johnbarker" (by way of richard@hrc.wmin.ac.uk (Richard Barbrook)) on Mon, 13 Sep 1999 02:49:25 +0200 (CEST)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

<nettime> June 18th:aftermath


JUNE 18TH: FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE AFTERMATH

The first Saturday in September, another lovely hot day in this best of
summers. Off with friends to meet more friends at a day and night event at
the squatted Lido on London Fields, Hackney.  It's a benefit for Reclaim
the Streets, organisers of the June 18th carnival against capitalism. Less
woolly than it sounds, that was, a lot less, homing in on a weak point,
the fixed-to-the-ground LIFFE building that houses the movement of
fixed-to-no-ground finance capital around the globe, billions of it daily. 

And it hurt, the post-mortems tell how it hurt. Not just the 2 or three
million pounds worth of damage reported but the vulnerabilty of on-screen
liquidity, in its City of London enclave. 2nd in line for blame-after 'the
anarchists bent on violence' was its own publicly financed City of London
police. LIFFE wiseguys complained bitterly of how they had been put in the
position of fighting off crazed anarchists on the stairs and walkways of
the building, and just where had their police been when it mattered. 

Not the first time either, the more serious attempts at a peace process in
the north of Ireland can be dated to the IRA bombing of the NatWest tower
in the City which saw every glazing firm from Essex on site within hours
rubbing their hands. Japanese owned banks warned that they would pull out
if there was any repetition. The City of London police responded with a
'ring of steel' around the city, checkpoints at its entry points. The
phrase was World War vintage, the practice stuck in police mindset, stop
all vehicles driven by black guys. Recently it has been phased down, too
much hassle for the circulation of the traffic needed to service the
trafficking of global finance. 

The IRA, OK, a very efficient underground organisation, the City's police
got away with a not guilty but this time, the date known and strenuous
attempts to infiltrate Reclaim the Streets. The post mortem became a
grovel with one let-out: how this was the first INTERNET-organized
anarchy. The grovel was there to be enjoyed: failures in communication;
lack of co-ordination with the Metropolitan police; errors made in crowd
control;  sorry sir, said the force's commander. Enjoyable for a day to
see the predictable squirming but no more. These are not the PC Plods of
middle class dominated British satire. Instead they are analyzing 'what
went wrong' for the future and for revenge now. 

The whingeing about the internet from both the police and the media is
rife with ironies. No doubt there is serious encryption used for the
endless to and fro of finance capital and credit but the technology is the
same.  Organising via websites meant that unlike conventional political
demonstrations no permission was sought for the event; no leaders could be
isolated or used to police it themselves; the police could not predict the
turnout. As part of an international day of action, images and news from
around the world were circulated via other web sites. Perhaps this
especially enraged so many British newspapers but the Internet as the
motor for a new stage of capital accumulation was suddenly a devilish
contraption, just as mid-19th century papers worried about cheap rail
travel being used by Chartists to organize nationally. 

The way in which the Internet developed seems to mean that
decentralization is integral to it, and that for once capital cannot shape
it exclusively to what it wants from it. But it would be daft to follow
the media and fetishize the net as they did in their coverage of June
18th. Its success came out the experience, technical knowhow and ingenuity
developed in rave culture, the Spiral Tribe showdown with the cops at
Canary Wharf seven years before, road and tree protests, large scale
squats, opposition to the Criminal Justice Act, and previous Reclaim the
Streets events. 

The comeback is a continuing police operation and a political offensive
which carries on where the last government's Criminal Justice Act left
off. The cops want revenge because for once they got some blame AND THEY
DIDN'T ARREST ENOUGH PEOPLE at the time. So a June 18th squad was set up
to look at thousands of hours of CCTV footage. Unambiguous technology
this, one-sided surveillance. One-sided but contested. Climbers from the
crowd skilled from tree protests covered the accessible cameras. Most of
us wore the coloured eye-masks, those with intent half-face scarves. Maybe
some of them slipped and some got reckless. At any rate enough slip-ups to
be worth a squad of viewers. The only publicized outcome so far, the
non-arrest of a son of the extremely rich Vestey family who years earlier
had caused mayhem in the East End by putting the London docks out of
business. Photos of the guy in the papers, profiles, AND THEY DIDN'T EVEN
NICK HIM. The purpose obvious, to make out the whole thing was financed by
rich kids rebelling against their parents and pulling in dangerous but
stupid delinquents to do the bad stuff. 

This is a lie, nothing further from the truth. Some sixties veterans I
saw;  some children of sixties veterans rebelling against something far
worse than their parents; and thousands of the disappeared generation, the
youth who, since the welfare system went super-moralistic have disappeared
from the registers. So far only one publicized non-arrest but the fear's
there, enough to take sensible precautions. It meant some friends decided
not to come to the Lido benefit yesterday, this first Saturday of
September. 

The Lido was closed some 12 years ago, maybe more. The only open air
swimming pool in the borough of Hackney that was packed with children and
adults all summer. Years ago when we were half as well off as now they
say, there were open air pools all over London. But the London Fields Lido
like many others became too expensive to run. Last summer some
enterprising people squatted it and in a short time put on a Reclaim the
Streets benefit that was mental. One of the best nights I can remember.
Under a full moon bands played in the deep end of the empty pool. Down the
rest of the 100 metres of it people danced. Film from earlier events
flashed back across the changing rooms. Heroic comrades lugged bags of ice
from faraway off-licences to keep the beers cold. 

In the lead up to this year's benefit the local Council which had
abandoned the pool years before, had probably forgotten it existed,
suddenly had the great idea that perhaps, despite the spending cuts they
have imposed, they might think about re-opening the pool but of course
there was the problem of the squatters. We've heard so much rotten
flim-flam from this Council over the years whether New Left or New Labour,
that it went in one ear and out the other. These days as Hackney house
prices are rising at a rate of knots and the dispossessed moved out to
bed-and-breakfast scams in the north of England, it is as passionately New
Labour as it was once passionately something else. 

In the meanwhile our current Minister of the Interior let slip in a radio
interview that there were thousands of travellers in the country who
masqueraded as gypsies and on the strength of it pissed on people's
doorsteps and were generally a criminal class. In fact the very class of
delinquents who have disappeared from the registers rather than do shit
training for shit jobs for shit wages, and who picked out MacDonalds for
special treatment on June 18th. One comrade pointed out that Hitler had
made the very same distinction, that genuine gypsies-racially pure?- were
OK but as for tinkers and the rest, it was the gas chambers. For me the
echo was the business of pissing in doorways, and a memory of Enoch
Powell, an overtly racist politician of the past, having a thing about
black people being free and easy with their shit, terrorizing old ladies
with it. 

Look on the bright side, after many personal and collective battles no
politician today could even hint at such a thing. London is an easy-going
multi-racial city and I'm proud of it, but since June 18th the attacks on
asylum seekers and travellers has upped several notches. 

Not stupid, those friends who decided on caution when it came to
yesterday's Lido benefit which did not happen. We heard the rumour early
afternoon but went down anyway, something about Noise Abatement and the
electricity cut off. Which is what had happened, the full team sent in to
squash what was to be a fine event headlined by Bryan Wilson & the Sounds
of the Earth, one of the best live reggae bands in town, in an abandoned
public facility brought back into public use. The full team. Which
consisted of Hackney Council, the Metropolitan Police, the June 18th
special squad looking for faces seen on CCTV. and then the London
Electricity Board, a private company brought in by the cops to turn off
electricty to the Lido. 

We made an afternoon of it on London Fields itself, the drummers who had
kicked off June 18th just down the road in Liverpool St station doing
their best but I was raging inside. We'd been robbed. 


Forgot to put a subject...which always helps.


#  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@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net