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The Black Bloc: Hedges vs Graeber

UrizenusSklar

 

Black_bloc

The Black  Bloc has
been in the news a fair bit over the last few years.  They have made appearances at G5 meetings, at
the WTO meetings in Seatle, at the NATO meetings in Chicago, and currently they
are very much in the news here in Brazil.

The Black Bloc is, strictly speaking, a tactic.  In protests, a horizontally organized group
of individuals will wear black and cover their faces, generally move about as a
unit and they may engage in some aspects of violence.   In theory this is done to distract the
police — ideally in a way that enables the free movement of the main protest
group.  By dressing in black, they allow
other protestors to know who they are and to stay away from them if they choose
to.

Chris Hedges recently wrote a piece calling the Black Bloc
“The Cancer in Occupy”. Hedges, like many others, believes that The Black Bloc is
not tactical, but involves “feral” acts of violence, is “adolescent,” scared
people away from Occupy, and made it easier for the State to demonize the
Occupy movement. 

Meanwhile, David
Graeber has responded to Hedges, arguing that Hedges has his facts wrong and
that in any case even Gandhi never renounced people who shared his cause — even when they advocated violence.

Gandhi made it clear that while he was opposed to murder
under any circumstances, he also refused to denounce the murderer. This was a
man who was trying to do the right thing, to act against an historical
injustice, but did it in the wrong way because he was “drunk with a mad idea"…
Gandhi remained resolute. It is always morally superior, he insisted, to oppose
injustice through non-violent means than through violent means. However, to
oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing
anything to oppose injustice at all.

The news media has been having a go at the Black Bloc’s
actions in the teacher protests in Brazil, and even publications like The Raw
Story seem to be painting the actions of the Black Bloc as senseless
violence.  However, yesterday I was speaking to a teacher here in Rio – a woman in
her 50s – who said “no the Black Bloc was protecting us from the police!”  So there is that.

I know some of you have views about this.  Is Hedges right?  Is The Black Bloc the cancer in occupy?  Or is Graeber right.  And what do you think of Graeber’s
interpretation of Gandhi here?  Comments
are open.

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23 responses to “The Black Bloc: Hedges vs Graeber”

  1. Matthew Smith

    You pose a false choice by suggesting that there are only two mutually exclusive interpretations. Furthermore, you offer two rather simplistic understandings of the Black Bloc as our only options. But, the situation is more complicated than this. Below, I'll say something about Hedges and Graeber and why they painted simplistic pictures of the Black Bloc. Before that, though, here's my take on the Black Bloc.

    First, injustice is not always to be opposed. Sometimes it is to be overcome through the construction of alternatives. That is, I think we err when we think that the natural response to injustice is raw confrontation. Once we abandon this simplistic view of political action, the question of violence is no longer germane. Sure, there is violence everywhere, but asking whether *we* should use violence is out of place.

    Second, as you noted, there is no group "The Black Bloc." It is a tactic. We can understand it as a tool. The question is whether it is a good tool for an end for which we approve. That is a pretty complicated question. The simplistic answer, "It's always a good tool for any activist endeavor" is obviously false. Suppose you are a member of a Southern working class community of color and you are trying to build a progressive organization to fight for increased wages and a decent grievance system at the primary local employer (e.g., the local university). Black Bloc tactics will almost certainly alienate pretty much everyone and doom that organizing endeavor to failure. On the other hand, if you are part of a massive street protest movement whose aims to disrupt the normal order of everything, then Black Bloc tactics will be useful both for the sake of disruption and for protection from the inevitable violent state crackdown.

    We should, in short, assess Black Bloc tactics within the context of the particular political endeavor.

    So, what about Occupy? Occupy – the pre-Sandy version in America is all I can speak of – was a powerful piece of theater, but not much else. It was a political aesthetic realized as a distinctive spectacle in public spaces. Art can be very effective at shaping people's self-perceptions and their political opinions. It can be especially effective when it, in one fell swoop, elegantly realizes in a single, tangible form previously inchoate dissatisfactions widely distributed through a population. It often provides people a lexicon for understanding themselves and their situation. This is primarily what Occupy did. One consequence of this – and so an example of Occupy's theatrical power – is the way the popular press represents the world in terms of the 1% vs everyone else, as if this is totally natural, i.e., as if this is how we've been thinking about things all along. But, that's not so. It took Occupy to make this way of thinking about politics seem universally obvious.

    Was the Black Bloc useful for this? Arguably. They were part of the theater. They were part of the aesthetic. Since Occupy had absolutely no serious organizational aims (it was at best inept, at worst retrograde, on that front), the Black Bloc posed no meaningful threat to organizational capacity. And, since Occupy's aesthetic was so powerful, the Black Bloc tactics couldn't "blackwash" that aesthetic. Overall, it seems like the Black Bloc was probably a useful, albeit not particularly important part of Occupy. Take it or leave it, no matter.

    Regarding Hedges vs. Graeber. I don't think Hedges is being politically sophisticated when he complains about the Black Bloc. He seems to see politically action as taking a single form, namely organization building. The Black Bloc is, as I suggested above, probably detrimental to building an organization. So, from the perspective of the organization builder, the Black Bloc is a bad tactic.

    But, as Hedges knows, political action also involves direct action, which often provokes state violence. So, the Black Bloc can be useful there. Why didn't he appreciate that in his comments? Who knows?

    Graeber, on the other hand, is a grandstanding blowhard. For him, political action is spectacle, preferably with him at the center. No wonder he loves Black Bloc tactics: they are anonymous, they make a lot of noise, and they focus attention on the spokesactivists. This allows him to step in and take the microphone and bathe in the beautiful white lights of television interviews and public lectures. So, Graeber is unlikely to appreciate that sometimes political organizing is boring, gritty, thankless, and best done quietly.

    Reply
  2. Anon

    What I'm about to say is not an argument for or against the views expressed by Graeber, but I suspect that it would identify a performative inconsistency on his part and the left more generally.

    The events of 9/11 were a great injustice. Suppose that one's reaction (in part) to that injustice is to advocate (what some take to be) a criminal war in Iraq. Would Graeber defend that individual from attacks by the left on the grounds that although it's an inferior response to a less violent one, at least it comes from the right place? What about the torturers at Abu Ghraib? Are they uncondemnable because they were taking action against many who had committed injustices and thought that such torture was warranted or served to right the wrongs of the tortured?

    I highly doubt that the left would refrain from condemning such individuals. I would not refrain, nor would I refrain from condemning the actions of the Black Bloc

    Reply
  3. Tim

    I am no Gandhi expert, but there are plenty of things Gandhi said that indicate Graeber's interpretation is wrong. Here is just one:

    "There is no half way between truth and non-violence on the one hand and untruth and violence on the other. We may never be strong enough to be entirely non-violent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep non-violence as our goal and make steady progress towards it. The attainment of freedom, whether for a man, a nation or the world, must be in exact proportion to the attainment of non-violence as the only method of achieving real freedom."

    Reply
  4. James F

    It's interesting to see that David Graeber is citing Gandhi to justify Black Block tactics. At a teach-in at Occupy Austin, Professor Snehal Shingavi argued that we need to reevaluate Gandhi in order to overcome the limitations of his nonviolent politics and embrace a greater diversity of tactics. Here is a link to a Youtube video of the teach-in:

    Reply
  5. jrs

    I'm sympathetic to Graeber. I don't know that there's extensive data on the Black Bloc, but Hedges's account of them is a completely inaccurate account of the Black Bloc I've encountered. I participated in the protests at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City back in 2001, and found that the Black Bloc initiated much of the violence. They would throw rocks at police, police would respond with tear gas. The Black Bloc people I talked to were misguided teen-agers looking to pick a fight.

    I'm not a Ghandi scholar, but I wonder if it's true that he never denounced murder. In any case, there are other arguments from authority: Martin Luther King denounced the Black Panther Party's violent tactics.

    But arguments from authority aren't really the point. It seems clear to me that property destruction does more to limit the protest movement to a relatively tiny group of committed radicals than to harm the system being protested. In light of this, if there were a way for the mainstream of the movement to remove the Black Bloc, it would be prudent for them to do so. If Hedges is right that this would only lead the Black Bloc to further radicalize and delegitimize the movement even more, then the protest movement is even more doomed than I thought.

    Reply
  6. IndianPhilGrad

    Prof Ludlow,

    One little thing. You might want to correct the spelling of Gandhi's name. It should be "Gandhi" and not "Ghandi". Thanks.

    On Graeber's interpretation: It is common knowledge in India, that Gandhi once completely abandoned a nationwide civil disobedience movement due to violence breaking out under its banner in a small town. The incident resulted in “a group of villagers burning down a police station ending up killing 22 policemen” (paraphrase: Simon O'Neill “Gandhi and the myth of non-violence”). This is but one example: he is known to have abandoned such movements on the eruption of violence multiple times, even when the movements were going extremely strong and abandoning meant letting go of all advantages gained, and did so even in the face of scathing criticisms from various other Indian leaders (ibid). In his public statements of abandonment of such movements he is known to have renounced the actions of the perpetrators as those of "ill-disposed persons, not true passive resisters at all" (ibid). The crux, Gandhi did not value tactical advantage over his principle of non-violence. (This is specifically significant since according to Graeber's own account he and his fellow Black Bloc activists took up Gandhian means when it was the tactical thing to do. To keep it short "Gandhian means for tactical advantage" is an oxymoron once you grasp the idea of Gandhian means.) As for the incident Graeber points to, it happened at the very beginning when, as Graeber himself suggests, Gandhi was just beginning to form his ideology/"strategy". The Gandhi we know of now is not merely the Gandhi of his youth. When there is so much in Gandhi's actions in the coming few decades that goes against the interpretation the said incident pushes, discussing that incident in isolation is misleading.

    Now, I am no Gandhi scholar. I just wanted to point out that at least popular historical accounts of Gandhi's conduct are at multiple places in tension with Graeber's interpretation. More evidence would be needed for his interpretation to hold any water. Look at the article above that I have quoted and paraphrased liberally for somewhat of a polar opposite interpretation to Graeber's; here's the link
    "http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=5662:gandhi-and-the-myth-of-non-violence".
    (O'Neill accuses Gandhi of being a "religious fanatic" who would for the sake of his principles not care about the lives or "deaths of ordinary people"!!!! Waaa…aaay too extreme!!.)

    Having said that, this only concerns that Graeber's Gandhi example seems to be wrongheaded; it is not a renunciation or condoning of Black Bloc ideology.

    Best,
    IndianPhilGrad

    [spelling fixed. sorry about that. great comment by the way! –PL]

    Reply
  7. David Graeber

    People misunderstand what I said about Gandhi. Gandhi made clear he opposed violent tactics. I don't think he made a big issue out of property damage one way or another, and present-day Gandhians in India do practice it (such as the famous KRSS destruction of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Karnataka), but he certainly didn't countenance any sort of attacks even against inanimate objects among his own followers. Obviously he condemned murder; but he didn't condemn the murderers, he insisted they were good people trying to do the right thing in a way he strongly disagreed with. Not only did he emphasize that those who used violent tactics against injustice were good people, he added that he considered them morally superior to those who took no action at all. This would have been the equivalent of saying "while I don't think it is a good thing to break a window, I understand that what Black Bloc are doing is far better than what the vast majority of Americans do when they stand idly by and do nothing."

    See how far this position is from most of those who claim to be Gandhian today?

    The example of Chauri Chaura, where Gandhi suspended a campaign after his own followers ended up killing 22 policemen (either by hacking apart, or burning alive, or both, depending on the account) shows precisely how ridiculous the comparisons now are. Obviously if some people in Occupy Denver or what-have-you ended up killing 22 cops, we would have suspended our campaign too – so would the Black Bloc, who oppose anything that will do harm to living beings. The idea that anyone is seriously acting as if a couple damaged pieces of glass in Oakland (i.e., in one out of 800 occupations) is somehow morally equivalent to burning 22 people alive is a perfect sign of how bizarre our public discourse has become. There's no way to have a mass social movement, especially one that's under constant attack by police, where there's no faction that gets even a little rowdy somewhere sometimes. The amount of damage to property done in the entire Occupy movement was less than one is likely to get after the average Canadian hockey game.

    What made me furious is that the entire liberal class, as Hedges calls them, used this entirely bogus idea of what was about Gandhi to essentially excuse looking the other way when the cops used extreme violence to suppress totally non-violent protestors across America. All they could talk about was whether two months before people in one city had illegitimately broken a window. In New York for instance, the only major incident of window-breaking I'm aware of happened on March 17, 2012, when police broke a storefront window, using a non-violent protestor's head. The incident was caught on video but somehow no one seemed to feel it was very notable because they were still ranting on about the Black Bloc, who at that point weren't breaking anything at all, and who hadn't existed at all in New York or 99% of occupations. Whereas Gandhi, were he alive, would have clearly said that while he was against (some) Black Bloc tactics, what they were doing was far better than those who were using them as an excuse to refuse to protest anything at all.

    Reply
  8. Alan Mills

    This is a debate which has been going on for decades. During the Civil Rights movement in the 50's and 60's, many non violent protestors were protected by the Deacons for the Defense, armed men, willing to use violence to protect their community from armed violence by the Klan, etc.

    Many wanted them hidden in the background, but even MLK relied on them for protecting his home and family at times.

    Today's Black Bloc seems very much in this tradition…but with less actual violence, and more theater.

    Reply
  9. Kris K

    "Black Bloc" sounds like they're looking for trouble. They should've gone with "Teal Bloc" or "Magenta Bloc" or Chartreuse Friendly Distractions. Or maybe they could wear signs saying, "If you need to beat someone, beat me instead of them."

    I am kidding, but not entirely. Left wing protestors need to maximize the signals that they send that their protests will be non-violent. Using humor helps in that regard. Do everything you can to make it hard for them to paint you as violent. Simply avoiding violence isn't enough.

    Reply
  10. Ambrose

    This is obviously false: "to oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing anything to oppose injustice at all". As if it makes no difference what kind of "injustice" we're talking about, how serious or harmful it is, whether it's a one-time kind of thing or ongoing and systemic, etc. As if it makes no difference what kind of "violent means" we're talking about, or who the victims of this violence will be, or how the severity and harm of the violence compares with the harm (if any) currently caused by the injustice… The counter-examples are too obvious to need stating. This is not a topic for serious intellectual debate. People who actually think this way are psychopaths or morons who would have no public role in a civilized society. People who carelessly throw around such vile and callous claims without really believing them or thinking them through are not serious thinkers. (Maybe, at best, they are engaged in some weird kind of posturing or status seeking.) That we think it worth discussing the merits of such patently false and toxic nonsense (provided, of course, that it comes from "the left") is evidence of advanced intellectual (cultural, moral, political) degeneracy.

    Reply
  11. David Graeber

    Well fine, but if you feel that's false, then don't invoke the name of Gandhi. That was his actual position…

    Reply
  12. Sean

    If your interpretation of "to oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing anything to oppose injustice at all" makes it "obviously false", so much so that "people who actually think this way are psychopaths or morons", then, for reasons well-known to most readers of this blog, you are probably not interpreting it right.

    This is not the place to try to work out a more charitable interpretation in detail (maybe it will turn out there is none); still, a reasonable person would read it not as "to oppose any injustice [however small] through violent means [of any kind, employed against anybody], is still morally superior to not doing anything at all", but rather as something more like "to oppose [serious, systematic, intractable injustice, which itself involves much violence] through violence [believed to be proportionate to the injustice, directed at those thought to be responsible for it, and part of what seems to be the only effective strategy for rooting it out] is still morally superior to not doing anything at all".

    That seems to include the murder Graeber mentions but to exclude Abu Ghraib etc.; and it seems like something one could mean by saying the shorter thing. It might or might not be true. But surely it's close enough to be "a topic for serious intellectual debate".

    Reply
  13. Anonymous

    Chris Hedges has considerable on-the-ground experience as a war correspondent–and this has unquestionably shaped his views on violence–but he certainly doesn't have as much on-the-ground experience as an activist and organizer as David Graeber does. Between the two, I'd venture to assert that David has more credibility on this particular issue.

    Reply
  14. Tim

    David Graeber,

    What is your evidence that this was Gandhi's actual position? The reason I ask is that it does not seem to fit with his view (as in the statement I quoted above) that non-violence is the "only" method of achieving genuine freedom. This renders the question about whether violent means are superior to do-nothingism pointless, since Gandhi thought of both of them as failures.

    Reply
  15. David Graeber

    Gandhi repeated this position on many occasions. I don't see why you see it as contradictory: why is it inconsistent to say that violent resistance is incapable of achieving true freedom but it's still better than not doing anything at all?

    Here is a quote where he puts it pretty straightforwardly:

    "I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence…. Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour.

    "But I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment…" ("The Doctrine of the Sword," 1920, Gandhi, Complete Works, volume 21, 133-34.)

    More or less the same thing is repeated in 1924 in Volume 27, p.9.

    In 1946, he responded to a question on his position on such matters by saying he was not the one to judge. "Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right." (Complete Works vol. 92, p.348).

    Is this enough? Want another? How about

    " Ever since my experience of the distortion of ahimsa [non-violence] in Bettiah in 1921, I have bee nrepeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honour by non-violently facing death, may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor. He who can do neither of the two is a burden. He has no business to be the head of a family. He must either hide himself, or must rest content to live for ever in helplessness and be prepared to crawl like a worm at the bidding of a bully." (Complete Works vol 43 pp. 81-82).

    Reply
  16. Ambrose

    Hi Sean.

    "to oppose [serious, systematic, intractable injustice, which itself involves much violence] through violence [believed to be proportionate to the injustice, directed at those thought to be responsible for it, and part of what seems to be the only effective strategy for rooting it out] is still morally superior to not doing anything at all".

    I agree with you that _that_ does sound like something worth discussing. But I don't see any good evidence that that is what Graeber had in mind. For one thing, he could easily have added all of these qualifications, or at least one or two, but didn't. Also, notice the context: the preceding sentence in the original has to do with what is "always" the case, not what is sometimes the case contingent on blah, blah, blah… It's actually not all that unusual for fans of leftist political violence to endorse evil in the name of the cause. (Maybe you don't know this?)

    In any case, if Graeber did mean something along the lines of what you're suggesting, his contention is not very helpful or interesting. For now we should have to ask whether it is actually true or even remotely plausible that the actions of the "Black Bloc" satisfy all the extra conditions that you think he is silently presupposing. Since that is deeply unobvious, at best, the more plausible claim you put in his mouth would make his larger argument very weak. (But maybe now you'll say I'm not being charitable enough, and that in fact he must have in mind some excellent set of unstated reasons for thinking that the apparently pointless, stupid violence of the "Black Bloc" is actually a justifiable and useful response to some specific kind of injustice that meets all these other conditions…)

    Reply
  17. Jason Wyckoff

    It's somewhat surprising to me that no one has yet mentioned "The Doctrine of the Sword," which certainly seems relevant to the question of what Gandhi, at least in 1920, believed on this question, and seems to some degree to support David Graeber's interpretation of Gandhi's position. (Though as IndianPhilGrad points out, it may be that Gandhi's position evolved over time. I also do not claim to be a Gandhi scholar.) http://www.mkgandhi.org/nonviolence/D_sword.htm

    A relevant excerpt:

    "I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence….

    But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment, forgiveness adorns a soldier. But abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish, it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature. A mouse hardly forgives cat when it allows itself to be torn to pieces by her. I therefore appreciate the sentiment of those who cry out for the condign punishment of General Dyer and his ilk. They would tear him to pieces if they could. But I do not believe myself to be a helpless creature. Only I want to use India's and my strength for better purpose."

    Reply
  18. Sean

    I can probably let Graeber speak for himself, since he's here, but I will say that I offered that interpretation advisedly, in light of things that Graeber actually says about the Black Bloc in, e.g., his book 'Direct Action'. The thought (stated!) there seemed to be that Black Bloc tactics are (often if not always) justifiable responses (sometimes preemptive) to the use of police violence in defense of serious injustice. I don't know if that's right – my personal experience with the Black Bloc is much more limited (and, I might as well add, negative) – but it's worth seriously considering at least.

    Reply
  19. David Graeber

    To Ambrose:

    One must bear in mind the context. In the US, participants in Black Blocs systematically foreswear any initiation of harm against a living being, and the overwhelming majority refuse to fight back even if physically attacked. (In fact Black Bloc'ers with whom I have discussed the matter invariably take exactly the position Gandhi spelled out above: that when you or someone you love is being physically attacked, the decision whether to respond non-violently or with equivalent force can only be a decision based on one's individual moral conscience; no one else has the right to tell you what to do under those circumstances.) Anyway they consider what they do to be an aggressive form of non-violence.

    Even if you feel that they are wrong, and that breaking a piece of glass that doesn't belong to you is always and under any conditions necessarily a form of violence, we are talking about the most minimal violence possible, in response to police operations that involve deploying systematic violence against human flesh and bones to achieve political ends (to put an end to a non-violent protest movement.) Gandhi, in the examples he cites above, was justifying far, far more violent acts than this, up to and including deadly force, in response to a government that, while it did use even greater force against protestors (even opening fire on them in some cases), was basically doing exactly the same thing. And in fact he went much further, saying that taking up arms is preferable to experiencing "dishonor."

    Again I must emphasize: I am not, myself, a Gandhian. I admire certain aspects of his legacy, and find others deeply troubling. All I am saying is that if you are going to evoke the spirit of Gandhi, try at least to get it right. At the very least, do not say things that are exactly the opposite of what Gandhi himself said under analogous circumstances.

    If anyone is curious what I actually think: it seems to me there are contexts when it makes little sense to think of damage to property as violence at all. To take an obvious example: if the only way to rescue a baby in mortal danger is to break through a window that doesn't belong to you – even against the window-owner's wishes – very few of us would see that as a violent act (or even if we did, we would be unlikely to see it as morally objectionable.) One must then ask: is it really any different if it's a thousand babies? I think a case could easily be made that the dramatic attacks on corporate storefronts in 1999 in Seattle, for instance, did contribute to setting off a chain of events that led to the end of structural adjustment policies that, in turn, prevented thousands of such deaths. For me though the key factor is the lack of certain knowledge in such matters. One cannot be sure the tactic will work, that it will publicize the problem, or otherwise have any effect. It might even backfire. This is where I think there is a fundamental difference between property destruction and attacks on human beings. If you break some windows – and I must emphasize this is not used as a tactic very often, during OWS I think it happened once during 800 occupations – and do not achieve your aim, even so, what harm have you really done? You broke some glass. Big deal. You may have caused some inconvenience, an eyesore, some extra expenses for corporations (Black Blocs studiously avoid attacking owner-operated enterprises), but also threw some extra work to local glaziers… (Actually if you think about it, it's the same with the baby: you might come too late, the baby might slip and fall anyway, but still, no one is going to weep too much about the window.) On the other hand, even if you are one of those people who believe it's morally acceptable to intentionally harm one innocent person in order to save a thousand others, all such thought experiments assume you can actually be fairly certain what the effects of your action will be. In reality, you can never be certain. And in the contexts of social movements, civil resistance, revolutions, etc, outcomes are especially uncertain. If you blow up a bomb because you think it might set off a chain of events that will lead to saving thousands of babies from dying of preventable diseases, you might well end up blowing some night watchman's legs off. Now some people might say that's a fair trade-off (I wouldn't, but some might), but even if you do think that, the fact is, YOU DON"T KNOW IF IT'S GOING TO WORK. You are dealing with radical indeterminacy here. And if you fail: you've just blown somebody's legs off for no reason at all. This is entirely different from putting a crack in some Starbucks facade. For me, there is simply no justification for blowing someone's legs off just because you think it MIGHT have some other beneficial effect.

    In the case on the Starbucks window, in contrast, one could make the opposite case: damaging a Starbucks facade is an evil so trivial that if there is any meaningful chance it might save the life of even one baby, it is probably worth trying.

    Don't get me wrong. My own personal estimation is that under current circumstances in the US, such tactics aren't effective and I have discouraged activists from using it. This wasn't hard: nobody I knew in New York even considered using such tactics while we were planning the occupation. They were obviously inappropriate. (Oakland was a special case for numerous reasons.) But I am simply talking about the moral issues here.

    These sort of calculations are very different from the sorts Gandhi made. But then I never claimed to be a Gandhian. I am simply saying that if you are going to evoke the moral authority of Gandhi to justify sitting idly by while cops attack protestors, because some guys put on masks and plastic shields, threw back tear gas canisters, or even, in one case, broke a window, you should consider the fact that what Gandhi himself would have said in such circumstances would have been something like this: "I can criticize such tactics because I have the strength and courage to stand in the way of the police lines and accept their blows with absolute non-violence, but even if the Black Bloc were shooting back with firearms, they would still be morally superior to you, who are sitting there watching police attacking peaceful protestors and refusing to do anything."

    Reply
  20. Remy Debes

    Curiously, I saw (what I now realize) must have been a black Bloc'er on an overpass just yesterday in Memphis, Tennessee. A number of signs were posted facing the oncoming traffic, along with both an Anarchy and Peace sign, and an individual in a mask waving a flag. I admit I had no idea what I was looking at, and it was only coincidence that I looked in at Brian's blog today. (Sorry Brian – I'm just not a regular blog reader). I'm still not sure if there was a particular cause for the demonstration.

    Reply
  21. Ambrose

    Hi Sean,
    When I distinguished between "stated" reasons and others, I had in mind reasons stated in the text under discussion. (Charity.) I haven't read Graeber's book, so I'll take your word for it that there he says things that support your interpretation. If it's not possible to (charitably) interpret Graeber's blog post without reading everything else he's written on the topic, that might be a problem with what he wrote rather than the interpretation of it.

    He could have said, but did not say, that "Black Bloc tactics are (often if not always) justifiable responses (sometimes preemptive) to the use of police violence in defense of serious injustice". Okay, sure. If the police are the Gestapo (and there's a real prospect that violence will help) then violence might well be okay. But no reasonable principle of charity compels anyone to interpret the statement under discussion as a statement to that effect. It certainly does not sound like the heavily qualified and hesitant other statement you think he "seemed" to be putting forward elsewhere.

    More to the point: in philosophical debates about how to respond to this or that "injustice" we are awfully careless. Maybe no professional philosopher _actually_ holds the insane view that _appears_ to be expressed in Graeber's remarks here. It's still worth noticing that many of us seem comfortable with very loose, general, careless talk of violence. I don't think it's a coincidence that leftists have a long history of endorsing or failing to criticize the most terrible violence and evil for the sake of some (supposedly) noble cause. Let's not talk of violence in a loose, careless, general kind of way. Let's try instead to speak more responsibly, remembering that real violence is often a terrible evil — even when it's done by leftists all fired up by their hatred of "injustice" somewhere in the world, even if it may well have been endorsed by Gandhi. Most of us in these kinds of discussions have _no_ real idea of just how terrible and evil political violence can be. Getting beaten up by some cops at a demonstration or held for a few hours at a police station or strip searched really sucks. That's nothing in comparison with the kinds of evils that millions of people have experienced at the hands of morally intoxicated leftists. (Though not leftists only, of course.) If we're contemplating some kind of endorsement of some kind of violence under some specific kind of circumstance let's think about all of that very, very seriously and carefully. A first step is to make it very clear that we are not (I hope) endorsing political violence wherever there is some kind of "injustice" that can conceivably be addressed to some extent in that way. (A recipe for endless all pervading violence.)

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  22. Ambrose

    Hi David. I tried to post this earlier but it seems not to have gone through. The gist was that, in your latest comment, you are saying merely that some actions that are wrongly labelled as "violent" (like breaking a few windows) are sometimes justifiable when that would bring about some very important good or prevent some serious injustice (and when we know or can reasonable expect that it would). You also say that doing real violence to people is not justifiable on the grounds that it "might" lead to some important good thing.

    Okay, that sounds entirely sensible. But isn't the issue here — one issue, anyway — the use of real violence and not just what gets called "violence"? In the Gandhi story, we are talking about murder. You are saying that for Gandhi even murder was better than inaction under those circumstances.

    Given the context — an attempt to defend what some may perceive as violence — it is natural to wonder what you think of this. Do you think real and serious violence is justifiable when there is a high probability that it will address "injustice" of some kind? If so, what kinds of circumstances might justify it in your view? I realize that one thing you want to do here is simply to interpret Gandhi's position, but there is the more substantive question to consider as well. Most of us probably agree with you about the use of "aggressive non-violence" and the evil of serious violence when there's no way to really know its effects. But what do you think about cases where that's knowable, or reasonably believable?

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  23. David Graeber

    Hello Ambrose,

    Well in the case of Gandhi, one must remember he was dealing with a colonial government whose authority was based only on force of arms. Britain was an empire, it called itself an empire, and the only justification England had to govern a country of 100s of millions of people halfway around the world was right of conquest. So if we are speaking of a British colonial official, we are speaking of someone whose power was founded on greater ability to shoot people in the past, and maintained by greater ability to shoot people in the present, and really very little else. One could make the argument that it's not morally wrong to shoot at the representative of an occupying army and presumably that was Gandhi's point. I think he was right too that the real moral problem is not so much that it's wrong to fight back against those who have imposed themselves on you by means of violence, but that by adopting similarly violent means you transform yourself, and the larger movement, into an image of what you oppose.

    This part of Gandhi I'm amenable to because as an anarchist, I'm opposed to all structures of systematic, institutionalized violence and would ultimately wish to eliminate them. I also think that the commonplace 20th century notion that one can seize state power through military means – or any other means – and then use state capacities for violence to reshape society into one in which violence will no longer be necessary has been proved absurd and disastrous. Systems of violence will tend to reproduce themselves. Violence itself tends to create a seductive mystique for those capable of wielding it, it becomes romanticized, and of course it creates bureaucracies that try to maintain their own institutional interests, which include, of course, the continuation of situations which require (or seem to require) their existence.

    The logic of the state of course is entirely based on the principle that it is acceptable to use or threaten violence to further some greater good (prevent crime, enforce traffic regulations, even, in our increasingly militarized society, to stop people from talking out of turn in meetings or not leaving a library quickly enough if they don't have a currently valid ID). The threat of physical violence informs almost every moment of our lives, much though we don't like to think about it. I am interested in imagining, and beginning to create, a society which would not require that constant threat of physical violence, or at the very least would keep it to an absolute minimum. This is why anarchists are so interested in experimenting with forms of consensus decision-making, etc, because they could work without violent enforcement. We want to make the form of our resistance to a power that we see as based ultimately on violence to take the form of relations that would not have to be so based.

    Does that mean someone who holds those principles has to disapprove of all forms of violent resistance? Well this is where it's difficult, because we also tend to believe in individual moral autonomy. You don't want to create a party line, and certainly don't want to tell people in a terrible situation that you've never been in how they should react to it. I've never lived under foreign military occupation. I'm not sure how I'd react if I was in that situation. So I find it difficult to stand in judgment over moral decisions made by people who are. I can talk about those I admire, though. I think the Zapatistas in Chiapas are quite admirable. They were a group made up overwhelmingly of indigenous people who suffered under what was basically a caste system, and who led a brief two-week insurrection in 1994: they seized the main towns and city in Chiapas and shot it out with the Mexican army when they tried to take them back, but their main goal was to declare a truce and immediately enter into negotiations with the government. Interestingly, they knew perfectly well the government would negotiate in bad faith and not keep any of the promises it made (as indeed happened) but they used the window this created to set up their own autonomous self-governing communities, based on directly democratic principles. They also hid all their weapons and started using only fake weapons in public. From that time on, they engaged strictly in non-violent forms of direct action, diverting power to their communities, answering attacks by the army by i.e., staging "invasions" of military bases by hundreds of angry indigenous women screaming at the soldiers, etc – but all done with the knowledge that they had real weapons and could go back to armed struggle if they were really forced to at any time. I thought this was quite ingenious. Basically, if you were a Tzotzil or Chol campesino before the Zapatista insurrection, and tried to use non-violent civil disobedience tactics, you'd probably just get killed. Rape, torture, and murder were regularly used by landowners and corrupt politicians against such communities with absolute impunity. What the insurrection did was to open up a space where such people could use non-violent tactics by making clear they could fall back on violent means if they had to, but they really didn't want to. This is a beautiful example of people in a very difficult situation thinking very creatively about how to use minimal violence to achieve maximal positive social effects. And the results, if you go to Chiapas now, are palpable. Everything has changed. In San Cristobal, it used to be indigenous people couldn't even walk on the sidewalks, but had to walk in the streets below. Everyone said "oh yes, all that changed after the insurrection." Obviously it's hardly paradise, but they did manage to achieve some remarkable effects.

    But that's just one example. APPO in Oaxaca also had some very interesting and sophisticated debates about violence. Like Gandhi, these emphasized not so much on the specific morality of when it is acceptable to use force, but on the political effects of the use of force on the movement itself. They ultimately came to the conclusion that either armed insurrection, or pure Gandhian non-violence, would undermine the democratic nature of their movement because either would require military-style discipline, tend to generate charismatic leaders, top-down structures, and so forth. So they come up with a sort of in-between level: they would throw rocks, even molotovs (if at riot cops in flame-retardant armor) but never use firearms. Interestingly this level of force, which is generally non-lethal (molotovs look scary but again, they're only used against armed vehicles or people wearing protective gear and don't actually kill anyone; at least, they didn't in Oaxaca), is widely used in Latin America, as for instance, during the overthrow of the Sanchez el Lozado government in Bolivia. Such movements do, indeed, manage to stay much more democratic than those which regularly resort to firearms.

    But this wanders somewhat far afield from the original question perhaps.

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