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AK Thompson Foreword by Bernardinedohrn AKTHOMPSON ANTI-GLOBALIZATION AND THE GENEALOGY OF DISSENT Black Bloc, Wh ite Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy ofDissent By AK Thompson Foreword by BernardineDohrn © 2010 AK Thompson This edition © 2010 AK Press (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore) ISBN-13: 9781849350143 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010925751 AK Press AK Press UK 674-A 23rd Street PO Box 12766 Oakland, CA 94612 Edinburgh EH8 9YE USA Scotland - www.akpress.org www.akukcom [email protected] [email protected] The above addresses would be delighted to provide you with the latest AK Press distribution catalog, which features several thousand books, pamphlets, zines, audio and video recordings, and gear, allpublished or distributed by AK Press. Alternately, visit our websites to browse the catalog and find out the latest news from the world of anarchist publishing: www.akpress.org I www.akukcom revolutionbythebookakpress.org Printed in Canada on: 100% recycled,acid-free paper with union labor. Cover and Interior by Josh MacPhee I www.justseeeds.org CONTENTS VU ohrn X11l rnardine D word, by Be Fore 1 ace Pref urselves OUf Riot, O 31 troduction: In hts ic Street Fig 59 ne: Semiot e Oppressed O dagogy of th Action, Pe 81 Two: Direct ar Home nging the W 107 Three: Bri Riot Gender in a 129 u Can.t Do Four: Yo e g Catastroph 157 The Comin Five: it ntation's Lim oda: Represe C 171 181 Notes 193 Bibliography Index fOREWORD r BY BERN ARDINE DOHRN K Thompson's provocative meditation on the past decade of global activism, violence, race, and gender justice leaps onto the streets of our sluggish minds, upending the bricks and pav­ ing stones of the taken-for-granted, provoking the fertile young activists from whom and for whom he writes to talk back, think harder, do more. This stun­ ning book has vibrant resonance for us too, who work to stay in the struggle­ the notorious sixties generation who troubled also about whiteness, violence, and opening space to become while challenging Empire. Thompson begins with the 1999 robust, inventive, horizontal demonstra­ tions against the secretive World Trade Organization, which heralded a new era of opposition to imperialismlneo-liberal capitalism. In both content and form, the exuberant and kindred creativity on the streets of Seattle at the end of the twentieth century broke new ground-much as the New Left of the sixties transformed the paradigm of the Communist left and anti-communist fear-mongering with freedom rides, sit-ins, draft and military resistance, love/ sexuality/gender liberation, and waves of cultural transformations. Of course, 9/11 interrupted the newborn radical birthing in Seattle and troubled its baby steps, so that it was several years into the Bush/Cheney nightmare before it became apparent that a fresh conglomeration of radicalism was thriving, largely under the media radar but intermittently visible when the ruling elite gathered, and in the World Social Forums and their regional and national offspring. viii Black Bloc, WhiteRiot Black Bloc, Wh ite Riot interrogates the early years of theanti-globalization movement for, Thompson says, "its unrealized promise"; its urgency is today all the more trenchant because of the new ripples swelling, new windows opening, struggles newly linking, altering both topography and demography. Taking inspiration from the Zapatistas and a luminous wave of indepen­ dence experiments south of the USborder, ten thousand environmental justice activists gathered just this spring in Cochabamba, Bolivia, epicenter of water struggles, coca farmers, and mining, to take heed of the planet's needs for our common future. Named the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, the gathering opened with a welcome from indigenous President Evo Morales to the assembled participants from 135 countries: "We can not have equilibrium in this world with the current in­ equality and destruction of Mother Earth. Capitalismis what is causing this problem and it needs to end." In remarkable ways across the hemisphere, the power and experiences of the previously silenced are turning up the volume: demanding greater independence from US power while seeking and finding elements of common cause with a stew of activists from the epicenter of late capitalism where the militarization of capital is experiencedas totalizing. In June 2010, some 20,000 young people filled the streets of Detroit at the second US Social Forum. The prison, health care, artist, labor, Palestinian, immigrant, housing, disabled, and justice activists and organizers present­ primarily young people of color (as was the first USSocial Forum)-paid hom­ age to the elders present: Grace Lee Boggs (who turned 95 during the Forum), Vincent Harding Gust turning 81), and Immanuel Wallerstein. Sixties people present were a small minority and served (generally) in solidarity and support. In contrast to the upheavals of the 1965-75 rebellions, which were largely char­ acterized by racial and ethnic separation as a consequence of white supremacy, today's new formations tentatively and experimentally make room for what the Black Panther Party used to call "white mother-country radicals." The zesty opening-march of Forum attendees through downtown Detroit included traditional labor, noisy musical carnival revelers, feminists under the banner of Elia's Daughter (named for Elia Baker of SNCC), veterans, and an­ archist formations chanting: "Not right, not left, Property is Theft!;' and "Cops here, troops there, US Out of Everywhere!" Yet not one major media outlet covered the march or the USSocial Forum. We did not exist. Amy Goodman of Democracy No w noted that twenty "tea party" activists would account for a week of blather on the news cycle but the Forum was rendered invisible, except in its own terms. Foreword ix In taking as his focus an interrogation of the trajectory of white youth, the "dirty kids" who are thrown into resistance, Thompson notes Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez's germinal essay, "Where Was the Color in Seattle?" as a challenging document leading to concrete solidarity and efforts at inclusion but also to self-scrutiny. He also asserts the importance of askingwhy so many white youngsters of privilege got so angry, felt so alienated, and were deter­ mined to act to set themselves apart from patriarchy and the death culture through dissent, distance, and action. How do we become political people? How do we, as Grace Lee Boggs asks, learn to live differently so that others may live? And, indeed, how do we learn to live differently so we also-in the belly of the beast-may more truly, more democratically, more egalitarianly, more humanly, live? . What is it about the contradictions for white youth of the global north­ more and more unbearable forms of alienation, comodification, consump­ tion, silences, a�d blindness in the face of atrocity and decay, complicity in the global ecological disasters, with the long war, amid the upheavals of late capitalism-that might tear them from their relative comfort? What drives the confrontational attitude and the longing to realize the full dignity of all human beings? Thompson reminds us of the Fourth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, which declares that the Zapatistas are fighting for a world in which "everyone fits" and "where all steps may walk, where all may have laughter, where all may live the dawn." I just witnessed the squats in Zurich, where young artists and activists re­ connoiter, seize, and then inhabit abandoned buildings in "marginal" neighbor­ hoods. They build artist spaces, theatres, music dubs, housing, restaurants­ repairing the buildings, living communally, sharing work. They hook up to the grid, keep the police at bay and manage to work and live and create for 5-6 years until the building is re-captured by the city for private profit. Some are political organizers linked to immigrants and the marginal, some more inward. They seem practical, visionary, arid deter�ined to live toward freedom. Black Bloc, Wh ite Riot also takes on the question of riot, of excess, of the violen�e embedded in tactical decentralization, away (momentarily) from so­ cial control. The book acknowledges that, tactically, some of the actions left activists isolated post-9/11, in the period of silence in the streets. It is both provocative and equivocal about violence as both the mundane template of our existence and the requisite path to political revitalization or to politics-to breaking through the suffocating society of control, what the author calls "the new enclosure."· x Black Bloc, White Riot Speaking primarily of sporadic property destruction and fleeting confron­ tations withpolice, Thompson distinguishes the riots of the anti-globalization struggles from the spectacle of terrorism. He might well agree with Simone Weil, who wrote: "Only the person who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice" (The Iliad, or, The Poem ojFo rce). This spring, my students and I traveled to the West Bank of Palestine, just outside of RamalIah, to observe the Israeli military courts where hundreds of youth stand criminal trial inside an Israeli military base, Ofer. There, we took measure of the dominion of force. The major charge against Palestinian youth seized by the Israeli military is throwing stones. This is the charge in 26.7% of military cases against children, which under Israeli Military Order 378 can result in a maximumsentence of 20 years in prison; this is rarely the sentence in but every military court case we observed, the child defendant confessed and pled guilty to avoid an extreme sentence. Evidence was not necessary. Evidence of harm was entirely lacking. Such is the notion of youth "violence" under occupation. Such is the notion of "terrorism." Thus do youth of color at home, youth who resist around the world, and white youth who transgress become criminalized, become "threats to public safety and security." Thus is dissent regulated and policed.
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