> Brian is mostly wrong here. There may be situations where a black bloc did
> use a protest as cover for activities, but most of the black blocs I know
> about and have participated in, not only worked with other activists, but
> engaged in activities on our own, away from other activists. This was the
> case with the A16 black bloc, the Inauguration black bloc, and the black bloc
> in Seattle during the WTO.
>
> I'm disappointed that Brian uses the language of the liberals by saying that
> the black bloc engages in unaccountable activities. The people in a black
> bloc have a right to organize themselves and conduct their actions, just like
> any other group at these major demos. You will never hear this charge used
> against DAN, Ruckus, or other factions, because it is simply an
> anti-anarchist smear.
I'm not in the mood to get into another endless black bloc debate with you here (and actually you weren't even addressing me, but again, were speaking to your "audience"). But the black bloc'ing tactic isn't 1) particular to anarchism, seeing as that it wasn't even invented by anarchists but by the left-commie autonomen and antifa groups in europe (i.e. the contention at your black blocs for dummies page that a "black bloc is a collection of anarchists and anarchist affinity groups that organize together for a particular protest action" is wrong - Black blocs may or may not be anarchist; the first black blocs certainly were not, and not all since the 1980s have been. ), 2) has zero use outside the protest arena, and the achievements of it within that one area are so far dubious at best (the seattle wto was shut down, in part due to black bloc'ers, but since then black blocs haven't accomplished anything substantial), and 3) as the Workers Solidarity Movement of Ireland (an anarchist group) said in an issue of Onward: "What is the possible gain from a tiny group of people adopting tactics that, by their nature, exclude the vast majority of people? It's not going to stop any decisions being made by the G8, because those decisions will be made anyway," whether or not any individual G8 meeting is shut down. "No one believes that stopping the WTO or G8 from having these meetings will actually stop them from operating. Nothing happens at these meetings that couldn't be organized in some other way." Workers Solidarity Movement, "What's the Future for the Globalization Movement?" in Onward, at
http://www.onwardnewspaper.org/news/0102/glob.html
So - black blocs weren't invented by anarchists, there's nothing about them that definitely binds them to anarchist principles (black blocs such as the RACB included Maoists and others), and so far they don't seem to work well. But boy they make people look harder core than thou, I'll give them that. It's also tiresome to be called a "liberal"/"Stalinist"/"Leninist" over and over simply for disagreeing with you.
Brian
--
"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." - Friedrich Nietzsche