Occupy militarism

I've been reading lots about the Occupy movement in the US, but I've resisted commenting on it as (a) the NZ franchise is relatively small and not particularly radical by comparison and (b) I can't say much of importance that's not already being said.

I was interested to note that the West Coast occupations have moved to adopt port and infrastructure closures as one of their key tactics, starting with the general strike in Oakland and moving on to a more general port shutdown. I'll call it a case of being rapidly proven right - as at the beginning of September, I wrote two posts on port closures as a bargaining tool for working-class movements and, relatedly, the space-time of Wal-Mart. Underlying those analyses was a sense that infrastructure and distribution facilities, rather than production facilities, have become the "strategic spaces" for activism. (In short: At its height, the United Auto Workers was the leading edge of the American labor movement, as it controlled key production spaces. Since then, increasing world trade has decreased the power of industrial unions while simultaneously increasing the importance of trade infrastructure. Of course, in small trading countries like NZ, working-class movements have always sought to establish their hegemony by controlling fuel and ports - witness the 1951 waterfront dispute.)

Anyway.

I read an interesting article yesterday on the tactical innovations of the Occupy Portland group, who have been running rings around the police lately. When faced with eviction, they have turned the occupation into a mobile picket, meandering through the streets in an effort to either tire the police out or frustrate them into brutality. It's an interesting article: half of it seems to react to the political effect of mass media, while the other half takes us back to the Paris barricades of the 1800s. I thought that the language used in the article was quite revealing:

The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old- the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.

Heavy infantry is a group of soldiers marching in a column or a phalanx that are armed with weaponry for hand to hand, close quarters combat. Heavy infantry function as a unit, not individual soldiers. Their operational strength is dependent upon maintaining the integrity of that unit. Riot police are heavy infantry. They will always form a line and advance as a unit.

Light infantry are armed with ranged weapons for assault from a distance. Light infantry operate as individuals that are free to roam at a distance and fire upon the opposition with ranged weapons. Cops firing tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, bean bag rounds, etc. are light infantry. They remain to the rear of the phalanx of riot cops (heavy infantry) and depend upon the riot cops maintaining a secure front and flanks to provide them a secure area of operations.

Protesters function fluidly as either light or heavy infantry. Their mass, because it is lacking in organization, functions as a phalanx, having no flanks or rear. Lack of organization gives that mass the option of moving in whichever direction it feels like, at any given time. If protesters all move to the right, the entire group and supporting officers has to shift to that flank. While the protesters can retreat quickly, the police can only advance as fast as their light infantry, supporting staff can follow and maintain a secure rear (if the mass of protesters were to run to the next block over and quickly loop around to the rear of the riot cops, the organization of the cops would be reduced to chaos). If that police cannot assemble with a front to oppose protesters, they are useless. The integrity of that tactic is compromised, and unable to maintain internal organization, the cops revert to individuals engaging in acts of brutality, which eventually winds up on the evening news and they lose the battle regardless of whether they clear the park or not.

Until the invocation of the evening news in the last sentence, this excerpt could have been drawn from, say, Friedrich Engels' meditations on the tactics employed in Paris uprisings, and the effect of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris, which replaced maze-like slum alleyways with boulevards that would allow artillery to be deployed against urban uprisings. I'm not sure whether or not this linguistic echo is of any importance; whether it suggests anything deeper about our historical moment.