A comment on successful rioting

Over on Richard Seymour’s “Lenin’s Tomb” blog, there’s a guest post by “Roobin” titled “The just-about-Gramscian theory of successful rioting” that is a fairly awful exercise in ultraleftism. I am not sure of Roobin’s identity, but he wrote an excellent analysis of James Joyce there the other day. My initial comment on “successful rioting” was to advise Roobin to stick to James Joyce, which prompted Richard to demand a more considered response. So here goes.

Roobin begins by hailing the work of the British antiwar movement whose gains he describes as follows:

Though by no means permanent, the lasting benefits of the anti-war movement have been a generalised anti-imperialist consciousness, a suspicion of secretive, undemocratic government and a check on the racist backlash against Muslims. These gains must be defended.

I wonder why he didn’t choose to include the movement’s ability to restrain the war-making capabilities of British troops in Iraq. I don’t want to read too much into this, but during the Vietnam War period, there were sharp divisions between those who opposed the mass demonstrations because they were not “anti-imperialist” enough and those who pushed for massive numbers, which in my view amounted to objective anti-imperialism. This insistence on the movement being more radical can be found in the pages of the ISO press in the U.S., taking the form of “Support the Resistance”. My reaction to such an approach can be found here.

Now it is entirely possible that I have misunderstood Roobin on this matter, but I am afraid that his take on the question of “successful rioting” is not susceptible to misinterpretation:

The good news is, given preparation (the opportunity for which, of course, is normally denied), the average citizen can match a police officer blow for blow. A police officer has access to hand arms, in particular clubs, but the ordinary citizen can get and/or easily improvise these. The same is true of body armour and self-defence. The police have roadblocks, the people barricades. The police can use sturdy, powerful vehicles, so can the public. The police can use tools such as water cannons to disperse a crowd but a resourceful crowd can use similar devices to reverse effect. The police can use small firearms. Even in Britain it is not impossible for a member of the public to get hold of some. Any weapons won from the police in battle can immediately be used against them.

Not to mince words, this is complete idiocy and most unfortunate for the British left to have it aired on a prominent blog such as “Lenin’s Tomb”. When Roobin writes “Any weapons won from the police in battle can immediately be used against them,” he is indulging in the worst kind of ultraleft posturing that can open up the movement to victimization. The best defense against the cops is massive numbers, not tactical adroitness with “body armour”, etc. At least Roobin seems to understand this when he states in the very next paragraph that “when 2 million people are intent on using Hyde Park for a demonstration there is nothing the state can do to stop them (without seriously upping the ante).” It is too bad that he simply did not stick with this approach and wandered off into what amounts to urban guerrilla fantasies of the sort that helped to destroy the movement in the 1960s and 70s.

Unfortunately, the emphasis on mass action is dropped in the very next paragraph when the comrade demonstrates a fondness for black block forms of struggle:

During the anti-G8 demonstrations in Germany recently there was a very successful direct action that blocked the railway line to the summit resort. The police blocked every road route toward the resort. The marchers approached a blockade as a mass before raising a set of flags and dispersing in large, pre-organised groups into fields of shoulder high corn, following the flags. The police had not planned for this and could not cope with it; their organisation had been broken.

The most significant aspect of the G8 demonstrations is not blocking a railway, but the participation of 80,000 opponents of the neoliberal system, many of whom came from the trade union movement. The notion of dispersed groups being somehow successful because they outmaneuvered the cops strikes me as going backwards politically. There was a serious reevaluation of this kind of cat-and-mouse, black block, tactical fetishism after 2001, which was never really put to some kind of test since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq more or less pulled the rug from underneath the anarchist and autonomist foot troops of the anti-capitalist movement.