[gipfelsoli] Gleneagles

[gipfelsoli-l at lists.nadir.org]

Reinventing Dissent: G8 2005 Analysis Part 1

This article examines the G8 mobilisation in 2005 from an anarchist perspective.
Part 1 gives a full description of the mobilisation, the Carnival, the Black
Bloc, the Ecovillage, and more...

Reinventing Dissent: The Unabridged Story of Resistance against the G8 Summit in
Scotland, 2005
by Alex Trocchi, Giles Redwolf, and Petrus Alamire

"Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of
conformity in our lifetime" Jacob Bronowski
Everyone knows that the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against us at summit
mobilizations. Yet the 2005 G8 mobilisation in Scotland proved that disrupting
a summit is not beyond our grasp, and that, if anything, we underestimate our
own capabilities.

It is all too easy to state that "Another World is Possible"-to actually create
another world is far more difficult. For a week, an unlikely field near
Stirling became the "Hori-Zone," a model of large-scale horizontal and
autonomous decision-making. To create a long-lasting and effective anarchist
network is looked upon as a fantasy. However, the G8 mobilisation turned a
scattered and divided activist scene into a well-organised network of
resistance, capable not only of hosting an explicitly anti-capitalist and
anti-authoritarian mobilisation, but also of continuing beyond the G8. As for
the inevitable action, anarchists confronted the meeting of the eight most
powerful men in the industrial world directly, right outside the G8 summit
venue, shutting down their highways and tearing down their fences. The attacks
of the fundamentalist Islamic bombers in London the same week look cowardly in
comparison. One cannot help but feel that there is something hopeful back in
the air in Britain, even as the dark repression of the police state inevitably
kicks into motion after the London bombings. Britain was the nation in which
industrial capitalism first took root, and accordingly it has often remained
ahead of its time in the art of protest. The British anti-roads movement of the
early 1990s was a harbinger of the "anti-globalisation" movement, featuring a
wild and eclectic focus on direct action and cultural resistance, in contrast
to the notoriously boring politics of the institutional left. The model was
moved with much success into the cities, in the form of Reclaim the Streets,
capitalising on the fact that in Britain hordes of ravers will show up
anywhere, anytime for a good party in the middle of a street. Within a few
years, cities from Brisbane to Bratislava were reclaiming their streets.
Coinciding with the G8 Summit in Cologne, the June 18th 1999 Global Day of
Action against Capitalism paralysed the financial centre of London, prefiguring
the shut-down of the WTO in Seattle a few months later.

As Britain's turn came to host the G8 in 2005, things looked grim. There had
been successful mass mobilisations, particularly in London for Mayday 2000 and
2001, and anarchists had taken part in direct action against the war in Iraq.
However, there had not been a "Global Day of Action" in Britain in six years,
and many anarchists in Britain were simply not interested, since many were
convinced that mass mobilisations were no longer effective means of resistance.
The early meetings consisted of arguments about whether a truly
anti-authoritarian mobilisation was even theoretically possible!

Nearly two years before the G8 summit, an anti-capitalist network called
Dissent! was founded in Britain to mobilise against the G8. The questions we
want to look at in this piece are whether Dissent! and the 2005 G8 mobilisation
actually succeeded, and whether they can serve as a model for actions and
networks elsewhere. We will begin with an analysis of the formation and
functioning of the Dissent! network. We will then give an overview of the
myriad actions that took place before the blockades around Gleneagles. Finally,
we will analyse the blockades and the response of the anarchists to the bombings
in London.

The Dissent! Network Forms...

Before beginning, there are two brief disclaimers. First, the participants in
the Dissent! network studiously avoid the word "anarchist," and prefer to call
themselves "anti-capitalist" and "anti-authoritarian." One reason behind this
is that the word "anarchist" might be seen to exclude our comrades in the
autonomist communist movement (especially from Germany) and the occasional
post-Situationist council communist. A more pressing reason is that in the last
decade, just like a century ago, the public in all Western countries has been
subjected to a media scare campaign around the word "anarchist," so the word
"anti-capitalist" is seen as more friendly. Nevertheless, we will just call all
the people who participated in Dissent! "anarchists" since we believe most of
them (minus our autonomist and council communist friends, to whom we must just
apologise!) would not object to using "anarchist" to describe their politics,
and since the word "anti-capitalist" could also be seen to include retrograde
Marxist-Leninist sects like the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) who were by
design not part of the Dissent! network. Second, we indeed often use the words
"Dissent! network" or just "Dissent!" to describe the actions of particular
working groups and people, and the general feelings of people, in order not to
have to specify individual names. Though a useful shorthand for saying
"anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist" every time we wish to speak of the
protesters (many who may have had only the slightest of contact with Dissent!),
this stands against the official policy of Dissent!, since only consensus
decisions at network-wide gathering can carry the weight of being cited in the
name of "Dissent!" and "anyone who claims to be speaking on behalf of the
Dissent! network is lying."
Dissent! as a network began after meetings at the UK Earth First! gathering and
London Anarchist Bookfair in 2003. More class-conscious than their
North-American counterparts, British eco-activists always tended to have little
patience for the notion that the Earth coming "First" means that its human
inhabitants are somehow "second." The original plan for Dissent! was to loosely
unite the various strands of British anti-capitalism in the run-up to the G8, a
grab bag of everything from ecology to insurrection, and to show that it was
something that could stand on its own as an anti-authoritarian UK-wide network.
The main problem is that there was actually no clearly defined or unified
agreement on anything at all, except a hatred of capitalism and hierarchy
combined with a love of humanity and the planet. Turning that particular
weakness into a strength, Dissent! adopted the most minimal points of
agreement: the hallmarks of the People's Global Action (PGA) network. This had
the effect of maximising the number and diversity of people who would be
interested in participating, while maintaining some political parameters. In
particular, these hallmarks feature "a very clear rejection of capitalism" just
in case people thought the network was reformist, "a confrontational attitude"
with a "call to direct action and civil disobedience" to focus the network on
concrete action over bureaucracy, and "an organisational philosophy based on
decentralisation and autonomy", which conveniently excluded authoritarians like
the SWP. Some groups participating in Dissent! originally seemed to want only to
network on a model similar to Earth First!, so that there would be local
collectives such as Edinburgh Dissent!, Brighton Dissent! and so on. Early on,
many people seemed to want to dispose of the idea of a mass action altogether,
and instead focus on decentralised local actions.

The initial meetings involved endless discussions about "What exactly is a
network anyway?" These involved both very long-winded arguments, and a real
discussion of how a UK-wide network could enable local groups to join something
larger without sacrificing their autonomy. A strategy based on maximising the
autonomy of the participants in Dissent! emerged. First, it was decided that
all local groups should adopt their own names - Newcastle Dissent!, for
instance, became "Why Don't You? - as a first step toward becoming a network of
autonomous groups in practise and not just in theory. Local groups were expected
to take care of their own internal finances, have regular meetings, and hold
local events. In addition, a Dissent! network gathering was used by the
Britain-wide Social Centre Network to donate generous amounts of cash to start
social centres throughout Britain. The purpose of these centres was to increase
the general level of social struggle, and many local groups coalesced around
them. Dissent! incarnated itself most clearly at its more-or-less monthly
"gatherings," where the local groups came together to discuss network-wide
issues and form working groups, the latter ranging from the normal "Publicity"
and "Legal" working groups to innovative ones such as the "Trauma Support
Group," which aimed to reduce burn-out and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in
the wake of police repression, and the "Working Group Against Work," which
formed to highlight issues of wage-slavery and precarious labour during the G8
protests. The "Education Working Group" became TRAPESE, a travelling roadshow
that educated people about the G8 through pub quizzes and workshops.
Importantly, these working groups allowed individuals from across different
geographical locations to get to know each other and work together, building
bonds of friendship and trust across the network. The network adopted the
fairly standard consensus and working-group model, so that during network-wide
"Dissent! gatherings" the often unmanageable number of people at the meeting
would break up into their working groups. They would "report back" to the
entire network on the results of their actions (or lack thereof) in between
gatherings, and ask for input from the wider network. If any decision was
expected to actually affect the entire network, it was decided via consensus in
the dreaded but useful plenary meetings.

Dissent! as an anti-capitalist network was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The
Dissent! gatherings went on for nearly two years before the mobilisation, and
two-day long meetings nearly led many participants to a state of heavy
drinking. For the first few Dissent! gatherings, the network seemed more like a
dis-organisation than an organisation. Many of the original proponents either
moved on, or dropped the torch for others to carry. From that chaos, however,
evolved a sort of flexible order as groups organically came together. Often the
first real point of action for a local group was to successfully host a Dissent!
gathering. While some of the "local groups" and "working groups" were in reality
a single individual (or, worse, just an e-mail address from which no one would
reply!), some groups formed into solid affinity groups where none had been
before. There was no small number of problems, as many groups managed to meet
for nearly a year without being able to focus their energies and accomplish
anything of note, and often individuals were stretched among what appeared to
be a never-ending cast of bureaucratic meetings. However, where before there
had been almost no activity, new local groups inspired by Dissent! and the
possibility of taking down the G8 began to be taken seriously, and
long-standing direct action groups ranging from local Earth First! collectives
to the WOMBLES in London started participating in the Dissent! network. When
weak spots were identified such as finances (after all, no-one ever wants to
sign their name to the paradoxical bank account of an anti-capitalist network),
individuals stood up and took responsibility.

The Dissent! network also jumped through hoops to remain inclusive, albeit with
mixed results. At almost every gathering there was a discussion of who should
be allowed to participate in the Dissent! network. Could Christians, who might
be proselytising an authoritarian religion? How about members of organised
political parties? What exactly were the limits of the PGA Hallmarks, and who
did they include and exclude? By adopting the most minimal radical guiding
hallmarks, and by agreeing to disagree on many issues, the Dissent! network
succeeded in attracting participation from more than the "usual suspects" in
such scenarios. Novel and accessible projects like the Cre8 summit community
garden in Glasgow and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army further
contributed to making the network more diverse and open. Although anarchists
are often used to meeting and planning in a clandestine manner, Dissent! tried
its best to be entirely open and public, both to avoid the stereotyping of
anarchists as secretive and to allow more people to get involved. In a country
like Britain where it sometimes feels like every square inch of the ground is
under CCTV surveillance, this strategy makes certain sense. The network
published all its meeting minutes on its admittedly labyrinthine website, and
was remarkably accessible - at least if one were on the e-mail list and read
the website regularly, since the communications of the network in between
meetings were nearly all digital. Despite this openness, reporters often
announced "secret anarchist plans to take action against the G8" after visiting
the website and discovering among the piles of meeting minutes a juicy tidbit
that had been, after all, publicly announced. Not that there weren't secret
plans, but more on this later.

Some aspects of Dissent!, such as its focus on local groups and decision-making
structure, were clearly hallmarks of a genuine network-but others, such as the
bank account and the mostly centralised production of propaganda, definitely
seemed to be the work of something resembling an actual organisation. Dissent!
had an informal leadership develop,as individuals and groups put things in
motion behind the scenes or overtly set the agenda via the process group and
proposals, resulting in much gnashing of teeth at meetings. Yet the informal
leadership was flexible, with individuals moving in and out of various levels
of activity, and often political manoeuvrings at meetings resulted in issues
that were being foolishly ignored being addressed. The "process group" in
charge of creating the Dissent! gathering agenda was in theory supposed to
rotate every gathering, although often it did not due to lack of volunteers. At
the beginning many processes were heavily criticised. To Dissent!'s credit, the
network learned by its mistakes and improved, though there is still much room
for improvement.

Also, Dissent! had unprecedented amounts of funding, combining online donations
with extensive fund-raising, and the total budget for the protest ran into the
tens of thousands of pounds, nothing compared to the multi-million pound budget
of "Make Poverty History," but substantial for anti-capitalists. People need to
think about the issues behind anti-capitalists using money to destroy
capitalism. Are we being corrupted or just "bio-degrading" money out of
capitalist circulation?

Who's Down for Civil Unrest?

After almost a year of perpetual meetings, the location of the 2005 G8 Summit
was announced: the Gleneagles Hotel in rural Scotland. This posed a dilemma:
either commit to a centralised action around the summit location or to
decentralised actions around the United Kingdom. Earlier at Dissent!
gatherings, many shared the implicit assumption that mass mobilisations around
summits were a dead-end. Serious thought had been put into what went wrong and
what went right at previous mobilisations, as shown by the still useful
magazine "Days of Dissent: Reflections on Summit Mobilisations." The rural
location of the Gleneagles Hotel presented added difficulties, since many found
it hard to imagine primarily urban activists tromping through the woods and
glens of Scotland. On the other hand, the idea of decentralised actions, which
had every local working group doing direct action in its home town instead of
coming to Scotland, was not appealing. First, just issuing a vague call for
action and hoping that every group would do something, even if focused around a
theme like climate change, was uninspiring. While decentralised days of action
like J18 in 1999 had been successful in the past, recently widely decentralised
actions had failed to accomplish much of anything. No one even remembers the
"Insurrection Night" proposal for decentralised actions across the United
States for G8 2004, which was accompanied by an equally ineffective call for
solidarity actions in the UK put forward by the Dissent! network. At the urging
of many members, especially those in Scotland who were thrilled a mass summit
was coming near to their town, Dissent! finally did reach a consensus that it
would indeed take on hosting a mass mobilisation in Scotland.

One lurking question was: Could anyone organise direct action and not be held
accountable by the powers of the state? The repercussions of this nebulous and
even dangerous position lent an atmosphere of paranoia to Dissent! gatherings.
The year-long operation to round up activists after J18 set a worrying
precedent, and often crippled the ability of newer activists to even discuss
what they actually wanted to do. Dissent! at first determined it would take as
its prime duty the organising of infrastructure for protests and remain
absolutely neutral towards action, except insofar as it would publicise them.
This meant organising a convergence centre for everyone and making sure there
would be no official Dissent! action. However, upon closer inspection of the
actual location of the summit itself, confusion set in even over
infrastructure. The location of the summit was north of Stirling, about an hour
drive north from both Edinburgh and Glasgow, the two largest Scottish cities.
The large reformist groups like "Make Poverty History" were basing their huge
marches in Edinburgh, while cities like Glasgow had a much stronger tradition
of working-class resistance, and the nearest towns to the summit itself, Perth
and Stirling, had only a very small number of sympathetic activists. As for
action, after Genoa many militant anti-capitalists were not excited by the
prospect of "storming the red zone" through a traditional attack on the
perimeter fence, which would likely be heavily guarded. The simple spatial
layout of the protest was a nightmare, and if Dissent! was too paranoid to
organise any actions, who would?

Despite the gloom, even the most cursory inspection of a map would give anyone
with an inkling of tactical ability reason for hope. Gleneagles was not nearly
as remote as many other previous summit locations. In fact, it was extremely
vulnerable by virtue of being accessible largely off a single trunk road, the
A9. A number of small side- roads led to the G8 venue through the idyllic
resort town of Crieff and the Ochil Hills. Since the Gleneagles Hotel only held
a few hundred people, and since the entourage of bureaucrats, translators,
caterers, and other assorted servants of capital for the G8 numbered in the
thousands, the vast majority of participants in the summit would have to be
driven in from nearby cities.

The idea captured the Dissent! network: Well-placed blockades on the motorways
could paralyse the summit. A large-scale blockade scenario, involving not city
streets but rural motorways, had already been experimented with earlier around
the G8 in Evian. Now, this idea could be revisited in the Scottish countryside,
with far better preparation. It was a difficult concept even to formulate, and
somewhat doubtful at times, but it made sense: If delegates, staff, and media
coming in from hotels could be physically stopped from getting to the G8, the
meeting would be shut down. Even if eventually many made it through, a blockade
would at least disrupt the meeting and send a message to the G8 that it could
not ignore. The sheer number of places the delegates could be staying was
confusing, but it seemed likely that a mixture of urban and rural convergence
centres at major cities, with at least one near the A9, would be best. To top
it all off, the Gleneagles Hotel was surrounded by hills. One group formed to
promote the ancient Scottish hobby of "hill-walking" across the countryside of
Scotland, a time-honoured occupation and hard-fought-for legal right in
Scotland. Its plan was to meet at the Gathering Stone in Stirling and walk
right over the Ochil Hills. Once on the hills they would light "Beacons of
Dissent," fires on the top of the hills that could be seen by the G8 leaders
below in their hotel, and then descend upon the hotel, not to be stopped until
they were having a whisky at the hotel bar in Gleneagles.

As a network, Dissent! continued to sponsor the policy of no "official Dissent!
actions," but at the network gatherings autonomous action groups began forming
and hatching plans around blockading and hill-walking. Since the action groups
were autonomous and not representing anyone but themselves, and their decisions
did not need to be ratified by the rest of the network, anyone was allowed to
join in any legally-risky action-planning. On the other hand, people who didn't
agree with a particular action or who were not in a position to suffer legal
repercussions could still participate in the Dissent! network. The combination
of hill-walking and blockades around the roads to Gleneagles would be hard for
any centralised police force to deal with, and was nearly guaranteed to disrupt
the summit as long as people showed up ready for action.

Convincing People of the Impossible

Would people actually show up for action against the G8? There had been some
activity in Europe: many considered the prior G8 mobilisation in Evian, France
to be a success since blockades did manage to substantially delay the G8
meetings, but Scotland was considerably further away than Lake Geneva for most
of Europe. Many anarchists and assorted anti-capitalists in England were
probably more familiar with the hotspots of Barcelona than they were with
Scotland. Nearly two years ahead of the protest, the "Dissent! Publicity Group"
began making ludicrous amounts of stickers, posters, and other pamphlets to
announce the summit mobilisation against the G8. These texts went through an
often painful but rewarding group writing process, and did end up sounding like
the voice of the genuinely new spirit many of us were feeling in the heyday of
the "anti-globalisation" movement before the vultures like Globalise Resistance
moved in. An "International Networking" working group formed, and hosted a
packed meeting in Tuebingen, Germany five months before the G8. This made it
much easier to get the word out in Germany and for people from overseas to
arrange their travel. In outreach it is often the small things, like helping to
pay the travel costs of anarchists from Ukraine and Russia (where the G8 will be
in 2006) that build true international solidarity. When it appeared there might
not be many Mediterranean activists at the mobilisation, a series of workshops
was organised in Spain and another International Networking Gathering took pace
at Thessalonika in Greece. In Britain itself, at every major and minor activist
event, from the autonomous spaces around the European Social Forum in November
2004 to an anarchist ballroom dance in Cambridge, the word spread that
something big was going to happen in Scotland during the summer. Towards the
end, a large print-run of small stickers was made, and these proved to be an
immensely effective tool in spreading the word about the G8, as they were
easier to put up than fly-pasted large posters and stayed up longer.

The Dissent! network made an effort to ensure its media policy did not create
leading spokespeople. Too often in anarchist groups one person, usually a white
male, gets labelled as the "leader" by the media, usually through talking to the
media about the message of the protest. One of the earliest decisions by
Dissent! was that "anyone who claims to be speaking on behalf of the Dissent!
network is lying," in order to prevent any self-proclaimed media spokespeople
from arising. Only decisions and statements approved by the plenary meeting of
a Dissent! gathering could be cited in the name of Dissent!. However, local
groups, working groups, and individuals could make as many statements and do as
much media work as they wanted to, as long as they were clear about who they
were and spoke in their own name. As a tool for preventing the media from
creating leaders, this policy was excellent. The policy was misunderstood by
many participants in Dissent! as explicitly forbidding all media work, and
confounded by so many anarchists' overt opinion that all media coverage was to
be inherently negative. Local and working groups did not for the most part deal
with the media at all, with only a few of them occasionally communicating to the
media through a collectively written press-statement. In turn this led the media
to more or less make up whatever they wanted to about the "sinister" Dissent!
network, and ironically ended up in a situation where the cops and corporate
media were the only ones "speaking" for Dissent! to the media. While the
corporate media are, with a few notable exceptions, scumbags who are interested
in making anti-capitalists look like deranged axe murderers, this media policy
didn't make it easy for anyone outside the anti-capitalist scene to feel
sympathy towards or even understand Dissent! or the radical anti-capitalist
analysis of the G8. In the final few months before the summit, a media-group
called the Counterspin Collective formed itself. The Counterspin participants
sent letters to the editor regarding the sensationalist British media's
outright lies about the "dangerous anarchists," and helped individuals who were
prepared to be interviewed as individuals. Members of this group acted as a
go-between for mainstream journalists through a "media phone number" that they
advertised. A group within Dissent! even managed to get an opinion piece
published in the "Guardian" newspaper, where the efforts of Make Poverty
History and Live8 were called the world's first "embedded protest," pointing to
how they allowed Blair to co-opt, domesticate and diffuse the struggle for
global justice.

Even the Rock Stars Mobilise

Throughout the two years leading up to the G8, other groups and networks against
the G8 started organising their own large-scale activities. The Southeast
Assembly, an anti-authoritarian network around London, took on the ambitious
plan of hiring trains to transport protesters from London to Edinburgh for the
mobilisation. This was viewed as a way to increase the level of anarchists'
organisational capacity by taking care of some of the necessary but unglamorous
and expensive work, such as booking transport, that is normally left to the
traditional Left and socialists. One interesting thing to note is that instead
of organising exclusively in large cities, Dissent! made it a priority to
organise in smaller towns that were in need of more momentum and conveniently
had less police surveillance.

At the same time as Dissent!, two years before the G8, large NGOs such as Oxfam
launched a massive media campaign and strategic alliance to "Make Poverty
History," a campaign centred around asking the G8 to cancel third-world debt,
enforce "trade justice," increase aid to developing countries, and in a very
radical gesture, not let privatisation be the condition for any aid or debt
relief. While this was a fairly radical agenda, in practice the campaign
consisted of wearing white wristbands manufactured in a Chinese sweatshop and
pinning all hope upon the G8. "Make Poverty History" was seen by many
anarchists in Britain, and many NGOs actually composed of Africans, as a
literal whitewash of the power held by the G8 by the largest British NGOs. Even
within "Make Poverty History," many of the more radical NGOs like "War on Want"
began heavily criticizing the endless heaping of praise upon Blair and his
chief economic wizard Gordon Brown, as well as the fact that Oxfam, Comic
Relief, and the more conservative NGOs were effectively dismissing their agenda
in their attempts to coddle to the G8. It appeared some of the NGOs might even
be sympathetic to Dissent!

At the mobilisation against the G8 in 1998 in Birmingham, many of these very
same NGOs under the banner "Jubilee 2000" formed a human chain around the G8
during its meetings. This was tactically useful and provided a great
counterbalance to the direct action that took place in City Centre. This time
around the NGOs did a massive media campaign that took "marching in circles" to
a whole new high: "Make Poverty History" hoped to mobilise two hundred thousand
people dressed in white to form a white armband around a non-existent target in
central Edinburgh an hour away from Gleneagles and on the weekend before the G8
actually met. There is something to be said for bringing so many thousands to
Scotland for issues of social justice. This was massive mobilisation for the
wrong date and the wrong place.

Later in the day, the manipulative Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
quickly put together a front-group called "G8 Alternatives." Originally they
wanted to hold a corporate rock concert in order to distract people from direct
action and sell them newspapers, but after the Scottish Parliament denied them
funding, they settled for an "alternative summit" complete with a high price
tag and big name speakers. While Dissent! was based primarily in
anti-globalisation networks south of the Scottish border, G8 Alternatives
attracted many more Scottish people due to the widespread socialist tendencies
of Scotland and good old-fashioned regular meetings in Scotland that were
widely advertised. However, the grassroots constituents were more feisty than
the SWP bargained for, and after Dissent! revealed its plans for blockading the
G8, the leadership of G8 Alternatives, attempting to prevent a mass defection to
Dissent!, announced they would host a peaceful, legal, and police-controlled
march to Gleneagles.

A few months before the G8 meetings Bob Geldof (a singer in the not particularly
well-known rock band "The Boomtown Rats") of Band-Aid fame decided to hold
simultaneous "Live8" concerts around the world on the same day of the "Make
Poverty History" march, inviting everyone from the Pope to rapper Fifty Cent to
join in his call for the G8 leaders to do something about poverty in Africa. The
politics of Live8 were murky and unclear at best, with no set agenda besides
celebrities grandstanding and legitimizing the G8, holding them up as potential
saviours who under the pressure of a few rock concerts would use their powers
for good instead of evil. In what could only be termed a truly bewildering turn
of events, Geldof then announced a concert on July 6th in Edinburgh - the same
day as the blockades - and called for everyone to flood Scotland. The police
panicked as visions of half a million confused pop fans wreaking havoc in the
city began troubling their sleep. Some anarchists viewed this as a potential
opportunity to expose hordes of well-meaning and previously depoliticized
people to radical politics. The government was likely simply pleased there
would be a giant rock concert to show on the evening news rather than
protesters. Geldof's second-in-command, Midge Ure, admitted that instead of
worrying about anarchists hijacking Live8, Live8 was hijacking the anarchists'
event.

The Dissent! network steered clear of sectarian warfare with reformist groups by
being friendly, while making no promises and consistently criticising their
reformist politics. The Blair spin-machine was using anti-globalisation
rhetoric to posit the British leader as a responsible world statesman,
portraying him as the saviour of Africa and pitting him against the Bush
regime, in its refusal to admit that climate change was real and man-made. In
contrast to many previous anti-globalisation protests where the public seemed
unaware and apathetic to the issues, it became positively hip to talk about the
G8 and anti-globalisation, and the forces of state and capital seemed to be
positively aping some early Naomi Klein article in their rhetoric. Even Gordon
Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was spotted wearing a "Make Poverty
History" wristband. It was like some anarchist dream: people knew the world was
going to hell in a hand basket due to poverty and climate change and were
looking for solutions: the main problem was that instead of relying on their
own ability to take action, people were petitioning the G8 leaders, the very
ones responsible for the problems, to solve them. As one leaked document after
another showed, the G8 was not even going to agree climate change was a
"problem," and poverty in Africa was only going to be worsened through further
devastating privatisation, even though a few small debts might be written off.
Not a big surprise since, as the radical research group Corporate Watch had
already revealed, the G8 agenda had been stitched up ahead of the summit in
collaboration with the very corporations destroying Africa and the global
climate - from Shell and Rio Tinto to Monsanto. One could almost feel the
disillusionment in the air: and now, as the dreaded anarchists took the stage,
this could have been the historic moment when many people finally understood
that solutions to the problems of the world could only come through direct
action.

History Speeds Up!

Even though there was a strong feeling about doing "something" at the Global Day
of Action on the opening day of the G8 Summit, it was felt by many that just
another spectacular protest was not enough. Instead, as one group after another
began formulating plans for actions around the G8, the Dissent! network
publicised and connected the diverse tapestry of actions of many groups, from a
demonstration in front of the Dungavel Detention Centre, where asylum seekers
are imprisoned on arrival or pending deportation, to the blockade of the
Faslane nuclear submarine base, where Britain's fleet of Trident nuclear
submarines is based, by Trident Ploughshares and Scottish CND. These alliances
were crucially important: while the local anti-G8 Reshape! groups were just
starting in Scotland, Scottish CND had a decades-old history of blockading and
pacifist direct action, and was widely applauded by everyone who disliked the
storage of all of Britain's nuclear weapons in Scotland. The idea of focusing
all energy on a single day of action gave way to the idea that a diverse
tapestry of actions should be woven together, starting months before the day of
action itself.

The Month Before July 6th: Cre8 Summat

>From the beginning, the Dissent! network tried make its radical politics
accessible to people of all sorts. Anarchists in the UK were inspired by the
"Fix Shit Up!" community outreach actions in the previous G8 Summit in Georgia,
which connected the G8 mobilisation with local struggles. Tired of being seen as
merely destructive, anarchists saw it as crucial to demonstrate how direct
action was also "positive" and constructive. It became a clear agenda for many
anarchists not only to attack the existing system, but to begin to construct
and demonstrate what the better world would look like. As the sensationalist
media were bound to tell everyone that senseless anarchist thugs were coming to
burn down their homes, and as Scotland had no previous exposure to such a large
anti-globalisation protest, some form of community outreach was vital. The idea
of a "Cre8 Summat" ("summat" being local slang for "something") finally took
flesh when a group of permaculture activists hooked up with campaigners in
Glasgow to create a community garden in a desolate patch of urban wasteland, in
one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods. Although community gardens and social
services were usually supported by the kind, gentle, and disempowering Scottish
government, in this case they wanted nothing less than to wipe whole sections of
the neighbourhood of Govanhill off the map, in order to build the M74 motorway
extension. In order to do this, Glasgow Council had begun to shut down one
social service after another. Now, residents had responded, even mounting a
militant occupation in order to reclaim their Victorian baths.

Early in June, after a few planning meetings with some of the local residents,
anarchists arrived in Govanhill armed with spades and with plants carefully
propagated months beforehand. Since the land was unsuitable for growing edible
plants, having been a wasteland and dump for years, truckloads of soil were
brought in as locals watched, interested but wary of the outsiders. One by one
people walking their dogs and kids riding their bikes came through the garden,
and were soon gardening hand-in-hand with the anarchists. In this wasteland on
which the state was planning to construct a supporting-column for the massive
road, there soon stood a garden with sculptures, paintings, flowers, and herb
beds. The Cre8 Summat ended with an all-day celebration at which the entire
neighbourhood showed up to party, and local newspapers published encouraging
stories about this "new way of protesting." While the Cre8 Summat was going on,
it was announced that the M74 motorway extension would be delayed by at least
two years following citizens' legal challenges. To its credit, the Cre8 Summat
helped to empower people in the neighbourhood around the project and
demonstrated that people do have the power in their own hands to bring about
positive change without waiting for the "sympathy" and "aid" of any politician.
Some of these people who would otherwise not have been interested in the G8 got
involved in Cre8, and went on to participate in the rest of the G8
mobilisation.

The Month Before July 6th: Not One, but Three Convergences

One problem with mass mobilisations is that no one knows exactly how many people
are going to show up. When a member of the Edinburgh Council asked someone from
the Dissent! Convergence Working Group exactly how many people were in their
"organisation," the only response was somewhere between a thousand and twenty
thousand. While everyone coming in from afar didn't need full "Bed and
Breakfast" treatment, some legal autonomous space near both major transport
centres and within spitting distance of Gleneagles was crucial. The Dissent!
network decided on the ambitious policy of opening multiple convergence
centres: Urban convergence centres in both Edinburgh and Glasgow, and a rural
convergence centre somewhere near Gleneagles itself. Since there was a whole
week of actions planned in or near the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh in the
run-up to the G8, it made sense to have a base in both cities. Most people
would come directly to either Edinburgh or Glasgow rather than directly to a
rural convergence centre near Gleneagles. With Glasgow having a large and
historically volatile working class, and Edinburgh hosting the massive Live8
and "Make Poverty History" events, it was reasoned that some of these people
could be tempted to join in more radical politics once they were actually
exposed to them.

The Dissent! network formed convergence working groups six months before the
protest to look for someone insane enough to rent a piece of land or a building
to anarchists. In Glasgow there was no problem finding a nearly derelict
warehouse that could be rented for hard cash and no questions asked, and soon
the Glasgow convergence space was up and running, with funds allocated to help
get a new permanent social centre off the ground.

Edinburgh was another story. The tight housing market in the expensive capital
of Scotland made finding space for a full-scale convergence centre impossible,
so a shop-front opened as the "Dissent! Infopoint" to offer free Zapatista
coffee and G8 information to interested parties. After what was either a naive
or an insane plan by the Scottish government to house the anarchists and police
in a single football stadium in Edinburgh, pressure from everyone from the
Dissent! network to the Green Party prompted the city to provide
state-sanctioned protest camping in the Jack Kane Centre, miles away from
Edinburgh City Centre. The protest site was revealed to have a price-tag and to
come complete with security and surveillance. On July 1st, anarchists arriving
in Edinburgh on the train from London decided to set up a squatted campsite
more to their liking in Pilrig Park. This horrified the authorities, who
proceeded to drop the cameras and lower security, and even let Dissent! set up
their own tent and food facilities.

In order to bring in more people from the streets, the Dissent! network in
co-operation with the reformist yet very effective People and Planet student
group (who once offered a workshop entitled "Reform or Revolution: Why Reform
is the Answer") set up a free "Days of Dissent" conference of workshops and
films in Edinburgh University. Around the corner, in the remains of a former
church, Indymedia set up dozens of computers to serve as the media
communications centre for the G8 protest.

Inspired by the "VAAAG" village set-up in Annemasse, France at the 2003 protests
against the Evian G8, the rural convergence centre was designed to be both a
demonstration of the world we want and a base for action against the G8. The
amount of energy spent in specifying exactly how the world we want would
function was intense, and the original idea for a campsite was transformed into
an idea for a Eco-village to demonstrate sustainable alternatives to life under
capitalism. With the protest just a few weeks away there was still no
Eco-village in sight, despite six months of intense searching, forming a
non-profit company, planning the details down to the plumbing, and allying with
much more publicly respectable groups such as People and Planet and Scottish
CND. Two sites on which tentative agreements had already been reached fell
through. Rumour had it the owners received menacing visits from agents of the
state. In an emergency manoeuvre, the rural convergence working group
approached the City Council in Stirling (the city due south of Gleneagles and
on the A9 trunk road to Gleneagles) and made a simple statement: It was
fundamentally better for everybody, including the residents of Stirling, if the
protesters had a legal place to camp with proper food and toilets than to have
them squatting buildings and rampaging throughout the countryside. One member
of Parliament from the region reported concern from his constituents that
Italian anarchists would be camping in their backyard with their sheep. After
considerable debate and even interest from Stirling Council in greywater
systems, a cattle field behind the Stirling football stadium was offered to
Dissent!. It was unfortunately bounded by the swift-flowing River Forth on all
sides except the entrance. For actions it appeared to be a certain trap but it
was still far better than having no place to hatch plans and organise within
walking distance of Gleneagles. The chessboard was finally set.

The Week Before July 6th: The Eco-village Opens

Within days after the deal was made, the cattle were cleared off the land and
the rural convergence site was ready to roll. Somehow a giant lorry had been
captured by anarchists and went around the whole country collecting all the
needed wood and other bits for the Eco-village. The Eco-Village was set into
two main sections, one a small section for People and Planet to hold their
festival, and the other the much larger "Hori-Zone" initiated through the
Dissent! network. As a week of intense set-up began, volunteers worked day and
night to get everything sorted out, anarchists from outside Britain began
pouring in, and the Eco-village began to take shape. Against all odds, it
actually was a genuine Eco-village: thousands of anarchists managed to live for
a week in an ecological fashion, including a vast "diversity of toilets" (as
Starhawk put it) ranging from composting toilets to the immensely
non-ecological but legally necessary porta-loos. Water was dealt with via
greywater systems were meant to filter the water through woodchips inoculated
with beneficial water-cleansing bacteria (although the clay soil of the site
made this difficult!), and an alternative energy collective had varying levels
of success in getting wind and solar energy working to help power mobile phones
and an Indymedia Centre. As for ecological living, even the BBC noted that it
"could be a model for us all." The Eco-village was criticised for not being
ecological enough, since many non-recyclable materials were used in its
construction, and a lot went to landfill afterwards. However, if more time had
been available for set-up instead of waiting for Stirling Council to commit to
giving the site to the protesters, better planning could have made the
eco-village even more ecologically sound. Some felt excluded by the often
haphazard decision-making process at the Eco-village, including the so-called
"The Bureaucracy Bloc,"an unelected group which ended up dealing with
infrastructure and all manner of troubleshooting.

The camp was organised around "barrios" or neighbourhoods, usually centred
around a kitchen, since a kitchen provided a natural place for everyone to be
together for breakfast and dinner. Each neighbourhood had its own consensus
meetings and would self-organise in order to deal with its own problems, and
each neighbourhood would send representatives to the site-wide consensus
decision-meetings that met every day to deal with village-wide issues. The
Dissent! Network emerged from the realm of bureaucratic meetings and ethereal
cyberspace to become concrete and real, as each local group and social centre
became a neighbourhood within the Eco-village. Food was bought from local
organic farms and distributed through the network of neighbourhood kitchens.
Medics provided rations and supplies to take care of people's needs both in the
Eco-village and for the blockades. Whole neighbourhoods took care of children,
and a loving and caring spirit made the Eco-village a surprisingly relaxing
hive of activity.

#file_1#
It was a virtual kaleidoscope of resistance: a death metal band raging against
capitalism, pagan healers helping anarchists deal with emotional trauma, and
Celtic fiddle keeping everyone's spirits high. A number of Stirling residents
visited and came away impressed both by the welcome they received and by just
how together it was. Many others, nervous of communicating with us, drove up to
the entrance to have a look and turned back. Corporate journalists were kept
corralled in a media tent outside the Eco-village. The occasional noisy drunk
would be dealt with by a "tranquillity team" of mediators who maintained
security on site, while others watched the horizon for approaching police. Many
people, when confronted with the idea of a world without government, quickly
retort that without government we would just rob, loot, and kill each other
off. Instead, without any state thousands of people lived, loved, and actually
made decisions together by consensus, often agreeing to disagree and respecting
the wide away of diverse opinions there. For those in the Eco-village, it was
like living the revolution.

Saturday July 2nd: Make Poverty History

The "Make Poverty History" march began in the Meadows of Edinburgh - sort of.
While many people had imagined an actual march from one point in the city to
another, the organisers had set it up so people would literally march in a
circle, for the sole purpose of a media stunt: A white band around central
Edinburgh, just like the "Make Poverty History" wristbands that had been
distributed throughout Britain. Having seriously underestimated the number of
marchers, the event became one big traffic jam. People were standing around for
hours waiting to begin marching, while others milled around on the large lawn of
the Meadows, listened to speakers, and paid money for bottled water and food
from corporate stalls. It was, in short, a "happening" rather than a march, and
a very disempowering one at that, although many of the speakers did have a
surprisingly radical flavour and questioned the legitimacy of the G8, the IMF,
and even occasionally capitalism itself. Despite threats by certain members of
"Make Poverty History" that those not wearing white would be removed from the
march, a horde of clowns showed up to add colour and humour to the event.
Dissent! had printed eighty-thousand fliers carefully subverting the logo of
"Make Poverty History" to "Make History: Shut Down the G8," in order to
encourage everyone at the march to stay on in Scotland and take direct action;
everyone from old Scottish ladies and young children from council estates took
the fliers, often resulting in confused questions and engaging debates about
social change. While the message of anti-capitalism was spread, few of those
people seemed to actually come to the Eco-village, showing not surprisingly
that it takes more than handing out a flyer to get people to act.

Anarchists met in a disorderly fashion in front of the "Days of Dissent"
conference. There had been debate about whether anarchists should split up into
small affinity groups for the march or march as one large contingent in order to
radicalise it, but as the moment approached the crowd simply split into two main
groups, with one sizeable Black Bloc running off early and the clowns and others
making their own way later to the march. After a good deal of pointless milling
about, the colourful anarchist contingents mostly dispersed into the crowd, but
the the Black Bloc tried to lead a breakaway march. It was a bit too late, for
by then the police had enough time to prepare their forces and surrounded them
with heavily armoured riot police, sending a message to all that no
unauthorized demonstrations would be allowed. Using the particularly British
policing tactic of "frustrate and disperse," they managed to isolate and
eventually split-up the Bloc. For better or for worse, the rest of the march
seemed to pass without incident. Nobody knows if they actually managed to
create the giant white wristband of people circling Edinburgh, although there
were thousands upon thousands there.

Monday July 4th: Blockading Faslane Nuclear Base

On the Monday before the days of action, two actions of differing natures
happened in Edinburgh and the Faslane Nuclear Base. For seven years before the
G8, Scottish CND and Trident Ploughshares had organised large non-violent
blockades at Faslane, home to Britain's infamous Trident nuclear submarines.
This year they moved the date of the protest close to the G8 summit in order to
remind people that the G8's domination of the world was backed up by murderous
wars, not by handing out debt relief to poor countries. This long and proud
tradition of civil disobedience was only strengthened by the energy and numbers
brought in by anti-G8 mobilisation, and for most of the day the entire base was
shut down. The police, long-accustomed to this sort of thing, actually were
rather kind and accommodating to the protesters. In Edinburgh, a different
story was taking place.

Monday July 4th: Carnival for Full Enjoyment

In Edinburgh, the Carnival for Full Enjoyment took to the financial and tourist
district of Edinburgh, in order to connect the mobilisation against the G8 to
the everyday struggles of people in the city. The carnival encouraged everyone
to take a day off work in protest against low wages, lack of job security,
over-working, and dole slavery. In the city that played such a key part in the
birth of the anti-poll tax campaign, this definitely hit a chord: thousands of
locals showed up for the Carnival, and Princes Street was lined with ordinary
people waiting for something - anything - to happen.

The state and the media had promised everyone a riot in central Edinburgh, and
they were hell-bent on making it transpire. Hordes of cops were everywhere, and
they went out of their way to harass, as the newspapers put it, the "most
militant anarchists": The clowns. They also again quickly trapped the Black
Bloc, and targeted medics for arrest. However, the Infernal Noise Brigade made
it to downtown Princes Street and then courageously took the streets. The
police reacted by blocking them in. However, as one older Scottish gentleman
noted, while from their limited perspective the police thought they had won the
day, the anarchists did a classic pincer around Princes Street, as there was not
one but three gathering spots for the Carnival. As these other groups arrived,
the police found themselves surrounded by people on every side, and proceeded
to panic.

The carnival then began in full force. Police attempted to block one unit of
their carnival with a line of horses, but the hilarious movements of a black
IWW sabotage cat puppet terrified the horses. Police from Manchester attempted
to arrest a man, and anarchists were outdone by angry locals who shouted for
the English cops to get the hell out of their town, and backed up their threats
by throwing uprooted flowers, rubbish, and even benches at the police! The
carnival sought to move people to targets like the Social Security head office,
home of dole fraud investigator Joan Kirk. Large bits of carpet with handles
were used to help reclaim some of the streets, and even a sound system was
pulled out at the last minute.

Many locals were disgusted with police behaviour and enjoyed the Carnival
because of, not despite, the chaos: People roaming the streets, cars trapped,
music playing, clowns mocking police officers, the houses of the corrupt and
wealthy targeted for payback. It was anarchy in its most pure and undistilled
form, and it felt a hell of a lot better to everyone involved than the
zombie-like shopping that dominates Princes Street every other day of the week.

Wednesday July 6th: The Day of Action

"Violent Extremists Come to Gleneagles: And we're going to try to stop them!"
the web-page of Dissent! proclaimed. And against all odds this is exactly what
happened. The hill-walkers met at the historic Gathering Stone inside the
grounds of Stirling University, and began their long walk through the Ochil
Hills. On the top of the breath-taking Scottish hills and within viewing
distance of the wine-glasses at Gleneagles, the hill-walkers lit their "Beacons
of Dissent!": the fires on the hill that traditionally in Scotland were the
signal that an invasion was near. The day before July 6th, the day of action,
the Eco-Village was abuzz with last-minute talk of blockades. Likewise, a
series of difficult meetings were taking place in the Glasgow warehouse, and
anarchists were busy hatching a scheme in Edinburgh as well. To say that
communication between the various convergence centres was difficult would be an
understatement: people for the most part had little or no idea what other groups
were doing. Although last minute guides to blockading the G8 had been produced
by the notorious Deconstructionist Institute for Surreal Topology, to almost
everyone the plan seemed vague and informal: Find friends, exit the convergence
centre, and stop the delegates on the roads by whatever means you can. There was
a method to the madness.

Scotland is home to an insect called the midge. The midge is like a mosquito,
but terrifyingly tiny, and they travel in hordes, making them even more
ferocious and unstoppable. Due to their small size and speed, one cannot even
slap them to kill them, but can only resist by literally running away from
them. In retrospect, the entire plan seemed to be based on "The Midge
Principle": Hundreds of irritating and determined small groups moving in and
out of critical road junctions would be impossible for a centralised police
force to cope with. This contrasted with the "Make Poverty History" march,
which seemed to be based on the behaviour of another common Scottish animal
also known to wear white: the sheep. The police, much like a shepherd, can
easily control vast numbers of people if they are docile and scared of
confrontation. In contrast, the "Midge" action was based on confrontation
through swarming, so that even when facing a vastly superior force, smaller
groups could overcome it by surprise and speed, so long as they were highly
mobile, co-ordinated, and had numbers at the critical point of engagement
equivalent to that of the superior force.

Although the plan sounded dodgy, autonomy worked: in their neighbourhoods in the
Eco-village, groups each met and had decided together how far they were willing
to go to stop the G8. The answer was pretty damn far; the highway to Gleneagles
was many hours from the Eco-village, and rainclouds were gathering. Since the
Eco-village was surrounded by a deep river and had only one exit, it would be
ludicrously simple for the police to simply block the exit and trap everyone
inside. To counter this, affinity groups began leaving the Eco-village en-masse
the evening before the day of action, often with nothing but a plastic trash-bag
for a raincoat and no supplies to block the road but their bodies. Hordes of
affinity groups scattered to the four winds, each trekking to find their own
way to the A9. The police set an emergency "Section 60" order that let them
stop and search anyone in Scotland for weapons, a technique used mainly to
separate activists and even arrest them. As the groups slipped out one by one,
the police seemed to be sleeping on the job.

The Black Bloc Strikes Back

As nightfall approached, roars could be heard from the campfire. Over a thousand
people, including a large Black Bloc, had stayed behind in the camp, preparing
themselves to march straight from the Eco-village to the M9 motorway (which
becomes the A9 a little further north). This courageous plan was dubbed the
"Suicide March" since it likely meant a direct confrontation with the police,
and for the inevitable throw down with police the Black Bloc prepared by having
some impromptu padded armour, a "battering ram" made of a line of lorry tires
attached to a banner, which bore the bemusing text "Peace and Love," and some
"big sticks." Since it was assumed that the police would attempt to block the
camp early in the morning, the mass walk-out set its leaving time for 3:00 AM.
As the Black Bloc gathered in front of the mass walk-out as it readied to
leave, the heavens opened and a giant torrent of rain came down, soaking the
Bloc and all the affinity groups already outside of the Eco-village.

Resolute, the mass walk-out left the camp - only to discover that in an act of
shocking incompetence the police had not blockaded the exit to the Eco-village.
While the police did eventually move in to stop the Black Bloc, it was too
little and too late as much of the Bloc had left the Eco-village unchallenged.
When the Scottish police finally managed to stop the Bloc en masse, they
attempted to trap them in a nearby industrial estate. The police learned all
too soon this was a mistake, as in a controversial but tactical move the Bloc
began to wreck corporate outfits like Burger King and Pizza Hut. This was
exactly the type of behaviour the police were trying to stop, and they had just
caused it by trapping the Bloc in a corporate shopping district. The police
backed off and the Bloc managed to find a road out. As the Bloc approached the
M9, the police finally pulled out the riot cops and formed a line blocking
their route.

To the shock of the police, the Bloc reacted with a full frontal charge on the
police lines. Ya Basta!-style armoured members took the initial charge - and
then, in a very non-pacifist move, turned on the police and attacked them from
behind! The front line of the Bloc was armed with the infamous big sticks, and
managed to beat the police at their own game by giving them a shocking
beatdown, while rocks were thrown at the police from behind. Overwhelmed by the
ferocity of the Bloc, the police line collapsed and the impossible was
accomplished: The Black Bloc and others involved in the mass walk-out
victoriously took the M9, shutting down traffic going to Gleneagles. In a
panic, the police sent hundreds of riot cops to surround the Bloc, but again
the Bloc battled their way out, and eventually dispersed and escaped through
the Scottish countryside to return victorious to the Eco-village. The "suicide"
plan was a momentous victory, for the taking of the M9 by the Bloc would turn
out to be the largest and most public of a series of blockades.


Reinventing Dissent: Part 2!

This second part continues the story of the G8 with a look at the blockades and
the London bombings.

Gleneagles Surrounded

Earlier, it had generally been thought that affinity groups would never leave
the camp the day before and move into position to take the roads. It was just
too much to ask of activists from all over the world who had just come to
Scotland and had little experience with rural actions and the topography of the
Scottish landscape.

That is exactly what happened. No doubt bringing much planning to a crescendo,
affinity groups spent the evening and night before the day of actions
scattering around the roads surrounding Gleneagles in a radius of several
miles, waiting to stomp on their targets. A vacation in the Scottish
countryside this was not: it rained heavily during the evening and vicious
midges attacked the activists. As the morning traffic started, the groups
mobilised and took the roads - creating an almost impossible policing
situation. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, the activists were everywhere. A
handful of affinity groups made sure the first wave of actions to halt traffic
at all crucial junctions leading to Gleneagles was successful. One of the first
blockades to hit was an innovative five-person lockdown in Muthill near Crieff,
a small village immediately north of Gleneagles that had never been discussed
openly as a site for protest. Thinking themselves safe, the American delegation
to the G8 had located in Crieff, and then had to spend hours waiting for the
police to disable the complex lockdown.

At the same time, another blockade, this time using a car with lock-ons inside
and underneath, hit the small road south-east of Gleneagles at the village of
Yetts o' Muckhart. Because the police had to spend so much time getting the
Crieff blockade dismantled, this one was up most of the day. Just in case the
delegates were re-routed around the A9, another large blockade hit the exit
from Perth, with two smaller ones south-west of Perth, near Forteviot and on
Kinkell Bridge. Even earlier, the train-tracks going to Gleneagles were
disabled using a compressor, tyres set ablaze on both sides a warning. With the
Black Bloc taking the M9 west of Gleneagles on the A9, the hotel was completely
surrounded by blockades for most of the morning. The Canadian delegation never
even made it to Gleneagles. Mission accomplished.

The original plan was to co-ordinate these blockades with disruption at the
hotels where the delegates were staying in Edinburgh and Glasgow. This made
sense given the convergence spaces present in both cities. While most of the
anarchists had gone to the Eco-village, the blockades guide released on the
Internet somehow got garbled by the media, who announced that the anarchists'
main plan was to blockade Edinburgh and riot in Glasgow, and in response more
of the police seemed to be based in Edinburgh and Glasgow than in Stirling.
Disinformation, whether on purpose or not, helped to confuse both the police
and ourselves. There was truth in the reports; instead of going to the
Eco-village, a substantial group of anarchists stayed in Edinburgh. In the
early morning, they went to the Sheraton Hotel where Japanese G8 delegates were
staying, and while hordes of police officers prevented any mass action, as the
delegates climbed on a bus affinity groups blocked the road by throwing a bin
into the street and surrounding the bus. Then, as delegates left the hotel with
the help of the police and made their way north to the Forth Bridge, a giant
steel bridge connecting Edinburgh to central Scotland, anarchists crashed two
cars into each other on the road to blockade delegates, in a literally
death-defying action.

In Glasgow, many of the anarchists had felt out of the loop of the action plans,
and were getting ready to head up to the Eco-village, when another wave of
anarchists, including the WOMBLES, showed up in order to blockade the hotels in
Glasgow where the delegates were staying. However, by then the anarchists
already in Glasgow were demoralised and in the process of leaving, so the
blockade organising in Glasgow broke down. To add to the confusion, on the
afternoon of the day of action the police mounted a huge operation against the
WOMBLES. The WOMBLES had been a major anti-authoritarian organising force
within London for years and had bested the London Metropolitan Police before,
and their social centres had been the main hubs of organising everything from
Indymedia to medic trainings in London in preparation for the G8. The police
were sure they were the ring-leaders behind the G8 blockades, guided perhaps by
the blind assumption that the UK anarchist movement works like the police, an
operation commanded from London. As the WOMBLES were in a van leaving Glasgow,
the police proceeded to surround them with hundreds of police and arrest eleven
of the WOMBLES on "conspiracy to breach the peace" charges; charges so
ridiculous they were dropped almost immediately. The next day the WOMBLES were
even attacked by the police in a pub! The WOMBLES did have two strengths which
doubled as weaknesses: their open organising meetings allowed the police to
discover their identities and plans easily, and their support of militant
direct action (as well as many them dressing in all black) made them the
stereotypical anarchist targets the police were looking for. Due to the general
confusion and repression, the blockades in Glasgow collapsed. However, one
strength of a decentralised network is that no matter how strong one of its
components is, the rest of the network and its connections continues even if
that component is lost. The amount of repression the WOMBLES faced is directly
proportional to how effective they've been in the past in contesting the state.

Swarming the A9

One by one, all the early morning blockades began to be cleared off, but these
were only the beginning. Hard-lock blockades are by nature troublesome and
difficult for the police to deal with initially, but once they were removed and
the participants arrested, it was easy to get the delegates through. While the
groups hard-locked on the perimeter of Gleneagles made sure the traffic got
snarled, many affinity groups which didn't have pre-decided targets proceeded
to get as close as they could to the hotel itself and literally jump in the
road. These affinity groups, after many hikes, played a sort of cat-and-mouse
game with the cops, capitalising on two obvious principles. The first is that
drivers tend to stop when they see someone in the road to avoid running them
over, even if said driver is transporting G8 delegates. The second is that the
police are by nature terrified of leaving their comfortable cars to run into
some countryside field to chase an anarchist. The combination made the
blockades around Gleneagles almost impossible for the police to deal with, as
their reliance on cars often led the police themselves to be blockaded. A
typical blockade struck first early in the morning, and simply walked around
the highway, and a few people doing this was enough to bring traffic to a
standstill. If there were any available materials, such as orange traffic
cones, they were re-arranged (and there are even reports of burning tires being
thrown into the road). Groups self-evidently had plans, as the BBC reported that
some activists hung-off via ropes from overpasses from the motorway to blockade
the exits; this was an exceptionally courageous move given that at G8 2003 a
British activist had nearly been killed when the police cut the rope on which
he and his comrade were suspended.

The vast majority clearly had no plan but to cause disruption, and groups would
appear on the road, blocking it by just walking around until the police could
mobilise and get near them, or dragging branches and dislodged paving stones
onto the tarmac. Then, they would simply exit the road and go into the nearest
field, walking away in order to get to another part of the road. The police
almost never followed them, and would eventually disperse to go deal with
another blockade - and at that moment, the affinity group would reappear at
another nearby location in the road, blocking traffic yet again till the police
re-mobilised. This effect was multiplied exponentially by the number of affinity
groups doing it. Just as the police would mobilise to stop one group, another
group would appear and blockade their way!

The clowns were present all over the place, tantalising the police and keeping
everyone in good cheer. At a certain point there was even a "kids' blockade" of
children blocking the road. A car blockade left the Eco-village, and they
gleefully thanked the police every time they were stopped and searched, as this
delayed traffic even more. Cyclists, who had arrived in Scotland on a bike-tour
against the G8, also lended their mobile support. At the Eco-village people
kept flooding back in and out, and a transport group kept in touch with
information from Indymedia, a Dissent! info-line, and various bike-scouts and
affinity groups in order to attempt to re-route groups to critical junctions.
The police were simply unable to keep track of the movements of so many small
groups taking the highway, such that even after the hard-locks were eliminated
and the Black Bloc returned to the Eco-village, the highway remained blockaded.
Delegates, media, and other assorted staff could not make it to Gleneagles, and
inside the hotel the meetings tottered close to collapsing, with nothing of any
substance happening. The BBC announced that the roads were closed by the
anarchists and the police sent announcements urging everyone to avoid the A9,
stating that traffic all over central Scotland was a mess. The Scottish police
were caught with their pants down. The news reported that a member of the
Scottish government announced that "Dissent! was both organised and dangerous."
At the Eco-village, one person stood up at a consensus meetings and announced
that "We have successfully destroyed 10,000 of Britain's best police force."

Taking the Fence Down

Humiliated, the police announced that they would stop the previously permitted
noon march to Gleneagles, called by G8 Alternatives. Gill Hubbard of the
Socialist Workers Party, the self-proclaimed leader of G8 Alternatives, had
done everything except put on a police uniform in order to ensure a legal,
peaceful demonstration without an ounce of direct action involved - and as
usual the grassroots of G8 Alternatives was considerably more rowdy than their
Trotskyist leadership. When the police disallowed their demonstration, people
undertook a spontaneous march through Edinburgh to demonstrate their right to
peaceful protest. The police backed off, and allowed the march to go on. By
this time, later in the afternoon, the trains were functioning again and the
highway was less of a mess, so several thousand people showed up to march on
Gleneagles, including many people from the Dissent! network, CND, and beyond.
As usual a fence had been erected, marking a large red zone around the hotel,
yet instead of being large and intimidating the fence was barely taller than
your average anarchist. One could climb over it. To counteract this, the fence
was actually two fences with diagonal fences in between so it would be more
stable if someone attempted to pull it down with grappling hooks, and so that
anyone who climbed over it would just become trapped in the middle. As the
march approached one part of an outer fence, spontaneous anger at the arrogance
of the G8 rose from the crowd, and groups such as the Dundee Trades Council went
to the fence and put their banners on it. One contingent got right next to a
fence and simply pushed and kicked it right off the ground, breaking the fence.
There was access to the inner security fence of Gleneagles itself!

Led by the Infernal Noise Brigade, a trickle and then a storm of people
approached the inner security fence through a field. Hundreds of people ranging
from clowns to Congolese drummers were in the red zone! The police were caught
off guard and didn't even have enough riot cops behind the fence to contain the
crowd. Just as a police officer would try to arrest a Black Bloc kid who threw a
rock at them, he would nearly trip over a rainbow-draped hippie, and then from
out of nowhere a Scottish union-member would jump in front of the confused
officer and in outrage demand his right to peaceful protest! Soon, the
mechanical buzzing of choppers could be heard overhead, as hundreds of riot
cops were flown in on Chinook helicopters, formed a giant line, and eventually
cleared the field. They had to literally send in the helicopters to stop us
that afternoon.

Tactically, the blockades were a tremendous success, for nearly the same reason
the Dissent! network was a success: Instead of homogenising everyone into a
single course of action, the blockades provided a structure that gave people
just enough to hang on to, while encouraging creativity and a diversity of
actions. Everyone felt they could do something to stop the G8, and a vast
diversity of tactics was employed. With a common goal, everyone knew they were
going to disagree on specific tactics, but managed to get along anyway. The
most controversial tactic by far was the physical confrontation with police
made by the Black Bloc as it left the Eco-village. Some of the pacifists, who
often were facilitating the meetings, were shocked by the relatively minor
property destruction and the physical confrontation with the police of
Wednesday morning, feeling that it betrayed the understanding they had reached
with some of the residents of Stirling and the Stirling Council. Others felt
that since the Bloc had been one of the first to shut down the M9, the action
was a stunning success, and that for most part the confrontation had been
well-timed and tactical. There was no consensus reached, but in the framework
set up by Dissent! autonomy was the secret weapon. Unlike many other protests
in which a vast centralised plan keeps everyone in check until the moment chaos
actually hits, the Dissent! plan was to have no "plan" but to facilitate the
creation of plans. This created real autonomy, allowing everyone to
self-organise around their own particular style and concerns.

On the other end of the spectrum from the Black Bloc was the Clandestine Rebel
Insurgent Clown Army, who aimed to protest the G8 by using their three - wait,
four! - secret weapons of humour: ridicule, red noses, face paint, and silly
army costumes. Nobody expected the clowns! The clowns had held trainings for
the months leading up to the G8 as a way for staid activists to release their
"inner clowns," and the results were fantastic: the police were absolutely
baffled at how to deal with them. Because the uptight British police knew they
would look ludicrous if they beat or even arrested them, they would just sit
there and be the target of the clowns' jokes, even when the clowns were
blockading the road! The clowns were one of the most organised contingents,
having their own internal e-mail lists and meetings. When organised but
disparate groups ranging from the clowns to the Black Bloc could sit together
in one meeting and work together to shut down the G8, the words "diversity of
tactics" really meant something. One could speculate that the process of
actually living together and having to co-operate on more mundane matters such
as keeping the toilets working helped everyone get along.

The blockades' success was not entirely the anarchists' doing; it must also be
attributed to the utter incompetence of the police. Due to their mistaken
belief that anarchists wanted a Genoa-style riot in Edinburgh, they put an
incredibly large concentration of their force in the city and, no doubt because
of request from the London Met, obsessively focused their efforts on following
and arresting the WOMBLES. The police force was a bizarre composite of English
police in riot gear and Scottish police in bright yellow jackets; with so many
different police forces called in to help in Scotland, the police sometimes
appeared to have even worse communications than the protesters did. The police
would let themselves be isolated, would not apply force until it was too late,
and in general seemed to have no idea how to cope with protesters that were
even a bit disorderly. We should not kid ourselves into thinking that it was
our tactical genius that won the day. It was about half tactically sound ideas
and about half sheer police incompetence. In the end, the day of action had
proved to be a victory for the global movement against capitalism, and everyone
wondered what the next day of action would bring.

Thursday July 7th: The Moment of Terror

Under the cover of darkness early on Thursday the police finally did what
everyone had feared they would: In revenge for the blockade of the G8, the
police blockaded the camp. They formed a large line outside the camp's main
entrance point, searching everyone coming in and out and even arresting people.
Most people coming back after a hard day of blockading and marching found
themselves trapped. As discussions on how to deal with this new development
began on Thursday morning, everyone was still exhausted but elated by the
success of the blockades the day before. Still, tensions soon became felt. The
more insurrectionary anarchists argued that the police blockade around the
Eco-village had to be disposed of in order to continue the success of the
previous day. With the police so obviously weak and the fence easily toppled,
they believed that one more co-ordinated action could shut the summit down. The
more pacifist wing felt that any attempt to force through the police lines,
especially now that the police would not be caught off guard as they had been
on the previous morning, would be a disaster, but they couldn't propose how to
deal with the police blockade.

Before discussions about the next few days of action could really commence, news
came of the terrorist attack in London. It hit everyone like a physical punch in
the stomach, and the whole meeting came to an eerie standstill. A tremendous
wave of shock and sorrow swept over the meetings; many people had friends and
family in London who could be dead. The news continued to worsen: one bomb had
gone off on a bus full of random Londoners going to work, and more bombs had
gone off at major Underground stations across the British capital. Unlike the
September 11th bombings, these bombings were clearly targeting civilians whose
only crime was to live in London, and their one and only intention was to
spread fear. Rumours spread that the G8 itself was cancelled - although it
later turned out that it was just interrupted while Blair flew down to London
to make a statement. The bombings were quickly said to be the work of Islamic
fundamentalists enraged by Britain's complicity in the war on Iraq. The timing
was almost too convenient: it shattered any dreams about refocusing the debate
on climate change and poverty, inescapably pulling the focus onto George Bush's
rusty refrain on war and terror, and most importantly sending everyone fleeing
for protection into the arms of the state. The net effect of the terrorist
attacks was complete paralysis. The spectacular bombings simply fed into the
image of the G8 as the defenders of western civilisation from anarchy and
Islam. The response of activists was half-hearted to say the least: there was a
plan for some sort of press release. One group didn't see how the bombings
really changed anything, and aggressively pushed to continue the blockade of
the G8. The fatal flaw of this proposal was the blockade around the
Eco-village. It was going to be hard to mount an escape without a united front,
and most people were physically - and now emotionally - exhausted. Finally an
agreement was reached to do a vigil for the victims in both London and Iraq
through a peaceful march out of the Eco-village.

Predictably, the vigil was stopped by the police before leaving the Eco-village,
and in a very strange moment the anarchists and the police seemed to share a
moment of grief together. There was a very touching ceremony at the gates of
the Eco village, where a procession of anarchists with candles sang to the
shift of cops. The candles were laid at the feet of the officers and for a
brief moment we were all one, separated by grief and a few rows of flickering
light. Many of the police seemed disenchanted with their job of "containing the
anarchist menace". The police even offered people in the Eco-village a free
train back to London. The energy left the Eco-village, and people eventually
began leaving in small groups. The police, in a style of policing no doubt
learned after decades of successful empire, would act as kindly as possible up
to the moment they searched someone leaving the Eco-village, then make an
arrest if they had any suspicion they were part of the Black Bloc or were
otherwise wanted. Things continued like this for days until finally almost
everyone had escaped the Eco-village. We were all held paralysed by the
spectacle of the London bombings, unable to act or move, caught in the same
numb sense of disempowerment that infected the rest of Britain.

In all respects, both the G8 and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists share the aim
of disempowering people through the media spectacle they create and their
ability to murder at will. This brings us to an important point: the difference
between the terrorists and anarchists is precisely in the effect that their
action has upon both the participants and the observers. Fundamentalist
terrorists want to see people disempowered, to provoke fear in the average
person on the street. Unlike terrorists, anarchists want to see people
empowered to take control of their own lives, to inspire hope rather than fear.
The G8 and the London terrorists are in an incestuous relationship: the London
attacks gave the G8 and in particular the Bush "War on Terror" agenda exactly
the excuse it needed to force a security state upon Britain, and deflect
attention from the effects of corporate globalisation. The alternative
represented, however imperfectly, by the Eco-village, Dissent!, and anarchists
everywhere is the real alternative to terror and capital. Just as popular
interest was moving to issues of global inequality and systematic ecological
collapse, at a moment that was so pregnant with historic possibility, the
terrorist strikes.

Anarchists proved themselves no more capable of responding to this turn of
events than anyone else, despite the empowering experience of the G8
mobilisation. A media blackout of course fell on the anarchists after the
bombings - but is all we are doing a game for the media to report on? For their
own part, the anarchists had very little to say publicly. One does not use the
word "racist" lightly, but it is hard to explain this lack of response by
anarchists any other way. People were very naturally shocked and horrified by
the events in London, but the same number of people have been dying frequently
in Iraq due to the depravity of the U.S. and their twin puppets the British and
Iraqi governments. Just because it happens in Britain, it is "different"? In one
obvious manner it is different, since it is our families and friends in London
that could have been killed, and so some loss of momentum for everyone to check
on the safety of their loved ones is both to be expected and is an expression of
our humanity. For days, in our stunned silence we could not even enunciate
clearly that the enemy of our enemy is not our friend: the authoritarian
religious fundamentalists such as those behind the bombings behead women in the
street for not wearing the Hijab. The situation is only getting worse, as the
"democratic" government set up in Iraq by the United States would enshrine the
very same Sharia laws in its new constitution. People desperately want another
option besides Bush and Bin Laden, and anarchists could have shown that in
their response to the bombings. Although it is tactically unclear what could
have worked, one has the feeling that something beautiful and brave could have
somehow shifted the British population's disempowerment. Yet nothing happened,
and the lack of a good media working group made any sort of even verbal
response impossible. At the same time, various anarcho-communist and
anarcho-syndicalist groups, seen as the conservative wing of the anarchist
movement, put together a very solid and inspiring "Statement against London
Bombings."

In final analysis, those responsible for the conditions that lead inevitably to
disasters such as the London bombings and the war in Iraq were left unmolested
in Gleneagles. It can only be called a failure of imagination. Perhaps we
should thank this turn of events for showing us that despite the dreams we made
reality, the world is engulfed in a larger nightmare that we must learn how to
respond to and eventually banish.

Ruthless Criticism

We can only move forward if we inspect our mistakes instead of blindly repeating
failing stratagems. There are definitely criticisms to be made of the day of
action, since the blockades disrupted but did not actually shut down the G8
Summit. There are clear reasons for this. Up until the very day before the day
of action, most groups were confused about even what city to be in. Dissent!
could have done a much better job at communicating the goals and actions of the
blockades. Dissent! was on some level too ambitious, and stretched its
organisational resources too thinly in setting up three convergence centres,
one of which was attended by only a few hundred and the other unattended on the
day of action. The convergence centres could have simply shut down themselves
down after their purpose had been served, and moved everyone to the
Eco-village. Communicating within one consensus meeting is hard enough;
communicating among three simultaneous consensus meetings is nearly impossible,
and serious thought needs to be put into how such a thing could be done
realistically. On the other hand, this lack of communication and lack of a
central convergence centre may have been a saving grace, as lack of clarity
about the blockades was probably one of the deciding factors in the police's
failure to focus on the Eco-village and the A9 itself.

Second, many groups who were out blockading felt very much alone and isolated
from other groups. Dissent! did not provide much of a communications
infrastructure, issuing only a single phone number one could call for "updates"
and having an ad-hoc communications map at the Eco-village. The map itself was
useful but could have been better managed, as it was usually unclear where to
send people to blockade. Most updates spread through rumour, and bike scouts
were few and far between, although some affinity groups had put together their
own scouting and communication networks. The Black Bloc that left the
Eco-village was mostly lost until they ran into a bike scout. Affinity groups
who organised through the public process often chose their location and time of
blockade almost at random, which led to crucial junctions having not enough
people blockading on them and other less critical junctions being overstocked
with anarchists, so that the G8 was eventually able to re-route its delegates
through the blockades. Still, through sheer mass and some clear thinking by
certain affinity groups, the plan did succeed up to a point later in the
afternoon in literally shutting down the G8. A network is only as powerful as
its communications, and something like a text-mobbing server (that was used on
a much smaller scale to great effect during the RNC protests in the USA the
summer before) would have allowed groups to use the ubiquitous mobile phone
"text" (SMS message) to communicate where more blockades were needed and where
the police and delegates were. On the other hand, once again, reliance upon a
centralised text-messaging centre would have had drawbacks: it could easily
have been infiltrated or shut down, and it might have turned out to be simply
useless in the Scottish countryside where mobile phone service can be dodgy at
best. Regardless, the gain should have outweighed the cost, allowing groups to
more flexibly co-ordinate where the blockades were going and when. Not
surprisingly, many groups got lost rambling in the sheep fields around
Gleneagles, and a topographic map was worth its weight in gold on the day of
action, so obviously Dissent! could have done a much better job briefing people
about the geography around Gleneagles.

Third, the main reason the G8 Summit was not shut down was not the fact that the
police managed to break the blockades, but that due to sheer exhaustion and lack
of food and water the various blockading groups simply went home early. Had the
level of intensity of blockading been kept up for only a few more hours - which
it might have been, if only people had known how effective their seemingly
isolated blockades actually were! - the summit would have likely been shut for
the entire day. Dissent! had set aside money for extra food and water for the
blockaders, but it wasn't enough and it would have been difficult, due to the
success of the blockades, to get the food and water to them anyway. Groups
should have been made self-sufficient not for a morning and afternoon of
blockades but for three full days of non-stop action. While this sounds
impossible, many of us have gone camping for at least three days, and carrying
that amount of food and water is possible - it just requires time and money for
preparation that most of the groups did not have. Provisioning would have
allowed the groups to continue their midge-like presence around Gleneagles. It
was only a matter of time until the police trapped people who had returned to
the Eco-village inside. To the extent the blockades were a success it is proof
that we can aim for something that is beyond our capacity to do, and still do
it. In retrospect, we just need to aim even further and press harder!

Spreading the Flames of Dissent

One of the most important things about Dissent! was its radical anti-capitalist
analysis, since this was what served as the concrete framework for organising
direct actions. It separated Dissent! from the Socialist Worker Party
leadership of G8 Alternatives, who while in theory are anti-capitalists, in
true Trotskyist tradition were absolutely terrified of direct action. What
Dissent! accomplished was to unite the various strands of British
anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism into a mobilisation framework,
strengthening the movement in Britain, and generating excitement about the G8
overseas. The anarchists set their own game plan for the G8 and succeeded: we
organised our own infrastructure, finances, publicity, and even action plans
independently of the NGOs and the old Left. While earlier mobilisations like
the FTAA protests in Quebec city had shown that anarchists could successfully
organise their own mobilisation, the Dissent! G8 mobilization was done by
anarchists on a national scale with international participation. One should
recognise how few people actually participated in the G8 mobilisation in
Scotland, and that the total number of people involved in the direct action and
self-organisation numbered five thousand or so at most. A few hundred really
formed the planning and organisation in the month leading up to the G8, with
only dozens working on the mobilisation half a year beforehand. The fact that
the protest worked so well was a testament to the power of a fairly small
number of people to self-organise, and the superiority of swarming and
decentralised networks over centralised hierarchies.

However, Dissent! never reached the point of generating a giant mass
mobilisation of its own. One could only imagine how much more powerful the
protest could have been had more people gone to the Eco-village instead of
staying home and watching Live8 on television, or if even a tenth of the
participants at the Make Poverty History march could have been persuaded to
join in the direct actions. Interestingly enough, more people who otherwise
would not have been involved in the Eco-village and the day of action seem to
have come from the Cre8 summat site than the "Make Poverty History" march, and
this shows that concrete activity is always a better way to get allies than
just flyers. As the ruckus at G8 Alternatives march proved, more people are up
for direct action than anarchists tend to give them credit for, but for
first-timers this often requires the context of a mass action where even a
clear affinity group is not a prerequisite. Public opinion was in favour doing
something about climate change and poverty in Africa, and in retrospect
Dissent! was simply outmanoeuvred by "Make Poverty History" to a large extent,
and by "G8 Alternatives" in Scotland, as far as involving masses of people was
concerned. This was primarily due to two factors: First, "Make Poverty History"
had a well-oiled media machine and contacts in Scotland. Second, they had paid
employees and were virtually endorsed by the government, who knew very well
their ineffective approach would not be a threat to the G8. Dissent! did
eventually start making fliers with more popular appeal such as the clever "Big
Bother" posters that took off from the "Big Brother" T.V. series, but it was too
little, too late.

The moments when global anti-capitalism can truly seize the popular imagination
are few, and while the Dissent! media policy obeyed its own principle of
preventing the rise of media spokespeople, it followed its policy too well,
and, in the words of one frustrated activist: "When no-one speaks to the media,
the police just end up speaking for us!" That is exactly what happened as
anarchists were routinely vilified, and even sympathisers who were not "in the
know" often found Dissent! and the mobilisation mysterious unless they could
actually make it to one of the meetings. One lesson for future mobilisations is
to craft a more coherent media policy that can use the media to artfully get the
message across without creating the impression of leadership. Something like the
media policy used by the masked Zapatistas, in which anonymous spokespeople are
carefully selected, might be more effective. Otherwise it could simply be the
case that more of us who have sensible things to say to each other should be
prepared to say them to the public through the media as well, however much that
risks having our message distorted.

Moreover, the best means of promoting anarchy is not abstract analysis or
propaganda, but by helping people live it. The connections to local everyday
struggles such as those against work in the Carnival and those against the
demolition of poor communities at the Cre8 Summat both worked well and were
crucial to the success of the G8 mobilisation. It seems that with tactics such
as the opening of social centres, the anarchist movement in Britain will slowly
yet surely make these connections. On a sheerly practical note, if the
convergence space search had begun in earnest a year before instead of months
before the protest, everything would have been easier, since organisers
wouldn't be in a continual state of panic over accommodation!

As everything from the discovery of the melting permafrost in Siberia to the
rapid destruction of the world's carbon sinks in the Amazon shows, however, we
may not have time for slowly but surely. Despite the pestering by popstars and
NGOs, the G8 managed to give only a paltry sum, far from even debt relief, to
developing countries while furthering massive privatisation. The G8 made no
substantial agreement on tackling climate change. The ecological collapse
caused by climate change is coming, hand in hand with the end of industrial
civilization due to peak oil, and it will take all the collective power we can
muster to make sure that humanity survives. Time is of the essence, and the
sustainable, decentralised forms of society so briefly glimpsed at these
convergences must strengthen now, if the psychotics hiding in comfort on 10
Downing Street and in caves in Pakistan don't do us all in first. Everything
depends on this. In fifty years, it will likely be too late.

Beyond the G8

It is all true: there are working-class heroes whose hearts are made of gold,
and villains in business suits who will try to stab us all in the back. The
Emperor has no clothes: in Gleneagles, the leaders of the world watched events
unfold on the news mutely, wondering why their retinue of sycophants and
servants were stopped behind an army of assorted anarchists, clowns, and
children. As Dissent! mobilised, we came to know that miracles still happen,
not by accident but by dedication and hard work. In the Eco-village, we came to
understand that another world is not only possible, it can exist right now:
thousands of people can organise their own lives, cook food for each other, and
even literally handle their own shit without a single boss or policeman. There
are thousands of us - at least. We are not alone, and even the most capable of
us must join hands with others, forming networks of resistance capable of
changing the world. Dissent! is just one such network - there are others, and
there need to be more. The G8 was just one event, in the tradition of Seattle,
Prague, and all the other moments where the established order ruptures and
something strangely beautiful emerges. The real question is: What next?

The lessons of this mobilisation are clear. The Dissent! network was an
excellent example of how a nation-wide above-ground anarchist network can
successfully organise the infrastructure for a mass mobilisation, and unlike
many past protests, design the entire infrastructure to encourage effective
actions. Dissent! showed how one can organise without losing autonomy.
Large-scale rural actions like the blockades of Gleneagles can be done, and for
the next summit that takes place in some remote location, such as the G8
mobilisation in Russia in 2006 and in Germany in 2007, the key point to strike
will be the roads leading to the summit. Outside of summits, we must find some
way that these model forms of struggle can emerge outside the traditionally
conceived arena of "globalisation" and be put to use against the fundamentalism
of both Bush and Bin Laden. This mobilisation showed how concerned many ordinary
people are with the problems that we anarchists are grappling with, and if
anything we just need to do a better job of broadcasting our solutions and, as
done in the Eco-village, actually demonstrate how anarchist organisation and
sustainability can be put into practice. The ability to create autonomous
spaces that provide concrete alternatives to capitalism, such as the
Eco-village and the Cre8 Summat, equals in importance the day of action itself.
When the world is screaming for these types of alternatives, anarchists need to
become better equipped and proficient at creating them.

The G8 is, if anything, a convenient excuse for us rebels to demonstrate our own
power - after all, capitalism and the state exist every day of the year, not
just on days of action. The importance of these days lies not in shutting the
summit down, but in inspiring people to demonstrate to take action into their
own hands. The bombers in London managed to nearly shut the summit down and
only caused paralysis and terror among ordinary people, a fact that was quickly
exploited by the G8. In contrast, the G8 knows that the real threat to their
regime comes from the anarchist and anti-capitalist mobilisation against the
G8. Blockades nearly shutting down summits and anarchists building Eco-villages
are proof by example of a spreading collective power that is far more dangerous
to the the G8 than any bomb, for it demonstrates the gathering momentum of a
widespread global revolt against all would-be rulers of the world. These days
of action are days of celebrating our resistance, strengthening it, and
furthering it. During these intense days and nights we remember we are neither
alone nor insane, and that our friends and lovers inhabit the entire world.
Still, the mobilisation against the G8 was just a glimpse of what a truly
organised, diverse, and visionary revolutionary movement could be.

Related
http://www.dissent.org.uk

[http://scotland.indymedia.org/newswire/display/2109/index.php]