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this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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There's no such thing as peaceful protesters when every protest is indiscriminately labelled as violent (and antisemitic!) because there's a chall drawing on the ground.
And there can be no such thing as our escalation when every protest is met with incredible police violence and often federal charges.
The state will escalate whenever it wants to and it feels threatened not because some cop cars are burned but because it sees a people's movement as being in direct opposition to the material interests of the class it serves, is of, and is funed by. It doesn't really need a seemingly valid excuse, it can invent one from thin air. Throughout the US, over the last local election cycle, there were candidates (who were then elected) on raising police budgets because the police had been defundee. The only problem is, they weren't defunded. The state wanted more money for cops at the behest of the chamber of commerce so it latched onto something and made some shit up and it worked.
The risk of adventurism is not that the state will have an excuse to escalate, it's that the wider public may be alienated by it rather than have a chance to recognize the role played by capital and the state. If a small group decides to blow up commuter rail train tracks to disrupt white collar workers' participation in the military industrial complex, it's unlikely to be understood that way by the general public unless they've already been long innoculated against that.
I guess there's another risk: your comrades getting arrested and/or killed. That's actually important as well as there are not very many of us. We always need to do a reality check on what we hope to accomplish vs. what we risk. The system to which we are opposed does such monstrous things that many of us begin to feel a sense of selfless opposition, but it is important to recognize that five years of good organizing is much more valuable than punching a single cop.
Anyways I'm ranting and not really arguing against you. Just wanted to add context for how to think about adventurism.
I think we agree! Maybe one way to rephrase my angle is that I see many people getting overly concerned with what they imagine the state will use as an excuse and I think they're usually overestimating the impact of the action itself (usually!). I think that inoculation of the public against the state action or in favor of the radical political project is more important. Or as you mention, spreading a consciousness against the legitimacy of state action (and perhaps the state itself), including by inviting certain kinds of overreaction.
For example, I don't think there are many people out there that are more receptive to cops because anarchists burned a bunch of their cars. In my opinion it's unlikely to prevent radicalization and it's unlikely to create a reaction that is legitimized by the burning of the cars. I think it's actually more likely to help radicalize younger people for whom the image itself is inspiring and transfixing. It could draw the focus of budding fascists but I am skeptical that it would, itself, be pushing them into fascism.
What might push people away from radicalization is the pointless infighting from the supposedly anarchist post itself, but that's its own whole thing.