#direct action

[thatcosmicstorm]

direct action doesn't have to be violent, btw. most direct action is nonviolent, btw. you don't always have to kill people and burn things down to do direct action, btw.

[kropotkindersurprise]

June 7, 2026 - Palestine Action target COSCO Shipping in Hamburg. The firm ships tons of weapons from across the globe to Israel, and from Hamburg, which is one of the world's most important logistics hubs. Thousands of containers with weaponry are shipped from Hamburg every year. Two to three containers are sent to Israel from the city, every single day. [video] Explaining why they're taking direct action, one of the activists said:

"I'm tired of meaningless discussions over nothing, tired of protests that lead nowhere, tired of feeling powerless and empty inside, because we let a live-streamed genocide happen in front of our eyes, while benefitting from the complicity. I decided not to get used to all of this cruelty, not to get lost in senseless consumerism and I chose to feel it all: the anger, the heartbreak, the grief. I wanted to go to the root of the matter: the genocidal war machine, which produces only death and destruction day after day"

[niks-is-okay]

So, let me be perfectly clear, this is very much an attack on the right to protest and especially on the right to direct action. If there's no one there to challenge a government's policies through protest, that means that democracy is over. The UK is fucked after this.

I would also like to highlight how ignorant and laughable this statement from Lady Chief [In]justice is.

She did, however, recognise that the proscription is highly controversial and there is widespread support for both Palestine Action and the Palestinian cause, adding: “We accept that there are many people who may be subject to a chilling effect due to this decision.” The Lady Chief Justice said Palestine Action is not a civil disobedience group engaging in peaceful protest like the suffragettes. She described Palestine Action as a “covert organisation that has revealed little about itself”, and said it “overtly proposes unlawful violence” to destroy the property of third parties.

In what world were the suffragettes doing peaceful protests??????? Literally the reason that (white) women got any rights back then was BECAUSE of direct action. Direct action is one of the most important ways to protest and now it is pretty much dead in the UK (and is becoming more and more dead on a daily basis in the rest of the world as well. I don't know where we're going at this point in time, but we do need to radicalize this very instant.

Palestine Action Ban Ruled Lawful by Court of Appeal

The government has won its appeal to keep the ban on direct action group Palestine Action.

[nokingsnocrowns]

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[chatsintowolves]

Fluid Resistance

The Spatial Mobility and Tactical Repertoire of the Black Bloc

Abstract

The Black Bloc represents one of the most visible and contentious tactical formations within contemporary contentious politics. This article examines the twin dimensions of mobility and tactics that define Black Bloc praxis, arguing that its political effectiveness is inseparable from its mastery of urban space and choreographed movement. Drawing on anarchist theory, social movement literature, and spatial analysis, the article traces the historical evolution of the Bloc from the German Autonomen to its global proliferation at summit protests. It conceptualizes Bloc mobility as a form of “swarming” that challenges state territorialization, and it analyzes specific tactical elements—masking, property destruction, affinity group organization, and digital communication—as components of an integrated kinetic repertoire. Through case studies of Seattle (1999), Genoa (2001), and Hamburg (2017), the paper demonstrates how mobility enables offensive and defensive maneuvers that temporarily disrupt police containment and inscribe an alternative political geography onto the city. The article concludes by reflecting on the strategic dilemmas posed by this fluid form of militancy, including tensions with mass movements and the co-optation of mobility by state forces.

Keywords: Black Bloc, social movements, direct action, spatial tactics, police protest, urban space, anarchism

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1. Introduction

At the turn of the millennium, a sea of black-clad figures, masked and moving in tight formation through the streets of Seattle, became the media emblem of the anti-globalization movement. That image—of the Black Bloc—crystallized a long-developing protest tactic that prioritizes anonymity, rapid mobility, and the direct disruption of capitalism and the state. The Black Bloc is not a group, an ideology, or an organization; it is, in the words of one activist handbook, “a tactic—nothing more, nothing less” (ACMECollective, 2001). Yet this tactic embodies a sophisticated spatial logic. The Bloc’s capacity to appear, coalesce, strike, and dissolve hinges on its unique manipulation of urban terrain and its cultivation of agile, non-hierarchical movement.

This article offers an analytical account of the Black Bloc’s mobility and tactics as intertwined dimensions of a singular political craft. While much commentary on the Bloc fixates on the morality or strategic wisdom of property destruction, far less attention has been paid to how the Bloc moves, how it choreographs its relationship with space, and how its kinetic practices constitute a form of spatial politics. I argue that the Black Bloc should be understood as a mobile tactical formation whose primary asset is its capacity to temporarily elude and subvert the state’s territorial control of protest. Its mobility is not merely instrumental—a means of getting from one target to another—but expressive, performing a prefigurative refusal of state-ordained protest scripts.

The article proceeds in five parts. First, I trace the historical and ideological genesis of the Black Bloc, situating it within anarchist traditions of direct action and the autonomous movements of late twentieth-century Europe. Second, I develop a theoretical framework for understanding Bloc mobility, drawing on concepts of swarming, nomadology, and the production of space. Third, I catalogue the core tactical components—masking, the property destruction spectacle, affinity group structure, and digital augmentation—that enable and depend upon this mobility. Fourth, I present three illustrative case studies that show mobility-tactics in action across different political conjunctures. Finally, I discuss the strategic tensions inherent in this model, including its friction with mass nonviolent movements and the ongoing adaptation of policing to counter Bloc fluidity.

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2. Historical and Ideological Lineages

The Black Bloc emerged in West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a tactic of the Autonomen, a diffuse network of militant squatters, anti-nuclear activists, and anti-fascists. The Autonomen refined the use of black clothing, motorcycle helmets, and coordinated street fighting to defend occupied houses and disrupt neo-Nazi marches (Katsiaficas, 2006). Crucially, they operated in small, self-organized affinity groups—clusters of five to twenty individuals who trained together and took autonomous decisions in the street. The Bloc was thus from its inception not a standing army but a mobile constellation of micro-cells that could combine into a larger mass as circumstances demanded.

This organizational DNA carried into the global justice movement of the 1990s and 2000s. As summit protests became regularized rituals, the Black Bloc traveled—from Berlin to Prague, to Seattle, Genoa, Quebec City, and beyond. Its diffusion was facilitated by the same anarchist networks that circulated zines, training manuals, and post-action communiqués. Anarchist theory provided the ideological scaffolding: the state, by granting permits for marches and designating “free speech zones,” produces a docile, predictable spatiality of protest. The Black Bloc’s refusal to march along prescribed routes, its breaking of shop windows and police lines, constitutes a direct spatial challenge to the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence and spatial ordering (Graeber, 2002). Property destruction is not wanton vandalism but a symbolic and material attack on the nodes of capital, while the Bloc’s constant movement makes it a “hard target” for arrest and kettle.

This history reveals a continuous, adaptive tradition. The Bloc did not spring fully formed from the Seattle streets; it grew out of decades of experimentation with autonomous urban warfare and a philosophy that sees the city as a terrain of struggle rather than a neutral container for political expression.

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3. Theorizing Bloc Mobility: Swarm, Territory, and the Right to the City

To understand Black Bloc mobility, we must move beyond a simple vocabulary of marching and place it within broader theories of spatial practice and power. Three theoretical lenses are particularly useful: the concept of the swarm, Deleuzo-Guattarian nomadology, and Lefebvre’s right to the city as refracted through radical protest.

3.1 Swarming and Networked Movement

Hardt and Negri (2004) describe the “swarm” as a network-based form of attack characteristic of the multitude—dispersed, decentralized, and capable of concentrating force at a single point without a central command. The Black Bloc operationalizes the swarm logic. Affinity groups move independently through streets, linked by cell phones, encrypted messaging, and practiced intuition. They coalesce into a block when a target is identified, strike, and then dissolve again into the urban fabric. This fluidity frustrates police, whose tactical repertoire is still largely organized around the containment of a singular, directionally predictable crowd (Wood, 2012). Kettling—the British police tactic of surrounding protesters—works best on a stationary or slowly plodding mass. Against a swarm that can change direction instantly and split into smaller units, kettling often fails, leaving officers scrambling to re-form cordons.

3.2 Nomad Space vs. State Space

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) distinction between “striated” and “smooth” space offers a provocative analogy. The state striates urban space: it zones, routes, grids, and regulates movement through street closures, permit conditions, and police lines. The Black Bloc, in this reading, practices a kind of nomadology—it moves through the city as a “smooth” space, transgressing striations, flowing through alleys, cutting across parks, and ignoring the vectoral logic of the boulevard. Its black-clad anonymity aids this movement; stripped of individual identity, the Bloc becomes a collective body that occupies space as a temporary zone of insurrection rather than as a congregation of subjects the state can later identify and prosecute. The mask, as will be discussed, is the gateway to this nomadic becoming.

3.3 Producing Counterspaces

Lefebvre’s (1991) dialectic of spatial production is also relevant. The state produces abstract space—homogenous, fragmented, hierarchical—which it polices. Protest, when confined to the permit, merely inhabits this space without challenging its production. The Black Bloc, by illegally marching against traffic, occupying corporate lobbies, or smashing the glass façades of global banks, engages in what one might call counter-spatial production. It momentarily overwrites the abstract space of capital with a lived space of confrontation and solidarity. Mobility is the medium of this production: the Bloc writes its ephemeral message on the city not with paint alone but with its own moving body. The famous slogan “We are here, we are everywhere, we are the Black Bloc” performs this spatial omnipresence, a declaration that attempts to concretize the Lefebvrian right to the city—a right not merely to access but to reshape urban reality.

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4. The Tactical Trinity: Anonymity, Affinity, Property Destruction

Mobility cannot be considered in isolation from the core tactical practices that sustain and are in turn enabled by it. These practices form an interdependent triad: the mask, the affinity group, and the attack on property.

4.1 The Mask and Performative Anonymity

The black mask (or bandana, gas mask, balaclava) is the most iconic element of the Bloc. Functionally, it protects against tear gas and facial recognition cameras. Symbolically, it enacts a collective identity that submerges ego and individual vulnerability into the group-body. The mask makes the Bloc visually homogeneous, amplifying its perceived size and menace. It also performs a critique of the individualized, liberal subject of conventional protest politics—the citizen who petitions with an uncovered face and awaits police permission. By masking, the Bloc declares itself outside that contract, operating in a space of autonomous action. Crucially, the mask facilitates tactical mobility after the action: once the Bloc dissolves, individuals can unmask and melt into bystander crowds, a practice that fundamentally depends on the ability to move quickly between insurrectionary and quotidian personae.

4.2 The Affinity Group as Mobile Cell

The affinity group is the molecular unit of the Black Bloc. Drawing on anarchist traditions going back to the Spanish Civil War, an affinity group is a small cadre of trusted comrades who plan, train, and act together. In a Bloc action, dozens of affinity groups operate with a high degree of autonomy. Some may specialize in window-smashing, others in banner drops, tripod blockades, or medic support. Communication happens via “scouts” on bicycles or motorcycles, hand signals, and encrypted apps. This cellular structure is precisely what makes the Bloc so mobile: there is no central committee to consult, no general to give orders. Groups constantly read the tactical situation—police lines, escape routes, sympathetic crowds—and adapt in real time. The Bloc can therefore pivot as a whole through a kind of distributed intelligence, “like a flock of starlings” (Graeber, 2009, p. 251), shifting direction without a single leader.

4.3 Property Destruction as Spatial Inscription

The destruction of corporate property—broken bank windows, burning police cars, vandalized luxury shops—is the most controversial and defining tactic. Within Bloc logic, it is not mindless violence but a calculated attack on symbols of capital and state power. In terms of mobility, this tactic serves a dual purpose. Offensively, it forces the state to divert police resources to protect specific targets, creating gaps in containment that the Bloc can exploit. Defensively, the broken glass, overturned dumpsters, and street barricades that follow an attack become physical obstacles that slow police pursuit and create improvised defensive positions, effectively reshaping the urban terrain to the Bloc’s advantage. Property destruction is thus a terrain-modification tactic: it degrades the striated, police-friendly street and creates a more friction-rich environment that favors the smaller, nimbler Bloc units. It also generates powerful media spectacle, whose impact—whether positive or negative for the broader movement—is a separate strategic question.

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5. Case Studies in Kinetic Protest

To illustrate the interplay of mobility and tactics, I examine three prominent Black Bloc actions.

5.1 Seattle, 1999: The Dispersed Wave

During the WTO Ministerial Conference, the Black Bloc, comprising several hundred activists in dozens of affinity groups, ranged through downtown Seattle, targeting Starbucks, Nike, and other corporate chains. Their movement was deliberately non-confrontational with the mass march of union members and environmentalists blockading the convention center. The Bloc acted as a fast-moving “wave” that flowed away from the main protest, pulling police out of position and preventing them from concentrating force. When the police attempted to kettle the Bloc, affinity groups peeled off in different directions, using their knowledge of the downtown grid. The shattered storefronts became a global news fixture, but tactically they scattered police assets across a wide area, rendering the WTO opening impossible. In the aftermath, many Bloc members simply unmasked and joined the nighttime crowds, vanishing into the city.

5.2 Genoa, 2001: The School and the Square

The Genoa G8 protests saw the Black Bloc operating in an intensely fortified urban environment of concrete barriers, razor wire, and a massive police presence divided into “red zones.” The Bloc’s mobility here was channeled through the medieval layout of Genoa’s narrow alleys (caruggi), which allowed small groups to maneuver and ambush police while remaining largely inaccessible to armored vehicles. The most dramatic sequence involved an “invisible college” tactic: a mobile convergence at the Diaz School, used as an activist media center and dormitory, and the subsequent defense of Piazza Alimonda. The Bloc’s tactics included erecting burning barricades to block advancing carabinieri, while medics and legal observers used the same fluid network logic to document abuses. The tragic killing of Carlo Giuliani highlighted the extreme risks of this mobile warfare, but the Bloc’s ability to fight a running battle across an entire quarter of the city demonstrated the tactical viability of mobile street-militancy against a militarized police state.

5.3 Hamburg, 2017: Welcome to Hell

The G20 summit in Hamburg provided a modern, digitally augmented example. In the “Welcome to Hell” action, thousands of black-clad militants, including autonomous Bloc segments, moved through the Schanzenviertel and St. Pauli districts over several nights. This was not a single Bloc but a fluid multiplicity of groups using Telegram channels, real-time GPS mapping, and “swarm chats” to coordinate movements, identify police vans, and announce safe routes. Affinity groups launched sequential attacks on banks, police stations, and luxury cars, while constantly repositioning to avoid the new German tactic of Einkesselung (encirclement) by mobile police units. The cat-and-mouse dynamic lasted hours, with Bloc elements using the city’s complex topography—canals, underpasses, high-density apartment blocks—to break line-of-sight. The Hamburg case underscores how digital infrastructure has amplified the innate mobility of the Bloc, allowing for a more precisely synchronized, yet still leaderless, swarm.

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6. Strategic Dilemmas: Mobility and Its Limits

The Black Bloc’s fluid tactics produce a series of internal and external tensions that shape its long-term viability.

First, there is the friction with mass nonviolent movements. The iconic 1999 Seattle protests succeeded partly because the Bloc’s property destruction drew a harsh police reaction that generated sympathy for the peaceful blockades. But in many later mobilizations, the presence of a Black Bloc has divided coalitions, alienated moderate allies, and served as a pretext for mass police crackdowns on all protesters. The mobility that makes the Bloc hard to catch also makes it hard to control by protest marshals, creating a sovereignty conflict within the movement itself.

Second, state adaptation is eroding the Bloc’s mobility advantage. Police forces now deploy their own swarming tactics (e.g., the French “voltigeur” units), preemptive arrests, widespread facial recognition, and the strategic use of kettling at choke points (bridges, squares) where mobility is naturally constrained. The Hamburg police’s use of helicopter surveillance and real-time crowd-flow analytics represents an effort to re-striate the space the Bloc seeks to smooth. A techno-spatial arms race is underway.

Third, the limits of property destruction as spectacle deserve scrutiny. While the smashed window is a crisp image of anti-capitalist wrath, it can also obscure the more patient, constructive dimensions of radical politics. Some anarchist theorists now speak of a “diversity of tactics” that situates the Black Bloc as one option within a broader ecology of resistance, rather than the sole vanguardist formation. The mobility that defines the Bloc need not be permanently wedded to property destruction; it can also support mutual aid caravans, unpermitted street parties, or the rapid construction of autonomous encampments. The tactical repertoire is mutable.

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7. Conclusion

The Black Bloc is far more than a random mob of vandals. It is a highly cultivated form of spatial insurgency whose core competence is mobility. By moving as a decentralized swarm through the city’s smooth and striated spaces, by donning the mask and organizing in affinity groups, by using property destruction to reshape terrain and divert state force, the Bloc enacts a lived critique of the state’s monopoly on legitimate urban movement. Its tactics are a performance of a different kind of city—one where the streets are not conduits for capital but stages for contestation.

At the same time, the Bloc’s very fluidity generates strategic contradictions that no amount of footwork can resolve. It remains a deeply ambivalent phenomenon: a tactical marvel caught between the prefigurative horizon of anarchist freedom and the repressive reality of the state, between the solidarity of the swarm and the vulnerability of the masked individual. Understanding the Black Bloc’s mobility and tactics is not a matter of endorsing or condemning them, but of recognizing them as a significant and evolving grammar of twenty-first-century protest.

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References

· ACMECollective. (2001). N30 Black Bloc Communiqué. In Notes from Nowhere (Ed.), We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. Verso.

· Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

· Graeber, D. (2002). The New Anarchists. New Left Review, 13, 61–73.

· Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. AK Press.

· Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin.

· Juris, J. S. (2005). Violence Performed and Imagined: Militant Action, the Black Bloc and the Mass Media in Genoa. Critique of Anthropology, 25(4), 413–432.

· Katsiaficas, G. (2006). The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. AK Press.

· Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.

· Wood, L. J. (2012). Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle. Cambridge University Press.

[nokingsnocrowns]

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[asthoughtobreathewerelife]

California folks - let’s help FUCK ICE by cutting off any businesses involved in private detention centers from state money!

I encourage you to contact your state senator about a bill that got through the state assembly and will be up for consideration in the state senate soon.

AB-2465 would prevent businesses directly invested/managing/profiting from private detention centers and agencies engaging in immigration enforcement from receiving state-provided benefits/subsidies/tax credits. It’s an exciting way to leverage a financial penalty onto companies who’ve let the financial incentives of this dirty work outweigh their morals. If it’s not enough that this work is despicable, then we should certainly make it less profitable…!

You can find your state senator’s info here: https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov

I wrote this myself even tho it sounds like a script - hurrah for engaging in civic duty, one little step at a time.

[kaccvcate]

I'm officially moving into a tent tonight B) this hopefully won't disturb my art production much, as I still have a comrade with internet and power.

I had to buy some things unexpectedly soon because of this, like a car ride back to town. I'm now more short for my storage unit rent than before.

I'm at $35/$120

I may have more in the accounts I can't access without my phone...when I get the new one in the mail this week, I'll know for sure.

Thanks again for reading