[lbo-talk] Lou Proyect responds...

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Wed Feb 8 11:06:44 PST 2012


All fine and good. He's still essential kvetching about how political currents other people spent years cultivating would look if he had been one of those pouring his life into organizing them instead.

Well, he isn't. Am I supposed to cry over it?

If he, or anyone else, wants to make Marxist-Leninisn (or anarcho-communism, or Catholic Workerism) a fighting force again, I wish them well. But his willfully misinformed attacks won't get him very far.

Meanwhile, these from a couple of actual anarchists (which I, for the record, am not):

"There is no 'the Black Bloc'. A black bloc is a tactic, not an organisation, engaged in by anarchists (yes, even us boring old neo-Platformist anarchocommunists, not just Insurrectionists) in which anarchists show up en masse at a protest, take steps to preserve their anonymity (as defense against state profiling), band together, ignore demands from illegitimate authority (i.e. the cops) and act together to defend participants' bodies and autonomy against state violence. It does not necessarily include sabotage-style direct action nor confrontation with cops (except for the fact that cops in general *seek* that very confrontation with any black bloc that forms on the ground). In fact there have been numerous black blocs on the east coast that I have been a participant in and that did not result in any property damage nor violent confrontation with cops whatsoever.

"This was my main problem with Hedges' article. I can't even get into discussing the thesis (a question of tactics) because the entire article is a soup of toxic misinformation. There is literally not one word in that article that is accurate. Chris Hedges is attacking a phantom organisation and creating links to people like Zerzan, because by inventing his scapegoat he needs to cast his net far and wide and grab at anything that might give it solidity."

http://pink-scare.blogspot.com/2012/02/against-hedges-on-black-bloc.html

"Hedges was trained as a journalist and worked for years at such luminaries of lies like the *New York Times*, so it shouldn’t be a secret where he’s gotten his sensationalism, his tendency to lie, his hyperbole, and, most of all, his seeming inability to do rudimentary research. Nonetheless, when activist celebrities like Hedges (and his friend here, Derrick Jensen) write even complete nonsense like this, it tends to have a certain conceptual currency with people."

http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/to-be-fair-he-is-a-journalist-a-short-response-to-chris-hedges-on-the-black-bloc

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:

-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."



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