[lbo-talk] North America's first black bloc

Joseph Catron jncatron at gmail.com
Sat Feb 18 23:00:15 PST 2012

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"OWS began at Zuccotti Park, once called Liberty Plaza. It was at this same Liberty Plaza twenty years earlier that an organization called the Youth Greens met in the chilly, predawn hours the day after the twentieth Earth Day anniversary to challenge what it saw as the primary cause of the ecological crisis: capitalism, as symbolized by the institution of Wall Street. In solidarity with the Wall Street Action, which was endorsed by over fifty social and political groups, and turned out two thousand people organized into affinity groups, with close to three hundred arrested, actions were held in San Francisco, Eugene (Oregon), Minneapolis, and Saint Louis. In San Francisco, six hundred people marched on the Pacific Stock Exchange at 6:00 a.m., with fifty of those later arrested.

"The Youth Greens was largely an ecological anarchist organization, working with the Green movement of the 1980s and 1990s. It had active chapters in five U.S. cities, with annual decision-making conferences, and infused antiauthoritarian ideas and practices into the emerging Green movement, arguing against reformists. The Youth Greens asserted that the ecological crisis was a result of social forms of domination, and that humans dominating and exploiting other humans extended into the natural world in the attempt to dominate nature. Thus, for the Youth Greens and its allies in the Left Green Network, resolving the social crisis, by addressing and overturning all forms of social hierarchy and domination, was the only way to solve the ecological crisis.

"We can learn from the ideas and practices of the Youth Greens. At the Earth Day Wall Street Action, Youth Greens assembled the first black bloc in the United States—inspired by the German autonomen, or 'those who are autonomous.' Dozens of young people dressed in all black and covered their faces with black bandanas as a way to avoid being identified and surveilled by police. Nine years later, this tactic would gain worldwide visibility at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. The Youth Greens also developed political principles covering almost every aspect of contemporary life, from gay and lesbian liberation to antiracism to the practice of direct democracy, viewing all this as interrelated and part of a larger global movement."

https://groups.google.com/group/socialwar-energy-climatewar/msg/1f59d8612bb91d7f?hl=en-GB&