On the Black Bloc: Hedges v. Graeber

Peter Ludlow outlines a few issues surrounding the role of the Black Bloc, with links to the articles by Hedges (Black Bloc is "the cancer of occupy") and the response by Graeber (who disagrees).

Here at Leiter Reports

In the comments section of that post, David Graeber clarifies:

"David Graeber said... 

 

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.