Excellent Socialist Worker critique of David Graeber’s ‘Peace Police’ article

Jasper sez “Socialist intellectuals are getting involved in the Black Bloc debate with interesting results. They can’t be guilt tripped into silence, unlike the liberals.”

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/15/building-a-stronger-occupy

There was a strong backlash against Hedges’ article, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, many of the responses failed to focus on the most important questions facing the movement.

For example, in his defense of the Black Bloc, anarchist and author David Graeber recounts how he and others involved in the early stages of Occupy Wall Street agreed to “Gandhian nonviolence” and “to eschew acts of property damage” because “we just didn’t feel that was an appropriate tactic for the situation we were in.”

But Graeber never states if he thinks that the January 28 action in Oakland used appropriate tactics. Instead, he uses a critique of Hedges’ position to advance two other points: first, that the police are always responsible for violence, not protesters; and second, that any attempt to agree on particular tactics for an action leads to the prospect of physical violence against those who want to act more “militantly.”

On the first point, it’s absolutely true that police are responsible for far more aggressive and destructive violence than protesters.

But focusing exclusively on the police sidesteps a question that activists have to ask—do supporters of the movement who have participated in its activities, or can be drawn into them in the future, see the police as the aggressors, or do they think demonstrators are looking for a confrontation, regardless of the consequences? The answer to that question can shape whether larger numbers of supporters can be mobilized, including in defense of the victims of police repression.

Graeber’s second point is that any attempt to establish agreement on some tactics as opposed to others for an action “invariably backfires.” Instead, such decisions should be a matter of “individual conscience.”

This is a profoundly anti-democratic statement. If he’s serious, than Graeber can’t object if a minority of one, two or a few impose their “individual conscience” to break into City Hall or provoke a fight with police on much larger numbers of people.

The inevitable result of this free-for-all regarding what takes place at a demonstration is that people with the most to lose—workers who can’t go to jail or they’ll lose their jobs, people with families, immigrants whose status could be questioned, racial minorities with good reason to fear encounters with police—will be pushed away from the movement.