>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [september26collective] The case for confrontation
> Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 00:43:55 +0100
> From: Flaco <antidote at ukf.net>
>
>
> TIME TO TAKE OFF THE GLOVES
> Why real change will never happen as long as our disobedience is
> submissively civil.
>
> To the vast majority of those that were there, the actions against the
> IMF
> and World Bank in Prague in September were a resounding success. Not
> only
> was the scythe of global privatisation, dollarisation and
> misappropriation
> temporarily wrested from the hands of the blood-letters meeting in the
> Prague Conference Centre, S26 saw an international, disparate but
> united,
> revolutionary bloc acting as an organised unit on the streets of the
> Bohemian capital. So why are the loudest shouters in the activist
> community
> (in the loosest sense of the word community) hell-bent on convincing the
> world that the day's actions were a failure?
<snip>
On the events in Prague, it is also important to note that the conference centre where the delegates were meeting had a Metro station which was operational. Thus, the only possibility of stopping the meeting was to breach the barricades - simply attempting to lock the delegates in was not an option. The use of force was required to make any impact.
I guess this is a rather different idea of what action is about to that which was floating around last year, including in some of the discussions of Seattle. The idea of a protest 'raising issues' has effectively been abandoned, replaced instead with the idea of actions which throw high-profile spanners in the workings of the international capitalist conference circuit. The 'raising issues' stuff then happens as part of the discussion of the actions - on the Net, and off it.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844