[van-announce] Anarchist discussion at Spartacus Books

[PC_Blakelock at ziplip.com]

Anarchist discussion at Spartacus Books
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
7:00pm
311 W. Hastings St. 
Vancouver 

Build anarchism in Vancouver. Come discuss anarchism and the anti-globalization movement and the recent Italian anarchist text "Notes on Summits and Counter-Summits". Bring ideas and suggestions for further events. Reading the suggested text is not required.

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Notes on Summits and Counter-Summits

The Illusion of a Center

Capitalism is a social relationship and not a citadel for the powerful. It is 
starting from this banality that one can confront the question of summits and 
counter-summits. Representing capitalist and state domination as a kind of 
general headquarters (it’s a question of the G8, the WTO or some other such 
organization) is useful to those who would like to oppose that managing center 
with another center: the political structures of the so-called movement, or 
better, their spokespeople. In short, it is useful to who propose merely a 
change in management personnel. Besides being reformist in essence and purpose, 
this logic becomes collaborationist and authoritarian in method, as it leads to 
centralization of the opposition. This is where the concern of these leftist 
adversaries, so anxious to make themselves heard by the “masters of the world”, 
in investing money and political hype on the summits in which those in power 
more and more frequently set the dates with them comes from. In the course of 
these summits decisions that were made elsewhere are merely formalized, but this 
certainly does not disturb the various representatives of the social forums; 
after all, their opposition is also completely formal, consisting mainly of paid 
seminars in which it is shown that neoliberalism is wrong and humanity is right, 
or, for the more lively, in some combative performance opportunely agreed upon 
with the police. Besides, how could an opposition subsidized by institutions, 
represented by municipal and parliamentary councilors and protected by the 
grave-diggers of the workers’ movement (we’re referring to the monitoring 
patrols entrusted to the CGIL [1] in collaboration with the cops) be real? The 
paradox is that people are called into the streets in the name of another 
possible world, but with the intention that
 absolutely nothing happens. Every 
time that a more or less oceanic crowd moves peacefully, visibly supervised, it 
is proclaimed to be a great victory for the movement. And yet these social 
pacifiers know quite well that their capacity to pose as negotiators with the 
institutions doesn’t particularly depend upon the number of people that they 
lead into the streets (millions of demonstrators opposed to the latest military 
aggression against Iraq have not  greatly worried the governments involved in 
the war), but rather upon the power of mediation and repression they manage to 
put into practice – or to justify – against all social rebellion. In fact, if 
summits and counter-summits are so frequently talked about, if  the 
representatives of the social forums have come together at the negotiation table 
and been flattered by the mass media, it is only because , in Seattle first and 
later on other occasions, something happened: thousands of comrades and poor 
youth attacked the structures of capital and the state, upset police city 
planning schemes by opening up spaces for communication and clashed with the 
uniformed servants. Without this subversive threat – together with the many 
insurrectional explosions that have shaken up the last few years, a mark of the 
times we have entered – the masters would have nothing to do with the various 
Casarinis and Agnolettos [2]. Hasn’t something of this sort happened with the 
unions? Listened to and bribed by capital in times of great social conflict with 
the aim of dividing, demoralizing and denouncing revolting proletarians, in more 
recent times, they have been put in storage. For the time being, they are forced 
to again raise a loud voice against the very attacks of the bosses that they 
themselves once justified and ratified. 

The “disobbedienti” spokespeople must then distinguish themselves from the bad 
ones, the extremists, the violent ones (i.e., those who practice direct action) 
and give political visibility to the others. On the one hand, therefore, the 
slogans of the social forums end up being perfectly suitable for the enlightened 
bourgeoisie: taxation of finance capital, democratic and transparent regulation 
over global trade, more state and less market, critical consumption, ethical 
banks, pacifism, etc. On the other hand, what they sell with their “democratic 
mobilizations” is a valuable commodity: the illusion of doing something against 
the injustices of the world. In this sense, counter-summits are a juicy 
spectacle. The bad few repressed and the good ones heard in their just demands: 
end of story? 

Power knows that it isn’t so simple. The disgustingly realistic proposals of the 
domesticated opposition have nothing to say to the millions of poor people 
parked in the reservations of the market paradise and repressed by the police. 
There was a bit of confirmation in Genoa: only during the clashes and the 
looting of supermarkets did the youths from proletarian neighborhoods unite with 
the insurgents. While the White Overalls with their gaudy spectacles appeared as 
Martians or buffoons in their eyes, those excluded from every political racket 
immediately understood  the language of revolt.

A Gust of Unpredictability

There is no doubt that in Seattle and Genoa, and again more recently in 
Thessaloniki, a critique without mediation against domination and its false 
enemies was demonstrated. Despite the dates being set by the masters, the 
direction by reformists in the streets was leapt over. We mention this, even 
though we were among those comrades who maintained that Genoa is everywhere: 
that if domination and dispossession are in every part of society and in daily 
life, attack has no need for dates set by the enemy. We have found interesting 
the practice of those who, deserting the stage of the “red zone” to violate and 
the trap of frontal clashes with the police, moved with agility, striking  and 
disappearing (notably, in this sense, the attack on the Marassi prison in 
Genoa). This powerful gust of unpredictability, this subversive “federalism” of 
actions and groups, signified an important rupture with the logic of those who 
centralize the enemy in order to centralize the struggle (and render it 
symbolic). But we still hold that being in the place where the enemy does not 
expect you, far from the appointments, is the best perspective. Even in their 
most interesting aspects, counter-summits limit this perspective. Besides, 
without taking anything away from the explosions in Seattle and Genoa, it seems 
to us that chasing after such dates is becoming a cliché, and more, a devourer 
of energy: as soon as one counter-summit ends, preparation for another begins. 
The dates are fixed more and more by the mass media, to the point that, if many 
revolutionaries have demonstrated, for example, against the war in Iraq, almost 
no one has managed to express any practical solidarity with the insurgents of 
Argentina or Algeria. Often more importance is ascribed to clashes that involve 
almost exclusively “militants” as compared to authentic social and class 
uprisings. 

We know very well why many comrades go to counter-summits: wide-spread direct 
action and the generalized clash with the cops is only possible in mass 
situations. Since the perspective of attacking elsewhere is extremely 
minoritarian, only in greatly expanded situations can a certain sort of street 
guerrilla warefare be tested. Other actions can be realized at any moment that 
are not in any way incompatible with certain practices in the streets during 
counter-summits. And yet we think that in the long run such a practice limits 
autonomy of analysis and action (in the face of how many social conflicts have 
we just stood there looking?) transforming it in spite of itself into a sort of 
extremist model within the “disobedient” caravan. Not to mention that it would 
still be a matter of asking why on earth power publicizes so many summits in 
which decisions that have already been made are ratified. All this seems to us 
to be a great terrain for the police to study and experiment with anti-riot 
techniques. A kind of homeopathic treatment: power is inoculated with tiny doses 
of the virus of subversion in order to reinforce its immune system in view of 
much broader social plagues. It must know how the bad ones move and organize 
themselves, and with which good ones it is possible to dialogue in such a way 
that nothing really changes.

An Experiment in the Open Air  

But above all, summits constitute another form of experimentation: seeing what 
level of oppression the population is willing to put up with. Bringing a bit of 
Palestine, with its checkpoints, its permanent red zones and its armored patrol 
cars around every corner, into the “rich West”, domination is informing its 
subjects that, until proven otherwise, they are criminals; that nothing is 
secure enough for the police and technological apparatus; that city planning is 
the continuation of the social war with other weapons. More that sixty years 
ago, Walter Benjamin wrote in his Theses on the Concept  of History that “the 
state of exception in which we live has become the rule”. If this is true, we 
must understand what links a lager for undocumented immigrants to the stadiums 
into which war refugees are loaded, certain poor and working-class neighborhoods 
patrolled by the police to the various Guantanamos scattered throughout the 
world, some evacuation operations utterly disproportionate in relation to the 
declared aim (entire neighborhoods evacuated in order to defuse some implement 
from the first World War) to the rationing of electrical energy carried out 
without warning – in the style of the 1920’s – by the ENEL [3]. Up to now it is 
a question of successful experiments that confirm what a comrade wrote in the 
1970’s: the people of capital are a stoic people. They upset traffic 
circulation, they put surveillance cameras everywhere, they install noxious 
antennas over the roofs of our homes, they criminalize more and more behaviors: 
no one says a word. 

Summits are the concentrated representation of all this, the legal suspension of 
every right. “What’s going on?” the average citizen asks, forced to take a 
detour in order to go shopping. “Nothing, it’s just the anti-globalization 
people,” the woman at the supermarket responds. Meanwhile, they are even 
privatizing the drinking water, while the police are everywhere. 

But precisely because it is a concentrated representation of a daily situation, 
the practical critique of social control must be widespread and constant, for 
example through the destruction of video cameras and other systems of electronic 
surveillance. It is important to map out the locations of the instruments of 
control, spreading awareness of them and theoretically supporting the necessity 
of attacking them.

The New Ugly Face of Domination

Power is increasingly brazen. On the one hand, the masters know that the current 
social conditions, increasingly marked by precariousness and dependence on 
commodities, can be imposed only through terror: such terror is manifested in 
the exterior in the form of war and in the interior in the form of fear for the 
future (for example, fear of remaining without work) or through the repression 
of increasingly widespread social groups. On the other hand, decades of social 
pacification – in which every despicable act has occurred simply because nothing 
has been done to prevent the preceding ones, an incredible acceleration of 
degradation – have given power an arrogance without precedence. We have seen it 
at work, for example, in Genoa, in the beatings, the torture, the murder of 
Carlo Giuliani. And it continues. The new police chief of Trento is Colucci, 
police chief in Genoa during the G8 summit, a certified pig. He will be managing 
the summit of foreign ministers of the European Union that will be held at Riva 
del Garda next September 4 through 6. Do you understand the message? A Trento 
committee “for truth and justice” has found nothing better to do than to invite 
him to a public confrontation.

Acid Rain and Fig Leaves 

The foreign ministers who will be meeting in Riva on September 4 through 6 must 
achieve a common platform to present at the WTO summit in Cancun, Mexico on 
September 10  through 14. The topic is the General Agreement on the Trade of 
Services (GATS) that anticipates precisely the liberalization of the principle 
“public services” on a global level. Among the many decisions in process, the 
most scandalous is surely that of the privatization of water, which may become a 
reality for the 144 member countries of the World Trade Organization. It is a 
process that started a while ago, since seven multinationals have contended for 
decades over the concession for bottling mineral water and in the last few years 
over the concession for managing the water system as well. The “Trento board for 
a social Europe” also dwells upon the privatization of water, and on its 
scarcity due to pollution, as the mark of the most unbridled neoliberalism. 
Apart from the usual complaints about the non-democratic aspects of these 
agreements (as if those made by individual governments were instead subject to 
who knows what public debates
; besides, weren’t the state institutions supposed 
to save us from the savage market?), what is equally scandalous in the discourse 
of the reformists is the gap between the amplitude of the disasters that they 
denounce and the solutions that they propose.

On the one hand, they indicate the causes of these disasters to be the 
industrialization of agriculture, the concentration of populations in 
increasingly gigantic cities, the pollution produced by factories, the waste of 
drinkable water for industrial machinery and for cultivation intended for the 
intensive breeding of animals; in short, the very essence of the 
techno-industrial system. On the other hand, they propose
 new laws, transparent 
rules, even citizen participation in the form of short term treasury bonds in 
the S.P.A.s [4] that privatize water.  Thanks to the marvels of progress, there 
are whole countries in which a collapse of the banking system would leave the 
countryside without water, and these citizen, so proud of being so, want 
different laws. Somewhat as if, in the face of a downpour of acid rain, one were 
to suggest covering the head with an organic fig leaf. The proposals of the 
various social forums, reasonable in terms of political and economic 
rationality, are simply crazy from a concrete ad social point of view. It is not 
a question of denouncing a world in ruins, but rather of snatching the space for 
resisting and the time for attacking. It is not just a question of how radical 
one is in the streets. The point is what sort of life one desires, how much one 
has submitted her or himself materially and spiritually to an increasingly 
inhuman and artificial social order or, on the other hand, what relationships 
one is ready to fight for. 

There is no need to go to Riva to oppose the water racket. Those directly 
responsible for this absolute commodification (for example the big businesses 
that bottle mineral water) are just a few steps away from us at all times. If 
the civilized can’t even defend the water they drink – or at least understand 
that others do so in a clear and direct way – we can all just go to bed. In this 
case as well, it is a long chain of dependence and oppression that now presents 
us with an exorbitant bill. Only through autonomy toward industrial mass society 
and through open revolt against the state that defends it could something 
different be born. 

The same is valid, for example for the question of patents, including those on 
the genetic code. It is simply idiotic to claim protective laws are of any use 
in confronting the entry of capital into the human body. Techno-scientific 
delirium, which consists of wanting to transform nature and human beings into a 
sort of variable of the computer, passed the point of no return some time ago. 
Any illusion of reforming a science that is entirely in the service of power is 
only a dismal hoax. The actions that have happened in most countries against 
transgenic cultivation or against private and state laboratories that experiment 
on the human genome have shown quite well that the critique of mercantile reason 
has no need of spectacular dates. 

More generally, what is euphemistically described as globalization would be 
unthinkable without the material basis furnished by the technological apparatus. 
We simply think about the things that are presented as principle factors in 
development and economic and military conflict: energy and information. This 
thing that can appear to be an unassailable Moloch is in reality a gigantic web 
formed by cables, antennas, substations, trellises and transformers that can be 
easily struck.

Riva Is Everywhere  

The CGIL will be taking care of monitoring during the counter-summit in Riva. 
The outgoing police chief of Trento has pointed out – rightly – that the more 
demonstrators make themselves into police agents, the less need there will be of 
the latter.

After long negotiations between the social forum and the police force (managed 
obviously by national leaders), it seems that the Municipality will make a villa 
outside of Riva available to the Disobbediente and their associates, granting 
them the right to demonstrate (always outside of town, in deserted streets) 
through Sunday. Riva will be closed, which means that the cops will simply block 
three access roads. The government commissioners’ office has passed an order 
prohibiting and suspending every exhibition or demonstration (including sports 
and cultural exhibitions) in more than twenty municipalities in the Trentino 
region. The police want empty streets, the population must understand that Big 
Brother is not just a televised transmission. And us? 

Let’s again take up a thread that comes from far away. Günther Anders wrote in 
the 1950’s, “Hiroshima is everywhere”, and in the 1980’s, “ Chernobyl is 
everywhere”. Some rebels against the technologized world in the 1990’s said, 
“Mururoa is everywhere” (at the time when the French government subjected that 
island in the Pacific to murderous nuclear tests). Two years ago, other comrades 
claimed, “Genoa is everywhere”. Because revolt explodes without limits and 
against every spectacle, because the Apparatus expects an enemy that is not 
there and reveals its totalitarian character still more, we say Riva is 
everywhere. We will not be in the streets against the summit of the European 
Union, because with the struggles of these times and those that will be, we have 
wanted and still want to strike other paths. Because following the logic that 
“This time it is close to my home” one does not escape the circle, since summits 
will always occur close to someone’s home. Because the real conflict is 
elsewhere. There are other ways to oppose the armoring of the cities and the 
valleys in which we live, ways within everyone’s reach. We want to free 
ourselves from the dictatorship of the number and from its worshipers. We know 
this is a perspective that may only give few results in the immediate, but it is 
by deciding for ourselves how, where and when to strike and tenaciously 
defending our reasons for it that we will cause individual and social 
insubordination to advance. 

Some Roveretan anarchists 

[1] The Italian General Confederation of Labor, a major trade union 
organization.

[2] Casarini and Agnoletto are spokespeople of groups behind the social forums. 

[3] The national electricity board in Italy

[4] Action associations similar to PACs in the US.