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Move fast, strike harder...
The G8 circus is coming to Heiligendamm. As recent summits have moved to more remote areas, we have felt our strength decline, mainly because they increasingly control the playground and everything around it. In Seattle, Prague and Genoa our strengths were in being inventive and surprising the police. This allowed us the freedom to stage effective direct actions and disrupt the summits. The time has come to seize back the initiative.
Move fast, strike harder...
G8 Heiligendamm 07: just another counter-summit?
The G8 circus is coming to Heiligendamm. As recent summits have moved to more remote areas, we have felt our strength decline, mainly because they increasingly control the playground and everything around it. In Seattle, Prague and Genoa our strengths were in being inventive and surprising the police. This allowed us the freedom to stage effective direct actions and disrupt the summits. The time has come to seize back the initiative.
We all agree that converging on Heiligendamm and staging actions there could be a constructive and empowering experience. However previous experiences with summit mobilisations have shown the need for us to become more flexible in our protests. Being fenced in and blocked from taking effective actions as happened in Gleneagles and St. Petersburg is both unconstructive and disempowering.
Over the last few years the most effective way for the dispossessed to attack capital has been to directly block the flows of commodity. This was done by the dock workers on the American west coast in 2002, the unemployed movement in Argentina since 1997, the Algerian insurgents in 2001 and the CPE struggle in France, last year. We should learn from this and aim to block the flows of capital, be this the flow of numbers in the digital world of the stock exchanges or the flow of cargo trucks on the motorway.
Our proposal is that we converge on the capitalist fortress in Heiligendamm and experience the power and energy of acting and living as a large group, but only for as long as we are effective and it increases our power. It means going along with the current perspectives of trying to block the summit and the flows all over Meck-Pomm but to come there prepared for radical changes of strategy: if the time comes when we are blocked from being effective, we should be prepared to move and take the battle to the capitalists where they are more vulnerable.
Through this shift in strategies we want to preserve the power and energy that we have felt in previous summit mobilisations, but at the same time create new capacity for disruption. Practically, and as a starting point, we need to create the collective capacity to make quick decisions and to be mobile at any time. We are not bound to one place as they are, and that is a great strength, allowing us to force the police to stay one step behind us, caught in their rigid structures. Our tactics should be those of mobile raids, not of laying an unwinnable siege.
With this in mind, we encourage activists to come to Heiligendamm prepared to move the battlefield, which requires us to be our own nomadic base. Organisationally, we commit to preparing a structure for sharing information and managing logistics which is able to move along with us.
The flows we propose to block are global and without borders. Many are affected by them but only few have the resources to be present at Heiligendamm. We encourage all those who can't come to the G8 to take part in the battle, blockading the flows wherever in the world they are.
Come prepared!
- anti-G8 international meeting- February, 11th, 2007.