Black bloc, white riot : antiglobalization and the genealogy of dissent

217 Pages·2009·4.317 MB·English

by  Thompson, A. K

Sociology/Cultural Studies
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“A manifesto for individuals who seek to destroy those K
structurally imposed identities that limit people’s full

expression of their genuine needs.”
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—George Katsiaficas, author of Subversion of Politics
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ith a title that’s a modern-day mash-up of Frantz Fanon and The Clash, O
Black Bloc, White Riot revisits the struggles against globalization that
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marked the beginning of the twenty-first century and explores the connection
between political violence and the white middle class.
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Beginning with an account of the political trajectory of the white
middle class through the first half of the twentieth century, AK Thompson
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argues that the anti-globalization movement constituted an attempt by white
middle class activists to reconnect with political—and, hence, human—being. I
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Drawing on movement literature, contemporary and critical theory,
and practical investigations, Thompson outlines the movement’s effects on the E
white middle class kids who were swept up in it and considers how and why

violence must once again become a central category of activist politics. R
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AK Thompson is a writer and activist living and working in O
Toronto, Canada. Thompson teaches social theory and serves on
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the Editorial Committee of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory
and Action.
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K

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$17.95 | £12
www.akpress.org
www.akuk.com
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BLACK BLOC, WHITE RIOT
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AK THOMPSON
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HITE
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ANTI-GLOBALIZATION AND
THE GENEALOGY OF DISSENT
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AK THOMPSON
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K
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HITE
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ANTI-GLOBALIZATION AND
THE GENEALOGY OF DISSENT
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Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent
By AK Thompson
Foreword by Bernardine Dohrn
© 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
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Printed in Canada on 100% recycled, acid-free paper with union labor.
Cover and Interior by Josh MacPhee | www.justseeeds.org
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CONTENTS
Foreword, by Bernardine Dohrn vii
Preface xiii
Introduction: Our Riot, Ourselves 1
One: Semiotic Street Fights 31
Two: Direct Action, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 59
Three: Bringing the War Home 81
Four: You Can’t Do Gender in a Riot 107
Five: The Coming Catastrophe 129
Coda: Representation’s Limit 157
Notes 171
Bibliography 181
Index 193
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FOREWORD
BY BERNARDINE DOHRN
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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 imperialism/neo-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.
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viii Black Bloc, White Riot
Black Bloc, White Riot interrogates the early years of the anti-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 US border, 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. Capitalism is 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 experienced as 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 US Social Forum)—paid hom-
age to the elders present: Grace Lee Boggs (who turned 95 during the Forum),
Vincent Harding (just 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 Ella’s Daughter (named for Ella 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 US Social Forum. We did not exist. Amy Goodman
of Democracy Now 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.
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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 asking why 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, and 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 clubs, 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, and determined to live toward freedom.
Black Bloc, White Riot also takes on the question of riot, of excess, of the
violence 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.”
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