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CHAPTER 1

HORIZONTAL ARMIES AND VERTICAL NETWORKS

We, the international working group on resistance against the next G8, are just a group of people sitting in a field, wanting to change the world. (International Working Group on Resistance Against the G8 2007)

Anti-summit Mobilisations

An Army Descends

I am stood with an umbrella, holding it above the head of an activist who is 'locked on' outside the Faslane Nuclear Submarine Base. We have been here for over five hours in the burning sun, and everyone is starting to wonder why. I am the one holding the umbrella because the person locked on has both of his arms locked inside two metal tubes through which he is attached to five other people. Together they form a circle, lying on the ground, chained to each other in front of the Faslane Nuclear Submarine Base. It is day one of a week of protests organised against the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland.

The blockades have been scheduled to last until 5 p.m., but there is still an hour to go and many people have already gone home. We would really like to go home too and are thinking of giving up, but just before the pressure of the day takes its toll, we are swept away to an alternative universe. Suddenly, as if out of thin air, an army appears. Yes, an army, but this is not your average army. This army has red noses and is wearing mismatched furry pink and green fatigues. They stand in formation in front of the blockade announcing that they have come as part of operation 'HA, HA, HAA' (Helping Authorities House Arrest Half-witted Authoritarian Androids) as they laugh in unison. General Mayhem (or was it Kolonel Klepto?) rings his whistle and the troops stand tall, saluting him with their thumbs to their nose and wiggling their fingers. Then, they break formation and start to run everywhere chaotically. These clown-soldiers each take an umbrella and hold it above the activists lying on the ground, telling jokes and making everyone laugh. Other clowns are performing a military stand- up comedy act as the deep sound of drums swells in the distance. Slowly, the rhythm of the 'samba band' draws nearer. When they finally arrive at the gate, the pink-and-silver clad dancers swirl through the clown army, and the pink, camouflaged clowns dance with the samba band to the Brazilian beats in an unchoreographed but synchronised routine. The entire space is transformed from a hot, empty, exhausted moment to the centre of an absurdly surreal world of laughter and music.

In this chapter I present a small portion of some of the actors I met during my fieldwork, focusing on the relationships they create. The main aim of this chapter is to map out the dynamics between these diverse groups of people and to offer a sense of how the various groups relate to one another and to the democratic praxis outlined in this book. To this end, I describe the people I worked with primarily in terms of the roles they fulfilled and how these activities placed them in relation to one another. I begin with the Clown Army as a semiotic tool for introducing some of the ideas underlying the autonomous strands of the alterglobalisation movement. I then briefly introduce the Dissent! network and the movement structure of 'affinity groups'. Using examples from G8 mobilisations in 2003, 2004 and 2005, I outline the relationships between the various networks in anti-G8 mobilisations, highlighting both commonalities to all settings and peculiarities to each setting. I argue that in social fora organising processes we find divisions and tensions within a singular process, while in anti- summit mobilisations, we see the coming together of diverse networks in parallel processes. Below I describe the political backgrounds of movement actors that will underlie the descriptions of conflict in the chapters to come, especially, the conflict between the 'verticals'and the 'horizontals'. Finally, although not directly relevant to a discussion of the collective spaces of global networks which are the subject of this book, I briefly introduce and locate the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) within the framework of the alterglobalisation movement to highlight the relationship between the alterglobalisation movement itself and the many movements that constitute it.

The Clown Army

I start with the Clown Army, not because they are the most important or the largest section of the alterglobalisation movement, but because they are hilarious. Conveniently, they also embody many of the most important values of the alterglobalisation movement. In the UK the Clown Army's official name is the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA). The significance of this name, in their own words, is as follows: We are clandestine because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity and we are everyone ...

We are insurgent because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere ...

We are rebels because we love life and happiness more than 'revolution'. Because no revolution is ever complete and rebellion continues forever. Because we will dismantle the ghost-machine of abstraction with means that are indistinguishable from ends. Because we don't want to change 'the' world, but 'our' world. Because we will always desert and disobey those who abuse and accumulate power. Because rebels transform everything – the way they live, create, love, eat, laugh, play, learn, trade, listen, think and most of all the way they rebel.

We are clowns because what else can one be in such a stupid world ...

Because buffoons always succeed in failing, always say yes, always hope and always feel things deeply ...

We are an army because we live on a planet in permanent war – a war of money against life, of profit against dignity, of progress against the future ...

We are circa because we are approximate and ambivalent, neither here nor there, but in the most powerful of all places, the place in-between order and chaos. (Clown Army n.d.)

The Clown Army's sentiment is echoed in many other sections of the movement. In this abbreviated version of their raison d'être, we see some of the major ideas underlying the autonomous sections of the anti- summit mobilisations: the refusal of fame, leadership and uniformity; the idea that they come from nowhere and are now everywhere as symbolic for the unpredictability and open, indeterminate nature of the struggle; the replacement of 'revolution' with prefigurative rebellion in which the accumulation of power is undermined through refusal to acknowledge it; the element of mockery as a way to undermine authority; and the idea that despite valuing unpredictability and chaos, some form of order or organisation is necessary. In all of these aspects they are very much in tune with other autonomous movements.

Dissent!

During the 2005 anti-G8 mobilisations, the Clown Army worked in loose connection with the Dissent! network. The Dissent! network was started in 2003 by movement actors involved in radical environmental and anti-roads actions, Reclaim the Streets, PGA, the anti-war movement and 'the global anti-capitalist movement which has emerged around meetings of those that rule over us':

The Network has no central office, no spokespeople, no membership list and no paid staff. It's a mechanism for communication and co-ordination between local groups and working groups involved in building resistance to the G8, and capitalism in general. It hopes to exist long after the world leaders have returned home in the early summer of 2005. (Dissent! 2004a)

There is intentionally no clear statement on the Dissent! website as to what exactly Dissent! is or believes. This elusiveness has a functional motivation – to keep the network as open, diverse and inclusive as possible. This vagueness is also a political statement. Dissent! follows in the footsteps of many movement networks, and even the 'alterglobalisation' movement as a whole, by refusing to be defined, refusing to succumb to one clear definition. Despite this lack of unitary definition, the Dissent! network still acts in unison; where there is no definitional unity there is still operational congruency. During the 2004 G8 protests, Dissent! released a statement of solidarity with the US protest groups, in which they defined themselves as 'a UK-wide anti-capitalist network that operates by the People's Global Action hallmarks' (Dissent! 2004b; see also PGA n.d.).

While there is no single definition of what Dissent! is, everyone involved has an opinion on the matter. One of my personal favourites is 'dissent is nothing and it was always nothing, it is made by what anticapitalists do within and everywhere'. The word 'nothing' is not meant to be derisive; this was a positive statement almost advocating that Dissent! ought to be 'nothing' in a conversation about avoiding a unitary purpose for the network. Allowing dissent to be 'nothing' (read nothing-in-particular) is in this case akin to allowing it to be many different things.

Affinity Groups and Action Groups

The autonomous sections of the alterglobalisation movement often organise themselves into 'affinity groups'. An affinity group is a small group of people (six to twelve people roughly) who build strong relationships of trust and friendship with each other and take action together. Normally, an affinity group will work together for many years on several different actions. In the alterglobalisation movement the close 'affinity' which was once a defining characteristic has diminished in favour of privileging action. Although there are still some who are part of long-term affinity groups that intentionally build friendship and community among their members, today most affinity groups are ad hoc and fleeting, being formed only a few days before a major blockade. Activists are aware of this difference and often call these last-minute affinity groups not 'affinity groups' but 'action groups'. This shift is partially due to the fact that movement actors often travel long distances and are accustomed to different political practices, and not all of them have the habit of working in affinity groups. Even for those who do have an affinity group at home, action groups are often a practical necessity because many people who come to these mobilisations take one to four weeks off from work or school to participate, and it is rare that an entire group of six to twelve people can do this together. The large scale of these mobilisations, and temporary, short time-frame, also leads to the diminishing importance of personal trust and friendship and an increase in the importance of having common action goals and wanting to employ the same action tactics. As Polletta (2002: 192) points out in the case of DAN, there is also a political aim behind this shift; affinity groups for direct actions are used as 'an opportunity to "go outside [one's comfort zone]" by joining people with different backgrounds' and not people one already knows and trusts.

Switzerland: Transient Affinity

This was certainly true of my affinity group during the 2003 G8 protests, which was a random selection of people, most of whom I had never met before. The G8 was meeting in Evian, France and protests were being organised in three different locations – Annemasse (France), Geneva and Lausanne (Switzerland). When I first arrived, I went to Geneva where I met with those setting up the autonomous village (village autogéré). I pitched my tent in the village and started to help welcome new arrivals at the information stand in the parc des bastions. In the village autogéré I met a Scottish woman with whom I later travelled to Lausanne. In Lausanne we randomly ran into an old friend of mine from the US and together with two of his friends we formed an affinity group. We intended to blockade the port in Lausanne and we quickly found others, mostly anglophones, who were interested in joining us. There were ten of us all together, but only one that I had known for more than two weeks. It was an affinity group of travellers. Two out of the ten were from Lausanne and the others were from the US or the UK. After the G8 protests, many of them travelled to Thessaloniki to protest the EU summit in Greece. The path that led them to Lausanne was often random. One man in the group never intended to come to the G8 protests, but he had been travelling across Europe, staying in squats along the way, and ended up at a gathering on squatting and autonomous lifestyles where he ran into a friend who convinced him to come to Lausanne. Two of the women were taking the summer off and travelling from one protest to another. One of the women, a 32-year-old single mother, had her twelve-year-old son with her. They were all either students or intentionally unemployed, living off of money they had saved and surviving by not spending very much, using tactics like hitch-hiking and 'skipping' food.

The US: Just Not a Sexy Place

For the G8 protests in 2004, I did not have an affinity group. It was difficult to get information ahead of time about the actions and logistics being planned. Perhaps I was just ill informed because I did not live in the US, but there were certainly fewer e-lists and websites than for the 2003 mobilisation, and nothing compared to 2005 and 2007. There were many reasons for the small size of the mobilisation in the US, but the main reasons were the upcoming Democratic National Convention (DNC) and the Republican National Convention (RNC) against which massive demonstrations were being planned. The location of the G8 summit was no help either. The summit itself was held on Sea Island, which was entirely off limits to protesters, dubbed a 'red zone'. The protesters had no choice but to go to Brunswick, Georgia on the mainland across from Sea Island. The small town of Brunswick was not a hotbed of political activity, although there were plenty of reasons why it should be. Racial segregation was still unofficially in place, separate toilets and all. There were so many toxic chemicals in the ground and water that it was impossible to open the tap without suffering from the smell. As one of the protesters put it: 'It's just not a sexy place.'

When I first arrived in Georgia, I first went to the Indymedia centre in Atlanta. The Indymedia centre, located in an abandoned church, was also home to four adults and one teenager. One woman living there who was involved in organising the protests was a single mother who had at one time been homeless with her now teenage daughter. During the protests she was working full time for the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition (GPJC) for a small stipend. She spent most of her time on the phone worrying that 'There are only eleven days to go and we still have no venues, no permits, no housing. One minute they tell us we can have a park or the college, the next we can't.' While in Atlanta I went to a street medic training and decided to 'run' as a medic during the protests. After the training, another medic and I travelled down to Brunswick together and stayed at the house of a local activist who had offered her property as a campsite. This woman was a 'veteran' of the 1970s women's movement and had supported campaigns for indigenous rights, but was no longer involved in political activism. She lived with her husband and three children in a medium-size house outside of Brunswick. She was very welcoming and friendly to all the protesters who came to stay, taking on a motherly role. She was less welcoming, however, to unwanted guests, including 'rednecks' (a 'classist term' not often used by activists, I was told) and 'authorities'. She kept a shotgun on the porch and in a conversation about potential trouble, she took her shotgun in her hands and comforted us by saying: 'Don't y'all worry now, if theys come even close to that fence there, I'll git rid of 'em.' The medics and I who stayed at her house grew close to her, but the contrast between us and her could not have been stronger. The medics were über politically correct and very careful in their use of language so as not to offend anyone. They were all highly educated, middle- to upper-middle-class urbanites from northern US or from abroad, mostly in their twenties and early thirties. She was older and settled in the countryside with a family, and in many ways the stereotype of a Southern woman, albeit a somewhat unconventional version thereof.

Despite these differences, working together went very smoothly. The 2004 G8 mobilisation was so small that literally all the different groups could easily come together and discuss how to proceed. Some of the main contingents were United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ), GPJC, the Gullah/Geeche march for reparations, Fix Shit Up!, the pagan cluster, the Fair World Fair, the medics and Indymedia. UFPJ is one of the largest mainstream anti-war organisations in the US, consisting of 650 local and international groups, but they were not very well represented in the lead-up to the G8 protests, with only one or two members arriving before the protests. Fix Shit Up! was an anarchist project that was aimed at showing the constructive side of anarchism. These activists worked together with local people to 'work on local projects, such as renovating houses and environmental clean-up' with the intention 'to arm ourselves with hammers instead of bricks. To count our victories in the relationships we build, rather than what we tear down' (Fix Shit Up! collective 2004). The Fix Shit Up! project started before the protests and was meant as a long-term commitment to the local community.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Will of the Many"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Marianne Maeckelbergh.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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