Streets of NYC seem laid out for scales of human interaction, unlike ones at the protest central of D.C. which feel like just large empty spaces between large symbolic official buildings. For that reason alone, NYC may be a more promising site of demonstration than D.C., unless organizers can mobilize black, Latino, immigrant neighborhoods of D.C.
As for police reactions, what if marches and rallies, with or without permits (which, to me, aren't important issues), get bigger and bigger, more and more militant in action, more and more radial in ideology, in response to domestic and international actions by the USG and their fearful allies? What might be likely reactions by far rightists and/or repressive apparatuses of states? They will probably provoke or manufacture "incidents" -- minor or major, depending on the size, militancy, and radicalism of protesters -- to create excuses for repression. If the past is any indication, they (far rightists and/or the state) are not above committing terrorism and blaming it on far leftists:
***** LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE - August-September 1998 BETWEEN "HISTORIC COMPROMISE" AND TERRORISM Reviewing the experience of Italy in the 1970s ...by TONI NEGRI *
...The four years from 1974 to 1978 saw a progressive tightening of the alliance between the DC and the PCI: this alliance extended outwards from government and parliament to the whole system of power, from the central administration out to the periphery, to the trade unions, to the running of communications and the media and even, remarkably, to the police. However, at the same time Italy's broadly-based social struggles were becoming more intense and the social movements broke definitively with all forms of institutional representation. We should not forget that these were battles of enormous extent and massive intensity.
Beyond the simple exercise of that "counter-power" which they had embodied since 1968, the social movements were also nurtured by the consequences of Italy's monetary deflation policies and by the industrial restructuring through which an initial - but definitive - "emergence from Fordism" was taking place, in terms of Italy's systems of manufacture and production. As it happened, the "historic compromise" was built around precisely these "austerity policies" against which the social protest movements were being organised.
Thus, when the repression - repression by the employers in the factories and repression by the police in society as a whole, making use of a whole new range of laws - stepped over the line and went beyond the bounds of democracy, the resistance in turn began to arm itself. The Red Brigades, for instance, initially emerged from among workers in the large factories in the north, which had been subjected to savage restructuring (6); and it was in these same factories, or in the communities associated with them, that practices of "proletarian justice", sometimes at the mass level and sometimes clandestine, began to appear.
A further independent and over-determined variable should be added to this interweaving of social and political components, which from this point onwards was continuously being crossed and recrossed by an uninterrupted series of working-class struggles and manifestations of urban violence. This new element was the direct provocation - for which I would argue that the only appropriate term is "terrorism" - on the part of the state organs charged with maintaining NATO interests before, during and after the "historic compromise".
After the Milan bombing of 1969, terrorist operations by these state apparatuses continued, year after year, and included the bombing of demonstrations and public meetings, and the bombing of trains and stations, which culminated in the appalling Bologna bombing in 1980 (7). (To date not one of the perpetrators or organisers of these massacres has been imprisoned). Criminal actions of this kind obviously added fuel to the fires of a Resistance which was only fighting for the right to self-expression, and had the means to do so....
<http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9809/msg00031.html> *****
Italy in the 1970s is not at all the same as the United States the 2000s (in which, for instance, social movements have no institutional representation comparable to Italy's), but it gives us examples of errors of the left -- far leftists as well as the PCI -- from which we can learn. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>