Be creative, try new things, do not fear failure. This sounds good. Unfortunately, the march in Denver was not “uncharted territory”. Maybe 200 people attempt a rowdy march advertised with radical rhetoric. Not long after beginning they are surrounded by police and most are arrested. The arrests and police violence disrupt a city block for a few hours and passers-by are angry at the cops. This is not a daring experiment; it is the repetition of an old form. It is territory that has been charted many times with very similar results.

This article reads as though its conclusion was decided before the events it describes actually happened… it then must go through intellectual gymnastics in order to fit the events to the conclusion. A stubborn refusal at any self-criticism other than small tactical things.

“Later, when the participants assess the march, some rate it a successful disaster: from a tactical standpoint it was a catastrophe, but it somehow created an environment in which the dissent submerged in downtown Denver boiled to the surface. If everyone had been sensible and simply dispersed in the park, nothing out of the ordinary would have happened. Instead, a very small number of people succeeded in shifting the options that confronted everyone else around them—and faced with new choices, many people acted differently than they would have otherwise. Had the initial group been more numerous or better prepared, the transformation might have been correspondingly more dramatic.”

Were there no other assessments? Was the sacrifice – the police violence, the arrests, etc – worth the rewards? This paragraph seems to be really stretching it in order to make this march look good, despite how easily it was contained and defeated (so much for constituting ourselves as a “force”).