Genoa, the black bloc and the rest...
After Genoa, the black bloc has been attacked by everyone, at a variety of levels. Others accuse the black bloc as being primarily responsible for the violence in Genoa, others speak of police infiltrators, other accuse it for attacking other demonstrators and others for smashing up things that are not ‘legitimate targets'.
Firstly, it needs to remain clear that the black bloc in Genoa was NOT a unified bloc, nor a political organisation or anything of that sort which would make these accusations more realistic. The black bloc is primarily a tactic and, as we understood in Genoa, a dress-code. Nothing more. The people who claim that the black bloc is an organisation are the cops. The fact that the black bloc attracts those who choose a confrontational attitude towards the cops and property is the only thing that can be said to unify it. But this is not a clear enough distinction: for example the tute biance as well, in their own fucked up ways, adopt a confrontational relation to the cops. And not everyone outside the black bloc feels very strongly about property either.
Secondly, the black bloc is not responsible for the cops' violence against everyone in Genoa. Whoever thinks in those terms should better stay home and watch TV because such an attitude is not only dangerous but shows a complete lack of understanding of the real world.
Thridly, in terms of police infiltrators. We do not know whether there were cops amongst us in Genoa. Maybe there were, but what does that mean? What difference does it make whether out of a few thousand people willing to attack the riot police and to destroy property some of them are cops? This a matter of concern for those within the black bloc, as a matter of our security, since cops amongst us might mean that some of us get arrested more easily because we have been identified or followed by cops (we were told this happened in Barcelona during the anti-IMF/World Bank demos). Apart from that it does not make a fucking difference. What are the political gains, on the other hand, that can be made by those who accuse the bloc of being infiltrated by cops? It is not by chance, for example, that the main people who came up with their ground-breaking stories of the type ‘I saw black bloc people coming from inside police vans' (like that scumbag Agnoletto's brother) were either from the Genoa Social Forum or some Italian Communist MP's –their political ideology necessitates the separation of people into ‘bad' and ‘good', and it is historically the case that those who do not follow their lead are easily dismissed as cops. And isn't it curious how some tute biance accuse the black bloc for having cops at its ranks when they themselves had made a special deal with the cops, for which they were complaining in Italian mainstream newspapers on the Saturday 21is of July because the police didn't keep? The Genoa Social Forum produced a photo which supposedly proves the point that there were police infiltrators in the black bloc. This picture however only prove3 the stupidity of the Social forum. It shows some cops in uniform and others in normal clothes who are wearing scarfs. Do you really have to be a fucking genius to understand that some cops will be wearing scarfs to protect themselves from the tons of tear gas they threw, especially if they do not have gas masks? How does that stupid fact prove that some cops were in the black bloc?
A further claim is that those cops are there to start smashing things in order to get everyone involved. This is so stupid that any 5-year old can easily dismiss. Does anyone really think that anyone in the black bloc needs infiltrators in order to start smashing things up or to attack cops?
In terms of the black bloc attacking other demonstrators this is again a dangerous rumour that is being spread by idiots like Agnoletto's brother. The black bloc did not engage into attacking other demonstrators. If some fights broke out with other demonstrators they were not always provoked by the black bloc (we were attacked by Cobas people for example, though we forgive them because they were pretty frustrated from the fact that the black bloc fucked up their demonstration and their attitude generally those days was fucking excellent –anyone who stayed at the psychiatric hospital knows what we mean), and even if they were these concern individuals within the black bloc and not everyone who was wearing black. So the black bloc attacked other demonstrators as much as other demonstrators attacked the black bloc. There was no fucking plan to attack other demonstrators.
The fact that certain of the targets of the black bloc in Genoa are not considered ‘legitimate' by everyone (even by other black blockers), is an issue that is unrelated to police infiltrators. Even if there were cops who were smashing proletarian shops it does not matter, because the point is that there are people among the black bloc who do not think that this is a problem and who got engaged in such actions themselves.
The idea that certain targets are legitimate whereas others aren't is to start with conspicuous, and it betrays a problematic part of the ideology of anti-globalisation. Capitalism is not just the big corporations, but a social relation which manifests itself as much in the big corporate stores and symbols (e.g. McDonalds) as in the small corner shops. It has to do with the fact that wherever we go, whether in a Marks & Spencer or the family corner shop, we are confronted with a world of commodities that only money can buy. The destruction of capitalism does not mean that the world will be transformed into environmentally friendly, organic-selling local shops, but that exchange and money in their totality will disappear.
Having said that, it is also clear that the destruction of capitalism does not depend on the amount of windows that we can smash. But to say that does not mean to condemn actions that took place in Genoa (or take place in other parts of the world) as misled. We were not in Genoa to destroy capitalism, so that kind of criticism misses the point. What happened in Genoa was a generalised riot not an anti-capitalist insurrection (those who do not understand the difference should better go home to join the other idiots from above). During riots, and the chaotic situation that these bring about, a lot of things can go wrong and it is fair enough to say that certain targets should be avoided. But again this is mostly a strategic issue and not a political or moral one. If the cops attack us with everything they have and we need to build barricades, we will make them with whatever is immediately available. We will not sit around in the street trying to figure out whether this or that car are bourgeois or proletarian. And if a small shop is attacked in order to get water and drinks for the rioters then so be it. Now if people insist on attacking phone boxes or traffic lights (one explanation for that was that it would create traffic jams in the following days) or other seemingly stupid targets, then people should ask them to stop. But we are not going to go around riots trying to get people to behave, let alone if the argument is that some companies are capitalist whereas others aren't.
If the black bloc deserves criticism for some of its actions in Genoa, these are of a different kind: for example, it is in fact a huge problem for people to smash telephone boxes or traffic lights when we are being charged by armoured cars and riot cops and we need to build strong barricades to hold them back. But again this is a problem of strategy and tactics, not a moral issue. As we said before, the black bloc in Genoa consisted of a wide variety of people whose only common ground was a desire to attack cops and property. This situation means that there were a lot of idiots amongst us who do not find it in themselves to prioritise certain things to others. It is one thing however to say that there are idiots among us and quite another to say that there were cops who ‘orchestrated' our actions.
Another point of criticism of the black bloc concerns the fact that on Friday it started attacking cops and property as soon as the demo started, a fact which meant that the black bloc was split into two parts (one went north, the other south with the Cobas). This was as much a result of stupidity (given that when people from the black bloc itself expressed the desire to keep our strengths for later and not waste all our petrol bombs in the first twenty minutes they were ignored) as well as a result of bad co-ordination. The black bloc did not manage to meet and discuss constructively the days before Friday so no one really knew what was going on. Given that the majority of the black bloc however clearly expressed to those who started smashing things and attacking the cops that this was not the moment for it, these actions cannot be justified.
This brings us to a crucial point about Genoa. The black bloc generally failed in (or was forced to abandon the idea of) attacking the cops in a good way. And this could be perhaps the only ‘accusation' that can be brought against the black bloc (although it is not really an accusation since in many respects we were forced to do this, it was not simply a matter of choice after a certain point). Contrary to popular myths, the most hardcore riots that took place in Genoa were those near Brignole station, and it was in these riots that Carlo Giuliani was killed. These riots were not made by either the black bloc or the tute biance. Instead, a wide variety of people took part in these –some were tute biance who got fucked off with their usual staged-confrontation and abandoned their formations, others were people who left the black bloc because vandalism became too ritualistic, others were members of reformist organisations and parties who got outraged by the police violence and chose to respond in the best possible way etc etc. In a sense, this was one of the most important events about Genoa, and no group or organisation (be it the black bloc or tute biance or whoever) can take the credit for. It was the moment when people chose to abandon pre-determined tactics and sterile organisations and to attack the cops in any way possible. This resulted in the most organised riot that we saw in Genoa those days: there were people at the front with shields, gloves and masks (either tute biance people or others who took up their equipment) taking care of the tear gas, and behind them loads of people with rocks and some petrol bombs. These were the people who chased off the cops for about one kilometre, who formed barricades which were carried forward every time the cops retreated, these were the people that forced the cops to pull their guns in order to stop them and who needed armoured cars charging at them at 60 kilometres an hour to get them to retreat.
This is a fact that many people have an )nterest in concealing, either because they do not want to admit that their members broke the party-line or because they want to show off about `eing in the best riot i. some other place in Genoa. We, on the other hand, don't give a fuck be#ause we have nothing to protect or to show off.
Proletarians against the machine
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