The text below consists of the draft notes compiled by bits of the stopstopg20 affinity group - see stopg20.blogsome.com. The text was never finished, is very obviously incomplete in every way, but I think contains some worthwhile reflections.

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OK, we will assume a certain amount of familiarity with recent events: the StopG20 protests; the media frenzy; StopG20 organisers ‘distancing’ themselves from actions that make them nervous or contradict their preferences; Arterial Bloc being ‘blamed’ for ‘violence’. With this presumption of shared knowledge, we would want to make the following points, beyond the most obvious i.e. we were right.

On stopping StopG20.

When we formed the Stopstopg20 affinity group and started attending StopG20 meetings, there was criticism and hostility from some involved in the collective, censorship and authoritarian behaviour from some in positions of relative power seeking to minimise our impact, cover up embarassing StopG20 activities and/or remove any critique of StopG20 from view, certainly in public and apparently at StopG20 meetings, to which significant decisions were not referred, allowing individuals to control supposedly collective decisions and representations.

But the point to make here is that some in StopG20 evinced anxiety about our affinity group and the intent read into our name. Were we actually trying to discourage people from being involved in StopG20? And were we planning to sabotage, through direct action, StopG20 events and actions? (Amongst other things we had sort-of ‘hacked’ into the StopG20 website by this point and altered parts of it to reflect a certain degree of harsh criticism, which may have led some to think we were going to be disruptive.)

Whatever the answers to these questions at the time, our answer now would be clear: They should stop. And if they don’t they should be actively discouraged from continuing. They should stop speaking as StopG20 people, as people who participated in StopG20, as ‘organisers’. We ‘participated’ in StopG20 too, but you don’t see us using this as political capital usable to launch our views into the media, as some have done and are doing to effectively help the police to marginalise, isolate and persecute those accused of ‘affray’, of property damage, of being mean to police or whatever.

In general, when the protest is over and people are still occupying the role of official ‘organisers’, you know things are (getting or staying) bad. When this role entails the calculation and declaration of distances - as in ‘organisers distanced themselves from the violence’ - then bad has officially travelled the distance to worse. However much such behaviour is expected, these moments are always ugly - the moments when unity-through-pluralism collapses into antagonism-through-state-violence, and the ‘media’ types start using the media to help define the bad protesters.

In the case of StopG20 we arrived at this moment some time ago.

On separation.

Arterial Bloc have been accused of being elitist, of refusing to engage with the rest of the protest, of keeping themselves separate. And yet, at the spokescouncils immediately before the StopG20 events, we distinctly recall proposals being put forward and not contested that amounted precisely to a request that anyone planning direct action of a type that could lead to conflict with the police keep themselves spatially separate, make themselves obviously distinct and not with the others. These proposals would obviously cut down the possibilities of Arterial Bloc or anyone else convincing people to participate in direct action, since if the people to be engaged are in the ‘community safe space’ then they are inside of the space in which direct action is prohibited.

The complaints about this aspect of Arterial Bloc activity are slimy, hypocritical, dishonest. Keep them as isolated as possible and then accuse them of elist separation. Act in a way that deserves contempt and then accuse people of being rude if they express this contempt.

The organisers seems to have been reasonably but not totally successful in distancing themselves from “violent protesters” both spatially and politically. (insert Marcus quote?) Marcus of the StopG20 ‘media collective’ has chosen to claim that the Arterial Block, to whom much of the ‘violence’ about which he is so ‘disappointed’ is being attributed, had nothing to do with StopG20, though as an affinity group they were as involved as many, attended spokescouncils, were talked about, appear on the StopG20 website, etcetera.
The Arterial Block, having lulled us into a false sense of banality, seem to have done pretty well, largely having a good time and, with those engaged in similar activities, easily the closest thing to an inspiring contribution. And though they made their intent to engage in direct action with a goal of disrupting the G20 meeting very over and very public, no-one prior at StopG20 events argued for public criticism of such actions, for aggressive distancing of StopG20 from Arterial Bloc, or anything along these lines. So no meeting suggested this would be done. And yet this is being done and effectively in the name of StopG20. (see the spokescouncil report immediately below this post for a discussion of the StopG20 ‘media collective’ and our expectations of abuse.)

On foreigners.

The police and media focussed heavily on the ‘accusation’ that interstate people an foreigners were involved in the anti-G20 actions. Christine Nixon, Victoria’s head cop, suggested that the trouble-makers were foreigners tooling around the world making, well, trouble, or at least looking for it. Somewhat bizarrely, this accusation also came from Socialist Alternative, or at least from Mick Armstrong, prominent leader of said trotocracy. This is what Mick had to say:

” The anarchist crazies involved in the ultra-violence were in no serious sense part of the demo. Just like their black bloc mates in Europe they simply exploited the demo for their own purposes.”

And then this

“What gave them a certain critical mass at the G20 was the presence of considerable numbers of anarchists from overseas. One of our members from New Zealand said he recognised at least 40 NZ anarchists. He knew at least 20 of them by name. There were also a considerable number of black [bloc] anarchists from Europe. We know of people from Sweden, Germany and England. These people are like football hooligans who travel the world looking for violence.

On top of that there were also a considerable number of anarchists from interstate.”

“The left should offer no comfort to these crazies. We should do whatever we can to isolate them.”

Socialist Alternative keep on surprising us, coming up with new ways to be opportunistic, nasty, right-wing. Perhaps naively, we wouldn’t have expected them to play with the rhetoric of ‘outside agitators’ and ‘foreign troublemakers’, not least as some of their members, including Mick himself, have had such rhetoric deployed in their direction, with sometimes appalling results for those concerned. And for people involved in a protest targetting the G20, an international organisation focussed on managing capitalism on a planetary scale, to run with this localism is a bit creepy.

On service to the Spectacular-Commodity.

The Herald-Sun once again took the opportunity, as did much of the mass media, to give up any pretense of ‘objectivity’, which is to say that the paper presented the world with extreme, condemnatory judgements without quotation marks, and adopted the view that self-evident ‘community’ opinion must be reflected or created, opinion in the form of an image of outrage in which readers are invited to see themselves, a position of horrified rejection intended to define not merely a viewpoint but identities and activities - even if they are only emotions and/or conversations.

The Herald-Sun stated in big, bold letters that the cops had been “under seige”, a statement given only marginally greater plausibility because of the prior police and organiser collaboration in lying about the expected numbers, but one which is manifestly absurd in the context of either the ‘predicted’ or actual scale of participation.

This collaboration has continued in the aftermath of the protest as the police and protest organisers have worked together to isolate and demonise the Arterial bloc. By distancing themselves from and denouncing the Arterial bloc stopG20 as well as other groups of the organised left are ensuring that police repression will be swift and cruel. In light of the denial of bail for [insert the guys name here] as well as the channel 10 supported police hunt those in the left with the exception of Solidarity and the ISO have said nothing to support those targeted. In fact in many instances they have suggested that it would be wrong for people to do so. In effect what has occurred is the joint repression by the state and the stopG20 organisers of people that chose to make a direct assault against the G20.

This constant collaboration, informal as it was, arose because both police and StopG20 organisers are implicated in spectacular-commodity economies in ways that make truth or falsehood irrelevant, reducing communication to particular forms of instrumentality. That is, the appearance of large-scale impending mobilisation was the condition of possibility of either side pursuing certain agendas, roles, ambitions and the abandonment/lynching of those participating in a confrontation against the G20 was seen as a necessary condition for the continuation of those agendas, roles and ambitions.

It appears that the left here is trying to mystify the reality of the conditions of our lives in order to support their own cause, whether that be the party, ‘ecology’ or some push for more ‘justice and democracy’. Here truth and communication have been disunited so that communication (and action) remain absolutely instrumental to the ‘cause’. This remains true with the supporters of a defence of the state repression of the Arterial Block. The ISO suggest a problem with the Arterial bloc “is that their politics exclude the need to organise mass collective action”, perhaps better read as ‘their politics exclude party discipline’. They then critique those that publicly condemned Arterial bloc and state that “disagreements over strategy and tactics should be dealt with by discussion and debate within the movement”. That is they disagree with the condemnation of the Arterial bloc because it was done through the mass media and affected their campaign to the imagined ‘public’. The problem the ISO has with Arterial bloc as well as those who publicly condemn them is that those actions interfered with their designs for the opinion of the imagined public. Likewise for Solidarity the problem with the Arterial bloc was their lack of control of communication a suggestion that their failure was a failure to be effective ‘leaders’.

5. On the absence of solidarity

In the aftermath of the protest Arterial bloc has been subjected to a program of repression executed by the state and with the collaboration of much of the left. The lack of solidarity is a result of a concern with the instrumentality of communication in various attempts to trick an imagined public into support for ’the cause’ – however loosely that may be defined.

The choice of abandonment has been made on the basis of a calculation of service to the cause of winning over an imagined public to an imagined cause. The greatest aspect of the arterial bloc is its refusal to engage with the imaginary and its ability to ‘make the most of an otherwise dull day’ and their abandonment is also an attack upon this. By refusing to accept the project of imagined communication as politics the activities of A bloc cut at the foundation of the spectacular-commodities sustaining much of the left.