By The Voice of Treason

We must organize with perfect clarity to be utterly unpredictable. When our enemies expect us to respond to provocation with violence, we must react calmly and peacefully; just as they anticipate our passivity, we must throw a grenade.
-Stockley Carmicheal

I know my enemy, and it isn’t the black bloc. It isn’t SOAR, vandals, anarchists or activists in general. My enemy is the same as yours, and countless other human beings around the world. My enemy is the capitalist state

After watching the new fascism emerge in Toronto, with thousands of police brought in from various Canadian cities, and the brave, passionate, and aware people from a spectrum of groups that gathered to face off with the state forces in riot gear in an attempt to encourage the crowds to ‘get off the fence’, I did not come away feeling that these masked comrades were my enemy. That’s right - ‘comrades’. Whether we like it or not, we are all fighting the same enemy and want many of the same things. Are the participants of the black bloc really any less our comrades than the well-liked, articulate liberals who wish to save the staus quo from itself?

Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
- Frederick Douglas

The costs of the G20 protests were enormous. Many of our hardest working and most committed organizers have been hit with charges and restrictions limiting their abilities to continue to serve their communities. As far as I’m concerned, these things can’t be blamed on the black bloc either. There seems to be a liberal tendency to lap up the media portrayal of ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’, to divide us and separate our efforts. That is the state’s work. The victims of police repression are not the instigators of police violence - THE POLICE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN VIOLENCE.

While I do have some disagreement with some of the tactics employed by black bloc participants, I do see them as a part of an overall combined effort. The property damage done by some was not my main concern over that weekend. The hundreds detained under questionable circumstances, and the hundreds more assaulted, and the tear gas and loss of basic civil rights - these were and have remained my main concern from that weekend.

Some think that ‘The Black Bloc Fucked Us’, and are to blame for an otherwise smoothly functioning and effective march. This is a hopelessly simple outlook on a complicated situation. Instead of recognizing their role in a war whose lines were drawn long ago, and taking their side accordingly, many have shuffled over to the safe side of the dichotomy - using the convenient mantra of non-violence as their moral shield.

The proper reaction to the events in Toronto is perhaps best summed up in the article ‘Supporting the Prisoners of the G20 Police State’ by Peter Gelderloos, in which he writes that “it is impossible to draw a line between the harmful consequences of governmental and corporate policy, the elitist way in which they determine that policy, and the extreme police control that accompany their summits.”

Gelderloos also takes aim at those who would eschew all strategies not premised on nonviolence, when he reminds us that “a great many more banks and cop cars will have to be thrown on the trash fire of history before we can talk about a new world, so we’d better stop getting so upset by such a modest show of resistance.”

And that’s exactly the point.