Bankraub: eine Initiative von Dilettanten.

Bertolt Brecht, whose dictum ‘Bankraub: eine Initiative von Dilettanten – wahre Profis gründen eine Bank‘ is the source of this web-log’s title header. It means “bank robbery: a mere dilettantish initiative. True professionals found banks”. Yes, well, as Brecht reiterated it, “Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank?” What is a bank break-in, compared to the crime of establishing the bank in the first place?

Martin Rowson’s excellent cartoon in The Guardian makes this point. (Cartoonists are allowed a radicalism which commentators cannot indulge on a liberal newspaper’s pages.) The “other” black bloc, he suggests, is the clique of besuited Bullingdon boys, Etonians, and free-market neoliberals, who are also, after all, smashing the (welfare) state, albeit to pursue aims apposite to the anarchists masked on our streets. Therefore the discussion about March 26th should focus not only on the audacity with which the government simply said ‘no’ to the half a million people uniting against their ideological programme. It should focus, I think, on the question of tactics, asking the question, ‘In whose interests is it that we divide ourselves up as ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’?’ And it should focus, lastly, on the question of the state monopoly on violence – on its definition, as much as anything else – and on the fact that the Metropolitan Police (and the vast purpose-built force for the day) saved the vast majority of its violence on Saturday for after dark.

By night, the “hydra-headed” “black bloc with brains” had out-manoeuvred cops successfully for hours and hours. The arm of justice, we’re supposed to understand, gets frustrated and spiteful in circumstances like these, and takes it out on people who might not deserve it. In many quarters, whinges about how the wholesome UK Uncut protestors – or the peaceful Trafalgar Square partyers – were arrested when ‘career criminals’ (read: people participating in the same day of rage, using different tactics) were not, put out a strange and treacherous message. We didn’t deserve it, they say. Those people were smashing things up. You cops just couldn’t catch them. Don’t take it out on us. But guys. If you are actually implementing the strategy you believe to be most effective in pursuit of your political goals, then don’t you expect the state to oppose (detain, arrest, imprison) you? If you believe marching “works”, you must surely expect state retribution for the subversive act of marching. If you believe occupying tax-evading shops “works”, you must expect arrest for that. To say “this doesn’t deserve arrest” is a tricky thing. It suggests you never meant it in the first place.

Moreover, it suggests you wish that police forces were militarised and sophisticated enough to crack down more effectively on the Black Bloc. As though that would benefit ‘peaceful’ protestors like you. Oh yes, it would benefit everybody, if the police wielded sufficient powers in terms of surveillance technology, anti-’terror’ equipment, and containment tactics, to stop black bloc-ers dead in their tracks.

It could be that the Black Bloc does not defend its activities well, indeed, that it exposes itself to the view that what it does consists of wanton hooliganism instead of political action. It could be that the response to black bloc action – assaults on symbols of the mega-rich, on tax-avoiding corporations and retailers, on banks – would be more concertedly positive if it had been timed to come after the government’s enormous ‘fuck you’, rather than be co-synchronous with the TUC march. It could be that the explicitly political nature of such utopian projects as the Black Bloc’s (for they are utopianists, who see a better world behind the shop-fronts) is obscured behind the macho razzle-dazzle of the ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’ style spectacle they present. Yet despite all this, it should be obvious to observers that – as Fitwatch argues here - ”the most serious violence yesterday was probably the attack by police on partying crowd that was gathered in Trafalgar Square.”

As many accounts and YouTube videos now verify, some thousand partying anti-cuts campaigners were brutally kettled, shoved, punched, batoned, man-handled, charged, detained, and arrested for no reason other than the alleged ‘attempt by one individual to damage the Olympic clock‘. Ultimately, as the Met Police sees everyone on a protest as essentially the same – Black Bloc, trade unionist, Green Partyist, or individual holding a sign that reads ‘The Free Market is Pretty Damn Expensive’, ‘How Sad to Love Money’ or ‘Let’s shift some god damn paradigms’ – why don’t we start seeing ourselves as – essentially, or at least in the most important sense – the same, too?

It seems that something like a majority agrees with Brecht’s – with Martin Rowson’s – point. Smashing a bank up a bit is nothing like so great a crime against society as the crime committed by those who established that system of organised robbery in the first place. Anticapitalism is fertile. Resistance is sweet. Let’s stick together, guys.

n.b. The Met Police’s story ’149 charged following disorder in central London’ omits to mention that many people have been bailed away from the Royal Wedding date and May Day. That many were divested not only of mobile phones but of clothing and released from custody after lengthy detentions, very far from home. (Whether protestors had money to travel with was ‘no concern’ of the Met’s.)