Thanks for the reasoned reply. I have a couple things to add.

I found Brendan's examples selective and misleading as well. Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the temple had much different motivations and consequences then smashing some corporate windows. And as much as he wanted to invoke the ELF and other direct actions, he left out some major example from history, for example Kristallnacht or the Birmingham Church bombings. These tactics appear less compelling when they aren't being used by the home team.

Secondly, the justification of the smashing by saying they weren't attacking "mom 'n' pop corner stores or restaurants," is again misleading. While they are corporations, they are still staffed by mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends. Direct action isn't an excuse when the store takes a quarterly loss due to being closed for a day. While the corporation can shrug it off as the cost of doing business, "mom 'n' pop" are likely not going to get that raise.

Huh, been kind of busy lately and part of waaaay too many discussions over this kind of thing all winter with Occupy Seattle people. Nonetheless I was shocked how quickly Brendan cut to the heart of the matter in an article he must of thrown together in about two hours? After all the digital ink spilled over this matter on numerous blogs since the actions of last fall, I really can't point to anything that combines real time events and historical context to work through some issues a lot of us are grappling with. The man's talents are wasted on movie reviews and puff pieces about politics in Olympia, really this points to a reoccurring theme I have about talent wasted by our crumbling meritocracy......
As I said before, there were broken windows and graffiti at Washington Middle School over the winter break and nobody called in the BATF or wrote a blog piece garnering over 150 comments, I guess some glass windows are more important than others? And to those who are shocked, SHOCKED by the violence of black clad men and women on MayDay, this is what you get when you declare that Social Security is going broke, demand austerity to cover the state deficit, deprofessionalize teachers, refuse to build a working transit system, shut out one third of the population from any say over what happens to them. In short, when people have no job, no way to go to school, are not prepared for the future, are not valued or even asked to participate; they get wacky ideas like busting up a car window. It's a symptom of a bigger problem, asking OS to police itself and pass nonviolence agreements is basically asking us to remove the symptoms without curing the disease; "make us feel safe" is what I hear, maintain the pretense that everything is fine, that a peaceful demonstration of political aspiration is more than adequate.
Despite claims by the mayor, police and commenters here, that if OS were only peaceful they would be listened too, actions say otherwise. If they really gave a shit about economic inequality, there would be headlines in the Times and press conferences by the Mayor that schools are being vandalized by gang graffiti, instead a few young people are being perp walked in court and a task force is pouring over surveillance to find vandals who busted windows at Nike Town and an abandoned court house.
This can get worse, the future is not written, keep it up and it will be more than windows broken.

@111

You're absolutely right to suggest that most of the 99% wouldn't care much, or even notice, if Occupy somehow adopted a completely incongruous system of organization and then used that system to internally enforce a strict code of nonviolence.

But you're absolutely, wrenchingly wrong to hint that people might listen to Occupy more attentively if and when the neo-smashists among them work up the nerve to break more than just windows.

@113

I think what I meant to say is that claims by media, intellectual elites, and politicians that Occupy just needs to stick to a policy of non-violence and they will be accepted into the pantheon of thought and respectability is just a lie. They use the smashy-smashy activity as an excuse to marginalize us, hence all the attention and media circus. Now that some chickenshit punks used MayDay as a cover to fuck shit up, all the talk is about OS and what the hell do they think they are. Giving credibility to the notion that vandalism and even more militant forms of direct action will advance the debate over economic disparity. The shock troop faction of OS think they actually mean something now that they are media darlings and hunted by a SPD task force.
Watch the GA and blog space dominated by the swaggering bravado of smashy-smashy activists. As their street cred is multiplied by continued arrests, their sense of vanguard isolation will increase, a security culture bubble will descend over them, further separating them from the world of less involved citizenry.
And who could blame them? A month ago they were just graffiti artists and coffee house dreamers, now they are fugitives from justice and underground heroes. Believe me, these kids are going to laid a lot by adoring fans and black clad groupies. They had an emergency decree called out by the Mayor in their honor, national media attention and an explosion of talk around the twitershere. They had to have know this would happen, or hoped it would, and have been rewarded for their boldness.
Expect more of this kind of activity, it feeds on itself. Continue to ignore social change groups, continue to defund schools and eliminate meaningful work for young people, militarize your local police with drone technology, consolidate media, build less parks and mass transit and continue building more corporate office space, only involve yourself in debates over the merits of breaking car windows, remain uninformed about how our economy works; like Dan Savage sez "it gets better".

@114

You're really just making threats, for all your couching them in terms of "those dreadful militant vanguardists."

I think your threats are hollow.

I don't think silencing debate over the violence will have any effect on it. I don't buy your claim that the violence will escalate if society responds to the violence itself, instead of treating the violence as a symptom of a societal malaise described and diagnosed by Doctor Occupy. I don't believe the neo-smashists would stop being violent if only the police would stop arresting them.

I do think economic injustice is a more important issue. And I notice that for all your shame-shaming about discussing violence instead of economic injustice, you're no more capable than anyone else of transitioning your discussion of violence into discussion of the issues the neo-smashists are supposedly smashing things about.

Very few people are likely to start talking about economic justice if you threaten them. And any discussion of economic justice that might take place as a result of your threats would be hopelessly compromised.

and yet, no real discussion of Occupy issues unless something gets broken, somebody gets arrested, a road gets blocked. Why is that? The mayor was obviously thrilled to pull out his emergency decree and look like he was doing something, the police almost had orgasms discussing the various tools used to break windows, and slog commenter threw them selves into discussing the nuances of violence and vandalism. I would love to talk about other forms of violence, like home foreclosures and daily compounded interest, but that is just too dull for non wonky people.

Once again, you seem to think if there was nobody in Occupy doing bad things, then these kind of things would be discussed without the threat of broken windows hanging over it. Bullshit. We had all winter to do that and there were no press conferences denouncing Bank of America using fraudulent foreclosure procedures in Washington state. There were no investigatory articles written in the Stranger about how the unemployed are adapting to the new post scarcity economy. Nothing until some prick breaks a window at Chase bank in Madison valley, or puts a circle A on the wall at Safeway. This is what you call violence fetishism, people who get a woody form watching or participating in violence. First it starts with a broken window, then a lot of windows, then an incendiary device, next thing you know were back to weather underground and Kent state levels of circle jerk.

Break the cycle, start to care about these things when nobody is spitting on a policeman, I double dog dare you.

@116

Strange, then, that we managed to read all that stuff about home foreclosures and Bank of America and the lives of the jobless in the New York Times and the Seattle Times and the rest of the Mainstream Media without anyone breaking any windows anywhere near the time of publication.

The notion that nobody is reporting on issues of economic injustice is laughable. You're not going out and gathering all that intelligence on your own, you're getting it from the media.

When there's violence, the press reports on the violence, not on the economic issues, as you complained in @114. You seem to have forgotten that complaint entirely, in @116.

The problem Occupy has isn't that society isn't aware of economic injustice. The problem Occupy has is that society isn't particularly interested in the sorts of solutions the core radial members of Occupy have been suggesting, e.g. "End Capitalism" or "Dismantle Hierarchy" or "Fuck the Police."

Society doesn't seem to be buying your theory that The Police State is brutally oppressing the Heroic Revolutionaries. The only people who seem to think Brutal Police Oppression is on an inevitable ramp-up to National Guard and Live Ammunition levels are the neo-smashists themselves, and their apologists.

Your threats are hollow.

I have to admit I don't read the Seattle or NY Times on a regular basis. When I do I am reminded how they actively bought the WMD hype driving into Iraq war 11, slept through the SEC vacation in the run up to the "08 financial melt down. I freely admit to finding my own news sources that tell me what already confirms what I believe to be true, and I don't think I'm the only one who does that. The difference is people read the defeatism of Frank Blethan's Times, ("Social Security will go broke by 2021") and flip to the editorial page ("Repeal the Death Tax!") and will make no connection what so ever between the two. In fact reading this information and doing nothing about it is worse than useless, reporting on half the facts and leaving out the back story of how we got here is what media like the NYT is all about.

When I listen to KUOW news segments what I hear is "sleep, sleep you tired man", as they report on current events, yes I get my information from the media, the question is what do I do with it. My bitch here is that people are doing all kinds of creative and interesting things with that information; Occupy Wall Street had the largest participation in multiple public events ever for MayDay, with only 8 arrests, and there was Zero media coverage, I challenge you to think back what happened in NewYorkCity a week ago based on what you read in the NYT. Los Angeles had a very creative series of parades and block parties, very unusual for that city, with several serious altercations with police, yet again, I ask you to recall what you read or saw about that event.
SF and Seattle had a wrecking crew of about two dozen window breakers do their thing and that is practically all anyone can remember, not surprising given the media hype around it. Where you are missing my point is I'm not apologizing or justifying Hulk Smash actions, I am pointing out the mathematical reality of its effect over media, police, institutional response to it. I agree the discussion is not so great, I would like to see this much passion put into homeless kids with respiratory diseases. For some reason because of these actions all you think OS is about is ACAB or "end capitalism", I assure you there is a lot more depth of thought than that. If there were some thoughtful media reporting in the days to come it could be more of that could come to light. Tell you what, I'll actually read the Times for a few weeks and eat some humble pie, I hope.

@118

You're right, parades and block parties aren't going to get anyone talking about economic injustice, either.

But then, you don't need to get people talking about economic injustice these days: you don't need to shout at the unemployed about unfair corporate practices, you don't need to hector anyone paying a mortgage about the evils of predatory lending. They already know about the problems. And they're not interested in present-day-Occupy's solutions. A vast conspiracy of disinformation isn't what's holding back Occupy.

I'm sure there are still a few people left at Occupy meetings apart from the neo-smashists, but "more thoughtful" versions of "Disassemble Hierarchy" or "End Capitalism" or "Decolonize" aren't going to be any more appealing Americans outside the Occububble than these mock-slogans I'm using. People are pretty smart, generally speaking; if you try to sell them anarchism with the label removed, they're still going to have the same reservations that people everywhere have had about anarchism for the past 150 years.

For a few minutes in the fall, Occupy was a locus and impetus for discussing things like tax reform, higher education funding, electing corporate watchdog candidates, financial regulation overhaul, and other progressive work. The people who reject that sort of effort, the Radicals, have remained with Occupy. The people who might actually carry out that sort of effort, the Liberals, have left. They've gone back to the organizations they came from, and they're still working on those ideas (and pissing off Occupy in the process, because Occupy thinks it owns the language of economic justice, and it fumes and foams whenever an organization outside Occupy "co-opts" that language).

There's more than one way to connect a set of dots. There's no lack of people connecting the economic-injustice dots out there; what's got Occupy frustrated is that they haven't been able to convince the rabble that a particular critique of capitalism with its roots in Marx is the correct way to number the dots. People are making their own pictures with those dots instead, and it's not because they're dull-witted pawns of the global corporate media octopus.

Well, not unless you've got your dots numbered to paint that picture, of course.

Parades and Block Parties ARE people talking about economic justice issues.

The Anarchists as well have gone back to their own collective houses and book stores after giving Occupy a shake. The whole thing has splintered into a hundred working groups and caucuses because they have a place to go back to, if conditions were truly at the Greek-like level financial Armageddon, this would not have been possible. As it exists, politically inclusive institutions are able to absorb the number of the public being shut out from the benefits of our current economic system.

Groups like The Chilrens's Alliance, Uncut Washington, Jobs with Justice ect provide the buffer needed for society to function in the face of breaking down safety nets and increasingly rapacious business practices. A 100 years ago Unions and Newspapers served this function of reconnecting disaffected citizens to the world around them, now they have been adapted to the interests of the extractive institutions. This is why I have such a low opinion of our current media and political party system, and I'm not the only one.

Believe it or not, the Marxists are the ones talking about fielding political candidates and building another political party that attempts to regulate capitalism. If occupy had listened to them, no general strike would have been called and its members would be debating a political platform instead of running wild in the streets. What we have now is a restless generation of young people who are just not prepared for the future, who have less options than I had when their age, who have been repeatedly lied to and miseducated by institutions that were supposed to make them functional members of our community. Mobs in the street are made up of people like this, the mayor and police think of them as a public safety issue because all they think about is crisis management. Those of us who don't have to think about the functioning of a municipality that is not able to pay for it self need to apply ourselves to finding a place for these disaffected people, or they will tear apart what we have built. Cities can die if they aren't taken care of, sitting back and thinking that "smart people are already taking care of things" is just not a given anymore.

@120

Ah I see. You, like so many of your fellow radicals who have "such a low opinion of our current media and political party system" are incapable of distiguishing the lowbrow insult "Marxist" from any substantial criticism of a critique of capitalism rooted in Marx.

But then, you're an anti-capitalist, and since there has been no revolution in anti-capitalism to supplant critiques rooted in Marx (and no, the Frankfurt School does not count), this is entirely consistent with the rest of your pronouncements.

And your last paragraph is simply a return to justifying, craving, and almost exhorting (though carefully avoiding glorifying) physical threats. Again.

Your threats are (still) hollow.

Perhaps peaceful demonstrators need a set of White Bloc tactics to counter the violent smashy types who want to highjack demonstrations for their own selfish purposes?

If a parasitic group commits violence, don't let them blend back in with the rest. Sit down, walk away, maybe even take pictures. (Cautionary note: at the Toronto G20, Black Bloc types did threaten violence against people with cameras.)