Earlier, it had generally been thought that affinity groups would never leave the camp the day before and move into position to take the roads. It was just too much to ask of activists from all over the world who had just come to Scotland and had little experience with rural actions and the topography of the Scottish landscape.
That is exactly what happened. No doubt bringing much planning to a crescendo, affinity groups spent the evening and night before the day of actions scattering around the roads surrounding Gleneagles in a radius of several miles, waiting to stomp on their targets. A vacation in the Scottish countryside this was not: it rained heavily during the evening and vicious midges attacked the activists. As the morning traffic started, the groups mobilised and took the roads - creating an almost impossible policing situation. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, the activists were everywhere. A handful of affinity groups made sure the first wave of actions to halt traffic at all crucial junctions leading to Gleneagles was successful. One of the first blockades to hit was an innovative five-person lockdown in Muthill near Crieff, a small village immediately north of Gleneagles that had never been discussed openly as a site for protest. Thinking themselves safe, the American delegation to the G8 had located in Crieff, and then had to spend hours waiting for the police to disable the complex lockdown.
At the same time, another blockade, this time using a car with lock-ons inside and underneath, hit the small road south-east of Gleneagles at the village of Yetts o' Muckhart. Because the police had to spend so much time getting the Crieff blockade dismantled, this one was up most of the day. Just in case the delegates were re-routed around the A9, another large blockade hit the exit from Perth, with two smaller ones south-west of Perth, near Forteviot and on Kinkell Bridge. Even earlier, the train-tracks going to Gleneagles were disabled using a compressor, tyres set ablaze on both sides a warning. With the Black Bloc taking the M9 west of Gleneagles on the A9, the hotel was completely surrounded by blockades for most of the morning. The Canadian delegation never even made it to Gleneagles. Mission accomplished.
The original plan was to co-ordinate these blockades with disruption at the hotels where the delegates were staying in Edinburgh and Glasgow. This made sense given the convergence spaces present in both cities. While most of the anarchists had gone to the Eco-village, the blockades guide released on the Internet somehow got garbled by the media, who announced that the anarchists' main plan was to blockade Edinburgh and riot in Glasgow, and in response more of the police seemed to be based in Edinburgh and Glasgow than in Stirling. Disinformation, whether on purpose or not, helped to confuse both the police and ourselves. There was truth in the reports; instead of going to the Eco-village, a substantial group of anarchists stayed in Edinburgh. In the early morning, they went to the Sheraton Hotel where Japanese G8 delegates were staying, and while hordes of police officers prevented any mass action, as the delegates climbed on a bus affinity groups blocked the road by throwing a bin into the street and surrounding the bus. Then, as delegates left the hotel with the help of the police and made their way north to the Forth Bridge, a giant steel bridge connecting Edinburgh to central Scotland, anarchists crashed two cars into each other on the road to blockade delegates, in a literally death-defying action.
In Glasgow, many of the anarchists had felt out of the loop of the action plans, and were getting ready to head up to the Eco-village, when another wave of anarchists, including the WOMBLES, showed up in order to blockade the hotels in Glasgow where the delegates were staying. However, by then the anarchists already in Glasgow were demoralised and in the process of leaving, so the blockade organising in Glasgow broke down. To add to the confusion, on the afternoon of the day of action the police mounted a huge operation against the WOMBLES. The WOMBLES had been a major anti-authoritarian organising force within London for years and had bested the London Metropolitan Police before, and their social centres had been the main hubs of organising everything from Indymedia to medic trainings in London in preparation for the G8. The police were sure they were the ring-leaders behind the G8 blockades, guided perhaps by the blind assumption that the UK anarchist movement works like the police, an operation commanded from London. As the WOMBLES were in a van leaving Glasgow, the police proceeded to surround them with hundreds of police and arrest eleven of the WOMBLES on "conspiracy to breach the peace" charges; charges so ridiculous they were dropped almost immediately. The next day the WOMBLES were even attacked by the police in a pub! The WOMBLES did have two strengths which doubled as weaknesses: their open organising meetings allowed the police to discover their identities and plans easily, and their support of militant direct action (as well as many them dressing in all black) made them the stereotypical anarchist targets the police were looking for. Due to the general confusion and repression, the blockades in Glasgow collapsed. However, one strength of a decentralised network is that no matter how strong one of its components is, the rest of the network and its connections continues even if that component is lost. The amount of repression the WOMBLES faced is directly proportional to how effective they've been in the past in contesting the state.
Swarming the A9
One by one, all the early morning blockades began to be cleared off, but these were only the beginning. Hard-lock blockades are by nature troublesome and difficult for the police to deal with initially, but once they were removed and the participants arrested, it was easy to get the delegates through. While the groups hard-locked on the perimeter of Gleneagles made sure the traffic got snarled, many affinity groups which didn't have pre-decided targets proceeded to get as close as they could to the hotel itself and literally jump in the road. These affinity groups, after many hikes, played a sort of cat-and-mouse game with the cops, capitalising on two obvious principles. The first is that drivers tend to stop when they see someone in the road to avoid running them over, even if said driver is transporting G8 delegates. The second is that the police are by nature terrified of leaving their comfortable cars to run into some countryside field to chase an anarchist. The combination made the blockades around Gleneagles almost impossible for the police to deal with, as their reliance on cars often led the police themselves to be blockaded. A typical blockade struck first early in the morning, and simply walked around the highway, and a few people doing this was enough to bring traffic to a standstill. If there were any available materials, such as orange traffic cones, they were re-arranged (and there are even reports of burning tires being thrown into the road). Groups self-evidently had plans, as the BBC reported that some activists hung-off via ropes from overpasses from the motorway to blockade the exits; this was an exceptionally courageous move given that at G8 2003 a British activist had nearly been killed when the police cut the rope on which he and his comrade were suspended.
The vast majority clearly had no plan but to cause disruption, and groups would appear on the road, blocking it by just walking around until the police could mobilise and get near them, or dragging branches and dislodged paving stones onto the tarmac. Then, they would simply exit the road and go into the nearest field, walking away in order to get to another part of the road. The police almost never followed them, and would eventually disperse to go deal with another blockade - and at that moment, the affinity group would reappear at another nearby location in the road, blocking traffic yet again till the police re-mobilised. This effect was multiplied exponentially by the number of affinity groups doing it. Just as the police would mobilise to stop one group, another group would appear and blockade their way!
The clowns were present all over the place, tantalising the police and keeping everyone in good cheer. At a certain point there was even a "kids' blockade" of children blocking the road. A car blockade left the Eco-village, and they gleefully thanked the police every time they were stopped and searched, as this delayed traffic even more. Cyclists, who had arrived in Scotland on a bike-tour against the G8, also lended their mobile support. At the Eco-village people kept flooding back in and out, and a transport group kept in touch with information from Indymedia, a Dissent! info-line, and various bike-scouts and affinity groups in order to attempt to re-route groups to critical junctions. The police were simply unable to keep track of the movements of so many small groups taking the highway, such that even after the hard-locks were eliminated and the Black Bloc returned to the Eco-village, the highway remained blockaded. Delegates, media, and other assorted staff could not make it to Gleneagles, and inside the hotel the meetings tottered close to collapsing, with nothing of any substance happening. The BBC announced that the roads were closed by the anarchists and the police sent announcements urging everyone to avoid the A9, stating that traffic all over central Scotland was a mess. The Scottish police were caught with their pants down. The news reported that a member of the Scottish government announced that "Dissent! was both organised and dangerous." At the Eco-village, one person stood up at a consensus meetings and announced that "We have successfully destroyed 10,000 of Britain's best police force."
Taking the Fence Down
Humiliated, the police announced that they would stop the previously permitted noon march to Gleneagles, called by G8 Alternatives. Gill Hubbard of the Socialist Workers Party, the self-proclaimed leader of G8 Alternatives, had done everything except put on a police uniform in order to ensure a legal, peaceful demonstration without an ounce of direct action involved - and as usual the grassroots of G8 Alternatives was considerably more rowdy than their Trotskyist leadership. When the police disallowed their demonstration, people undertook a spontaneous march through Edinburgh to demonstrate their right to peaceful protest. The police backed off, and allowed the march to go on. By this time, later in the afternoon, the trains were functioning again and the highway was less of a mess, so several thousand people showed up to march on Gleneagles, including many people from the Dissent! network, CND, and beyond. As usual a fence had been erected, marking a large red zone around the hotel, yet instead of being large and intimidating the fence was barely taller than your average anarchist. One could climb over it. To counteract this, the fence was actually two fences with diagonal fences in between so it would be more stable if someone attempted to pull it down with grappling hooks, and so that anyone who climbed over it would just become trapped in the middle. As the march approached one part of an outer fence, spontaneous anger at the arrogance of the G8 rose from the crowd, and groups such as the Dundee Trades Council went to the fence and put their banners on it. One contingent got right next to a fence and simply pushed and kicked it right off the ground, breaking the fence. There was access to the inner security fence of Gleneagles itself!
Led by the Infernal Noise Brigade, a trickle and then a storm of people approached the inner security fence through a field. Hundreds of people ranging from clowns to Congolese drummers were in the red zone! The police were caught off guard and didn't even have enough riot cops behind the fence to contain the crowd. Just as a police officer would try to arrest a Black Bloc kid who threw a rock at them, he would nearly trip over a rainbow-draped hippie, and then from out of nowhere a Scottish union-member would jump in front of the confused officer and in outrage demand his right to peaceful protest! Soon, the mechanical buzzing of choppers could be heard overhead, as hundreds of riot cops were flown in on Chinook helicopters, formed a giant line, and eventually cleared the field. They had to literally send in the helicopters to stop us that afternoon.
Tactically, the blockades were a tremendous success, for nearly the same reason the Dissent! network was a success: Instead of homogenising everyone into a single course of action, the blockades provided a structure that gave people just enough to hang on to, while encouraging creativity and a diversity of actions. Everyone felt they could do something to stop the G8, and a vast diversity of tactics was employed. With a common goal, everyone knew they were going to disagree on specific tactics, but managed to get along anyway. The most controversial tactic by far was the physical confrontation with police made by the Black Bloc as it left the Eco-village. Some of the pacifists, who often were facilitating the meetings, were shocked by the relatively minor property destruction and the physical confrontation with the police of Wednesday morning, feeling that it betrayed the understanding they had reached with some of the residents of Stirling and the Stirling Council. Others felt that since the Bloc had been one of the first to shut down the M9, the action was a stunning success, and that for most part the confrontation had been well-timed and tactical. There was no consensus reached, but in the framework set up by Dissent! autonomy was the secret weapon. Unlike many other protests in which a vast centralised plan keeps everyone in check until the moment chaos actually hits, the Dissent! plan was to have no "plan" but to facilitate the creation of plans. This created real autonomy, allowing everyone to self-organise around their own particular style and concerns.
On the other end of the spectrum from the Black Bloc was the Clandestine Rebel Insurgent Clown Army, who aimed to protest the G8 by using their three - wait, four! - secret weapons of humour: ridicule, red noses, face paint, and silly army costumes. Nobody expected the clowns! The clowns had held trainings for the months leading up to the G8 as a way for staid activists to release their "inner clowns," and the results were fantastic: the police were absolutely baffled at how to deal with them. Because the uptight British police knew they would look ludicrous if they beat or even arrested them, they would just sit there and be the target of the clowns' jokes, even when the clowns were blockading the road! The clowns were one of the most organised contingents, having their own internal e-mail lists and meetings. When organised but disparate groups ranging from the clowns to the Black Bloc could sit together in one meeting and work together to shut down the G8, the words "diversity of tactics" really meant something. One could speculate that the process of actually living together and having to co-operate on more mundane matters such as keeping the toilets working helped everyone get along.
The blockades' success was not entirely the anarchists' doing; it must also be attributed to the utter incompetence of the police. Due to their mistaken belief that anarchists wanted a Genoa-style riot in Edinburgh, they put an incredibly large concentration of their force in the city and, no doubt because of request from the London Met, obsessively focused their efforts on following and arresting the WOMBLES. The police force was a bizarre composite of English police in riot gear and Scottish police in bright yellow jackets; with so many different police forces called in to help in Scotland, the police sometimes appeared to have even worse communications than the protesters did. The police would let themselves be isolated, would not apply force until it was too late, and in general seemed to have no idea how to cope with protesters that were even a bit disorderly. We should not kid ourselves into thinking that it was our tactical genius that won the day. It was about half tactically sound ideas and about half sheer police incompetence. In the end, the day of action had proved to be a victory for the global movement against capitalism, and everyone wondered what the next day of action would bring.
Thursday July 7th: The Moment of Terror
Under the cover of darkness early on Thursday the police finally did what everyone had feared they would: In revenge for the blockade of the G8, the police blockaded the camp. They formed a large line outside the camp's main entrance point, searching everyone coming in and out and even arresting people. Most people coming back after a hard day of blockading and marching found themselves trapped. As discussions on how to deal with this new development began on Thursday morning, everyone was still exhausted but elated by the success of the blockades the day before. Still, tensions soon became felt. The more insurrectionary anarchists argued that the police blockade around the Eco-village had to be disposed of in order to continue the success of the previous day. With the police so obviously weak and the fence easily toppled, they believed that one more co-ordinated action could shut the summit down. The more pacifist wing felt that any attempt to force through the police lines, especially now that the police would not be caught off guard as they had been on the previous morning, would be a disaster, but they couldn't propose how to deal with the police blockade.
Before discussions about the next few days of action could really commence, news came of the terrorist attack in London. It hit everyone like a physical punch in the stomach, and the whole meeting came to an eerie standstill. A tremendous wave of shock and sorrow swept over the meetings; many people had friends and family in London who could be dead. The news continued to worsen: one bomb had gone off on a bus full of random Londoners going to work, and more bombs had gone off at major Underground stations across the British capital. Unlike the September 11th bombings, these bombings were clearly targeting civilians whose only crime was to live in London, and their one and only intention was to spread fear. Rumours spread that the G8 itself was cancelled - although it later turned out that it was just interrupted while Blair flew down to London to make a statement. The bombings were quickly said to be the work of Islamic fundamentalists enraged by Britain's complicity in the war on Iraq. The timing was almost too convenient: it shattered any dreams about refocusing the debate on climate change and poverty, inescapably pulling the focus onto George Bush's rusty refrain on war and terror, and most importantly sending everyone fleeing for protection into the arms of the state. The net effect of the terrorist attacks was complete paralysis. The spectacular bombings simply fed into the image of the G8 as the defenders of western civilisation from anarchy and Islam. The response of activists was half-hearted to say the least: there was a plan for some sort of press release. One group didn't see how the bombings really changed anything, and aggressively pushed to continue the blockade of the G8. The fatal flaw of this proposal was the blockade around the Eco-village. It was going to be hard to mount an escape without a united front, and most people were physically - and now emotionally - exhausted. Finally an agreement was reached to do a vigil for the victims in both London and Iraq through a peaceful march out of the Eco-village.
Predictably, the vigil was stopped by the police before leaving the Eco-village, and in a very strange moment the anarchists and the police seemed to share a moment of grief together. There was a very touching ceremony at the gates of the Eco village, where a procession of anarchists with candles sang to the shift of cops. The candles were laid at the feet of the officers and for a brief moment we were all one, separated by grief and a few rows of flickering light. Many of the police seemed disenchanted with their job of "containing the anarchist menace". The police even offered people in the Eco-village a free train back to London. The energy left the Eco-village, and people eventually began leaving in small groups. The police, in a style of policing no doubt learned after decades of successful empire, would act as kindly as possible up to the moment they searched someone leaving the Eco-village, then make an arrest if they had any suspicion they were part of the Black Bloc or were otherwise wanted. Things continued like this for days until finally almost everyone had escaped the Eco-village. We were all held paralysed by the spectacle of the London bombings, unable to act or move, caught in the same numb sense of disempowerment that infected the rest of Britain.
In all respects, both the G8 and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists share the aim of disempowering people through the media spectacle they create and their ability to murder at will. This brings us to an important point: the difference between the terrorists and anarchists is precisely in the effect that their action has upon both the participants and the observers. Fundamentalist terrorists want to see people disempowered, to provoke fear in the average person on the street. Unlike terrorists, anarchists want to see people empowered to take control of their own lives, to inspire hope rather than fear. The G8 and the London terrorists are in an incestuous relationship: the London attacks gave the G8 and in particular the Bush "War on Terror" agenda exactly the excuse it needed to force a security state upon Britain, and deflect attention from the effects of corporate globalisation. The alternative represented, however imperfectly, by the Eco-village, Dissent!, and anarchists everywhere is the real alternative to terror and capital. Just as popular interest was moving to issues of global inequality and systematic ecological collapse, at a moment that was so pregnant with historic possibility, the terrorist strikes.
Anarchists proved themselves no more capable of responding to this turn of events than anyone else, despite the empowering experience of the G8 mobilisation. A media blackout of course fell on the anarchists after the bombings - but is all we are doing a game for the media to report on? For their own part, the anarchists had very little to say publicly. One does not use the word "racist" lightly, but it is hard to explain this lack of response by anarchists any other way. People were very naturally shocked and horrified by the events in London, but the same number of people have been dying frequently in Iraq due to the depravity of the U.S. and their twin puppets the British and Iraqi governments. Just because it happens in Britain, it is "different"? In one obvious manner it is different, since it is our families and friends in London that could have been killed, and so some loss of momentum for everyone to check on the safety of their loved ones is both to be expected and is an expression of our humanity. For days, in our stunned silence we could not even enunciate clearly that the enemy of our enemy is not our friend: the authoritarian religious fundamentalists such as those behind the bombings behead women in the street for not wearing the Hijab. The situation is only getting worse, as the "democratic" government set up in Iraq by the United States would enshrine the very same Sharia laws in its new constitution. People desperately want another option besides Bush and Bin Laden, and anarchists could have shown that in their response to the bombings. Although it is tactically unclear what could have worked, one has the feeling that something beautiful and brave could have somehow shifted the British population's disempowerment. Yet nothing happened, and the lack of a good media working group made any sort of even verbal response impossible. At the same time, various anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist groups, seen as the conservative wing of the anarchist movement, put together a very solid and inspiring "Statement against London Bombings."
In final analysis, those responsible for the conditions that lead inevitably to disasters such as the London bombings and the war in Iraq were left unmolested in Gleneagles. It can only be called a failure of imagination. Perhaps we should thank this turn of events for showing us that despite the dreams we made reality, the world is engulfed in a larger nightmare that we must learn how to respond to and eventually banish.
Ruthless Criticism
We can only move forward if we inspect our mistakes instead of blindly repeating failing stratagems. There are definitely criticisms to be made of the day of action, since the blockades disrupted but did not actually shut down the G8 Summit. There are clear reasons for this. Up until the very day before the day of action, most groups were confused about even what city to be in. Dissent! could have done a much better job at communicating the goals and actions of the blockades. Dissent! was on some level too ambitious, and stretched its organisational resources too thinly in setting up three convergence centres, one of which was attended by only a few hundred and the other unattended on the day of action. The convergence centres could have simply shut down themselves down after their purpose had been served, and moved everyone to the Eco-village. Communicating within one consensus meeting is hard enough; communicating among three simultaneous consensus meetings is nearly impossible, and serious thought needs to be put into how such a thing could be done realistically. On the other hand, this lack of communication and lack of a central convergence centre may have been a saving grace, as lack of clarity about the blockades was probably one of the deciding factors in the police's failure to focus on the Eco-village and the A9 itself.
Second, many groups who were out blockading felt very much alone and isolated from other groups. Dissent! did not provide much of a communications infrastructure, issuing only a single phone number one could call for "updates" and having an ad-hoc communications map at the Eco-village. The map itself was useful but could have been better managed, as it was usually unclear where to send people to blockade. Most updates spread through rumour, and bike scouts were few and far between, although some affinity groups had put together their own scouting and communication networks. The Black Bloc that left the Eco-village was mostly lost until they ran into a bike scout. Affinity groups who organised through the public process often chose their location and time of blockade almost at random, which led to crucial junctions having not enough people blockading on them and other less critical junctions being overstocked with anarchists, so that the G8 was eventually able to re-route its delegates through the blockades. Still, through sheer mass and some clear thinking by certain affinity groups, the plan did succeed up to a point later in the afternoon in literally shutting down the G8. A network is only as powerful as its communications, and something like a text-mobbing server (that was used on a much smaller scale to great effect during the RNC protests in the USA the summer before) would have allowed groups to use the ubiquitous mobile phone "text" (SMS message) to communicate where more blockades were needed and where the police and delegates were. On the other hand, once again, reliance upon a centralised text-messaging centre would have had drawbacks: it could easily have been infiltrated or shut down, and it might have turned out to be simply useless in the Scottish countryside where mobile phone service can be dodgy at best. Regardless, the gain should have outweighed the cost, allowing groups to more flexibly co-ordinate where the blockades were going and when. Not surprisingly, many groups got lost rambling in the sheep fields around Gleneagles, and a topographic map was worth its weight in gold on the day of action, so obviously Dissent! could have done a much better job briefing people about the geography around Gleneagles.
Third, the main reason the G8 Summit was not shut down was not the fact that the police managed to break the blockades, but that due to sheer exhaustion and lack of food and water the various blockading groups simply went home early. Had the level of intensity of blockading been kept up for only a few more hours - which it might have been, if only people had known how effective their seemingly isolated blockades actually were! - the summit would have likely been shut for the entire day. Dissent! had set aside money for extra food and water for the blockaders, but it wasn't enough and it would have been difficult, due to the success of the blockades, to get the food and water to them anyway. Groups should have been made self-sufficient not for a morning and afternoon of blockades but for three full days of non-stop action. While this sounds impossible, many of us have gone camping for at least three days, and carrying that amount of food and water is possible - it just requires time and money for preparation that most of the groups did not have. Provisioning would have allowed the groups to continue their midge-like presence around Gleneagles. It was only a matter of time until the police trapped people who had returned to the Eco-village inside. To the extent the blockades were a success it is proof that we can aim for something that is beyond our capacity to do, and still do it. In retrospect, we just need to aim even further and press harder!
Spreading the Flames of Dissent
One of the most important things about Dissent! was its radical anti-capitalist analysis, since this was what served as the concrete framework for organising direct actions. It separated Dissent! from the Socialist Worker Party leadership of G8 Alternatives, who while in theory are anti-capitalists, in true Trotskyist tradition were absolutely terrified of direct action. What Dissent! accomplished was to unite the various strands of British anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism into a mobilisation framework, strengthening the movement in Britain, and generating excitement about the G8 overseas. The anarchists set their own game plan for the G8 and succeeded: we organised our own infrastructure, finances, publicity, and even action plans independently of the NGOs and the old Left. While earlier mobilisations like the FTAA protests in Quebec city had shown that anarchists could successfully organise their own mobilisation, the Dissent! G8 mobilization was done by anarchists on a national scale with international participation. One should recognise how few people actually participated in the G8 mobilisation in Scotland, and that the total number of people involved in the direct action and self-organisation numbered five thousand or so at most. A few hundred really formed the planning and organisation in the month leading up to the G8, with only dozens working on the mobilisation half a year beforehand. The fact that the protest worked so well was a testament to the power of a fairly small number of people to self-organise, and the superiority of swarming and decentralised networks over centralised hierarchies.
However, Dissent! never reached the point of generating a giant mass mobilisation of its own. One could only imagine how much more powerful the protest could have been had more people gone to the Eco-village instead of staying home and watching Live8 on television, or if even a tenth of the participants at the Make Poverty History march could have been persuaded to join in the direct actions. Interestingly enough, more people who otherwise would not have been involved in the Eco-village and the day of action seem to have come from the Cre8 summat site than the "Make Poverty History" march, and this shows that concrete activity is always a better way to get allies than just flyers. As the ruckus at G8 Alternatives march proved, more people are up for direct action than anarchists tend to give them credit for, but for first-timers this often requires the context of a mass action where even a clear affinity group is not a prerequisite. Public opinion was in favour doing something about climate change and poverty in Africa, and in retrospect Dissent! was simply outmanoeuvred by "Make Poverty History" to a large extent, and by "G8 Alternatives" in Scotland, as far as involving masses of people was concerned. This was primarily due to two factors: First, "Make Poverty History" had a well-oiled media machine and contacts in Scotland. Second, they had paid employees and were virtually endorsed by the government, who knew very well their ineffective approach would not be a threat to the G8. Dissent! did eventually start making fliers with more popular appeal such as the clever "Big Bother" posters that took off from the "Big Brother" T.V. series, but it was too little, too late.
The moments when global anti-capitalism can truly seize the popular imagination are few, and while the Dissent! media policy obeyed its own principle of preventing the rise of media spokespeople, it followed its policy too well, and, in the words of one frustrated activist: "When no-one speaks to the media, the police just end up speaking for us!" That is exactly what happened as anarchists were routinely vilified, and even sympathisers who were not "in the know" often found Dissent! and the mobilisation mysterious unless they could actually make it to one of the meetings. One lesson for future mobilisations is to craft a more coherent media policy that can use the media to artfully get the message across without creating the impression of leadership. Something like the media policy used by the masked Zapatistas, in which anonymous spokespeople are carefully selected, might be more effective. Otherwise it could simply be the case that more of us who have sensible things to say to each other should be prepared to say them to the public through the media as well, however much that risks having our message distorted.
Moreover, the best means of promoting anarchy is not abstract analysis or propaganda, but by helping people live it. The connections to local everyday struggles such as those against work in the Carnival and those against the demolition of poor communities at the Cre8 Summat both worked well and were crucial to the success of the G8 mobilisation. It seems that with tactics such as the opening of social centres, the anarchist movement in Britain will slowly yet surely make these connections. On a sheerly practical note, if the convergence space search had begun in earnest a year before instead of months before the protest, everything would have been easier, since organisers wouldn't be in a continual state of panic over accommodation!
As everything from the discovery of the melting permafrost in Siberia to the rapid destruction of the world's carbon sinks in the Amazon shows, however, we may not have time for slowly but surely. Despite the pestering by popstars and NGOs, the G8 managed to give only a paltry sum, far from even debt relief, to developing countries while furthering massive privatisation. The G8 made no substantial agreement on tackling climate change. The ecological collapse caused by climate change is coming, hand in hand with the end of industrial civilization due to peak oil, and it will take all the collective power we can muster to make sure that humanity survives. Time is of the essence, and the sustainable, decentralised forms of society so briefly glimpsed at these convergences must strengthen now, if the psychotics hiding in comfort on 10 Downing Street and in caves in Pakistan don't do us all in first. Everything depends on this. In fifty years, it will likely be too late.
Beyond the G8
It is all true: there are working-class heroes whose hearts are made of gold, and villains in business suits who will try to stab us all in the back. The Emperor has no clothes: in Gleneagles, the leaders of the world watched events unfold on the news mutely, wondering why their retinue of sycophants and servants were stopped behind an army of assorted anarchists, clowns, and children. As Dissent! mobilised, we came to know that miracles still happen, not by accident but by dedication and hard work. In the Eco-village, we came to understand that another world is not only possible, it can exist right now: thousands of people can organise their own lives, cook food for each other, and even literally handle their own shit without a single boss or policeman. There are thousands of us - at least. We are not alone, and even the most capable of us must join hands with others, forming networks of resistance capable of changing the world. Dissent! is just one such network - there are others, and there need to be more. The G8 was just one event, in the tradition of Seattle, Prague, and all the other moments where the established order ruptures and something strangely beautiful emerges. The real question is: What next?
The lessons of this mobilisation are clear. The Dissent! network was an excellent example of how a nation-wide above-ground anarchist network can successfully organise the infrastructure for a mass mobilisation, and unlike many past protests, design the entire infrastructure to encourage effective actions. Dissent! showed how one can organise without losing autonomy. Large-scale rural actions like the blockades of Gleneagles can be done, and for the next summit that takes place in some remote location, such as the G8 mobilisation in Russia in 2006 and in Germany in 2007, the key point to strike will be the roads leading to the summit. Outside of summits, we must find some way that these model forms of struggle can emerge outside the traditionally conceived arena of "globalisation" and be put to use against the fundamentalism of both Bush and Bin Laden. This mobilisation showed how concerned many ordinary people are with the problems that we anarchists are grappling with, and if anything we just need to do a better job of broadcasting our solutions and, as done in the Eco-village, actually demonstrate how anarchist organisation and sustainability can be put into practice. The ability to create autonomous spaces that provide concrete alternatives to capitalism, such as the Eco-village and the Cre8 Summat, equals in importance the day of action itself. When the world is screaming for these types of alternatives, anarchists need to become better equipped and proficient at creating them.
The G8 is, if anything, a convenient excuse for us rebels to demonstrate our own power - after all, capitalism and the state exist every day of the year, not just on days of action. The importance of these days lies not in shutting the summit down, but in inspiring people to demonstrate to take action into their own hands. The bombers in London managed to nearly shut the summit down and only caused paralysis and terror among ordinary people, a fact that was quickly exploited by the G8. In contrast, the G8 knows that the real threat to their regime comes from the anarchist and anti-capitalist mobilisation against the G8. Blockades nearly shutting down summits and anarchists building Eco-villages are proof by example of a spreading collective power that is far more dangerous to the the G8 than any bomb, for it demonstrates the gathering momentum of a widespread global revolt against all would-be rulers of the world. These days of action are days of celebrating our resistance, strengthening it, and furthering it. During these intense days and nights we remember we are neither alone nor insane, and that our friends and lovers inhabit the entire world. Still, the mobilisation against the G8 was just a glimpse of what a truly organised, diverse, and visionary revolutionary movement could be.
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