Provocateurs in Berkeley (and elsewhere)?

[Cordelia]

"Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform. Don't kid yourself." - Frank Zappa

"This Is What Democracy Uniformity Looks Like!"

[OP ED]

The police never catch the black bloc because the black bloc is the police.

[American Dream]

We're well into this thread by now- has any good evidence been produced about how extensive the use of black bloc tactics by the State might be? Is there a smoking gun about spooky types using this tactic/controlling these movements in the post-WTO left? I mean not just simple infiltration but "fucking shit up" under cover of ultra-leftism.

[OP ED]

It's hard to have evidence when no one ever gets caught. To me, that's the evidence.

[American Dream]

I think they just busted 200 or more in Washington D.C. It's by no means the first time black bloc types have been arrested.

[American Dream]

http://www.pmpress.org/content/article. ... 7150210922

Owen Hill


It worked!

I was at the action (demonstration, whatever) last week. I used to find them exciting but I’ve grown weary. Attended my first in ’68 or ’69 as an early teen when we ended the Vietnam War and ushered in Lasting World Peace with our protests in Westwood. Saw some good ones when I was a union steward at LAX—I felt a responsibility to help out other unions. A couple of Caesar Chavez UFW things were real coarkers with lots of arrests and some real, well-earned gains. Mostly these memories are pretty blurry—the huge anti-war marches that blanketed big cities after 9/11 were incredible spectacles, inspiring in the moment but useless in the long run as Bush then Obama did their part to destroy a region. The closing of the docks in ’11 was one of the most inspiring days in the political side of my life (fuck, in my life, period), watching Occupy flex its muscles and seed the various movements that represent the resistance now. On a personal level, it was at a time in my life when I realized that from here on out I’ll be old and so it was moving to see so many young people. I’ve also attended the various post-murder anti police rallies, bitter affairs squelched by militarized cop forces.

So now we have the two types of “actions”. The pink hats/hold hands kind and the basic black break it ups. I try to attend both, thinking (still think) that it’s better to get out there and put your body on the line (or at least support those who do) than get lost in cynicism. Go, team! But thinking—I’d rather go home and read a good book, watch it on the news, live my not-quite bourgeois (a little too poor) lifestyle. Abject hopeless is no damn fun, and “we” are failing on all fronts.

Something changed, for me, last week, and I have to thank the Black Bloc folks for that. Not that they’d care, I’m ideologically impure (I hope) and, I think, would be hopelessly bored by all their reductive theory based blah (although last week I caught myself using “bourgeois affectation” in a facebook post. What’s become of me?). That’s a style thing, though.

What they did last week, in tandem with the “armchair liberals”, worked. It worked! They went in, broke some stuff, the nazi asshole was stopped, mission accomplished. I think it worked because they were surrounded by at least a thousand “peaceful” demonstrators, a nice cover. It was really surgical, at least at first. The silliness that followed was the typical Bay Area hooliganism—I’ve always found that kind of charming. We don’t have soccer riots here, we have the after party, followed by a good dose of cop brutality.

That it happened in Berkeley means that it was followed by all those pre-written news stories about “violence” in the streets, and lots of theories about agents provocateurs and outside agitators (shades of my youth!), people who didn’t show up going off the rails (Robert Reich, we love you, wise up!), and facebook threads that eventually turn pissy. But-but-but. It worked! If you were at Sproul that night you wanted to show Milo the door. Chanting would not have accomplished that, not pink hats, not dancing on the steps. And, other side of the token, a line of folks in faux military gear breaking windows would have been stopped (brutally) by the cops in no time without the support/witnessing of the pink hats. To digress—please, both sides, redesign the costumes. What a lot of corny shit.

I’m seeing/hearing that this is a fascist takeover, or at least some sort of authoritarian endgame. If you believe that, how can you write off the Black Bloc? People have died fighting fascism, we could be there again. At least consider—the people you stand against are beyond rational argument. And, to those that stomp in and break stuff: You’re dead (or at least ridiculous) without popular support and you don’t have it. People who should be on your side don’t like you very much. A night breaking ATMs could be the manifestation of another form of bourgeois affectation. Do you really have the support of the oppressed? Time to cut the crap on both sides. Find a way to hang together, folks.

[dada]

I think one thing that possibly has changed is that family structure wise we are not in the same place as the authoritarian father model of past generations. It of course still exists but even the most tyrannical father has lost ground to the influence and authority of technology, the media and other culture influences. I think we live more in a John Bly-ish Sibling Society where technology really has surpassed and usurped family authority. The desire to be popular has undermined the family to a large degree and that, along with numerous other desires/wants, that technology can possibly deliver has made us turn towards social media for direction and guidance.

So we transfer mystical feeling and nostalgic sentimentality onto the internet and technology. One authority or another. Family or the group mind. What has really changed? They way people think is still leader/follower. Pecking order, social status.

To me, the important part of the Zappa quote is "Don't kid yourselves." Sure we're all wearing uniforms. Are we aware that we're just playing games? The ones who are aware of the role-playing nature of society are not as high-strung.

Great album, by the way. burnt weeny sandwich.

[American Dream]

antifa notes (february 8, 2017) : Milo Yiannopoulos, Daddy, STRAYA (AFP, PFF, UPF) … & anTEEfa!

http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=40851

[Searcher08]

[minime]

To me, the important part of the Zappa quote is "Don't kid yourselves." Sure we're all wearing uniforms. Are we aware that we're just playing games? The ones who are aware of the role-playing nature of society are not as high-strung.

Is Goodwill/handmedown/yard sale wearing a uniform? Only if you're trying NOT to wear a uniform.

[American Dream]

I'm mostly wearing a disguise- and I know it- but I have no black ski masks in the drawer and never have. Just the same, big up to Viewpoint:

Back in Black

Salar Mohandesi February 8, 2017 |



On Friday, May 3, 1968, several hundred radical students stared down a contingent of fascists outside the Sorbonne, in Paris. The day before, the neo-fascist group Occident torched the offices of a leftist student organization, leaving behind their call sign, the Celtic Cross. In response, radical students called for a demonstration against “fascism and terror,” steeling themselves for a fight.

Brawls between radicals and fascists had become a common feature of the Parisian political scene since the Algerian War, when fascists turned to terrorism, assassination, and bombings in a last-ditch effort to prevent Algerian independence, demolish the left, and seize state power. After the war, paramilitary groups like Occident continued to wage war on the left. In this context, many student radicals began their political education in antifascist organizing, where they learned how to fight fascists in the streets, confront the police, and organize swift, militant actions. As one radical explained, “I was antifascist. That was how I was socialized. Others wielded the dialectic – I wielded the matraque.”

The radical youth groups of the 1960s developed paramilitary wings known as the service d’ordre (SO). As its name suggests, the SO took responsibility for maintaining general order. They acted as parade marshals during demonstrations, protected rallies and meetings from raids, defended militants hawking newspapers from fascist attacks, and later handled security at occupations. But the SO also played an offensive role, disrupting lectures during student strikes, storming fascist meetings, and confronting police during demonstrations. For those in the movement, there was no contradiction between these functions, so long as the SO answered to the larger struggle.

That Friday, both sides came prepared. When Occident thugs marched towards the university, sporting helmets, clubs, and smoke bombs, radicals fastened their helmets and smashed furniture to fashion weapons for the inevitable melee. Panicking, the chancellor called the police, who made matters worse by raiding the demonstration and making indiscriminate arrests. Students quickly retaliated, surrounding police vans, ripping up cobblestones, and throwing missiles at police.

The were 574 arrests that day. Students across Paris were radicalized by the crackdown, and took to the streets demanding that the police liberate their comrades. Protests climaxed a week later, on May 10, when radical youth, led by the battle-hardened SO, fought police into the night. Radicals cut down trees and overturned cars to erect barricades, stretched wires across the streets, rolled automobiles into police lines, set fires to halt police advances, and unleashed salvos of cobblestones. When the plumes of tear gas finally cleared, 200 cars lay in ruins, at least 400 were injured, and over 500 arrested.

Remarkably, despite the vandalism, violence, and property destruction, polls indicated that 80 percent of Parisians supported the youths. In fact, residents of the Latin Quarter provided protesters with food, water, material for barricades, and refuge from police. On May 13, the unions called a strike. Students occupied the university, factory workers followed suit, and by the end of the month, some nine million workers were on strike. As life in the capital ground to a halt, President de Gaulle left the country to consult with the army. Though de Gaulle soon reasserted control, the May events overturned French society. Factories became ungovernable for over a decade, diverse social movements proliferated across the country, and de Gaulle himself was forced out of office in 1969.



It’s astonishing to see, then, the reaction of the liberal intelligentsia to the return of the “black bloc” today. Some critics, like Erica Chenoweth, claim that “history” allegedly proves that “black bloc tactics” are ineffective. To begin with, accounts like these erroneously conflate militant street-fighting with armed struggles against dictatorships, misrepresenting the black bloc as a militia or guerrilla force, rather than a specific tactic. Even worse, they’re historically inaccurate. There’s little doubt among historians that militant street-fighting played a crucial, catalyzing role in 1960s France. There’s also agreement that the tactic proved effective in many other struggles – for an example closer to home, consider the Detroit uprising of 1967. Rather than ending in chaos, the riots not only radicalized unions, but actually generated long-lasting and durable organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

But let’s not make the opposite error as Chenoweth. The example of May ‘68 does not suggest that street-fighting will automatically call into being mass movements of the kind that radically overturned French society in the 1960s and 1970s. The confrontational tactics of radical youth before and during May 1968 detonated a highly combustible conjuncture, and the exact political sequence of the May events can never be repeated.

“History,” then, does not provide us with models to mechanically follow or avoid. If the history of militant confrontation shows us anything, it’s that black bloc tactics may work in some cases and not in others: effectiveness depends entirely on the conjuncture at hand. Evocations of the past might shed light on a time when something like the black bloc did play an important role in social movements, but can’t tell us whether the black bloc is appropriate today. Only a concrete analysis of our concrete situation can determine what role, if any, the black bloc can play in today’s movements. While many have rightly questioned the bloc’s overall effectiveness over the past decade or so, we are now in an objectively different historical conjuncture, which should force us to reconsider the potential role of the black bloc.

New Conjuncture

As I have argued elsewhere, the black bloc represented a specific tactic that once enjoyed a valuable place within the strategy of a certain constellation of movements. But over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, these movements collapsed, repression heightened, and radical spaces were restructured, undermining the social bases that grounded black bloc tactics. The bloc managed to live on as a kind of “floating tactic,” but survival came at a cost. Without a broader strategy, partisans of the bloc found themselves compelled to continually reproduce this single tactic in the hopes of spontaneously resurrecting the strategy that once gave it meaning, trapping themselves in a bad infinity of spectacular actions. Separated from mass organs, its members tended to take on a distinct cultural identity, sometimes in outright opposition to movements. Throughout the 2000s, some black bloc militants derided other demonstrators for holding them back, while less confrontational activists denounced the bloc for irresponsible adventurism. It’s from this period that the bloc’s reputation dates.

But the dawning of the Trump administration has changed the game. By unleashing a massive assault on all sectors of the working class, his presidency has raised questions about security, personal safety, and bodily autonomy. Trump’s unilateral imposition of racist immigration policies has already thrown the lives of immigrants into disarray. Future actions will further imperil the lives of the undocumented. If passed, the Republican’s nationwide right-to-work bill would gut unions, leaving countless American workers even more vulnerable than they already are. Meanwhile, Trump’s foray into “healthcare reform” could leave twenty million Americans uninsured, potentially resulting in 43,956 deaths annually. Hate crimes have already spiked, as emboldened fascists have tagged swastikas in cities across the country, sent death threats to synagogues and mosques, and verbally and physically harassed minorities. Just two weeks ago a Tump supporter shot a protester at a Milo Yiannopoulos event in Seattle – the victim’s right to free speech saw none of the defense from civil libertarians that Richard Spencer was granted for a non-lethal punch. In this context, it’s worth reconsidering the role that militant confrontation, and self-defense, might play in protecting collective movements.

There’s also evidence that the idea of confrontation is gaining wider acceptance. Many of those organizers who have not previously adopted black bloc tactics are growing far more receptive, and in some places are seeking alliances with those who use them. Despite the controversy surrounding the event, it seems many Berkeley students supported the militant tactics that prevented Milo from speaking at Berkeley, where he intended to launch a campaign against sanctuary campuses, and may have planned to reveal the names of undocumented students. “My campus did nothing to stand between my undocumented community and the hateful hands of radicalized white men — the AntiFas did,” an undocumented student wrote of the Milo event. “A peaceful protest was not going to cancel that event, just like numerous letters from faculty, staff, Free Speech Movement veterans and even donors did not cancel the event. Only the destruction of glass and shooting of fireworks did that.”

There’s even a growing mainstream interest in the black bloc. Within hours, the video of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face received nearly a million views, and was set to music from “Born in the U.S.A.” to “The Boys Are Back in Town.” The black bloc is now discussed at the dinner table, featured on cable television, and addressed on the front page of the New York Times, challenging some mainstream liberals like Sarah Silverman to rethink their assumptions. This changing attitude is likely a reflection of the radicalizing political situation. Animated by Trump, hundreds of thousands of Americans who never joined a protest before this election are now sacrificing their free time for political meetings, marching against traffic, shutting down airports, getting trained as organizers, and even contemplating a general strike. Many are coming to feel that the violence of a broken window pales in comparison to the violence of Trump’s administration. In fact, it’s precisely this surprising openness to black bloc tactics that has sent critics into such a delirious state.

At the same time, black bloc militants recognize the need to find ways to organically integrate street-fighting within a whole ecosystem of struggles. Let’s not forget that in Berkeley, the bloc’s actions were only one aspect of a broader campaign that included publishing op-eds, buying out tickets, working with faculty to pressure the administration into canceling the event, organizing through the UAW, contacting local politicians, reaching out to different communities in the area, and holding public meetings.

The black bloc militants I’ve spoken to at recent demonstrations in Philadelphia have stressed the importance of working with larger mobilizations, not against them. That means transforming the bloc from an identity to an integrated tactic. The way forward, then, is to creatively articulate street-fighting not only with a wider range of tactics, but with wider mass movements, which will likely mean putting the bloc to a range of uses, as French radicals in the 1960s did with the service d’ordre.

During Trump’s inauguration, black bloc tactics helped Black Lives Matter activists shut down a checkpoint, chasing away neo-Nazis. What other uses can the bloc serve today? Shutting down airports? Protecting abortion clinics? Helping to stop deportation raids? Defending the autonomous survival programs we’ll need to develop in the coming years?

Continues at: https://viewpointmag.com/2017/02/08/back-in-black/

[brekin]

To me, the important part of the Zappa quote is "Don't kid yourselves." Sure we're all wearing uniforms. Are we aware that we're just playing games? The ones who are aware of the role-playing nature of society are not as high-strung.

Is Goodwill/handmedown/yard sale wearing a uniform? Only if you're trying NOT to wear a uniform.

I think if you have control over what you wear, and even most people with limited means do, you are wearing a uniform.
For example, when you are at Goodwill and have to choose between the:

1. Make America Great Again T-Shirt
2. Obama T-Shirt
3. Frank Zappa T-Shirt

Which do you choose?

Although I have worked with certain individuals from different cultures, with limited English, where a Shirt was like the platonic ideal. It literally could have seemingly anything on it and they would wear it. Think of a middle aged man wearing something along the lines of those old "I'm a royal bitch if I don't get Chocolate!" t-shirts. But I'm sure they even have other signifiers from their culture conferring status, belief, etc.

I'd like to get this shirt.

[Searcher08]

Moo!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_as_Fuck

To me, the important part of the Zappa quote is "Don't kid yourselves." Sure we're all wearing uniforms. Are we aware that we're just playing games? The ones who are aware of the role-playing nature of society are not as high-strung.

Is Goodwill/handmedown/yard sale wearing a uniform? Only if you're trying NOT to wear a uniform.

If think if you have control over what you wear, and even most people with limited means do, you are wearing a uniform.
For example, when you are at Goodwill and have to choose between the:

1. Make America Great Again T-Shirt
2. Obama T-Shirt
3. Frank Zappa T-Shirt

Which do you choose?

Although I have worked with certain individuals from different cultures, with limited English, where a Shirt was like the platonic ideal. It literally could have seemingly anything on it and they would wear it. Think of a middle aged man wearing something along the lines of those old "I'm a royal bitch if I don't get Chocolate!" t-shirts. But I'm sure they even have other signifiers from their culture conferring status, belief, etc.

I'd like to get this shirt.

[minime]

I think if you have control over what you wear, and even most people with limited means do, you are wearing a uniform.

If you like.

[dada]

We're all wearing uniforms, I don't think having a choice in the matter changes that. Go to jail, you wear the jumpsuit.

We all put on different roles, in our relationships with others. Our brains are wearing uniforms, we "wear many hats."

It's a good point about the "trying not to wear a uniform" uniform. That's probably the way Frank meant it. He was saying it from the stage at a Mothers concert. Lots of 'colorful, unique characters' in the audience, I bet. Putting on a show at the show.

That was Frank's market. Social rejects, whether by choice or through no fault of their own. Freaks. Those 'too smart for their own good.' People who don't fit in.

You could even sign up for The Mothers' newsletter, United Mutations. "Hey kids, be different! Join the don't-join-a-club club!"

It was all presented in a self-mocking style. A brand that attacks branding, a commercial product that exposes the farce of commercialism. People get it. Consumers don't.

And that was part of the brand, as well. The record label obviously had no problem with it. Really, what anti-commodity can't be recuperated by the corporate system. Put a barbed-wire frame around a work of art, it will still get stolen and re-framed. A nice plastic candy-colored frame. Design weaponized art, with a virus built in to attack capitalism. If it infects a hundred million people, what happens? That's seen as commercial potential. Pretty soon it.becomes part of the Rolling Stone fashion cycle.

I'm sure Frank knew all this. I think his Mothers' angle was honest, at least. I remember watching an interview with Pete Townshend, he was saying how The Who was taking rebellion from kids, repackaging it and selling it back to them. He clearly thought it wasn't a good thing, the hypocrisy of it made him cynical.