The property destruction committed by a small group of people masked and dressed in black during the general strike conducted by Occupy Oakland has not unsurprisingly created a media event with much attendant discussion. As someone who has been present at other protests in the Bay Area I was not surprised to see this happen. I has many times before. However, the Occupy Movement is a new and somewhat different phenomenon in protest movements. Many questions are being raised about how it can and should deal with such incidents and what that says about the nature and validity of the movement.
Today on Naked Capitalism I came across a reference to a post on the Corrente blog.
Black Bloc and Occupy Oakland
This is a very long and detailed post. The poster is using links to livestream coverage of general assembly meetings as a basis to analyse how the group is dealing with the matter. I am sharing it here, not because I share all his/her views, but because it seems like a serious attempt to look at what is actually happening rather than making sweeping pronouncements out of whole cloth. I am going to give a few excerpts from it, but it is necessary to read the whole thing to get the full context.
It appears that the vast majority of people partipitating in Occupy Oakland events comdemn the black block actions. Tens of thousand participated in the demonstrations (I've seen estimates ranging from 7000 to over 40,000 participants). The most common estimate for the number of black bloc people involved is only about 200 - obviously, a tiny minority.
But there appears to actually be a serious split among the core occupiers and in the general assembly regarding black bloc and use of violence/vandalism. I suppose this is not necessarily surprising. It makes sense that people who are able/willing to indefinately camp out under difficult conditions and constant threat of police raid, and those who are able/willing to consistently attend long GA meetings, may have different demographics and more radicalized beliefs than people who are more sporadically involved. I've seen this at prior occupations I've been involved with (e.g. the 1985 WI Capitol apartheid-divestment occupation comes to mind).
It seems that a large fraction of the Occupy Oakland GA attendees are unwilling to renounce violence/vandalism as a tactic. I don't think this reflects the majority of attendees (many are passionately opposed to black bloc tactics), but it's apparently not a small minority either. See the feed from Friday's Occupy Oakland GA - scroll to about the 32:30 mark for the speakers dicussing this, and listen to the crowd reponse. Also, here's a posting from a GA attendee summarizing discussion of this topic.
From postings by OO participants at various sites/forums, several lines of thought seem to be contributing to tolerance of black bloc. I see a lot of posts arguing that destruction of property is not violence - and this position seems common among certain anarchists, even if they're not actively in agreement with use of black bloc tactics currently. Some are arguing that since this movement is nascent, now is not the time for violence since it would alienate the mainstream - but that they would support its use once events have advanced sufficiently. Others more fundamentally disagree with the use of violence/vandalism, but are not willing to oppose/condemn black bloc since
that would be siding with the "enemy" over other protesters. I also see a lot of condemnation of those who intervened to stop black bloc vandalism on Wednesday (e.g. at Whole Foods) - they're being referred to as "peace police", and there seems to be particularly strong anger against those who tried to physically restrain or physically block the black bloc individuals (even some commenters who appear relatively unsupportive of black bloc are condemning "peace police" actions as coercive and as failing to respect "diversity of tactics").
There is a lot more but this seems to me to be the core of it. There are a lot of people demanding that the entire Occupy Movement adopt a unified and consistent position condemning the activities associated with Black Bloc and its tactics, including the wearing of masks by anyone who participates in demonstrations. Given that the movement is by design and intent non-hierarchical and inclusive this isn't likely to happen to such an extent. People will make various predictions about what that means for the future of the movement, but I don't think that the expectation of a unified message will be fulfilled.
For people who are really interested in understanding what is actually happening with this movement they must look to the dynamics within general assemblies and not the media produced sound bites. That is a time consuming and sometimes tedious undertaking. Thus, not a lot of people are likely to bother.