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Green Anarchist no. 66 - Globalisation |
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Written by John Connor before Prague S26 for the Reflections on MayDay anthology, this article was not published in it, further underlining his point about Chiapatnik manipulation of popular assemblies and restriction of debate within their ‘acceptable limits’.
Why debate with those that won’t listen? Certainly RTS isn’t listening to Earth First!. After every big London street party “against capitalism”, the consensus at EF! gatherings has been that capitalism isn’t the totality of our oppression. RTS always accepts this, only to ignore it hyping their ‘next big thing’. Rightly refusing representation, consensus conclusions at EF! gatherings are not binding and neither is RTS what it was, London EF!. Anarcho-ouvrierists who jumped on the RTS bandwagon as a result of the MayDay conferences from 1998 on—those responsible for the ‘bad penny’ references to capitalism—generally don’t even attend EF! gatherings, reducing the participation of those that do to propaganda / recruitment exercises. If they’re not prepared to listen to EF!ers criticism, the only purpose of RTSers attending EF! gatherings is to persuade others to contribute to their project on RTS’s terms, increasingly necessary as this one-way ‘dialogue’ means fewer and fewer are willing to organise street parties each time.
At the Winter 2000 Moot, RTS were told that protesting on a bank holiday would reduce the event to mere demonstration, symbolic and not direct action, and that this lack of true focus could be disastrous. Learning that this date had been imposed by the ouvrierists post-N30 with an announcement to the media in order to boost their MayDay 2000 conference, most at the Moot said they’d organise local street parties rather than accept this fait accompli. Unable to heed this criticism, RTS carried on regardless, precipitating the predicted disaster and—because of the demo ‘law of gravity’ that builds big (London) demos at the expense of smaller (regional) ones—drawing the majority of EF!ers into it too. If there had been genuine dialogue, this disaster could have been averted, or at least mitigated by more successful local street parties.
The May Day autopsy process at the EF! Summer Gathering was another exercise in illusory participation. There were half-a-dozen workshops over the course of days with ‘issues’ discussed in the minutest detail and endless quibbles about process and garbled report-backs, but by the time we all reached the last session everyone (especially facilitators) was so exhausted by the same people saying the same things again and again that even the patter of rain on the meeting-space roof was excuse enough for it to fizzle out. This ‘prevailing through exhaustion’ technique reminded me of the old CP’s, except critics get to bore themselves silly, which looks so much more participatory and leaves them feeling they only have themselves to blame! The autopsy process was made all the more futile by RTS’s indifference to any conclusion that could have come out of it anyway. Even if those present had cared—and their concerns appeared limited to improving the next street party, their reason d’tre, rather than whether there should be one—past experience shows that those that weren’t wouldn’t have.
Most depressing—and one thing that decided me to contribute to this anthology—was the discussions about ‘the next big thing’, Prague S26, going on parallel to the May Day autopsy at the Gathering. It was obvious from this that those hyping it had learned next to nothing They were as wedded to the mass demo formula as ever, even though May Day had shown how problematic it was. S26’s leading lights—the usual ‘organisers’ and ‘empire-builders’—were urging passivity, stressing the objective was recruitment / propaganda and building up their contacts “for next time” rather than trying to kick the WTO out this time, in the spirit of Seattle N30. When will the WTO next be in Prague then, and why gather activists from across the world there for S26 if not to take action? Those suggesting disruption in this workshop were pointedly ignored and any that occurs is now likely to arise only as self-defence against fascist provocation, not as necessary, concerted offensive action. Throughout, the implicit agenda was leading lights aggrandising themselves by inculcating representational principles, both within EF!UK in the name of concerted action on demos (those falling for this being offered the compensation of thinking themselves ‘professionals’, ‘the select few’ in on the next trend) and beyond it in the name of international liaison.
But—again—why debate with those that won’t listen? Aside from testing the integrity of this platform (well done on that, anyway, assuming you’ve published [but they didn’t!]), this provides a space for responsibility and remembering, both things RTS aren’t hot on, now even revising their ‘No M11’ roots. I’m not saying they should stupidly ‘stand up and be busted’, just that the ‘house style’ is against future best effort. Hopefully elsewhere in this anthology, Squall’s Jim Paton has put the counter-argument to the ‘official version’ that May Day was somehow really about guerrilla gardening in Parliament Square and everything that happened elsewhere is to be blanked. I’ll take this opportunity to point to an elsewhen, Euston N30, where RTS offered no analysis and little comment on police provocation and subsequent easy containment of that event (‘the kettle’), rendering everyone vulnerable to carbon-copy treatment by the Met on May Day. This failure to acknowledge and learn from past mistakes means there are still idiots out there insisting ‘J18 was great’ as if every subsequent event will be a simple replay. They’re evidently totally oblivious to the law of diminishing returns operating with these mass demos or even such obvious local factors as demonstrators being unfocused and less up for it on May Day v. the Met being better prepared, resourced and trained to deal with public order situations than City police on what was their own best patch, central London. The point of debating here is not to appeal to those RTSers that won’t listen, but to others that will.
One distinction made endlessly at the Summer 2000 Gathering was between big demos and mass demos. The latter were characterised as exercises in manipulation, a small number of organisers steering a large number of other, ignorant people where they wanted them to go to do what they wanted them to do. Another feature of this is RTS propaganda being dished out on the day to facilitate this process and to represent to participants and, more importantly, the media what the spectacle ‘really means’. RTS came in for a lot of criticism for the content of literature issued during J18 (some spuriously equating criticism of finance capital with anti-Semitism!), but almost none for presuming to represent the views of the majority of participants per se. These leaflets often present anti-globalisation issues in the opposite of concrete terms, adequate for disseminating ‘group-think’ jargon to the faithful but—as the May Day disaster demonstrated—the opposite of useful. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the emphasis on sound systems has now reduced, but the mass of people on events like May Day are really there for the party and adventure, not because of ‘issues’, and RTS’s current manipulative style only encourages this passive consumption of protest. Given their indifference to the motivations of the majority (and their ineffectiveness in disseminating their brand of ideology), is it surprising that most come to street parties with mainstream media-created expectations of them and act accordingly? (One plus: this blows all peace police talk of imposing ground-rules on street parties out the water). Figleaves to ‘popular participation’ like the microphones in Parliament Square aren’t enough—they were dead on the day and even if they hadn’t been, they’d have been used either to vent hot air (as with the Gathering autopsy) or by RTS to issue authoritative crowd directions (such de facto stewarding might have been necessary under the circumstances they’d contrived, perhaps, but hardly counts as ‘popular participation’).
Another problem with this representation is the shift in RTS manifestations from direct to symbolic action. The protest is about ‘sending a message’ rather than achieving anything in itself, what direct action is. This is a surrender of power to others supposed to act on the message rather than doing it yourself. The movement-building but not movement-doing tendency revealed by the approach of some organising Prague S26 is a variant of this and a symptom of the same problem—a slide into representation. The concern is with what looks impressive (numbers and publicity: spectacle) rather than with what is actually effective (direct action). Early RTS street parties were primarily direct action, pedestrians temporarily reclaiming space from cars. Reclaiming space from capital doesn’t mean anything on the same level—its temporary too but symbollocks because capitalism is more diffuse process than concrete place. As the original RTS Internet posting had an article by Graham Burdett in Green Anarchist 30 down as the inspiration for the guerrilla gardening on May Day, I particular want to take issue with this. Inspired by Anthony Wigen’s classic, The Clandestine Farm, Graham’s article suggested guerrilla gardening as a clandestine subsistence activity for small groups in diverse geographical locations, not a throwaway media stunt. No doubt a few will point to the odd dope plant left in Parliament Square as evidence that the guerrilla gardening was actually somehow ‘direct action’, but none of the veg planted then has fed anyone since, nor was it intended to. Endless blurb about the utopian potential of this action proves its symbolic intent—or else it wouldn’t have been done publicly and en masse, and it wouldn’t need explanation because in feeding people, its meaning would be directly obvious. I thought there was something particularly hollow about RTSers pitching May Day to ‘send a message’ symbolically and then take umbrage when this didn’t work out as they expected. What did they expect, given the reception they’ve always had from the mainstream media? Particularly noteworthy was the outrage directed against George Monbiot, supposedly ‘one of us’, for his Guardian piece despite endless previous proof of his moderation. Notably, this vitriol was not also thrown at The Ecologist’s Zac Goldsmith for a Telegraph piece equally hostile but also pushing his magazine’s very Right-wing ‘oppose corporations, not capitalism’ and ‘family, nation and tradition against globalisation’ lines. Then again, the Goldsmiths have put a lot more dosh into EF! UK through the back door than George Monbiot ever has….
I’d have thought it was prima facie unacceptable to pro-anarchy types to have a manipulative, hierarchical relationship between organisers and organised and—for what it’s worth—RTSers readily accepted this at the last Gathering. Affinity groups were suggested as a ‘half-way house’ solution, allowing big demos based on principles other than mass. Manchester’s May Day protest, where each group participating was given an action kit, was cited as an example of this in practice. However, this only involved a few hundred people, rather than the thousands attracted to big London street parties, and if they have trouble handing out enough leaflets, enough action kits is clearly going to be beyond their means. Perhaps this is a way for enlarging the number of active participants in a demo, but it still suggests central direction (eg. through issuing instructions in the action kits) and thus mass action with all the problems associated with that, just at one more remove. There’s also the problem of large numbers of out-of-it or leery people turning up anyway, led on by mass media expectations and not interested in this more self-directed activity. The most likely consequence of this is going to be a few hundred activist types acting in affinity groups and using the mass of others attending as cover, much as during J18. As well as being little more than a replay of previous elitism, current police containment tactics mean the time for this is past. Some will argue for this anyway, reasoning that getting large numbers of people together at a street party is more likely to win the ‘issue’ publicity and that some of those attending may ‘join the movement’ and take direct action later—propaganda / recruitment arguments. The difficulty with ‘publicity’ is that—as MA’M found to their cost, with the Met telling the mainstream media they were containing anti-monarchy demos MA’M never even called—is that the authorities now know the script and are scoring more points this way than the movement is, hardly surprising given the media’s own biases and the police’s better access to and control over it. Traditionally, a slagging from police mouthpieces in the mainstream media was simply adjudged the inevitable cost of effective direct action—but with the slide into representation, we’re getting a situation of bad publicity and no direct action either by way of compensation! No doubt the Met are thanking RTS for all that (unnecessary) bank holiday overtime too. A particular point to note here—and to show how the direct action movement moves in cycles—is that the authorities had no difficulty dealing with one-off / one-day disruption of the sort most street parties represents. During the early days of EF!UK, there were a series of blockades against tropical timber imports. The cops actually instructed mill owners targeted to shut down for the day, knowing blockaders and media would have a very boring day ahead (deterring both from future blockades) and the mill concerned could happily carry on with deforestation-as-usual the other 364 days of the year. This proved so successful that EF!UK was in a tail-spin until the start of the anti-roads campaign.
To summarise, RTS has gone from being a direct action movement superseding the traditional Left by uniting means and ends and effectively targeting what is specific and concrete, to a clique publicising grievances against airy abstractions using symbols, claiming to represent others probably indifferent to these ends by manipulating them into attending mass demos mainly for propaganda / recruitment purposes, like any Trotskyite party but without the ideological coherence. Before discussing alternatives, we need to ask how they made this transition.
Out of the 2nd Encuentro for Human Dignity and Against Neo-Liberalism in Spain, RTS offshoot Peoples Global Action absorbed the Zapatistas anti-globalisation / anti-capitalist rhetoric and their penchant for delegates and mass organising (much of which is in the interest of the Zapatistas as a state-in-waiting, rather than the peasantry they presume to represent and whose ‘popular assemblies’ they manipulate true to their Maoist form). With anti-roads campaigns reaching a hiatus, the direct action movement looked to globalisation and capitalism as root causes for environmental degradation, especially when national regulations against it could be overridden by the likes of the WTO. Because of RTS’s effectiveness in opposing roads using direct action and their rather inarticulate anti-capitalist concerns, they linked with workers groups like the striking Liverpool dockers. ‘Linked’ is a shaky term here, implying formal agreement between formally-demarcated bodies, much like the old Left used to do. This wasn’t what was going on, but the idea of representatives with their contacts squirreled away ‘fixing things’ by acting as de facto delegates to workers groups in the name of anti-capitalism and the international anti-globalisation network obviously appealed to such people. Recognising a rhetoric and organising techniques increasingly like their own, RTS’s public activities drew in the anarcho-ouvrierists in a last-ditch throw to revitalise their tail-ending politics, something RTS had itself done much to discredit in the mid-1990s. With this came substantial back-doors bungs from the ouvrierists allies Chumbawamba, flush from signing to EMI, which further led to the use of catch-penny anti-capitalist rhetoric, discredited mass organising techniques, and secretiveness amongst the clique. Having an ability to deliver numbers to order is a big asset here, ultimately leading to absurdities like May Day, where a few people manoeuvred many others into a situation there was no opportunity for real direct action available whatsoever.
In terms of alternatives, we need to look why the anarcho-ouvrierist milieu failed before RTS repeats all of its mistakes. Their suggestion is that we need the active co-operation of the majority—typically identified in the vaguest terms as the working class—to make revolution, so we must adopt policies that will appeal to this majority and avoid issues and actions that won’t. By opting to struggle for a Cause as abstract from themselves (despite rhetoric, ouvrierists often make the revealing slip of calling the mass of people in society ‘they’ even if they’re working class themselves—their particular sect is, of course, ‘we’), this perspective is inevitably ideologised and shot through with all the difficulties of ideology. These include mistaking ideology for a complete world-view clashing with all others slightly different—such difference becoming a challenge to sectarian loyalties and power bases—slides into unthinking dogma, and a cult of self-sacrifice / self-denial akin to the repression / work fetishism that built this society and which is ultimately Christian in origin. Such a perspective is the worst concomitant of representation, intrinsically inauthentic and so inappropriate as a force for liberation. As proposing or acting on anything this majority aren’t already would be ‘substitutionalist’, anarcho-ouvrierist found themselves trailing behind various groups in dispute, repeating demands reformists were more likely to win them. Despite this, they claimed to represent the whole working class rather than only their own small group (or even just themselves), though the former hardly noticed them and would be most unimpressed if it did. The idea (often tricked up as ‘counter-power’) is to take the State’s legitimacy for themselves and then somehow to free the majority of society using this power. Concerned with mass mobilisation, they’ve never really dealt with the difficulties of delegating power and representing others in an authentically accountable way because that would discredit their whole perspective. As RTS are rapidly discovering and as any simple review of history would have shown them, you just can’t.
Rather than attempting to seize power or represent anyone but ourselves, we should recognise that we aren’t struggling for anyone else—our concern is with our own liberation, although by struggling against what oppresses us, we will contribute to the liberation of others also oppressed by it. The alternative to this is the cult of self-sacrifice / self-denial discussed above, intrinsically a dead-end. There is nothing to stop this being a collective process, struggling with and alongside others, but it’s not an act of charity that we can put off to return to some privileged background or whatever (I’ve seen too many ideologue-turned-bosses). The point is not to get others to ‘join up’ or for us to act on their behalf, but for them to take action by and for themselves. The most we can expect to teach by example is technique and maybe a little defiance. Our role shouldn’t be counter-power, but the destruction of power and how it is applied to hold together and hold down this society. At its inception, I thought RTS’s street parties could contribute to this as the focus on pleasure and the immediate got over difficulties of ideologisation and self-sacrifice / self-denial as well as the rigid distinctions that typified ouvrierist politics. I can now see how they’ve been recuperated into a form of passive mass entertainment or a ritual of blowing off steam at best—Carnival’s traditional role in preserving society through a one-day concession by gratifying the immediate desires of the mass—and actually acts as a surrender of initiative and self-determination.
Acting from clandestinity at times and places of our choosing and allowing our actions to speak for themselves inasmuch as they make more activity by more people possible should be enough as an alternative and should stop any unwanted legitimacy accruing to us. This is not to create a platform to put demands to the WTO or whoever to change their policies, it’s a way of stopping the implementation of these policies on the ground until they have to pack them in. Though tainted with reformism, the anti-GM crops campaign is an approximate example of this in action. Relatively small-scale crop trashings by a small but determined minority picking where, when and how they wanted to take such action, whether in conjunction with others emphasising different tactics or not, has proved uncontrollably flexible and a lot more effective in challenging globalisation in practice than any of the big London demos. I don’t want to get drawn too much into questions of whether this small group approach would have been as effective as J18 or N30 Seattle, not least because trying to attack where the system is strongest rather than where it is most vulnerable is frankly not smart tactics, but note here on J18 that any action was just down to a few hundred active people organised in affinity groups and a very inexperienced police force. On Seattle N30, it doesn’t take 10,000s to shut down any modern city, just a dedicated few in the right places who know what they’re doing (also—the SWP’s opportunistic, revisionist accounts not withstanding—it wasn’t the mass blockades but the looting of the few dozen involved in the Black Block that encouraged the local underclass to loot too, and it was this that provoked the state of emergency that forced the WTO from Seattle). One tragedy has been the amount of effort diverted from this into one-off symbolic mass actions well-signposted ahead which the police and media can easily contain, both physically and ideologically. Actions in decentralised campaigns cited don’t take half a year (and half a rainforest of leaflets) to organise and they don’t need big clandestine funders exerting their corrosive influence either (in fact, revolutionaries should make it a rule of thumb not to get together actions any bigger than they can fund from amongst themselves using their own resources, to ensure transparency and human scale). It seems whenever anyone wants to protest anything now, they just ritually intone: ‘why not organise a street party?’ or, even more pathetically, ‘why not get RTS to organise a street party?’. Instead of saying something so brainless and now—given the sophistication of current police tactics—pointless, it is past time we, ourselves, resisted actively.
The tute blanche (White Overalls) are already well-known in the European and American protest movement, being well recognisable with their uniform and protection pads in the front lines. They undeniably showed their reformist and reactionary core to the worldwide movement in Prague, but still they fail to get the adequate response true revolutionaries should give them, which is the same deserved by blue-dressed cops. That’s why we consider it necessary to spread info on them, their tactics and their lies.
The tute bianche / Ya Basta comes out of the bigger and more sold-out social centres of northern Italy, like Leoncavallo in Milan, Rivalto in Mestre and Pedro in Padova. Just giving a good look at these places, it’s easy to understand now the tute bianche can’t be other than reformist: here you find never-ending compromises with authority, collaboration with political parties, big events described as DiY, well-defined hierarchies and leaders, pretend-to-be-rebel identities sold with gadgets and smoke liberation fests, and annual incomes larger than in many companies.
With their statements and their actions, tute bianche play a hard-looking role, and are desperately trying to have more adepts among those opposing globalisation, but they cannot hide the truth of their relationship with Green and Leftist parties (actually, many Giovani Comunisi, youth section of the Italian party Rifondazione Comunista, are part of tute bianche) and of their own involvement in politics (some of their leaders like Casarini and Farina took part more than once in elections, even the 2001 ones, and are those same going on TV to declare war on the police for the Genoa G8 summit, backed by men in balaclavas!). Can we consider politicians on our side of the barricades? We think not, even if they wear balaclavas to look cool and hard, or speak of battles against power to get our complicity.
Actually we have to beware of them, since we know that when they say “battles in the streets” or “Seattle-style protests”, they mean something completely different, permitted marches with planned routes, no direct action and no civil disobedience. What made the Seattle example really inspiring was the element of surprise, with multiple street blockades and direct actionists attacking Capital outlets. What tute bianche sell as “Seattle-style” is a protest where everything is already decided for you, and the decision is: no riot, no action, no individuality, no disobedience (even to their rules).
We saw them in action many times in Italy, and the show is always the same. Part one: they declare war, fill their mouths with big words and say they will besiege and close down whichever meeting / forum. Part two: they ask for permitted marches and collaborate with police and political parties taking part in the protests (sic!). Part three: they appear at marches with their pads, helmets and protections, display in the front lines, take care that nobody has the insane idea of smashing bank or multinationals’ windows and that the march can take place without any ‘problems’. Part four: this is the most important one, here is where they try to get revolutionary credibility … clashes with police! They used to confront police at the end of the route with plastic shields and no offensive object, pushing in order to pass the ‘red line’. But these clashes are fake ones! They usually take place when most protesters have gone away, but TV cameras are still present, and last just a few minutes (which would be a very stupid way to clash with police indeed). Moreover, you can easily notice that cops hit mostly only on the shields, avoiding heads or other body parts and don’t use tear gas, which is their favourite weapon during real clashes or riots. What these co-ordinated clashes work for is to build consensus on their facade of hard core protesters, while giving no hassle to Power in practice. Their aim is to catch more and more potentially angry people, willing to practically attack Power and its meetings, and take them on a do-nothing-and-look-at-us fluffy aside.
Another important role they play during protests is also that of white-dressed cops. Many times tute bianche tried to isolate, demask or physically attack those who passed to action. In May 2000 at the biotech forum Tebio protests, they even distributed a leaflet with a sort of ‘10 commandments’ to follow during the march. Commandment #2 read “nobody can put in practice spontaneous acts of any kind”, while #11 similarly stated that “during the march no personal or collective action has to occur” and #8 that “you can throw nothing that has not been decided by the organisers”. And they also didn’t forget an invite to grass with commandment #12, inviting “to inform tute bianche of anything happening”. On that occassion these white cops couldn’t stop a block determined to attack banks and multinational stores during the march, but some days later they went to the square that hosted this block to threaten them for having ruined their show (and of course they didn’t forget to do it with their white-cop uniforms on). More examples come from Ancona, where in May 2000 they lined up between anarchists and cops, or Bologna, where a couple of months earlier at an anti-fascist demo they preferred the usual fake clashes rather than attacking fascists (which was done by others, later attacked and threatened by tute bianche!). Another example has been Prague, where they both made futile clashes, a fake attack at a McDonalds and prevented real acts of destruction.
It is clear that tute bianche are a dangerous infiltration in the revolutionary and protest movement, and a big obstacle for the genuine fight against capitalist power. It is time for worldwide comrades to know it, in order not to do again the error of collaboration and complicity. Actually, it is time to get rid of them! Knowing that they’ll try to lead the Genoa G8 protests, and are already preparing their show … will you take a part in it, or will you ruin it with revolt?
“We’re building a mass movement!” I heard Jason shouting as we were being dragged off some bridge in London. That happened years ago, around the time of Twyford Down. It was the first I’d heard of the mass movement thing. My first thought was “No, we’re getting dragged off a bridge by the cops!” How wrong I was. Looking back, it seems we were building a mass movement, though many of us had not the slightest intention of doing so. But now it seems we have such a movement, and it expresses itself through such organisations as Globalise Resistance (GR).
It’s not the intention of this article to go much into who is behind it all, such as the SWP; that has been well covered elsewhere. That very debate is obscuring deeper problems with the ethos of globalising resistance. Those are the things I want to investigate in this article.
The raison d’être behind such organisations as GR is that because capital (or oppression, or whatever your favourite enemy is) us global, so should resistance to it be. There is little if any talk of exactly WHY this should be so; it seems that it is considered to be self-evident. That so many people accept this shallow prognosis at face value and do not wonder about it shows a lot about our movement, and society as a whole.
Television, and more recently the internet, have had an incalculable effect on us. People generally are less able now to assimilate complex ideas. In the busy busy global village, where information spews incessantly from every electronic orifice, we need to have ideas pre-digested for us, then vomited out in bite-sized chunks by authority figures such as the news readers.
Instead of having a good overall view of what is going down in our own communities, we have a selection of decontextualised fragments from pre-chosen sources all over the planet. Meanwhile most of us don’t even know the names of our neighbours. Globalise Resistance reinforces this by giving us nice little sound-bite ‘causes’ like Gap sweatshops and the Zapatistas. Very few people would know much about any of these things, just what GR’s info sheets give; the lives, loves, history and desires of millions, summed up in a paragraph or two by a person who doesn’t know them. A few snippets of semi-random information does not constitute a planetary perspective. What GR purveys is more like ‘Global Awareness to go’. You want fries with that?
Conspiracy or not, the media control our communications to a larger extent than anything else does, and hence they shape our society. Recognising this, many activists have decided that it is important to get our voices onto those media. Other activists have argued that it is more important to organise ourselves and use our own media (including word of mouth). This is the more difficult path, and makes less sense in the context of this society. It is much easier to convince someone with just a few words of something they already understand, than to try to introduce something that goes against what they understand.
If you talk about ignoring the media and just getting on with local actions in small groups, most people do not understand what you’re talking about. Most people think that if an act doesn’t get big media coverage, it is not worthwhile. We have all been brought up to understand this idea. Pop stars, film idols, Great Leaders and Entrepreneurs have been rammed down our throats by the media from the moment of our birth. They are the only ones who can achieve anything. So when the call goes out for thousands to turn up at the next meeting of the Great and Famous G8 or World Bank meeting, it makes immediate (if misguided) sense, and can easily drown out the little voice that is asking for help to stop the local allotments from being sold off for development, or to stop a local woodland being chopped by a greedy farmer.
But it wasn’t like this a few years ago. Something has changed, and this is where we come to the inevitable swipe at the boring left-over Lefties. Back in the late-80s and early-90s, the Left was only beginning to realise that they were no longer relevant. Their ideas were rooted in the Sixties and Seventies, a pretty dismal time not many people wanted to remember. The Left were no longer sexy, and a new movement was emerging that was out-sexying them massively.
Ecological direct action was arriving in Europe, imported from the USA by groups calling themselves Earth First!. These people were jumping on diggers, building tree houses and tunnels, blockading timber depots and occupying construction sites in the most in-yer-face way imaginable short of total revolt. Being mostly young and not from political backgrounds, their rhetoric was devoid of all the boring legacy of socialist dogmas. They fired the imaginations of many and for a while there were camps and actions going on all over the country. The movement was growing exponentially, and in a very decentralised way. Groups formed and took action locally, networking with their own local communities, attracting help and inspiring similar things all over the world.
But this wasn’t to last. The Left was looking and learning (after a fashion). Gradually they infiltrated this movement and sometime in the late-90s, it dropped the ‘ecological’ and became just the ‘direct action movement’. The hierarchically-minded politicos who moved inon the initiative started by EF! and the ALF didn’t like the loose and uncontrollable nature of this movement, and neither did they like most of the ideas, so they are now in the process of changing both. Rather than change their ideas, they choose, the the way of all conservatives, to take the funky packaging and wrap their own unchanged dogmas in it. Is Genoa etc physically any different to, say, Paris in ‘68? Have they really learned anything at all?
By making big anti-globalisation actions, GR et al take away the autonomy of the locally-organised action. All that local groups of concerned people can now organise is the buses to get there. The agenda and location is set by the World Bank or the IMF, or the G8, and relayed by a few self-appointed leaders who won’t even admit that they are leaders. It doesn’t matter what is happening in your local area. Or even, for that matter, what connections your own groups have. A visitor from West Papua to Dublin was invited to a GR meeting. Thinking this would be a good opportunity to get some support for his people, who are being massacred by Indonesia, he went along well-prepared to talk about what is going on and what people here in the West (where the problems all stem from) can do to help them. He didn’t get the chance. For the whole meeting, he had to listen to them talk about their recent visit to Genoa.
Globalise Resistance and its look-alikes are apparently a reaction to the globalisation of something or other. Just what has globalised varies depending on whom you ask. Such a movement should claim its roots in the pirates of the Spanish Main, or the bandits who attacked pilgrims on their way to the various ‘holy lands’. Somebody must have given the Phonecians trouble too. I haven’t seen any such references. It’s as if the Empires of the last six thousand years never happened, and all this global commerce and oppression started just after the miners’ strike.
Now there is almost nothing going on locally, and if you talk to anyone remotely ‘radical’ they will babble on until closing time about Genoa or whatever, even if they only know the cousin of someone who went. Even just a few years ago, you would hear people talk about the issues, the things supposedly they are opposed to, and some ideas for other ways to do things. No, it is all about the spectacle itself. Who went there, who got arrested, who met whom, which clubs and gigs they went to, what the cops did, what the crowd did. Never a mention of why.
For those who can make it (get time off from the wage slavery everyone is now stuck in) these big anti-acronym actions may be real, but for the rest of us they are quite literally a spectacle with absolutely no relevance whatsoever to our own situation, our own lives, or even to the effects we have on the people who live in the places the raw materials come from to create our jobs. Even for the people who go to them, there is no real relevance. Like all the other media-driven moments that make up modern lifer, they are an experience to be consumed then added to the bank of ‘experiences’ which make up the totality of our fragmented lives.
Having smashed up a Gap or McDonalds in some far away place, we come back and do nothing go rid our towns of them, and wait for te Next Big Thing to be handed down to us from on high. Empowerment has become a bad word, a cliche, and the thing it refers to us also disappearing.
With this globalisation of resistance we lose the very thing we were struggling to recover: our autonomy. The only way to express our autonomy in such situations is to break the ‘rules’ of the organisers, by rioting, smashing things up and so on. This might seem fine, but isn’t it really the same thing as resisting rule in everyday life? Why should we have rules in our ‘movement’? Why go all the way to Genoa to smash up a McDonalds? Isn’t the whole thing about globalisation that things are the same everywhere?
Small actions, easily reproducible,
requiring unsophisticated means that are available to
all, are by their very simplicity and spontaneity
uncontrollable. They make a mockery of even the most
advanced technological developments in
counter-insurgency. This is what capital and the State
are afraid of, this is the news that never makes the
headlines, but is carefully concealed from the public
eye.
- Willfull Disobedience, Vol. 2, No.
6, ‘Against the Logic of Submission:
Hatred’
The truth is that our movement (and that’s a whole other can of worms not to be opened here) was seduced into this course of action by the mass media, via a bunch of inadequate people who were not good enough to make it in the cut-throat world of business, and instead imposed their mediocre organisational skills on us, who were doing fine without them. Thousands of small acts by groups of friends and even single individuals got no coverage at all, while the bigger actions got onto the national news. We were thwarted by our own obsession with the state’s media. Direct action, by definition, needs no coverage. If state media is needed, then the action is not direct.
Computer technology is what allowed capitalism (or globalisation or whatever) to be manifested in its present form. In fact, it formed our present system, which was designed precisely to fit in with what could and could not be done with computers. Not surprisingly the same symptoms can be discerned in the new, globalised anti-G movement as in other aspects of computerised society. Depersonalisation is the first to come to mind: we are all just sheep, running around where the sheepdog directs us. When a few of us do try to strike out alone, we find it impossible because the majority of the sheep are doing as they’re told and we never get enough people interested in local actions to get anything meaningful established.
In any given town, it is relatively easy to get a group of people together to go swanning off to some big event, but not to plant fruit trees or close down a local parasite. It is easier to sit in a cybercafe communicating with other cyber-revolutionaries than to get a small meeting together in the local pub.
If we make the internet the basis
of co-ordinating our struggles, for communicating our
projects, actions and dreams, then our struggles, our
projects and all that inspires them will become the kind
that can be communicated through the internet—that
is, projects, struggles and dreams that can be broken
down into interchangeable bits of information where
people, their passions and desires are of little
importance except to the extent that they are useful in
producing marketable bytes. This is because the kind of
communication and co-ordination that can happen through
the internet has already been organised before we start
to use it, and it has not been organised in our interest,
but rather in the interests of the social order of
domination.
Willfull Disobedience, Vol. 2, No. 6,
‘The Internet and Self-organisation’
The same thing is true of the globalised resistance movement itself. We are diverting from impossible to control small-scale actions towards the mass actions which can be easily policed. Police forces prefer the Saturday night trouble to be confined in to one or two big night clubs than to be scattered all over town where they cannot control it. That’s why many dodgy clubs continue to stay open. The same principle applies to insurgency.
Properly speaking, global thinking
is not possible… Look at one of those photographs of
half the Earth taken from outer space, and see if you
recognise your neighbourhood. The right local questions
and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish
question “What will this do to our community?”
tends towards the right answer to the world.
-Casey Neill
Eco means ‘home’, it comes from the Greek word, oikos. We need to put the eco back in our actions and use the global networks to enhance rather than destroy or consume our own local ones. Ultimately the global networks must be disconnected, as humans seem unable to cope with such concentrations of power. Whales have had global communications for millions of years, termites are good at civilisation, and buffalo are good at herding. Humans should concentrate on what they are good at, and not try to manage everything.
We need to push this eco aspect of our work, and not to let all and sundry dictate or misuse our actions. We need to redefine what movement it is that we are part of. How can we support the rights of workers when we are opposed to the place they work in, the materials they use and the end product of their labour, not to mention wage slavery itself? If supporting workers’ rights is a ‘clever’ way of getting them to listen to our views, why then do we not do the same with fascists? Socialism is no more relevant to a viable future on this planet than fascism.
Things happen locally or they don’t happen. Things happen locally all over the world. Nothing happens globally, except comets and asteroids. A sweatshop may be nominally part of a global corporation, but its physical reality is most definitely local.
A corporation (or a nation, for that matter) is an unthinking entity, it follows the line of least resistance, the path of most food. Managers are a figurehead, they have no real control over the direction of an organisation; that is determined by the survival needs of the organisation itself. If a manager acts against the interests of the corporation, he is rejected.
As Oliver Stone once said, the beast doesn’t know it exists. These Statesmen and leaders, the G8, the IMF and so on, are powerless outside of their respective organisations. The power they wield is not their own. They like to parade around as key decision-makers, VIPs, but the reality is that the organisations they are enslaved to have needs, and the will of the individual manager is irrelevant. All they have power over is the re-direction of a small percentage of the cash-flow into their own personal coffers, and that only if they fulfill the demands of their organisation.
By eschewing the local reality of capitalism / civilisation / whatever in favour of large-scale gatherings around VIPs we not only obscure the true nature of our enemies, but also give credit to the illusion of power those VIPs generate. What is needed now is not a mirroring of the power structure of the state, we need to attack the real source of that power, in our schools, factories. Road-building projects, and all the other local issues that together make up the global catastrophe. Most of all, we need to understand what things we do ourselves to support that system in our everyday lives, and to persuade others to do likewise.
Within every revolution are the seeds of what follows it. For anarchy to work at all, it has to be done locally, so a globalised resistance can do nothing to further our aims, only to make them more distant than ever by setting the stage for yet another power structure to emerge in place of the old one.
We don’t need anyone to speak to the IMF or World Bank on our behalf, we already spoke to them in countless places all over the world. We spoke to them in Seattle and Genoa too. Now it is obvious to even the most optimistic idiot that they have no intention of disbanding themselves. What is there to talk about? The big ‘global’ actions may have served a purpose, but now it is time to move beyond that. We need not a mass movement but a massive movement everywhere, built on local initiatives which are not answerable to anyone but the local communities themselves. No more building of platforms to be used to misrepresent us, no more collusion with devious (but not good enough for business) power-seekers.
The death of Carlo Guiloana during the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa shocked many people in the First world. Carlo was assassinated by the militarized police forces of the New World Order, whose outright fascist nature was made clear when Guiliani’s arrested comrades were forced to pay homage to Il Duce in words and song by the Italian security forces. To the starry-eyed bourgeois activists in north America and Europe, Carlo’s death was a horrible travesty of justice against a movement to democratise global capitalism. To people in the South—the ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’ lands—such assassinations are neither unusual nor unexpected. There has been a war raging over control of the Earth’s resources for a century (or more) and the fight to create a global corporate state—the New world Order by Bush I—is only the latest phase, one which has claimed dozens (Mexico, India), hundreds (Papua New Guinea), thousands (Columbia, Nigeria), even millions (Democratic Republic of the Congo) of lives around the world. Sadly, it’s only when these deaths occur in the presence of First World media and other witnesses that they register any sort of reaction at all.
The stakes in this conflict are extraordinarily high.
On one side are the megawealthy who wish to preserve the protected enclaves of privilege and material ease industrial society creates for them. In their way are the other 6 billion people on Earth, who the ruling elite wish to cast aside to fend for themselves in the waste and ruin industrialism continues to make of the world. Limited privileges are granted to the bourgeois and workers so they will tolerate the death dealt out to provide these privileges. For instance, the people of Africa being slaughtered to provide oil and cell phones for consumers. Will consumers in the First World give up gasoline and wireless communication devices in order to relieve the suffering of other, distant, dark-skinned people? Not willingly or they would already have done so. Many of the people involved in the anti-globalisation movement aren’t interested in or even aware of the plight of these other people. All they want is a better deal—a greater share of the profits raked in by the plundering of foreign lands. Their wildful naivete about how the post-capitalist world works is obscene. But to cut them some slack, there us an ongoing conspiracy by the shapers of society to prevent us from realizing the continuous efforts of the ruling elites to divide us so that we’ll gladly annihilate one another in order to maintain the illusions described as “capitalism” and “democracy”.
World War One was an effort by the ruling elites of the industrialised nations to divide the world into permanent have and have-not nation states and spheres of influence for the colonial powers. It also allowed them to crush the international solidarity rampant among the workers. One of the war’s chief apologists, US president Woodrow Wilson, described it as an effort to make the world safe for democracy. What he actually meant was that the natural resources of the world would be made available for the benefit of the industrialised nations.
Their attempt was only partially successful, so the attempt was repeated in the war over fascism (WWII) and further refined during the subsequent Cold War. What the elite learned from their experiments were:
propaganda campaigns could manipulate the people within industrialized societies to leap to their deaths unquestioningly, upon command
a modern society will accept death camps, as long as “other [minority] people” were being exterminated
no atrocity committed against a civilian population is inexcusable, especially if the media and government act like it never happened.
Having learned this throughout the course of the 20th century, the ruling elite were ready to implement the New World Order.
I could see the clubs … at their work. Their ends were smeared with blood, and blood sprayed the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Sometimes I saw the policemen hopping up on the benches, continuing to strike blows from there or jumping back down on top the bodies below
This is not a retelling if the actions of Italian police in Genoa, but a description of an ongoing campaign of violence directed at the people of New Guinea by the police and military forces of Indonesia (from the West Papua Action Update #2). Most of New Guinea is populated by people who still live closely with the natural world as hunter-gatherers, herds-people, fishers and gardeners. Fed up with ‘development’ that threatened their ways of life, the tribal hillfolk rebelled.
In 1988, on the Papua New Guinea side of the island, the people of Bourgainville shut down the massive Freeport copper mine by putting away their pens and picking up guns. They’ve been waging a successful guerrilla war against the armed forces of PNG and their Australian cohorts ever since.
This inspired a similar attempt to drive civilization from the Indonesian side of the island. By the time the event described above happened, this effort had seen 50 activists killed and hundreds more arrested or disappeared.
No doubt more people are familiar with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, timed to coincide with the imposition of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Several hundred Zapatistas and their supporters have died in the low-intensity fighting that followed the uprising of the EZLN. Like the Free Papua Movement in New Guinea, the Zapatistas are fighting for the right of indigenous people’s self-determination and against ‘economical development’ dictated by global financial concerns. Meanwhile, oil extraction is fuelling two genocidal wars, one in Africa and one in South America.
The Ogoni people of the Nigerian delta have already lost their lands to Shell Oil. They fight now for survival as a people. A similar conflict is currently being forced on people north of Ogoniland as an oil pipeline and drilling is forced upon people and land from Chad to the Atlantic coast.
Plan Columbia will escalate Columbia’s civil war into regional instability to ensure that social and political chaos there is carefully managed so as not to interfere with oil extraction or the cocaine trade. The peaceful, cloudforest-dwelling U’wa people are doomed.
Under the NWO, armed forces can sweep into countries and forcefully take whatever they want, literally, over the dead bodies of the local people. They’ve successfully demonstrated this in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A rare mineral used in wireless communication devices—solton—is being extracted from the DRC for First World corporations by the invading armies of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the mercenary forces of UNITA, a Cold War terrorist army from Angola. They are also helping themselves—and transnational corporations—to diamonds and coffee. No one knows how many Congolese have died during this invasion, which began on 1997. Conservative estimates are 3 million. The actual toll could be much higher, which would put this war on a par with the worst violence during African colonisation and the slave trade. We’ll likely never know how many people have died in this war because, quite frankly, most people in the First World aren’t interested.
Despite the horrors being inflicted upon people in South America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands, there is hope for us all.
The people of New Guinea want nothing to do with globalisation and may success in smashing the nation states trying to impose economic development upon them. The Zapatistas have demonstrated the effectiveness of organising communities with a combination of analysis and rifles. It was the influence of the Zapatistas that led to the international street festivals against the institutions of the NWO.
More recently, the people of Bolivia disrupted the daily continuity of life in their country to demand an end to IMF economic plans, such as privatisation of their water supply.
As I write this , plans are being made in India for a similar on-going uprising by a coalition of people’s movements. Among their demands are:
There have been dozens of lives lost in this struggle already as indigenous and poor people in India resist development and corporatisation of their lives and lands, and for an end to the dalit (‘untouchable’) undercaste’s repression. The people of India are poised to turn their society on its head in order to shape a better future for themselves and their descendants, just as the people of Bolivia are doing.
Now that the war to implement the NWO has been brought violently to us in the First World, how will we react? Some of the anti-globalisation protesters have no interest in giving up their private automobiles and cell phones, and will co-operate with the forces of economic order and power against those of us willing to act in solidarity with the struggles of distant peoples: we face common enemies in this fight for our lives. The peace and justice professional activists will denounce as insurrectionaries for being violent, even as people around the world are being massacred to sustain consumerist lifestyles. Rather than diminish our activity, however, we must go on the offensive.
The ‘Welcome’ column of the ‘00 issue of Resistance, the paper of the Earth Liberation Front’s press office, states:
The only problems I can find with actions like these (ELF) are that they aren’t happening frequently enough, and at severe enough levels
The same issue quotes Black Liberation Army fugitive Assatas Shakur on its cover
…not to engage in physical resistance, armed resistance, to oppression is to serve the oppressor, no more, no less. There are no exceptions to the rule, no easy out
Carlo Guiliani was not the first casualty in the revolt against the NWO. Rather than mourning or being frightened by his passing, we should be inspired that the NWO cannot co-exist with our desire for life, and resolve that we will be the ones who survive this conflict!
With the resistance to the NWO having grown from 50.000 people in the streets of Seattle to 300,000 in Genoa, the plans of the elite were in danger of coming unraveled. Something had to be done—quickly. How about starting an unwinnable, perpetual, religious war? First World people have already accepted a genocidal campaign against the Iraqi people, in which millions of civilians have been starved, bombed or otherwise killed by a combination of air strikes and economic sanctions. Today (19/09/01), the UN announced that 5 million Afghani people are in danger of starving to death in the immediate future. Unless, of course, the US military and its Afghani allies slaughters them first.
The media focuses on the atrocities perpetuated against the US—live on TV, even—and continues to remain silent about the genocidal warfare against the peoples of Columbia, New Guinea, the DRC, etc. Meanwhile the US government can exponentially increase its policy of robbing the taxpayers to give to the rich corporations, even as these same corporations throw hundreds of thousands of workers out the door.
This is George Orwell’s 1984 nightmare come true; a perpetual war raging through central Asia to keep the excess population occupied and / or terrorised, and give the governments an excuse to repress their domestic opposition.
What I have to wonder why did the US give the Taleban government $43 million in May ‘01, knowing they were harbouring Osama bin Laden, who was already wanted for bombing US embassies in Africa and blasting the USS Cole?
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