, was hit by a police stun grenade, and suffered a serious eye injury. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/Montreal/story/2012/03/08/Montreal-student-protest-eye.html). That same day there were other more minor injuries and tear gas lobbed as students gained entry to Loto Quebec's offices. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/Montreal/story/2012/03/07/student-protest-Montreal.html) This happened one week before the annual March 15 demonstration against police brutality, which police appealed to students not to join (see below). Nevertheless, this advice was ignored, it was a large March 15th (perhaps the largest ever), between four and five thousand people, with police using more stun grenades, tear gas, baton charges, etc. and making 150 arrests. (http://rabble.ca/news/2012/03/police-violence-rise-Montreal and http://Montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120315/mtl_police_brutality_march_120315/20120315/)

(For some years now this has been standard fare at large militant demonstrations in Montreal: the police violently attack in order to divide the demonstrators into a few smaller groups, which they then chase around for hours throughout the downtown core.)

Actions aimed to cause economic disruption increased throughout the month; for instance, on March 21, Montreal's Champlain Bridge (a busy connection to the south shore suburbs) was blocked during rush hour.

On March 22, there was a large demo - the largest in many years, at least since the 2003 lead-up to Iraq, perhaps even larger than those - of 200,000 people. The trade unions were involved in backing this demo. Personally, i saw very little organized left presence - i.e., no newspapers, fliers, or even banners from left groups - but it seems that this is because the march was just so big that it was possible to be there for several hours and yet not see any of them, as the CLAC (Anti-Capitalist Convergence), several anarchist groups, as well as the Maoist PCR-RCP were all there distributing literature and agit prop.

Already by this point, the strike had taken on dimensions not seen for decades. Hundreds of thousands of students were participating, and a majority of post-secondary institutions were affected.

Right-wing students opposed to the strike began going to court, asking for injunctions against the strike. Just like injunctions pertaining to labour strikes, these court orders are used to criminalize pickets, and to give police an excuse to arrest strikers.

The injunctions started arriving in late March. First, a community college in Saguenay was ordered to resume classes - the college hired security guards to enforce the court order, and students trashed the college.

Next, Laval University in Quebec City received a similar injunction on April 3. UQAM is the francophone university in Montreal where working-class people are more likely to go; it has been a center of radical activism in this city since it was founded in 1969, and not surprisingly has been the militant core of the entire strike movement. On April 4, UQAM’s administration obtained a similar court injunction.

Against these injunctions, the student unions upheld their right to strike with militant direct action (i.e., mass pickets) against the administrators, the cops and the private security guards. This is the first time this has happened since 1968, some of the best direct actions having now taken place on the picket lines (including fighting the cops to the point that they have had to retreat, on several occasions).

Indeed, the use of injunctions, while not affecting all striking students, contributed to an escalation, as strikers successfully met the challenge. As a member of Professeurs Contre la Hausse (Professors Against the Hike) warned, "This kind of judicialization may create an explosive cocktail among students, teachers and administrators." (http://www2.Canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=6519058) Indeed, if anything, the injunctions have spurred on the strikers’ direct action tactics, and the strategy of economic disruption and mass street protest that has come to define this spring. (http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/Roving+student+protesters+tackle+multiple+Montreal+targets/6442031/story.html)

On April 4, 71 people were arrested after the ritzy Queen Elizabeth Hotel was stormed; they knocked over buffet table and smashed dishes. Two security guards were apparently hurt in the melee. (http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/UQAM+gets+injunction+against+striking+Montreal+students/6409104/story.html)

On April 5 (Passover!)  locusts were released inside the University of Montreal, forcing classes to be canceled. (http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2012/04/05/19598226.html)

On Friday, April 13, students at the University of Quebec’s Outaouais campus in Gatineau received an injunction to go back to class. The next Monday, the administration had to cancel classes after students barricaded themselves inside a building. Police brutalized one student, who was hospitalized. (http://ssmu.mcgill.ca/tuitiontruth/news/crisis-at-uqo-riot-police-enforce-injunction-160-arrests/) A few days late, on April 19, there were 151 arrests at the Outaouais campus, as students defied the injunction for the fourth day in a row; crickets were also released into this university's library and walls got some red paint. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/ottawa/story/2012/04/19/gatineau-protest-Montreal-students-bus-to-join-arrests.html) More police brutality, some of it getting noticed, especially as one kid was photographed with blood pouring down his face.

On April 16, police would claim people shut down the Montreal subway system by throwing bags of bricks on the tracks. Police also claimed that molotov cocktails were left outside of a residential building which people incorrectly thought housed government offices. That same evening, several government buildings had their windows smashed, red paint thrown on them, and molotov cocktails found outside of them, unexploded. One can make of these claims what one will - people do make mistakes, people do sometimes make bad choices as to targets; but police also do plant "evidence" to discredit our side, both on their own initiative and as the result of orders from on high. Many comrades, not usually prone to conspiracy theories, feel that this string of events, especially so many molotov cocktails that all happened not to explode, was very fishy.

All the more so as the government moved in very quickly to make political hay from this, now framing its refusal to negotiate with CLASSE in terms of the latter not having denounced violence, even though there was no evidence tying them to these attacks. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/Canada/Montreal/story/2012/04/16/Montreal-vandalism-student-movement.html) In a show of unity, neither the FECQ or FEUQ agreed to negotiations unless the CLASSE was included - this was historic, nothing like it having ever happened before. Indeed, FEUQ lost thousands of members in 2005 because they broke solidarity with ASSE to accept a shitty deal. This time around, they made the political choice to stand solid with CLASSE, not so much because of some newly discovered political principles, but because they realised they would be completely gutted from the inside if they repeated that mistake.

If the solidarity with CLASSE represented a political breakthrough within the student movement, a breakthrough on the streets occurred in late April, as the government was hosting a big to-do about the Plan Nord, a massive development plan in Quebec's north, where the population is mainly Indigenous (Cree, Inuit and Innu). Plan Nord promises to be a version of northern development in the tradition of the James Bay hydro dams, i.e., some people will oppose it on anti-colonial grounds, some on environmental, and then eventually some on colonial capitalist and nationalist grounds, based on the argument that "our" resources being sold too cheaply to foreign corporations.

There were demonstrations against Plan Nord on April 20 and 21, much of the mobilization for this being done by anti-colonial forces, green and insurrectionary anarchists, who were reinforced by student protesters. People got into the conference center and cops at one point were sent running. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=83SLtpBiJjg) As one comrade explains, "The first day was actually a momentous event, in that we started fighting back for real, fear had disappeared and we managed to kick some serious pig ass on that day. Also solidarity was felt in the street fighting to a level never seen before."

Although the people who had gotten into the conference center were violently ejected by police, a victory had been won. After the premier gave his speech, the conference was delayed and the job fair that had been organized as window dressing was canceled for the day - and even this speech, an attempt at damage control, backfired, as Charest tried to joke that the protesters were welcome, after all, he would give them a "job in the north" (i.e., in his massive colonial ecocidal development project). Suddenly mainstream commentators started wondering if Charest himself might be to blame for the escalating tension on the streets; ever since, one of the most popular chants at demos has been, "Charest, dehors! on va te trouver un job dans le nord!" (Charest, get out! We’re going to find you a job in the north!)

This registered as a big step forward for the radical left, and a real black eye for the Liberals, with less than two dozen arrests on the Friday. Demonstrations continued on the next day, however not as aggressively, which led police to take advantage of the change in tone by making several dozen arrests, ostensibly to prove that they had "regained control" and to make up for the humiliating youtube videos showing them running away from protesters.

Sunday April 22 was Earth Day, which turned out to be the second demonstration of more than 200,000 people in Montreal this spring. Earth Day this year had become a place for all kinds of people on the left and all the various "causes" to gather, with everyone wearing red squares, the symbol of the student strike. The event has since been incorporated into the narrative of a "Quebec Spring" or "Maple Spring" that has emerged, of a spring of struggle that goes far beyond the issue of a tuition hike.

Also on Sunday, April 22, the FECQ passed a resolution that it would negotiate if the CLASSE did not renounce violence, as it claimed this would amount to the CLASSE "excluding itself". At the same time, the FEUQ offered to allow CLASSE reps to join the discussions as FEUQ reps, with the understanding that once there they would speak for the CLASSE. Later that day, after a lengthy assembly, CLASSE adopted a resolution to condemn violence targeting people except in self-defense. The wording was obviously the result of a compromise between different political tendencies, and specifically did not denounce property attacks, fiercely defended civil disobedience and direct action, and framed things in terms of the greater violence being economic violence, and the violence of the police.

These first negotiations started Monday, April 23, with the Minister trying to impose a 48-hour "truce" while they were going on, meaning no actions of economic disruption, interpreted by her to include demonstrations of any kind. While CLASSE did not technically agree to this truce (to do so would have required a general assembly), spokespeople did state that they could go along with it as they had not planned any disruptive action within that time frame. This was somewhat disingenuous, as a night-time demonstration had in fact been planned, and members of the CLASSE executive now tried to use bogus reasons to have it moved to the Wednesday.

Defying this move, hundreds of people gathered regardless on the evening of Tuesday, April 24. This first night-time demonstration was organized largely by students at CEGEP du Vieux Montreal, a working-class CEGEP which has one of the most hardcore student unions, affiliated with CLASSE. It was clearly framed as a rejection of any truce, and the point was made that when CLASSE started making deals about how people were allowed to protest/resist, it was no longer representing the protesters. While newspapers talked of "dozens", roughly 500 people attended, with some property damage, including a bank window smashed.

Wednesday morning there were allegedly smoke bombs set off in the Montreal subway system, while students joined with laid off Air Canada workers to block the street outside an Air Canada shareholders' meeting. Despite attempts by union reps to have only their people speak, rank and file workers insisted on taking the microphone and then passing it to student reps. Around lunchtime Minister Beauchamp announced she would no longer negotiate with CLASSE because the truce had been violated, amongst other things by these latest occurrences and the demo the night before. FECQ and FEUQ left the negotiations in protest. That same day, three high schools voted to go on a three-day strike. At the same time, the call went out for another demonstration that night.

Roughly 10,000 people showed up Wednesday night, and the demonstration got off to a good and militant start, with extensive attacks on property: all the banks on the route had their windows smashed, the Apple store and other establishments received red paint - the police would say a car was set on fire, though that has yet to be confirmed. For their part, the police attacked people with stun grenades, pepper spray, and beatings, making over 80 arrests. (Later on, police station 21 had its windows broken.) Some good video footage: https://vimeo.com/41177705

Thursday night there was a third demo, again with thousands of people attending. There were fewer arrests and vandalism than on the previous night. At this point, it became clear that there would be night-time demos every night until the Minister returned to negotiations.

Friday (April 27) was the fourth night time demo. This time i decided to attend, and i was both surprised, heartened, and disappointed by what i saw. I’ll go into some detail here, not because this was a particularly important demonstration, but because it was one where i was there so i can give a bit more detail.

For one, it was not a warm night - just under zero (celsius), with occasional very light snow. Thousands definitely did show up when it started at 8pm, perhaps as many as ten thousand at first. It felt very unleft, which i mean in a good way, meaning just that it was not the left activist crowd i am used to hanging with, or who i normally see at demos. Obviously a lot of young people, but i definitely was not the oldest. Getting a slice of pizza before it started, a Black guy in line in front of me said, "It's going to be a thousand white kids against two thousand cops, crazy!" - i asked if he had gone to any of the other demos and he said he wasn't into that bullshit. Then i bumped into a woman i have known for years, a veteran of decades of various kinds of social justice/peace activism, who explained to me she had come to tell the students "how it's done" - by which she meant nonviolently. I didn't know what to expect.

The crowd was overwhelmingly white and francophone. Essentially, this was a Quebecois event. Which makes sense, as the entire official class-oriented apparatus in Quebec is Quebecois, from the trade unions to the student unions to the antipoverty groups. This strike is "historic" amongst other reasons, because the English universities and cegeps have not voted to participate in a strike in decades (or ever, depending on who you talk to) - yet even in this strike, the English universities have no solid pickets, and as a result many classes continue pretty much as usual. All a reflection of the fact that social democratic politics in this society is Quebecois. Plenty of exceptions, but that's what they are: exceptions.

Given that, the April 27 demo had relatively non-existent visible nationalist politics (2-3 flags or signs), though some of the chants ("Whose Quebec? Our Quebec!") could be understood that way. The complexion of the march was largely middle class, but the politics were of class struggle from below, i.e., the bulk of people there experience the tuition hikes as part of a process pushing them out of the middle class, endangering "their future", whereas the political core (and thus the people formulating the slogans, etc.) have a clearly left-wing perspective and frame things in terms of working class struggle.

This is not an unusual situation in the First World, especially in North America - the pitfalls are fairly well-known, even if the way to deal with these remains elusive. As such, in the future this is likely to split, along much the same lines as the Occupy movement and other swells in protest in North America. So long as we remain in this stage of the capitalist crisis, most people politically affected by such protests will initially end up lining up behind some kind of progressive, soft-nationalist social democracy, while a minority will be won to radical left positions. As international capitalism is pushing sections of the middle class (including the labour aristocracy) downwards, it is important to also recognize that a minority will develop a radical resistance that may oppose this, but along exclusionary and authoritarian - even fascist - lines. (Here, as in the United States and English Canada, we see signs of the potential for this in the attraction to conspiracy theories and exclusionary nationalist solutions.) The task at hand for our side within these metropolitan societies is to intervene politically from an anticapitalist, anticolonial, and internationalist perspective in order to increase the numbers who will take option #2, though we should not have any illusions about that ever being more than a minority.

In this regard i was shocked at how little - as in zero - organized left presence there was at this demo. Nobody handing out newspapers. Nobody with fliers for upcoming events. No groups with banners. Nothing, nada, zilch. This is an example of the fact that, while the radical left has been present at these events, it’s capacity to do outreach has at times been outstripped by the size of the upsurge taking place, by the sheer number of protests, as well as the number of people who attend them.

Despite - or perhaps because of - such a lack of organized left presence, at first it felt like a really big militant march, snaking through the city. It felt a lot more disappointing after the first half-hour, when police blocked an intersection (Ontario and St-Laurent) and would not let us pass. Someone had been arrested, and 20-30 cops, not rigged out in super-heavy riot gear or anything, were standing against 10,000 people, maybe 200-300 of whom were masked (though not a black bloc as such) and looking like in theory they'd have been in favor of rumbling - yet the arrested comrade was never rescued, and it took 20 minutes to even get the cops to move and let us pass. Worse, the main chant at that point was "We are staying peaceful!" Very bad.

As the demo snaked on, this happened a few times, and by 11pm it was a little smaller, but still many thousands. The cops then announced it had turned into an "illegal assembly" and had to disband, but this had no effect. Between 11pm and midnight there were a few more standoffs, increasingly tense, a bit of pepper spray, some kind of flashy thing shot into the air, and a few arrests. Although there was no black bloc, someone blocked up did throw a stone through the window of an army recruiting center - they were actually physically attacked by "pacifists"; although you can't see it all, you can see some here: http://www.cyberpresse.ca/actualites/dossiers/conflit-etudiant/201204/27/01-4519835-une-marche-pacifique-malgre-la-tension.php. I also heard that people applauded when police made arrests, of which there were 34 in all that night. Although the media described these as the result of police making "surgical strikes", what this really amounted to was retaliatory and often random arrests; i.e., see this youtube video showing a group of kids under arrest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiib7CVafw0

On the other hand, i did not see anyone intervene when the small unlucky contingent of cops who were assigned to accompany the demo had (empty plastic lightweight) bottles and marbles thrown at them. And i did notice that as the demo got smaller the "We are staying peaceful" chant was overtaken by "We are staying in one group", meaning physically tight.  Cool tankie chant of the night: "Charest, sans blague - on t’envoie au gulag!" ("Charest, we're not joking - we're going to send you to the gulag!")

I left the demo at 1am; there were still thousands of people, but i was tired and wanted to get the last bus home. The next morning's headlines were all about how the demo policed itself and was anti-vandalism. What several comrades have pointed out to me is that during the month of March and April things were escalating in the streets, but that many students who were not in the streets every day were experiencing this filtered through the media. When CLASSE was kicked out of negotiations, this led to thousands of people joining the nightly demonstrations and turning them into the main form of protest; however, when these thousands of people saw folks carrying out militant actions, they reacted based on their own understanding of "good students vs. bad vandals" that had been constructed in the media. So it is not that the protests turned against people carrying out more militant actions, so much as that they were swollen by thousands of new people who did not grasp the dynamic of what had happened before. (For mainstream media on the overall relationship of black bloc and student strike: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/05/04/graeme-hamilton-hard-to-claim-Montreal-violence-isnt-tied-into-wider-protest-movement/ and for a sympathetic explanation which appeared in the mainstream media but was written by a comrade: http://rougesquad.org/en/content/black-bloc-and-red-square)

In any case, talk of the black bloc,and militant tactics being marginalized, while puffed up by the media and social democrats, proved to be premature.

While nightly demonstrations did continue, albeit with far fewer militant actions and arrests, the next major confrontation occurred on May first, at the annual anticapitalist demonstration.

Unlike English Canada and the United States, where Mayday is mainly a radical left thing, in Quebec it is the main labour march, with trade unions, politicians, etc. jumping on board. Tens of thousands of people, sometimes more, take to the streets in Montreal.

In the 1990s, there developed a situation whereby younger anarchists were often getting vamped on by trade union security marshals, frequently because they would be chanting anti-nationalist slogans or else acting militant. This was both bad politics on the part of the unions, and also a bit of a generation gap - i remember hearing a security marshal at the first demo where this happened, he was panicked talking into his walkie talkie about how "nazi skinheads" had invaded the march - it was in fact a very disorganized proto-black-bloc of anarchist teenagers. This split with the trade unions was deepened every year, in part by the security marshals being heavy handed - especially those from the FTQ (the Quebec Labour Federation), the least progressive of the three main trade union federations. With the rise in Maoism that culminated in the official formation of the PCR-RCP in 2007, Maoists became even more visibly present in the mix. (Prior to 2007, this group had been known as the PCR(OC); it had been founded in 2001 out of the group Groupe Action Socialiste.)

A few years ago, this process culminated in a decision on the part of a coalition of anarchists, Maoists and others to organize a separate march with an explicit anticapitalist basis of unity. The demo took place in Hochelaga, a heavily Quebecois neighborhood, one of the poorest in Montreal - and also the site of years of class-oriented organizing and activism by anarchists, Maoists, and other communists. The straw that had broken the proverbial camel’s back had occurred the year previous, when comrades who had occupied the office of then-FTQ president Henri Masse to protest against union corporatism were violently ejected - i.e., kicked, hair pulled, etc. - by union goons. (See pages 3 and 11: http://www.clac-Montreal.net/sites/default/files/coup_pour_coup_web.pdf ) As one comrade explains, "We split from labour to organize the anticapitalist demo because they are just too pathetic and sold out in general, and extremely fucking pathetic when it comes to anticapitalism and acknowledging the radical history of May Day."

As a result, since 2008, every May 1st there have been two marches, a trade union march and a militant anticapitalist march; while at first the trade union march was by far the largest of the two, for the past couple of years they have been roughly the same size. The Anticapitalist May 1st has been another place where militant street tactics have developed; the demos have routinely been attacked by police - in 2008, boneheads seemed to be a part of a setup - and people have been hurt and have received heavy charges.
In 2011, some police were roughed up - while some suspect this was a setup, it could have also just been pure stupidity, as some relatively unprotected cops felt they could enter the march and make arrests without anyone resisting - leading to a several-month covert investigation of the PCR-RCP, following which some people’s homes were raided and three comrades were arrested. It was initially reported that these arrests were carried out by the anti-gang squad, but it soon came out that the organized crime division had established a red squad (or maybe a black-and-red squad?) over the past year, named the GAMMA (Guet des activites et des mouvements marginaux et anarchistes - clunky literal translation:  "Surveillance of Activities of Marginal and Anarchist Movements") - in order to respond to the increasing militancy of local anticapitalist demonstrations.  The GAMMA agents were accompanied by someone from the integrated national security unit, and amongst the subjects the comrades were questioned about was a bombing of a recruitment center in Trois Rivières (a city about two hours from Montreal) in 2010 just after the G20 in Toronto.

On 2012’s Mayday, the anticapitalist demo was clearly larger than the trade union march - several thousand people. In fact, the trade union march was hardly even mentioned in the media. The tone was set before it even started, as police vamped on a Maoist comrade (who was arrested as part of last year's GAMMA investigation) on the grounds that he was breaking his conditions.

Nevertheless, the demo started peacefully enough, however within an hour street fighting had broken out between the black bloc and police. The demo was declared an "illegal assembly", and soon after the cops got pelted with some rocks, a massive police charge broke it apart. In fact, as we wandered the streets, we assumed it was over, although isolated standoffs between people and police, and tear gas and stun grenades going off, made the downtown area seem surreal. We trekked along for about a half an hour before, by accident, coming across the remnants of the demo, several hundred people, at Carre St-Louis. More marching through the streets, anti-police chants, etc., ,ending at Place Emilie Gamelin, with some more tussles with police, a few more arrests, and then finally many of those who remained joined with that night’s student demonstration. In all, there were 108 arrests at the Mayday march. Sympathetic left report here: http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/what-really-happened-montr%C3%A9al-may-day-protest/10727 and video footage here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhQv-dDdHf4

Throughout this period of escalation, which started in March and has still not necessarily ended, a dynamic relationship has been created between one protest and the next. The people in the streets have been creating momentum, and a political crisis that the government has found itself unable to manage or reverse so far.

This is the context in which the Liberal Party was scheduled to hold its party conference in Montreal between May 4 and 6. This is where they were to decide upon their platform for the elections that will have to happen later this year. Due to the protests that have rocked the city every day, the week before it was to take place, it was announced that it would instead be moved to the town of Victoriaville, a couple of hours away.

The  anti-cutback Coalition opposee a la tarification et a la privatisation des services publics, as well as a variety of student associations quickly organized buses to bring the fight to them. Which is what happened. Between two and three thousand people traveled to Victoriaville.  Demonstrators quickly knocked over the police barricades, but then simply gathered in front of the line of police and listened to speeches. The police attacked the demonstration just ten minutes later, shooting tear gas and hitting people. As one comrade recalls, "I was shot point blank with an impact projectile (pepper powder) and they started to launch CS grenades at the same time; then all hell broke loose." Some people resisted, throwing things back at the police, who had begun firing stun grenades and plastic bullets. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A_6QnK1w1i4

During this initial attack, three demonstrators were badly injured by police projectiles; initially it was reported that one was at risk of dying, though this is fortunately no longer the case. Two men suffered severe head injuries; in one case, requiring 8 hours of surgery, and resulting in the loss of an eye. As police were firing various "sublethal" weapons at people’s heads, the most likely hypothesis at this point is that he was hit on the side of the head with a tear gas canister, as these explode upon impact, and his ear was sliced open. A woman also lost several teeth as she was hit in the face by a police projectile. There were also countless people who received leg injuries from plastic bullets.

In the case of one of the seriously injured, Alexandre Allard, there are several eyewitness reports of what happened, including video footage from CUTV (the Concordia campus television station, which has been providing live coverage of many of the Montreal protests). Police, when informed that someone was injured and possibly dying, refused to phone an ambulance. Demonstrators phoned for one, while street medics - many of whom belong to a group formed out of the nurses’ union, who have attended several of these protests in uniform - attempted to provide first aid. (Given the severity of his injuries, this likely proved critical.) Police continued to lob tear gas, and as people began to run, demonstrators had to form a human chain to protect Allard from being trampled. As police continued with the tear gas and moved in, people then had to move Allard, not once but twice, in order to protect him. Finally, as people cleared a path for the ambulance (which took over twenty minutes), police took advantage of the gap in the crowd to make another assault. Video footage of all of this here: http://cutvMontreal.ca/videos/1132 and a story in the Gazette, Montreal’s English-language mainstream newspaper: http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/never+seen+police+like+this/6582164/story.html

The fighting continued for hours; there is heartening video footage of one cowboy cop jumping on a demonstrator to arrest him, only to receive a beating from other protesters. The cop was sent running, the demonstrator got to go home that night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1MZMx7eN9w

Nevertheless, there were over 100 arrests, many of which occurred when people were already on their way back to Montreal. Three buses were intercepted by the police: as one comrade later wrote, "we were forced to sit throughout the night - over ten hours - as police processed passengers in the station and armed guards stood watch on a bus transformed into a jail." (http://Montreal.mediacoop.ca/story/riot-police-turn-bus-jail-cell-victoriaville/10800) While this does point to a vulnerability in terms of travel logistics, it also indicates police were unable (or perhaps not trying to?) to get that many people during the demonstrations/riots themselves, and were instead taking advantage of these easy pickings for the sake of PR.

A first person accont: http://Montreal.openfile.ca/Montreal/text/first-person-account-victoriaville-protest-descends-violence

More media coverage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTQZ60AZ2pQ

On Friday night, in the wake of the riots, all three student federations, including the CLASSE, appealed for people to be calm. The three student federations had entered into marathon negotiations with the Minister on Friday: it would have been a media coup for the government to be able to come up with a settlement during the party conference, and so everything was likely timed this way on purpose - i.e., refuse to negotiate until right before the conference, then hold negotiations with an eye to getting some kind of resolution to put wind in the Liberals' sails for the next election.

Indeed, less than 24 hours later, after almost three months of the students being on strike, on Saturday, May 5, there was word that an "agreement", or at least a "tangible offer", had been agreed to or drafted or something (vagueness ruled!), between the three student federations and the government. Reports are making it clear that this came from heavy pressure from the trade unions, especially the FTQ, which had people at the talks, and which threatened the student reps that they would withdraw their support if there was not an agreement reached. (http://www.lapresse.ca/debats/chroniques/yves-boisvert/201205/06/01-4522604-la-contribution-syndicale.php)

Essentially what the "proposal" boils down to would be that the tuition hike would still happen, but would be balanced in the upcoming semester by an equivalent reduction in institutional fees, so the way it was being presented by the government was that the actual amount paid would stay the same. This has been denounced as a farce, as it would mean the hike would still happen but would in effect be paid for in the form of cuts to student services. While there may be a lot of waste (i.e., perks to administrators and such), the places to make these cuts would be decided by a committee comprised of 4 student reps, 4 reps from the trade unions, and 11 reps from school administrators, government, etc. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that even if the cut to institutional fees matches the tuition hike in the first year, that it would do so next year or the year after. This view has been buttressed by Minister Beauchamp's making public statements over the weekend about how the government has won, has not given in, etc., which may prove to be an error on their part, as the agreement has not been ratified (as of May 8) by any of the still-striking student associations, and the latest media reports have student reps saying they doubt it will pass.

(Francis Grenier, the guy who lost his eye to police in March, had this on his facebook status: "For myself and many other of those injured in the student conflict, the strike of 2012 is never going to be over with, so we cannot be content with so little"; for a good left response to the offer: http://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.ca/2012/05/mouvement-etudiant-cette-entente-est.html )

At the same time, in the wake of the months of increasingly militant protest here, the State is responding, and not just with violence on the streets.

On May 7, it was announced that CSIS - the internal spy agency, unlike the FBI, but like the German Verfassungschutz, unable to make arrests but with a focus on infiltration/surveillance - has begun investigating the Union Communiste Libertaire (anarchists), the PCR-RCP (Maoists), the CLAC (Anti-Capitalist Convergence, mainly anarchists but also some others), and the RRQ (Quebecois Resistance Network, nationalist) and their activities in the riots. (http://tvanouvelles.ca/lcn/infos/national/archives/2012/05/20120506-183028.html)

That same day, referring specifically to events in Quebec, a (federal) private member’s bill was drafted to criminalize the wearing of masks at riots or "unlawful assemblies", with jail time of up to five years - given that the Conservatives have a majority in the federal parliament, it would be difficult, and would require a militant extraparliamentary struggle, to stop this from passing. Such a law will apply Canada-wide. (http://www.680news.com/news/national/article/359688--conservatives-back-private-members-bill-targeting-masked-protesters). (It should be noted that all it takes for a demonstration to become an "unlawful assembly" is for the police to say it is one; i have been at dozens such "unlawful assemblies", often the police make the call right at the beginning and then attack. One gain of the past few years is that demos are sometimes able to withstand this attack, and indeed during the strike many such "illegal assembles" have proceeded, with the police not feeling sure enough of their position to make a move.)

This was followed, on May 7, by Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay announcing that a series of bylaws will be passed to counter the rise in militant protest. Organizers will have to tell police the route of their demonstration beforehand, or else the demonstration will be automatically classified as an "illegal gathering". Wearing a mask at any demonstration, whether it has been declared an "illegal assembly" or not, will likewise be criminalized; however police will be given wide latitude to decide how to apply these rules, as the mayor has indicated he only wants demonstrations "that are likely to get out of hand" to be targeted. What’s more, fines for being present at such illegal gatherings are to dramatically increase, to $500-$1000 for a first offense up to $3000 for repeat offenders. (No crime need have been committed, simply being at the scene will be enough - there are literally thousands of cases of people who have been swept up by police in this context simply for having been walking down the street at a time when a protest is being kettled or smashed.) (http://www.Montrealgazette.com/news/Montreal+masked+demonstrators/6580627/story.html)

Repression is both predictable and inevitable when we go on the offensive, and as such these legislative moves are the logical result of the escalation that has taken place over the past months. That said, it always remains an open question whether repression will end a cycle of struggle, or fan the flames - in and of itself, all it does is confront people with a choice to either push ahead further still, or else back down. Backing down always leads to demoralization, the fragmentation and scattering of our forces, and in the long term plays into the rise of exclusionary and right-wing forces, not only pro-State, but also (and separately) pro-fascist. At the same time, escalation comes with its own risks too, for every step on our part will be matched by steps taken by our opponents. Historically, there are no long-term blueprints for success (that’s why we’re still stuck with capitalism), though in the medium-term maintaining political focus while extending the scope of the struggle, both geographically and in terms of the issues mobilized around, seems the best way of keeping one step ahead of the State.

When i saw the youtube footage of kids chasing cops outside the Plan Nord conference, throwing sticks and stones at them, i was elated. On a gut level i felt "they don't know that they're supposed to be afraid to do that" - my kind of activism, and most people i've known who have been activists for a long time, would not have tried that, because it looked tactically unwise, and likely to lead to arrest. So, at first blush, it could look like a strength of spontaneous radicalism. Indeed, i can think of other examples where something tactically unwise that people with more experience would "know" could not work has not only worked, but became an element in a breakthrough. I think what we accumulate as mental baggage may always seem to us subjectively to be "knowledge" and "experience" and "good", but in actual fact we may be learning wrong lessons, or the lessons someone else wants us to. In which case, outside repression is not even necessary.

However, my initial reaction was simplistic, and inaccurate. The militant street tactics here have not appeared sui generis. For one, i know many people who were there, and they are people who have been active for years. There were also people who have been active but part of a younger crowd, who have eschewed the demo-etiquette that developed over the past ten years here, and have been consciously developing a more militant praxis in Montreal for a couple of years now. But even they have been doing this on the basis of ideas and debates that existed prior to April 20.

For ten years now, the ASSE has been doing groundwork on campuses across Quebec, providing a radical reference point for students, and developing an analysis that is militant, feminist, and clearly anticapitalist. Over the past three years in particular, there have been repeated blockades, occupations, and the like carried out by students working in coalitions with community groups and even trade unions. Many activists got their training, as it were, at these actions.

More broadly, anarchists, Maoists and others in Montreal have nurtured specific experiments in militant street protests for over a decade now. The oldest such "tradition" is the International Day Against Police Brutality, organized by COBP (which came out of repression against the anti-HLI protests in 1995) on March 15, which has been going on since 1996, and which routinely involves vandalism, some street fighting (or at least violent arrests by police), and an organizing collective which refuses to condemn this or to give the police their demo route in advance. This year police publicly appealed to students to not join the COBP march; this advice was ignored by many, thousands showed up, and there were heavy police attacks, a cop car was flipped, etc. (The week before, Grenier had almost lost his eye due to a police stun grenade, which helped set the tone.) And even March 15 built upon militant tactics developed in the struggle against the first round of neoliberal cutbacks, the Axworthy reform in the early 90s, and a series of militant antifascist mobilizations later in that decade.

Although not annual events, all of this has also existed in a positive feedback loop with occasional summit-style events, such as Quebec City Summit of Americas in 2001, the WTO Montreal mini-summit in July 2003, the Montebello meeting between Bush, Calderon, and Harper in 2007, and the Toronto G8/G20 two years ago.

Similarly, persons unknown have engaged in sporadic acts of protest of a less open nature - police cars have occasionally been torched, etc.. Nothing incredibly big, but enough to have an effect on the consciousness of people who self-identify as activists.

All of which is to say, my initial somewhat romanticized notion of "these are kids who are avoiding the errors of the activist scene" was just that, a romanticized and incorrect notion. What is happening is more complex, and i have no way of measuring it objectively, but it builds upon previous experiments in militancy, is fueled by the spontaneous and fresh wave of protest from people who feel they are being pushed out of the middle class, and occurs in a global context defined by the Arab Spring of 2011, the Occupy phenomenon, and resistance in Greece, Spain, and elsewhere.

It is the best thing i have seen in Quebec in a long time, and the biggest thing of its kind i remember ever seeing here. I say that aware of the much heavier, and more important, Oka standoff in 1990 - but the difference is that at that time the mass mobilizations in Montreal and the suburbs were of a racist, even pro-fascist, nature - this time around, for the moment, it feels like an offensive rather than a rearguard engagement.

And things are far from over, the above is just an overview of what's happened so far. Definitely incomplete, but hopefully useful for some of you.

For more information in English:

• Rouge Squad Tactical Translation Team: http://rougesquad.org/
• CLASSE: http://www.stopthehike.ca/
• CLAC Montreal: http://www.clac-montreal.net/en
• Sabotage Media: http://www.sabotagemedia.anarkhia.org/category/english/
• Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR-RCP): http://pcr-rcp.ca/en/

And on Facebook, News from the 2012 Quebec student general strike: https://www.facebook.com/pages/News-from-the-2012-Quebec-student-general-strike/332377376800387

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Paint Bombs in Quebec Student Strike

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From the pro-police media:

Vandals armed with suspected Molotov cocktails and red paint hit several buildings in Montreal overnight, in an hour-long spree that left windows damaged and buildings defaced.

Montreal police say there were at least four attempted firebomb attacks at buildings containing provincial government offices after 3 a.m. ET Monday.

The buildings hit include:

750 Marcel-Laurin Bvld.
3269 Saint-Jacques Blvd.
7077 Beaubien St. E.
7171 Beaubien St. E.
"Once police arrived on scene, they found bottles [containing] liquid," said Montreal police Const. Yannick Ouimet, adding that the bottles were tossed through smashed windows.

Police haven't confirmed what was inside the bottles, but they believe they were meant to be incendiary devices.

None of them ignited, however, and no one was hurt.

At some of the scenes, police found red squares painted on buildings or sidewalks. The red square has become the symbol of the student movement opposing the province's tuition hikes.

Two weeks ago, a similar attack coated the Montreal offices of Quebec's Education Ministry in red paint.

Wrong building likely hit
Police believe that one of Monday's attacks, on a building at 7171 Beaubien, was made in error since it was on an apartment building.

The building "had nothing to do with the Quebec government," Ouimet said. Police believe the vandals realized their error and moved down the street a short time later, where they hit the office of Quebec Labour Minister Lise Thériault.

A fifth attack was also reported at 5456 Côte-des-Neiges Rd., but it involved only paint. No incendiary device was found.

Police are still investigating and haven't identified any suspects.

The attacks come one day after Quebec Education Minister Line Beauchamp said she's ready to discuss university governance with student groups opposed to the planned tuition hikes.

Many of the province's post-secondary students have been on strike for more than two months in protest of a tuition increase that will see them paying $1,625 more in fees over five years.

Students have been staging near-daily demonstrations in Montreal and across the province since March.

Beauchamp said at a news conference Sunday she is ready to meet with students to discuss the creation of an independent committee to oversee university spending.

But tuition increases, scheduled to take effect in September, aren't up for discussion, Beauchamp said.

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Can't Stop the Kaos: A Brief History of the Black Bloc

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Excellent news, comrades - at a time when inquiring minds want to know, the folks at Autonomous Resistance have delivered the goods, producing this snappy little pamphlet history of the Black Bloc in europe and north amerika.

You can download Can't Stop the Kaos from their site, or mirrored here.

Read. Discuss. Apply.

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Black Bloc Action in Guelph

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Guelph comrades stand in solidarity with the Black Block...

Personally, i feel kind of unconditionally that the Black Block's activities in Toronto recently were legitimate, regardless of follow up. But in terms of political efficacy, in terms of being "successful" or not, all our activities are vindicated (or not) based on what we and others do next. How we exploit the opening for discussions, conversations, arguments. Burning cop cars are good in and of themselves, but they are truly great when they're a part of a long-term dynamic that entices people to break with the system.

As part of that process, these comrades have made a nice contribution:

(from Toronto Media Co-op)

Militant Black Bloc Action in Guelph.

by Sense of Security

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday July 22, 2010
Guelph, Ontario

MILITANT BLACK BLOC ACTION IN DOWNTOWN GUELPH

Despite the current climate of fear tactics, arrests and police intimidation, a group of people in support of those arrested for Black Bloc related charges engaged in direct action which demonstrated the radical spirit of the Black Bloc: handing out sandwiches.

Two people with bandannas covering their faces and clothed in black held a black banner with colorful letters reading “Solidarity Means a Snack” while a number of others, similarly dressed, gave out free food to local downtown residents and bystanders, many of whom stopped to talk and discuss the issues raised by the G20 protests and subsequent crackdowns on activists.

Members of Guelph’s Sense of Security (SOS), a grassroots community organization that provides food, shelter and advocacy for people in need chose to stand in support of the G20 political prisoners in spite of the ongoing repression. “This is a militant Black Bloc action, and we are here in support of people arrested for Black Bloc related charges during the G20. We’re doing this today to show that people who confronted capitalism in the streets are doing it day in and day out in their local communities: serving food, doing needle exchanges, doing harm reduction programs, outreach, advocating, providing food and shelter.”

Far from being a public relations stunt or an attempt to polish their image, they were happy to explain the political reasons behind their actions: “We’re not here saying ‘this is what the Black Bloc should be doing. The point is that this is what the Black Bloc does. The idea that what happened on the 26th was random or non-political is inaccurate bullshit. The word ‘radical’ comes from the Latin ‘radix’, which means ‘root’, and the heart of the Black Bloc is going to the root of what causes poverty: colonialism and capitalism. What people saw during the G20 happens every day on our streets to poor people, people of color, indigenous people, any marginalized community: the reality is that the intent of the so-called ‘justice system’ has nothing to do with justice, that the police don’t serve the people, they brutalize, violate and terrorize with impunity. So, really, who are the real ‘criminal extremists’ here?”

Talking with community members, the SOS and allies found that the majority of people who came up to chat with them were not intimidated by their anonymity. Several related stories of experiences in their home countries and expressed their lost faith in having immigrated to a “free” country, only to find the same old repressive state violence in action. Meanwhile, a heavy police presence was maintained and all downtown public transit was re-routed outside of the streets where the action was taking place, despite the fact that the Guelph SOS serves food on a regular basis in the square, and that no confrontations took place.
In the words of one woman, her face hidden by a pink and black bandanna: “Police violence, criminalizing political and social movements, these aren’t novelties that just magically appeared on June 24th-27th and then disappeared. This is street level reality and it happens every day. And every day, people who believe another world is possible are working, organizing, dreaming and fighting in a diversity of ways to cultivate those movements.”

Their faces may be hidden, but the message is clear: if the billions of dollars wasted during the G20 were intended to scapegoat us into fearful silence, then every cent was a drop in a sea of total failure.

Sandwiches, anyone?

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G20 Theories, Debates, and Slander: Sorting the Mess

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Our strategy as anti-capitalists should be to retain and reinforce our differences from both the social-democratic and the right-wing critics of corporate globalization. This means continuing the work many of us are doing, in day to day struggles alongside the classes and nations which are most oppressed by Canadian capitalism. It also means promoting aggressive tactics at demonstrations and emphasizing our hostility to police and to the State, weak points for both the social-democrats and right-wingers.

Finally, it means keeping in mind that not everyone at our protests are our allies, even if they may claim otherwise.

- Classes, Cops and Liberal Spin: Thinking About Montebello

Folks have different takes on what happened, and why, in Toronto during the G20. At issue is how the Black Bloc managed to trash a few cop cars and break countless windows while sustaining so few arrests, and what relation this accomplishment had to the mass arrests and police violence that were subsequently directed at non-Black Bloc demonstrators.

There is some disagreement - but not a lot - about what actually happened on the 26th and afterward. Where there are disagreements is in explaining how and why this happened. For that reason - and because i was not there, so have nothing new to add - i will not go over the events of those days. For those who have not read about them yet, i recommend pages 10-12 in Zig Zag's Fire and Flames: a militant report on Toronto anti-G20 resistance, G20 Capitalism is attacked in the streets of Toronto by Jaggi Singh and Robyn Maynard, or any of numerous news reports about the protests.




Three Versions of How Things Happened

On the left, three versions have emerged to explain the actions of the Black Bloc and the police in Toronto on June 26 and afterwards.

1) The Black Block outmaneuvered the enemy, successfully carrying out attacks on police cars and smashing windows of banks and large corporations due to the tactical advantage it gained from its fluid, undisciplined form.

As one can read on on SnitchWire:

The Black Bloc against the G20 summit in Toronto was one of the fiercest, ruthlessly efficient and effective Blocs seen in North America in a considerable amount of time. This, of course, was brought by the momentum and experience gained by the anarchist movement in North America (under insurmountable odds in most circumstances) within the last fifteen years. Several police cars were set on fire, corporate property destruction and looting were rampant, and the pigs were fought in the street.

Or as comrade Zig Zag has argued:

The ability of the bloc to move quickly enabled it to outmaneuver the riot cops, who were hampered by a slow response time. Wearing up to 80-90 pounds of gear, they could not move fast enough over any distance. Just to get to an area required moving chartered buses or convoys of mini-vans through city streets (not an easy task even under normal traffic conditions).

2) The second theory as to what happened in Toronto is slightly more nuanced, and as such comes in several flavours. Unfortunately, almost all of these are defeatist.

Emphasis is put on the discrepancy between the massive repressive presence - $1 billion spent on security, tens of thousands of police mobilized, extensive pre-summit info gathering, etc. - and the seeming inability of the police to get a handle on the Black Bloc on the 26th.

What emerges is a theory that the police allowed the Black Bloc to do their thing, and may even have facilitated it, in order to be able to justify repression.

As support for this theory, there are numerous anecdotes of people hearing police say that they had orders to hold back. Furthermore, while some eyewitnesses claim they could hear munitions exploding in the burning police cars, others insist that the cars were empty of standard police equipment and had seemingly been left there with their gas tanks almost empty. One activist commented that, based on their experience in previous militant confrontations, "It just seemed too easy."

As the anarchist (but anti-BB) journal Ideas and Action argued:

The noninterference of the police in property destruction – much remarked upon in Toronto – is a clear indication of its utility for the elite. Many observers have noted the usefulness of images of destruction in the media for justifying the $1 billion spent by the city of Toronto on “security” measures. Lest there be any doubt, the Toronto Police Department declared: “All you have to do is turn on the TV and see what’s happening now. Police cars are getting torched, buildings are being vandalized, people are getting beat up, and [so] the so-called ‘intimidating’ police presence is essential to restoring order.”

As the famed author and activist, Naomi Klein, observed, the police strategy consisted of “allowing what happened on Saturday [in Toronto] to happen with almost no intervention; and then… using that inaction as justification for scooping up hundreds of other activists, beating up journalists, just going on a rampage. Now, if they were serious about getting the people who had broken the windows, they would have done the arrests there at the time.”

Or as prominent canadian leftist Judy Rebick claimed:

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? And they did let it get out of control. The police knew exactly what would happen and how.

And as progressive journalist Justin Podur claimed:

The point here is that at least through a passive decision, and more likely through active provocation, the police helped see to it that windows and police cars were destroyed. Journalist Joe Wenkoff followed the Black Bloc for 27 blocks without any police presence. A police source told Toronto Sun reporter Joe Warmington that the police had orders to let it happen: “there were guys with equipment to do the job, all standing around looking at each other in disbelief.”

Unfortunately, some who hold this line have opted for a typically social democratic solution to the alleged police conspiracy to enable the Black Bloc: they have publicly criticized the police for not having "done their job" on the 26th!

All of which leads people to stop thinking in terms of solidarity, but instead to think in terms of being "aggrieved citizens". Revolutionary consciousness is pre-empted by the consciousness of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. It's just a hop, skip and a jump from such positions to the odious discussion thread on rabble.ca, where people are urged to turn in photos of "vandals", ostensibly with the logic that by doing so they will be "outing" undercover police officers. Whereas in fact what they are doing through such behaviour is providing evidence to the police. (Woe be it to anyone clean-cut and in shape who was around the Bloc - such individuals are being badjacketed and their photos tossed around the internet as part of the "they-must-be-cops" hysteria.)


3) A third, more obviously rightist version of events, holds that the Black Bloc itself is thoroughly encapsulated - that is to say, controlled by the state, with or without the BB members necessarily knowing it themselves. According to this theory, the Black Bloc is essentially a black ops connected to some secret police agency, deployed by the state to rob "peaceful" protesters of their credibility and deprive them of the moral highground.

This version of events draws on a distorted version of events at the 2007 Montebello protests where three agent provocateurs were identified trying to infiltrate the Black Bloc. In the days between summits, such theories have been the purview of the far right, with sources such as Alex Jones' Prison Planet spreading the idea that the BB and in fact the entire anarchist movement is something between an encapsulated gang and a pseudo-gang, working at the behest of the New World Order.

But following the action on the 26th, even many progressive individuals who would find Jones' politics to be anathema could be found wondering aloud whether or not "their" movement might not have been victim to such a byzantine state maneuver. The conspiratorial/populist website globalresearch.ca, run by the Center for Research on Globalization, has run a series of pieces with titles like G20 Riots: Is the Black Bloc a Police Psyops Group? As allegations surface of at least one deep cover agent around the broader anarchist scene, with perhaps more to come, this theory may gain added currency, especially amongst those who don't have any personal contact with militant protesters.


The Fallout: "Socialist" Criticism tails Media Backlash

The police attacks on demonstrators who had no intention of breaking the law or engaging in militant confrontation traumatized and angered many progressive people. As in all such situations, the initial reactions were confused, and could vacillate wildly. Folks said stuff they would later regret - not only newbies but also experienced activists speaking in front of television cameras. People were outraged at the police for attacking the "peaceful" protests, and the media worked hard to instill outrage at the "vandals" in the Black Bloc who had apparently provoked it all.

At this point a variety of socialist and trotskyist organizations obviously felt they had an opportunity to score points against the Black Bloc and militant protest tactics, which they have never been happy with but have been politically unable to clamp down on ever since the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999.

To quote Miguel Figueroa, leader of the soc dem Communist Party of Canada:

“It is high time that the anarchists and their misguided and counter-productive policies be publicly repudiated and condemned. Their infantile antics pose absolutely no threat to the ruling class and its state apparatus,” Figueroa said.

“On the contrary, such actions are extremely harmful in that they scare away the masses of working people from political struggle, and provide a convenient cover to those trying to further curtail the democratic rights of the people.”

The International Marxist Tendency, one of the most conservative trotskyist organizations, whined:

What were the objective results of the black bloc tactics? In the eyes of the state, the politicians, and their mouthpieces in the media, the violence of the black bloc delegitimizes the legitimate protests and demonstrations of the labour movement. It justifies the massive security expenditures and aggressive and intimidation tactics of the police. The labour movement can argue against the police presence and plead peaceful protest all they want, but because of the presence and actions of the black bloc, the police can always justify their aggressive presence and brutality. In the end, black bloc tactics justify the police action and brings the wrath of the police down on the labour movement. [...]

The police and the black bloc are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. The police step up security and their presence, causing the black bloc to come up with increasingly bold and inventive ways to circumvent this security, causing the police to step up their presence and attacks on democratic rights. This week, the police were almost daring the black bloc to attempt to penetrate the security perimeter and fence, precisely so the police could physically assault demonstrators and workers, and assault their democratic rights.

And in the IMT's newsletter Fightback: The Marxist Voice of Labour and Youth:

Unfortunately, a “Black Bloc” of one or two hundred was allowed by the police to vandalize the city of Toronto. The police abandoned select cars to allow this mob to torch them. This was then used as justification to attack the mass of peaceful working class protesters. [...] We state that the Black Bloc are not part of our movement and there is no difference between them and police provocateurs. As seen in other protests, some of them may in fact be police agents.

(Need it be added that the IMT considers police unions to be part of their "labour movement"; i.e. see their 2008 piece on cops in the land that murdered Jean Charles de Menezes and so many others: Britain: Bolshevik Bobbies)


The official Socialist Project statement, in their e-newsletter, ironically named The Bullet:

On Saturday, in the midst of a larger demonstration (estimated at between 10-25,000), organized by the labour, anti-privatization and peace movements, a series of unwarranted acts of vandalism by a small number of protesters against stores, vehicles and buildings, was used as an excuse for a massive unleashing of repression and attacks by police against the democratic rights of both protestors, and Torontonians as a whole. (Like what happened at the Montebello Summit of North American leaders in August 2007, it will come out over the next weeks how widely the police had infiltrated some of the key groups -- especially the so-called Black Bloc, knew the planning and participated as agent provocateurs.)

And as Ritch Whyman of the International Socialists argued, in perhaps one of the most intelligent anti-BB pieces:

...as has been noted in many cases, the tactics and politics of the Black Bloc – and some anarchists and some others on the left – leave them prone to being manipulated by the state. In almost every Summit protest, police and others (in Genoa it was also fascists), infiltrate or form their own blocs to engage in provocations. The politics of secrecy and unannounced plans and a quasi-military (amateur at best) approach to demonstrations leave the door open to this.

The tactics also open the door for the justification of further police repression. [...]

[...] outside of a small minority, these actions at best can inspire passive support from those who do not like police. But the majority have no confidence to engage in these actions themselves or agree with them. Instead of giving confidence, the tactics generally produce confusion and play into the hands of the state that would prefer it if no one ever protested. They allow the state to justify its repression and expenditures. In essence outside of an already radicalized minority they don't leave anyone with a deeper sense of confidence about the ability to fight capitalism. Instead at best they leave the impression that the fight against capitalism can only be carried out by a heroic minority, at worst they leave people worrying about going to demonstrations. The tactic is far from radical because it does nothing to challenge capitalism in any way; it does nothing to instil confidence in others to resist.

While the Black Bloc is not above criticism, and a debate about strategies and tactics can always be interesting, to start spewing this shit at a time when people are behind bars, organizers are facing charges which could lead to years in prison, and the media and police are continuing to hype up public anti-BB sentiment, is astounding. You want to talk about strategy? Well, the choice to prioritize such point-scoring speaks volumes of the strategic priorities of the organizations involved. These criticisms, in their timing, are right-opportunist - they are examples of people trying to frame themselves as the "good" and "responsible", as opposed to the "bad", "misguided" or "manipulated" anarchists. Nevertheless, it is not enough to just say so - regardless of the timing or the motives, if we're serious about something, we have to be prepared to answer out critics.


A Bit of History

The various socialist and progressive groups that held hegemony over the canadian left in the 1980s did not tolerate the kind of behaviour they have been moaning about recently. Especially at "peace" demos, to be even slightly rowdy - sometimes even just in the choice of one's slogans - was enough to attract belligerent "peace marshals" who would zoom in on you, if need be pointing you out to cops for arrest or at least harassment. This was not a result of inexperience or ignorance in the movement, but was the preference of an alliance that held the reins, and was not about to let them go if they could avoid it. Non-violent civil disobedience was as radical as you were allowed to get, and even then only in the choreographed manner so aptly derided by Ward Churchill in his book Pacifism as Pathology.

In canada, this left gradually waned throughout the 1990s, as rapid changes on the international scene, neo-liberal austerity programmes (i.e. the Axworthy reforms, and various provincial versions thereof), the 1990 Mohawk uprising and its aftermath, and many other factors eroded the "common sense" position that violence and militant action were somehow uncalled for on the left. A position that large numbers of people had known to be untrue, and that had been particularly unappealing to a younger generation who did not enjoy dynamics that made left-wing demos resemble school outings, complete with monitors, rules, and procedures undemocratically imposed by their elders. (No joke: at their extreme, some "peace" activists in the 80s even spoke of imposing dress codes on younger members, specifically complaining about punks and their "violent" attire!)

To a new generation which - as new generations always do - was providing the most dynamic energy to the left, anarchism was attractive in part because it was not associated with the movement leadership, and with its ties to punk rock and a "no holds barred" ethos, it seemed to be an appropriate antidote to the latter's boring rituals of dissent, their stifling rules about sex and gender, and what seemed to be their legacy of failure and compromise. (That such judgments were unfair and based on exaggerations and misperceptions is of course another aspect of what new generations always do...)

In Toronto, anarchists had become more and more central to new political activism throughout the decade, culminating in the 1988 Survival Gathering, which included a "day of action" riot. But what truly sealed the deal was the rapid rise of a neo-nazi street force focused around the Heritage Front in the 90s (secretly influenced and supported by CSIS, you know), which necessitated a violent, non-symbolic response. While a wide gamut of progressive forces coalesced against the HF, the leading edge was the more and more anarchist-dominated Anti-Racist Action, where groups like the International Socialists with their conservative orientation to politics simply found themselves unwelcome.

In Montreal, similar developments took place throughout the 90s, building on actions organized by the Comite des Sans Emplois, and a series of ad hoc antifascist coalitions (against the Heritage Front, the French National Front, and the right-wing catholic group Human Life International). The first time i believe the Black Bloc marched in Montreal, it comprised of antifascists from Toronto who were participating in the 1993 anti-FN demo. Then following arrests at the anti-HLI demonstration in 1995 that Montreal's Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality (since renamed the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality) was formed. Building on a series of (primarily youth-) riots, a kind of anti-institutional class war anarchism was also developed around the newspaper Demanarchie, and the latter was briefly repressed following the 1996 Quebec City riots, during which the national assembly was set aflame.

On the continental scale, the pivotal event everyone points to is the Black Bloc emerging at the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, two years after the spectacular use of pepper spray against non-violent protesters at the 1997 APEC summit in Vancouver. Seattle made it official: you could no longer impose blanket "non-violence" on the left - not even on the relatively privileged white left. A militant practice that had been nurtured and developed in specific cities and scenes, often within the antifascist movement, was now introduced as an essential element of the "new" antiglobalization movement.

As Xtn of Chicago ARA would later recall:

the Battle of Seattle grabbed everyone's attention and made us sit up. Images of thousands of protesters clogging the streets of downtown Seattle were broadcast on every television across the world - so too were scenes of the Black Bloc and the attacks on capitalist property and police. Newspapers were scrambling for info on the new street militants and their ideology of anarchism. And debate started to rage in the radical press. The Black Bloc was seen by some as wrongheaded youth interested only in adventurism. Sometimes the Black Bloc was condemned outright and treated as criminal - an attitude that rolled in from the established Left. [...]

The actions by the Black Bloc and anarchists turned traditional politics on its head. The black-clad voice in the protest movement wasn't content to beg the politicians and capitalists for reforms. The Black Bloc symbolized a new generation of activists wanting nothing short of revolution. (Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, pp. 2-3)

This is about when i first started hearing about "diversity of tactics", and while i could be wrong, it struck me at the time as a face-saving compromise. Under the watchword of "diversity" anarchists and other radical factions signaled their willingness to work alongside people who vehemently disagreed with illegal tactics, without forcing the point - and the latter were given an open invitation to join with us, and a fig-leaf to hide behind when things got heavy. So contradictions lay behind this new catchphrase.

This "diversity" was always being challenged and renegotiated, but one thing it did prove was that the leftover leaders of the previous decades' movement were aware that they could not unilaterally impose their tactical preferences. They had been unable to maintain (never mind expand) their own base, so they needed the energy and dynamism of the more militant, younger activists, no matter how distasteful these might be.

In this light, the statements of social democrats, trots, socialists, and others about the Black Bloc, are a part of a long debate, a long and constant process of negotiation and renegotiation. Their timing in exploiting this fig leaf may suck, but we shouldn't feel too betrayed.

At bottom, as noted by Ritch Whyman of the International Socialists, these tactical disagreements represent different strategies. But we shouldn't trust him to characterize what these differences are. Instead, we should do some thinking of our own - when we do, we can see that in fact the arguments being put forward by the socialist left flow not only from differences in strategy, but from different ways of looking at the world. The Black Bloc, and similar tactics, do not make sense from their point of view, and with good reason. Where they hope to go, this kind of militant practice is indeed counterproductive. Rather than build a movement separate from the State, self-reliant and prepared for the heightened levels of violence that we see coming, the vision that unites most of these detractors is one of gaining influence within various institutions already somewhat integrated into the State - the "labour movement" (by which they mean the trade unions and the NDP), various NGOs, and recognized progressive lobby groups.

When the IMT bemoans the fact that "In the eyes of the state, the politicians, and their mouthpieces in the media, the violence of the black bloc delegitimizes the legitimate protests and demonstrations of the labour movement," partly they chose an unfortunate way to phrase their concerns, but partly, like a Freudian slip, there is truth behind this embarassing outburst: key to their strategy is the goal of being seen as legitimate by "the state, the politicians, and their mouthpieces in the media." Or if they can't be, then they hope to hold key positions in organizations (the NDP, the trade unions, etc.) which are. This is not an exaggeration: the most craven examples of the entryist tradition, the IMT stands out from the pack by its continued position in Britain (its home base) of working within the Labour party. For folks like this, by smashing things up, the Black Bloc can indeed upset their entryist fantasy.

When groups like the IMT and the IS talk about mobilizing a "mass movement", they essentially want masses of people to swell their ranks - or the ranks of the institutions they have infiltrated - without essentially challenging the consciousness or way-of-life as experienced under capitalism more generally. They would like a chain-of-command for protests, with the bulk of people passively attending events organized by them - or ideally by coalitions of forces in which they will have a critical voice. That they so rarely get what they want is testimony to the failures of their style of "coalition building"/united front/entryism (which generally leaves everyone from militants to liberals feeling used and disrespected), and also the way in which their kind of micromanagement leads to less dynamic and more dull events.

In their criticism that the Black Bloc is "undemocratic", these groups posit an abstract and unified "working class" as counterposed to any specific offensive organizations or innovations that might "alienate the masses". Like some anarchist anti-vanguardist strawmen, this argument ignores the ways in which the organizations and initiatives of oppressed people are (like everything real) flawed and impure, and only appealing to some people, sometimes only a very few at first. These critics feel that instead of working with and supporting such particular expressions of resistance, they should be condemned out of hand for not representing the abstract and incorporeal "masses".

Socialists and other progressives often agree with us that capitalism is becoming more and more brutal, and that as people's living conditions become more difficult life is getting a whole lot shittier. Like some of us, they see value in defending social infrastructure, legislation, trade unions and other aspects of the 20th century welfare state. But where they clearly take a wrong turn is that this seems to be their only plan, in practice if not in theory. And to this end alliances with "progressive" forces - some of which are not really very progressive at all - are key to their entire strategy, even though they obviously have no chance of radicalizing these "allies". A rearguard action with no exit strategy.

Socialist politics is for them a holding pattern, at best a game of getting your group to have influence amongst the right people or in the right institutions (generally trade unions or the NDP, sometimes broad "progressive" coalitions active around some issue). The only hope for their much-vaunted mass movement fantasy is if some external factor will come along to push people to become interested in left politics - at which point i guess the idea is that the group with the most spotless resume and the "correct line" will be well-placed to suddenly gain a broad hearing and wield an influence far beyond its small numbers. (They steadfastly refuse to consider the possibility that external factors might push many people to the right, not the left, or to consider what kind of strategies would be needed in such an eventuality.)

In the meantime, it remains vital to not "alienate" the wrong people - which translates into not doing anything risky, anything that will provoke a strong reaction or challenge people's preconceptions of what is right or acceptable.

Despite their criticisms of the Black Bloc, they don't "movement-build" themselves, or at least not in the way that we understand the term. They merely engage in a perpetual hunt for "allies", all the while sucking in a certain number of students to join and maintain their organizations, the majority of whom will leave after a few semesters, some disillusioned, others well-groomed for careers in the sinking ship of social democratic politics.


What's It Good For? Speakin' 'bout My Friends


The Black Bloc is a form of political-cultural intervention, and in my opinion a positive one. Its tactics, while overwhelmingly symbolic, embrace a willingness to break the law, and a vision of an autonomous movement or movements that do not depend on the State for their "right to protest". It can expand the space for other forms of activism, and provides a potential avenue of attack against the State's hegemony (in the Gramscian sense of the term). Potentially, it is a complement to - or, for some people, a beginning of - counter-power.

At the anti-capitalist May 1st demonstration in Montreal earlier this year there was no Black Bloc. The police were trying to intimidate people, roughing them up, confiscating banners, searching bags. At one point they tried to arrest a young man - he was wedged in between two cops on horses, while others stood around, batons out and ready to strike. Personally, i was terrified about what might happen to him.  But the crowd would have none of it, and i saw a woman comrade physically intervene, unarresting the young man as the crowd engaged in and withstood a shoving match with cops, and a very intimidating large police dog.

The people who were able to - non-violently but forcefully - rescue this man from what seemed to me to be certain arrest, did not fall from the sky. They were not born with these skills, with this willingness to potentially engage in a fight with cops. They weren't karate experts or super-heroes or anarcho-ninjas. These skills are something they learned, and i know where many of the individuals in question did so: in precisely the kind of militant confrontations, often under the banner of the Black Bloc, that some people would like to see ejected from the movement.

Again: from the socialist, social democratic, and many trot points of view such skills are simply not necessary. Just not a part of how they envision taking power. While they may acknowledge a need for occasional violence, that's what the trade union security is there for, no need for members of the "vanguard" to dirty their hands with such things. It is telling that on June 26th members of the International Socialists stood side by side with members of the Canadian Labor Congress as marshals separating people from the cops protecting the security fence - they were faced off against the protesters, not the riot squad, yet another indicator of who the IS would be using force against, if it came down to it.

Even those trot groups that do show some sympathy to the Black Bloc - i.e. the sparts and the IBT - do so from a patronizing perspective of the mature "teachers" observing the "confused" youth (they always say these groups are all youth) whose desperation and weakness leads them to adopt such tactics.

For instance, although the IBT take the IMT to task for the latter's unprincipled attacks on the Black Bloc, their position remains that:

Marxists do not advocate the tactics of the Black Bloc because, however emotionally fulfilling for the individuals involved, they are at bottom an expression of frustration by powerless and socially isolated (if personally courageous) militants. Their focus on striking symbolic blows against the oppressors is conditioned by the absence of a mass working-class movement with a level of political consciousness sufficient to potentially overturn capitalist rule.

At their best, these comrades mistake a step in the right direction for the pathos of everyday life under capitalism.

Against this i'd say that, as an experiment, as a technique, the Black Bloc is worth engaging in. It may not be the do-all and end-all, but it represents a positive attempt to push things in an interesting direction. There are many situations where it would be counterproductive, and participants seem to have no problem realizing this and protesting "just like everyone else" on countless other occasions. But when used it will inevitably put questions on the table that - while irrelevant to their left - are central to ours.


Defensive Triumphalism: Speaking to My Friends

i was not at the G20 protests. In a sense, this puts me ahead of the pack in following that established left tradition, of not letting facts stand in the way of a good argument. A practice that normally indicates some kind of dishonesty, but a condition which - at this point in the discussion - characterizes us all. And reminding ourselves of this, that whether one watched the protests on tv, via the web, or whether one was smashing windows and running from cops, it is too early to gauge the "success" or "failure" of the police actions, or even of our own.

It is understandable to be angry and somewhat defensive given how our "allies" in the socialist and trot camps engaged in their full court press following the 26th. That said, it's important to remember that the Black Bloc is a component of our movement, not the other way around, and that our movement is aiming to challenge worldwide capitalism, not just its social democratic pals and its socialist critics.

Many people seem to feel that if the cops left their cars to be burned, or if they allowed property destruction to be carried out, that that discredited the actions of the Black Bloc. This belief seems to be shared by pro-BB and anti-BB voices alike, and so people's versions of what took place and why on the 26th seem to be largely ideologically-driven, everyone promoting the theory that makes "their side" look best.

This is unfortunate, because we can't know as of yet exactly how the State managed (or failed to manage) the protests on the 26th, and whether or not a tactic is legitimate and useful only partially depends on whether the enemy deploys countermeasures. Tying oneself too tightly to the concept that "we're fluid and free so we out-maneuvered, out-ran, and out-thought the cops" begs the question of how one will respond if - as is entirely possible - it is revealed that police were not as clueless as all that.

Furthermore, it equates the Black Bloc's effectiveness with military success, while failing to appreciate the degree to which this is both constrained and permitted by political factors. While a revolutionary movement needs to constantly challenge itself, ruthlessly re-examining its tactics and preparing for the worst, triumphalism is self-congratulatory, and doesn't lead to any conclusions other than perhaps "do more, do bigger". The Black Bloc ceases to be a tactic grounded in particular conditions, one we can use at the present historic juncture while building for better things (and worse days) ahead, and instead simply becomes good enough to leave alone.

Similarly - like the conspiracy theorists - such triumphalism requires forgetting that the State had several objectives, and preventing the Bloc from doing its thing wasn't necessarily #1. World leaders were arriving on the 26th, and there were motorcades throughout the city - making sure nothing happened to these criminals was certainly the highest priority of the cops' list, and in that they succeeded. It's not like the 20,000-strong security force was all there in order to vamp on the Bloc, they had other things in mind too. Three cop cars given or taken was not really the point.

Even if the police were caught completely off guard by the Bloc, the arguments put forward in some quarters suggest that they never would try to manipulate us or use us for political ends. That for them, the military confrontation with the Black Bloc is all that counts - which is really silly when you think of it, as they could wipe us out in one long weekend if the military was not subservient to the political. We do have to acknowledge that under certain circumstances, the police could try to exploit the knowledge that a Bloc would be active, for political purposes. That doesn't mean that's what happened in Toronto on the 26th, but it does mean that - in our own interests, as well as in the interests of democratic dialog - raising the question does not mean one has crossed the line and become a class enemy.

Movement history is replete with examples of the state allowing revolutionary organizations to develop, even to carry out offensive activities, preferring to keep them under wraps, under control, or at least knowing roughly who might be doing what. To this day there is still a question of whether or not the police watched as the Wimmin's Fire Brigade torched those porn stores back in the 80s, and there is evidence that the RCMP was keeping tabs on certain FLQ cells as they carried out their activities. i am not stating that the Bloc is encapsulated, just that we should not shrug off the question of what the State's strategy is as if it were irrelevant. While there is not much chance of our being outmaneuvered by our trot critics, the same is not true for the State, which has plans inside of plans and which can easily think in terms of of years or decades.

Questioning how the Black Bloc sustained so few arrests, examining the possibility of infiltration, and trying to learn as much as possible about the State's countermeasures - both military and political - strike me as essential components to further developing and advancing the Black Bloc tactic in North America.

It doesn't mean not setting their cars on fire, it just means keeping your spidey-sense on, keeping an eye out for traps, and an open mind about why things might sometimes "seem too easy".

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