[Gipfelsoli Newsletter] Hokkaido -- Heiligendamm -- Strasbourg/ Kehl

[International Newsletter]

- Protestation against the tightening of immigration restrictions in relation to
the G8 Summit
- Homeless people shut out of bus terminal in Sapporo ahead of G-8 summit
- Update about repression in Japan against anti-G8
- Protesting against Kyoto Police raid of union office
- G8 actions in the Netherlands
- Roundtable on g8 Resistance: Perspectives for the Next Phase of Global
Anti-Capitalist Uprisings
- The 2008 G-8 in Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment
- La Via Campesina llama a la movilización en contra del G8 en Hokkaido Japón
- NO JUSTICE NO PEACE: The vertices of the Anti Military Plenum Berlin

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Protestation against the tightening of immigration restrictions in relation to
the G8 Summit

June 11, 2008

WATCH (Lawyers’ Network for Human Rights Observation around the G8 Summit)

For the forthcoming G8 Summit at Lake Toya in Hokkaido from July 7 to 9, many
NGOs and citizen groups are preparing and organizing events relating to human
rights, peace, environment and other subjects. Many NGO activists and other
civil movement activists from abroad are planning to come to Japan to take part
at various G8-related projects.

However, there are reports that the Japanese authorities are handling
immigration control very rigidly with regard to the Summit, in several cases
even preventing international activists from entering Japan.

In particular, foreign activists who have been convicted of a political crime
are required to prove that their crime was political, and provide evidence that
they are allowed to enter Japan despite their criminal record, which is
according to the political crime exception from the ground for denial of
landing as ruled in Section 5 Paragraph 1 Number 4 Phrase 2 Immigration Control
and Refugee Recognition Act ("Immigration Control Act"). Thus, as a condition
for recognizing someone as a political criminal, the authorities demand from
her/him to submit documents which are extraordinary difficult, if not
impossible to produce within an ordinary visa issuance procedure. What's more,
of people with a political crime record many are often internationally renowned
activists, therefore applying formal and rigid criteria to what counts as
evidence of political crimes may damage the credibility of Japanese society.
Recently, a former activist of the African National Congress, Mr. Trevor Ngwane,
who was planning to take part at meetings and events related to TICAD (Tokyo
International Conference on African Development) from May 28 to 30, was de
facto denied entrance to Japan. In fact, Mr. Ngwane has been arrested once in
the past, but he was exonerated, so that he currently does not fall under any
of the grounds for denial of entry into Japan at all. Nevertheless, on the eve
of leaving for Japan, the Foreign Ministry demanded that he produce a
certificate issued by the South African Police to the effect that he had never
committed any crime. Even though Mr. Ngwane then submitted an affidavit that he
had never been punished before, which he obtained from police, the Foreign
Ministry denied to issue him a visa under the pretext of obtaining
verification, so that Mr. Ngwane could not embark upon his airplane as planned
and had to abandon his visit to Japan.

Besides Mr. Ngwane's case, a member of a Korean civil group was denied entry to
Japan, sent back to Korea and was allowed to enter only upon her second
attempt; also a German NGO activist was rejected at the Otaru Harbour in March.
Furthermore, the famous Italian philosopher and political thinker, Antonio
Negri, was asked to produce the same documents as in Mr. Ngwane’s case,
resulting in the cancellation of his visit. We still feel keenly the
astonishment throughout the world about the Japanese government's lack of
understanding. We hear that many visa applications are still being examined by
the consulary division of the Foreign Ministry.

Associating legitimate civil activities around the G8 Summit with "terrorism"
without any justification, and restricting the immigration control
systematically is irresponsible behaviour towards international society.
International law obligates a state to provide full protection for freedom of
expression, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly for civil movements. This
obligation applies self-evidently when executing security measures and controls.

We demand that the Japanese authorities respect the rights of political
criminals granted in Section 5 Paragraph 1 Number 4 Phrase 2 Immigration
Control Act and that the Japanese government does everything in its power to
stop hindering foreign NGO activists from coming to Japan.

Source: http://watch08summit.blogspot.com


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Homeless people shut out of bus terminal in Sapporo ahead of G-8 summit

SAPPORO -- A bus terminal in front of Sapporo Station has started shutting out
homeless people ahead of the G-8 summit to be held at Lake Toyako, Hokkaido,
from July 7-9, it has been learned.

The terminal's operating company is prohibiting homeless people from staying at
the terminal on the grounds of improvement of administration, citing thefts and
an arson attack in March. It says that it is not "bullying" the homeless.
However, support groups say it is possible that the bus terminal is
over-reacting due to the summit, and that its move is problematic from a human
rights perspective.

On June 1, a notice titled "caution" was put up in a waiting room and along
stairways in the terminal, prohibiting people from sleeping over or entering
the facility after operating hours. The operating company is now considering
having guards patrol the terminal and caution people not to stay there
overnight.

Sapporo Municipal Government officials said there were 109 homeless people in
the city as of January this year. About 20 to 30 of the homeless people sleep
in the terminal, which has no shutters and which people can freely enter at
night.

"It's a facility with high public use, so we need to strengthen security ahead
of the summit," an official from the operating company said, commenting on the
move. It says it is not considering forced removals at this stage, and is going
no further than a "request" for them to leave.

One homeless man in his 50s who has stayed in the terminal for four or five
years said there was nowhere else for him to go.

"From about spring I've started being questioned more by police officers.
There's no fear of me being attacked here, and it's the only place I can sleep
in peace. I know I'm causing trouble, but if I'm shut out there's nowhere else
for me to go."

A labor and welfare citizen's group in Hokkaido plans to investigate the effects
of the move at the terminal.

"In Hokkaido, a place like the bus terminal is necessary for homeless people in
the winter," said Takenori Kinoshita, an associate professor at Hokusei Gakuen
University who heads the group. "We want to keep our eyes fixed on whether the
latest move will have repercussions on other facilities."

(Mainichi Japan) June 13, 2008

Source: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080613p2a00m0na008000c.html


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Update about repression in Japan against anti-G8

More than ever anti-G8 activists, anarchist and communist need our international
solidarity, take action against Japanese business interests in the countries you
live and contact the Japanese embassies and consulates also and protest this
repressive measures to prevent people organising against capitalist tyranny!

>From ABC OSAKA - Preliminary information: Over 40 people have been arrested in
pre-emptive sweeps of broad left and anarchist groups.

Tabi/Rebel_Jill is apparently doing well inside, and is full of spirit. Tabi
will be out of the 27th most likely, they probably won’t let him out before the
g8. We’ve already gathered about 700 dollars for his defense. A bank account has
been set up at the post office to support Tabi:

Yuubin Furikae Kouza 00200-5-38572 Meigi 5-16 Kitsuke Kokushoku Enkai

Kin-chan from the Kamagasaki Patrol (Osaka), who is constantly followed by
police and usually has a helicopter following him at demonstrations, was
arrested yesterday morning. The police haven’t even come up with a charge for
him apparently. Falsifying the reasons may be difficult since there are no
problems with his address registration or parole. Nevertheless he will be held
for 23 days for sure.

The same day a union in Rakunan, Kyoto was raided, had their office searched and
2 of their members arrested (details below in Japanese).

Not clear when this happened just yet but 4 members of the Chuukaku- ha Leninist
organization were arrested in Tokyo, apparently members of the leadership.

On May 29th, there were 38 people arrested at Hosei University in Tokyo, at a
political assembly against the G8 at the University. This hasn’t made the
activist newswires.

Source: email


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Protesting against Kyoto Police raid of union office

10th of June before 9 in the morning, 19 police men from Kyoto Prefecture Police
Security 3rd department (so called public safety dep.) raided and searched the
union office which is used by Rakunan Union, Rakunan Workers Network, Asia
Joint Action (Asia Kyodokodo) , (and ) also an house of ‘A’ who is a member of
Rakunan Union for the suspect of “fraud related incident” (with an arrest
warrant), which is an apparent excuse to crush the movement against the summit.

Kyoto Police (‘Hori’ is the person in charge) claims that the union member A
unlawfully received unemployment allowance in 2004, which is claimed to be
found as a proof after the search of his house. (‘A’ denies this of course.)
This is something which happened in 4 years ago and even if what they claim was
true, it should had been dealt by ‘Hello Work’ (something like JobCenter).
Responding to our question, Hori said it was conducted originally by the 3rd
Department. Answering to another question why they had to search the union
office for an suspected incident of an individual, he gave no convincing
reasons other than saying “It is Independent Workers Network (Jiritsu Rooren)
which is used as a contact address for Asia Joint Action (Asia Kyodokodo).

Kyoto police did the search based on their made-up story, ‘A’ received the
allowance to fund Asia Joint Action (Asia Kyodokoodo) to find out his relation
to the group for the proof of their fake story.

They spend three hours searching and occupying the office for the proof, which
of course can not be found. Instead, they brought back a list of members of
Rakunan Union and a list of members payment of union fee. Are they going to
claim that these are the proof of his “fraud”??

Source: email


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G8 actions in the Netherlands

Past weekend the city of Utrecht was the centre of action against the G8. On
Friday there was music in activist cultural centre ACU. Saturday 14th was the
day for a bicicle demonstration. Some 100 people participated. Last year,
before the Rostock-Summit, all participants were arrested and locked up for
many hours, but this time the police was more collaborative and the
demonstration went as planned (see pictures here:
http://www.indymedia.nl/nl/2008/06/52896.shtml)

Yesterday, Sunday 15th, was a day for direct action. This consisted in invading
the premisses of Kamp Zeist: one of the 10 jails for refugees in Holland.
Although there was lots of police two groups succeed in penetrating the jail,
one of them occupied the roof of one of the celblocks, while from the outside
people cheered and hit tennisbals with little notes in them over the walls and
fences. Seven persons on the roof were arrested by some miserable looking group
of riotcops with masks and armour. See more info and pictures here:
http://www.indymedia.nl/nl/2008/06/53018.shtml

Comming soon:

The 5th of July is international day of action. In Holland this will be joined
by something called ‘Enter Fortress Europe’. People are urged to form teams and
beat the g8-system. The so called Fortress Europe is chosen as a main goal
because it is the most direct materialisation of G8 and EU policy: creating
poverty elswere and repressing people who revolt against that and/or try to
find a livable place. People abroad can also join the game and help beat the
system, more information on that will be availabe soon on
http://www.enterforteuropa.org.

here’s a little trailer about that day already:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7gl3r7lEZk

Source: email


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Roundtable on g8 Resistance: Perspectives for the Next Phase of Global
Anti-Capitalist Uprisings

Interventions # 1
first appeared in Issue 6 of Upping the Anti: a Journal of Theory and Action.

The G8 is more than a place where neoliberal trade agreements are authored. It
is also a space where the legitimacy of global governance is reproduced. In
2005, 300,000 people took to the streets in Edinburgh to ask the G8 for a
solution to poverty. By 2007, antagonism and dissent prevailed once again. We
are entering a period that could mark the resurgence of positive dynamics from
the earlier phase of global uprisings. But have we learned from the past? Can
we build our interventions on new and more stable ground?

These are the questions that guide the following roundtable discussion with
Hanne Jobst (Germany), Saby & Go (Japan), Miranda (Italy), and Jaggi Singh
(Canada). The participants highlight the necessity of rooting global insurgency
in everyday struggles and consider whether the global circulation of struggles
is enabled by continuous networks or events like summit protests.

Kriss Sol is an Amsterdam-based activist researcher. He has been involved in
summit protests and local organizing around global issues for several years.

Source: http://uppingtheanti.org/node/3070


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The 2008 G-8 in Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment

Bristol, Mayday, 2008

zero

The authors of this document are a collection of activists, scholars, and
writers currently based in the United States and Western Europe who have gotten
to know and work with each other in the movement against capitalist
globalization. We’re writing this at the request of some members of No! G8
Action Japan, who asked us for a broad strategic analysis of the state of
struggle as we see it, and particularly, of the role of the G8, what it
represents, the dangers and opportunities that may lie hidden in the moment. It
is in no sense programmatic. Mainly, it is an attempt to develop tools that we
hope will be helpful for organizers, or for anyone engaged in the struggle
against global capital.

I

It is our condition as human beings that we produce our lives in common.

II

Let us then try to see the world from the perspective of the planet’s commoners,
taking the word in that sense: those whose most essential tradition is
cooperation in the making and maintenance of human social life, yet who have
had to do so under conditions of suffering and separation; deprived, ignored,
devalued, divided into hierarchies, pitted against each other for our very
physical survival. In one sense we are all commoners. But it’s equally true
that just about everyone, at least in some ways, at some points, plays the role
of the rulers‹of those who expropriate, devalue and divide‹or at the very least
benefits from such divisions.

Obviously some do more than others. It is at the peak of this pyramid that we
encounter groups like the G8.

III

The G8’s perspective is that of the aristocrats, the rulers: those who command
and maintain that global machinery of violence that defends existing borders
and lines of separation: whether national borders with their detention camps
for migrants, or property regimes, with their prisons for the poor. They live
by constantly claiming title to the products of others collective creativity
and labour, and in thus doing they create the poor; they create scarcity in the
midst of plenty, and divide us on a daily basis; they create financial districts
that loot resources from across the world, and in thus doing they turn the
spirit of human creativity into a spiritual desert; close or privatize parks,
public water taps and libraries, hospitals, youth centers, universities,
schools, public swimming pools, and instead endlessly build shopping malls that
channels convivial life into a means of commodity circulation; work toward
turning global ecological catastrophe into business opportunities.

These are the people who presume to speak in the name of the ‘international
community’ even as they hide in their gated communities or meet protected by
phalanxes of riot cops. It is critical to bear in mind that the ultimate aim of
their policies is never to create community but to introduce and maintain
divisions that set common people at each other’s throats. The neoliberal
project, which has been their main instrument for doing so for the last three
decades, is premised on a constant effort either to uproot or destroy any
communal or democratic system whereby ordinary people govern their own affairs
or maintain common resources for the common good, or, to reorganize each tiny
remaining commons as an isolated node in a market system in which livelihood is
never guaranteed, where the gain of one community must necessarily be at the
expense of others. Insofar as they are willing to appeal to high-minded
principles of common humanity, and encourage global cooperation, only and
exactly to the extent that is required to maintain this system of universal
competition.

IV

At the present time, the G8‹the annual summit of the leaders of ‘industrial
democracies’‹is the key coordinative institution charged with the task of
maintaining this neoliberal project, or of reforming it, revising it, adapting
it to the changing condition of planetary class relations. The role of the G8
has always been to define the broad strategic horizons through which the next
wave of planetary capital accumulation can occur. This means that its main task
is to answer the question of how 3Ž4 in the present conditions of multiple
crises and struggles 3Ž4 to subordinate social relations among the producing
commoners of the planet to capital’s supreme value: profit.

V

Originally founded as the G7 in 1975 as a means of coordinating financial
strategies for dealing with the ‘70s energy crisis, then expanded after the end
of the Cold War to include Russia, its currently face a moment of profound
impasse in the governance of planetary class relations: the greatest since the
‘70s energy crisis itself.

VI

The ‘70s energy crisis represented the final death-pangs of what might be termed
the Cold War settlement, shattered by a quarter century of popular struggle.
It’s worth returning briefly to this history.

The geopolitical arrangements put in place after World War II were above all
designed to forestall the threat of revolution. In the immediate wake of the
war, not only did much of the world lie in ruins, most of world’s population
had abandoned any assumption about the inevitability of existing social
arrangements. The advent of the Cold War had the effect of boxing movements for
social change into a bipolar straightjacket. On the one hand, the former Allied
and Axis powers that were later to unite in the G7 (the US, Canada, UK, France,
Italy, Germany, Japan)‹the ‘industrialized democracies’, as they like to call
themselves‹engaged in a massive project of co-optation. Their governments
continued the process, begun in the ‘30s, of taking over social welfare
institutions that had originally been created by popular movements (from
insurance schemes to public libraries), even to expand them, on condition that
they now be managed by state-appointed bureaucracies rather than by those who
used them, buying off unions and the working classes more generally with
policies meant to guarantee high wages, job security and the promise of
educational advance‹all in exchange for political loyalty, productivity
increases and wage divisions within national and planetary working class
itself. The Sino-Soviet bloc‹which effectively became a kind of junior partner
within the overall power structure, and its allies remained to trap
revolutionary energies into the task of reproducing similar bureaucracies
elsewhere. Both the US and USSR secured their dominance after the war by
refusing to demobilize, instead locking the planet in a permanent threat of
nuclear annihilation, a terrible vision of absolute cosmic power.

VII

Almost immediately, though, this arrangement was challenged by a series of
revolts from those whose work was required to maintain the system, but who
were, effectively, left outside the deal: first, peasants and the urban poor in
the colonies and former colonies of the Global South, next, disenfranchised
minorities in the home countries (in the US, the Civil Rights movement, then
Black Power), and finally and most significantly, by the explosion of the
women’s movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s‹the revolt of that majority of
humanity whose largely unremunerated labor made the very existence ‘the economy’
possible. This appears to have been the tipping point.

VIII

The problem was that the Cold War settlement was never meant to include
everyone. It by definition couldn’t. Once matters reached tipping point, then,
the rulers scotched the settlement. All deals were off. The oil shock was first
edge of the counter-offensive, breaking the back of existing working class
organizations, driving home the message that there was nothing guaranteed about
prosperity. Under the aegis of the newly hatched G7, this counter-offensive
involved a series of interwoven strategies that were later to give rise to what
is known as neoliberalism.

IX

These strategies resulted in what came to be known as ‘Structural Adjustment’
both in the North and in the South, accompanied by trade and financial
liberalization. This, in turn, made possible crucial structural changes in our
planetary production in common extending the role of the market to discipline
our lives and divide us into more and more polarized wage hierarchy. This
involved:

• In the immediate wake of ‘70s oil shock, petrodollars were recycled from OPEC
into Northern banks that then lent them, at extortionate rates of interest, to
developing countries of the Global South. This was the origin of the famous
‘Third World Debt Crisis.’ The existence of this debt allowed institutions like
the IMF to impose its monetarist orthodoxy on most of the planet for roughly
twenty years, in the process, stripping away most of even those modest social
protections that had been won by the world’s poor‹large numbers of whom were
plunged into a situation of absolute desperation.

• It also opened a period of new enclosures through the capitalist imposition of
structural adjustment policies, manipulation of environmental and social
catastrophes like war, or for that matter through the authoritarian dictates of
‘socialist’ regimes. Through such means, large sections of the world’s
population have over the past thirty years been dispossessed from resources
previously held in common, either by dint of long traditions, or as the fruits
of past struggles and past settlements.

• Through financial deregulation and trade liberalization, neoliberal capital,
which emerged from the G7 strategies to deal with the 1970s crisis aimed thus
at turning the ‘class war’ in communities, factories, offices, streets and
fields against the engine of competition, into a planetary ‘civil war’, pitting
each community of commoners against every other community of commoners.

• Neoliberal capital has done this by imposing an ethos of ‘efficiency’ and
rhetoric of ‘lowering the costs of production’ applied so broadly that
mechanisms of competition have come to pervade every sphere of life. In fact
these terms are euphemisms, for a more fundamental demand: that capital be
exempt from taking any reduction in profit to finance the costs of reproduction
of human bodies and their social and natural environments (which it does not
count as costs) and which are, effectively, ‘exernalized’ onto communities and
nature.

• The enclosure of resources and entitlements won in previous generations of
struggles both in the North and the South, in turn, created the conditions for
increasing the wage hierarchies (both global and local), by which commoners
work for capital‹wage hierarchies reproduced economically through pervasive
competition, but culturally, through male dominance, xenophobia and racism.
These wage gaps, in turn, made it possible to reduce the value of Northern
workers’ labour power, by introducing commodities that enter in their wage
basket at a fraction of what their cost might otherwise have been. The
planetary expansion of sweatshops means that American workers (for example) can
buy cargo pants or lawn-mowers made in Cambodia at Walmart, or buy tomatoes
grown by undocumented Mexican workers in California, or even, in many cases,
hire Jamaican or Filipina nurses to take care of children and aged grandparents
at such low prices, that their employers have been able to lower real wages
without pushing most of them into penury. In the South, meanwhile, this
situation has made it possible to discipline new masses of workers into
factories and assembly lines, fields and offices, thus extending enormously
capital’s reach in defining the terms‹the what, the how, the how much‹of social
production.

• These different forms of enclosures, both North and South, mean that commoners
have become increasingly dependent on the market to reproduce their livelihoods,
with less power to resist the violence and arrogance of those whose priorities
is only to seek profit, less power to set a limit to the market discipline
running their lives, more prone to turn against one another in wars with other
commoners who share the same pressures of having to run the same competitive
race, but not the same rights and the same access to the wage. All this has
meant a generalized state of precarity, where nothing can be taken for granted.

X

In turn, this manipulation of currency and commodity flows constituting
neoliberal globalization became the basis for the creation of the planet’s
first genuine global bureaucracy.

• This was multi-tiered, with finance capital at the peak, then the
ever-expanding trade bureaucracies (IMF, WTO, EU, World Bank, etc), then
transnational corporations, and finally, the endless varieties of NGOs that
proliferated throughout the period‹almost all of which shared the same
neoliberal orthodoxy, even as they substituted themselves for social welfare
functions once reserved for states.

• The existence of this overarching apparatus, in turn, allowed poorer countries
previously under the control of authoritarian regimes beholden to one or another
side in the Cold War to adopt ‘democratic’ forms of government. This did allow a
restoration of formal civil liberties, but very little that could really merit
the name of democracy (the rule of the ‘demos’, i.e., of the commoners). They
were in fact constitutional republics, and the overwhelming trend during the
period was to strip legislatures, that branch of government most open to
popular pressure, of most of their powers, which were increasingly shifted to
the executive and judicial branches, even as these latter, in turn, largely
ended up enacting policies developed overseas, by global bureaucrats.

• This entire bureaucratic arrangement was justified, paradoxically enough, by
an ideology of extreme individualism. On the level of ideas, neoliberalism
relied on a systematic cooptation of the themes of popular struggle of the
‘60s: autonomy, pleasure, personal liberation, the rejection of all forms of
bureaucratic control and authority. All these were repackaged as the very
essence of capitalism, and the market reframed as a revolutionary force of
liberation.

• The entire arrangement, in turn, was made possible by a preemptive attitude
towards popular struggle. The breaking of unions and retreat of mass social
movements from the late ‘70s onwards was only made possible by a massive shift
of state resources into the machinery of violence: armies, prisons and police
(secret and otherwise) and an endless variety of private ‘security services’,
all with their attendant propaganda machines, which tended to increase even as
other forms of social spending were cut back, among other things absorbing
increasing portions of the former proletariat, making the security apparatus an
increasingly large proportion of total social spending. This approach has been
very successful in holding back mass opposition to capital in much of the world
(especially West Europe and North America), and above all, in making it possible
to argue there are no viable alternatives. But in doing so, has created strains
on the system so profound it threatens to undermine it entirely

XI

The latter point deserves elaboration. The element of force is, on any number of
levels, the weak point of the system. This is not only on the constitutional
level, where the question of how to integrate the emerging global bureaucratic
apparatus, and existing military arrangements, has never been resolved. It is
above all an economic problem. It is quite clear that the maintenance of
elaborate security machinery is an absolute imperative of neoliberalism. One
need only observe what happened with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern
Europe: where one might have expected the Cold War victors to demand the
dismantling of the army, secret police and secret prisons, and to maintain and
develop the existing industrial base, in fact, what they did was absolutely the
opposite: in fact, the only part of the industrial base that has managed fully
to maintain itself has been the parts required to maintained the security
apparatus itself! Critical too is the element of preemption: the governing
classes in North America, for example, are willing to go to almost unimaginable
lengths to ensure social movements never feel they are accomplishing anything.
The current Gulf War is an excellent example: US military operations appear to
be organized first and foremost to be protest-proof, to ensure that what
happened in Vietnam (mass mobilization at home, widespread revolt within the
army overseas) could never be repeated. This means above all that US casualties
must always be kept to a minimum. The result are rules of engagement, and
practices like the use of air power within cities ostensibly already controlled
by occupation forces, so obviously guaranteed to maximize the killing of
innocents and galvanizing hatred against the occupiers that they ensure the war
itself cannot be won. Yet this approach can be taken as the very paradigm for
neoliberal security regimes. Consider security arrangements around trade
summits, where police are so determined prevent protestors from achieving
tactical victories that they are often willing to effectively shut down the
summits themselves. So too in overall strategy. In North America, such enormous
resources are poured into the apparatus of repression, militarization, and
propaganda that class struggle, labor action, mass movements seem to disappear
entirely. It is thus possible to claim we have entered a new age where old
conflicts are irrelevant. This is tremendously demoralizing of course for
opponents of the system; but those running the system seem to find that
demoralization so essential they don’t seem to care that the resultant
apparatus (police, prisons, military, etc) is, effectively, sinking the entire
US economy under its dead weight.

XII

The current crisis is not primarily geopolitical in nature. It is a crisis of
neoliberalism itself. But it takes place against the backdrop of profound
geopolitical realignments. The decline of North American power, both economic
and geopolitical has been accompanied by the rise of Northeast Asia (and to a
increasing extent, South Asia as well). While the Northeast Asian region is
still divided by painful Cold War cleavages‹the fortified lines across the
Taiwan straits and at the 38th parallel in KoreaŠ‹the sheer realities of
economic entanglement can be expected to lead to a gradual easing of tensions
and a rise to global hegemony, as the region becomes the new center of gravity
of the global economy, of the creation of new science and technology,
ultimately, of political and military power. This may, quite likely, be a
gradual and lengthy process. But in the meantime, very old patterns are rapidly
reemerging: China reestablishing relations with ancient tributary states from
Korea to Vietnam, radical Islamists attempting to reestablish their ancient
role as the guardians of finance and piety at the in the Central Asian caravan
routes and across Indian Ocean, every sort of Medieval trade diaspora
reemerging
 In the process, old political models remerge as well: the Chinese
principle of the state transcending law, the Islamic principle of a legal order
transcending any state. Everywhere, we see the revival too of ancient forms of
exploitation‹feudalism, slavery, debt peonage‹often entangled in the newest
forms of technology, but still echoing all the worst abuses of the Middle Ages.
A scramble for resources has begun, with US occupation of Iraq and
saber-rattling throughout the surrounding region clearly meant (at least in
part) to place a potential stranglehold the energy supply of China; Chinese
attempts to outflank with its own scramble for Africa, with increasing forays
into South America and even Eastern Europe. The Chinese invasion into Africa
(not as of yet at least a military invasion, but already involving the movement
of hundreds of thousands of people), is changing the world in ways that will
probably be felt for centuries. Meanwhile, the nations of South America, the
first victims of the ‘Washington consensus’ have managed to largely wriggle
free from the US colonial orbit, while the US, its forces tied down in the
Middle East, has for the moment at least abandoned it, is desperately
struggling to keep its grip Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean‹its own
‘near abroad’.

XIII

In another age all this might have led to war‹that is, not just colonial
occupations, police actions, or proxy wars (which are obviously already taking
place), but direct military confrontations between the armies of major powers.
It still could; accidents happen; but there is reason to believe that, when it
comes to moments of critical decision, the loyalties of the global elites are
increasingly to each other, and not to the national entities for whom they
claim to speak. There is some compelling evidence for this.

Take for example when the US elites panicked at the prospect of the massive
budget surpluses of the late 1990s. As Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal
Reserve at the time warned, if these were allowed to stand they would have
flooded government coffers with so many trillions of dollars that it could only
have lead to some form of creeping socialism, even, he predicted, to the
government acquiring ‘equity stakes’ in key US corporations. The more excitable
of capitalism’s managers actually began contemplating scenarios where the
capitalist system itself would be imperiled. The only possible solution was
massive tax cuts; these were duly enacted, and did indeed manage to turn
surpluses into enormous deficits, financed by the sale of treasury bonds to
Japan and China. Conditions have thus now reached a point where it is beginning
to look as if the most likely long term outcome for the US (its technological
and industrial base decaying, sinking under the burden of its enormous security
spending) will be to end up serve as junior partner and military enforcer for
East Asia capital. Its rulers, or at least a significant proportion of them,
would prefer to hand global hegemony to the rulers of China (provided the
latter abandon Communism) than to return to any sort of New Deal compromise
with their ‘own’ working classes.

A second example lies in the origins of what has been called the current
‘Bretton Woods II’ system of currency arrangements, which underline a close
working together of some ‘surplus’ and ‘deficit’ countries within global
circuits. The macroeconomic manifestation of the planetary restructuring
outlined in XIX underlines both the huge US trade deficit that so much seem to
worry many commentators, and the possibility to continually generate new debt
instruments like the one that has recently resulted in the sub-prime crisis.
The ongoing recycling of accumulated surplus of countries exporting to the USA
such as China and oil producing countries is what has allowed financiers to
create new credit instruments in the USA. Hence, the ‘deal’ offered by the
masters in the United States to its commoners has been this: ‘you, give us a
relative social peace and accept capitalist markets as the main means through
which you reproduce your own livelihoods, and we will give you access to
cheaper consumption goods, access to credit for buying cars and homes, and
access to education, health, pensions and social security through the
speculative means of stock markets and housing prices.’ Similar compromises
were reached in all the G8 countries.

Meanwhile, there is the problem of maintaining any sort of social peace with the
hundreds of millions of unemployed, underemployed, dispossessed commoners
currently swelling the shanty-towns of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a
result of ongoing enclosures (which have speeded up within China and India in
particular, even as ‘structural adjustment policies’ in Africa and Latin
America have been derailed). Any prospect of maintaining peace in these
circumstances would ordinarily require either extremely high rates of economic
growth‹which globally have not been forthcoming, since outside of China, growth
rates in the developing world have been much lower than they were in the ‘50s,
‘60s, or even ‘70s‹or extremely high levels of repression, lest matters descend
into rebellion or generalized civil war. The latter has of course occurred in
many parts of the world currently neglected by capital, but in favored regions,
such as the coastal provinces of China, or ‘free trade’ zones of India, Egypt,
or Mexico, commoners are being offered a different sort of deal: industrial
employment at wages that, while very low by international standards, are still
substantially higher than anything currently obtainable in the impoverished
countryside; and above all the promise, through the intervention of Western
markets and (privatized) knowledge, of gradually improving conditions of
living. While over the least few years wages in many such areas seem to be
growing, thanks to the intensification of popular struggles, such gains are
inherently vulnerable: the effect of recent food inflation has been to cut real
wages back dramatically‹and threaten millions with starvation.

What we really want to stress here, though, is that the long-term promise being
offered to the South is just as untenable as the idea that US or European
consumers can indefinitely expand their conditions of life through the use of
mortgages and credit cards.

What’s being offered the new dispossessed is a transposition of the American
dream. The idea is that the lifestyle and consumption patterns of existing
Chinese, Indian, or Brazilian or Zambian urban middle classes (already modeled
on Northern ones) will eventually become available to the children of today’s
miners, maquila or plantation laborers, until, ultimately, everyone on earth is
brought up to roughly the same level of consumption. Put in these terms, the
argument is absurd. The idea that all six billion of us can become ‘middle
class’ is obviously impossible. First of all there is a simple problem of
resources. It doesn’t matter how many bottles we recycle or how energy
efficient are the light bulbs we use, there’s just no way the earth’s ecosystem
can accommodate six billion people driving in private cars to work in
air-conditioned cubicles before periodically flying off to vacation in Acapulco
or Tahiti. To maintain the style of living and producing in common we now
identify with ‘middle classness’ on a planetary scale would require several
additional planets.

This much has been pointed out repeatedly. But the second point is no less
important. What this vision of betterment ultimately proposes is that it would
be possible to build universal prosperity and human dignity on a system of wage
labor. This is fantasy. Historically, wages are always the contractual face for
system of command and degradation, and a means of disguising exploitation:
expressing value for work only on condition of stealing value without work‹ and
there is no reason to believe they could ever be anything else. This is why, as
history has also shown, human beings will always avoid working for wages if
they have any other viable option. For a system based on wage labor to come
into being, such options must therefore be made unavailable. This in turn means
that such systems are always premised on structures of exclusion: on the prior
existence of borders and property regimes maintained by violence. Finally,
historically, it has always proved impossible to maintain any sizeable class of
wage-earners in relative prosperity without basing that prosperity, directly or
indirectly, on the unwaged labor of others‹on slave-labor, women’s domestic
labor, the forced labor of colonial subjects, the work of women and men in
peasant communities halfway around the world‹by people who are even more
systematically exploited, degraded, and immiserated. For that reason, such
systems have always depended not only on setting wage-earners against each
other by inciting bigotry, prejudice, hostility, resentment, violence, but also
by inciting the same between men and women, between the people of different
continents (“race”), between the generations.

>From the perspective of the whole, then, the dream of universal middle class
‘betterment’ must necessarily be an illusion constructed in between the Scylla
of ecological disaster, and the Charybdis of poverty, detritus, and hatred:
precisely, the two pillars of today’s strategic impasse faced by the G8.

XIV

How then do we describe the current impasse of capitalist governance?

To a large degree, it is the effect of a sudden and extremely effective upswing
of popular resistance‹one all the more extraordinary considering the huge
resources that had been invested in preventing such movements from breaking
out.

On the one hand, the turn of the millennium saw a vast and sudden flowering of
new anti-capitalist movements, a veritable planetary uprising against
neoliberalism by commoners in Latin America, India, Africa, Asia, across the
North Atlantic world’s former colonies and ultimately, within the cities of the
former colonial powers themselves. As a result, the neoliberal project lies
shattered. What came to be called the ‘anti-globalization’ movement took aim at
the trade bureaucracies‹the obvious weak link in the emerging institutions of
global administration‹but it was merely the most visible aspect of this
uprising. It was however an extraordinarily successful one. Not only was the
WTO halted in its tracks, but all major trade initiatives (MAI, FTAAŠ)
scuttled. The World Bank was hobbled and the power of the IMF over most of the
world’s population, effectively, destroyed. The latter, once the terror of the
Global South, is now a shattered remnant of its former self, reduced to selling
off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.

In many ways though spectacular street actions were merely the most visible
aspects of much broader changes: the resurgence of labor unions, in certain
parts of the world, the flowering of economic and social alternatives on the
grassroots levels in every part of the world, from new forms of direct
democracy of indigenous communities like El Alto in Bolivia or self-managed
factories in Paraguay, to township movements in South Africa, farming
cooperatives in India, squatters’ movements in Korea, experiments in
permaculture in Europe or ‘Islamic economics’ among the urban poor in the
Middle East. We have seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid
association, most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global
media, often have almost no ideological unity and which may not even be aware
of each other’s existence, but nonetheless share a common desire to mark a
practical break with capitalism, and which, most importantly, hold out the
prospect of creating new forms of planetary commons that can‹and in some cases
are‹beginning to knit together to provide the outlines of genuine alternative
vision of what a non-capitalist future might look like.

The reaction of the world’s rulers was predictable. The planetary uprising had
occurred during a time when the global security apparatus was beginning to look
like it lacked a purpose, when the world threatened to return to a state of
peace. The response‹aided of course, by the intervention of some of the US’
former Cold War allies, reorganized now under the name of Al Qaeda‹was a return
to global warfare. But this too failed. The ‘war on terror’‹as an attempt to
impose US military power as the ultimate enforcer of the neoliberal model‹has
collapsed as well in the face of almost universal popular resistance. This is
the nature of their ‘impasse’.

At the same time, the top-heavy, inefficient US model of military capitalism‹a
model created in large part to prevent the dangers of social movements, but
which the US has also sought to export to some degree simply because of its
profligacy and inefficiency, to prevent the rest of the world from too rapidly
overtaking them‹has proved so wasteful of resources that it threatens to plunge
the entire planet into ecological and social crisis. Drought, disaster, famines,
combine with endless campaigns of enclosure, foreclosure, to cast the very means
of survival‹food, water, shelter‹into question for the bulk of the world’s
population.

XV

In the rulers’ language the crisis understood, first and foremost, as a problem
of regulating cash flows, of reestablishing, as they like to put it, a new
‘financial architecture’. Obviously they are aware of the broader problems.
Their promotional literature has always been full of it. From the earliest days
of the G7, through to the days after the Cold War, when Russia was added as a
reward for embracing capitalism, they have always claimed that their chief
concerns include

• the reduction of global poverty

• sustainable environmental policies

• sustainable global energy policies

• stable financial institutions governing global trade and currency transactions

If one were to take such claims seriously, it’s hard to see their overall
performance as anything but a catastrophic failure. At the present moment, all
of these are in crisis mode: there are food riots, global warming, peak oil,
and the threat of financial meltdown, bursting of credit bubbles, currency
crises, a global credit crunch. [**Failure on this scale however, opens
opportunities for the G8 themselves, as summit of the global bureaucracy, to
reconfigure the strategic horizon. Therefore, it’s always with the last of
these that they are especially concerned. ]The real problem, from the
perspective of the G8, is one of reinvestment: particularly, of the profits of
the energy sector, but also, now, of emerging industrial powers outside the
circle of the G8 itself. The neoliberal solution in the ‘70s had been to
recycle OPEC’s petrodollars into banks that would use it much of the world into
debt bondage, imposing regimes of fiscal austerity that, for the most part,
stopped development (and hence, the emergence potential rivals) in its tracks.
By the ‘90s, however, much East Asia in particular had broken free of this
regime. Attempts to reimpose IMF-style discipline during the Asian financial
crisis of 1997 largely backfired. So a new compromise was found, the so-called
Bretton Woods II: to recycle the profits from the rapidly expanding industrial
economies of East Asia into US treasury debt, artificially supporting the value
of the dollar and allowing a continual stream of cheap exports that, aided by
the US housing bubble, kept North Atlantic economies afloat and buy off workers
there with cheap oil and even cheaper consumer goods even as real wages shrank.
This solution however soon proved a temporary expedient. Bush regime’s attempt
to lock it in by the invasion of Iraq, which was meant to lead to the forced
privatization of Iraqi oil fields, and, ultimately, of the global oil industry
as a whole, collapsed in the face of massive popular resistance (just as Saddam
Hussein’s attempt to introduce neoliberal reforms in Iraq had failed when he was
still acting as American deputy in the ‘90s). Instead, the simultaneous demand
for petroleum for both Chinese manufacturers and American consumers caused a
dramatic spike in the price of oil. What’s more, rents from oil and gas
production are now being used to pay off the old debts from the ‘80s
(especially in Asia and Latin America, which have by now paid back their IMF
debts entirely), and‹increasingly‹to create state-managed Sovereign Wealth
Funds that have largely replaced institutions like the IMF as the institutions
capable of making long-term strategic investments. The IMF, purposeless,
tottering on the brink of insolvency, has been reduced to trying to come up
with ‘best practices’ guidelines for fund managers working for governments in
Singapore, Seoul, and Abu Dhabi.

There can be no question this time around of freezing out countries like China,
India, or even Brazil. The question for capital’s planners, rather, is how to
channel these new concentrations of capital in such a way that they reinforce
the logic of the system instead of undermining it.

XVI

How can this be done? This is where appeals to universal human values, to common
membership in an ‘international community’ come in to play. ‘We all must pull
together for the good of the planet,’ we will be told. The money must be
reinvested ‘to save the earth.’

To some degree this was always the G8 line: this is a group has been making an
issue of climate change since 1983. Doing so was in one sense a response to the
environmental movements of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The resultant emphasis on biofuels
and ‘green energy’ was from their point of view, the perfect strategy, seizing
on an issue that seemed to transcend class, appropriating ideas and issues that
emerged from social movements (and hence coopting and undermining especially
their radical wings), and finally, ensuring such initiatives are pursued not
through any form of democratic self-organization but ‘market mechanisms’‹to
effective make the sense of public interest productive for capitalism.

What we can expect now is a two-pronged attack. On the one hand, they will use
the crisis to attempt to reverse the gains of past social movements: to put
nuclear energy back on the table to deal with the energy crisis and global
warming, or genetically modified foods to deal with the food crisis. Prime
Minister Fukuda, the host of the current summit, for example, is already
proposing the nuclear power is the ‘solution’ to the global warming crisis,
even as the German delegation resists. On the other, and even more insidiously,
they will try once again to co-opt the ideas and solutions that have emerged
from our struggles as a way of ultimately undermining them. Appropriating such
ideas is simply what rulers do: the bosses brain is always under the workers’
hat. But the ultimate aim is to answer the intensification of class struggle,
of the danger of new forms of democracy, with another wave of enclosures, to
restore a situation where commoners’ attempts to create broader regimes of
cooperation are stymied, and people are plunged back into mutual competition.

We can already see the outlines of how this might be done. There are already
suggestions that Sovereign Wealth Funds put aside a certain (miniscule)
proportion of their money for food aid, but only as tied to a larger project of
global financial restructuring. The World Bank, largely bereft of its earlier
role organizing dams and pipe-lines across the world, has been funding
development in China’s poorer provinces, freeing the Chinese government to
carry out similar projects in Southeast Asia, Africa, and even Latin America
(where, of course, they cannot effectively be held to any sort of labor or
environmental standards). There is the possibility of a new class deal in China
itself, whose workers can be allowed higher standards of living if new low wage
zones are created elsewhere‹for instance, Africa (the continent where struggles
over maintaining the commons have been most intense in current decades)‹with the
help of Chinese infrastructural projects. Above of all, money will be channeled
into addressing climate change, into the development of alternative energy,
which will require enormous investments, in such a way as to ensure that
whatever energy resources do become important in this millennium, they can
never be democratized‹that the emerging notion of a petroleum commons, that
energy resources are to some degree a common patrimony meant primarily to serve
the community as a whole, that is beginning to develop in parts of the Middle
East and South America‹not be reproduced in whatever comes next.

Since this will ultimately have to be backed up by the threat of violence, the
G8 will inevitably have to struggle with how to (yet again) rethink enforcement
mechanisms. The latest move , now that the US ‘war on terror’ paradigm has
obviously failed, would appear to be a return to NATO, part of a reinvention of
the ‘European security architecture’ being proposed at the upcoming G8 meetings
in Italy in 2009 on the 60th anniversary of NATO’s foundation‹but part of a
much broader movement of the militarization of social conflict, projecting
potential resource wars, demographic upheavals resulting from climate change,
and radical social movements as potential military problems to be resolved by
military means. Opposition to this new project is already shaping up as the
major new European mobilization for the year following the current G-8.

XVII

While the G-8 sit at the pinnacle of a system of violence, their preferred idiom
is monetary. Their impulse whenever possible is to translate all problems into
money, financial structures, currency flows‹a substance whose movements they
carefully monitor and control.

Money, on might say, is their poetry‹a poetry whose letters are written in our
blood. It is their highest and most abstract form of expression, their way of
making statements about the ultimate truth of the world, even if it operates in
large part by making things disappear. How else could it be possible to
argue‹no, to assume as a matter of common sense‹that the love, care, and
concern of a person who tends to the needs of children, teaching, minding,
helping them to become decent , thoughtful, human beings, or who grows and
prepares food, is worth ten thousand times less than someone who spends the
same time designing a brand logo, moving abstract blips across a globe, or
denying others health care.

The role of money however has changed profoundly since 1971 when the dollar was
delinked from gold. This has created a profound realignment of temporal
horizons. Once money could be said to be primarily congealed results of past
profit and exploitation. As capital, it was dead labor. Millions of indigenous
Americans and Africans had their lives pillaged and destroyed in the gold mines
in order to be rendered into value. The logic of finance capital, of credit
structures, certainly always existed as well (it is at least as old as
industrial capital; possibly older), but in recent decades these logic of
financial capital has come to echo and re-echo on every level of our lives. In
the UK 97 of money in circulation is debt, in the US, 98. Governments run on
deficit financing, wealthy economies on consumer debt, the poor are enticed
with microcredit schemes, debts are packaged and repackaged in complex
financial derivatives and traded back and forth. Debt however is simply a
promise, the expectation of future profit; capital thus increasingly brings the
future into the present‹a future that, it insists, must always be the same in
nature, even if must also be greater in magnitude, since of course the entire
system is premised on continual growth. Where once financiers calculated and
traded in the precise measure of our degradation, having taken everything from
us and turned it into money, now money has flipped, to become the measure of
our future degradation‹at the same time as it binds us to endlessly working in
the present.

The result is a strange moral paradox. Love, loyalty, honor, commitment‹to our
families, for example, which means to our shared homes, which means to the
payment of monthly mortgage debts‹becomes a matter of maintaining loyalty to a
system which ultimately tells us that such commitments are not a value in
themselves. This organization of imaginative horizons, which ultimately come
down to a colonization of the very principle of hope, has come to supplement
the traditional evocation of fear (of penury, homelessness, joblessness,
disease and death). This colonization paralyzes any thought of opposition to a
system that almost everyone ultimately knows is not only an insult to
everything they really cherish, but a travesty of genuine hope, since, because
no system can really expand forever on a finite planet, everyone is aware on
some level that in the final analysis they are dealing with a kind of global
pyramid scheme, what we are ultimately buying and selling is the real promise
of global social and environmental apocalypse.

XVIII

Finally then we come to the really difficult, strategic questions. Where are the
vulnerabilities? Where is hope? Obviously we have no certain answers here. No
one could. But perhaps the proceeding analysis opens up some possibilities that
anti-capitalist organizers might find useful to explore.

One thing that might be helpful is to rethink our initial terms. Consider
communism. We are used to thinking of it as a total system that perhaps existed
long ago, and to the desire to bring about an analogous system at some point in
the future‹usually, at whatever cost. It seems to us that dreams of communist
futures were never purely fantasies; they were simply projections of existing
forms of cooperation, of commoning, by which we already make the world in the
present. Communism in this sense is already the basis of almost everything,
what brings people and societies into being, what maintains them, the elemental
ground of all human thought and action. There is absolutely nothing utopian
here. What is utopian, really, is the notion that any form of social
organization, especially capitalism, could ever exist that was not entirely
premised on the prior existence of communism. If this is true, the most
pressing question is simply how to make that power visible, to burst forth, to
become the basis for strategic visions, in the face of a tremendous and
antagonistic power committed to destroying it‹but at the same time, ensuring
that despite the challenge they face, they never again become entangled with
forms of violence of their own that make them the basis for yet another tawdry
elite. After all, the solidarity we extend to one another, is it not itself a
form of communism? And is it not so above because it is not coerced?

Another thing that might be helpful is to rethink our notion of crisis. There
was a time when simply describing the fact that capitalism was in a state of
crisis, driven by irreconcilable contradictions, was taken to suggest that it
was heading for a cliff. By now, it seems abundantly clear that this is not the
case. Capitalism is always in a crisis. The crisis never goes away. Financial
markets are always producing bubbles of one sort or another; those bubbles
always burst, sometimes catastrophically; often entire national economies
collapse, sometimes the global markets system itself begins to come apart. But
every time the structure is reassembled. Slowly, painfully, dutifully, the
pieces always end up being put back together once again.

Perhaps we should be asking: why?

In searching for an answer, it seems to us, we might also do well to put aside
another familiar habit of radical thought: the tendency to sort the world into
separate levels‹material realities, the domain of ideas or ‘consciousness’, the
level of technologies and organizations of violence‹treating these as if these
were separate domains that each work according to separate logics, and then
arguing which ‘determines’ which. In fact they cannot be disentangled. A
factory may be a physical thing, but the ownership of a factory is a social
relation, a legal fantasy that is based partly on the belief that law exists,
and partly on the existence of armies and police. Armies and police on the
other hand exist partly because of factories providing them with guns,
vehicles, and equipment, but also, because those carrying the guns and riding
in the vehicles believe they are working for an abstract entity they call ‘the
government’, which they love, fear, and ultimately, whose existence they take
for granted by a kind of faith, since historically, those armed organizations
tend to melt away immediately the moment they lose faith that the government
actually exists. Obviously exactly the same can be said of money. It’s value is
constantly being produced by eminently material practices involving time clocks,
bank machines, mints, and transatlantic computer cables, not to mention love,
greed, and fear, but at the same time, all this too rests on a kind of faith
that all these things will continue to interact in more or less the same way.
It is all very material, but it also reflects a certain assumption of eternity:
the reason that the machine can always be placed back together is, simply,
because everyone assumes it must. This is because they cannot realistically
imagine plausible alternatives; they cannot imagine plausible alternatives
because of the extraordinarily sophisticated machinery of preemptive violence
that ensure any such alternatives are uprooted or contained (even if that
violence is itself organized around a fear that itself rests on a similar form
of faith.) One cannot even say it’s circular. It’s more a kind of endless,
unstable spiral. To subvert the system is then, to intervene in such a way that
the whole apparatus begins to spin apart.

XIX

It appears to us that one key element here‹one often neglected in revolutionary
strategy‹is the role of the global middle classes. This is a class that, much
though it varies from country (in places like the US and Japan, overwhelming
majorities consider themselves middle class; in, say, Cambodia or Zambia, only
very small percentages), almost everywhere provides the key constituency of the
G8 outside of the ruling elite themselves. It has become a truism, an article of
faith in itself in global policy circles, that national middle class is
everywhere the necessary basis for democracy. In fact, middle classes are
rarely much interested in democracy in any meaningful sense of that word (that
is, of the self-organization or self-governance of communities). They tend to
be quite suspicious of it. Historically, middle classes have tended to
encourage the establishment of constitutional republics with only limited
democratic elements (sometimes, none at all). This is because their real
passion is for a ‘betterment’, for the prosperity and advance of conditions of
life for their children‹and this betterment, since it is as noted above
entirely premised on structures of exclusion, requires ‘security’. Actually the
middle classes depend on security on every level: personal security, social
security (various forms of government support, which even when it is withdrawn
from the poor tends to be maintained for the middle classes), security against
any sudden or dramatic changes in the nature of existing institutions. Thus,
politically, the middle classes are attached not to democracy (which,
especially in its radical forms, might disrupt all this), but to the rule of
law. In the political sense, then, being ‘middle class’ means existing outside
the notorious ‘state of exception’ to which the majority of the world’s people
are relegated. It means being able to see a policeman and feel safer, not even
more insecure. This would help explain why within the richest countries, the
overwhelming majority of the population will claim to be ‘middle class’ when
speaking in the abstract, even if most will also instantly switch back to
calling themselves ‘working class’ when talking about their relation to their
boss.

That rule of law, in turn, allows them to live in that temporal horizon where
the market and other existing institutions (schools, governments, law firms,
real estate brokeragesŠ) can be imagined as lasting forever in more or less the
same form. The middle classes can thus be defined as those who live in the
eternity of capitalism. (The elites don’t; they live in history, they don’t
assume things will always be the same. The disenfranchized don’t; they don’t
have the luxury; they live in a state of precarity where little or nothing can
safely be assumed.) Their entire lives are based on assuming that the
institutional forms they are accustomed to will always be the same, for
themselves and their grandchildren, and their ‘betterment’ will be proportional
to the increase in the level of monetary wealth and consumption. This is why
every time global capital enters one of its periodic crises, every time banks
collapse, factories close, and markets prove unworkable, or even, when the
world collapses in war, the managers and dentists will tend to support any
program that guarantees the fragments will be dutifully pieced back together in
roughly the same form‹even if all are, at the same time, burdened by at least a
vague sense that the whole system is unfair and probably heading for
catastrophe.

XIX

The strategic question then is, how to shatter this sense of inevitability?
History provides one obvious suggestion. The last time the system really neared
self-destruction was in the 1930s, when what might have otherwise been an
ordinary turn of the boom-bust cycle turned into a depression so profound that
it took a world war to pull out of it. What was different? The existence of an
alternative: a Soviet economy that, whatever its obvious brutalities, was
expanding at breakneck pace at the very moment market systems were undergoing
collapse. Alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system
must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form; this is why it becomes
an absolute imperative of global governance that even small viable experiments
in other ways of organizing communities be wiped out, or, if that is not
possible, that no one knows about them.

If nothing else, this explains the extraordinary importance attached to the
security services and preemption of popular struggle. Commoning, where it
already exists, must be made invisible. Alternatives‹ Zapatistas in Chiapas,
APPO in Oaxaca, worker-managed factories in Argentina or Paraguay,
community-run water systems in South Africa or Bolivia, living alternatives of
farming or fishing communities in India or Indonesia, or a thousand other
examples‹must be made to disappear, if not squelched or destroyed, then
marginalized to the point they seem irrelevant, ridiculous. If the managers of
the global system are so determined to do this they are willing to invest such
enormous resources into security apparatus that it threatens to sink the system
entirely, it is because they are aware that they are working with a house of
cards. That the principle of hope and expectation on which capitalism rests
would evaporate instantly if almost any other principle of hope or expectation
seemed viable.

The knowledge of alternatives, then, is itself a material force.

Without them, of course, the shattering of any sense of certainty has exactly
the opposite effect. It becomes pure precarity, an insecurity so profound that
it becomes impossible to project oneself in history in any form, so that the
one-time certainties of middle class life itself becomes a kind of utopian
horizon, a desperate dream, the only possible principle of hope beyond which
one cannot really imagine anything. At the moment, this seems the favorite
weapon of neoliberalism: whether promulgated through economic violence, or the
more direct, traditional kind.

One form of resistance that might prove quite useful here ­ and is already being
discussed in some quarters ­ are campaigns against debt itself. Not demands for
debt forgiveness, but campaigns of debt resistance.

XX

In this sense the great slogan of the global justice movement, ‘another world is
possible’, represents the ultimate threat to existing power structures. But in
another sense we can even say we have already begun to move beyond that.
Another world is not merely possible. It is inevitable. On the one hand, as we
have pointed out, such a world is already in existence in the innumerable
circuits of social cooperation and production in common based on different
values than those of profit and accumulation through which we already create
our lives, and without which capitalism itself would be impossible. On the
other, a different world is inevitable because capitalism‹a system based on
infinite material expansion‹simply cannot continue forever on a finite world.
At some point, if humanity is to survive at all, we will be living in a system
that is not based on infinite material expansion. That is, something other than
capitalism.

The problem is there is no absolute guarantee that ‘something’ will be any
better. It’s pretty easy to imagine ‘other worlds’ that would be even worse. We
really don’t have any idea what might happen. To what extent will the new world
still organized around commoditization of life, profit, and pervasive
competition? Or a reemergence of even older forms of hierarchy and degradation?
How, if we do overcome capitalism directly, by the building and interweaving of
new forms of global commons, do we protect ourselves against the reemergence of
new forms of hierarchy and division that we might not now even be able to
imagine?

It seems to us that the decisive battles that will decide the contours of this
new world will necessarily be battles around values. First and foremost are
values of solidarity among commoners. Since after all, every rape of a woman by
a man or the racist murder of an African immigrant by a European worker is worth
a division in capital’s army.

Similarly, imagining our struggles as value struggles might allow us to see
current struggles over global energy policies and over the role of money and
finance today as just an opening salvo of an even larger social conflict to
come. For instance, there’s no need to demonize petroleum, for example, as a
thing in itself. Energy products have always tended to play the role of a
‘basic good’, in the sense that their production and distribution becomes the
physical basis for all other forms of human cooperation, at the same time as
its control tends to organize social and even international relations. Forests
and wood played such a role from the time of the Magna Carta to the American
Revolution, sugar did so during the rise of European colonial empires in the
17th and 18th centuries, fossil fuels do so today. There is nothing
intrinsically good or bad about fossil fuel. Oil is simply solar radiation,
once processed by living beings, now stored in fossil form. The question is of
control and distribution. This is the real flaw in the rhetoric over ‘peak
oil’: the entire argument is premised on the assumption that, for the next
century at least, global markets will be the only means of distribution.
Otherwise the use of oil would depend on needs, which would be impossible to
predict precisely because they depend on the form of production in common we
adopt. The question thus should be: how does the anti-capitalist movement peak
the oil? How does it become the crisis for a system of unlimited expansion?

It is the view of the authors of this text that the most radical planetary
movements that have emerged to challenge the G8 are those that direct us
towards exactly these kind of questions. Those which go beyond merely asking
how to explode the role money plays in framing our horizons, or even
challenging the assumption of the endless expansion of ‘the economy’, to ask
why we assume something called ‘the economy’ even exists, and what other ways
we can begin imagining our material relations with one another. The planetary
women’s movement, in its many manifestations, has and continues to play perhaps
the most important role of all here, in calling for us to reimagine our most
basic assumptions about work, to remember that the basic business of human life
is not actually the production of communities but the production, the mutual
shaping of human beings. The most inspiring of these movements are those that
call for us to move beyond a mere challenge to the role of money to reimagine
value: to ask ourselves how can we best create a situation where everyone is
secure enough in their basic needs to be able to pursue those forms of value
they decide are ultimately important to them. To move beyond a mere challenge
to the tyranny of debt to ask ourselves what we ultimately owe to one another
and to our environment. That recognize that none this needs to invented from
whole cloth. It’s all already there, immanent in the way everyone, as
commoners, create the world together on a daily basis. And that asking these
questions is never, and can never be, an abstract exercise, but is necessarily
part of a process by which we are already beginning to knit these forms of
commons together into new forms of global commons that will allow entirely new
conceptions of our place in history.

It is to those already engaged in such a project that we offer these initial
thoughts on our current strategic situation.

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La Via Campesina llama a la movilización en contra del G8 en Hokkaido Japón

¡El G8 tiene que solucionar la crisis que han creado!

Los representantes de los 8 países más ricos del mundo se reunirán del 7 al 9 de
Julio del 2008 en Hokkaido, Japón. Estos gobiernos han impuesto políticas que
son la causa original de la crisis de los alimentos y de la agricultura. Esta
crisis mundial empezó a surgir en los años 70 y dejó a 852 millones de personas
en la extrema pobreza, la mayoría de ellas viviendo en las áreas rurales. La
reciente crisis de los precios de los alimentos ha llevado la crisis a las
ciudades, donde la gente ya no puede comprar suficiente comida. La crisis
climática originada por el abuso de los combustibles fósiles en los países
industrializados y la deforestación masiva por las compañías transnacionales,
golpeará especialmente a los países pobres del Sur.

La reacción de la OMC, del Banco Mundial así como de los gobiernos del G8, ha
sido desastrosa: simplemente impulsan las mismas políticas que han sido las
causas de la crisis actual: más liberalización, más apoyo a los fertilizantes y
semillas industriales, la revolución verde en África, más ayuda alimentaria y
una rápida expansión de los agrocombustibles. Debido principalmente a la
actitud de los países del G8, no se ha producido un avance en la conferencia de
alto nivel organizada por la FAO y las compañías transnacionales recibieron un
apoyo total para su iniciativa desastrosa de los agrocombustibles.

¡Ya basta! ¡Es irresponsable que ustedes y las instituciones multilaterales
continúen destruyendo nuestra producción de alimentos y que nos dejen a la
merced de un puñado de compañías transnacionales y de los mercados
internacionales que no son capaces y no están interesados en alimentar al
mundo!

Tenemos que detener el apoderamiento por parte de las grandes compañías, de la
agricultura y el sector pesquero. La respuesta a la crisis climática y a la
crisis de los alimentos es la producción de alimentos por parte de los
campesinos y pequeños productores basada en recursos los locales y dirigida al
consumo local.

Queremos que el G8 asuma su responsabilidad para dar los pasos adecuados para
evitar una profundización de esta crisis potencialmente explosiva:

- Que detengan la producción de agrocombustibles dirigida por las grandes
compañías.

- No más liberalización de los mercados agrícolas y pesqueros, que suspendan las
negociaciones de la OMC, ALC y EPA

- No más fallos y arreglos rápidos. Necesitamos un análisis profundo sobre la
crisis y el desarrollo de políticas a nivel internacional y nacional que
protejan y refuercen la producción de alimentos basada en los campesinos y los
pequeños productores.

Los gobiernos del G8 y las empresas transnacionales tienen que asumir la
responsabilidad total por la crisis climática y de los alimentos. A través del
poder económico, ellos controlan el sistema de la ONU (la FAO, el programa
mundial de alimentos, IFAD
), la OMC, Banco Mundial, FMI y las negociaciones de
los acuerdos de libre comercio.

Los gobiernos del G8 tienen que tomar decisiones para solucionar la crisis y
tendrían que permitir a otros países adoptar las medidas necesarias. El G8 en
este momento crucial será decisivo para el destino de cientos de millones de
personas en el mundo. El G8 tiene que tomar decisiones para solucionar el
desastre que ha creado.

¡Movilízate, ven a Hokkaido!

La producción de alimentos basada en los campesinos y los pequeños productores y
la agricultura ecológica para abastecer los mercados locales, es la mejor
respuesta a la crisis climática y de los precios de los alimentos.

¡Ha llegado la hora de la soberanía alimentaria!

July 4th -9th Días de acción de los pueblos

Programa de acción en Hokkaido durante la cumbre del G8

4 de Julio Día de la Soberanía alimentaria. Movilización por los movimientos
sociales internacionales..

5 de Julio Debate sobre la crisis climática y movilización

6 de Julio Acciones de las mujeres

7 de Julio Movilización de los movimientos sociales de Asia. 9 de Julio
Conferencia de Prensa

Para más información consulta www.viacampesina.org o contacta

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NO JUSTICE NO PEACE: The vertices of the Anti Military Plenum Berlin

    * Wars aren’t appearing from nowhere. Today’s wars are a requirement and a
result of the capitalistic world order. There is no « Godd war ». Military
Interventions – mostly named as « humanitary mission » – serve the upkeep and
backup of the dominant measures of hirarchy – and exploitation. They hit the
civil population, they bring flight and poverty. They are categorically to be
reject – whether with or without UN mandat. Wars and Terror threats conduce as
well to moisten the absolute ban on torture – NO TORTURE, NO JAILS !

    * The NATO is the military alliance of the rich industrial Nations, it’s
unique function is to enforce their Interests. The NATO takes itself the right
to military enforce and ensure the rules of the leading world order, globally
and against all resistance. As integral part and military fundament of that
imperialistic exploitation, the NATO has to be dissolved.

    * This is also true for the european intervention troops and all national
cambat units as the federal armed force. Private security services and
paramilitaries are instantly to be disarmed. All quasi-colonial allied
occupation missions of the NATO and the EU, as for example in Afghanistan (
ISAF ), in Kosovo ( KFOR ) and in Bosnia, have to be stop – immediately !

    * Same for the mission « Active Endavour » in the mediterranien sea and «
Frontex », which serves the migration control and refugee defense.

    * The nuclear «  hit the first stragedy » of the NATO has to be cancelled,
they pose a existential threat to the rest of the world. The only possibility
to avoid the danger of a devastating nuclear war in long-term, is to completely
scrap all nucelar weapons ( to start in the USA, Great Britain and France ) and
requires the principle renunciation of nuclear energy.

    * Within the NATO, the concept of the civil-militarian co-operation, in
NATO’s jargon « comprehensive approach », is significantly promoted. At this,
civil means are getting exploited and diverted from it’s intended use. Whilst
this concept is supposed to fight against resistance in foreign countries, it
functions as well as door opener for militarisation of the Police force and for
increasing military missions inside NATO countries. Military and military-like
structures have no right to be, nor here nor abroad. Any cooperation with the
Armee is to be dismissed.

    * Armed forces and wars lead to masculinisation, to « rambonisation » of the
societies, orders, obedience and inhuman exercise lead to the utilization of
unethhical violence and murder. Men with experience in war are often
traumatized and tyrannize their social surrounding all the way to homizide. We
turn against all forms of sexual violence, which is part of any war.

    * Perspectively the aim has to be to create social conditions as a
international movement to accomplish those claims – the Leaders will never
change their politic unsolicited.

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