Diversity of Tactics

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Connexions Library

Black Bloc: Connexipedia Article
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...
Black Bloc Provocateurs Set Strasbourg Hotel on Fire
Article
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 provocateu...
A Diversion We Don't Need: Against The Current vol. 158
Laird, Kevin
Article
2012
We know from our own experience that none of us wants to have the Diversity Of Tactics argument again. So why does it continue to happen? Because we radicals and anarchists have unintentionally become...
Diversity of Tactics and Democracy
Lakey, George
Article
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 c...
The Fire This Time: Burning Bridges
D'Arcy, Steve; Canyon, Syrah
Article
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 'd...
The futility of activism using violence as catharsis
Davidson-Harden, Adam
Article
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 chan...
How the 'black bloc' protected the G20
Davidson-Harden, Adam
Article
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 dispirite...
In the Aftermath of the G20: Reflections on Strategy, Tactics and Militancy
Whyman, Ritch
Article
2010
The tactics of the Black Bloc make it clear that, for them, it is more important to smash windows than to try and march with thousands of workers and engage them in arguments about how to move struggl...
Summit Protests Are Obsolete
Giordano, Al
Article
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...
Throwing Out the Master's Tools and Building a Better House: Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution
Solnit, Rebecca
Article
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 surp...
Who Controls The Black Bloc Anarchists?
Watson, Paul Joseph
Article
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 provid...
The Whole World Stopped Watching: "Diversity of Tactics", Repression, and the RNC protests in St. Paul, Minnesota (Part I)
Duhamel, Phillippe
Article
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 rec...
You Can't Blow Up a Social Relationship: The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism
Article
1979
An Australian socialist-libertarian response to terrorism in the aftermath of the 1978 Sidney Hilton bombing, and a meditation on the inferior logic of terrorist-based politics.