Rogueish

ahipstory:

Black Bloc tactics are solely for the fleeting entertainment of the people who take part in them. They communicate nothing to the world at large. They lead nowhere. They offer nothing to build on. Mainstream working people aren’t going to adopt Black Bloc tactics, or join the Black Bloc at protest ghetto events. The lack of credibility and commitment and failure of imagination seen in the April 30th Mission District vandalism spree is a symptom of the fact that a society gets the dissidents that it deserves. A society that proclaims that being entertained is the highest possible form of human aspiration gets a brand of ersatz radicalism that loyally mirrors this.

When I read the first three sentences I thought this was from an insurrectionist article in favor of the black bloc, but it turns out to be intended as criticism, based on a largely unargued assumption that the point of protest is educative, in which the protestors, who know what’s wrong, tell the uninformed people, thereby causing said people to act against whatever this wrong is. This seems like a limiting framework with which to analyze political action, as it flattens all action to communication, making smashing windows another form of signing a petition or liking a Facebook status.

ETA: Also, it seems to me there’s a fundamental connection between this understanding of politics as education and liberal state-centered politics, in that both are premised on alienation: politics on this understanding is not about doing something, but rather about saying something so that someone else will do something.