“Anti-Capitalism As Ideology...And As Movement?” is an analysis of the anti-summit movement by the British communist group Aufheben which was first published in the tenth annual issue of their journal in September 2001.
The anti-summit movement was at its height from the blocking of the WTO meeting in Seattle in November 1999 to the massive rioting against the G8 meeting in Genoa in July 2001. After the violence in Genoa in which the Italian pigs murdered a young rioter everyone expected more of the same at the IMF and World Bank annual meeting in Washington DC at the end of September 2001. Instead the Twin Towers were knocked down and the protests barely happened. Since then while attempts to attack summits in the US and Australia – ie. the WTO meeting in Sydney in November 2002 – have mostly been farcical, big anti-summit protests have continued in Europe. In June 2003 there was extensive rioting against the G8 summit in Geneva and the EU summit in Thessaloniki. In July 2005 there was a large but totally passive demonstration against the G8 summit in Scotland led by those scumbags Bob Geldof and Bono as well as relatively small but well-organised protests led by radicals that caused some disruption to the summit. The events in Scotland made clear that the liberals have become even more passive than they were a few years ago while the anarchists and other radicals can organise effectively but are no longer able to mobilise large numbers even from within their own ranks.
The large antiwar demonstrations in 2002-3 seemed to draw on the same section of the population as the anti-summit protests – young, university-educated people with fewer prospects than their parents. Yet for the most part the radicalism of the anti-summit protests was completely missing from the antiwar protests. In Europe various radical groups are organising around ‘precarity’, the precarious situation many young workers find themselves in with casual work but these efforts have not yet achieved much of a response outside the radical scene. When young workers begin to struggle en masse we hope it is with the anger and energy displayed in the best of the anti-summit movement rather than the passivity of the anti-war movement.
Most Aufheben articles are available at their website, www.geocities.com/aufheben2
This pamphlet was first published by Treason Press for the protests against the WTO meeting in Sydney November 2002. This edition with the introduction added was published in August 2005.
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