{"id":474,"date":"2006-11-21T19:47:51","date_gmt":"2006-11-21T09:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=474"},"modified":"2006-11-28T01:57:22","modified_gmt":"2006-11-27T15:57:22","slug":"g20-and-revolutionary-marxism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=474","title":{"rendered":"G20: And ‘revolutionary Marxism’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below are six<\/strong> samples of the response of the authoritarian left<\/a> to last weekend’s G20 protest. For the record, like, and to be critiqued in good time…<\/p>\n

1) Bob Gould<\/a><\/em>, ALP<\/a><\/strong>, November 21:<\/p>\n

Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment<\/a><\/em> was a funny movie, but 100 Morgans running around is a political pain in the neck.<\/p>\n

The old movie, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment<\/em>, starring a very young Vanessa Redgrave<\/a><\/em>, is one of my personal all-time favourite movies. The penultimate scene, with the whole world chasing Morgan in his monkey suit all over London, is very funny indeed.<\/p>\n

One Morgan is okay<\/a>, but a hundred or so southern-hemisphere Black Bloc wannabes trashing police vehicles at an otherwise peaceful but relatively small Melbourne demonstration, in the current reactionary Australian political climate, is something essentially quite different to Morgan\u2019s monkey suit.<\/p>\n

The essential question [?] is the fact that these irresponsible political adventurers disguise their faces. I agree strongly with Mick Armstrong\u2019s post on this matter on Leftwrites<\/strong> [below], and I defer to his knowledge, based on his investigation as to who these people were. The very act of people from outside a city invading a demonstration in another city with the clear intention of launching a semi-military attack on the cops, with their faces covered, irrespective of the consequences for the rest of the demonstrators, is a calculated political act directed against the bulk of the demonstrators.<\/p>\n

People with covered faces who attack the cops, unless they are rather unlucky and their covering falls off, are very dangerous to everybody else at the demonstrations, and quite possibly include fascists and agents provocateur… real agents provocateur certainly do exist, and organised contingents with covered faces clearly facilitate the [activities] of real agents provocateur…<\/p>\n

…There is also, obviously, a new set of factors. I attended some demonstrations in Sydney over the past couple of years, several of which had the rubric of closing down some capitalist institutions such as the stock exchange. Despite declaring to myself that, at 67, I wasn\u2019t going to get too close to the physical action, of course I did, and was the one greybeard among many young people squeezed by police horses around the corner from the Market St building, which was effectively closed for a few hours by the demonstration.<\/p>\n

I had strategic misgivings about rhetoric on closing down the city with small forces, but those protests went off without too much difficulty. A striking feature of those protests was the appearance of a new breed, at least in Sydney, of obviously specially trained crowd control police wearing distinct blue or grey uniforms, physically as tough as nails, and drawn up in semi-military formation.<\/p>\n

To people round about I described them as pit-bull terriers, which raised a bit of a laugh. Incidentally, for no reason that I could fathom, they all seemed to be pretty short. I tried to chiak<\/a> [?] them a bit, but they weren\u2019t having any, and remained grim-faced and hostile.<\/p>\n

These cops weren\u2019t obvious at the protests against the recent Lebanon invasion, which seemed to be policed by more or less ordinary coppers. At the first of those protests there was a very large police presence compared with the size of the protest.<\/p>\n

I gave a bit of cheek to one of the commanders in front of his underlings, about why they needed so many coppers for a small protest. He was stony faced, and refused to respond except in monosyllables, but the ordinary coppers around him were cracking little grins. I don\u2019t doubt that some police are hostile to \u201cpeople of Middle Eastern appearance\u201d, indigenous Australians and others, partly out of prejudice and partly because of the day-to-day contradictions of policing in some areas.<\/p>\n

None of these realities seem to me a sound reason for ignoring the contradictions among the police, and instead treating them as a homogenous reactionary mass. Politically, what does that achieve?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ha ha ha — nice one Bob. But as far as I’m concerned, the truly<\/em> “essential question” is: was Bob’s choice of filmic revery a coy reference to my own good self? Aside from that, I’m sure that Mick appreciates Bob’s endorsement of his ‘investigative’ skills for — as far as I’m aware — nobody else does.<\/p>\n

Like Mick, Bob makes a number of other claims which are, in the end, more akin to slander than analysis, though their shared hostility towards “black bloc wannabes” invading Melbourne is, in Bob’s case at least, hypocritical, at best. (Maybe next we’ll be treated to exhortations for such foreign no-goodniks to ‘Go back to Russia’?) Then again, at least Bob, unlike Mick, has the excuse that he wasn’t actually present.<\/p>\n

Finally, the ‘new factors’ Bob discerns as being most germane to a discussion of the activities of the ‘paramilitary’ ‘Arterial Bloc’ — invading towns, trashing cop cars, endangering innocent civilians and acting as a pole of attraction for fascists and agents provocateurs — are neither new<\/em>, nor particularly relevant<\/em>. The militarisation of the police, for example, has been well-documented elsewhere<\/a>, and its history extends well beyond the May Day<\/strong> events in Sydney in 2001\/2 that Bob refers to in his post.<\/p>\n