[p2p-research] Let's Roll the Tanks against the Banks!

[Michel Bauwens]

hi martin,

there is a difficult dialectic between general nonviolent tactics and civil
disobedience, and you are right that without the nastyness of the second, it
is very difficult to get attention to the first ... nevertheless, if you let
the second totally free in the hand of a violent fringe, more often than not
rife with provocateurs, you are almost certainly losing the mediawar and the
sympathy of the public .... letting go an orgy of destruction in my view
very rarely helps social movements, while mature and responsible social
movements police these outbursts ... nearly every right-wing victory is
predicated on playing with the fear of the broad public, and I think it is
wiser to take those enemy tactics into account ... now of course, there is
only a limited way you can control these outbursts, when people are really
angry ..

in your responsee, you say, this is not what I hear within the movement, of
course, I am talking what you hear outside the movement ... you do concede
my point actually but blame it on state violence and terrorism, I disagree,
it is the images of the black block which are seared into TV viewers mind,
and most of them see the police as legitimate protection of democratically
elected leaders ... That hostile forces and corporate media will distort
events is a given, up to smart social movements to be careful not to give
them extra ammunition,

Michel

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 9:28 PM, j.martin.pedersen <
m.pedersen at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On 18/07/10 15:46, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> > in thailand, I believe it was the insufficient attention to the violent
> > fringe, which weakened the movement and chased the middle classes away in
> > fear; I also feel that it is the reason for the dramatic weakening of the
> > once successfull alterglobalization movement ...
>
> What do you base that on? First time I hear this. From within the
> movements there has been mainly violence from oppresive state forces to
> experience.
>
> On a global level, I think we are still in the infancy of these
> movements. Still building, nbetworking, federating.
>
> If you are speaking about the Western European part of the movements
> that gained a lot of media coverage from loosely 1998-2004 (in great
> part because of minor property destruction or, as it were, creative
> architectural critique, but rest of which was predominantly a fluffy,
> happy hippie affair in pink), then I think it was a generational moment,
> the creative forces of which are burnt out, moved to the country side
> (where, such as the Tarnac 9, they are also attacked) or bringing up
> children.
>
> But - also - after 9/11, focus in the media and the law began to shift,
> which meant that alterglobalisation events were less interesting for the
> media - and were lumped in with terrorism by police and media. So yes,
> violence led to a weakening of the movement of movements, but it was
> state violence and its counter-point, socalled terrorism, and not
> violence from within the movements. In fact, the minor bits of
> activities that could be said to be violating public space a little bit
> and corporate space a bit more, was one of the major reasons why the
> media gave time and space to those movements in the first place - and
> also the basis upon which NGO people like Susan George could - divide
> and conquer - gain a platform to distinguish "the good" from "the bad"
> and thus side with the state and benevolent capital (as if there was
> such a thing).
>
> -m
>
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