The first embedded protest
Live 8 and G8 are attempts to hijack justice campaigns
Kay Summer and Adam Jones
Saturday June 18, 2005
The Guardian
Shortly after Bob Geldof called for a million people to converge in
Edinburgh for the
opening day of the G8 summit, Midge Ure, the co-organiser of Live 8,
was asked if he was
worried about the events being hijacked by anarchists. His response was
that Live 8 was,
in fact, hijacking the anarchists' event. There is more than a little
truth in this statement.
What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that Blair and Brown,
in turn, are trying to
do something similar with the Live 8 and Make Poverty History
campaigns.
The spin surrounding the summit is beginning to appear as little more
than a cynical
attempt to buy off a section of what is commonly called the "global
justice" or "anti-
capitalist" movement by feigning serious engagement with some of its
core issues: global
poverty and ecological crisis.
This is the first G8 summit in the UK since the battle of Seattle, an
event which brought the
contemporary anti-capitalist movement into the spotlight and succeeded
in breaking both
the "there is no alternative" spell of neoliberalism and the "one size
fits all" dogma that
had plagued the old left.
This was a leaderless movement that began to talk about building
diverse communities of
self-determination, direct democracy and ecological sustainability.
They declared:
"Another world is possible." A world, of course, free of poverty, but
also one free of the
G8, whose raison d'etre, after all, is to manage a system that
prioritises the pursuit of
private profit over people and planet. In other words, they talked
about a world without
capitalism.
Blair and Brown do not want a repeat of Seattle, or Genoa, or any of
the other summits that
have been accompanied by mass acts of disobedience. They want a
stage-managed,
benign spectacle, and so they play along with Live 8 and Make Poverty
History, creating
the world's first "embedded" mass protest.
Blair's wearing of the Make Poverty History wristband and Brown's
presentation of a
modest new debt-relief programme (one, we might add, with stringent
conditions
attached) were carefully manipulated spectacles designed to obscure the
fact that the G8's
policies are at the very core of the world's problems.
While the coming together of hundreds of thousands of people for the
Make Poverty
History and Live 8 events certainly should be understood as a genuine
expression of
human solidarity, if we are serious about wanting to change the way in
which the world
works it is essential that we do not make poverty of history in
attempting to do so.
In other words, we need to ask ourselves: who have, historically, been
the agents of
change? And, importantly, who has the ability to change the way in
which the world works
today? The answer, of course, is not Bob and Bono. But neither is it
Blair and Brown. It's
ordinary, everyday people. It's us. It's you.
Those who have the power to not only make poverty history but to make
history itself are
the same as they always have been: ordinary people who do extraordinary
things.
The contemporary anti-capitalist movement, born in the tear-gas-filled
streets of Seattle,
belongs to an ongoing history of struggle: the Haymarket martyrs who
fought and died for
an eight-hour working day; the anti-fascist fighters of the Spanish
civil war; South African
townships refusing to pay extortionate water bills; the ecological
direct activists who
resisted the UK road-building programme of the 1990s; the workers of
occupied factories
in Argentina; the Skye islanders who reclaimed their right to free
movement; the
indigenous of Bolivia fighting the privatisation of natural resources.
History is made by
people who refuse to play by the rules, who refuse to politely ask for
the powerful to
throw them a few crumbs.
If on July 6, when the summit opens, the multitude who converge on
Edinburgh decide not
to play their allocated role in power's spectacle but to join together
with those from
around the world taking direct action by blockading the summit, while
demonstrating real
alternatives to the way in which we currently live, then perhaps
history will have made one
of those leaps that happen only a few times in a generation - a leap
that restores our faith
in our own power to change things.
· Adam Jones is from Brighton Dissent! Kay Summer is from The Common
Place Social
Centre, in Leeds; both are involved with the Dissent! Network,
promoting radical resistance
to the 2005 G8 Summit
www.dissent.org.uk
Live 8 and G8 are attempts to hijack justice campaigns
Kay Summer and Adam Jones
Saturday June 18, 2005
The Guardian
Shortly after Bob Geldof called for a million people to converge in
Edinburgh for the
opening day of the G8 summit, Midge Ure, the co-organiser of Live 8,
was asked if he was
worried about the events being hijacked by anarchists. His response was
that Live 8 was,
in fact, hijacking the anarchists' event. There is more than a little
truth in this statement.
What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that Blair and Brown,
in turn, are trying to
do something similar with the Live 8 and Make Poverty History
campaigns.
The spin surrounding the summit is beginning to appear as little more
than a cynical
attempt to buy off a section of what is commonly called the "global
justice" or "anti-
capitalist" movement by feigning serious engagement with some of its
core issues: global
poverty and ecological crisis.
This is the first G8 summit in the UK since the battle of Seattle, an
event which brought the
contemporary anti-capitalist movement into the spotlight and succeeded
in breaking both
the "there is no alternative" spell of neoliberalism and the "one size
fits all" dogma that
had plagued the old left.
This was a leaderless movement that began to talk about building
diverse communities of
self-determination, direct democracy and ecological sustainability.
They declared:
"Another world is possible." A world, of course, free of poverty, but
also one free of the
G8, whose raison d'etre, after all, is to manage a system that
prioritises the pursuit of
private profit over people and planet. In other words, they talked
about a world without
capitalism.
Blair and Brown do not want a repeat of Seattle, or Genoa, or any of
the other summits that
have been accompanied by mass acts of disobedience. They want a
stage-managed,
benign spectacle, and so they play along with Live 8 and Make Poverty
History, creating
the world's first "embedded" mass protest.
Blair's wearing of the Make Poverty History wristband and Brown's
presentation of a
modest new debt-relief programme (one, we might add, with stringent
conditions
attached) were carefully manipulated spectacles designed to obscure the
fact that the G8's
policies are at the very core of the world's problems.
While the coming together of hundreds of thousands of people for the
Make Poverty
History and Live 8 events certainly should be understood as a genuine
expression of
human solidarity, if we are serious about wanting to change the way in
which the world
works it is essential that we do not make poverty of history in
attempting to do so.
In other words, we need to ask ourselves: who have, historically, been
the agents of
change? And, importantly, who has the ability to change the way in
which the world works
today? The answer, of course, is not Bob and Bono. But neither is it
Blair and Brown. It's
ordinary, everyday people. It's us. It's you.
Those who have the power to not only make poverty history but to make
history itself are
the same as they always have been: ordinary people who do extraordinary
things.
The contemporary anti-capitalist movement, born in the tear-gas-filled
streets of Seattle,
belongs to an ongoing history of struggle: the Haymarket martyrs who
fought and died for
an eight-hour working day; the anti-fascist fighters of the Spanish
civil war; South African
townships refusing to pay extortionate water bills; the ecological
direct activists who
resisted the UK road-building programme of the 1990s; the workers of
occupied factories
in Argentina; the Skye islanders who reclaimed their right to free
movement; the
indigenous of Bolivia fighting the privatisation of natural resources.
History is made by
people who refuse to play by the rules, who refuse to politely ask for
the powerful to
throw them a few crumbs.
If on July 6, when the summit opens, the multitude who converge on
Edinburgh decide not
to play their allocated role in power's spectacle but to join together
with those from
around the world taking direct action by blockading the summit, while
demonstrating real
alternatives to the way in which we currently live, then perhaps
history will have made one
of those leaps that happen only a few times in a generation - a leap
that restores our faith
in our own power to change things.
· Adam Jones is from Brighton Dissent! Kay Summer is from The Common
Place Social
Centre, in Leeds; both are involved with the Dissent! Network,
promoting radical resistance
to the 2005 G8 Summit
www.dissent.org.uk
