On the topic of critical mass melting away - as I've noted before, data from 108 predominantly nonviolent resistance campaigns shows that the emergence of a violent flank reduces mass participation (note - in this graph, "radical" actually mean violent, not politically radical). The number of people participating is greatly reduced.

And indeed, Occupy Oakland is having trouble making quorum in its GAs and many people are talking about having dropped out of Occupy Oakland because of the Black Bloc violence. So you end up with increasing enrichment for the militant subset.

As Louis Proyect notes of Black Bloc: "at best they leave the impression that the fight against capitalism can only be carried out by a heroic minority at worst they leave people worrying about going to demonstrations."

Interesting link in the link of the counter argument:
To an essay on the commons and Occupy.

Fortunately, the truths animating each of the objections suggest a way forward. In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality. The set of ideas and practices built around the notion of the commons fulfills this function. The commons is a finite resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of its users and producers. The finitude of the commons enables us to address social inequality and environmental limits to capitalist development in their dialectical unity

the more convoluted and incomprehensible the prose gets? That is why a movement needs the capacity of expelling bad elements.

...but I've done a bit of studying and a lot of reading, some before my direct experience, much more after. Zero university education on the subject -- I matriculated at Benning School for Boys and a few other deep-South bastions of "military science," and Huachuca, Yuma, Carson and Panama before practicing my counter-revolutionary craft (Infantry Operations and Intelligence) in Vietnam and Laos.

It's certain that if the French had stopped oppressing the people of "Indochina" and left -- respecting the locals' right to choose their own government -- there would have been no violence to accomplish those ends. The movement that eventually defeated the French, Japanese, and American imperial designs was willing to use whatever means were necessary, making enormous sacrifices, across generations, to rid themselves of rule by powers who were stronger in numbers, wealth, arms, training -- stronger in everything but their politics and their resolve.

I've always admired the courage of true pacifists, and adherents to non-violence -- the Quakers, Gandhi, MLK, etc. -- who were willing to risk their freedom, bodies, and lives in acts of civil disobedience. In several cases I was an active supporter, sometimes an active participant -- but I've never believed that those who control the major political parties in the US will hesitate to use violence to protect (and increase) their political and economic power, or even to prevent any reform substantive enough to relieve economic injustice.

MLK's assassination -- exactly one year after his "A Time to Break Silence" speech, excoriating US politics, declaring "...an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring" -- is an example.

Emma Goldman said if voting could change anything, it would be illegal. I believe that's true in the US, not just since "Citizens United," but for more than a century.

King's contemporary Malcolm X (also assassinated) talked about the ballot or the bullet. He also said:
"If you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that confronts them, and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program."