https://www.satyagrahafoundation.org/the-cancer-in-occupy/
>>Hedges: Black Bloc anarchists are a “cancer” in Occupy; they are a “gift to the security state” because they alienate the public, provide pretext for repression, and destroy the nonviolent movement’s moral authority and broad appeal.Hedges mistakes the symptom for the disease or, more accurately, he dishonestly frames the movement’s most threatened elements as “the cancer” that “leads to violence.” This framing makes the task of repression less of a PR failure for the bourgeois media, whose job is to legitimize police action. This analysis is also liberalism, not materialism, I personally believe if you don't use materialism you are not leftist or properly anti-capitalist at all. The state does not need a pretext to repress; it represses when the movement threatens power, regardless of tactics and their moral levels. Occupy’s nonviolent encampments were evicted, its activists pepper‑sprayed, its leaders surveilled in NYC, the "black bloc" in NYC used purely defensive tactics and never engaged in stone throwing, burning, or window breaking like Oakland did. The “moral authority” Hedges fetishizes is a counter-insurgency method of division, and conquering. Militant actions merely expose the state’s violence, and that exposure is precisely what radicalizes the masses. The state’s brutality is the gift; it strips away the illusion that reform is possible. Occupy Oakland had more energy than Occupy Denver, Chris Hedges arguments fails.
>>Hedges: Black Bloc focuses its fury on the organized left, unions, Zapatistas, etc., not on capitalists; they are obstructionist, powerless, engage in random violence, lack strategy.This is counter-insurgency language. A coalition of Anarchists and Marxists is who originally began organizing the OG occupy. That is a classic instance of rhetorical inversion, a gaslighting tactic where the accuser projects their own role onto the accused. Hedges claims the Black Bloc “focuses its fury on the organized left, unions, Zapatistas… not on capitalists.” as he calls the organized left… a cancer? It is Hedges and the liberal-reformist left who spend their energy attacking militants, denouncing “violence,” which is more often than not, just organized anti-capitalist militancy, not violence, and generally policing the boundaries of acceptable dissent, while the capitalists go untouched. As for “powerlessness”, he's just wielding words as weapons for confusion, disassociating the organizers of the movement from the movement, so they can be attacked by the state without giving the militant left more legitimacy. Hedges was likely towing the line during Obama's FBI backed COIN up.
>>Black Bloc “detest organization, oppose all organized movements,” ensure their own irrelevance; they are “progressive adolescentization.”This is a straw man. The militant formations organized the most important parts of the movement, they organized around shared political lines, operational security, mutual aid, and direct action. They simply refuse to organize in ways that can be captured by liberals. “Organization” is not synonymous with 501(c)(3) paperwork, elected leadership, or coordinating with police. Hedges’ model of organization is precisely what makes a movement safe for the state's operatives.
>>Hedges: Black Bloc’s “diversity of tactics” allows a few hooligans to discredit peaceful protesters; they serve the 1%His handler was mad that Occupy Oakland voted not to denounce riots as a legitimate tactic, so all the counter-insurgency media panels were looking to platform him as the voice of reason. Diversity of tactics is not a cover for adventurism; it is a strategic recognition that different contexts require different responses. The state escalates regardless, the only question is whether the movement is prepared to meet force with force, or cunning ideas. Hedges’ insistence on a single tactic (nonviolence) is a straitjacket. Moreover, the notion that “a few hooligans” discredit the movement is inverted, the movement is discredited when it is seen as weak, when it refuses to defend itself, when it lets the state dictate the terms of engagement.
>>Hedges: Black Bloc tactics are criminal, hyper‑masculine, mob violence that turns humans into beasts.This is gas-lighting language, reminds me of how voices from intelligence agencies talk about movements they want to dis-empower, disarm. The parallel is precise. Abroad, the CIA funnels money to NGOs that cultivate militant movements, riotous, armed, destabilizing, useful for weakening hostile states in order for regime change, or destruction. At home, the same intelligence architecture funnels money to a different class of NGOs, the ones that preach nonviolence, moral authority, and the sanctity of organization. The goal is symmetrical, to ensure that no genuinely threatening militant movement takes root on US soil. Chris Hedges is not necessarily CIA, he doesn’t need to be. He is a volunteer for the domestic wing of the same operation. His language, his moral framing, his relentless attacks on the militant edge, these are the ideological counterpart to the foreign NGO’s material support. One arms the insurgency abroad; the other disarms it at home.
>>Hedges, Nonviolent movements must “embrace police brutality” to delegitimize the state; King’s model.King’s movement did not rely solely on nonviolence; it had armed self‑defense wings in the Deacons for Defense, and it was crushed through state violence anyway. The end result was, you guessed it, violence. The idea that nonviolence “wins hearts and minds” is historically selective, liberal, and it worked in contexts where the state was vulnerable to international pressure (e.g., civil rights movement). Nonviolence is a death sentence for movements. Hedges clings to a fantasy that the state can be shamed into self‑restraint, a liberal fantasy that ignores COINTELPRO, the Green Scare, and the daily murder of unarmed people by police. What's sad is so many of you are in organizations dictated by the same voices as people like this, like I said CAPTURED, REFORMIST, without TEETH.
>>Hedges: The real work is winning hearts and minds, building broad coalitions, using nonviolence as strategic tool.Every fucking leftist org thinks this is the way, this is the task, they recruit like liberals or churches. Winning hearts and minds does not require neutering the movement. Coalitions with liberals and NGOs are not “broadening” the movement; they are diluting it. The JPA works with whoever shares immediate objectives, but we do not confuse temporary alliances with true political unity. Hearts and minds are won when people see that the movement can protect them, and attack those who attack them and their livelihoods. Believe it or not, people who are actually oppressed aren't put off by the idea of the oppressed rising in fury.
Chris Hedges is not a revolutionary, and the spheres of leftism he comes from hold no revolutionary positions. He is the voice of the counter‑insurgency left, the left that exists to manage and contain, to moralize and pacify. His essay is not a constructive critique of militancy; it is a blueprint for how the liberal red-left performs its true function, to isolate, discredit, and ultimately crush the vanguard that threatens its own comfortable position within the capitalist order.
>>This may seem old, but I'm showing yall how the counter-insurgency plays out from within, so perhaps you can resist it and severe ties from it