Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [42]
A story. Seattle, late November, 1999. Massive protests against the World Trade Organization, and more broadly against the consumption of the world by the rich, turn violent, as police shoot tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against nonviolent, nonresisting protesters. Among the tens of thousands of protesters are several hundred members of what is called the Black Bloc, an anarchist group that doesn’t play by the rules of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is normally a fairly straightforward dance between police and protesters. There are certain rules, such as trespassing, that protesters and police generally agree protesters will break, after which it is just-as-generally agreed that protesters will be arrested, often roughed up a little bit, and then usually given nominal fines. Sometimes, as in the case of Plowshares activists, whose courage can never be questioned, the dance becomes surreal. The activists show up at military installations, beat on pieces of military technology with hammers (thus the name; beating weapons into plowshares), and pour their own blood onto the devices in symbolic protest of the blood these weapons shed. They then wait for the military police to show up—or call the police themselves to make sure they show up—get arrested, and sentenced to years and years in prison. Other times the dance becomes comical, as when protest organizers provide police with estimates of the numbers of people who have volunteered to be arrested (so police can schedule the right number of paddy wagons), and also provide police with potential arrestee’s IDs so the process of arrest will be smooth and easy on everyone involved. It’s a great system, guaranteed to make all parties feel good. The police get to feel good because they’ve kept the barbarians from the gates, the activists feel good because they’ve made a stand—I got arrested for what I believe in—and those in power feel good because nothing much has changed.
The Black Bloc doesn’t play by these rules (not, as we’ll eventually see, that their rules necessarily work better). In Seattle, they broke windows of targeted corporations in order to protest the primacy of private property rights, which they distinguish from personal property rights: “The latter,” a subgroup of the Black Bloc stated, “is based upon use while the former is based upon trade. The premise of personal property is that each of us has what s/he needs. The premise of private property is that each of us has something that someone else needs or wants. In a society based on private property rights, those who are able to accrue more of what others need or want have greater power. By extension, they wield greater control over what others perceive as needs and desires, usually in the interest of increasing profit to themselves.”98
Although the actions of the Black Bloc have been painted as violent by pacifists, members of the corporate media, and, ironically enough, by gun-wielding police, Black Bloc members themselves deny this: “We contend that property destruction is not a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process. By this definition, private property—especially corporate private property—is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it.”99 It seems pretty obvious that unless you’re a hard-core animist, it’s not really possible to perceive breaking a window—especially a store window, as opposed to a bedroom window at three in the morning—as violent. But because of Premise Five, when the window belongs to the rich and the rock to the poor, that act becomes something akin to blasphemy. The anarchists continued, “Private property—and capitalism, by extension—is intrinsically violent and