Alex Foti on Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:00:44 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> After Rostock, Copenhagen, Heathrow: shifts in the movement against neoliberal globalization and neoconservative millitarism |
dear social radicals and cultural heretics from all lands:)) A new phase in radical politics and movement action may be brewing. New forms of social insurgence are being experimented in various corners of metropolitan Europe and they could soon spread to and be cultivated as novel modes of protest and revolt by dissenting youth and marginalized sectors of society. The historical backdrop is one of ecological catastrophe, social protest against labor precarization, the final financial meltdown of neoliberal capitalism, european disgregation, failing technocratic elitism encouraging securitarian reflexes in bipartisan governments (luckily sarkozy and merkel are divided by economic policy; still their strong-armed tactics on the home front are worringly similar) and xenophobic, clerical, west-supremacy reactions in all European countries. For every radical leftist in Europe, there are two radical right-wingers, and four moral-majority-type moderates. In this situation, so reminiscent of the 1930s and 1940s, radicals must think in progressive terms, if they want to set the agenda for the few remaining true liberals, and stave off cryptofascism and ecodarwinism. Rostock, Copenhagen, Heathrow, i.e. respectively: the show of potency and potential for protest of the European antiglobalization movement six years after Goeteborg and Genova, which managed to put Heiligendam's G8 summit under siege with the star-march and escape the manacles of police control and state intimidation; the still simmering six-month-long urban rebellion of the 69ers of the pink mermaid against state- and city-decreed demolition of the hub of alternative life in Denmark; the successful planning and execution of the first eco-autonomous, low-carb protest camp (complete with windmills, thermo and pv solar panels, grey-water recycling, wi-fi network, and more) to act against climate change in an anti-technocratic way and denounce major corporate culprits and state-backed greenwashers: it was illegally held on the grounds of the third air strip that would double passenger traffic and had to deal with gordon's cops armed with anti-terrorist powers; it picketed the airport authority offices and made its anarcho-ecologist, science-based demands heard on the global media. These three events occurred in 2007 are testimony of a new lymph flowing in the anticapitalist movements adopting ideological forms that belong to this century, viz. to the post-cold war era. Pink, ecotopian, urban insurgence seems to be the name of the game. Pink, because since at least Act Up threw the gauntlet of protest to the neoliberal order, queer has become revolutionary for all sectors of society: it's no longer simply a matter of identity politics, it bespeaks a radical transformation of society, and the contested institutionalization of the end of patriarchy. Pink because it refers to pinko deviant political tendencies in non-pacified urban subcultures, experimenting with the radical mixing of codes, genders, ethnicities. Pink like a clown insurrection. And ecotopian like reclaim the streets (these two fundamental moments in the history of the "noglobal" movement have much in common), guerrilla gardening, criticalmass-vélorution, and now the climate action camp, setting a new template for ecological protest. It's a DIY, eco-hacking way of dealing with environmental issues, exploring how they can empower the people in adopting alternative forms of socialization and social organization, one whose powerful echo can be found in European environmental justice movements, such as -- speaking from a spaghetti perspective -- NoTav in Piedmont and the ongoing region-wide (and national) protest against the DalMolin US aircraft base in Venetia. Urban insurgence, like the one that has mobilized Copenhagen's alternative youth since March in countless demos and actions, and least two episodes (the second this month) of large-scale rioting to defend to the last the very idea of social squatting as a way of life, which has become integral to the notion of european urban culture over the last three decades. As bojan radej sez, self-managed zones and radical collectives will have to federate all across Europe, if the political legacy of punk and autonomism is to survive in our cities. So the still-frame I'm portraying of the unfolding story of rebellion and protest is this: the european establishment is losing all its political and financial credibility, there are powerful winds blowing to the right, but the radical (black, pink, green, anarchist, negrian) left of the european movement --as opposed to the staid socialcommunist and liberalenvironmentalist parties still capturing its votes-- is alive and kicking and possibly bringing to fruition in the late 00s its political strategy that decisively breaks with the 20th century left (1917, 1945, 1968: it don't matter here) and its party and union forms, both in terms of contents (no borders, fuck precarity, immaterial commonalism, ecotopia from below, fight 4 social freedoms, lgbtq rights), media (indy reporting and blogging, action camps, cultural subvertising, carnival of revolution, anticorporate free press, rad.theory on the net and in uncivil society), tactics (metropolitan insurgence, ecological direct action, anarcho-pink non-violence), and actors (creative underclass in cities and universities, service laborers, disaffected transethnic youth, queer women and men, brainworkers from all walks of life). Organization (networking) has been deliberately left out of the list. 'Cos the movement against neoliberal globalization and neoconservative militarism born in Seattle and resurrected in Rostock loves p2p and unanimous decisions, and hates anything having a whiff of bureaucratization and majority-voting. Still, flat as we wanna be, we'll have to organize. That's the wobbly imperative, an American indigenous product we shall do well to imitate a century later. ps i know fellow activists sometimes resent this kind of bird's eye view on THE movement, but hell I dunno I feel a new wind of change blowing and wanted to share my views with you. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org