You make plans, we make history

"you make plans - WE MAKE HISTORY"

- graffiti in Genoa port, June 2001.

A Leisurely Ramble Through The Overgrowth Of
Ecological Collapse, Science,
The Anti-Globalisation Protests

and Reclaim The Streets

Written: September 2001

From endangeredphoenix.com

The totalitarian nature of modern capitalism is not the
monolithic authoritarian dictatorship as imagined half a century ago in the
"Brave New World" and "1984" novels, but a more subtle
regime ruled by a bewildering diversity of means penetrating more and more into
areas of life previously uncolonised and uncommodified; in the realms of the
geographical, sensory, emotional, genetic, etc. The technological growth of the
capitalist mode of production that fuels these new invasions is an increasing
threat to the chances of simple biological survival.[1a]

In this Age of Indifference, most just don't want to know.
They block it all out, stick their heads in the sand. Doom and gloom only makes
people feel even more impotent (or, worse, they join Friends of the Earth).
If ecological catastrophe is mentioned at all, it's usually mentioned with all
the anger and sadness that people talk of a dead hedgehog on the road, then
change the subject.

Some think of the End of the World as humanity paying for its
sins - humanity is so wretched, we deserve to die. This misanthropy is there
as much in those who seem resigned to the collapse as in those who claim to
oppose it. For some of them, Nature is sacred - human beings profane. Hence so
many ecologists justifying misanthropy with Malthusian fervour. Many ecologists
fence off nature, like those wardens belonging to wild life trusts, particularly
English Nature, who can barely tolerate the presence of visitors on their
reserves so great is their bitterness against people in general (they must have
been naturally selected for the job because they possessed this qualification).
Because of the runaway devastation of nature, this contempt for a lost humanity
is a growing - and scary - tendency, ranging from the more fanatical animal
rightists to the US Earth First! (UK Earth Firstists tend to be a
lot less Malthusian, a lot more anarchist): it may yet become the basis for
supplanting in horror the genocide of 3 million with that of 3 billion.(1b) But most
will more than likely have gone mad by then, you and me included maybe.

Such fatalism is an excuse to avoid looking at who
and what
are more to blame than most and consequently an excuse to not struggle with
integrity to get to the roots of it. Some fatalists, being so used to being
spectators, somehow feel detached from this End, as if they aren't going to
live through the progress of this catastrophe, as if they're going to die
suddenly, or as if it's only going to happen to others, without them
experiencing the misery of this long drawn-out horror. Others even look at this
disaster with cynical expectation, some grandiosely psychotic sado-masochistic
glee at the decomposing decadence of it all. Most regard any sense of desperate
urgency as an inexplicable intrusion, or, amongst the Middle Class, an
irritating nag of guilt that makes them write out a cheque to Greenpeace.
No matter what, life must carry on as if ecological collapse is not really
happening, or, if it is, it's just another 'subject' to talk about, like Big
Brother.

Mass flooding and the diversion of the Gulf Stream away from
Europe, both caused by global warming, both causing a collapse of agriculture in
areas where agriculture has thrived for 14,000 years, both with a not unlikely
chance of happening, are predictable possibilities clearly looming on the
horizon.An American climatologist proved that the diversion of the
Gulf Stream had happened over 15,000 years ago through examining bore samples
from the mud bed of the Atlantic. He then combined this with research by a
British scientist in the 1950s who, analysing rock samples in Cumbria,
discovered that the previous Ice Age had taken a mere 10-20 years to develop.
Speculating on a repeat of this scenario due to the decline in salinity in the
Gulf Stream conveyor caused by the melting Arctic ice cap, this climatologist
was awarded a medal by President Clinton himself. Apart from providing this
scientist with a lucrative income, such spectacular recognition means fuck all.
Already at the end of the 70s scientists could measure how much pollution their
pollution-measuring instruments added to the atmosphere whilst they measured the
pollution - clear scientific proof of how wonderfully objective science is.
(2)

Too Much, Too Early

Dominant ideology claims that global warming will begin to
have severe consequences within 50 years. Combined with a serious
"something must be done" tone, such propaganda is designed to reassure
people that something will be done, that long-term concerns will be met
with reforms by those who know best and that there's nothing very immediate to
worry about. The inability of world governments to agree on reductions of
greenhouse gas emissions by even 5% when scientists say reductions of 50% are
quickly necessary to combat global warming only show that the immediate
interests of competition in the global marketplace always override any rational
long-term ecological planning for capitalism. It's even planned that there'll
be a form of Stock Exchange for dealing in the trading of emission reductions
between countries; richer countries will be able to trade off any reductions
allocated them by international agreements to poorer countries so as to carry on
happily polluting. The logic of the commodity, in which everything is reduced to
a quantifiable measurable equivalent, reveals in its movement towards this
perfection its perfect inhumanity. Never mind 50 years, in closer to 5 years
many of us will be seeing the outcome of this insanity. The rich might trade
life on Earth for life on Mars(4) or up Uranus or wherever they fantasise fleeing
to, but unless the logic of trade, of exchange value, of the economy is
destroyed probably most of us shall be destroyed. 50 years? If you'd told
a Jew in 1895 that there'd be an unprecedented quasi-extermination of his race
in 50 years time, even if he'd believed you it would've meant nothing much.
50 years into the future might affect some of us a bit, and would affect most of
our children in their late middle age, but it's sufficiently distant to feel
that it won't be so bad because we'll adapt to it. And many millions are
utterly dominated by an ideology of the here and now for whom focussing on the
past or on the future is meaningless: for them, 50 days is pure abstraction, let
alone 50 years. They have more pressing problems (well, don't we all?). But
the iceberg looming over Titanic Earth is probably very near whilst official
science is looking at it from the wrong end of a telescope. Sure, for some of us
it might just be a slowly rotting decay, but for many one ecological horror
could easily have a domino effect on many others...

Although we have to talk about "the end of science"
we have to be broadly clear about what this means. It certainly doesn't mean a
renewed primitivism without medical knowledge, electricity etc. However it would
have to involve a large reduction in the use of electricity. Even in the
form of wind, wave and solar energy, electricity has a damaging effect on the
earth: one has only to look at the carcinogenic effect of high voltage pylons to
see this (one of the best riots this summer was on the island of Cyprus, where a
large demonstration against the building of a massive phone bugging mast, well
known for causing leukaemia in kids, broke into the British Army compound where
the erection of the mast was planned to take place, attacking security guards
and destroying loads of army vehicles).

Some people say that science and technology is innately
capitalist, like money. We disagree, although obviously it has formed, and is
formed by, capital. But then, so are the buildings, streets and countryside,
which also have to be transformed. One might just as well say that we shouldn't
use fire because fire was invented during humanity's struggle against the
alienation of nature. Money, on the other hand, cannot be transformed - it is only
a means of social control, a way of reducing people to wage slaves etc. Paper
and metal can be used in lots of different ways, but as money it's only
purpose is to serve the economy. A castle can be a defence of feudal power or an
aspect of the tourist industry, but constantly changed by the people who use it
it can also become an area of experiment, a vast adventure playground, a place
to live and discuss and whatever. Technology, like a castle, would no longer be
fixed and fetishised. For us, 'the end of science' means a transcendence of
science whilst retaining what is useful in scientific methodology in the context
of an emerging social movement. Some scientific specialisms like climatology
(especially its history) and some of the many offshoots from astronomy put
together in a scientific inter-disciplinary way could be dynamite if applied in
a greater coherent totality by a social movement ending the capitalist function
and specialist nature of such insights (a couple of million light years away
from that old Trot, Piers Corbyn, who turned his particular insights into the
effects of sunspots on long-term weather into a cool couple of million). There's
no way any present day Anton Pannekoek, for example, could keep their excellent
insights into social contradictions separate from the insights they developed in
their careers as scientists. Pannekoek was a fairly important astronomer, but we
wonder just how many of his fellow astronomers realised he was a significant
social theoretician? Pannekoek's social theorising, in Lenin as Philosopher
for example, does occasionally use astronomical concepts. But his distinction
between bourgeois sensationalist materialism and historical materialism was
essentially a neutralist conception leaving out the realm of praxis - the
notion that man made history but not natural history. Now, though, capital is on
the verge of creating 'natural history' with Jurassic parks,
Frankenstein foods, designer babies, etc.

Capital regularly re-writes social history in its own image
but now it desires to re-write the biological future according to its own
blueprint. Its insatiable desire to re-cast everything in its own image opens up
Capital's new frontiers of conquest: messing with evolutionary characteristics
by genetic engineering is, in a sense, to re-write both our inherited past and
evolving future biological history. Our genetic history will not be what it was.

AAAAAAAAAA
AAGH!!!!!!!!!!!

A sector of Hollywood continually
sells catastrophe back to us, with its endless digitalised graphic presentations
of Earth-crashing asteroids, gigantic floods, colossal fires and deadly
epidemics, etc.(5) Some catastrophists - and we're all catastrophists now -
believe that future disasters may not be solely due to a
rate-of-exploitation-induced global warming but to natural factors: as far as
the Earth's crust is concerned, capitalist factors have so far been
negligible, only triggering minor disturbances, although we should all be aware
of what a nuclear explosion might do one day.

One theory put out in France a decade ago was that the spread
of nuclear power and the decline in deep shaft mining has contributed to
increased seismic activity along the fault lines. Hence the big rise in
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Regardless of the validity of this theory,
it's well-known that the inequality of capital investment causes very
different results for an earthquake in San Francisco than for a similar one in
Turkey or wherever. However, some disasters have little to do with capitalism.
Though it's essential to be sceptical of official ideology pushing the natural
line when it comes to disasters, we shouldn't automatically go the
other way and assume that all disasters are made by capital. Sure,
capital makes the consequences of accidents - and some things are
accidents - far far worse than any possible rational organisation of the world
(one has only to look at how the Turkish Army ripped off loads of the stuff
donated across the world to the earthquake victims).

We have been quite remarkably spared major catastrophes such
as an asteroid crashing into the Earth, which some scientists say is inevitable
in the long term, or the eruption of a giant caldera (volcano) over the last
2000 years or so. An eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands
could collapse a western facing mountain and start a giant Tsunami (a massive
tidal wave) which could spread across the Atlantic causing waves to crash
hundreds of miles inland in certain parts of the North American eastern
seaboard. It's happened before in the immense paradigm of time in geological
history. Happening now, Wall Street would be wiped out, but only geographically,
not as a force. Millions of anti-Americans would probably get off on the whole
thing, happily watching scenes of underwater MacDonalds on the News, but the
outcome will be globally horrific. Revolutionary optimists might wishfully claim
that it'll all provoke a revolution but couldn't the situation be so
desperate that instead of a rationally based, moneyless order emerging, it would
be endless mayhem? Enter stage left - our saviours, the professional
ecologists, shooting down looters like partridges...

But in the end do we indulge in these catastrophic future
hypotheses in order to play the role of Cassandra, making prophecies that no-one
believes...or to somehow prepare for, and harden ourselves against, the worst
(that way we'll never be disappointed)... or just as a perverse form of morbid
entertainment...or as a way of making us feel better in the present just for surviving
and for making us happy it hasn't happened to us yet...or are these crazy
scenarios designed to resign ourselves to sod's law - if it's possible it'll
happen...does knowing about these possibilities make us try to change these
futures...or are we just kidding ourselves that that's what we're doing...or
what?

Whatever happens, the accumulating consequences of more

Chernobyls, more BSEs, more epidemics, more GM "accidents^",(6)
whether consciously recognised or not, dominate the fate of the world and its
inhabitants. Revolution or no revolution, the toxic fallout from this society
will be a feature of life for Earthlings for the foreseeable future.

Even many of those causing this disaster will suffer its consequences, though at
a slower rate than the rest of us. They think they can buy their way out of it
with the very cause of it - with their millions and billions they think they'll
be able to live their dream - make the perfect environment in a space capsule
boldly going forth, finding adventure in infinity and beyond. As for us
Earthlings, we'll probably only get to know the answer to "What planet
are these guys on?" if there's a successful revolution which then
sends them off to Pluto or further.

 

"Humanity is quite willing to be scorned and ridiculed,
but it is quite unwilling to let it be said in explicit terms that it is being
scorned and ridiculed. Violated in fact it finds refuge in mere words"

- Custine, La Russie en 1839.

Already independent science is receiving independent funding
from such independents as the oil and car companies to come up with the
Goebelldeegook that global warming is "natural" in order to get people
to just accept it. Official analysis is already proving beyond a doubt that the
planet has warmed up at these temperatures before, deliberately forgetting that
the 3, 4 or 5 degrees easily attributable to CO2 emissions makes all the
difference.

The very closeness of ecological disaster, the knowledge
of it as a constant possibility, defines this age we live in and the
consciousness and practice of both capitalism and its opposition.

It is our intention here to look at the limits, contradictions and possibilities
of some aspects of this opposition as a means to clarify what's happening and
how to advance it: for ourselves, first of all, and anyone else who finds a use
for it.

*********************

GENOA

Who's getting burnt now?

The eruption in Genoa certainly upped the stakes on both
sides of the hierarchical divide, but the killing was not unexpected: for weeks
the ideology of the G8 and its police and media defenders was designed to get
the mass of spectators to adapt to the idea that killing some of these mad
anarchists would be utterly justified. At Gothenburg the shooting of a
demonstrator in the back was initially treated as a major deviation from
democratic norms, but within the hour, the State had reassured journalists that
it was no big deal and after 36 hours it was already so passé as to be
considered stale news. The virtual denial of the sad 'right' to demonstrate
on May 1^st in the West End here, instigated by Tory Blair and Ken
Livingdeath, was also an upping of the stakes by the powers-that-be, with very
little assertion of angry dignity against such a depressingly boring humiliation
- a few windows broken, a CCTV camera wrecked...(perversely, some anarchists
hailed this caging in as a victory). It was small surprise that Burlesquoni,
with all his media power, would use the slightly cruder methods that a
traditionally murderous semi-fascist police force encourages (in this country,
class deference amongst many of the cops has often put a brake on vicious
attacks on middle class demonstrators, at least since the killing of Blair Peach
in 1979). But the killing of the 23-year old working class anarchist Carlo
Guilliano and the beating up of some very conservative pacifist protestors
sparked off demonstrations outside police stations and, possibly, some strikes,
though media blackouts and State censorship of the Internet make it hard to know
what's really been going on. We know, despite the media attention on
politicos, that the demos against globalisation in Genoa also involved thousands
of Genoan and Italian youth and workers, including a large block of striking
steelworkers. So one can see how much more popular it was than Prague. For
instance, the Stefano steelworks in Brescia came out on strike against "the
ferocious violence of the police" demanding the release of a local
steelworker shop steward arrested in Genoa. However, a lot of the anger after
Genoa was channelled into safe demonstrations as the giant CGIL trade union
federation and the more combative (although very recuperative) COBAS
co-ordinating committees got involved.

VIOLENCE - IN BLACK AND WHITE

"In terms of historical function, there is a difference
between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practised by
the oppressed and the oppressors. In terms of ethics, both forms of violence are
inhuman and evil "” but since when is history made in accordance with ethical
standards? To start applying them at the point where the oppressed rebel against
the oppressors, the have-nots against the haves, is serving the cause of actual
violence by weakening the protest against it." "” Marcuse, "A
Critique of Pure Tolerance",1966.

"If we are able to mobilise all our violence, we might,
perhaps, be able to overcome brutality." "” J. Genet.

Those non-violent activists who are so determined to
"keep it fluffy" on demos and preserve the purity of their peaceful
spectacle that they are willing to denounce and identify troublemakers and
directly or indirectly finger them to the riot cops illustrate the truth of
Marcuse's statement (after Seattle, a section of the Black Block put out an
excellent statement about this and other matters). In a world dominated by the
permanent violence of hierarchical social relationships, the state and capital
rule by the apparent consent of its passive citizens, but when this
"consent" is withdrawn or challenged it is revealed to be founded on
and, when all else fails, ultimately enforced by boots, bullets and batons. But
for the fluffy pacifists the only irreconcilable difference is not between
oppressors and-oppressed. - but between their ideology of. non-violence
and those oppressed who oppose it in practice. And some of them are happy to
help the cops physically enforce this repressive pacifism. Not all of them are
though - some dislike this complicity almost as much as they dislike the
violence of rioters and cops: at least they are consistent in their purity. But
they do nothing about their dislike of this fingering because that could involve
a fight.

Violence is a tactical question and we neither morally
condemn it nor uncritically support it. It has its appropriate and inappropriate
moments.

In the situation of a demonstration violence is often made
possible by the presence of those who remain non-violent. The minority more
capable, confident and inclined towards violence can, when necessary, escape
into the larger non-violent crowd whose presence and occupation of space makes
police manoeuvres more difficult. This was the case with some of the Reclaim the
Streets demos in London, at least up until 2000. In Genoa this didn't work
because the cops just laid into fluffies and spikeys indiscriminately.

It has become the dominant ideology amongst the
respectable 'opposition' to claim that the attack on the Genoa Social Forum proves that
the State fears the pacifists more than the anarchists. Some claim that the
police stood by and watched the anarchists wreck shops and residents' cars and
did nothing. Whilst this may well be true of one incident, everyone knows that
the cops and the black block had been attacking each other Thursday and Friday,
with the technological equipped and armoured cops inflicting far worse than they
got, of course. And the cops had been beating up people well before the
particularly sadistic attack on the Genoa Social Forum. Moreover, not all those
who stayed the night at the GSF were pacifists. Also, as is well known, the guy
who got killed was from the black block, so it's a lie to say that the
pacifists got a worse beating than the non-pacifists. But why let the
facts get in the way of a good ideology? In fact, the
pacifists are just competing for martyrdom with the anarchists (doubtless we
shall see in the near future some of these Statist 'pacifists', particularly
a few of the famous ones, trying to gain some credibility by getting nicked over
some act of so very civil disobedience). If anything the lesson of this is that
it doesn't matter what tactics you employ, the cops and the State are still
your enemy and see you as theirs'. Undoubtedly peaceful tactics also work in
certain situations, like the destruction of GM crops. But to make an ideology
out of tactics usually means you end up as a cop - at least you police your own
thought, feelings and behaviour with a detached moral superiority to the obvious
fact that none of us are above the shit.

The presentation of the conflict between violent and
non-violent action is epitomised in support for the nice people in white (Ya
Basta!) against those nasty people in black (the black block). But the
subversive truth against such a religious vision is beyond good and evil. If we
had to simply "take sides" we'd be with the black block, because
they at least made sides in this conflict, unlike the vast majority of
demonstrators who were mostly merely numbers or victims or make their money as
professional ecologists, NGOs or whatever. It was them who had the courage to make
history. However, taking sides changes nothing: it's only by
looking at some of the contradictions in all the sides in this movement
that one can contribute to everyone going beyond the ideological sectarianism or
its false opposite - phoney consensus, that's such a barrier to dialogue
within this movement.

YA BASTARDS

What about our heroes in white, "Ya Basta[rds]!"?(7)
Significantly they have strong connections with the Refoundation Communists,
particularly local councillors, but also MPs, the ones who are performing their
phoney opposition in Parliament. Indeed, these connections protect them from any
attacks by local cops. And apparently some of their set-piece
confrontations have been rehearsed in the weeks before demos with these local
cops (it was the national cops who were drafted into Genoa who administered the
beatings). It is a strictly hierarchical Organisation (well, what Organisation
isn't, regardless of any non-hierarchical pretensions?), running on
semi-military lines, composed of leaders and followers, all competing for fame
and complements from the respectable 'opposition'. The Middle Class may
praise Ya Basta! for not returning the blows of the cops but these moral
pretensions are virtually the only reward for such abject masochism.
Nevertheless, there are occasions when some of their tactics have worked - for
instance, the Wombles, who imitate Ya Basta!, managed to get through the police
cage on May 1^st, Oxford Circus, using their padded costumes.

But what about our anti-heroes in black - the black block?
An amorphous bunch, no doubt, made up of anyone who was up for a fight,
including flag-waving Maoists. This is not intended as a criticism of the black
block as a whole: any riot, strike or occupation will involve people with a wide
variety of ideological stances. In the late 60s the Situationist International
praised workers' sabotage of industry and were aggressively dismissive of
Maoists. Yet some of these same worker-saboteurs were also Maoists. Whilst the
S.I. was certainly right to criticise Maoism, it doesn't help if criticism of
an ideology implies a dismissive attitude to everything the holder of the
ideology does, although the stupidity of an ideology will undermine any movement
towards sabotaging capitalist social relations.

Doubtless there were also some police infiltrators in the
black block, but then they infiltrated all the main political groups, and
nobody would say the pacifists were agent provocateurs (but maybe they are...?).
But then the reconstructed Stalinists, the main accusers of the anarcho-agent
provocateurs line have merely reconstructed their well-rehearsed traditional
slanders about any movements outside of their control. As for the accusations,
usually by the angels of Ya Basta!, that the black block look a bit grim and
gothic, this is about as relevant as complaining that the Good Guys look like
Michelin men. Though it looks like a uniform, the logic is that if everyone who
wants to fight wears black then it makes it a lot harder for particular
individuals to be picked out from CCTV afterwards, which in Britain at least, is
how the cops get most of their arrests. Demo fashion statements have little to
do with it. Sadly, so far, we haven't seen a Trojan horse version of these
demo styles: people dressed in Michelin men gear, rushing into a phone booth and
changing into Blackblockman, but who knows what you could do once you start
thinking about it?

Exclusively focussing on violence, however, can blind some
anarchists to other, possibly more appropriate, tactics. As far as we
know, there was no large occupation of a building in Genoa other than those
permitted by the council which could have served as a centre of discussion not
just about the obvious aspects of globalisation but about all the different
problems faced by most people: the education factories, the increasing misery of
work, the worsening stupidity of culture, the cramped housing conditions, the
claustrophobia of the family, the collapse of community, the tedium of shopping
and all the other horrors with which the economy sucks the life out of us. But
then activists too often think that everything's been said, talk is cheap and only
violent confrontation speaks louder than words. Some undoubtedly thrive off the
negative publicity they get, and a few even have a kind of symbiotic
relationship with the media they rightly hate - posing on top of a wrecked
car, seeing the media response as the event, their link to history. Whilst it's
good that they physically attack the professional liars of the media, the
contradiction is that some of them really love getting their picture in the
paper.

And the media really get off on the story even as they spout
out horror shock at the rioters and moan about how powerful they are because it's
their fault -"If only we hadn't given them the oxygen of publicity"

as some Guardian hack scrawled echoing Thatcher's desire to censor the IRA
(thus planting a subliminal message - "All anti-State violence is the
same"). And then he has the arrogance to start hand-wringing about
"no-one wants censorship"...This at a time when there's been virtual
silence about the uprising in Algeria. Whilst seeming to battle censorship, the
liberal press spontaneously censors whatever doesn't fit their excuse for
producing a newspaper in the first place - supply and demand ideology.

Equally, despite an apparent critique of Leninism,
a few of
the black block have a vanguardist notion of themselves - hoping to invisibly
direct the movement. The full-time activist substitutes him/herself as the
radical subject in place of the proletarian in struggle. They are the authority
on struggle. That's why there's a lot of hierarchical activist bullying, and
manipulative emotional blackmail to "go on the demo", as if demos are
the main terrain of struggle. But they have only come to seem so because of the
marginalisation of workplace and neighbourhood-based struggle over the last
decade. For dominant ideology, the anti-capitalist activist has become a
simplified caricature of what it means to oppose this society, which ignores the
struggle of the precariously dispossessed - within the activist themselves
first of all and in the struggle of the working class and the peasantry globally
- as the more central movement threatening the ruling class (hence, for
instance, the virtual blackouts about the uprising now going on in Algeria and
the strikewave in Argentina).

Some of the worst of the anti-globalisation ideologies is
that globalisation means giving up the power of the local democratic state, as
if the State hasn't always been a function of the market economy (see Do or
Die! no.8). Blair, as a result of Genoa, is rapidly getting the leaders of
South American and African countries to sign up to the glories of globalisation,
because it'll make their class and its control of the nation-State very
wealthy and powerful, though a few Leftists will excuse them "because they
have no choice". Liberal-Lefties hailed the defeat of the multinational
drug companies by the South African state in a court ruling as a great victory
for the progressive independence of the nation State. The victory was hailed as
a victory for AIDS sufferers in S.Africa, who would now have cheap access to
government subsidised drugs. The spin was that this kind of modern social
democracy could honestly affirm its independence from the
multi-national-dominated world market. What was not given so much publicity was
the fact that a few weeks later the S.African government decided to spend the
money saved and their freedom to lower prices not on anti-AIDS drugs, but on
drugs for other less debilitating illnesses. AIDS victims are just going to have
to work fucking hard to get those expensive drugs (and most won't make it)
regardless of the apparently benevolent potential of the State. This is the
logic of market relations whether local or international - to insure an ever
worsening hierarchy of misery as a prod to work harder. Unless they produce
surplus value, AIDS sufferers are surplus to requirements.

Tony Benn is one of the more famous representatives of this
dominant pro-democratic nation state tendency. After Genoa he said, with
stunning originality, "In Britain, we have to channel some of the energy
that now goes into protest back into the ballot box". Doubtless he
hopes that this could be the same kind of energy that he was Minister of back in
the late 1970s, when he armed the Atomic Energy Authority and, like Thatcher
after him, shut down loads of coal pits because they were "uneconomic"
(people's memories are so short that, just 5 years after losing his
ministerial position, he was welcomed into the struggle of the miners against
pit closures). However, after June 2001's lowest election turnout in the UK
ever (1918 doesn't compare - there were loads of soldiers waiting on the
Continent to be demobbed, not to mention women under 25, who couldn't vote)
one would have expected a subtler reference to bourgeois democracy (there is no
automatic reason for optimism in this low turnout: the USA has, for a long time,
had elections where under 50% of those entitled to vote haven't, but this has
not meant a corresponding increase in class struggle). Given the intensified
conditioning being meted out to the young in the form of "citizenship"

classes in schools and nauseating propaganda like that, Benn's reflex verbiage
about ballot boxes shows him to be as reactionary as Blunkett or Estelle Morris.
The ideology of spreading this kind of democracy is merely an ideology of
democracy of form. Submissive to the utterly undemocratic content of the
commodity economy, it's a largely unrealisable capitalist utopia, involving
voting for your own Police Authority, your own boss, your own concentration camp
commander. Whilst we seek a social movement which is anti-hierarchical and
inclusive as possible and which may when appropriate use such democratic forms
as voting and revocable delegation subject to immediate recall by those who
delegate them, yet we do not uphold what is currently called 'democracy' as
any sacred principle or ultimate goal. That would be to fall into the same trap
as the Green scene's stifling consensus obsession that we criticise in this
text. It's the content of this struggle that will determine whether
voting and delegation extends the collective power of individuals or ties them
ideologically even closer to the complexities of the commodity form. The
fetishisation of organisational forms which makes a measurable equivalence of
each persons vote, but which reduces that person to a mere number, is the mirror
image of the commodity form.

If people accept this pro-nation State point of view it's
not merely that they have the wrong ideas. In most cases, if they don't wish
to develop a critique of politics and of the economy it's
because of what it means practically as well. It would mean giving up on
the gang mentality which is the basis of the nation state; giving up on some
hope in some external authority, hope in some hierarchy or another. It would
mean questioning their scene, their milieu, their party, the whole notion of,
and identification with, 'country' (the nation, the party, the milieu, the
family, which appear most protective of the individual are, like all protection
rackets, in fact, the most debilitating for individuals). It would mean saying
what you liked and disliked, what you liked, wanted and hated, and being
consequential about it. It would mean recognising your isolation in these very
different collectivities and the differences in your points of view and
struggling to communicate this with neither one-up-manship nor giving in to the
apparently most articulate.

There's no business like no business

In the discussions which followed Genoa and earlier
anti-globalisation riots many, particularly the Middle Class, claimed that the
wrecking of small businesses was an expression of uncontrolled stupid anger.
MacDonalds and Starbucks, ok - but "small is beautiful, man". But if
small businesses are not our main enemy, they are still part of the world
of business which is. Many of the multinational businesses which are the
critical targets of much of the professional ideologists of this movement,
started off small. Size is unimportant: it's what you do with it that counts.
Support for small business is not just support for exploitation on a small
scale, but also support for a method of surviving utterly determined by the
alien economy. Someone who still has as an ideal a nice commodity economy
will always despise the good reasons for attacking all the immediate
representations of the commodity, however relatively petty. A market trader
writes: "I'd be pissed off if a riot through my workplace destroyed my
stall, but I'd be so overjoyed to see my workplace wrecked that such economic
realism would be reduced to an "oh well" shrug of the shoulder".
Riots outside of the strict activist definition of political protest always
attack the shops, and there were some good examples of proletarian shopping in
Genoa, and not just by activists. Some people feel annoyed by it, and
undoubtedly some of the shop owners are ok people forced to do this stupid work
by the collapse of the traditional mass workplaces or whatever; equally, some
are rich and some are mean petit-bourgeois morons. To only have politically
correct "political" targets ignores over 200 years of working class
riots. Likewise, in setting up barricades, it's kind of obvious that it won't
just be Mercedes and Rolls Royces that get trashed, but those who can afford to
be aloof from the reality of confrontation invariably display their outraged
disapproval at the rioters apparent lack of discrimination. In Paris in May '68
nobody was worried that their car got used as a barricade: "what is a
broken car to a broken skull?" one car owner said.

Until we transform social spaces currently occupied by the
logic of business into places of "public dialogue" then trashing them
is the next best thing. Until we take over buildings, neighbourhoods, shops,
restaurants, theatres, factories, offices, schools, parks, determining our lives
directly, non-hierarchically, without external authority, rioting and looting
will remain the most ready-to-hand assertion of our collective power.

Waiting for Monbiot

"By contrast to the hundreds of thousands of people who,
like me, spent their working lives making polite representations, [Carlo
Giulliani] was acknowledged by the eight men closeted in the ducal palace...all
those of us who lead moderately comfortable lives tend occasionally to forget
that confrontation is an essential prerequisite for change."- George
Monbiot, The Guardian, 24/7/01.

If Monbiot is treated with an inordinate respect by some
sections of the anti-globalisation movement it's because he is capable of
digging up many a revealing fact - after all, it's part of his
well-paid job. Those whose working lives involve being paid to
make "polite representations" to the scum in power and who "lead
moderately comfortable lives" have good reason to forget, and not just
occasionally, that confrontation is an essential part of change (and not just a
prerequisite for it): after all, they have yet to be confronted with the
sickening nature of their self-satisfied role, their niche in the spectacle of
opposition. Monbiot's tactic here is to acknowledge or pre-empt a possible
criticism in order to avoid recognising how his material position effects
everything he says and doing something based on that recognition. He's a
little apologetic about being Middle Class but only to clever cleverly show his
Middle Class contempt for hooligans and vandals and violent anarchists, which,
however aesthetically dressed up, is the same as the cliché of the
powers-that-be: "Mindless Violence!" Up to the defeats of the 80s,
when the liberal-Leftist Middle Class were possessed by an almost overwhelming
sense of guilt about their position, a guilt brought about courtesy of an
intransigent insurgent working class, someone like Monbiot wouldn't have dared
show such Middle Class contempt. But Monbiot is very much a semi-idiotic product
of the crushing defeat of the working class and its libertarian allies
(squatting, etc.) and the conservative reaction we are still unbearably living
through. Whilst in the 80s some of the Middle Class felt pressured into
justifying proletarian violence as an understandable reaction to the attacks of
the State, nowadays, for the Middle Class, violence is always mindless unless it
is informed by their minds. For those who have no desire to get to the
roots of anything, 'intelligent' anger always has to be hierarchically
organised and respectful of their 'intelligence'. For them, this is the
essence of order, regardless of the disorder it imposes on the vast
majority. On the other hand, independently expressed anger is always, by

definition, 'uncontrolled' because it is uncontrollable.(8)

Monbiot is a total dumb fuck compared with more suss
recuperators like the more internationally famous Canadian, Naomi Klein. After
all, in No Logo she praises the June 18^th '99 rampage
through the City of London, along with the '97 battle in Trafalgar Square, as
inspirational jumping off points for a more combative anti-globalisation
movement than previously experienced. Unlike Monbiot, she carefully doesn't
condemn such violence (despite her partner being a right-on TV current affairs
commentator). Though she gets off on appreciating the salutary effects of such
violence - if only on grabbing media headlines - it's doubtful she's
ever gone near to caving in a Starbuck's coffeehouse window. We should be as
wary of this operator as of Monbiot, because, plain-as-day, the stab in the back
will surely come.

Later in his article on Genoa, Monbiot quotes
enthusiastically from an 18^th century British government law which
said that the state could dismantle any commercial enterprise "tending
to the common grievance, prejudice and inconvenience of His Majesty's
subjects". I'm sure the millions of workers who were the victims of
one of the more overtly brutal developments in British history - the forcing
off the land, the growth of the 14 hour day, the extraction of absolute surplus
value - would have been well consoled by Her Majesty's governments' fine
words of concern for their grievances and inconveniences. A believer in the Good
State is also a believer in words and polite representations: on paper
everything can be made to look good. Although he says at the end of his article

"Words alone are not enough" that means something very
different coming from someone who can justify the 18^th century
British State than from someone who realises that writing a text is not enough.
It's a classic leftist myth, based in his own political aspirations, to hail
the idea of the Good State. But there's never been any example of a State
which didn't have the blood of the poor on its hands. Not one - from
Cuba, to Lenin's Russia to Atlee's Britain to Roosevelt's America. In
fact, most of Monbiots State-oriented prescriptions read like a litany of
hapless, pie-in-the-sky offerings, always missing the point.Underlying
Monbiot's perspective, shared by all sorts of professional ecologists, is a
kind of newly painted on Keynsian social democracy.

Keynes' project, put simply, was to curtail the power of
private capital, which he rightly associated with constant economic crises such
as the Depression and thus also curtail the consequent proletarian struggles in
response to these crises threatening the very existence of capital. He proposed
massive State intervention in, and regulation of, a more consumer-led industry
alongside the massive extension of the Welfare State, policies which influenced all
the main political parties at the end of World War II. But the margin of freedom
such an acknowledgement of working class needs provided gave people the space to
fight for far more in conditions of relative affluence, threatening in the late
60s and 70s to destroy the power of capital itself. The right-wing criticism of
Keynesianism was "Give them an inch and the bastard's will take a
mile" and has involved the clawing back of this inch of freedom to the
suffocating narrowness we have now. We've come full circle: the dominant
ideology of anti-globalisation is little different from the position of Keynes
in the 1930s.

Keynes, at the end of his life, was an extremely disappointed
man knowing that unless his model was applied world-wide, and with it, bringing
into existence the universal currency of the gencor, it would fail.
American banks together with the strong British banks, and the far shakier banks
of the other Western allies, created the IMF and circumvented his proposals. The
way then was prepared long ago for the rapacious domination of Anglo-American
finance capital. Keynes wanted to preserve exchange but destroy speculative
currency dealings by replacing them with trade flows unlike today when the
former massively outweighs the latter. Is there any reason not to believe
that Keynsianism couldn't make a comeback? The economically too reductive
ultra-leftists will tend to deterministically dismiss such a possibility, yet a
global ecological Keynsian State, the ideal being pushed forward by those who
want to save us, could become the dominant perspective if, once again, capital
is threatened by all sorts of revolts amidst environmental chaos. Sure, it won't
be the nicey State the idealistic ideologues like to present it as. Whilst the
need for money exists it'll be more like the creation of a military-style
world ecological pseudo-Keynsian ultra-authoritarian State. It will police the
planet by mass slaughter induced both economically and by force of arms,
justifying itself by its ability to save the world, blaming the mass slaughter
on the inheritance from the Free Market epoch, always promising progress and
improvement and still defending the mechanisms of a cleverly media-presented
capitalist exploitation reducing life to mere survival as never ever before.

The basis of this New Economy arising from the
ashes will
partly be the development of clean productive forces. Already sections of
capital are beginning to invest in ways of circumventing Suicide Capitalism. For
example, developing the clean car which runs on water by separating and
extracting the hydrogen in the water, or cars run on compressed air. It'll
still be a car - gobbling up our immediate geographical space everywhere,
preventing us playing and communicating in the streets. How many ecologists will
be bought off with the carrot of that reward? History tells us how easy it is to
buy people off.(9) Inevitably people are going to partly welcome the building, say,
of a hydrogen-based power station, once the problem of hydrogen storage has been
solved, curing minor carbon emissions. That way, "come the revolution"

(as we used to say) we won't have to dismantle the whole thing like we would a
nuclear power station. And Yet It Moves mentions how some Maoist workers
took over an experimental nuclear power plant during the Portuguese revolution
in 1975. Not knowing what to do with the plant they surrendered it shortly
afterwards. This incident certainly forces practical reflection upon us. After
all, you couldn't sabotage the installation nor simply close it down like that
without also running terrible risks - closing it down would require specialist
knowledge. Neither though could you maintain its functioning. This was the real
dilemma for these innovative and courageous workers, their Maoism
notwithstanding - a dilemma which is as poignant today as nearly 30 years ago.


Genoa follows a direct line of anti-globalisation protests
which exploded in Seattle in 1999, then led to confrontations in Davros, Prague,
Gothenburg and a few other places. The best piece on The Battle of Seattle is
available at:
Break Their Haughty Power (Loren Goldner's website) though there's an
excellent eye-witness account by Jeffrey St.Clair in the November 1999 edition
of the normally crap New Left Review, entitled Seattle Diary: It's a Gas,
Gas, Gas. What happened in Seattle was clearly influenced by the trashing of
the City of London on June 18^th 1999, initiated by Reclaim the
Streets and others. After this, some of those preparing for the Seattle
conflict, said, "We wanna do what you guys did on June 18^th".
However, it was not just the strengths of RTS that are appearing in these
massive protests, but also some of their weaknesses. To change the future we
need to look a bit at the strengths and weaknesses of the past.

                                                              
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Reclaim The Streets

RTS and the wider eco-protest/direct action movement is
directly linked to earlier direct action and mass occupation movements "” the
squatting, eco and peace movements and free festivals of the 60s and 70s, as
well as the general libertarian current of that era. It. also has similarities
with the 19th century Romantic movement in its criticisms of how capitalism's
technological advances are destructive of both the environment and social
relationships, as well as echoing some of its moralism and idealism.

But perhaps its closest historical relative is the
anti-nuclear/peace/CND movement of the 5Os/6Os and 70s. Both share a concern
with issues that could determine the ultimate fate of humanity; and as a
consequence both movements have been broad coalitions, cross class rainbow
alliances of humanistic concern.

Yet these earlier movements usually existed in periods of
regular mass working class struggle, in dramatic contrast to the present vacuum.
RTS and co have emerged in a very different social climate "” the earlier
period of the 60s/70s being a post-war high point of class struggle, while the
present period is the miserable result of the defeat of that struggle, with
working-class confidence and combativity in the UK at its lowest ebb in living
memory (and longer).

But while the left have criticised RTS and co. for the limits
and deficiencies of its politics, lack of class perspective, its largely middle
class composition etc "” it's nevertheless true that RTS, in
responding to a request from striking Liverpool dockers to organise a joint
action against their bosses, immediately achieved more links and co-ordination
with "workers in struggle" than all the Left put together could have
imagined in their wildest wet dreams. (Paper selling just does not
compare).

RTS's/Critical Mass's link up with striking tube workers
was also a good practical example of making connections, however limited. "It
was great rushing up the stairs of the London Transport offices, occupying the
directors' room, reading through their books, cracking jokes, the security
guard jumping up onto the window sill arms outstretched to prevent what he
imagined would be a would-be martyr amongst us who would have been prepared to
throw themselves out for the cause, the laughter that greeted him, the
conversations, the authorities pissed off... these things make us feel good -
sure, a moment is not a movement but it's a good buzz, a fond
memory."

Also to the envy of the left, RTS and co. have organised
several explicitly "anti-capitalist" demos in central London in
co-ordination with other similar international events. Thousands have attended
these events, disrupted and attacked capitalist institutions, bringing riot and
disruption to the commercial centres and Whitehall. (We will deal further on
with the thornier question of the content and effectiveness of these actions and
some common shortcomings in the definitions arid understanding of what
capitalism is.)

The eco-protest scene appears to have emerged more or less
independently of the left wing and anarchist political arena, and is all the
healthier for it, by and large escaping the senile theoretical and practical
rigidity of the Left. But clinging to one 's strengths and achievements can
become a weakness and obstacle in time, and with RTS and co., innovation appears
to be becoming orthodoxy.

The eco-direct action movement is largely a coalition of
various single issue groups many of whom have gone beyond single issues; plus,
more recently, entryists from various Leninist and anarchist factions who, in
typically arrogant fashion, mostly see their role as delivering the necessary
ideological and/or organisational leadership to an activist scene that lacks it,
with the possibility of recruiting a few new members to their shrinking
political groups.

align="middle">

RTS in Camden

"The first RTS street party was along Camden High
Street at Camden Lock, on a warm Sunday in 1995. Working there, it brightened up
my day - great to see the road blocked, the carnival atmosphere was original
then, though Camden has long tried to have a carnival atmosphere on Sundays and
had kind of already succeeded insofar as carnival and business are not
incompatible, but this was good because there were no cars. Sure shoppers every
Sunday manage to slow down traffic enormously, anyway, which was why they
probably chose the site because there was already a crowd of potential
partygoers...Two cars had been theatrically crashed together, having been towed
there already, and kids were wrecking what remained of them...And then you'd
see these Mother Earth worshippers doing weird prayers and singing and generally
adding to the circus atmosphere, the freak show...And there was this guy, a
stallholder who sells coffee and doughnuts riding around on his little bike
beaming...the guy's a fairly traditional young petty bourgeois - whilst he
was having fun as part of the RTS party, his employees were providing him with
the means to a fairly good livelihood...Some shopkeepers said "This is bad
for business", whilst others said "No, it's good for business"

and I thought, "Who really gives a toss?"...And there were mates of
mine - their kids smashing up the crashed cars in front of the (alternative)
cameras...Later, at the end of the day, 7p.m., I had to pack up and load up the
car with my stock. So I take my car round and find they're still picketing the
crossroads, sitting down across the street. A couple of friends look embarrassed
when I drive up. The crowd is fairly hostile. The cops want to wave me through,
so I switch off the engine. The crowd cheers. I get out and explain I need the
car because I need money - abolish the economy and money and we can abolish
the car...or something like that, not that articulate...I explain, rather
demagogically, that if I drive round, which is twenty times longer, then I'll
pollute the environment a lot more than if I just drive over the bridge...With
the engine off, they agree to give me a push the fifty yards I have to go.. As
we move off a camera and microphone come through the window - "How does
it feel to have the first Green car" a woman asks. "It's not green,
it's yellow", I hilariously quipped ho ho. They push the car off with
some of them sitting on the bonnet, a funny event. I feel happy. A politico, a
comrade, on the other side of the bridge, not having really seen what had gone
on, virtually accused me of scabbing, of having broken the picket line, thus
slightly upsetting an otherwise merry situation. Despite this, the feeling of
connecting in this friendly way really perked me up just before I had to shift,
lift, load, transport, and finally unload and stack up a van full of heavy boxes...
A couple of years later an RTS video was shown on Channel 4 at 3 o'clock in
the morning and there I was, with my car, talking about money and so on. To me I
looked like a pratt - TV always makes everyone look like a pratt, but others
thought I was ok....I'll have to get myself a manager...I felt I should have
demanded royalties from the Italian guy who made it, but apparently he sold it
to Channel 4 and gave the money to Amnesty - it'll look good on his CV...."

While this film student was making his film about RTS he was
confronted in an RTS squat by an outsider about his motives. He was rightly
accused of just using the struggle to further his budding film career and
turning the struggle into a commodity (one can imagine the sales pitch he gave
Channel 4 about how in touch with youth culture, and what an authentic voice of
it, he was). The crowd of RTS activists present were surprised that someone
should be so directly challenged, implying that this was not quite appropriate
behaviour - and they listened to the argument in a passive and neutral way, as
if it was merely a little entertainment and very much external to them, despite
the fact that it should have been them, rather than an outsider,
challenging the opportunist creep. Later, those whose voices had been used on
the soundtrack meekly gave him the signed permission he needed for use of their
speech, despite many of them being pissed off that he was giving the proceeds to
the pathetically liberal Amnesty: Amnesty won't support prisoners who have
used violence in their struggles and yet has as one of its leading lights Judge
Hoffmann, a Law Lord who regularly turns down appeals by West Indian prisoners
against the death sentence. There was no public debate in RTS about all this -
due partly to a lack of critique of the media and refusal to confront
contradiction in order to maintain the almighty consensus.

The ideal of consensus is an important principle in the
decision-making processes used by organisers and activists in the DIY scene. Yet
because of the nature of the events organised, such as street parties, and the
security needed to successfully pull them off, they are inevitably organised in
detail by small secret groups - so while consensus operates at one level in open
meetings etc at another higher level of crucial decision making it is dispensed
with in favour of conspiratorial groups. This form of organising is determined
by what is being organised - i.e. the kind of event that requires
clandestine planning in order to outwit the intense police surveillance directed
at the targeted inner circle of organisers.

 

In the original, first printing of this text, there was a
critique of one of the significant RTS organisers. We include the original as a
footnote. Since this was first published we've heard that this guy does not
support the ideology of ethical investment. Certainly at the beginning of 1999
he did: one of us heard him arguing with a friend about it, with him saying that
RTS didn't have a party line on it, and that an advocate of it should come
along to an anti-capitalist meeting preparing for June 18^th.
Certainly people change, and we must obviously accept that this guy is now
against such bullshit. Also, we took the Evening Standard's account of his
accounts at face value: a bad mistake. We should have tried to check. We also
got it wrong about RTS propaganda supporting this ethical investment ideology;
certainly leaflets advocating ethical investment were around RTS meetings in
1999, though we have been informed that RTS never put their name to them.
Unqualified apologies for getting it wrong.

 

The "consensus" that appears as a noble conviction
or principle also functions as a means of maintaining the fragile alliance of
this broad church of activism; the minimum agreements reached by consensus are
the limits beyond which the coalition would start to fragment; more fundamental
differences tend to be repressed for the sake of unity - a unity based on the
lowest common denominator. This kind of ecological alliance seems to be
reproduced globally. For example, Rene Riesel describes the Confederation de
Paysan (the French small farmers federation); it "gathers
together socialists, hippies, repentant lefties, Greens - a rather paradoxical
circle of ideas that works through consensus so as to present a united front,
with all sorts of tendencies which cohabit without ever going to the bitter end
of discussions..."

Who is this guy, Riesel? An ex-member of the Situationist
International, who played a significant part in the May '68 movement, now a
sheep-farming peasant, Riesel got nicked, with a couple of others, destroying a
granary-full of GMO grain simply by drenching the stuff with water. He received
a year inside suspended for 5 years. Subsequent sabotage increased the suspended
sentence by another year. Having been close to Jose Bove, he broke with him
partly over his moronic wallowing in media fame, partly over his social
democratic Statist outlook, partly over the fact that he moves in quite
obnoxious circles - even being courted by the French National Front, without
him rejecting these flattering come-ons in the slightest: he's even been
photographed shaking hands with Pasqua, the former Minister of the Interior who
makes Michael Howard, Jack Straw or David Blunkett look like liberals. Bove gets
his credibility from the careful dismantling of a MacDonalds, for which
he'd got prior approval from sections of the Socialist Party-run State, and
sections of the police. Thousands have attacked MacDonalds(10)
before and after him,
but he gets a name for himself because the attack was done with a polite nod to
and from the powers that be. Clearly he is being used to bolster French capital
against American capital. Isn't this the political future? - European capital
increasingly in conflict with American capital using the
anti-globalisation/ecology movements as their socially concerned image in this
power battle. Blair has yet to go along with this because of the hangover of the
special relationship, but in the future recessions and crises no relationship is
special.

However, with the greatest respect to Riesel for continuing
to fight with such generally lucid intransigence, we don't entirely agree with
Riesel's stance,. After his initial and mostly excellent "interview"

book (Declaration sur L'Agriculture Transgenique et Ceux Qui Pretendent S'y
Opposer) with the Encyclopaedie des Nuisances he too, like Bove,
gives media interviews - in, for example, Liberation and the right-wing Ecologist magazine run by the reactionary, Teddy Goldsmith,
whose deep
ecology led him to support the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia for their destruction of
industry and the push into the countryside. Brother of the late Jimmy Goldsmith
of U.K. Independence Party fame, he supports a return to pre-industrial values,
such as primitive religion (pantheism etc.), defends feudalism and serfdom, and
maintains a continuous dialogue with various eco-fascists. Though the content of
Riesel's interviews is far more radical and profound than Bove's, such a
complicity reinforces an ideology of free speech without consequences, of
dialogue with the ruling world, which undermines his intransigence. Contrary to
the normal world of obnoxious control freakery-cum-editing, practiced often as
much by revolutionary autonomists as by the straight media, it might well
be that in the case of Riesel he's ensured that they don't alter one word of
what he's saying. Nevertheless it gives credence to these bankrupt ideological
outfits. But maybe the guy just doesn't have time to make a written text by
himself because farming demands a daily hard graft...we don't know. Though he
imagines that this gets his ideas across to a wider audience, Riesel has
forgotten that the media's seductive methods of co-opting rebellion weakens
and softens whatever radical perspective he tries to convey, making him a victim
of his star status: it isolates him with an aura of personal radicality rather
than encourages others to equally daring risks; the audience remains an
audience. The media is a pleasantly lit window onto the dominant world that
constantly entices you in, and into a polite dialogue with it round the
apparently warm hearth of spectacular recognition. But refusing all that cynical
shit is the only way to have some margin of dignity, some sense of self-worth
and honesty, and some degree of clarity. If you want to be able to look yourself
in the mirror and not lie to yourself, then just say fuck off to all that
flattering crap.

A symptom of the repressive consensus of RTS is the cliched
content of most of the anti-globalisation propaganda. For instance - Evading
Standards, Financial Crimes or the Monopoly glossy brochure for May 1^st

are just different forms of theorising-by-numbers. They're almost exclusively
re-written stuff most of which has been around for donkeys years and is always
written as a message for others. The problem with all this stuff is that
the authors think that their revolt is complete and that it's just a question
of getting others to rebel. An approximate agreement with a lowest common
denominator critique stops people developing their precise point of view, their
differences, as if doing things with other people necessarily involves shutting
up about these differences. When they write, it's not to discover - there's
just no spirit of questioning and self-questioning. In all their texts
supporting this or that struggle there's never any attempt to look at some
dialectic between what they want and what these struggles express - the
struggles are always seen as some direct action which somehow connects up to a
global movement because in some vague way they challenge the system. But the
contradictions are completely glossed over.

VIVA ZAPATA! - ABAJO MARCOS!

The obvious contradiction glossed over in the anti-glabalisation
movement is the virtually uncritical eulogising, sometimes masked as positive
theorising, of the Zapatistas., when it's been known for 5 years at least that
Marcos and co. are another protection racket, more all-embracing than most. Take
what an Australian woman said of the '96 encuentros: "... the women
doing all the cooking and cleaning, including of toilets, invariably without any
footwear (the men had the boots), even after heavy rainfall...Harry Cleaver said
"Well, maybe they like it..."...the workshops organised like a
bourgeois University - compartmentalised into separate categories like 'Indigenous
Culture', 'Politics', 'Economics' etc....the impossibility of
questioning anything openly in the meetings..." She then went on to
describe how, when Marcos gave the red carpet treatment to a French journalist
who'd just recently slagged off and lied about a wave of strikes in the public
sector, a total bourgeois whom Marcos welcomed into his open arms and treated
with far greater respect than the vast majority of the French contingent (who,
for example, were forced along with lots of others, to endure, without shade, a
2 or 3 hour wait in the scorching shadeless midday sun), the French contingent,
the biggest contingent there, revolted a little, and presented Marcos with a
letter objecting to this complicity, an insult to the movement in France. A
meeting was arranged to discuss this in the middle of the forest at night, in
the pouring rain. After some wait, Marcos rode up on horseback with his
entourage and, giving a monologue lecture, withdrew the letter from his coat and
proceeded to contemptuously read it in a dull monotone (a crude contrast with
his normal dramatic poetic style) to the gathering below him, at the end
throwing the drenched letter into the mud below, saying "Well, politics
forces us sometimes to meet with our enemies", which says how little this
movement embodies a critique of politics. . At least one of the French
critics was woken up in the middle of the night, ordered out of his tent and was
confronted by a few armed Zapatistas, who abused him verbally for his lack of
submissive respect for his hosts. Coupled with Marcos' star treatment of
Mme.Mitterand, an even worse bourgeois scum, this seriously dented the illusions
of the less ideological participants in the French contingent In retrospect, one
suspects the armed battles in San Christobal de las Casas in January '94 were
in fact bargaining ploys in this political perspective (sacrilege!). Doubtless a
future brutal attack by the Mexican State against the population of Chiapas will
rejuvenate flagging international support for Marcos and co., and one might feel
fury and horror at such a possible brutal development, but the form and content of this
nationalist struggle has nothing in common with any independent anti-State
activity.

Contradictions of the Assembly
Form
(not in original text)

  
The Zapatistas are hailed by the anarchists and other ideologists of the
assembly form for their non-hierarchical form of decision-making. They see what
they want to see. The genuine desire for mutual self-determination latches onto
a form of organising which is certainly necessary in many circumstances but
which usually doesn't go far enough in its refusal of external authority. It
ignores the fact that the assembly form has, throughout history, been more than
just occasionally compatible with capitalist progress. For example, in Maoist
China (the inspiration for the Mexican fore-runners of the Zapatistas, dating
from the 70s and 80s) mass self-management within each local commune helped to
develop State capital. Significantly, the self- management of local production
and distribution was carried out by collective 'non-hierarchical'
decision-making but within an externally-defined framework whereby the national
comprehension and organisation of this production and distribution was the
exclusive, and secret, terrain of the Party (however, some of
these projects, such as 'The Great Leap Forward' , were so weirdly
ideological that they hardly helped develop State capital, or, for that matter,
anything else apart from an atmosphere of utter fatalism). Mao had his central
committee, his distant Zapatista heirs have the secret circle of Indian chiefs.
Open Democracy for the Masses - Secret Dictatorship for the Elite - the cry,
in different forms, of the ruling class everywhere. Politics, like commodity
production, is so precious that it should always be attended by a bodyguard of
secrets. The defenders of the Zapatistas claim that they are not opportunists,
that they have integrity, that they're not Leninist - as if many Bolsheviks
before they came to power in 1917 didn't also have integrity and took enormous
risks. The point is not that vanguardist manipulators can be defined as purely
cynical opportunists (unlike those in Power) but that the logic and practical
form of "democracy" allows people to be manipulated - it's mostly
based on the resignation of individuals to the limit of externally defined
notions of acceptability, to what everyone else says and does. Usually it
involves resignation to those who specialise in taking the initiative and to the
experts who can put their nebulous feelings into words. The experts in making
speeches only express the lowest common denominator of the mass of individuals
at the assembly: the different nuances of autonomous self-expression in struggle
never get a word in. Especially because of the fear of being ostracised or made
fun of, of being humiliated for daring to criticise those who command hierarchical
respect. Manipulation falls on the fertile ground of everyone's anxiety of
being "incorrect", of making their own mistakes; it falls on the
fertile ground of the gang mentality, the corruption of the desire for
community.

However,
the critique of the assembly form can go too much the other way, dismissing mass
decision-making in favour of the 'clarity' of the communist minority. This
is the typical line of the Bordigists, for example. That Bordiga, apparently
till the end of his life, supported the crushing of the Kronstadt commune is
illustrative of how intellectual, abstract and elitist this notion of the 'correct'
minority is. Whilst every struggle may have a minority of people who are clearer
about the necessary aims of the movement these perspectives have to be argued
openly, and a movement should be judged on its practical progress towards these
aims, a process over time, not on its failure to spontaneously launch an assault
on the totality of commodity relations from the moment of the insurrection, a
magical absolutist fantasy that has little practical meaning: an ideology of
conversion to an ahistorical truth. Conveniently, the critique of this
'totality' of commodity relations that this intellectual perspective
involves excludes a critique of the specialists in consciousness. So much for an
assault on the totality. Moreover, it's just as destructive of subversive
initiative to submit to the dictatorship of the minority as it is to submit to
the dictatorship of the majority.

RTS as a crowd-puller

In RTS the repression of contradiction also functions as a
crowd-puller - as maximum numbers are needed to attend street parties for them
to take the site and hold the ground, the publicity and some content is
deliberately tailored to appeal to as broad a constituency as possible. To take
just one example - whilst the majority of RTS can't stand Techno-music
(whose main advantage over other forms of music commodities is that it doesn't
bother to pretend to express anything life-loving, emotional or
passionate) they knew that having loads of Techno-sound systems would draw in
the thousands of punters from the Rave scene. But most of these people don't
even have the limited notion of struggle that RTS have. In a rare attempt to get
away from the fixation on Central London as a venue for street parties and
demos, one of the RTS events was held in High Street, Tottenham (summer 1998) in
an attempt to reach out to the workers. However, the crusties and others from
the rave scene had no desire to connect to the local 'community' and some
proceeded to cover the garden walls and bus shelters with meaningless graffiti
advertising their little bands, record labels and fanzines, urinating without
permission in the neighbourhood gardens, whilst chucking loads of litter into
them. RTS, to its credit, felt obliged to issue a leaflet apologising, and
organised a clear-up of the gardens etc.

"The best moment of the Tottenham Street Party was not
in Tottenham, but was the spontaneous occupation of Euston Road before it, with
drummers and kids dancing across the road blocking it for over an hour.
Otherwise, despite, the good-spirited child-friendly set up of spontaneous
sand-pits and play areas across the road and the novelty of a picnic in the
middle of what is normally a heavily polluted utterly weary area, after a while
these lost their novelty and I felt I was just left with the alienation of a
routine party where you half-know a few people but never find anything really to
talk about.except say 'Hi!'...and where I was constantly distracted by
little entertaining circus-type scenes leaving me feeling kind of empty..."


"The victories
of art seem bought by the loss of character.""”
Marx, 1856.

 

The RTS events always have a sense of performance and theatre
about them. For some activists this is a chance to embody their political
ideology as they display their exotic dress sense and more ethical and
environmentally sound lifestyle as a fine example to the rest of society. (These
choices that are felt to be so important as self-definitions are lifestyle and
consumer choices - bikes over cars, veg over meat, small over large etc.).


But there is the tension of contradiction within the display
of costumery on show. On the one hand, dressing up in carnivalesque gear is a
coded message to the cops that you are a fluffy, non-violent , non-threatening
participator and so should be treated as such: but with a commitment to
non-violence one tends to reduce one's options to symbolic and
representational acts. ln the context of a demo, a fluffy dress sense
is both an assertion of a "radical" life-style as a theatrical role
and also a submission to the role of citizen exercising your democratic right to
protest as a symbolic presence rather than an active subject. (But this
theatrical passivity can be turned on its head, as at the M4 street party in
July 1996, when a giant woman on stilts with an enormous tent-like dress was
used to conceal someone with a road drill beneath her skirts who dug holes in
the tarmac).

But while the DIY movement is a partial break with
conventional politics and its representatives it nevertheless still shares some
of its outlooks: we have to try to understand the relationship between the
political activists and the rest of society or, as some see it, between
the actors and the spectators.

With the present mood being one of general apathy towards
organised conventional politics, we may see a continued growth of eco-DIY
politics; probably up until the point where the social question of class
struggle and power is once again raised (after a long absence) by working class
combativity on a large scale. For the eco-scene the question will then confront
them as to what their relationship to a class movement is to be. The more
reformist elements who see class struggle as only an outdated struggle for job
security within the existing polluting forms of industry (ignoring the
contradictory possibilities of the proletariats situation) may continue to cling
to an increasingly irrelevant high moral ground of an exemplary lifestyle and
consumption whilst, looking down their noses at the meat-eating, car-driving
workers. (Others may become born again leftists and be just as irrelevant).

Others will be part of the real movement and contribute what
they can from their own situation and perspective.

For the moment, the eco scene lacks any real critique of
politics and culture as categories of separation and representation that must be
gone beyond. Alternative politics and culture imply instead a co-existence with
what one is being an alternative to; one determines the DIY content of these
categories without transcending them. Whilst some of them accuse people who are
violent against the State as using the enemies weapons, they feel fine about
using the enemies weapons when they take a cultural form. For example, in their
ambiguity towards the media, whilst creating their own media, one can see the
tolerance for the role of cultural critic, of specialists in creating a nice 'creative'
image for "the movement", as if the world of images wasn't our
enemy. Whilst many in this scene absolutely oppose anything but the barest
minimum contact sometimes necessary with the media, they have yet to seriously
question those who are somehow into that "exploiting the media" shit.
This is linked to the misunderstanding of capitalism as something external in
the form of banks, multinationals etc rather than a social relationship between
people that dominates and colonises us all.

This simplistic populist notion of capitalism is linked in
some way to how the Middle Class, who formulate these notions, relate to their
work. Much more than proletarians, the Middle Class tend to have a need to
pursue self-fulfilment, dignity and meaning in their work and for it to be seen
to have intrinsic social importance, for it to appear to be more than just wage
labour done out of economic necessity. To generalise - maybe over-generalise -
workers tend to struggle about what capital does to them in their lives (riots,
strikes over conditions, wages, rent etc.) while the Middle Class tend to assert
their power by protest about more external issues of capitalism's practice (it's
inefficiency, unfairness and destructiveness, consumer issues, etc). To give an
illustration that's been pointed out before: proposals for a campaign of
collective resistance against the introduction of the New Deal/Workfare for dole
claimants were met with total lack of interest by RTS and other eco activists:
despite the fact that many were claimants who would face the increased hassle
and many road protests and other activism had been largely financed by the dole.
Obviously this would appear less heroic, noble, glamorous, high profile and sexy
than protesting to save the planet and convince others to adopt this
role. This is linked to a Middle Class aversion to being seen to have to combine
to defend one's direct economic needs. It would mean giving up the self-image
of altruism, the self-righteousness that comes from having a moral cause, linked
to a proud notion of standing on your own two feet.

This lack of a critique of capitalism as a set of social
relations, this idea of capital as being just "out there" has been
stated by innumerable people, some of whom have been involved in RTS. But many
have merely substituted the "theoretician" role as a reaction to the
activist role, thus reproducing the very hierarchical social relations they
claim to have criticised: wherever there is a division of theory and practice
the division of labour dominates. It's a symptom of this petrified
counter-revolutionary epoch that saying this is a billion times easier than
doing something about it.

AUTHORS' HEALTH WARNING: What follows is a fairly abstract
ramble, with fairly concrete implications, much of which will be of interest to
fairly few people, yet which needs to be said.

 

THE TWILIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS

or How to Theorise with a Comfy Cushion

The theoretician role is as problematic as the activist role
- and writing this doesn't exempt us from recognising not just its
limitations but how "theory" which doesn't contain its own critique
can become something separate from the struggle to practically overcome
these limitations, can become just another "here is the Truth -on your
knees before it" type monologue.

This theorist role is particularly debilitating in the
attitudes of some ultra-leftists to the glaring absence in dominant ecological
ideology of a critique of political economy, which leads them to arrogantly
dismiss the anti-globalisation/ecology movements because of its dominant trends.
They ignore or too easily dismiss the fact that the best of the ecologists are
transcending ecology using their experience and ecological critique as an
utterly valuable and necessary contribution to the critique of political
economy.

This ignorance is defended by an ideology of progress
inherited from Marx and Hegel from a time when the ideology of science and
progress, particularly in its battle with religion, blood ties and superstition,
was far less problematic than it is now. With the fallout from capitalist
progress threatening the very existence of humanity, it's pig ignorantly
abstract and glib to come out with, "Revolutionary politics are based on
taking advantage of the progressive dynamism of capital against its reactionary
side, in order to explode capital's contradiction" (George Forrestier, "Wrong Direction: On Reclaiming a
One-Way Street", the
longest, and worst, article in "Reflections on June 18").
If this suffocatingly arrogant article were the only attempt of political
economy to deal with ecological/anti-globalisation issues it would be small
wonder if many ecologists preferred the simplistic formulae of, say, John Zerzan's
"Future Primitive".(11)

Zerzan provides, for those who don't want to think for
themselves, a semi-religious 'answer' to our present plight; but just as he
has idealised, and lied about, pre-class societies dominated by an inhuman
nature as some kind of Garden of Eden, so his Future Primitive built on the
graveyard of half the world's population is more likely to be some kind of Mad
Max each-against-all scramble for survival than the wonderful wild world freed
from the chains of technology that is his utopia. The hypocrisy of his position
is blatant: technology has to be smashed but it's fine to regularly broadcast
his message on American radio and even sometimes TV. This is not the same kind
of contradiction, forced on all of us, as, say, the desire to abolish money and
yet having to use it in this society: a spectacular use of technology has
to be opposed even by those who can recognise that there might be some
use for TV and radio (as technology but not in its monologuing form and
ideological content) as a mediation for genuine global communication in the
possible post-revolutionary society. A pretty good dismantling of much of Zerzan's
"facts" is provided in the text by En Attendant, "John
Zerzan and The Primitive Confusion" (B.M.Chronos, London WCIN 3XX), which
is, nevertheless, over-rationalist and has a very French take on the American
hippies. To be sure, when the hippy counter-culture was exported to France, it
was largely just another cultural commodity, but this was far less the case in
other countries, especially Britain and Germany, where it also really did have
some edge. And in the States, more than anywhere else, it expressed a genuine
critique - e.g. in its attack on the work ethic and on money (taking, for
example, the form of Free Stores, where people could donate anything they didn't
want and/or take anything they did want in a non-exchange relationship).

In opposition to Zerzan's simplistic primitivism,
it's
worth pointing out that absolutist ultra-Leftists going completely the other
way, tend to dismiss ecology entirely as having nothing to do with social
revolution. For all their belief in the autonomy of the proletariat, the theory
of most of these Marxian autonomists is not autonomous, not developed from a
dialectic of their own struggles and a critical expropriation of the struggles
of The Good And The Great, not developed from their own point of view but is
much more like the very unautonomous old style CP theoreticians who used to ask
themselves, "What would Marx have thought in this situation?".

In fact, much of the petrified reductionism of the critics of
political economy stems from weaknesses in their Grand Master, Marx himself.
Marx, despite his contribution to a marvellously hateful summary of Capital's
workings, was notoriously limited by his Hegelian notion of historical progress
when it came, for example, to a comprehension of the Luddites, whom he dismissed
as being opposed to capitalist progress (which Zerzan himself rightly criticised
during a far less ideological period of his life - in the 1970s, when he also
wrote an excellently informed piece, The Practical Marx, on just how
bourgeois Marx's everyday life was)). What's the point in having a
great insight into the general workings of commodity fetishism if your notion of
progress prevents you from connecting to a practical movement to subvert the
miserable use of this progress, however limited and backward-looking its
consciousness? Marx shared one thing in common with Hegel: the alarming view
that mankind was progressively dominating nature, reducing nature to a
"social category". In their day it was understandable, especially
seeing that geology was still in its infancy, though now it has become
inexcusable. Although Hegel on nature is in other respects fascinating, his
general outline that human activity has modified nature would also be fine if it
wasn't so domineeringly triumphalist. Take, for example, Hegel's note to one
of his 1805-6 lectures: "...wind, mighty river, mighty ocean,
subjugated, cultivated. No point in exchanging compliments with it - puerile
sentimentalities which cling to individualities". A page of exclamation
marks would not be sufficient to register our collective shock. Two hundred
years later we know the "mighty ocean" currents of the Atlantic
and Pacific are far more likely to subjugate us and we are only beginning to
appreciate the catastrophic consequences (it's ironic that the philosopher of
historical progress attributes to science powers that were laughably attributed
to a King - Canute - over 800 years previously).(12) Let's face it: the
scientific-technological utter transformation of the world has always
been partly counter-revolutionary, even if it presented unprecedented
revolutionary possibilities.. Whilst its demystifying force was in some ways
progressive in the 19^th century ("God is dead"), it's the
tautological role of the intellectual to put a top-heavy overemphasis on the
progress of this kind of practically detached consciousness. And from religion
to science has not been progressive in a simplistically positive way.

"Scientific" consciousness, the fetishism of science and technology,
becomes even more a brutal justification for class power than religion, the
fetishism of the omnipotent & omniscient. Sure, Marx was far more
experimental intellectually than those who reified the bits of him they liked
(the bits that fitted into their own hierarchical ambitions) into an ideology of
scientific progress which was the intellectual justification for the most brutal
history of capital accumulation ever (Stalin's Russia). But it's the
tendency to a one-sided stress on "consciousness", product of the
division of labour and of the struggle to realise and suppress philosophy, that
makes some of Marx's viewpoints authoritarian and bourgeois. Marx didn't
seriously try to turn this bit of Hegel on its head: capitalist technology and
science is only potentially progressive in the hands of the
proletariat using technology outside and against any commodity uses of it,
outside and against its production as an alien force subject to property laws
and the law of value. Capital was meant to be progressive in this sense - in
centring history on human beings it provided a far clearer material base for the
potential conscious determination of history by humanity than was possible in,
say, Spartacus' time. But only as underlying potential was it 'progressive',
not as a reality, which is why our abstract critics of political economy are
useless when coming to deal with real situations (just as Marx most of the time
had relatively little to say, often skirting over problems because of political
expedience, when it came to those moments of class struggle when this potential

transcendence manifested itself practically).(13)Although it can be said that both
Hegel and Marx marked an advance on romanticism there was also a common
connecting thread between them in the sense that all of them wanted to change
the present situation (against all commonly held beliefs, romanticism wasn't
passive at all in relation to nature but wanted to work on nature too but only
in great sympathy with it).

Many of those who have a critique of political economy link
up with ecological movements mainly on the basis of playing the teacher role -
"Here is the theory which fills the gaps", as if a critique of
political economy is something you 'have' and can patronisingly impart.
There is in these encounters, and in their apparent fluidity, the beginnings of
some real attempt to go beyond an ecological critique and to go beyond merely
'having' a critique of political economy, but in the way each side contains
a partially true critique of the other the dialogue becomes merely a swapping of
monologues - neither side really want to be influenced by or to seriously
influence the other. And yet, if people seriously want to win, or at least get
further, such an influence could spark off fresh insights and initiatives coming
from an inspiring acquaintance with each others separations...Practically, this
might take the form of thinking of ways to support the next Post Office strikes or
the next fuel protests or....?(14)However, when theory is above such a movement its only
function is as some prestigious mediation between people who think that they
somehow carry the consciousness of the class struggle. They think they
embody as a milieu the struggle to transcend the contradictions of this epoch
more than anyone else who rebels in ways that don't fit into some

"theory". The theoretician tends to subtly push people who make a
theoretical contribution into playing the theorist role, to insist on 'theory'
as the central mediation in their communication. In fact, the contradictions of
this milieu, of which some of us are to a certain extent a part, are merely a
different version of the contradictions everybody else lives. The theoretician
role is as much a symptom of the retreat from the critique of daily life as the
activist role, both being symptoms of the enormous defeats of the class struggle
- and a resignation to these defeats, and to a specialism, by those who don't
want to admit it. Saying this doesn't mean we're above the contradictions of
our epoch but by understanding them, which means trying to change them, we can
contribute to a movement that will do far more than just talk and write and
participate in one-off actions.

One could ramble on a lot more but let's just leave it at
this:

The comfortable specialised roles of activist, theorist,
media representative become, at the end of the day, accommodations within
capitalism. It is not enough to occupy the bourgeois terrain - we have to
abolish and go beyond it.

Capt. Pugwash, Tom the Cabin Boy, Seaman Staines & the
rest of the crew of The Black Pig,

9th September 2001

 

 

P.S. As the date shows, this was completed two days before
the kamikaze destruction of the twin towers and part of the Pentagon.
A draft of a leaflet followed the original. This has now been put amongst more appropriate texts, namely the site page
"Kamikaze Kapitalism".

FOOTNOTES

[1a]We're living in a world that a
former
revolutionary compared to "those Walt Disney cartoon
characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without
seeing it: the power of their imagination keeps them suspended
in mid-air, but as soon as they look down,and see where they
are, they fall." Now more than ever. Ecological collapse
isn't the only abyss constantly there on the edge of everyone's daily
life, but it's one of the most fundamental nowadays.(Phoenix note not in original).


[1b] One of the best
incidents at an RTS event was, famously, the punk makeover of the
genocidal
Winston Churchill (May 2000), his statue graffitied, which was later made into a
great sticker under which was written: "THIS WAS HIS FINEST HOUR". One
of his lesser known contributions to being "Britain's greatest Prime
Minister" (Ken Livingdeath) was his deliberate mass starvation of the
Bengalis during World War II. When Churchill requisitioned the Bengalis boats,
essential for the distribution of rice, Earl Mountbatten made arrangements for
10% of the space on his battleships to be put aside for rice distribution.
Churchill promptly withdrew 10% of Mountbatten's battleships. 3 million died. "They'll
reproduce themselves soon enough", Churchill was meant to have said.
With the possibility of 3 billion or more dying in the future apocalypse,
today's Malthusians hope the reproduction process will be far slower.

Phoenix note, not in original: When W.C.
(who as Home Secretary before World War I had ordered the
killing of Tonypandy striking miners) died in 1965, his death was celebrated throughout South Wales.

 [3] One of the best critiques of the history of science in English and its
present day totalitarian application is Phil Mailer's And Yet It Moves.(Phoenix note: It is available on the

revolt against an age of plenty site).
Although little read (oblivion and silent censorship today nearly always
surround real critique) it far surpasses those liberal left critiques like
Stephen Jay Gould's etc. Now updated by Campo Abierto in Spain this text is,
however, insufficiently forceful, insufficiently urgent and insufficiently
updated from when it was first published in the mid-80s: it's rather bland and
lacking edge.

[4] Amazingly, scientists are already doing research into how to make Mars
fertile and habitable, by producing greenhouse gases on it to increase the
temperature.

[5] Post September 11 footnote: The terrorist attack on the twin towers has
caused a terrible disaster....for Hollywood: "real life" has surpassed
the endless catastrophe movies, previously seen as unrealistic, so this sector
is no longer profitable - for the moment at least.Phoenix note (not in original): Spielberg has rectified this in his crass "War of the Worlds"
movie, which very obviously evokes 9/11, complete with happy ending - the defeat of the alien baddies. Another recent Hollywood movie - The Day After Tomorrow
- depicts ecological catastrophe but in such a ridiculously over-dramatised way (events which would take a few years to develop
happen over a few days) that it somehow trivialises the ecological horror creeping up on us, since it comes over as so unbelievable.
This is not an appeal
for 'realistic' catastrophe movies - apart from the fact that movies almost invariably reinforce passivity, the ideology of catastrophe
tends to breed a petrified fatalism.

[6] "When asked, the P.M. said the Blairs eat organic. 'But that doesn't
mean other food is unsafe.', he asserted." - News of the World Sunday
Magazine, 19/3/00. (All food served in the Houses of Parliament is now organic).

[7] See Do or Die! no.9 for an excellent article on them in
Prague.


[8] As Do or Die!
has pointed out, the demonstrations/street parties are
mostly organised by the Middle Class, but most of those arrested have
been
Working Class. Do or Die! often has some of the best articles about
what's going on, but also has a lot of Lefty articles supporting Left-wing
would-be capital, which doubtless make some of the Do or Die!ists cringe and
squirm, but these differences never become explicit.Phoenix Note (not in original): We distributed this text at the end of September
2001
including copies to Do Or Die, a couple of whom we knew personally a bit. Normally, Do Or Die mention
everything that writes about Reclaim The Streets, ultra-critical or ultra-supportive. Our text wasn't even mentioned. We suspect
that because it didn't fit under any easy pro- or anti- catagorisation that they effectively censored it, and clearly didn't want anyone to read it.

[9] A woman round RTS was really excited by the proposed transformation of parts
of Camden High St. into a walkway, hailing it as a great victory. It seemed to
escape her notice that these shopping areas are horribly alienated spaces
utterly devoid of the spirit of experimental play that children used to treat
the streets with. See "The Freedom Of The Street" in our articles by Jack Common

[10] " MacDonalds Today - IKEA
tomorrow!"

[11]  Though far less pretentious, another article which tends
to dismiss
RTS etc. out of hand is the Brighton-based "Undercurrent",
which after June 18th came out with the conclusion, "...in its
present
form, the direct action movement is going nowhere". Considering
what
has happened in the couple of years leading to Genoa disproves this.
Whilst we
agree with much of their criticisms of the written ideas of the direct
action
movement, it seems ridiculous to judge these actions almost purely on
the least
significant part of them - their "theory". Such Marxists - sorry,
Marxians - have forgotten the excellent anti-ideological perspective of the
young Marx - "This does not mean that we shall confront the world and
proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall
develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world.
We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide
you with the true campaign slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why
it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether
it wishes or not." (Letter to Ruge, September 1843). Equally, when Marx
says, "Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about
himself, so one cannot judge such an epoch of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from
the contradictions of material life..." this can also be applied to
Capital's real or apparent opposition - and to those who judge them.
Forrestier's, and to a lesser degree, Undercurrents', essentially intellectual
and ideological relationship to the real movement only exposes the material
basis of such ideological roles - i.e. the academic environment of the
University. (To be fair, Undercurrents have revised their views of this movement
and have produced useful material on other subjects.) Forrestier's attitude
particularly is not to engage with, but, rather, to dismiss from on high those
who don't possess the correct usage of marxist categories/terminology: so proud
is he of his own little 'correct' marxist
repertoire.

 
[12] Interestingly, a little later the beginnings of ecological critique began
to be formulated by individuals as disparate as Thoreau in America and Ruskin in
England. Apart from Reclus (an anarchist geographer), the 19th century
revolutionary movement took no account of this critique. Despite Ruskin's
obnoxious proposals desiring an ultra-authoritarian and statist rule by an all
powerful, personally hand-picked intelligentsia, he nonetheless correctly
intuited that the new iron and steel industry situated on the west Cumbrian
plain was altering the climate of the Lake District, a link-up that earlier
romantics like Wordsworth, Southey and de Quincey just couldn't
make.     

 13 This is certainly not to affirm
some abstract pseudo-critique of the notion of progress which is
post-modernism's revelry in meaninglessness - a lifeless relativism which, like
the commodity form itself, makes everything - all histories and societies -
interchangeably equivalent. The progress of alienation, the progress of the
potential of the struggle against it, the progress of the immensity of our tasks
are realities that can't be philosophised out of existence. But to be simply
positive about such progress is to be deaf, dumb and blind.

[14] It's to RTS's credit that it gave some positive reference to the fuel
protests in their paper at the time of Prague, particularly so considering the
moralistic contempt coming from most ecologists, and the equally arrogant
dismissal of these "petit-bourgeois" coming from much of the
ultra-leftist critics of political economy. But Prague was occupying their
thoughts and arrangements so much that they never considered connecting to this
movement which had created the first national crisis since Poll Tax. See Looks
As Though We've Got Ourselves A Convoy - on the September - November 2000
fuel protests, in this section of the site (Class Struggle Histories). 

NOTE: We distributed this at the end of September 2001
including copies to Do Or Die, a couple of whom we knew personally a bit. We were told that it would be reviewed in the
next issue,
but in the end it wasn't even mentioned that it was available. We don't know why they effectively censored it,
perhaps because it raised questions they didn't want to deal with.