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  1. Agent provocateur
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    A person employed by the police or other entity to act undercover to entice or provoke another person to commit an illegal act.
  2. An analysis of the G20 protest and the black bloc
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    It should be clear that the actions of the black bloc reflect their politics. The actions in Toronto mirror those tactics used elsewhere. The tactics and politics regardless of their intent are inherently elitist and counter-productive. In fact they mirror the critique of reformism many on the left have. The NDP says vote for us and we’ll do it for you, the black bloc says in essence the same thing – we will make the revolution for you. At best the tactics of the black bloc are based on a mistaken idea that the attacks on property and the police will create a spark to encourage others to resist capitalism, at worst they are based on a rampant individualistic sense of rage and entitlement to express that rage regardless of the consequences to others. The anti-authoritarian politic they follow is imposed on others. Very rarely will you see a black bloc call its own rally, instead the tactic is to play hide and seek with the police under the cover of larger mobilisations.
  3. Anarchy is struggle for life, freedom and dignity
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    A communique by the Circle of Fire anarchist collective and the Anarchist Bulletin BLACK FLAG on the events of May 5th, 2010 in Athens, when three bank workers were murdered by 'anarchist' arsonists. The murders came as an ultimate result of an irrational, meaningless and needless violence which is promoted by an autistic, un-political and anti-social concept that has become a parasite to the anarchist/antiauthoritarian movement, sucking its blood and disparaging it, leading it to criminalisation and social isolation.
  4. Black Bloc
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    People who engage in protests wearing black clothing and masks and engaging in property damage. The tactic was developed in the 1980s by anti-nuclear activist autonomists, and was subsequently adopted by some anarchists, as well as some right-wing groups such as the autonomous nationalists of Europe. Black blocs lend themselves to infiltration by police and agents provocateurs, and it has often been alleged that their primary function, whether intentional or not, is to provide a pretext for police repression.
  5. The black bloc and the Battle of Seattle
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
  6. Black Bloc Provocateurs Set Strasbourg Hotel on Fire
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    Legitimate anti-NATO protesters are determined to use non-violent civil disobedience to block the summit. In order to provide an excuse to use batons and rubber bullets against them, agents provocateurs masquerading as Black Bloc anarchists have been dispatched with instructions to burn down hotels and vandalize churches.
  7. Breaking windows is not a revolutionary act
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    Black Bloc vandalism in the middle of a big protest is not only a diversion from the issues but puts everyone into unneccessary jeopardy without their consent.
  8. The Cancer in Occupy
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists — so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property — is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.
  9. Chris Hedges and the black bloc
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    From its inception back in the European autonomist movements of the 1980s, the black-clad activists refuse to answer anybody outside of their ranks. Within the “affinity group”, everything is cool. Outside of it, who gives a shit? Ironically, this kind of elitism is not that different from the “vanguard party” posture which puts the needs of the sect above that of the mass movement.
  10. Communist Organizing in the Jim Crow South
    What's Not in The Great Debaters

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    The Great Debaters is a well-made movie. But in its paeans to dedication and debate, it downplays the real social struggle that was going on in the U.S. in the 1930s, including by black people in the South.
  11. Cut It Out: An Open Letter to Black Bloc Anarchists
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    Black Bloc tactics actually serve the cause of the 0.1%.
  12. Diversity of Tactics and Democracy
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2002
    To me, a strategy isn't democratic if it intrinsically alienates the majority of oppressed people and shuts the door to their participation. A strategy isn't democratic if it drives away the working class when they have every reason to participate and want to.
  13. 'Diversity of tactics' as a justification for violent tactics - a debate, part 1
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
  14. The Fire This Time: Burning Bridges
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    Some activists hold back from condemning tactics that are politically stupid and destructive, like the recent Ottawa arson attack by an anarchist group, because of a commitment to the doctrine of a 'diversity of tactics'. However, the original idea behind a diversity of tactics, that is, a variety of approaches to organizing for change, has been appropriated by activists devoted to property destruction as a media spectacle, who feel that they should be exempted from criticism by other activists, no matter how much their tactics serve to undermine the building of a broad-based movement against capitalism.
  15. Five Days in Seattle: A View from the Ground
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1999
    About the 1999 protests in Seattle.
  16. The futility of activism using violence as catharsis
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    The anarchist practitioners of violence are fundamentally elitist. They do violence because it makes them feel good, and they don't care about the fact that it undermines the real work for social change that movement activists are doing.
  17. German autonomen: morality police
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    On the origins of "black bloc" tactics.
  18. How 'Antifa' Mirrors the 'Alt-Right'
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Behind the rhetoric of the "alt-right" about white nativism and protecting American traditions, history and Christian values is the lust for violence. Behind the rhetoric of antifa, the Black Bloc and the so-called "alt-left" about capitalism, racism, state repression and corporate power is the same lust for violence.
  19. How the 'black bloc' protected the G20
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    The black-clad mob in Toronto has left a lot of people not only in the general public but in the wider nonviolent social/global justice movements in Canada feeling disgusted, demoralized and dispirited. Just the result you want if your goal is to marginalize and stifle dissent. The blocistes, in other words, are the most effective tool on the ground for silencing the valid concerns of the broad social movements.
  20. Is this what a police state looks like?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    The corporate security state is not static - it will keep filling more and more space to the extent that they are allowed to by civil society. The police actions in Toronto are one of those key moments, one that we will look back on as a time when the authoritarian governments we now endure tested our resolve. They know exactly what they are doing. There was no spontaneous 'over-reaction.' There were no cops 'out of control' - the obvious fact is they were always in control. The decision to allow the Black Bloc to do its destructive work without any intervention at all was strategic. They were assisted in their work by the Black Bloc, some of them agents provocatuers, all of them enemies of social change.
  21. National Anarchism
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    National-Anarchism is a syncretic political current that was developed in the 1990s by former Third Positionists to reconcile anarchism with nationalism and in some cases racial separatism. It has philosophical roots in the writings of Julius Evola and the neo-Spenglerian Francis Parker Yockey, and claims Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Max Stirner among its influences. Critics are concerned that national-anarchism may be the potential new face of fascism. They argue that by adopting selected symbols, slogans and stances of the left-wing anarchist movement in particular, this new form of post-war fascism hopes to avoid the stigma of the older tradition, while injecting its core fascist values into the newer movement of anti-globalization activists and related decentralized political groups.
  22. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - October 9, 2017
    Meeting the Challenge of the Right

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2017
    Challenging the Right requires not only anti-fascist actions in the street, but organizing to reach those who may be attracted the the appeal of the Right and offering an alternative social vision. This issue of Other Voices offers a number of articles, books, and films offering different perspectives on meeting the challenge of the right.
  23. The Politics of a Punch: Richard Spencer and the Black Bloc
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Alt-right leader Richard Spencer was punched in the face by a man dressed in black bloc garb. Louis Proyect gives his interpretation of the punching incident.
  24. Provocateur Cops Caught Disguised As Anarchists At G20
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    At every single major summit over the past few years, authorities have inserted agent provocateurs into protest groups in order to spy on them and if necessary, provoke violence to justify oppressive police brutality in the eyes of the watching world.
    We have documented numerous different occasions where the leadership of the black bloc anarchists were actually working with the authorities to provide a pretext for a police state crackdown.
    During the previous G20 protest in London, black bloc anarchists were allowed by police to smash up bank buildings while being accompanied by more press photographers than other protesters in what was obviously a stage-managed spectacle for mass consumption
  25. Shining a light on the black bloc, part 1: Italian autonomism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    The combination of autonomist thuggery and Red Brigade terror had a lot to do with the implosion of the Italian left. While the Italian bourgeoisie was ready to carry out a repression even if the left had been far more intelligently organized, this was no excuse for carrying out tactics calculated to drive the average working class person into the arms of the government in the name of “security”. Revolutionary politics is really a project that is designed to win people to a cause. This involves patient explanation. Once someone develops a revolutionary consciousness, there is little that the state can do to vanquish it. A broken window can easily be replaced, but a revolutionary mind is permanent.
  26. Summit Protests Are Obsolete
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    I can understand why a lot of folks went to the G20 protests, sincerely wanting to stand up and be counted against savage global capitalism and its consequences. The problem is, almost nobody who didn't participate, especially those who only heard of the protests through the media, has any idea what the protests were about, or why the protesters were there.
  27. Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House 
    Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    Diversity of tactics does not mean that anything goes and that democratic decision-making doesn't apply. If you want to be part of a movement, treat the others with respect; don't spring unwanted surprises on them, particularly surprises that sabotage their own tactics -- and chase away the real diversity of the movement.
  28. What do the Autonomen want?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1988
    Autonomen are not a faction in the spectrum of anti-capitalist struggle. They are also not the radical wing of the protest movement. Autonomen consider rather each movement an opportunity to gratify their need for self-realization in battle.
  29. Who Controls The Black Bloc Anarchists?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    Whose interests do the violent actions of the black bloc benefit? The interests of the general public in using free speech as a means of political change? Or the interests of the authorities in providing the perfect pretext with which to crush and outlaw that free speech? You can't overthrow the entire system by smashing one bank and starting a bonfire. Real political change takes generations of struggle, decades of building respected educational platforms, and a gargantuan grass-roots movement focused on taking power on the local level and expanding upwards. Throwing a brick through a window isn't going to achieve anything other than making the vast majority of the general public despise you even more, and support the very systems of power that you are supposedly opposing. The black bloc sect exist to provide the media with violent footage with which to demonize legitimate protesters.
  30. The Whole World Stopped Watching
    "Diversity of Tactics", Repression, and the RNC protests in St. Paul, Minnesota (Part I)

    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    I must engage those of my activist friends who believe in the "Diversity of Tactics" framework, the now established modus operandi of summit and convention protests. I have come to believe a sorry record of repeated protest failures must be laid squarely at the foot of this ideologically tainted utopia.
  31. Why is the New York Times promoting the "black bloc"?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    A New York Times article, which ran across four columns of the newspaper's front page under a huge photo of a black-masked individual preparing to break an office building window with an iron bar during Wednesday night's protests at the University of California, Berkeley, amounted to free publicity and promotion of the violent protests organized by elements identifying themselves as the "black bloc," anti-fascists and anarchists.

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