Game Plan.

          The pandemic has probably brought more people to board games to escape bored evenings, in lockdown, but how many of these board games come to suit anarchist ways of thinking? Well, C4SS, Centre for Stateless Society, have put forward the suggestion, Bloc by Bloc. See what you think. 

 

Image from Anarchist News

 

       For better or worse, board games tend to be a popular form of entertainment in radical spaces, and yet there are precious few games that explicitly deal with anarchist ideas. For those exhausted by games glorifying nationalistic conquest, monopoly capitalism, and settler colonialism, Bloc by Bloc: The Insurrection Game may offer a breath of refreshing (if tear-gas-scented) air. According to the introduction in the manual, Bloc by Bloc is “a semi-cooperative game simulating protest movements, riots and popular uprisings in urban areas of the world during the first decades of the 21st century.” The name refers to the black bloc, a tactic used to anonymize and thereby protect participants in these uprisings, and in the game refers to the literal wooden blocks that represent such participants.
      Released by Out of Order Games in 2018, the latest edition of Bloc by Bloc features randomized map generation, area control strategy, and hidden agendas, where each player is a faction of revolutionaries fighting against the police in an attempt to liberate their city. Each of the various factions (workers, neighbors, prisoners, and students) has a special ability giving them an advantage in their struggle against the state. For example, the students can more easily and freely move about the city, whereas the neighbors are better at building barricades to slow down the movement of the police.
        Bloc by Bloc is a game for 2 to 4 players and it typically takes 2 to 3 hours to play. Players new to strategy board games might find the learning curve a little steep, but the instruction manual is clearly worded and includes reference cards that remind players of their available actions. Experienced board gamers will probably find many of the mechanics familiar. Board game comparison site boardvsgame.com gives it a complexity rating of 2.7 out of 5; compare this to the 2.3 / 5 of the classic competitive mainstay Settlers of Catan or the 2.4 / 5 of the popular cooperative game Pandemic.
      While it can be played in fully cooperative mode, the game’s unique semi-cooperative mode is the recommended way to play, and in this Final Straw Radio interview, the game’s designer TL explains why. In contrast to fully cooperative games, where all players are on the same team and playing against the game’s “cardboard AI,” the players in Bloc by Bloc might all be on the same team — but they also might not. In fully co-op games, there is a tendency for everyone to follow the lead of the most experienced player, at its worst becoming a de-facto game of solitaire with less experienced players acting as mere extensions of the most experienced. This dynamic (while perhaps a rational strategy, the players want to win after all), isn’t necessarily encouraging of the critical thinking and anti-hierarchical mindset that anarchists seek to cultivate. But by introducing uncertainty about other players’ agendas, Bloc by Bloc instead forces each player to autonomously evaluate any particular move on its own strategic merit. 

 Read the full article HERE:

 

 Comment from Anarchist News: 

    It was fun but the gameplay is horrible . It wouldn’t be too hard to tweak it to Make it playable. The fix would to have way less dice rolling , which there is more of in this game than risk, which is the reason risk doesn’t hold up. Also the game is way too long. I appreciate the effort though, it’s hard work creating a game

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So The State Repression Continues.

 

       If you like Beethoven, then you'll love this, a rather unusual rendering of his ninth symphony.

 The G20 leaders listen indifferently to a performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony—Bakunin’s favorite musical composition—while the rightful heirs of Beethoven and Bakunin engage in heroic struggle outside the walls.

         The aftermath of the G20 is still being felt by those who took part in the protests and others not really involved, as the German state does what state's do, come down hard on any dissent, useing any excuse to try and stifle opposition to their grip on power and privileges.

This from Crimethinc:

       Police raided more than 20 apartments, collectives, and projects around Germany in the early hours of December 5 in a new wave of repression following their unsuccessful attempts to brutally suppress demonstrations against the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg. The “Soko Schwarzer Block,“ the special police commission called “black bloc“ that was formed after the G20, officially announced that the searches pertained to an incident during the G20 at Rondenbarg trailer park—in which the police trapped and attacked a crowd, injuring many people. Solidarity actions and demonstrations responding to the raids took place immediately in Hannover, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Hamburg, Flensburg, Göttingen, and Berlin.
      Fabio, a person who spent four months in prison, became a symbol of the scandalous lies that the authorities have been spreading about the police attack at Rondenbarg. During the attack, police kicked 14 people down a fence, screaming “That’s your breakfast, antifa swine!” All of them sustained serious injuries, including broken bones. Since the police video was published by a TV station, we can all compare the different versions. History is made by those in power and what we witness right now is the fabrication of truth. The truth that the police and the judges are trying to promote is not compatible with the experiences that thousands of people share of being charged without provocation, brutally beaten up, water-cannoned, and pepper-sprayed during the summit.
      The official charge is “Landfriedensbruch,“ breach of the public peace. But even according to the police spokesperson, the searches were not carried out to find evidence to use against people participating in the demonstration. The searches were officially made to find out more about the structure of the protests and the organizers of the riots. In other words, the explicit goal of the police is to suppress dissent via violence and ongoing intimidation.
       The intention of the police is to frame the people they attacked as rioters. But they also raided the apartments of union members. Consequently, even mainstream journalists called the searches a PR bluff. The act that the arrestees are accused of is nothing more than being part of a demonstration from which stones and fireworks were thrown. The police have admitted that they did not expect to identify anyone who had thrown anything.

Anarchy Is For Lovers.

 

          For every anarchist in a black balaclava, there are at least forty aiming in the same direction, but taking a different route, anarchism is a multi-stranded fabric. Anarchism is the destination, the battles, tactics, struggles and strategies are how we deal with the obstacles that litter our path. It is a path that will require all our imagination, initiatives, determination and solidarity, for our opponents, apart from having a massive propaganda apparatus in their armoury, they have power, savagery, brutality and massive weaponry in their arsenal. However we should never forget, our means shape our ends, how we shape the foundation will determine the structure of our building. In spite of the image portrayed by our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, of anarchism as a violent creed, anarchism is a philosophy of love. It is not hate that drives us to fight injustice, it is love of justice, it is not hate that drives us to struggle against oppression, it is love of freedom. No matter the shape and colour of our battles, it is love of humanity that dives us forward, a desire that all our people must be free from oppression and exploitation.

From Splice Today:

 

          Potentially at least, anarchism and pacifism are, as Garrison and Tolstoy saw, bound together conceptually; it’s plausible to argue that government could not operate at all without physical force, coercion, incarceration, and other forms of violence, so that pacifism entails the rejection of state power. Mott said that people “should have no participation in a government based upon the life-taking principle—upon retaliation and the sword.” On the other hand, anarchism does not entail pacifism, and many anarchists have considered themselves insurrectionists and violent revolutionaries.
           This debate has extended throughout the history of anarchism. In DC and London in the 1980s, for example, the political punk movement split between militant anti-fascists and “peace punks.” The two strands continue among anarchists now, though the more war-like party is the more visible.

Read the full article HERE:

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The History Of The Black Bloc

Nothing much on? why not watch a movie?


A history of the Black Bloc from the stimulator on Vimeo.

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THE TRILOGY OF TYRANNY.

     Most states come down hard on any opposition, some more than others. Anarchists seem to come in for the worst of that state violence. At the moment in Greece the state is coming down hard on any anarchist groups it can lay its hands on. They face brutal treatment at the hands of the police and a prison sentence on some charge or other. However in Egypt it seems that it is somewhat different, with the The Islamist party of the Jihad Organization and Jama'a al-Islamiya calling for the Black Bloc to be killed. According to the Egyptian Independent it has been stated, “God orders us to kill, crucify or cut off the hands and feet of those who spread mischief on earth,” said Jama'a al-Islamiya Mufti Abdel Akhar Hammad, citing a verse from the Quran. “The president must give that order.”. In the same article it says, Mohamed Samra of the Jihad Organization said that the Black Bloc group is financed from abroad and must be killed, and that the National Salvation Front members must be arrested and charged with incitement to riot. 

     Is this democracy at work in Egypt, is this what the people of Egypt took to the streets for, in their millions? Is this the flower of the Arab Spring? Party politics, religion and the state, is a mix from which freedom and democracy can never grow, it is a poisonous cocktail that, if the people accept it, always ends in tyranny, control and repression. We can call on centuries of history to verify this pattern, we have a world of practical ongoing evidence to back this up, it is there before our eyes on a daily basis.

     The only hope for the people of this world to have what is rightfully ours, freedom and justice, is for the trilogy of tyranny, the state, party politics and religion, to be irrevocably eradicated. A world of communities organised by those who live in those communities, in federation with other communities. A world of self determination, co-operation and mutual aid is possible, and will see an end to the bloodshed and misery that unnecessarily floods our world at present.

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THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE.

The Universal Language:

 “Fuck the Police” (Montreal, Night 47)

This from, Outside the Circle: 

            I feel like I probably saw and was in the middle of only a fraction of all the tides of popular protests against the Grand Prix tonight. But to likely understate it, the police (SPVM to SQ) totally lost control and the people totally held the streets. And as one person said to us on the streets as riot cops swarmed by us for the umpteenth time–after about the umpteenth time that nearly everyone (and by nearly everyone, I mean an eclectic mix of thousands and thousands of people, many dressed in fancy Saturday night party clothes, far from “the usual suspects” and not a black bloc in sight) pushed the police back or for all intents and purposes kettled the cops, and after the many umpteenth times that nearly everyone booed at and many threw plastic bottles (or a beach ball) at the police–there’s a universal language on the streets this evening, and it’s “fuck the police.”

          Of course, there was plenty of good reason to speak this global language on Montreal’s streets this evening: tear gas, batons, the incessant beating on shields, pushing, harassment, pepper spray, injuries, arrests. But none of those tactics worked. Nor did the tactic of attempting to divide the thousands of people “marching” or simply filling the streets. Each time the police managed to split enormous amounts of people into two, three, or four groups, or seemed to have dispersed people altogether, seconds or minutes later, there was a new massive group, or several, or another hot spot, with no rhyme or reason, and definitely no coordination. The sheer beauty of a mysterious spontaneity birthed of some sort of popular will and determination. Whether tourist or local, student or person in their seventies, a kid a stroller or an adult in a wheelchair, white or black, out for a drink or out for a protest, and on and on, people just kept coming at the cops again and again and again, with little fear and lots of animosity.

Continue READING:

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SHOULD ANYONE HAVE A MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE?

        Is self defence violence? It is a regular feature of the media to keep referring to “violent demonstrations”, what they fail to see is that a demonstration is in essence an act of self defence against a very powerful force, in most cases it is the state or states. The question is always how far do you go in defending yourself? A lot of the violence on demonstrations is one sided and from the the state apparatus and in others the violence is not violence but no more than being provoked into defending yourself against, kettling etc.. Obviously as the superior force of the state apparatus has the upper hand by means of weaponry and training, this means, those defending themselves have to continually seek new strategies and tactics. There is an obvious conflict between the state which protects wealth, property and corporate power, and the people at the other end being exploited by this cabal, in such a conflict, should one side have the monopoly on “violence”? The following is a short extract from an interesting article from Anarchist News Dot Org:

   "The Black Bloc protesters interviewed did not endorse violence, but did take issue with how violence is portrayed when acts of vandalism do occur during demonstrations. When it comes to the state’s monopoly on violence, they said, there is no comparison.     “What is rarely acknowledged in the mainstream discussion, and even among the left, is the disproportionate nature of violence of the state in acts all around the world,” said “O.” “We are engaged in three wars — Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia — we have covert wars in Iran, we have structural violence here at home through poverty, budget cuts, police brutality, and when one person throws a rock through a window it is treated as an out-of-context violent act.”

Not all Black Bloc protesters are anarchists. However, Black Bloc tactics are easily embraced by those who prefer to resist the state and foster collective action.

For protester Rick Young, the Black Bloc protesters, who he affectionately called “the anarchy guys,” were the heroes on May Day. He joined the protesters as they surrounded the police on Hill Street. Young’s experience on the “front lines” caused him to see the Black Bloc as soldiers in a battle for social and economic change.

“The anarchy guys were the only guys that showed real solidarity today,” he said while resting in Pershing Square, the final destination of the march. “They were really together. They were the ones that allowed the marchers to come down Hill Street.”

Young speaks of his face-off with police as a “band-of-brothers” moment, where differences quickly dissolve in a group action borne out of the necessity of self-preservation.

“I don’t even know their names … but let it be known that the anarchists today broke the police line at Fourth Street and allowed the marchers to come down here,” he said.

Read the full article HERE:

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