From Montreal Counter-Info:

Hatred for the police? You feel it too? They piss you off, ticket you, harass you, arrest you, bring you to the station, baton you, pepper-spray you, or tear-gas you, beat you, surveil you, follow you, blackmail you, handcuff you, throw you in a cage, make you lose an eye, terrorize you?

They feel important strutting around in their uniform, putting their nose in everyone’s business. They represent the authority of the State. They hold the monopoly of legitimate violence. You must respect law and order, under the threat of having your life stolen from you and being thrown in a cage. They are the guard dogs of power.

Cops piss you off. But beyond sticking their nose in your business, they exist to maintain the system as it is, and to prevent people from revolting. No matter what they say, that’s their principal function. You often hear the classic argument that “police are nice, but like everything there are some bad apples that tarnish their reputation”. They justify their usefulness by ceaselessly displaying their feats of arresting a pedophile or pimp. Of course, these sorts of interventions are made a part of police tasks because we have been historically robbed of our capacities to manage conflicts in an autonomous way, but in reality, power doesn’t give a fuck about your well-being. The more a neighbourhood is gentrified, the more new citizens and businesses require a clean and secure neighbourhood. The police aren’t going to go beat a landlord making illegal rent-hikes – they reserve this treatment for the crackhead on the corner. “The police in service of the rich and the fascists”, the good old slogan reminds us.

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From It’s Going Down:

“I’m not a protester. I’m violent.”
-Masked Rebel in Ferguson

Along with voting, in today’s society protesting peacefully is often held up as one of the only ways that everyday working-class and poor people can change the world. This is a myth we are raised with, and since the time that we are very young, we are taught that peaceful protest helped bring about massive changes in this country and remains the only way in which people can correctly pressure the government into addressing problems and grievances. This myth has gone on to become a framework that not only criminalizes and normalizes repression, but also helps to generalize the policing and shaming of various tactics of resistance in social struggles. If we are to create a movement that can not only push back against broad attacks but create a new way of living, this false notion of “peaceful protesters” is going to have to be completely destroyed.

A History of Violence

When someone says that non-violence has been the only way that human beings have changed the world, they’re fucking lying.

Across the world and across history, oppressed, marginalized, poor, and working-class people have used a variety of tactics to further their goals and fight back, and this includes things that could be considered violent. Overall, this means that when people refuse their roles within society and instead force the system into a state of crisis, that’s when we can create a situation in which we can forward our own agenda. This often means that people refuse to do the things that allows the system to reproduce itself. In the case of workers, people strike. In the case of renters, they go on rent strike. For the poor, they refuse to be passive: they riot. In the case of all, they defend themselves against the violence of State repression and the police: they fight back. 

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