rundbrief 12.8.

gipfelinfo 12.8.2002
öffentlicher rundbrief der infogruppe [berlin]
-----------------------------------------------

GENUA G8 - SCUOLA DIAZ - BOLZANETO: KONTAKT ZU
EHEMALIGEN GEFANGENEN UND VERLETZTEN GESUCHT

Vom 15. September bis 5.Oktober 2002 findet im
autonomen Kultur- und Begegnungszentrum Reitschule
Bern (www.reitschule.ch) das Projekt aeLe Geometrie
della Memoria - Nachdenken ueber den G8- Gipfel in
Genuaô statt. (www.memoria.ch)
Anfangs Oktober werden AnwaeltInnen der
Internationalen Untersuchungskommission zu Genua
ihre Untersuchungsergebnisse zu den Ereignissen im
Juli 2001 praesentieren. Danach findet ein
Internationales Tribunal gegen die Angeklagten
Berlusconi, Fini und Scajola statt. Fuer diesen
Anlass suchen wir ehemalige Gefangene und Verletzte,
die ueber die Polizeibrutalitaet und
Menschenrechtsverletzungen als ZeugInnen aussagen
moechten.
Aus dem Programm:
(Mehr Details auf  http://www.memoria.ch )
Do 03.10. Menschenrechtsverletzungen waehrend dem
G8-Gipfel 2001: Mitglieder der Internationalen
Untersuchungskommission zu Genua praesentieren ihre
Resultate
Mit kurzem Video
Fr 04.10. Der Tod von Carlo Giuliani: Mitgliederder
der Internationalen Untersuchungskommission zu Genua
praesentieren ihre Resultate.
Evtl. ist die Mutter/sind die Eltern von Carlo
Giuliani anwesend (in Planung)
Film 19h "Carlo Giuliani, ragazzo", Cristina
Comencini, Italien 2002
Sa 05.10. 10h - 20h Volkstribunal gegen die
politischen Verantwortlichen der
Menschenrechtsverletzungen waehrend dem G8 (Details
folgen)
Wer Interesse hat und/oder mehr wissen moechte,
melde sich bitte bei:
 tribunal@memoria.ch
Solidarische Gruesse
Die OrganisatorInnen des Volkstribunals

BITTE WEITERLEITEN!

[ http://www.memoria.ch ]

INVITATION AU PROCES DE AHMED

Salut à touTEs,
Le collectif de soutien à Ahmed (et aux autres
militants mis en examen suite aux manifestations no
border) de Strasbourg a pris la décision d'inviter
toutes les organisations et associations (fussent-
elles ce qu'elles sont) à se solidariser contre la
criminalisation des militantEs et à apporter leur
soutien à Ahmed le 21 août lors de son procès, et
avant cela pour appuyer la levée de son isolement et
sa demande de mise en liberté.

Nous vous invitons à battre l'appel à une
mobilisation solidaire élargie et aussi à publier et
à diffuser rapidement cette pétition ainsi que
d'autres documents de protestation que nous vous
ferons suivre afin que nous soyons en mesure
d'appuyer la demande de mise en liberté dont
l'audience pourra se tenir la semaine prochaine
(date non encore définie).

[collectif de soutien à Ahmed]

INVITATION TO THE TRIAL OF AHMED

Hi all,
The support collective for Ahmed (and for the other
activists that have been criminalized after the
noborder demonstrations) from Strasbourg has decided
to invite all organizations and associations to act
in solidarity against the criminalization of
activists, to express their support for Ahmed on the
21st of Augustus during his trail, and to demand the
end of his isolation in prison and support his
demand to be freed.

We invite you to start a broad mobilization of
solidarity and to publish and to distribute the
adjoined petition and any other protest documents
that we will send out in the future so that we can
build pressure behind the demand to release Ahmed
from prison (the hearing can take place next week
but the exact date has not yet been fixed).

[the support collective]

DISCUSSION PAPER ON STRATEGIES FOR ACTION

2nd European Conference of Peoples' Global Action
Leiden, 31 August - 4 September 2002

Introduction
************
This document is the result of conversations at the
NoBorder camp in Strasbourg, where it emerged that
many people desired an emphasis on strategies during
the PGA conference. This was seen as involving
thought about ways to (1) continue confronting power
and face the current wave of repression, (2) relate
the opposition against power structures with
proactive efforts to create alternatives, and (3)
strengthen and widen our networks. This document is
aimed at kick-starting debates on analysis and
action proposals around these three key dimensions -
as part of an on-going discussion, rather than an
attempt to reach consensus.

This paper presents some analysis and questions for
the debate - but we stress that it only reflects the
ideas and opinions of the people who wrote it or
criticised it (people from different countries who
found time for this discussion in Strasbourg or
later through email lists). It has no intention to
be comprehensive, objective or representative; in
fact, we hope that it is just the opposite, in order
to encourage other people to develop their own
analyses and suggestions and to share and debate
their ideas with others. If possible, we ask people
to do this in writing before the conference, in
order to give local groups the opportunity to
consider diverse points of view in their preparatory
debates. The forum
 http://pga.squat.net/phorum/list.php?f=8 (part of
the forum for the conference,
 http://pga.squat.net/phorum/) and the
 caravan99@lists.riseup.net mailing list can be used
to share your thoughts with others before the
conference. To post new texts in the strategies
section of the forum, go to
 http://pga.squat.net/phorum/post.php?f=8

This paper was mainly prepared as input for the
specific discussions on strategies and tactics.
However, we also invite you to consider its content
as it relates to discussions in other thematic
workshops during the conference.

We invite everyone to distribute and discuss this
document outside of the 'usual' networks and
communication channels. We should try to reach out
particularly to sectors which are negatively
affected by unequal relations of power, but are not
very much involved in our networks (such as women's
groups and self-organised refugees and migrants, sex
workers, homeless people, etc). We also invite
people to translate the document into as many
languages as possible, especially non-Western
European ones, and post them in the forum.

1. Confronting Power and Facing Repression
******************************************
Since the Zapatista uprising, the combined efforts
of different emancipatory networks rapidly
challenged the established political culture, by
exposing the violent and undemocratic nature of
market forces and representative democracy. Through
direct action, civil disobedience and global
communication and coordination, the networks
successfully defied capitalism and 'democratic'
representation, thus eroding the source of
legitimacy of Western power structures. This in turn
strengthened and cross-fertilised existing processes
of emancipatory social change all over the world.

After Genoa and the attacks of 0911, however, the
source of legitimacy of power is changing radically.
We are returning to the old days of rule by fear,
scapegoat politics and muscle (especially in the
USA) although with a democratic façade. There is no
sign of opposition from most of the Western
population, and often these changes happen with
their participation and support. The imagery related
to the so-called 'war on terror', which links
security, nationalism and 'culture', provides a
perfect scapegoat for the social tensions provoked
by economic restructuring. It legitimises aberrant
laws to isolate and criminalise people on the basis
of skin colour, nationality, religion and political
activity, enabling the state to widen its immense
range of tools for surveillance and social control.
The racist panic is also used to strengthen military
budgets and legitimise as many geostrategic wars in
the South and the East as demanded by the 'enduring
freedom' of Western economic interests.

The response from the global emancipation networks
to these developments has been quite limited.
Although there have been very good examples of the
opposite, we are still a long way from appropriately
responding to what might be the most important
change in patterns of domination since the end of
the II World War. The good news is that we have not
been paralysed and different mobilisations since
Genoa and 0911 have sent a strong message of
continued resistance. But if we really want to have
an impact we need to do a better job at attacking
social fear. By this term we mean the manufacturing
of collective insecurity and the continuous
construction of enemies and threats, which is used
by power structures to legitimise themselves and
produce a popular demand for ever tighter security,
militarism and control, targeted especially against
those who were already oppressed and excluded.

An important advantage for us is that, in spite of
the success of fear-manufacturing mechanisms in the
West, capitalism is being questioned, and opposed,
by growing numbers of people all over the world. The
challenge is how to continue nurturing this
opposition while relating it to other forms of
oppression (racism, sexism, etc), fighting against
social fear, and surviving the growing repression
that we are facing.

Possible questions for debate
* How do you evaluate the effects of the anti-
capitalist mobilisations and actions of the last few
years? How do you think things changed after Genoa
and 0911? Are we having an increasing or decreasing
impact on public opinion, and why? What do you think
struggles against power and repression will be like
in the near future?
* How can we attack the self-legitimisation
strategies being employed by power structures?
* How can we improve our capacity to communicate
with sectors of society that perceive themselves as
'non-political' and buy into fear-engineering
policies? How can we increase our 'cultural
flexibility' to improve our communication with them?
What forms of action and communication can we use to
overcome the limits of demonstrations and direct
actions?
* How can we approach the crisis of the electoral
system? And the rise of the far right?
* How do we protect ourselves from the growing
repression and criminalisation, and react in cases
of extreme harshness, such as in Genoa?
* How can we increase the exchange of technical
capabilities and organisational experiences?
* Do you want to talk about summit-hopping or are
you bored to death of the subject?
* Do you want to talk about violence-non-violence or
are you bored to death of the subject?

[Since the war against Iraq is likely to start in a
few months, and is also likely to provoke tremendous
tensions and maybe even attacks in Western
countries, it would also make sense to start
preparing our responses to it.]

2. Building Alternatives
************************
The global days of action and counter-summits of the
past years have had an immense impact. But even when
the novelty and success of these mass protests gave
them the guise of an unstoppable tidal-wave, it was
already clear to most people involved that we cannot
build new social relations through protest alone.
The idea that solutions would somehow emerge by
themselves from the dynamic of ever-growing protests
was questioned from the beginning by many within our
networks, and increasing numbers of people have been
experimenting with ways to supplement protests with
sustained initiatives advancing concrete social
struggles.

With the clear failure and thorough discrediting of
both parliamentary-reformist and vanguardist
options, there is increasing awareness that in order
to affect meaningful transformation we need to
combine a growing confrontation with power
structures with a renewed emphasis on building
autonomous alternatives. This strategy is one by
which people in different contexts and struggles
identify opportunities to extract energy, resources
and meaning out of existing social relations and put
them into building new ones. The image then is one
of many autonomous but connected attempts to hollow
out existing structures, while at the same time
creating, expanding and strengthening new diverse
patterns of social relations. Perhaps, the European
Social Consulta (www.europeanconsulta.org) could
become a tool to help us advance strategies in this
direction. There will of course always be an
important role for global actions and issue-based
campaigns; in fact, protests and alternatives should
reinforce each other in a long-term process of
emancipatory social transformation.

In fact, there is no clear-cut distinction between
confrontation against and alternatives to the
existing system. Democratic, non-hierarchical, non-
commodified alternatives need to maintain their
active confrontation with existing power structures
in order not to be incorporated or marginalised -
and as soon as they reach a significant dimension
they will suffer at least the same degree of
repression as mass protests, if not more. They will
never have a real chance to become strong enough to
pose a real threat to the system without engaging
actively in the struggle against it, but at the same
time they may offer us a more coherent, credible and
self-reliant basis to struggle from.

Possible questions for debate:
* Do you see this analysis as relevant? What sort of
social change do you envision, and how?
* What role(s) do you think that these alternatives
can play in challenging the existing social order?
What are their limits? Does it makes sense to
concentrate our efforts in building them? If not,
what are the implications?
* How can we move from symbolic fringe actions (even
if there are 300.000 people in them) to transforming
society at a more fundamental level?
* How can autonomous alternatives become relevant to
wider sectors of society? How can we encourage large
numbers of people to self-organise alternative
social relations and link up with networks of
struggle?
* How could the Social Consulta be an adequate tool
for these objectives? What other tools we need?
* How do we maintain a balance between the
construction of decentralised alternatives and the
confrontation with global oppressive structures? How
can we avoid repeating the mistakes of the huge
alternative movements (cooperatives, etc.) that grew
up around the workers movements of the XIX-XX
centuries and ended up coopted by the market and/or
the state, or bankrupt, and with them the illusion
and energy of millions of people?
* How can we avoid losing the cross-fertilised,
heterogeneous and ever-changing nature of globalised
struggles and social relations? How do we avoid
retreating into excluding and restrictive local
identities, as many communes did?
* How do we encourage people involved only in
'lifestyle politics' to look at the broader picture?
* What role should high-tech play in our struggles
today? And in the alternatives we build?
* What should the role of PGA be in the construction
of decentralised and autonomous alternatives?

3. Cooperation within and outside existing networks
***************************************************
The success of our actions so far has been based on
two factors: (1) the combination of a great
diversity of discourses from emancipatory struggles
in all continents (social, environmental,
indigenous, feminist, etc), and (2) forms of
articulation, action and communication that make our
networks immune to most of the problems that have
plagued 'leftist' struggles for a long time:

* The collective articulation of global days of
action has been based on decentralisation and
autonomy; on spaces and tools for communication and
coordination among people who think, act and speak
for themselves. The rejection of any form of
collective identity for the networks, of centralised
finances, of permanent representatives towards
media, of mandated mediators towards the
institutions and of any other source of power, made
it structurally impossible to 'divide', corrupt,
domesticate, co-opt or behead the networks, and gave
us an unprecedented degree of operativity and
dynamism.

* The combination of diverse participatory forms of
action (artistic forms of expression, direct action
to destroy capitalist symbols, civil disobedience
etc.) made an unambiguous statement of rejection of
global power structures, seriously eroding their
legitimacy and drawing public sympathy. The attempts
of the state and media to criminalise our networks
had, until Genoa, the opposite effect than intended:
rather than isolating, dividing and weakening us,
they made our struggles more visible and attracted
new people to the actions and networks.

* The attempts to create diverse and decentralised
means of communication have been an important step
towards producing self-organised, flexible and
dynamic systems that help to facilitate
participation and reduce predictability.

We expect that all participants at the PGA
conference agree on the need to maintain and improve
these forms of articulation, action and
communication - not just because they define the way
in which the network operates and relates to other
networks, but also because their great results they
have had in the last years. However, there are some
important questions to discuss. Here are some
examples:

* PGA and similar networks in Europe and North
America have connected mainly people who come from
so-called autonomous groups (squats and social
centres, self-organised environmental or solidarity
groups, anarchist collectives, post-ideological
action groups, etc). The active participation of
people who are most directly affected by the
structures of power which we confront (self-
organised refugees and migrants, women's groups,
homeless, sex workers, etc) has been quite limited.
This contrasts sharply with the situation in Asia,
Latin America and the Pacific (and to a much lesser
degree, also in Southern Africa), where the
participation has so far mainly come from large
movements of the most oppressed people (peasants,
indigenous peoples, women's organisations, etc) -
although in Latin America and the Pacific there is
also an increasing participation from local
autonomous groups. It is true that there are not
many movements of oppressed people in Europe, and
even fewer that work according to principles of
decentralisation and autonomy, but we seem to be
doing a bad job at working together even with the
ones that we are already in contact with.

* Beyond the 'organised' groups and movements, there
are huge numbers of people who challenge the
existing order on a daily basis - for instance,
applying low-intensity invisible techniques in their
jobs to constantly defend and reinvent more humane
ways of producing, crossing borders without
permission, using graffiti or drums to bring life
into grey suburbs, shoplifting in large malls, etc.
Sometimes some of them come in contact with our
networks (through social centres mainly) but most of
them seem not to be very interested in or aware of
what we do. At least part of the reason for this
must lie in our ways of doing things and relating to
each other: how we perceive and present ourselves,
how we communicate, what sort of things we do (and
fail to do), how we do them, etc.

* In most actions and events in which PGA has played
a role, it has so far deliberately maintained a low
profile. This has been done in order to avoid
creating too much of a 'collective identity', for
such a thing could have transformed the nature of
the network from a tool for communication and
cooperation into a political subject of its own (the
opposite of working on the basis of decentralisation
and autonomy). The idea was to concentrate the
visibility and protagonism in the local groups doing
the actions, and those that used PGA in their name
have been asked by the convenors to find another
one, since nobody can speak on behalf of PGA. While
this is all very good and coherent with PGA
principles, our intentional low-profile has provided
a great springing board for power-hungry
representatives of centralised organisations to
present themselves in mainstream media as 'speakers'
of the 'anti-globalisation movement' (whatever that
means), while PGA remained only visible to insiders.
If we want, it should be possible to combine a
deliberate lack of collective identity with a
collective effort to achieve more visibility for
PGA. But do we want that? Would it be a dangerous
step? Do we need it?

* In the last years, several media-oriented
organisations have been created in order to
capitalise on what the media inaccurately calls
'antiglobalisation movement'. Since their purpose is
to attract as much good (corporate) press and
institutional attention as possible, they generally
don't oppose capitalism and centralised power;
instead, they propose to manage them differently.
Some of them don't hesitate to participate in the
criminalisation of our networks to get better media
coverage. However, they have been able to appeal to
and attract many sound and genuine people who knew
no other way to get involved in 'the movement'. Many
of these people have more radical positions than
their respective organisations, but have also
developed a strong sense of collective identity and
'belonging' to them. So even if the relationship
with the leadership of these organisations is bound
to be conflict-ridden, maybe our networks should try
to relate in more positive terms with their members
- or maybe not?

* A particular case is the World Social Forum, a
diverse and heterogeneous media-powered
event/coalition (where there are some good
organisations and movements) that was created by
some sectors of the old left, of social democracy
and of mainstream NGOs in order to present
themselves as the moral guides of the 'anti-
globalisation movement'. The WSF has broadened the
so-called 'anti-globalisation movement' and given it
a 'respectable' public image, accelerating the
delegitimation of neoliberal ideology, and thus of
power. On the other hand, mainstream media and
social democratic parties are positive about the WSF
due to its legitimising role, since the
'alternatives' that it proposes to neoliberalism are
still based on capitalism and bureaucracies (global,
national or local). In any case, the WSF and its
offspring (like the ESF) are a major meeting point
for people and organisations that might not have
found other ways to link up with 'the movement'.
There will be a special workshop in the Leiden
conference to organise a parallel space during the
upcoming meeting of the ESF in Florence, and there
should also be a separate paper to prepare for it.

These are some issues for discussion on this topic,
you might think of different ones. You might totally
disagree with our analyses, we'd be glad if this was
the case, since this text is aimed precisely at
encouraging debate. We of course do not expect any
consensus to come out of the discussions, the only
intention is to foster the exchange of ideas around
these topics, which will hopefully give raise to
internationally coordinated initiatives on specific
aspects of our work.

Appendix: on a more fundamental note
************************************
All the topics for discussion presented in this
paper are based on the assumption that we all agree
on the need to reach out to ever growing sectors of
society and to construct a process of broad social
change in Europe. But for this to happen, we need to
become a 'mass movement', not in the sense of
integrating 'the masses' in 'our' struggle, but in
the sense that increasing numbers of people take
control over their own lives through diverse means
and according to their own ideas. But can we become
a mass movement in Europe in the foreseeable future?
What are the consequences if we think that we can?
And if not? [We think that we can, otherwise we
would not waste our time writing this paper, but
some people might not agree, and that is also a
legitimate and coherent position.] Do we want to
give it a try, or shall we concentrate on more
tangible, immediate things?

[Peoples' Global Action]

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