[WS:] Thanks for the link. Informative.
However, this piece brings to mind the opening line of the "18th brumaire" : history repeats itself twice - once as tragedy, and again as farce. The "tragedy" part of direct action was the Italian Biennio Rosso or a wave of factory occupations http://libcom.org/history/articles/italy-factory-occupations-1920 which initially resulted in a "managed solution" (establishing collaboration between workers' councils and factory management) but in a longer run sparked fascist reaction that literally crushed socialist and communist organizations. One of the key lessons of that experience (at least one absorbed by the Comintern) was the inevitable shortcomings of direct action, which demonstrated the need for a well organized political party structures for a radical transformation of social and political institutions aka the revo.
Now fast forward 80 years and what do we see? A bunch of folks extolling the virtues of direct action without a well organized party structures and then pissing and moaning that the authorities use time-honored tactics proven to be effective against this form of protest, albeit presented in a modern managerial jargon.
History repeating itself twice and on multiple levels - once as tragedy, and again as farce.
>From the hindsight one can also see that not only direct action but
the socialist party approach did not fare that well in industrialized
countries in comparison to social democracy that not only delivered
the goodies to the working class but thus far survived the onslaught
of neoliberalism. Socialism did not. Sure, social democracy did not
do much to stop "imperialism", "racism" and other bogey men of the
emasculated radical left, but neither did socialism.
Wojtek
On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 2:54 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> A good overview of the different kinds of policing models we've seen.
> Back in 2000 when I was doing research on asymmetrical warfare and
> what were once called non-lethal weapons (now called less than
> lethal), it was evident that a change was afoot, prompted by Seattle.
> Because affinity groups used tactics such as consensus-based
> decentralized decision-making, it was difficult for police to
> infiltrate and disrupt protest groups, let alone understand what was
> going to happen and how.
>
> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00394.x/full
>
> <quote>
> >From negotiated management to strategic incapacitation
>
> The effectiveness of negotiated management began to breakdown in the
> face of new challenges posed by the emerging global justice movement
> (for a detailed discussion see Gillham and Noakes 2007; Williams
> 2007). These new challenges were related to the organizing structure
> and tactics being employed by a new generation of activists and were
> particularly evident during the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO)
> protests in Seattle. During the WTO protests police and thousands of
> demonstrators clashed in the streets, the mayor declared a curfew and
> established a no protest zone in the center city, and the governor
> declared a state of emergency and called up the National Guard to help
> police reclaim the streets. On-the-job troubles included hundreds of
> arrests, millions of dollars in property damage, and the disruption
> and failure of the WTO meetings. In-the-job troubles that resulted
> include the resignation of the Seattle chief of police, a lost
> re-election campaign for the Seattle mayor, a city council report that
> criticized police actions as misguided and overly forceful, and
> several costly lawsuits waged against the city (Gillham and Marx 2000;
> Gillham and Noakes 2007; Smith 2001).
>
> The failure of negotiated management is attributed to several
> organizational and tactical factors (Gillham and Noakes 2007). These
> include the inability of Seattle police to properly prepare for
> contingencies and allocate resources necessary to control the
> unpredictable tactics employed by direct action protesters. Further,
> police could find no one with whom to negotiate from groups using
> leaderless, affinity group organizational structures. Police were also
> unable to infiltrate such uncooperative groups – both because of the
> close knit nature of such groups and because of local laws adopted
> during the negotiated management period that prohibited police
> surveillance of political groups that had not yet committed a crime
> (Gillham and Marx 2000) – leaving officials without accurate
> intelligence on the specific plans of many groups. The protesters'
> goal to ‘shut down’ the WTO meetings was widely known, yet police had
> only limited ideas on how this would happen. Finally, police could not
> predict the outcome of group decisions or disrupt communications
> between potentially unruly protest groups that utilized consensus and
> decentralized decision-making procedures.
>
> The use of such transgressive or disruptive tactics and organizational
> styles was not entirely new. What was new was the large number of
> activists that used them in Seattle to stymie police. Going back to
> the 1980s and increasing over the years in popularity among small,
> grassroots and radical groups was the rejection of negotiated
> management and the choreographed demonstrations that the permitting
> system produced. Activists complained that demonstrations orchestrated
> with police were overly accommodating and ineffectual for promoting
> their goals (Kaufman 2002; McPhail and McCarthy 2005; Rootes 1999;
> Walls 1999). Instead, radical groups ranging from environmental to
> anti-abortion and gay rights refused to use ‘contained’ or familiar
> and undisruptive tactics and instead engaged in ‘transgressive’ or
> innovative and confrontational tactics (Tilly 2000), rejecting the
> former on both philosophical and tactical grounds (Rootes 1999; Walls
> 1999). The coalescence in Seattle of multiple groups that refused to
> participate in negotiate management represented “the culmination of a
> thirty-year-long process of political reinvention [among grass-roots
> organizations, and] the creation … of an effective, decentralized,
> multivocal radicalism based on direction action” (Kaufman 2002, 35).
>
> The contentious events in Seattle and the breakdown of negotiated
> management there sent a warning to public order mangers across the
> country: the next protest cycle would not be easily managed. Police
> interpreted Seattle as a watershed and ‘the start of a new genre of
> protests’ (Gainer 2001) that would require retooling and retraining of
> police across the country (Fisher 2001; Gainer 2001; Noakes and
> Gillham 2006). In the few months following Seattle, police responded
> by coordinating a cooperative effort between federal law enforcement
> agencies and police from large municipalities where disruptive
> protests were considered most likely to occur. National trainings and
> conferences brought together public order experts and officials from
> cities that had hosted large events in the past and from those that
> would host such events in the future. The purpose of these gatherings
> was to develop and share neutralizing strategies useful for
> undermining the actions of transgressive protesters (Beasley et al.
> 2000; Fernandez 2008; Fisher 2001; Gainer 2001; Narr et al. 2006).
>
> Besides the failure of negotiated management, the police response to
> Seattle was shaped by a shift in the broader criminal justice system
> informed by a new penology philosophy. It conceives crime as systemic
> rather than individualized and stresses the need to identify potential
> victims and preemptively protect them (Feeley and Simon 1992; Garland
> 2001). Pre-emptive protection is best achieved by conducting risk
> assessments to identify aggregates of people most likely to offend and
> incapacitating them (Auerhahn 1999; Feeley and Simon 1992). The shift
> away from negotiated management accelerated in the changed political
> context after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as security and
> neutralization of threat became the central focus of law enforcement.
> Combined these factors played out in the rapid development and
> adoption of strategic incapacitation as a leading strategy for
> policing large protests events where authorities anticipated that
> protesters would likely engage in unruly and unpredictable actions.
> Characteristics of strategic incapacitation
>
> US police agencies retooled their approach to protest events through a
> back and forth process of responding to transgressive tactics employed
> by activists then readjusting their own response guided by the new
> penology framework of risk assessment (Gillham and Noakes 2007; Oliver
> and Myers 2001). Between the Seattle protests in 1999 and the
> terrorist attacks in September 2001, the contours of the strategic
> incapacitation approach to protest policing began to emerge. That
> process would only intensify in the decade since the 9/11 attacks as
> strategic incapacitation has become an increasingly common strategy
> employed in the policing of large demonstrations.
>
> The primary goals for police in this new era are to preserve security
> and to neutralize those most likely to pose a security theat. To reach
> these ends strategic incapacitation emphasizes the application of
> selectivity whereby police distinguish between two categories of
> protesters – contained and transgressive – in order to target those
> perceived most likely to engage in disruptive activities. Contained
> protesters, often referred to by police as ‘good protesters’ are
> generally known by police, use conventional and legal tactics,
> negotiate with police, make self-interested demands, and are generally
> older. By contrast protesters considered ‘bad’ or transgressive
> articulate more abstract demands, use unpredictable and often illegal
> tactics, do not negotiate with police, and are generally younger
> (Tilly 2000).
>
> The central characteristics of strategic incapacitation are
> identifiable by comparing it to prior strategies on the five
> dimensions of policing discussed earlier, plus the addition of three
> other dimensions needed to fully capture how strategic incapacitation
> differs from previous protest policing strategies. Table 1
> consolidates these differences. For each of these dimensions, I
> contrast the prior strategies with strategic incapacitation and use an
> illustrative case to show how police are now employing the latter when
> managing mass demonstrations they anticipate will be unpredictable,
> disruptive and pose a possible security threat.
> </quote>
>
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