Stop StopG20! Stop the Stagemanagement of Dissent

The enemy has been engaged and through that engagement a politics is being defined and executed. For unknown reasons two targets have been elevated to such a status as to merit effort being exerted in the creation of this text…

First, are the stencil posters that the recuperative forces of capital have been putting up around Melbourne. In order to bring a crowd larger than the sum of the organisers of this representation of resistance StopG20 has decided on linking their event with anti-war in Iraq sentiment. Based on success being conceived as equating with the quantifiable conversion of human beings to their own image of resistance and in some instances renouncement of other elements of the spectacle. The actual text of the stencil posters reads “stop the war/stop g20” so the idea that what is being referred to is the Iraq war is an assumption, but a safe one, as reference to other wars does not seem to fit, for instance they could have decided to be honest with themselves and announce their intent to prevent any ‘class’ war – but that seems unlikely. The stopG20 group has decided that they will gain the most people for conversion to their image of resistance through attaching themselves to an image with greater prominence within the spectacle. But in itself the call for “stop the war” is telling, such claims always come to and from the idea of the “continuation of war by other means” – that is the imposition of capital through a mechanism, imagined as different, that holds a monopoly on the use of violence. These stencils are an aspect of the “continuation of war by other means continues”, they are images that replace lived experience so as to ensure the continuation and furtherance of the imposition of the social relations of capital. This is why it is crucial that they are destroyed.

The second target worth mentioning is the Trades Hall council building. This image of resistance has for too long been the left edge of the imposers of capital, ensuring that any attempted escape is contained within a norm of the necessity of work. Now in its old age, this building and those that control it move more and more closely to the approximation of the image of that which they oppose themselves to – it would appear that the irrelevancy of democracy is being realised at the level of the spectacle. That may be reason enough for the defilement of this building but what makes such action absolutely necessary is the reverence of the institution and by extension (by its absurd participants) the physical building itself. The church that is Trades Hall must be defiled and ridiculed until it is reduced to a representation of its actuality – a barren hole.