Means and beginnings
> Summits are our summits! What happens at them? On the face of it,
> they’re about protesting, about being against things. But in fact
> what we do is far more positive: we spend time together, we
> demonstrate together, maybe riot a little; we talk together, we
> argue together; we dance together, we drink together, some lucky
> ones even fall in love…
>
>
— Summits and plateaus
Which all sounds like a good description of the protests in Scotland last week. They were pretty succesful, I think. Not that we achieved any ‘ultimate’ ends: capitalism still stands, the G8 summit went ahead. But it’s a mistake to cast these things in terms of ends anyway; any end we can articulate in the terms available to us right now is _already_ recuperated. Remember that William Morris quote at the beginning of Empire: “Men fight … and the thing they fought for comes about … and then it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” Which is not to say we shouldn’t have concrete demands, but these demands are always just the latest name for something that will have to be fought for again under another name.
Instead of demands, what are important are our concrete means. Take the blockades on Wednesday, the first day of the summit. Their importance doesn’t lie in the fact that they shut down the summit (they didn’t). What’s important is that groups that formed over the course of a few days, following plans they’d made themselves during those days, were able to materially disrupt the summit. Capitalism is based on the illusion that organisation outside of its regime is impossible: on Wednesday, that illusion had to be directly materially enforced by the groups of riot cops being ferried up and down the A9. Before capitalism can be defeated, it first needs to be identified as a specific enemy rather than an inescapable condition. That’s what these actions are about: forcing capitalism to reveal itself as something that we can challenge, rather than leaving it in its preferred position of measureless power.
Other actions are about measuring our own power. The Indymedia centre in Edinburgh provided free, self-organised reporting facilities (text, photos, video, radio) for hundreds of people over the week, staffed by media activists who had come from all over the world (or, sometimes, people who had just wandered in off the street to see what was happening). The Glasgow convergence centre transformed a disused factory into a working living and meeting space. The Stirling Eco-village, although I didn’t get a chance to go there, apparently had a lot of success as a space for people to come together to plan actions, as well as being an example of a self-organised and environmentally sustainable living space. It’s important not to underestimate the effects of all this — the almost physical blast of freedom that hits you as you walk into a liberated space crystalises anti-authoritarian politics in a way I suspect is hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it. That’s why these events, as opportunities for engineering these affects, are so important.
Not everything went perfectly. The geographic dispersal caused problems, with no self-organised space in Edinburgh and a great convergence space in Glasgow where there were no actions. The Make Poverty History march was enormous but also, of course, enormously liberal, and the anti-capitalist block didn’t last very long, thanks to police who don’t know the difference between a group of people some of whom happpen to be wearing black, and an anarchist Black Block. And we probably could have done more to get in touch with the communities around where we were staying; although the march through Niddrie on Saturday morning went well, as did, apparently, the Black Block in Stirling on Wednesday. The kids I talked to around the Glasgow convergence centre seemed pretty well-disposed to the protesters, but I’m not sure we got across the subtleties of our anti-capitalist critique, at least not to the young boy who greeted me with a clenched fist and a shout of “Fuck George Bush, he’s gay.”
But hey, preguntando caminamos, as they say. This was, after all, the first mobilisation of this sort in the UK. The point of these is, always, to learn, to expand our own powers while and through confronting capital’s. It’s odd to come to the end of a week or longer of hard work and exhilirating freedom and think, “well, it’s a start.” But that’s what it is, and that’s what anti-capitalism desparately needs: not a hypostasized end, a revolution; but, simply, a start.
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off topic, sorry, but I got my exam results today. I got a first overall, with three 1st marks (over 70) and one 2.1 mark. Apologies for not posting much recently, but I’ve mostly been learning about Kant and Sartre, and I don’t really have much to say about either of them yet.
Comment by rachel @ 7/15/2005 4:03 pm
Fantastic, well done. You should have made this news a post on its own. BTW, I bought a copy of Being and Nothingness the other day. It’s fucking long.
Comment by Tim @ 7/15/2005 8:16 pm
Being and Nothingness is really long. I’m doing mostly secondary reading at the moment, but I’ll probably take some time off work to study later in the holidays, and I might try to read it then. Still really shocked about results! Glad I got firsts in both the philosophy units.
Comment by rachel @ 7/16/2005 4:11 pm
Did you manage to score with any hot anarchist chicks?
Comment by Marty @ 7/18/2005 4:38 pm
Answer the question, Claire! (Tim)
Comment by Alistair @ 7/19/2005 10:36 pm
Regrettably, the answer is no. There was this stunning Israeli woman I was getting on fairly well with, but I didn’t strictly ’score’. And, come to think of it, I don’t know that she was an anarchist per se, either.
Comment by Tim @ 7/19/2005 11:02 pm