From: info <info-AT-j12.org>
Subject: RE: AUT: Black Block In Italian
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 09:34:27 +0100



Paul wrote:

> The US "Black Blocks (TM)" have written more of themselves because it is 
in
> the Land of the Brand that the "BB" has become a reified, 
self-mythologising
> entity reduced, rather like the groups of the lotta armata of old, to
> issuing communiques to try and retro-fit a deeper political
> interpretation/significance onto activity that was hitherto 
self-explanatory
> as emanating from the desire to smash things up.

Commie00 replied:
or maybe many participants in na black bloc have a desire to actually
communicate with the rest of the class. commendable to say the least.


But compare this with:
> Commie00 wrote:
> most anarchists i have talk to about this
> statement have been scratching their heads trying to figure out when the
> "black bloc community" came about, and trying to figure out why a group 
of
>anarchists would be such vanguardists, etc.

As far as I can see only a few of the participants in the na black blob 
share this desire to actually communicate with the rest of the class - or 
are there many more communiques which have not been communicated. How can 
myself and other proletarians gain access to these pearls of wisdom.

Also you raise concern that this specific text is written by vanguardists. 
Do the other many texts show the same problem?

Paul wrote:
> And to clear up a misconception, the Northern European* "black
> blockers" have never excluded leninists, if for no other reason
> that the "autonomen" pretty much defined themselves within  some
> kind of weird maoism, much inspired by the RAF (if not identical
> to it,) as well as all kinds of armed "national liberation"/urban 
guerilla
> movements. The more reactionary the better, I would tend to
> phrase it.

Commie00 replied
it would be interesting to see what some northern european autonomen i've
met. all of them were stanchly anti-leninist, including the leninism of the
raf.

My response:
I can remember back in the seventies it was Anarchist papers like Black 
Flag who wrote so much about the RAF, even though they were staunchly 
anti-leninism. Their fetishism of armed struggle overwhelmed such scruples. 
Of course at certain points Anarchism and Bakuninism are in contradiction, 
at other points they run parallel. I think it is important to recall how 
Mao called for a mass mobilisation outside the structures of the party when 
he felt beleagured by the bureaucracy. This populism precisely paralleld 
Bakuninism as Mao was then imagined as a free floating philosopher rather 
than the cap at the top of the party pyramid.

Commie00 wrote:
i think the problem that a lot of people have with the autonomen is that
they are a movement and not an ideology, and thus they are very diverse.
there is no doubt that some aspects of the movement are as you say, others
however are the opposite.

again we have the problem of trying to define a large and various group of
people by the actions and ideas of a portion. this is reactionary to the
core.

My response:
I am not quite sure whether you are suggesting abandoning any form of 
political analysis here. Clearly the autonomen was a movement within which 
a range of ideologies are/were at work. Likewise with the so-called Black 
Block, there are ideologies at work. Part of this process is the 
self-mythologisation. I have taken one of the communiques which you regard 
as being so commendable to criticise. I would be very interested to see 
more. I want to understand how the political manipulation is being 
orchestrated and fed back into the media. I am quite aware that a) many 
street fighters do not regard themselves as part of the black block and no 
doubt many of them aren't even anarchists, b) that many people who do 
consider themselves as part of the black block don't go along with such 
communiques as the one criticised and would not want to be involved in 
issuing communiques at all.

Indeed I think it is quite possible that the black block as a media term 
might blow over if sufficient effort is put into criticising the 
manipulative politics which is trying to push it into the headlines in the 
first place.

Fabian




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