The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book. Gord Hill

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      FOREWORD : The Politics of Rupture

      Allan Antliff

      Shortly after anarchist-organized disruptions at the G201 Summit in Pittsburgh on September 24-25, 2009, the “ex-workers” collective Crimethinc published a comic entitled Rolling Dumpster, which described the political radicalization of a garbage bin that goes from feeding vegans to serving as a projectile for the Black Bloc.2 The story reminded me of a similarly radicalized dumpster I helped to roll down a street during the April 2000 mobilizations against the International Monetary Fund/World Bank in Washington, DC. There, people were already looking ahead to shutting down the June 2000 meetings of the Organization of the American States (OAS) in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.3 As Windsor, OAS members would prepare the agenda for a “Free Trade Agreement of the Americas” (FTAA) which was to be signed at the third annual Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001. But that wasn’t all that was going on. Washington, DC, Windsor, Quebec City, and Seattle, site of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in 1999, would prove to be tactical battlegrounds pitting anarchist-style militancy against government repression, leftist cooptation, and state-corporate media management.

      Gord Hill’s history reveals that anarchists did not arrive in Seattle devoid of tactics. Our strategic weapons—affinity groups and masking up, human barricades and lockdowns, street theater and other forms of disruption—had all been put into practice before. For example, the Independent Media Center that proved so effective in bypassing corporate news in Seattle was modeled on media centers at “Active Resistance” anarchist gatherings in Chicago (1996) and Toronto (1998).4 Similarly, as he notes, Black Bloc tactics had been tried out on numerous occasions, including 1992 demonstrations in San Francisco protesting the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s invasion of the Americas.5 Lastly, anarchist modes of non-hierarchical organizing for street confrontations presented state officialdom, corporate

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      Foreword

      media, unions, non-government organizations (NGOs), and the socialist left with a well-honed “fight-back” version of “what democracy looks like.”6 What set it all ablaze was the Zapatistas’ “Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neo-liberalism” in Chiapas, Mexico in 1996. This helped to galvanize an international network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists to mobilize along explicitly anti-capitalist lines (the Vancouver Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit was another important catalyst).7 A second “Encountro” in Spain in 1998 spawned the “People’s Global Action” network, which then coordinated a series of international global days of action, notably the “Carnival Against Capitalism” on June 18, 1999, where militant street tactics were part of the mix.8 As all these elements came together on a mass scale, they drew unions, NGOs, and the left into an anarchist/anticapitalist protest vortex that escaped control, shaking up the powers-thatbe and laying the ground for the wave of disruptions that followed.

      Anarchism generated tensions internally and externally. Within the broad-based coalitions making up the anti-capitalist movement, anarchists attacked both capitalism and the state as such, a position that upset the usual round of trade-offs and politicking between governments and NGOs or leftist attempts to channel anti-capitalist militancy into statist political programs. For example, at the G20 Summit in Toronto in June 2010, one of Canada’s most well-known “progressives,” socialist Judy Rebick, was completely caught off-guard by the Black Bloc actions documented in this book.9 Responding with a post on the website rabble.ca (which she cofounded with other left-wing journalists to court an audience among those mobilizing for the 2001 actions in Quebec City), Rebick praised union-organized attempts to direct people away from confrontations and claimed the police had allowed the Black Bloc to succeed in a bid to justify repressing the “overwhelmingly peaceful” mass of demonstrators who, in her political imaginary, were simply asserting their “right to protest ... where political leaders can hear them.”10 Rebick has long pushed for more street-level ‘activism’ as a supplement to the political program of the Canadian socialist-‘lite’ New Democratic Party and her hostility towards the Black Bloc is