This episode of "It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine",
was made possible by contributions from slaves like you!
Spank you very much!
A lot of people involved in the black bloc on saturday
and many of them 6 months ago were members of the labor party,
working for the democrat party and people who really believed back then
that parliamentary democracy could work for them
and now they believe it's not gonna work for them.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
Gooooooooood morning slaves and welcome to another sedition of
"It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine",
the show where all our heroes were masked!
I'm your host the stimulator,
and with global may day protests and the occupy wave of actions coming up
I thought it would be nice to do a little segment about the tactic of tactcs.
The cancer in Chris Hedge's colon.
Too big to fail, big enough to fall!
The most widespread and mimicked street formation of the last 6,000 years.
And the craze has police departments and politicians wetting their dockers.
Yep.
The black bloc - But what about madrid?
You are right, agitator.
I must first pay my respects to the lion-hearted peeps in madrid
who daringly attacked the fuzz during anti-austerity protests last month.
The underpinnings of this movement are confrontational and radical.
Many people out there think that the black bloc
is a gang or a crew that one can join.
The radical group called the black bloc anarchists
openly brag about using terrorist-type tactics.
There are no black bloc anarchists you thick-nost shit rocket.
The black bloc is simply a fucking tactic!
Black bloc is not a group or social movement,
it's simply a tactic used by protesters to protect themselves from police agression
and express a complete rejection of capitalism.
Like the tactic of blockading a street.
The blockade is used with the objective of stopping police or industry traffic
into an area you're trying to hold or protect
and it could be part of an overall strategy to protect that forest
or autonomous zone, for example.
The black bloc tactic can be used for the purpose of securing streets
with the strategic goal of creating autonomous spaces for discent
within a context of intense police repression.
It can also be used to attack corporate and state infrastructure
allowing the saboteurs to remain anonymous.
This tactic has spread around the world like wildfire
and we have witnessed its power in places such as turkey,
egypt, brazil and colombia.
So, to find out more about the history of the black bloc,
I bring you francis dupuis-déri, a motherfucking anarchist
and author of Who's Afraid Of The Black Blocs?
Hey francis, how the fuck are you?
Huuuuuuuuh I don't know!
When was the tactic of black bloc first deployed?
The black bloc the way we know it appeared the first time in germany
in west berlin, at the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s.
The first time the term "black bloc" was coined in germany was in 1980
and it was called at the time the autonomen movemen,
movement mainly of political sqatters who were involved
in the protest agains the nuclear industries and nuclear weapons
and the neofascist movement in germany.
So at the time in germany they were wearing leather jackets,
that was fashionable at the time, so black leather jacket,
black motorcycle helmet and they were merging in black bloc to get a mass of
anonymous people, because you can't recognize people in a homogeneous
mass of people wearing black and masks and they were using this tactic
to confront and fight the police, which was coming to expulse them from their squats,
for instance, or to fight agains neo-nazis in the streets.
In the description of your book, "Who's afraid of the black blocs",
it states that the image of the window-smashing thugs hides a complex reality.
Can you fucking explain?
Too often the black bloc is described by politicians, by police officers, by journalists,
by scholars, even, as something really not interesting from a political point of view.
They're described as a bunch of hooligans and as apolitical individuals
who just like to riot, like to smash things without any political rationale.
The black bloc, which are primarily white, sort of nihilistic, destructive...
embracing confusing, petty vandalism in this repellent sort of cynicism with revolution...
And of course when you listen to them, when you watch them in action,
when you look at them, when you follow them
and when you try to understand what they do in germany, in france,
in great-britain, in greece, in brazil,
you rapidly understand that it's only about politics.
There are 50 thousand other people that are gonna be here
and I figured even if they are here protesting in a way that I don't like,
advocating a reform or abolishing some particular institution
at leat there's 50,000 people that really care and are worked up about something
and hopefully we can come out here and give them a show
of a little more radical direction.
About politics, about the economics, of course, also about power relationships,
about domination, and it's a way to express a radical criticism of
these systems: the state system, the capital system, the bank system,
and their targets is the message. It's what they target that give us
the meaning of their action.
Thanks francis.
Stay tuned after the break for an interview with a montreal streetfighter.
Viewers of this fucking show know that in 2012, thousands of people took part
in the 6 months insurrection in montreal.
What is popularly known as the maple spring
began as a student strike but evolved into a popular revolt that included
many sectors of society.
The sheer fucking number of protester and the non-stop use of militant
street tactics exhausted non only the cops but also their budget.
Since-then the montreal po-po have smarten up and have consistently
cattled anticapitalist demonstrations as a way to avoid a repeat of 2012.
This year, comrades have been having conversations as to how to regain
the street power that was obtained on that insurrectionary moment.
So to review some of their tactics used in the balance of that year,
I bring you nick, a university student involved in much of
the street fighting of 2012. But first, a fucking disclaimer.
So enough of that noise.
Hey nick, how the fuck are you?
I'm feeling great.
So, how the fuck the street fighting progress in montreal?
From the beginning of the strike, We saw the use of masks
go from being an isolated practice to something that became normal
for hundreds of people to do.
This explosion in the use of masks wasn't magical.
It took anarchists consistently masking up and explaning why they mask up
in flyers and in conversations.
The same can be said for attacks agains police.
As the strike progressed, the isolated attacks on police that characterized
the demos during the beginning of the strike, so does a couple of rocks
thrown in their direction eventually became more popular to do
up to the point where demos sometimes became very uncontrollable for hours.
This is simply a matter of persistence.
Fuck! Holy shit!
As people continue to see massed up street fighters getting away
with attacking the pigs we'd been clubbing them for weeks.
They start to see themselves as capable as acting conflictually as well.
I imagine that this involved many different groups of friends in the students milieu
making plans to come to demos with these intentions for the first time
but also probably involved many people coming back themselves.
The tension that can be felt against the police during strike initially mostly only
manifested itself in chance. But over time this transformed into the more
empowering practice of attacking police directly.
And as more and more people took this up it snowballed into being normalized.
And what are some of the tactical lessons learned from that period?
When you look at the confrontation with police that we've seen here,
it can basically be broken down into two things:
confrontation that frees up space in the police, and
confrontation that doesn't have the force to make police retreat
but is still valuable obviously. From what I've seen the factor that make
projectile attacks, for instance, capable of winning the space
are coordination and widespread participation.
With an offensive mentality that doesn't wait for police to attack us first.
This is how fear changes camp, severing the cycle of police inevitably attacking
the demo and dispersing it as everyone runs from police charges.
In montreal the courage to confront police is already held by many people,
while often the level of self-organization is not quite developed enough
to make these confrontation long-lasting.
Something that some anarchists quickly realized
was that if we want to hold the streets after things start to get wild,
projectiles must be collected as soon as possible.
During the demos with more militant tone, like march 15th, the night demos,
the book fair weekend, april 25th, may day and others,
whithin the first 10 minutes you would see crews running to houses and gardens
to collect rocks inside bags, using hammers to pry rocks up from the street,
or thrashing the larger pieces into throwable sizes on the sidewalk.
People who collected rocks would then distribute them amongst
the masked portion of the demo.
Something that also started to happen more often with people counting down
for throwing, so that instead of just one or two rocks actually connecting with police,
there were volleys that could make police retreat.
Another tactic to accompany rock-throwing that has been used
pretty extensively is throwing paintballs. These often have a limited effect
unless aimed well enough to hit a visor. I've seen this happen only once.
Fire extinguishers filled with paint, on the other hand, as seen in oakland
during the general strike, are the perfect weapon agains police.
With one swoosh you can blind an entire riot cop line
and take them out for as long as it takes them to clear their visors.
The same goes for police vehicle's front windshileds.
Fireworks are also often shot at police lines, but the few times
road flares have been used, they've been far more effective than fireworks.
It's also really important for undercovers and corporate media to be fought
out of the demo as soon as things start to get rowdy,
to make it safe or to eventually disperse and demask.
And finally, wearing black socks over shoes and ditching them
with everything else can save you a lot of trouble.
So can wearing cotton gloves.
Yep, that's about it.
Thanks, nick!
And that's about it for this sedition of
"It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine".
As always, this here labor of love and rage is brought to you by slaves
who shared their fiat currency so that we can keep the lights on.
So muchas motherfucking gracias to... jason, samantha, katie, kylon, fiona,
rahina, daniel, patrick, miguel, gavon, adrian, tim, angela, thomas,
preston's production, rosemary, tom, alexander, gregory, jimmy,
dylan, christian, kyle, valentine, françois, alyssa, jennifer, liam, richard, justin,
james, robin, chris, aaron, mika, steven, shawn, serena, patrick, (inaudible), F.G.,
bruce and... steven. (inaudible).
Also I wanna give a warm welcome to the newest members of the taconspiracy:
ashley, emilia and... justine.
Bienvenidas!
For links to information about militant street tactics, just visit my fucking website:
And to quote from sun tzu's The Art Of War:
The ultimate skill is to take up a position where you are formless.
If you are formless, then most penetrating spies will not be able to discern you,
or the wisest counsels will not be able to do calculations against you.
See you in the streets...