On Nov 5, 2011, at 9:35 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> That is an excellent question! And the answer, in both cases, remains to be
> seen. I don't think it's my place to defend either the breaking of a window
> or the occupation of a park - those who are doing that stuff today can
> choose whether to justify themselves publicly or not - but if I were forced
> to register a defense, I might say that each opens up a new space for
> political debate that otherwise simply wouldn't exist.
>
> I remember, in the immediate aftermath of Seattle, some Black Bloc
> participants publicly arguing that their actions had transformed what might
> otherwise have been an easily-forgettable kind of civil disobedience (on a
> par with the recent Tar Sands action in Washington, DC) into a more
> substantial shift in the public discourse. It would be futile for me to
> wade into a debate from a decade ago, but as I previously said, they had a
> logic, and it wasn't inherently wrong.
I thought Judith Butler did a fine job explaining how the occupation of a "public" park is a powerful political act that reconfigures our sense of what public space is:
http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en
On the Seattle question, there wasn't much window breakage. The big news from that event was that it basically shut down the WTO summit. From your account, BB folks seem to have an inflated sense of their importance. Breaking windows at a Whole Foods seems kind of silly to me, like a childish temper tantrum.
Doug