Tonight, we revealed ourselves to the ‘serious’ StopG20 group. We went along to a spokes-council meeting and introduced our affinity group, the stopstopg20 affinity group, to the people in attendance. Unfortunately, attendance at the spokes-council was down – numbering around 10ish.
We prepared a short statement – more a collection of connected points – that outlined our intended activity and the reasoning behind it. Unfortunately, my inability to deal with nervousness induced by crowds in a public speaking situation meant that I rambled on each point and meandered through the collection as a whole.
So as promised (to the ten or so at the meeting) and for those not at the meeting… here are the points that we were going to read out…
- Increasingly everything we do is becoming work, becoming labor for capital. And Increasingly we are being surrounded by nothing but commodities. This has occured to such a degree that it may be that we can only define our world through commodities.
- This is a situation that is true for our resistance to capital as well – increasingly participation in organized resistance equates to automatic recuperation into capital.
- It is in this context that stopg20 (the serious one) has been formed – and what we are witnessing brings new meaning to the term going through the motions – as the success of the late ninties in anti-summit convergences is searched for.
- What we see here is a collection of images acting as resistance – the signifier standing in for the signified. The only political content of the stopG20 organisation appears to be to gather together everything that appears ‘left or progressive’ or ‘anti-American’.
- By refusing to acknowledge the futility of sacrifice to objects and continuing to collect possible objects for submission to the alienation and exploitation inherent in capital are perpetuated and reproduced, as capital is reproduced.
- StopG20 is a representation and scaffold for the spectacular-commodity of resistance in place of lived experience. And is therefore a spectacle that distracts us from making decisive in roads against capital.
- We believe that the most fun and worthwhile activity as part of an anti-capitalist life is to assault the spectacular-commodity that is the StopG20 object.
- Therefore we, ‘StopstopG20 is embarking on an attempt at disrupting the recuperation of resistance into one of the many objects that are the ‘left wings of capital’ – be they the Venezuelan state, Greens, fair trade, the remnants of social democracy or any other silliness…
As usual this brand of ultra-leftism reducers the difference between those that are involved in recuperative projects and the contradictory lines of struggles that go on and around it. In the name of a purity of proletarian self-activity it effaces real existing activity of the proletariat. Another myth is build and another priesthood gathers to tend its shrine. A transcendental truth is erected, a new catalogue of sins produced. I’d rather stay in the contradictions and mess of the living city.
Comment by Grumpy Cat — November 1, 2006 @ 10:49 pm
Fair dinkum mate! I reckon the stopstopg20 crew are trying to point to a real process: the commodification of everything. To what extent the spectacle of resitance is a moment of the reproduction of the capital relation is at the very least of interest to revolutionists. Are these questions raised? Well yes, here they are. But it seems as if the fact of raising them is enough to rule them out, or condemn them. Perhaps for those sunk in the stopg20 groups the very act of questioning their role is unconscionable, like doubting the one true faith. Yes reality is messy, but that appears even more of a reason to give pause and consider that the whole stopg20 schtick is just so much grist for the spectacular mill.
Comment by Bruce Tucker — November 3, 2006 @ 9:16 am
But the questions stop stopg20 raise are also being raised by some who are involved in the organising against the g20….. cats such as me for example. In fact the aspace outside project seems to be explicity framed within a critique of what is going on and what has come before it. You only have to stick a toe into the various small-a anarchist / autonomous circles to find a lot of the same questions being asked. In fact in the various teach-ins i have been to ( thats three) the politics of stopg20 has come under pretty sustained critique as have the methods/role/nature of the activist and the summit protest. It is this that makes some elements of the anti-g20 mobilizations pretty exciting.
Comment by Grumpy Cat — November 3, 2006 @ 9:31 pm