hi all
I'm forwarding this story because it alludes to some pretty big divisions among Italian radicals. I was wondering if anyone knows more about this. Also can anyone tell me about the politics of Ya Basta/the White Overalls. Among anarchists there seems to be fairly uncritical admiration of Ya Basta (more accurately the White Overalls) because of their willingness to go the biff with the pigs. How are YB organised? What do they do apart from trying to storm summits?
pete
Basta la Vista
by Arthur Neslen
The Leoncavallo PGA conference story I wrote for Now magazine in Toronto, is online at gzhttp://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/current/news_spread.html until Thursday, when the front page changes and the story goes onto the website archive. Now claims a readership of 400,000.
[...]
MILAN - Giant metallic sliding doors open into the Leoncavallo social centre in Milan. A temporary autonomous zone part holiday resort, part conference centre, part leisure complex, it's a monument to squat culture on an epic scale.
It's also the venue for the first European conference of Peoples Global Action (PGA), the umbrella network of anti-capitalist activists that has changed the world a little, since its inception in Geneva three years ago.
Seattle, Washington, Prague, Sydney, Nice, the activists almanac of raucous protests against global financial institutions were all organized under the PGA's aegis. Quebec has been too. But the movement is at one of its perennial crossroads. Activists mutter about burn-out in bars, and campaigners whisper that they're getting stuck on a jet-set anti-summit trip. Meanwhile, direct action advocates uneasily mull the path they're treading with NGOs, and wonder if they'll get there together.
Leoncavallo is a forum for these issues and more. It's the voice of the movement talking to itself. In several languages at once, simultaneously translated.
While February's Porto Allegre conference in Brazil focussed on policy issues, and involved many NGOs, Leoncavello is strictly an activists' affair. It's been organized by Ya Basta! (Enough!), the Italian originators of the white overall movement that is spreading like wildfire in activist circles.
Many trace Ya Basta's roots to the mid-1990s when the Zapatista uprising began but it was actually born out of a small Italian Marxist-autonomist current of the 1970s, heavily influenced by the ideas of Foucalt.
While other Italian leftists and anarchists of the time were turning to terrorism and historic compromises, the nascent Ya Basta were swotting up on esoteric-sounding theories of “biopower”. Foucalt argued that the modern state was increasingly separating people from their bodies so as to sell back a stunted and commodified shell, while reducing human beings themselves to a state of bare life.
In a political time dominated by life-and-death arguments about social class, organization and responses to state repression, the idea didn't catch on but 25 years later, at the S26 demonstration in Prague, it came of age.
The sight of hundreds of disciplined "White Overalls ” marching with arms linked, riot shields and water pistols at the ready, fighting the Czech cops to a standstill inspired thousands abroad. At home though, the grumblings were already beginning.
Today, some 300 activists from every European country are in Leoncavello for the first evening of the conference but while there are delegates from Canada, the US, Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina, Israel and India, few Italians are hanging out.
The mood on the stony patio allotment outside the conference complex is a mix of the euphoric and cautious. Miyuki, a Canadian climate change activist is joyfully embracing old friends and new as the US Ya Basta delegation arrive. "Hi, I'm from British Columbia, do you know where that is?" she enthuses. "I'm from Seattle honey,” one replies.
Moose, an activist from the New York City Ya Basta collective, loves the 'squatter chic atmosphere here. He got active after being inspired by Ya Basta's Prague contingent, and researching their philosophy. His organisation claims up to 100 supporters and he's planning for the anti-FTAA protest in Quebec City next month.
"We've been working with indigenous peoples and are going to cross the border at Akwesasne without passports,” Moose tells me. "Five hundred to a thousand of us will cross there to meet with the Canadian caravan of autoworkers, postal workers and groups like the Ontario Coalition against Poverty. ” Won't the police try to stop you I ask? "Oh yeah,” he nods. We're planning accordingly.”
NGO critics argue that confrontations with cops and property destruction isolate activists from wider support but Moose is unimpressed.
"Whatever the NGOs want to say they can say, but property doesn't breathe, it doesn't feel, it doesn't hurt. There is a problem with city-hopping leaving each city in a mess but the actions also inspire people and show them what the cops do to protestors. My response to the NGOs would be that capitalism is the biggest purveyor of violence on the planet.”
Later that night, delegates are still arriving in dribs, drabs and torrents. At the Barretto bar, Lexus, an animal rights activist, approaches me for a light in Italian, says he's from Florence. Then he breaks out in an American drawl and confesses that he's really a US lawyer on the run from a gun-happy police department. "I'm not paranoid, they really are trying to kill me,” he insists. "My lawyer said to leave the country but I'm going back to sue them. They picked on the wrong guy this time.”
Maybe I say, but isn't it a big risk to take. Couldn't you let it pass? Lexus stiffens. "I'm going to keep fighting,” he squints. "They're going to have to kill me.”
The sleeping quarters upstairs in the centre are basic. A snore orchestra of 250 tired activists lie strewn around the floor like casualties at the Battle of the Somme. In keeping with the libertarian ethos of Leoncavallo, there are no security guards downstairs. We've all been given red delegates card and trust is the modus operandi.
But it doesn't extend to everyone. The next day, after the getting-to-know-you opening session of the conference, half the day is spent arguing over whether the British Trotskyist groups Workers Power and the Socialist Workers Party should be allowed to participate.
Many British anarchists, most vocally a Reclaim The Streets sub-committee, see them as hierarchical, authoritarian sects who swamp movements for recruitment purposes. A workers Power delegate protests, "If a sub-group from one group decides who can and who can't participate, then who are the real authoritarians? This is a witch-hunt!” The non-British delegates look perplexed.
The session is inward-looking and open-ended. It smells like score-settling and ultimately, a fudge is agreed where the SWP can only talk about organizing the Genoa demonstration in July and Workers Power can only speak "when we feel it's constructive to do so. ” Leoncavallo is a conference in which many different conferences are unavoidable.
When the delegates open up and look outwards, the results can be inspiring. A Colombian representative from Processo de Communidades Negras finishes a rousing speech with the words, "We cannot be if others are not!” They can also be willful. A delegate from Liverpool reads the conference the words to a song he's written about murdering the bourgeosie: "Tickle the rich because everyone deserves to die laughing. We will drown you in Lake Geneva with melted cheese and chocolate. The cuckoo clock strikes midnight.”
A system of hand signals used in Prague is "consensed ” and political currents from Germany's Resistance of Crazy Rebels to the Karnataka State Farmers Association eddy and overlap in a colorful culture-clash with multiple musical accompaniments.
There's a hemp bar (and bars of hemp), a cinema, restaurants, and outdoor cafes where most of the real business is conducted in knotted activist hunches during the breaks.
I want to talk to Luca Cassarini, the de facto leader of Ya Basta but he's not an easy man to engage. As he briefly leaves a huddle, I decide on a cheerful gambit. “Hello,” I say, “are you Luca Cassarini?” “No ” he replies and walks off.
Back on the conference floor, the talk has turned to process and delegates have turned off. Long periods of boredom are punctuated by moments of acute confusion as delegates try to decide what they want to talk about and in which order. "If this is what the revolution looks like, I'm going to become a stockbroker,” asides a British delegate from the Wombles (White Overall Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggle).
The Greeks are set upon a debate on the Balkans. An old left delegate declaims that "we ve never had a chance like this since 1968!” Luca says we have to develop a "bubble of meaning" to challenge the production of thought and the British delegates scratch their heads.
Genoa is a hot potato. The July 20th anti-G8 demonstration will be crucial for European activists, not least because an incoming rightwing Italian administration is expected to ban it. Ya Basta are mobilising for a “general citizenship strike ” but no-one knows exactly what this means and in the working group, 50 activists get bogged down deciding how to split up into a further three sub-groups.
Outside the room, activists mutter about meeting whatever force the police use against them on July 20th with an equal measure. On a Naples demonstration the week before the conference, police fired rubber bullets at 25,000 anti-globalisation demonstrators armed mainly with a giant inflatable GM corn-on-the-cob.
The wider question of whether this is an anti-summit movement or something more rears its head only indirectly. Tomsk, a British Womble tells me, "people are becoming better street fighters. I don't want to be arrogant, but now if we want to shut down a conference like the G8, we can do it. We could also do something more beneficial.”
Many here publicly argue that local activism and movement-building are being neglected in favour of one-off spectaculars, which poorer activists can't get to anyway. But in private, after a year and a half of global protesting, some anti-capitalists are beginning to complain of burn-out.
Miyuki is now a climate change activist but six months ago, she was the fairy who led the "blue line ” demonstration in Prague. "Too many demonstrations can be a cause of burn-out," she says. "I put so much time and money and energy into creating an infrastructure at the convergence centre in Prague, and then I spent a long time afterwards trying to work out what had actually happened. It was too much. It's effective but also extremely hard and it never works out the way you expect it to.”
As night falls, Leoncavallo opens its doors to the Italian rave scene, with British drum and bass artist Goldie topping the bill and thousands of young Italians joining the party, blending into the pop-art graffiti on the walls. The entrance fee is token and Leoncavallo is suddenly a cutting edge music festival. Colombian kitchen-sink film noir is going on in one cafe, drummers are doing their thing in another and craft stalls are everywhere, as kids skin up and pop pills. The scene is sheer techno oblivion.
When the delegates reassemble the next afternoon, it's announced that one female delegate was sexually attacked as she tried to sleep upstairs during the revelry. Other women were sexually harassed.
Ya Basta are apologetic but an activist takes the microphone to bitterly complain: "The organizers should have protected us from people who had nothing to do with the conference. ” He's booed, and the PGA's European summit quickly moves on to other business.
The first item on the agenda is representation rights at September's Cochabamba PGA assembly in Bolivia. Tensions between activists from the South - particularly Latin America - and those in Europe and North America have sometimes been evident and a 70-30% South-North balance has been agreed between the two hemispheres.
A Bolivian delegate tells the conference, “We don't need any more humanitarian tourism, there's enough of that already. Indians are not an exotic product waiting for your solutions. People should collect money to support our struggles.”
A Spanish activist counters that “North-South relations are a complex issue but some Latin Americans have a tendency to equate us all with the United States. Using guilt as a motivating force is counter-productive. We need to develop new forms of solidarity. If we go with guilt, we're fucked.”
Somehow, a few hours before it's scheduled to end, the conference becomes a place of frantic and constructive debate. As the delegates go into workshop mode, I finally manage to catch Luca, who is effusive about Ya Basta and the spread of white overall movements from Finland to Chicago.
“The White Overall movement began in 1994 when the mayor of Milan tried to destroy the Leoncavallo centre,” he tells me. "In two years he destroyed it twice and after the second destruction, he said: 'They are now ghosts. They don't exist.'"
“So we organized a mass demonstration to squat Leoncavallo again, to show that we were still alive and we used the fact that people are scared of ghosts by dressing up in white. The day of the urban guerilla started here.”
Ya Basta went on to forge direct links with the Zapatistas in Mexico, taking their name from Subcommandante Marcos's rallying call that began the Chiapas uprising. "The Zapatistas said that 'to be visible we had to cover our faces.' We said, 'to be visible we had to cover our bodies with white overalls.' It makes evident something that is hidden.”
One thing evident in the conference is that Luca has a following, not unlike Marcos's in some quarters. He's thoughtful, charismatic, a gentle speaker and he seems to see parallels himself.
“Subcommandante Marcos solved the problem of the relationship between specific persons and the wider group by obeying the commands of the Indians, the people really leading the struggle,” he says.
But the question of political leadership in Italy has been a difficult one. Disputes between political social centres have been acrimonious, with the most poisonous accusations flung around, occasionally accompanied by fists. In Genoa, one squat bears the graffiti slogan, "No heroin, no police, no white overalls”. Although he's been the target of much personal criticism, Luca is not phased.
“We are a big group so it's natural that a feeling of envy starts,” he tells me. "But we should not seek the enemy within the movement. We should find ways to respect our differences. So long as there is mutual respect, we can solve any problems or conflicts.”
Around the conference, some murmurings about post-modernism have accompanied Luca's way-out sounding ideas about a "bubble of meaning" and the “general citizenship strike ” but he feels they are germane.
"The bubble of meaning is a way of building consensus. Building ideas, culture, information and perceptions of reality inside people's heads is this system's first gain. We're not just against globalisation. We aim to capture this bubble and use it to create an alternative."
"The general citizenship strike is an attempt to update the idea of the general strike. It doesn't just involve workers, it's about migrants, pensioners, the unemployed, all the “invisibles ” whose lives have been atomised. The citizen is part of a group - the city - and as we are all citizens of the world, we should all have the same rights. We are all human beings.”
Outside, some delegates have arranged themselves into colorful circles to discuss issues like “no borders ” caravans and autonomous trades-unions. Others are beginning to leave in the same dribs, drabs and torrents that they arrived in.
On the way out, Italians activists from the Tactical Media Crew complain to me about the conference's organization. “There were very few Italians here,” one says. "I personally don t like Ya Basta at all but this was an important forum where you could discuss ideas. ” And sometimes it was.
The Dutch groups Eurodisnie and Global Resistance are due to pick up the convenor's baton from Ya Basta at the Cochabamba conference, but whether the movement developes further than the next globalisation summit is still an open question.