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2009-12-20

What if They Threw a Black Bloc and the Police Arrested Everyone?

“Around 1000 arrests in Copenhagen
Police said they rounded up 968 in a preventive action against a group of youth activists at the tail end of the demonstration.
“We saved the demonstration from being disturbed totally,” Per Larsen, chief coordinator for the Danish police, told the New York Times. “There were some hard-core protesters that we have neutralized.”

I.
 The political: war. Two Parties: that of Order and that of Insurrection.

II.
 The prophets say we will soon be fighting for clean water. There are already food riots. What better way to set this stage of history than to paint the picture of 1000 potential rioters, neutralized?
Anti-globalization activists are not the only ones to fully comprehend the symbolic value of global trade summits. At the first global summit to deal specifically with responses to climate change, the Party of Order demonstrated exactly what the epoch of uncertainty and crisis will mean: counter-insurgency to a T. The police openly stated their objective: “the biggest security operation since World War II,” and accomplished it—militarily—with speed, efficiency, and finesse.

Pic: Copenhagen

III.
 Order, securitization, and immunization. From the position of the Party of Order, the crises we currently inhabit are always the results of unknown variables. If these variables were mapped, understood and rationalized, they could be controlled and neutralized. This occurs either by means of inclusion into democratic order or by means of discipline and force. For example, the unconscious self-abolition of honey bees, because of their productive capacity in agribusiness as forced immigrant labor, must be viewed from the position of the Party of Order as a possible threat to the production of food. Even a hurricane must be calculated in terms of its destabilizing effect—as if it were an act of terrorism. At the human level, all labor which has become superfluous must be viewed in its capacity to produce and perform subjectivities. When human beings fail to perform their subjectivities, they are often decomposed or made an example of. This happens through the violence of job-removal, moral-sanctions and murder, but also at the level of biological disciplining of bodies—the deployment of beauty standards, gendering and racial coding—and at the level of preemptive biotechnological assaults through global social networks mapping, biometrics, and proliferation of surveillance. From the position of the Party of Order this is the only course possible because today in the general conditions of absolute social war, there is no way of distinguishing between a docile, hard-working citizen-subject and a potential terrorist.

IV.
 Between a docile, hard-working citizen-subject and a potential terrorist, there is life; between life and a potential terrorist, there is the police. The Party of Order’s spectacular goal: generate beautiful works of art in which the police are our glorious protagonists—ensuring order, rescuing kittens, and embodying the exceptional desire of civil society to brutalize its excesses every so often. The party of insurrection must make it its objective not only to reverse this, but to generate different, disturbing and self-alienating works of art. The image of static, noise—the pornographic image which deletes its author and model—must be generated in order to inflict a profound violence to the system of meaning which the Party of Order enforces.

V.
 Even occupation can be rationalized. No tactic should fit in a tool box. The Party of Order is eager to bring an unruly situation to its logical conclusion (see: the second occupation of the New School). The party of insurrection’s appearances must mutate. Either from the application of collective intelligence or by means of simulacrum, each slight alteration in tactical continuity disrupts the predictions of the Party of Order. For example, a shift from all-black everything to black tops, denim bottoms provides slightly easier and hastier withdraw. Attacking where the enemy’s forces are not does not only mean diffused nocturnal sabotage or individuated strikes.

VI.
 The party of insurrection, if it will refine “the convergence” past its declared expiration date, must develop the intelligence, resources and material solidarities to appear as multiplied, yet vast. It is necessary to be numerous and cruel when engaging in terrain with police. In a city, a few ruined avenues occupied by life is enough to cause a crisis. If by means of destruction, mobility and appropriate technology is nice; if by means of territorialization, then what we must learn is what devices stick, hold on, and endure. The capacity to self-organize and deploy forces—300 rioters here, 300 rioters there and 300 rioters there—which are always reinforcing each other, must be developed. The intelligence which transforms any commodity we may come in contact with into a device of insurrection must be learned. Moreover, the capacity to inflict psychological or emotional harm to an enemy force must be experimented with beyond the practices of passive shaming. This can be advanced either by the development of our own “less than lethal” weapons which counteract the police’s rubber bullets, pepper spray and bean bags, and which perhaps make the molotov obsolete, and/or by means of a different strategy to combat, in which the heart is both the weapon and target.

VII. 
The next convergence points: unstable cultural events, vulnerable gatherings of the rich, holiday events, reality TV show filmings, the next disaster, celebrity marriages, the deployment of our own doomsday gangs which collectively attack functional subjectivities, our own or otherwise.”

Source: http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/10273