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Debate on Tactics: Violence vs. Nonviolence, Hedges vs. CrimethInc.
There has been a long-simmering debate within Occupy over tactcs -- is this a nonviolent movement or is there a role for violence and property destruction. From the outset we have taken the position of nonviolence because we see that as the effective approach to achieving out goals. Indeed, that is what is missing from much of the debate -- goals. Tactics flow from a vision, goals and strategy. We do not just march without a purpose, or protest a government official for no reason, or protest a bank unless it fits with our goals. The vision can be something broad like ending corporate rule, or ending the rule of oney and shifting power to the people. The goal can be ending corporatism and militarism, with lots of smaller goals along the way. These are the visions and goals we have set for ourselves. The strategy serves the purpose of achieving these ends. Once you have vision, goal and strategy then the tactics can be developed to achieve those ends. This framework has been missing in the Occupy and it was evident in the debtate described below. Hedges asked what the goal was and never got an answer.
We had a hard time finding good articles on this debate, below are a few and we will add more if they appear. Also, below is a link to the debate so you can view it for yourself.
Challenging the corporate-state is no easy task. The U.S. is the largest empire in world history, the U.S. military is the strongest in the world, the police force at home is massive with layers of police often militarized. The electoral system has been manipulated to protect corporate power and prevent real change. The concentration of wealth is intense and with that the concentration of power. Those who want real change have taken on a great challenge. We must be strategic in our approach if we want to win -- if we really want to shift power from money to the people.
The Narcissism of Small Differences: Hedges v. CrimethInc.
By Kristofer Petersen-Overton
Open CUNY, September 15, 2012
It’s been about seven months since Chris Hedges dropped his bombshell attack on Black Bloc tactics as the “cancer in Occupy” and his words still echo in activist circles across the country. Charging protestors who “dress in black” or “obscure their faces” with hypermasculine—even criminal—behavior, Hedges drove a wedge between radicals within Occupy apparently committed to very different visions of resistance. Debates within the movement have obsessively focused on the virtues of violence or otherwise at the hands of protestors and the state security apparatus. The small but persistent anarchist core that helped launch the protests in 2011, predictably scandalized by Hedges’ unhinged accusations, flatly refused to engage with him publicly. Hedges similarly expressed no interest in opening up a dialogue with people he viewed as little more than thugs and hooligans. Fortunately for us, this mutual skepticism was overcome last Wednesday in a highly anticipated, but ultimately anti-climactic, debate between Hedges and the ideologically anarchist CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective.
I entered into the debate expecting to sympathize with CrimethInc. and left frustrated by the shallowness of the discussion. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote an op-ed critical of Hedges in this newspaper following his inflammatory article earlier this year.) I had sincerely hoped to hear a compelling case for the ubiquitous “diversity of tactics” hailed by so many on the libertarian Left. Unfortunately, Brian Traven, the CrimethInc. representative charged with debating Chris Hedges, struck me as woefully unprepared for the task. This was unfortunate, not only because the audience was denied a truly incisive look at the important issues, but also because Proshansky Auditorium was literally overflowing with black-clad, body-modified anarcho-punks expecting to see Hedges put in his place. In my view at least, this did not happen. To put it simply, Traven lost at what should have been a homecoming game.
Once the speakers were introduced by Sarah Leonard of Dissent magazine, Brian Traven began. He modestly (but repeatedly) informed us that although he wasn’t accustomed to speaking before larges audiences, he would “speak from the heart.” All very nice, but hardly an effective opening statement. Hedges, with irrepressible pomposity, dove right in, immediately laying out his opposition to Black Bloc tactics simply and without flourish. In sharp contradistinction with Traven, this was a man accustomed to speaking before large audiences.
Hedges mostly summarized the points in his original article: Black Bloc is a dangerous tactic, a gift to the surveillance state that allows the movement to be easily repressed, while undermining its mainstream appeal. His position has apparently remained unchanged despite the deluge of compelling responses to his arguments that have appeared during the last seven months. Members of the audience expressed their dissatisfaction with Hedges by repeatedly laughing incredulously at his points. Occasional expletive-addled heckles interrupted him at several points, especially when he accused those who engage in Black Bloc tactics of “using” Occupy to their own ends. Not everyone in the audience resented Hedges’ however. A corpulent bearded man sitting next to me indicated his approval by gesticulating in the “twinkle fingers” style popularized at Occupy gatherings last autumn.
The debate jumped wildly across topics: mask-wearing, police violence, state power, the meaning of civil disobedience, horizontalism, criminality. At one point Traven declared, “Chris Hedges is calling some of you here in this room criminals [for engaging in Black Bloc tactics].” To this Hedges abruptly replied, “When I say ‘criminal’ I’m referring to Wall Street.” Aggressive behavior by masked hooligans, he argued, is not necessarily morally wrong, but it is a tactical blunder that will not advance Occupy’s goals in the long-term. Traven insisted that American social movements have always been tied to a history of violence against private property. Giving a recent example, Traven pointed to the (lack of) a response by the city of Oakland when Oscar Grant was shot and killed by police. Only when riots erupted did the city finally react. Therefore, violence is occasionally required to advance the cause. “Look, I am not a pacifist,” Hedges told us. “I was in Sarajevo. I know that violent resistance is sometimes necessary. But we’re not there yet in this country … If the concern was simply over masks, I would cede many of your points. But mask-wearing leads to other things that scare away the mainstream and undermine the movement.” Challenging state power through violence, Hedges insisted, requires at least matching the states repressive capacity. Barring that, violence is futile.
At times Traven diminished my intuitive sympathy for his views by making snide ad hominem remarks about Hedges. In one case (I’m not entirely sure I understood the reference, but it drew arrogant laughter from Hedges’ detractors in the audience) Traven said, “Chris sees ethnic cleansing everywhere, even when it’s just a kid with a spray paint can.” To make matters worse, these kinds of remarks were almost never followed up with substantive responses to Hedges’ actual points. When Hedges began speaking about the supposed “hypermasculinity” of violence, Traven dismissed the argument altogether. Instead, he said there was “some problematic gendering going on” and that it wasn’t constructive for “two white men” to go at it on such issues. I was left confused as to why Traven would agree to participate in such a debate to begin with if he felt certain issues were altogether inappropriate for a discussion between privileged white men. He opted to read a letter from a jailed female colleague instead of attempting to rebut the points.
In another instance of unnecessary personal attack, Traven called Hedges “blind” to the danger his writings caused, that the state now uses his work to justify repressing those engaged in Black Bloc tactics. “I can assure you the state doesn’t give a damn what I write about,” Hedges replied. “I wish they did. I wish they read everything I wrote. But they don’t. And they certainly don’t lock up protestors based on what I write. I’m not going to go into the David Graeber argument about whether what I write causes some people to be hurt.” The state, he argued, eagerly seeks ways to stymie popular uprisings and Black Bloc gives them the whiff of criminality required to repress the entire movement. “The reason I sued Obama over the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] was because I knew they’d go after the Black Bloc first.” Incredulous laughter.
In their closing statements it was clear that the speakers had not budged at all. Hedges warned against a latent proto-fascism led by elements on the far-Right like the billionaire Koch Brothers, while Traven ended with the depressingly trite observation: “Not all violence… is bad.” They broke no new ground, illuminated no obscure understanding of resistance, barely addressed the points invoked by their respective opponents, and succeeded only in making me question, yet again: Why? Why in the U.S., where activism takes on an especially timid approach to state power, where protestors scrupulously adhere to police directives, are we concerned when a few people with masks scream at the police? In my view, Hedges has built a straw man based on a superficial understanding of the very tactic he resents. But Traven missed the boat altogether in his appeals to virtuous violence. Why are we even talking about this? There have been no major acts of violence. By all standards, Occupy has been one of the most well-behaved mass demonstrations in recent memory, in which the only incidents of private property damage have been committed by the NYPD in the course of brutalizing protestors. So why are we even discussing this? I would love to have the conversation at some point, when events on the ground display an urgency that cannot be avoided. But, (as Hedges repeatedly said vis-à-vis state violence) we’re simply not there yet.
The Black Bloc Doth Protest too Much
Journalist Chris Hedges and CrimethInc's Brian recently debated nonviolence. (Photo: Ari Paul)
It finally happened. After months of anarchists howling over journalist Chris Hedges’s controversial article “The Cancer Within Occupy,” the author debated the subject of non-violence and the diversity of tactics in the Occupy Wall Street movement with Brian Traven, representing CrimethInc, an anarchist group sympathetic to the Black Bloc tactics Hedges denounced in the article.
Both sides made good points in the exchange, which took place Sept. 12 in before a packed audience in Manhattan. Hedges reflected upon his years covering wars and revolutions for the New York Times, saying that violence can hinder progress, while Traven brought up relevant questions about how we as a society define what is violent or criminal. But the real star of the show was the Black Bloc supporters themselves, whose main goal, it seemed, was to discredit any and all scrutiny of themselves and smear their detractors with ad hominem attacks. Traven at one point suggested that the police were taking cues from Hedges, who laughed at the idea of security forces being inspired by his railings against corporate capitalism.
For people who raise their middle finger to the man and brag about their fights with the cops, these rabble-rousers are perhaps the most thin-skinned activists I have ever encountered, as they have still yet to recover from the fact that a writer turned a critical lens on them in one article seven months ago. They simply cannot tolerate any dissent against their tactics, and they fight back the only way they know how: by being whiny little brats.
Both presenters had their faults. Traven’s main tactic for ducking criticism was to employ a post-modernist obfuscation of any inconvenient questions. When asked if the Black Bloc had ever succeeded, he questioned what success meant. When asked if the Black Bloc was marred by hyper-masculinity, he dismissed Hedges’s definition of gender. But for the most part, Hedges responded to these things respectfully.
Hedges has a tendency to put people off with his ministerial style. Some people find him condescending with his repeated reminders that he covered the wars in El Salvador and the former Yugoslavia. Regardless, during the debate he was constantly met with childish hisses, laughter and cries of “liar,” not to mention one suggestion that his career as a war correspondent was a cover for his employment with the Central Intelligence Agency.
This whole act was not just disrespectful to the participants and the event’s organizers, but the hordes of people who wanted to listen, who maybe could have been swayed into seeing things Traven’s way (he didn’t seemed bothered by the disturbances). And so I decided to photograph the troublemakers, despite being told that I could only take photos of the panelists and not the audience. As far as I was concerned, this was a public space (City University of New York property, to be exact), and once these people decided to be disruptive they have made themselves a news event.
And so I was escorted outside by an event organizer and a uniformed security guard and urged to delete my photos, as they had received text messages that I had pointed my camera in the direction of the shouters. Despite the delicious irony of anarchists deferring to rules and security, I am always perturbed by anyone who feels they should be shielded from the press if they are, in fact, doing something newsworthy. Out of respect for the organizers I complied and erased the frames, which didn’t matter because they were too blurry to be used anyway.
But this kind of entitlement to be at once disruptive and immune from accountability is emblematic of the kind of dish-it-out-but-can’t-take-it attitude they have displayed in reaction to Hedges’s original article. If they’re still having a tantrum about Hedges’s article, how can we expect them to hold up against the 1 percent shock troops?
This is why I think it is ultimately wrong to classify this particular group as anarchists—that would sully the names of various movements past and present that have used and currently use non-hierarchical structures in anti-capitalist organizing. This particular clique is explicitly and actively against the left, and there’s a reason the CrimethInc book Days of War, Nights of Lovereads like the ideological bastard child of Karl Marx and Ayn Rand. It rails against corporate control, but replaces class struggle with libertarian individualism. Capitalism and the state are oppressing you, and their flavor of anarchism is your struggle to liberate yourself from the mediocrity of the bourgeois state. You have to do whatever you can to do to save yourself.
This is why Hedges and Traven couldn’t come to a consensus. Hedges wanted to know what kind of society Black Bloc anarchists wanted to create, but never got a real answer, and that’s because they’re currently living in it. They’ll roam the city streets, living in squats, riding on freight trains, mocking all the losers in suits and blue uniforms for squandering their days for paychecks and health insurance. They live off the waste of capitalist society (if they don’t already have trust funds), cocooned in their punk rock Neverland. Their utopia isn’t a liberation of oppressed society but their personal secession from it.
This is the kind of anti-social narcissism that Hedges wrote about in the article that kicked off this whole mess. The rage against the police, press and fellow anti-capitalists has everything to do with their inflated sense of self and precious little to do with solidarity.
I’ve encountered it recently. In Chicago, during the NATO protests in May, Black Bloc participants gathered with other activists in Grant Park, wearing masks, waving banners and angrily confronting anyone who took their photo. My response was that if you don’t want your photo taken don’t go to a public protest where you know there are going to be hundreds of journalists. Further, picking a fight with the police only endangers journalists and other activists. While covering the Eurozone crisis in Athens this summer, I was confronted by so-called anarchists for photographing them, and in fact, they routinely assault journalists in demonstrations while later celebrating television news footage of their street fighting. They want to have their dumpster-dived vegan cake and eat it, too.
I don’t fully side with Hedges on his take on the Black Bloc. During the debate, for example, I bristled when Hedges suggested that there was some common ground for both OWS and the police because they are working class (see my articles in the Indypendent and The Guardian on the subject). But it is certainly a win for Hedges when his critics live up to his description of them.
“The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects,” Hedges wrote. “Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant. They hear only their own voices. They heed only their own thoughts. They believe only their own clichés. And this makes them not only deeply intolerant but stupid.”
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