Any type of tactic or strategy needs to be understood in its social and political context. Evaluations of the usefulness of tactics should be partly based on how our opponents respond, and the costs and benefits of likely outcomes. This applies to both anarchists and those condemning them. If people want to engage in a better way to occupy buildings – property occupations were something that was called for in a democratic vote at the General Assembly – or do something completely different, they can do that. People will eventually gravitate to what works. Instead of engaging in strategic action of any nature or going through the democratic channels that have been created at Occupy Oakland – many are deliberately trying to bait radicals and divide the movement. I have heard nothing in their argument that proposes effective alternatives or strategies, or even has an honest discussion of violence in our society. Movement tactics can and should be debated, but police tactics within the movement are not debatable no matter where they come from or what their intent. The lessons of COINTELPRO show us we shouldn’t loosely throw around accusations of “provocateur” because we do not like people, or uncritically accept media accounts of our movement; but we also should not create a culture that lets these tendencies grow, nor should we seek false safety by turning inward. No one said that this would be easy.
The media and some currents of the movement are preoccupied with an effort to bait the radicals at the center of creating this whole movement as “violent” for destroying property and defending themselves against the police. The morning Occupy Oakland was evicted a snake march with more than a few anarchists wove through the city for hours and destroyed nothing, despite plenty of justified anger and police provocation. Later that night, when Scott Olsen was shot in the head from close range with a “less than lethal” weapon that almost killed him, and police ruthlessly attacked a crowd with a variety of similar weapons for hours, nothing was destroyed and the worst the cops got was some water and paint thrown at them. People have shown up trying to make citizen’s arrests, trying to start chants that cops are the 99% (that get quickly shouted down by a large majority) or posing for pictures with uniformed police. These same segments don’t understand the function of the police.
In a purely objective sense, the police are there to maintain the exiting order. This means evicting protesters and shooting, arresting or beating peaceful protesters that do not disperse as they have done numerous times in Oakland. A successful movement can debate tactics and how they fit into contexts or strategies, but a successful movement does not debate basic social facts or delude oneself about the nature of those who are paid and trained to stop us from creating a just society. These tendencies normalize the role of the police in suppressing dissent, have no solidarity with the movement when it is attacked, and purposely or inadvertently extend police attempts to manage, divide or destroy the movement without offering alternative strategies. A debate over a diversity of tactics necessitates that we share the same objectives – transforming social relations. The fact that these shared goals of radical change are likely not universal makes this a red herring.
The variety of forces that are at play here either want to drive the anarchists and radicals out of the front of the movement and let something more palatable replace them or to sow such a division in the movement that the potential course of that (ostensibly) intra-movement conflict scares people who are not radical or militant away. Those are the two traps that lie in front of us. If we close our eyes and move forward we will find ourselves in one of them. If we are smart we can walk around them with an ever-increasing number of people.
[...]
http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/156