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Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
In a world saturated with capital’s antagonisms, a politics based exclusively on openness and affirmation is bound to fail. But The Free Association suggests that attempting to found our practice on antagonism brings its own set of problems…
Mildred: What’re you rebelling against, Johnny? Johnny: Whaddya got?
The Wild One (1953)
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Alice in Wonderland
Source: http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-4/six-impossible-things-before-breakfast/ weiter...The G8 protests: Below, around and against
Uncomfortable collaborations in blocking the G8
By Shannon Walsh
“I have no fear of any sentence that you may pass on me, while protesting nevertheless with energy against this substitution of violence for justice, for this frees me in the future of any inhibition against repaying the law with force”. Defense speech of Louis-August Blanqui before the Court of Assizes, 1832
The blockading of the G8 in Heiligendamm Germany at the beginning of June revealed once again the enormous flood of opposition, and counter worlds, that continue to grow in the face of global capitalism. Rostock, the coastal town closest to the cloistered meeting, was a blossoming of strategies, movements, and individuals swarming below dozens of police helicopters. The protest was a grand expose of the many cracks against, within, and beyond capitalism.
Source: http://www.nu.ac.za/CCS/default.asp?2,40,3,1232 weiter...Roundtable on g8 Resistance: Perspectives for the Next Phase of Global Anti-Capitalist Uprisings
Click here to download the pamphlet cover and click here for the guts of the PDF File.
Interventions # 1
first appeared in Issue 6 of Upping the Anti: a Journal of Theory and Action.
The G8 is more than a place where neoliberal trade agreements are authored. It is also a space where the legitimacy of global governance is reproduced. In 2005, 300,000 people took to the streets in Edinburgh to ask the G8 for a solution to poverty. By 2007, antagonism and dissent prevailed once again. We are entering a period that could mark the resurgence of positive dynamics from the earlier phase of global uprisings. But have we learned from the past? Can we build our interventions on new and more stable ground?
These are the questions that guide the following roundtable discussion with Hanne Jobst (Germany), Saby & Go (Japan), Miranda (Italy), and Jaggi Singh (Canada). The participants highlight the necessity of rooting global insurgency in everyday struggles and consider whether the global circulation of struggles is enabled by continuous networks or events like summit protests.
Kriss Sol is an Amsterdam-based activist researcher. He has been involved in summit protests and local organizing around global issues for several years.
Source: http://uppingtheanti.org/node/3070David Graeber: THE SHOCK OF VICTORY
The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.
This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.
I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initial propositions here:
Source: www.infoshop.org weiter...What Would It Mean To Win?
film, 2008
Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, 40 min.
“What Would It Mean To Win?” was filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. In their first collaborative film Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler focus on the current state of the counter-globalisation movement in a project which grows out of both artists’ preoccupation with globalisation and its discontents. The film, which combines documentary footage, interviews, and animation sequences, is structured around three questions pertinent to the movement: Who are we? What is our power? What would it mean to win?
Source: www.ressler.at weiter...Manuela Zechner/ Anja Kanngieser: Negotiating speech and organizational practices
Negotiating speech and organizational practices: field notes and reflections from two counter-G8 (2007) initiatives.
Based on empirical research around two events that happened in response to the G8 meetings in Germany in summer 2007, this paper examines relations between the organizational practice and the discourses that set up and guided both these events. One of them was a meticulously coordinated blockade action ("Block G8") close to Heiligendamm, and the other a theory-inspired "summit" calling initiatives to unalign from the education agenda of the G8. While the "Block G8" was an action with a clearly determined goal (blocking several roads), the outcome of “summit” was left open. Both events endorsed practices of self-organization, aiming to function in a horizontal, transparent, open and inviting, as much as in a critical, manner.
Despite the different objectives of the events, their aims appeared similar, and indeed some similar problems and organizational symptomatologies emerged in their course. By investigating and juxtaposing the conceptualisations and praxes of "Block G8" and "summit", we hope to address strategies for negotiating the conflicts that arose, so as to further the potential for translations of such rhetoric into practice and vice versa.
PAULA explains herself
Meanwhile a series of asessment papers have been published about the G8 protests, some of them carry approaches that are worth discussing. a text that quite some people have been waiting for has not been published, it somehow disappeared in between. So here it is, it should reach many and play its part in the evaluation-process.
PAULA explains herself
With this paper we want to publish a part of our evaluations and self-criticism. PAULA, the crossregional plenary for a decentral space of actions and blockades around the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, has been a heterogeneous, temporary alliance of groups and sole persons. For this reason we will only evaluate the decentral blockades and not deliver a collective statement about the G8 protests in general. We take part in this discussion in another place in our everday lives and in our groups.
Source: email weiter...Turbulence: Move into the light?
Postscript to a turbulent 2007
It’s night time and a man is crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for his car keys underneath a lamp post. A woman comes along and starts to help him. After they’ve been searching together for a while the woman asks the man: “Are you sure this is where you dropped them?”
The man replies: “No, I think I dropped them somewhere else.”
“Then why are we looking here?” she enquires.
“Because this is where the light is.”
Download booklet at www.turbulence.org.uk
Source: www.turbulence.org.uk weiter...TOP Berlin: Make a foreshortened critique of capitalism history!
Without a radical critique every action becomes mere activism- reflections on the anti-G8 mobilisation 2007.
3, 2, 1...action!
Without a doubt, it was the event for the European left this summer: anti-racist groups, queer activists, squatters, debt-relief groups, anti-fascists, trade unionists, environmental organizations...in June, all of them travelled to the small German village of Heiligendamm in order to express disagreement or even disrupt the G8 summit. Months before there was a marathon of meetings, conferences, fundraising concerts, and every leftist place in Europe got swamped with flyers and posters mobilizing against the summit. The focus of it all: action. Demonstrations, riots, blockades, vigils, clandestine actions...there was something in it for everybody.
G8: Summary of Evaluations
Reflections
After the G8, a whole lot of debriefs and reflective summaries were published by the protesters. There were differences in opinions depending on the groups’ characters, nationalities, examining questions, time of debrief, questions in focus and tactical preferences.
Most questions examined were the effects of the protests, the question of militancy in protests and violence and consequences for the future.