What a bunch of horseshit. Let me tell you about the "anarchist bloc", which
I had the memorable experience of following on their initial rampage.

I first came across them at Westlake Center, where they were engaged in
overturning newspaper vending machines and stomping on them, scattering
their contents far and wide. To the repeated pleas of the nonviolent
protesters to stop, they responded in their preferred argot: a string of
profanities.

"This is OUR fucking thing, aright?" one of them intelligently screamed. "If
you don't like it, you can go do your own fucking thing somewhere ELSE!! Got
it?!?"

"But why must you destroy everything?" pleaded one. "What possible good can
come of this?"

"Because it's the whole fucking system, man, that has to be torn DOWN! I
HATE this fucking place!"

"But WE don't! We live here! We LOVE Seattle! Can't you just let us have our
city?"

"NO!!! I HATE your fucking city!!! It makes me SICK! I want to tear it all
DOWN!! You know that? I want to destroy fucking everything and.... and...
plant a fucking GARDEN!!!"

Whereupon a comrade tapped him on the shoulder, they cranked up the thrash
metal on their boombox (good for gardening, I hear), and they mounted their
bikes for their next destination. Which was where I photographed their
initial rampage against local businesses.

This is where the hypocrisy in the referenced communique really shines. They
make it sound like their targets were carefully selected. They weren't.
Everything in their path was trashed. Note the picture in Day3 of my website
of the nonviolents cleaning an abandoned 5-and-10 storefront of graffiti.
Some oppressor of the working class.

Also choice was their justification for trashing Starbucks ("peddlers of an
addictive substance whose  products are harvested at below-poverty wages by
farmers who are forced to destroy their own forests in the process"). With
nicknames like "Meth," it should hardly be surprising that everyone of them
was a heavy smoker. You didn't notice any smoke shops being put to the
torch.

As for their pious distinction between violence against property and
violence against people, that's horseshit too. Not only did one vandal try
to spray paint me when I took a picture of him, but later several of them
tried to mug me with crowbars for the same offense. The papers carried
accounts from other participants to the same effect.

That is why I refused to grant them the dignity of the term "anarchist"--a
term associated for me with the Wobblies, Chomsky, Rocker, Thomas Pynchon,
and Sacco and Vanzetti. I also refused to grant them the thrill of being
labeled thugs. Dillinger had panache. More than anything they reminded me of
Malcolm McDowell's band of Droogies in A Clockwork Orange, a jaded bunch of
nihilists who enjoy violence for its own sake, nothing more. So that's what
I call them in my website. Droogs. Sort of reminds one of "drool", too,
which is about what their politics amount to, and about the sum of what they
produce.

Oh, let's not forget their other heroics: on the first day of WTO week they
took over an "abandoned" building, supposedly for the homeless. First, it
wasn't abandoned--there were small business tenants in the lower floors, who
promptly lost their water and electric when the city shut it off. How
emancipatory. Second, if there were ever any "homeless" in that building, as
the term is commonly understood, they stayed well hidden. Third, they
justified the takeover in Marxist terms, namely that the landlord had
exploited labor to buy it, so they were just taking back the surplus value.
Aside from failing to share any of that surplus value with the truly
oppressed, their pseudomorality invites the comeback, if property belongs to
those whose labor paid for it, then how does your claim arise in the first
place? The landlord's exploitation factor may be some arbitrary number
larger than 0, but theirs is self-evidently 100%. By the way, last time I
checked, they had reneged on their pledge to leave after the WTO.

I could go on and on, but if you aren't with me by now, you will never be.
Believe me, those people were about as revolutionary as Charles Manson.