This article has been written for the Italian anarchist monthly “Invece” (“Instead of”) in April 2011, aiming to offer a view about some episodes – despite the vast nature of the theme – which happened during the last years which have contributed to the revival of the debate concerning the funeral march of the German military machine and not only. Episodes which are linked together through a red (and black) thread: that show that today like yesterday it remains possible to be sand in the cogs of militarism.

On how a repressive coup can be transformed into counter-attack…

In July 2007 three comrades have been arrested. Oliver, Axel and Florian are brutally stopped by police special forces units in Brandenburg/Havel, near Berlin, just after they left some incendiary devices under some trucks which belonged to the German army. Since a long time there had been an investigation mounting against them – and four other comrades, from which one is going to get arrested on the same day – conducted by the federal criminal police (BKA) : all of them have been accused of membership within the “Militant Group” (MG), a clandestine formation which had been active since 2001 mostly in Berlin and which has carried out a couple of dozen incendiary attacks against symbols of repression (courts and police) and capitalist exploitation (different kind of enterprises).

Disclaimer:

This piece, while approaching many topics which might be of interest for any reflections by anarchists, autonomous people and other social rebels, is still very oriented towards the German context. Therefore, you reader, will find a few things which might sound awkward to you, if not being aware on the German situation, but I still hope that this will not necessarily create a divide, intolerance or simply make you bored.

“Between the joy and the frustration of being trapped within a known play of theatre: a few notes following the G8 summit in Germany and its repercussions”.

In a world saturated with capital’s antagonisms, a politics based exclusively on openness and affirmation is bound to fail. But The Free Association suggests that attempting to found our practice on antagonism brings its own set of problems…

Mildred: What’re you rebelling against, Johnny? Johnny: Whaddya got?

The Wild One (1953)

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice in Wonderland

Uncomfortable collaborations in blocking the G8

By Shannon Walsh

“I have no fear of any sentence that you may pass on me, while
protesting nevertheless with energy against this substitution of
violence for justice, for this frees me in the future of any
inhibition against repaying the law with force”. Defense speech of
Louis-August Blanqui before the Court of Assizes, 1832

The blockading of the G8 in Heiligendamm Germany at the beginning of
June revealed once again the enormous flood of opposition, and counter
worlds, that continue to grow in the face of global capitalism.
Rostock, the coastal town closest to the cloistered meeting, was a
blossoming of strategies, movements, and individuals swarming below
dozens of police helicopters. The protest was a grand expose of the
many cracks against, within, and beyond capitalism.

Click here to download the pamphlet cover and click here for the guts of the PDF File.

Interventions # 1

first appeared in Issue 6 of Upping the Anti: a Journal of Theory and Action.

The G8 is more than a place where neoliberal trade agreements are authored. It is also a space where the legitimacy of global governance is reproduced. In 2005, 300,000 people took to the streets in Edinburgh to ask the G8 for a solution to poverty. By 2007, antagonism and dissent prevailed once again. We are entering a period that could mark the resurgence of positive dynamics from the earlier phase of global uprisings. But have we learned from the past? Can we build our interventions on new and more stable ground?

These are the questions that guide the following roundtable discussion with Hanne Jobst (Germany), Saby & Go (Japan), Miranda (Italy), and Jaggi Singh (Canada). The participants highlight the necessity of rooting global insurgency in everyday struggles and consider whether the global circulation of struggles is enabled by continuous networks or events like summit protests.

Kriss Sol is an Amsterdam-based activist researcher. He has been involved in summit protests and local organizing around global issues for several years.

This text in japanese

The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.

This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.

I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initial propositions here:

film, 2008

Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, 40 min.

“What Would It Mean To Win?” was filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. In their first collaborative film Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler focus on the current state of the counter-globalisation movement in a project which grows out of both artists’ preoccupation with globalisation and its discontents. The film, which combines documentary footage, interviews, and animation sequences, is structured around three questions pertinent to the movement: Who are we? What is our power? What would it mean to win?

Negotiating speech and organizational practices: field notes and reflections from two counter-G8 (2007) initiatives.

Based on empirical research around two events that happened in response to the G8 meetings in Germany in summer 2007, this paper examines relations between the organizational practice and the discourses that set up and guided both these events. One of them was a meticulously coordinated blockade action ("Block G8") close to Heiligendamm, and the other a theory-inspired "summit" calling initiatives to unalign from the education agenda of the G8. While the "Block G8" was an action with a clearly determined goal (blocking several roads), the outcome of “summit” was left open. Both events endorsed practices of self-organization, aiming to function in a horizontal, transparent, open and inviting, as much as in a critical, manner.
Despite the different objectives of the events, their aims appeared similar, and indeed some similar problems and organizational symptomatologies emerged in their course. By investigating and juxtaposing the conceptualisations and praxes of "Block G8" and "summit", we hope to address strategies for negotiating the conflicts that arose, so as to further the potential for translations of such rhetoric into practice and vice versa.

Meanwhile a series of asessment papers have been published about the G8 protests, some of them carry approaches that are worth discussing. a text that quite some people have been waiting for has not been published, it somehow disappeared in between. So here it is, it should reach many and play its part in the evaluation-process.

PAULA explains herself

With this paper we want to publish a part of our evaluations and self-criticism. PAULA, the crossregional plenary for a decentral space of actions and blockades around the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, has been a heterogeneous, temporary alliance of groups and sole persons. For this reason we will only evaluate the decentral blockades and not deliver a collective statement about the G8 protests in general. We take part in this discussion in another place in our everday lives and in our groups.

Postscript to a turbulent 2007

It’s night time and a man is crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for his car keys underneath a lamp post. A woman comes along and starts to help him. After they’ve been searching together for a while the woman asks the man: “Are you sure this is where you dropped them?”

The man replies: “No, I think I dropped them somewhere else.”

“Then why are we looking here?” she enquires.

“Because this is where the light is.”

Download booklet at www.turbulence.org.uk

Without a radical critique every action becomes mere activism- reflections on the anti-G8 mobilisation 2007.

3, 2, 1...action!
Without a doubt, it was the event for the European left this summer: anti-racist groups, queer activists, squatters, debt-relief groups, anti-fascists, trade unionists, environmental organizations...in June, all of them travelled to the small German village of Heiligendamm in order to express disagreement or even disrupt the G8 summit. Months before there was a marathon of meetings, conferences, fundraising concerts, and every leftist place in Europe got swamped with flyers and posters mobilizing against the summit. The focus of it all: action. Demonstrations, riots, blockades, vigils, clandestine actions...there was something in it for everybody.

Reflections

After the G8, a whole lot of debriefs and reflective summaries were published by the protesters. There were differences in opinions depending on the groups’ characters, nationalities, examining questions, time of debrief, questions in focus and tactical preferences.
Most questions examined were the effects of the protests, the question of militancy in protests and violence and consequences for the future.

As it turns out, the words of an undercover cop in Berlin's Kreuzberg district during the street fights of the Walpurgis night some weeks before the G8 summed up the German police's reasoning in repressing our counter-summit. We saw how tactfully they treated Saturday's 2nd June mass demo and the blockades that followed. And yet the violent raids of housing collective projects and old haunts of Berlin and Hamburg outlined that they had decided to attack, and did so successfully, in two levels. First, they targeted those who got in trouble later, comrades known to them from the past: Anarchists, leftists and other activists were given the hint by house raids days before the summit. Then there were those who got in trouble sooner, that is, as they joined the movement. All it took was making the mistake of finding oneself at the front line: Water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets proved the undercover cop of Kreuzberg right.

Anti-G8 protesters march to the barricades.

This year saw the Group of Eight (G8) summit taking place in Heiligendamm, Germany, adjacent to the Baltic Sea. Like the site of previous G8 summits, this area is fairly remote, requiring a large amount of organizing and travel for those attending the week of protests surrounding the summit. Since the street battles of Seattle, meetings of institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the G8 continually locate to less and less urbanized areas, making travel for activists longer and less efficient.

(by Association for Autonomy, a4a)

This text provides a tactical analysis of the most crucial operation of the week of protests against the G8 in Germany: the blockades. Whilst Block G8 champions its successful mass blockades at two of the gates to Heiligendamm, the decentralised blockade concept, PAULA, seems to have vanished from the discussion.

While this in itself would already be an interesting point for reflection, our interest here is neither to play one concept off against the other, nor is it to provide a deconstructive critique of each of them. Our aim is to offer a point of departure for a discussion about the effectiveness of our collective tactical operations during such direct actions as blockades so as to strengthen these in future.

There is a pressing urgency for such an analysis from our perspective. This necessity has to do with one of the pivotal insights of the cycle of summit protests after Seattle: that direct action is possible within the context of a mass movement.

I

Dear Vittorio,

The events at the end of the anti-G8 march in Rostock on Saturday 2 June, when there was an outbreak of prolonged and violent fighting between some of the demonstrators (the so-called “black block”) and the police, disturbed and challenged me. I felt critical of the violence of the black block, but also felt the need to discuss and understand. I think a lot of people on the march felt the same way – critical but wanting to talk and understand rather than condemn (there were, of course, others who simply condemned the action, but that is not my position).

I wanted to discuss with you in particular because I know you were in the middle of the battle and because I have a very great respect for you and I think we can discuss honestly and without disqualifications. The aim for me is not to win an argument, not to come to an agreement, but to understand.

Walking through cities connected to world distribution networks, we shift from one imaginary to the next, from Monoprix™ to UGC™, from Friskies™ to the Guggenheim™ or Pinault™ foundations to MacDonald's™. Each time we activate fields of relational, communicational or sensational possibilities, equivalent and interchangeable. The commodity-possibilities© offered by world supermarket culture are born of desires and needs conjured up by advertising and the media. They can only be actualized with the money we have at our disposal, through our work and our credit at the bank. The richest has a good chance of being right, because he's got the cash for it. He can create his own commodity-possibilities©, and impose them on everyone else. An equation associating truth, money, technology and power takes form: it allows you to work on your own indoctrination, your own subjection. Foucault speaks of "regimes of truth" by which he means the self-tightening circle in which the subjection of individuals and the production of subjectifying truths reinforce one another.

This report of our experiences as an international press group during the 2007 G8 protests is intended to inspire more people to do press work in the future, to try to counter the spin of the press industry of corporate capitalism to utilise the press. Just like summits, streets, neighbourhoods and workplaces, the press is a site of struggle. When blockading, our aim is to disrupt the summit, in the same way, we can understand press work as disrupting the story-telling of the powerful about how the world functions. Those with power constantly construct discourses to legitimise their power and their actions. One way they do this is to use the press. One way (of many others) we can challenge this is by doing so too. But of course the press is not a neutral arbiter in this struggle over meaning. Our intention was to embrace this discursive struggle to battle out the story through the press, rather than let it simply report the story of the battle on its own terms. Of course ‘the’ press is not a homogeneous entity and represents differentiated interests despite perhaps some common tendencies, at least within the corporate realm. This is why Indymedia and other activist press projects remain a core element of our movements. Our starting point was a recognition that we had to understand the interests press outlets have and how they function. These we aimed to challenge. Not simply to ‘bring the press on our side’ and influence them to report more ‘favourably’ about us, but to engage with, and enable others to engage with the challenge of productively using the press for our political aims. In this spirit we offer the below as a contribution to the ongoing debates about mediation, representation and press work that take place within our movements.

The following text was written by people belonging to the radical left in Germany, who, like many others, have different perspectives on and opinions about the incidents of the 2nd June 2007 in Rostock during the protests against the G8-summit. One thing we do have in common is our will to resist, which in its practical realisations, with their different means of expression, is respected by all of us. Public denunciation and one-sided apportioning of blame are not our means. With this text we aim to engage in positive and negative criticism, of ourselves, and also of those with whom we have worked on a common concept of resistance over the past two and a half years.

thank you for sharing ideas; i totally agree with your view that insiders (negrian) and outsiders (autonomists) fight the same battle. This distinction between inside-outside is imposed by the theory of empire/multitude. This is the only reason I accepted it as a starting point of my reasoning and tried to oppose it indicating that the struggle from the outside is possible and that it can progress very much to the benefit of the struggle in the whole. I think that the battle ground still needs to be discovered - it is not inside, nor outside but in the radical middle. To arrive at this location, all antagonistic presentation of our reality needs to be the first isolated by the act of 'exclusion of excluders by the excluded' (Castels).