Anarchists generally don’t give a fuck about proper orthography, which makes a person like me part of a minority. There’s at least one exception to this generalized disinterest, though, and that’s the case of the term “black bloc”.

Should any of those letters be capitalized? Well, there are different opinions, but most anglophone anarchists seem to recognize that there shouldn’t be capital letters because we’re not talking about an organization or a movement, but a tactic. Organizations, and sometimes movements, qualify for the status of “proper noun”, which generally require capitalization (though there can be exceptions, see: k.d. lang, bell hooks). Tactics, on the other hand, do not qualify for this status. This opinion is not universal amongst anarchists, though.

Is it acceptable to spell out this term using a letter-kay [k, K], i.e. “black block”? Absolutely not! This is pretty much an anarchist shibboleth, or at least it is for anglo anoks – a determinant of whether or not you are part of the in-group or the out-group. Besides, “black block” looks ugly, and there’s a meaningful difference between a bloc and a block, to be elaborated upon shortly.

In discussing the tactic in the abstract, should “black bloc” be introduced with an article or not? In other words, should we speak of “black bloc” or “the black bloc”? Here, even though anarchists generally fall into the habit of speaking of “the black bloc” all the time anyway, there is a general understanding that it’s bad to reify the widespread myth of the Black Bloc organization/movement, and thus some people speak of “black bloc” while others try to say “the black bloc tactic” each time, all five syllables of it. This last question doesn’t only concern orthography, but also what the place of this word is in the complex of English grammar, both written and spoken.

So, in an effort to answer these questions, ai am just going to get right to the point with my answer.

None of the words in “black bloc” should ever be capitalized, unless, of course, the word “black” has found itself at the beginning of a sentence. Let’s maintain that “block” with a letter-kay simply can’t be used. Finally, the tactic, in the abstract, is simply “the black bloc tactic“, and if we want to be using a shorter term, the one we should use is “black bloc’ing“.

This last pronouncement is going to be controversial, for sure, but the term “black bloc’ing” is actually used all the time when anarchists speak about black blocs. That’s obviously a rather strange spelling, but also one that ai think to be necessary. The two most obvious alternatives are to use either “blocking” or “blocing”, but the first of these seems to identify “black block” as a possibly acceptable spelling for this term, and second looks like it shouldn’t be pronounced with a hard letter-cee [c, C] sound, and it also looks like it shouldn’t exist in the English language. You can probably say the same of “bloc’ing”, with its apostrophe, but you can at least make the argument that the apostrophe signals that the letter before it should be pronounced as a voiceless velar plosive, and that it is therefore better than “blocing”, which looks like it might be pronounced in any number of weird ways.

Besides, once we accept the legitimacy of “black bloc’ing”, we get so many other words that look so elegant with this apostrophe, and which we are likely to use more often.

For example, the verb “to bloc up” – meaning, in effect, to change into black bloc attire – can now be rendered in text easily. Ai bloc up, my ruedawg blocs up, dudeguy bloc’ed up earlier, the Sugar Sammy affinity group is bloc’ing up under the weird anti-civ banner over there, it’s nice to see so many bloc’ed-up people in a demo, but is there an actual black bloc anywhere?

We also get the term “black bloc’er” from an acceptance of “black bloc’ing”, which looks so much nicer than the term “black blocker” that occasionally shows up in places. Even if you disagree, it’s confusing to include the letter-kay in this form while maintaining that it doesn’t belong in “black bloc”, and yet is also clear that the word “blocer” looks a bit strange itself.

Blocks and blocs

Why am ai so opposed to the letter-kay? Well, that’s because a black block would better refer to a black Lego block than to a collection of people grouped together and covering as much of their body as possible in black clothing. The word “bloc” was chosen for a reason when this term was originally translated into English from the German term «Schwarzer Block». Whereas, in English, the word “block” refers to something discrete, whether a Lego block or a city block or a prison cell block, the word “bloc” refers to something that is perceived, composed of multiple things that are certainly different from one another in many ways, but which are beheld as the same indistinguishable mass.

Thus the “Communist bloc” that occupied the Eurasian landmass during the Cold War. It included the massive territories of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, as well as many smaller states like Yugoslavia, Albania, and later Cambodia and Vietnam, many of whom had conflictual relationships with one another – and yet they appeared as a uniform threat to the capitalist powers, something that needed to be contained. So much so, in fact, that it took nearly a decade for most capitalist states’ foreign policy makers to perceive the Sino-Soviet split, by which time, in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union and China were at the point of armed clash.

And thus too black blocs, whose defining feature as a discrete tactic is that the individual people comprising the bloc become difficult to identify and track as individuals, something that renders a potential advantage to the black bloc’ers. An enemy that isn’t fully understood is an enemy that is more difficult to engage.

The proper noun

It is worth mentioning the fact that, in making the point that there is no singular Black Bloc organization present in every single demo, it is worth noting that there have, in fact, been some entities that have chosen to name themselves “Black Bloc”. For example, there was the movement that emerged in early 2013 that used the name “Black Bloc” to describe itself: Black Bloc Egypt. This was apparently a rather heterogenous movement, and it apparently drew its inspiration from anarchists who had used the black bloc tactic in other parts of the world (and perhaps in Egypt itself, since yeah, there were black blocs in the Cairo of 2011 too), but this movement definitely espoused a certain baseline political ideology, and the things that it did went far beyond simply using the black bloc tactic.

This is something we should be able to acknowledge if we ever find ourselves trying to discuss what the tactic is. Yet it should require no more elaboration than it does to explain that occupation is a tactic that exists independently of, say, the Occupy movement.

In the case of Black Bloc Egypt, it’s interesting, and probably not all that surprising, that the black bloc tactic – and the movements that have employed that tactic in the past – would serve as the main inspiration for a movement of anti-capitalist, anti-theocratic youth seeking to create a kind of collective political identity. That’s because, for many reasons, the term “black bloc” has been imbued with an anarchist character. This isn’t an entirely good thing.

The political coding of the tactic

The term “black bloc” comes from the term that German news anchors used to describe crowds of black-clad, masked-up squatters who formed to defend their homes from attacks by the state; the news anchors may have gotten the name from the German police first, but it’s a bit unclear. In any case, squat defense was a thing that happened a lot in Germany, and other West European countries, throughout the 1980s. When things really picked up in terms of efforts to defend Hamburg’s Hafenstraße squats, starting perhaps in 1986, «Schwarzer Block» became really widely known in German-speaking parts of Western Europe.

The squatters were mostly not anarchists, and the news anchors, for their part, did not refer to them as such either. Anarchists in Turtle Island were inspired by the squatters’ movement, though, and the other political tendencies associated with the German autonomes.

Whenever there are disturbances around the world, anarchists are quick to learn the particular terms that are used, in whatever context, for what we might call in English “hooligans”. In French, one term is «casseur»; in Greek, one term is «koukoulofori»; in Turkish, one term is «çapul». Ai can name all of these off the top of my head, without looking them up – and ai bet many anarchists have similar knowledge. All of these are words that are used by news media against uncontrollable or rebellious people in the streets, and they then get appropriated and turned into a positive identity. They become words of celebration, not just among those çapuling every day in Istanbul, but in places where there are people inspired by those happy çapulers. This same thing played out a few decades ago with the term «Schwarzer Block», translated to “black bloc” in English. The German hooligans embraced the label that had been applied to them, and the celebration of this label spread along subcultural and political channels to other parts of the world.

So, what happened is that, at some point, some Turtle Island anarchists started to do a similar thing where they would show up to larger demos with a mind to sticking together and wearing as much black as they could over as much of their body as possible. At the very least, this was what people were doing by the first time that ai was involved in a black bloc, in 2007. (There are various ideas about when and where the first black bloc on this continent was, but the answer seems a bit unknowable to me; let’s just say “around 1990”.) Speaking of that specific black bloc ai participated in, which was during deliberations on the Atlantica Free Trade Agreement in Halifax, it was rather different in form than those demos that had happened in Germany so many years ago. In the German demos, the entire demo would typically be comprised of black-clad people (almost all of them squatters or at least heavily involved in the squatting scene), and those people were almost certainly not wearing specific black bloc attire in order to make them more difficult to identify individually. Yes, the German squatters generally wore masks, but so have lots of other militants. Those Germans did not function as a bloc within a demo. Very interestingly, they seem to have worn the clothes that they apparently wore most of the time anyway (i.e. what was fashionable in their particular subculture and/or practical in their particular circumstances).

All of this means that the German squatters did not actually operate as a black bloc. The modern concept behind this term, anarchists’ tactical conception of what a black bloc is, was actually created by anglophone anarchists after the height of the German squatting struggle in the 1980s was over. It had very little to do, in fact, with that particular movement – and it had a lot more to do with the political situation in which anarchists on Turtle Island and in Western Europe found themselves over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s. Later on, the term “black bloc” was brought into German as an anglicism, and without many people necessarily even being aware that the term’s origin was in German (although plenty of people must have been). It also entered other languages, like French and Arabic, as an anglicism. It carried with it a very specific meaning by this point, but also one that was routinely ignored or confused.

Today, anarchists in the English-speaking world (and in may other places) usually participate in violent physical confrontation with the state by participating in demos, and these usually take place in cities that, increasingly, are fraught with surveillance devices and other means of gathering visual evidence on riots. Black blocs are useful for anarchists, insofar as we want to break windows and get away with it. There are other good things to say about black blocs, but this should be sufficient for this post. Our appreciation of this tactic has led many of us to elevate this tactic to something more than it is. It has become, in a way, a specifically anarchist tactic, if not the anarchist tactic.

In other words, it isn’t just corporate newscasters that discuss black blocs as being something more than what they are. Anarchists do it too. A good example is when the magazine 325, in its ninth issue, spoke of the Black Bloc (with capital letters) as an example of informal organization in the same paragraph as it mentioned the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), examples of the same. 325‘s claim might be true to a point, but it’s pretty obvious that, whereas the ALF and the ELF are banners under which anyone can claim an action (so long as, in the case of the ALF at least, they adhere to the organization’s guidelines), the same cannot be said of “the Black Bloc” – unless, of course, you set up something like Black Bloc Egypt, which does end up serving as a sort of banner under which certain things cannot be declared.

Ai don’t think this kind of thing is particularly useful for anarchists, though. First, the aesthetic is easily appropriated – and, in fact, it has been appropriated – by racist nationalists. This is the whole “autonomous nationalist” phenomenon in parts of Europe, and along with black bloc attire (which, for the record, can be as useful for the purpose of terrorizing an immigrant neighbourhood as it can be for attacking police after they shoot a teenager), they have also taken up certain “causes” that anarchists are usually at the forefront of promoting in a militant fashion, most notably defense of the Earth. If we argue that the black bloc tactic is an anarchist tactic, but we are also unable to stop scumbags from employing that tactic to scumbag ends, then people who don’t know the details may assume, rightly or wrongly, that the black bloc that did something scumbaggy in their neighbourhood was comprised of anarchists.

When we talk about black blocs as anarchists (like this blog post is doing, since ai’m an anarchist), or when black blocs comprised of anarchists and fellow travelers talk about themselves (like when black bloc’ers go for a stroll together and hand out flyers to passers-by), we should avoid talking about it as something that is ours. Instead, in theory directed towards other movement participants, we should talk about wearing masks, street fighting, uniformity of dress, and the combination of all three as tactics that have a place in a broader strategy for liberation (which counters the arguments of pacifists and managerial types, for example). When we hand out flyers to proles in Hochelag’ about “what a black bloc is”, we should emphasize that it is a thing that anyone can do, to whatever end they like, so long as they have some black clothes and some friends.

We should really stop moaning about Nazis stealing our good ideas, too. Yes, it sucks, but was it really our good idea, anyway? The topic is debatable. Like, having done some reading about the West German squatting scene in the late ’80s, ai am not entirely sympathetic to everything that was going on. Ai don’t think that movement is mine any more than ai think the 2012 strike movement in Québec was mine; instead, ai understand that movement as a place that was inhabited by people that ai have sympathy with, but also by a lot of others, including a lot of shitty people. So if the Nazis stole it from anyone, it was not just anarchists or people who anarchists like, but also, say, Marxists who believed that talking about gender issues is a useless activity, and yet who were also part of that historical West German scene, also fought the cops, etc.

In any case, a big part of Nazis’ whole deal is that they steal ideas from others and use them towards their own shitty ends, and while plenty of anarchists may have not heard about the autonomist nationalist phenomenon yet (which is fine, since not all of us spend hours reading obscure blogs about what racists in Bulgaria are up to), the reality is that anarchists in Turtle Island, on the whole, have known about black bloc’ing Nazis in Europe for a while now. We shouldn’t be shocked or upset about it every time we hear mention of them. Instead, we should think about what this means for our anarchist scenes which, rightly or wrongly, often spend a lot of time talking about black blocs.

A few criteria for identifying black blocs

#1. Three people in black bloc attire do not make up a black bloc. The whole point of a bloc is that it is difficult to distinguish individual parts or grasp the full size of it. So, at the very least, there need to be enough people in a bloc so that you can’t just tell how many people comprise it just by looking at it. It needs to be enough people that you need to take a second to count them.

#2. An area of a demo where there are lots of people in black bloc attire, but also a lot more who are not wearing black bloc attire – but who may be wearing “dark clothing”, masks, goggles, helmets, and so on and so forth – is not a black bloc. It is, perhaps, an area where a black bloc is likely to form, but it could also just be described as “the rowdy section”. Within this section, there may be a black bloc, of course, which may or may not comprise all of the black bloc’ers, but which probably doesn’t.

#3. Just because people are wearing masks and hoodies, that doesn’t mean they are a black bloc. The proper attire is really important, and even though it is sometimes difficult for people in a bloc to achieve total monochrome uniformity, it’s usually easy to tell when they are trying and when they are not.

Errata

Did you know that there was a Sudanese political party called “Black Bloc” during British rule? Pretty weird!