Arguments for and against rioting as a means of effecting change in places like Baltimore?

Here are some essays I think are good:

• “In Defense of Looting” by Willie Osterweil is an eloquent defense of looting in the context of the Ferguson riots.

• “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” by Guy Debord is an insightful analysis of the Watts Rebellion of 1965.

• “You Are Not The Target Audience” by Wiliam Gillis is an apology for the black bloc tactic of smashing windows.

• “The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left” and “Learning From Ferguson” by Peter Gelderloos look at the liberal mechanisms (including the narrative that ‘non-violence works’) used to relegate the efforts following police violence to superficial reforms.

And here are two of my own that I wrote after the Ferguson riots:

• "On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson"

• "No War But The Class Apocalypse!: Further Reflections on Rioting"

How Nonviolence Protects the State is a great work on this subject.

Some points:

The history you've learned has probably been whitewashed to avoid talking about the violence that made many social movements possible. Civil rights movement? Sure there were plenty of nonviolent events, but there were also riots, bombings, arson, the rise of armed gangs to protect communities, etc. Those violent acts may have done more to mobilize the federal government to intervene and push legislation forward than any other force. The independence efforts in India were also marked my militant leaders like Chandrasekhar Azad, and it may have ultimately been violence elsewhere (Palestinian uprisings for example) that force the British hand to send troops elsewhere and take their hands of the colony. None of this, of course, makes for good education if you want law-abiding citizens who wouldn't think of acting against a police force or anything else.

Obviously the book offers more explanations and examples, but the takeaway should be, militant actions (riots and others) have contributed hugely to the success of many social revolutions. Nonviolence and violence both have parts in any movement that wants to create real, actionable change. Movements that use just one are typically much less successful (if at all).

Rioting is a TACTIC. You evaluate a tactic depending on its context in a STRATEGY. Tactics by themselves do not cause victories. Tactics have particular effects in particular situations.

Why Smash Windows by myself.

It doesn't accomplish anything by itself, and it sure as shit ain't pretty. But it gets people's attention (few things in modern America do) and it creates genuine political pressure. If militancy becomes normalized in certain neighborhoods, like it did in some places in Greece (for example) then the relative power vacuum created can be filled by the community without the intervention of the state. If radicals are smart they can take advantage of that and actually start putting their ideas into practice, even if it is on a limited scale.

I'll add that I don't "support" rioting, it's what happens when things get so bad there's no ignoring it and when the state refuses any other attempt to make it accountable. It's power's chickens coming home to roost. But in certain situations it becomes almost impossible to effect change without ratcheting up tension significantly.

I think it's also worth mentioning that bad things happen in all the chaos. Though much of that depends on context. For example, anarchist black blocs, if they are involved in this sort of thing, mainly target police and corporate property and tend to leave regular people's shit alone. For another example, the riots in Frankfurt a little while ago, while fairly destructive and violent, were extremely targeted. Those people obviously didn't show up with the intention of stealing shit or breaking things just because, their actions had a message that was easy to figure out and unless you're a capitalist or a rabid statist you're probably not going to weep for a bank window or a trash can fire.

There's no such thing as an "organized riot", but for these things to be effective I do think there has to be a certain understanding of purpose, otherwise it just turns into more or less meaningless chaos. Rage can only get you so far. The better the understanding of the overall goal and what you're trying to achieve, the less harm is going to happen to innocent people caught in the middle of it. It's hard to look at what happened to Reginald Denny for example and say that such a thing needed to happen. None of the people rioting in Baltimore are animals, they're youth who are in a shitty place in our society and are fed up with it. But I don't really think a lot of them know what they want outside of an abstract concept of "justice". The militancy that sprung from the riots in Ferguson has meaning because it has lead to the growth of organizations that do have very clear and direct goals for their communities rather then just a sense of anger. Disarm NYPD or Take Back The Bronx, for example. The tension created space for these things to grow and for new ideas to find footing.

For a riot to lead to anything truly positive it needs to have an ideology behind it, really. Otherwise it's not resistance so much as venting. It'll come and go, maybe it will spur some half assed reform, but it does not build autonomy unless people work for it.