more Re: [G_O] Wandering Between Two Worlds-Genova

[Arianna]

Hi Nate, 

At 18:58 14/08/2002, you wrote:

>Arianna- in your last post you said something to the effect that big meeting or demonstrations are frequently a meeting of pre-constituted identities and that it is only state repression which unleashes the monster of something else, some larger humanity or other possibility or something, the labor of resistance. Is this really the case? 

It's what I perceived. 

>It strikes me as terribly problematic to focus on state repression as catalyzing agent, this sounds very close to the bad old view which wishes catastrophe on the working class so that we'll finally "get it" and cast off our chains.
>I do agree with the sentiment, I think, but I worry at the formulation which places state repression as the sole possible ingredient which unleashes this 'monster'. 

I must have been unclear. I don't think this is a 'view', nor a formula, articulated as such. your word sentiment expresses it better I think. to think of repression as the 'sole possible ingredient' would make us a bunch of masochists. but that is what groups are increasingly confronted with whilst attempting to 'labour' towards something more politically constitutive, a labour that I said due to their i/p is less 'social' and expansive than it could and needs to be at the moment. 

>Also, may there not be mixing and communication happening at the margins of the event? I wasn't in Genoa so I can't comment, but I do have experiences of a number of really bad demonstrations. That struck me in the account on autonomedia, the police keeping the 'violent ones' from meeting the marching 100,000. It seems to me that in part the function of vanguard groups, police, and trade unions etc in these situations is not only to keep a lid on the demonstation but to prevent mixing between 'accepted' demonstrators and others. This was my experience in the April 2000 protest in Washington DC, the 'official' march wasn't just a failure to be militant, but just as much -maybe more importantly- was a mechanism which largely kept those of us shutting down streets from interspersing with those who were there to attend a rally and listen to speeches.  Luckily this wasn't wholly successful.

thats surely something worth thinking about when in loco, I think the question of violence is inextricable from the question of legality (Benjamin is useful on this - see end). this is why I am more interested in the disobedients and autonomists. The behaviour of those who find themselves in such situations is consistent with the extent to which they rely on a form of mediated legitimation (whether through state, media or traditionally legitimated forms of political action). 
once the event began in Genova last year, the 'official' negotiators were fully betrayed by the government through mass criminalisation/repression, whatever they'd agreed beforehand. as a result, their main priority became to regain legitimacy in the eyes of 'the people' by appealing to some idea of pacifism (we are not the black bloc). its an old story, the point is its a mistake to waste too much time on the question of tactics, since they are largely dictated by the aggressor.the notion of pacifist demonstrators in a situation like genova is as abstruse as that of innocent civilians in wars and of 'economic' immigrants in globalisation. the suspension of the law is the ground of its legitimacy, it is on this that we must insist when bringing these ritualised experiences of police repression to bear on most people's everyday life.  

>Here in Chicago a number of anarchist and other folks with the Direct Action Network got very involved in a local campaign around funding for a high school in a predominantly Spanish speaking neighborhood with a high immigrant population, helping win the campaign and building relationships with people who weren't previously "in the movement".
>
>This type of activity is where some anarchists I know (we don't really have autonomists in Chicago) are moving, I think as part of a re-think after vanguardists hijacked anti-war activities almost immediately after 9/11, trying to build ties with individuals and communities 'outside the movement' by engaging with struggles happening in different places around 'local' issues like air quality, police issues, immigrants' rights etc. I don't know what to make of this trend, it seems fraught with dangers of opportunism and yet if we take seriously the idea of the social factory then these types of resistance are loosely equivalent to 'shop floor resistance' and possibly disruptive of capital.

I think the question of immigration and borders is the main question today, but hope to write more on this in the future.

arianna