Beyond the Future

Unfortunately it's very close to reality, with some of the workshop descriptions lifted word for word out of programmes for recent activist events. We include it here for reference:

Beyond the Future
A carnival of resistance and revolution
January 8th 2005, Venue to be confirmed
As part of the build up to the G8 summit due to be held in Gleneagles, Scotland, from 6th-8th July 2005, Manchester is hosting a full day of discussion, skill sharing, networking and information spreading. Aimed at drawing together diverse strands and autonomous currents within the movement of movements, Beyond the future values the heterogeneity of struggles and adopts a pluralistic approach that celebrates the diversity of grassroots campaigns.

Beyond the future is about reaching out to the wider community and breaking out of the ghetto, it's about a coming together of rebels, activists, youth, squatters, the precarious, the disobedient, the disaffected, the disempowered, the disordinate and the dismembered. In every generation there are those who refuse, those who resist, those who carry the seed of a new world in their hearts. We will be making links and tearing down fences, taking our dreams for reality and demanding the impossible. A fair trade café will run throughout the day.

Beyond the last event we organised needs you! It can only work with your participation. There are no spectators and no performers. We need volunteers to skip food, chop veg, help with technical stuff and most of all to provide your enthusiasm and uncritical participation.

Key themes are- Dissent the G8! Media Hacklabs, Precarity, Social centres, subversive transgression, info-hubs & subvertising.

"All of this activity needs a new form of organisation. I personally think that Anarcho-Green is our output and destination. I think that now that the cold war is officially over on the European continent, we can merge Libertarian, anti-racist and Transgender social activism together to create new radical identities that can bring Eastern European and Western brothers and sisters into a new political project capable of opposing fascist Bushism. I mean, this is the task at hand and social conflict is spiralling. Others possibilities are, of course, the peace movement, the open source information movement, the alternative global fair-exchange movement etc. But we need to pose ourselves the question of power and the institutional interface. This is vital at this stage." Alex Foti, Chainworkers.

Full Programme

Room 1

11.00-13.00 - Breaking borders, transgressive migration and transcendental subversion - "If Seattle really marks a transition to a new kind of politics - a participatory politics, a biopolitics if you like then the future lies in developing forms of self-management of conflicts federating themselves across wider political spaces - from the regional to the transcontinental" - Alex Foti, Chainworkers

13.00-14.00 - Pagan magick, Eastern mysticism and the liberating power of dance.

14.00-18.00 - Autnomous self-managed art, culture performance space for producing agit-prop, puppet piracy, clown insurrection armies and radical subvertising hacktic art transgression culture jamming insurrection

Room 2

All day- Dissent Network, G8 Briefing

9.00-11.0 Why the G8 is unfair and undemocratic.

11.00 - 13.00 - Training for action. NVDA skills and more. Workshop presented by two guys who were in Seattle.

13.00-14.00 - Lunch break.

14.00-14.15 - CANCELLED - A critical appraisal of the efficacy of protesting leaders' summits, a critique of protest activism as abstracted from everyday situations where capitalism and oppression are experienced and can be transformed, an assertion that this never ending series of (less and less) spectaculars are a substitutionist disengagement from communism as an ongoing working class response to capital, etc. - CANCELLED

14.15-14.30 - Break for wacky, spontaneous, surrealist art intervention by two Italian indymedia activists.

14.30-16.30 - Protest Strategy and action initiatives -Tactical frivolity or looking scary? Samba or retro funk?

16.30-18.00 - prisoner support - How are we going to support people whose lives are irreversibly effected by the horrors of incarceration after it hopefully all kicks off? Workshop presented by anybody who was jailed for Mayday 2000 who is still talking to us.

18.00-18.30 - Concluding plenary summarising the days discussions. We will agree that we need to disrupt the summit with a big protest with local focus where everybody respects others' tactics and the local environment and supports the prisoners afterwards. And someone will say we mustn't forget women's issues.

Room 3

9.00-11.00 - Trees, why we luv em! And why I shag my sister! No compromise in defence of the Earth! South Wales Earth First!

11.00 - 13.00 - Precarity Badminton - A panel of people lacking any obvious qualification will discuss precarity and what it means to be precarious. How do we respond to precaritisation and the neo-liberalist agenda of precaratism? How can media-hackers and labour activists support precarious workers from the outside? What have I got stuck up my arse? The panel will be a diverse collection of activists and writers united only by a regressively reformist analysis and a lack of involvement with any workers' struggle.

13.00-15.00 - The cultural intersections of precarity and patriarchy - Another two hours discussing existential precarity and social exclusion with regard to flexiculity and radical subjectivism and how it relates to recycled situationist discourse.

15.00-16.00 - Precarity, precocity and primitivism - Focus on precarity and the construction industry, especially looking at the cultural intersections of scaffolding work and info-hubs and how they can help us to unlearn language.

16.00-18.00 - Precarity and marmite - Exploring the admittedly tenuous links between the Animal Liberation Front and the sans-papier movement in France.

Room 4

9.00-11.00 - Toffbusters - Making the lives of the CLASS ENEMY precarious!!!!

11.00-13.00 - Occupied social centres - Their role in the community and tips for getting black kids to organise hip hop nights.

13.00-18.00 - Plenary from the global south - Beyond the last event we organised takes its lead from social movements in the global South and has invited self-appointed spokespeople to represent various politically indefensible groups of poor people who don't like America in an attempt to draw links between our ghettoised white, middle class protest movement and their wacky ideas. The list of people prepared to talk to us in return for a one way plane ticket includes-

- Al jaq jihad - A radical group of Sudanese Islamicist anarchists that may or may not exist.

- Waia Zi Chi Banzai Yenin Eeza!* - Tibetan Maoist movement (they told us they like trees)

- Revolutionary Popular Front of Landless Peasants and Dispossessed (County Cork)

*[Death to all by bamboo cane up arse!]

Also running throughout the day

Cultural rebel cinemascope - old videos of Prague and Genoa. And maybe that desperate bollocks about 'Bourganville'

Media Hacklab - Media HackLabs - autonomous technology zones, spaces for learning, for making your own media, for the sharing and developing of free and not-for-commercial-use technologies and software, for battling surveillance and alienation, for ongoing projects and for using new forms of communication in direct action.We regard hacking to be an attitude that isn't confined to information technology. Our way of being hackers is apparent in day-to-day life, even when we're not using computers. It reveals itself when we fight to change the things we don't like, such as force-fed misinformation, the use of expensive technologies that are not available to everyone, and having to accept information dispensed without any interactivity. The media hacklab will be running until Dave takes his laptop home.

All Day Creche - Provided by The Hakim Bey study group.

Squat party 8- till late. Venue to be announced. Bring own Ket.

Event supported by... South Wales Earth First! Chainworkers (Italy). Al jaq jihad (Sudan), Waia Zi Chi Banzai Yenin Eeza! (Tibet), Revolutionary Popular Front of Landless Peasants and Dispossessed (Eire), MUPPETS (Movement of Unemployed and Precarious Puppeteers Effecting Transient Struggles), Reclaim Paedophilia, Toff Busters, Colchester Anarchist Group.