in these situations, there is only so much futility a person can take before their rage can get the best of them and a burning cop car or a smashed bank window starts to look pretty appealing. yes, these are futile acts, but what do we expect people to do when they are treated like shit and the justice system does nothing to intervene on their behalf?
sure, ideally we could all rise above it and aim for a perfect, superhuman state of restraint. sure. and yes, ideally i too would prefer the demonstrations were strictly peaceful (for strategic reasons mainly) and that other, more polarizing means of demonstration and protest and disruption occurred outside of these public gatherings (where they would be more effective).

— Cop Car Burned! All Criticisms of Global Capitalism Rendered Moot!

“I’m extremely angry, I’m extremely disgusted that this is what our money our tax dollars are going to do to put armed thugs on the streets of every intersection of Toronto to target community organizers, the people who are out on the streets to talk about poverty, to talk about racism, to talk about homelessness. This is what we are here to do and we are being targeted before we even get to the streets…

I’m leaving this press conference and going to the streets. I encourage people watching if you don’t agree with this if you don’t agree with this kind of policies intimate if you’ve lost your jobs, if you’re living in poverty, if you’re upset that over a billion dollars of your money was spent on this armed camp in this fortress in our city then please join us in the streets. The only way we can tackle these issues that we’re hear to tackle is if we refuse to be afraid if we refuse to be silent and we continue to get on the streets.”

— Farrah Miranda quoted in Community Organizers thrown in Unmarked Police Vans en Route to Press Conference on Targeted Arrests [via]

And with the exception of the risk of arrest and the general lack of amenities, practically every aspect of the anarchist summit-protest experience resembles a bourgeois leisure trip. Almost as if we were at Club Med, we sit around and wait for the next scheduled activity (in our case a march instead of a guided tour or a massage), and then return home to drink beers and talk in excited tones about all the crazy shit we saw that day. And just like any vacationer, we interrupt the local’s lives during each of our outings with a characteristic arrogance—justified by our radicalism instead of the tourist’s fat pocketbook.

— I Left My Heart in Pittsburgh

here’s a way to think about the incredible political doctrine of sartwellianism. say you get a bunch of protestors in pittsburgh for the g-20. and say they’re radical squatters, internet pirates, anti-globalization people, vegans, anarchists, earthfirsters, etc. now: some of these folks have a lot in common with some of the folks who have been going to tea parties. both you and the tea partiers are looking for a place outside the structures of power, where you can live as you think is right. what y’all have in common is the right approach. join hands, my children.

— eye of the storm

what?

In 2003, the state declared Pittsburgh a distressed municipality, placing it under ‘Act 47 Supervision’, which meant that much of the power in the city shifted from city council to an unelected board of lawyers and corporate economic ‘experts’ tasked with charting our ‘recovery.’ The tangible result was attacks on unionized city workers through outsourcing, wage freezes, and reduced benefits in combination with more regressive taxation policies and a slew of objectionable policies. We’ve been going through our own limited form of the ‘structural adjustments’ neo-liberal economic policies disastrously pushed on other countries. For us, the G-20 does not represent merely an abstract attack on other people; they represent an economic and social worldview that has trickled down to hurt the people of Pittsburgh.

— POG G20 Resistance Update #2 - Capital and its protectorate, the State, continue their scheming and we persist in our resistance.

For anarchists, generally, it seems there is a severe lack of discussion over strategy and where we want to take our ideas. Of course it is impossible to form an overarching idea of strategy throughout the entire anarchist movement, but what we can do is within our own groups and organizations, or locally and regionally, develop plans of action linked not by type of tactic, but achievement of goals. Are we aiming for complete anarchy and the abolition of the state? Are we trying to end the war and smash militarism? Are we looking for an end to racism, patriarchy, heterosexism? Are we trying to get the cops off our block? Okay, what are we going to do to make that happen? There is no action, protest, or black bloc that is single-handedly going accomplish those goals. We must look at what all our tactical decisions are hoping to accomplish, how they will be linked and complement each other, and how they will aid in the development of continued resistance. If we are employing tactics without strategy that means we are reacting not acting, only proceeding defensively instead of taking the bull by the horns. It all comes down to answering this question: Are we in it to win? If the answer is yes, we need to talk.

— I’m Going to Pittsburgh but I’m Not Sure Why: Advancing Beyond Tactics and Developing Anarchist Strategy

Aside from cynically masquerading as a grassroots effort, like the astroturf, right-wing media and lobbyist owned and operated ‘Tea Parties’, the New York City-based Bailout the People organization is using the occasion of the G-20 summit to solicit donations (to supplement their trust funds established by socialites and the KGB) and engage in a form of a tactic that is common among, but not restricted to, the authoritarian left, known as “entryism”, where an existing struggle or organization is willfully, and often deceptively hijacked by members of an outside organization. Another WWP front-group, that is better known, is International ANSWER, which discredited and demoralized the opponents of the escalation of the long-running US war in Iraq, through its ineffective, permitted, protest parades, its thinly veiled authoritarian politics, its insistence on taking credit for the mobilizations and protests of others, and its continued cooperation with law enforcement. This is no different than what the paper-selling, authoritarian-left alphabet soup has done to discredit and derail popular resistance and grassroots organizations for the past 100 years, with special malice reserved for anarchists, who they tend to shoot in the back the back, both figuratively and literally, whenever possible. This is why people like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, among others, were publishing condemnations of Lenin and Trotsky’s violent excesses, 40-50 years before US liberals would accept that that the ‘Worker’s Paradise’ of the USSR was merely another dictatorship. What began in Petrograd, continued to Kronstadt, the Ukraine, the Barcelona May Days, Hungary, and the collusion with the de Gaulle regime, which preserved his (and their) power.
Given their long-standing policy of uncritical support for any dictator or war criminal willing to stick a red star on a national flag and/or taunt the US government, including the dynastic North Korean regime, Slobodan Milosevic, and longtime US asset, Saddam Hussein, how sincere can the Workers’ World Party (WWP) in its opposition to the G-20? The WWP split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) due to the latter’s condemnation of Stalin’s 1956 invasion of Hungary and subsequently fell in behind any tyrant willing to use leftist rhetoric as a justification for their brand of repression and imperialism. No apologists for the 1989 actions of the Maoist state in Tienanmen Square are worthy of the level of trust and solidarity required for sincere opposition the G-20, who counts the WWP’s beloved state capitalist China, among its member nations.

— NYC Stalinist front group attempting to hijack opposition

We are asking you to join us because of those frustrations. We are asking you to come to Pittsburgh with every ounce of anger and rage that you feel when your local projects refuse to manifest into something larger, fiercer, or broader, or when that anger itself forces you into isolation or alienation. We want you to come with your own grievances and your own fears. We are asking you to turn the motivations and strategies of your local, daily resistance into a massive, national specter of disobedience. That specter is not a spectacle, to disappear on September 26th; it is a threat that must insistently, permanently haunt every aspect of every official response to the economic crisis.
Of course, we do not ask you to join us merely to satisfy some internal existential angst, or to work off some vague frustration before you go back to your regular life. We also feel the G-20 summit is of utmost strategic importance, in a broader sense, for anarchists in the US.
The Obama administration is yet to face any serious criticism or rebellion from any sector of the population, and the government’s accommodating treatment of minor resistance that has taken place, such as the Chicago Windows and Doors sit-in, have shown their skill in quickly co-opting such acts before they get out of hand. The strategic responsibility that lies before us as anarchists and anti-capitalists, then, is to get out of hand. The best venue for such a thing is naturally a national one, one where we can get enough people in one place to make something happen, where the dialogue is already focused on a topic (the economy) that everyone is talking about. The strategic opportunity this presents us is that of injecting a thousand stale debates about the economy with the whispers of anti-capitalism. Changing the discourse allows us to reframe small acts of rebellion as part of a larger, deeper whole: it’s no longer just a sit-in, a housing action, or vandalism, but instead understood as part of a larger anti-capitalist whole. This is already happening in Europe with the disruptive anti-G-20 protests in London, the massive rebellion of the young, migrants, and unemployed in Greece, the workers taking their bosses hostage in France.

— Why We Would Never Go to a Summit Again AKA Why We’re Going to Pittsburgh AKA Why You Should Join US