It's a long road down to Kananaskis
It's a short road back the other way
If the cops pull you over to the side of the road
You won't have nothing to say
No, you won't have nothing to say

There's a man waiting down the Highway 40
And he's waiting with a rifle in his hand
And he's looking down the road for an out-of-province car
And he thinks he's fighting for his land...

...Yes, he thinks he's fighting for his land

(Reworked from Phil Ochs: Going Down to Mississippi)


GOING DOWN TO KANANASKIS: FORK IN THE ROAD FOR OUR MOVEMENT. PART I.

PART I

The "Endless War on Terror" was launched by the Bush Administration in near unanimity with the "International Community" (a sleight-of-hand term for imperial partners such as Britain, Germany and Canada) last October. The World Trade Centre Attacks are obviously the starting point for an understanding of most political events in our current situation. One of the very first "predictions" (perhaps an attempt at self-fulfilling prophecy) was that the Anti-corporate Globalisation movement would shrivel and die; That the few remaining activists of the First World would quickly be lumped in with Al Qaeda- and even the Palestinians and Colombian rebels-- as "terrorists". Indeed, here in Vancouver, Canada it was made only days after the attacks in September by columnist Michael Campbell in the Vancouver Sun, when he made the grotesque link between a crudely vague "terrorism" and the members of our ranks who wear black masks and get involved in direct actions against the symbols of the corporate states.

Many of us who had been heart and mind involved in this movement for several years were deeply concerned about where our movement could go from here, if it could retain itself at all. Were we not a shallow movement, without a viable centre, without any connections to the communities in which we worked, a movement of transient troublemakers that might have the right idea only in the vaguest sense? Would we not completely drop off of the radar screen?

Well, all apologies to Mark Twain, but the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated. By March 16, 2002 we had regrouped enough to have five hundred thousand people amass in the streets in Barcelona, Spain against the EU- the largest convergence yet up until that point in our movement. Our organising also began to be able to make calculated choices based on what new situations reality placed before us here in North America- in February in New York, groups that were primarily anarchist-led put together a protest against the World Economic Forum. In the streets of New York there was almost no one who was willing to organise in the overwhelmingly hostile setting as it was laid before them. The "anarchist" groups usually associated with "violence" and "immaturity" put together an important demo of 25 thousand people in the very city that saw the beginning of the new era of reaction. This represented a tactical retreat into non-physical confrontation to simply maintain the existence of such protests, while we regrouped to rethink what to do next. In other words, we were developing a sense of thinking strategically.

Perhaps the greatest aspects of our resurgence into prominence have been two recent events. First was the April 20, 2002 demonstration in Washington DC. What was originally to be a demonstration against the IMF and World Bank became a 100 000 strong demo in support of the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people against the increasingly genocidal Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Again on this theme, a group that is called the International Solidarity Movement that sees itself as part of the resistance movement against corporate globalisation policies has been operating in Palestine, putting their bodies in between the civilians of Palestine and the advancing Israeli Defence Forces. Such a massive growth in both dedication and analysis is without precedent for us and speaks volumes as to the rising maturity of our movement. We are making the connections as a movement between an amorphous "globalisation"- policies that emanate from late imperialism and capitalism-with the horrid front lines of imperialist assaults on people, in places from Palestine to Venezuela. Nothing could be a more important growth, as what we truly need is to develop an analysis to arm ourselves. At the demonstrations in Calgary that I will discuss, we heard a slogan: "Viva viva Palestina, Venezuela, Argentina!" Accompanying that was one that came out of New York back in February: "They are Enron, we are Argentina". Such a noise was not made in the streets of Seattle in 1999.

I had attended an anti-war conference in Montreal last May, and the conference itself had been organised by the same sorts of people that had built the more militant and anti-capitalist demonstrations at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. The conference focused on almost every spot on the globe, educating people in our movement from across the continent and involving people from around the world. That such a principled and non-dogmatic conference can come out of our movement is another sign of our advancing thinking. Aside from being denounced by the "International Bolshevik Tendency" for insufficiently fighting imperialism, the anti-imperialist, anti-war and anti-racist conference was able to produce a lot of constructive dialogue and opportunity for cross country, continental and planetary networking. Onward we march.

From there, I began to hitchhike back home to stop in as many large Canadian cities as I could to help make further contacts with fellow activists. After about a week and a half, I stopped in Calgary where the main convergences against the G8 were slated to take place at the end of June. The first night I met a law student whom was a national from Africa. He attended the university, and after we debated the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD, an initiative developed for the G8 Summit. While called African, it would be best seen as made in response to the critiques made very public by our movement, so as to gloss over their persisting neo-colonial relationship with Africa- and lauded by people like U2's Bono) I spent the night on his couch in the residence. The next morning, we had a much needed coffee and I headed into town to make what I thought would be a quick opportunity to get in touch with the local organisers as they prepared their multitude of creative demonstrations and a counter summit. The counter summit was called the "People's Summit", the G6B (they are eight, we are six billion).

What I discovered was a repressive atmosphere that I had never experienced before, except perhaps as a ten-year old tourist in Mexico in 1985 where soldiers wandered the streets with machine guns. The difference, of course, was that in Mexico those guns were ostensibly to "protect" people like myself, a simple North American tourist. However, here in Alberta, the measures-- grotesque media slanders, by-laws against our rights to peaceful assembly, "anti-terrorist" legislation and the refusal to grant any space in Calgary or near Kananaskis for protesters to meet-were directed at folks like myself. People were acting as if under siege, and the meetings were still more than a month away. With suspicion was how I was greeted, chaos seemed to reign in the organising (there were not many posters around, the city was working overtime to bungle any attempts at inter-activist communication), fear was the guiding factor and a feeling of impending doom prevailed. I had to walk around and ask people who looked like they might be considered 'usual suspects' in order to come into contact with radicals working in Calgary. I learned that some of the coalitions for organising had already broken down, with people on all sides of the different debates becoming married to certain "positions". I heard that the entire city had co-ordinated to deny the organisers proper spaces to hold meetings and that the use of ad-hoc spaces like college cafeterias was resulting in the activists being chased out. No halls were rented to activists to hold meetings during the summit, and that the few spaces that could be accrued were separated by vast amounts of space. The trade union bureaucrats had also broken off contacts, and all spaces applied for to be used for camping out-of-town activists had been denied by the city. The unions were planning a march called a "family march" for the afternoon of the 23rd of June. Even this seemingly harmless march, three days before the start of the G8 Summit and guaranteed to be peaceful, had not received a permit. A glimmer of hope was that the unions had vowed to carry out their march regardless of the city's ban from Mayor David Bronconnier (who had stated that public parks could not be used for political purposes, despite the fact that he had used just such a venue for a barbecue to kick off his last electoral campaign).

The final and most significant measure used by the Federal Government to quash the resistance of the people to their plunderous economic rule was the systematic blocking of any attempt to set up the "Solidarity Village", a project to allow a camp near the Summit site itself (near Kananaskis, often called K-Country). The Federal Government had paid the Stony Nation $300 000 dollars to prevent them from renting any space for the Solidarity Village, which was being organised by the Canadian Labour Congress in conjunction with the Council of Canadians. All other locations were on Crown Land, and were quickly and without discussion, denied access to any single protester. After the cancellation of the Solidarity Village, a real black cloud began to hover above the organisers- and the city of Calgary continued to deny any place for use by the multitude of people coming in from all over the continent (and even the world, to a small extent). The plea made by activists in response to all of this was simply that people are coming, and they can't be stopped.

Even a full month plus before the Summit was scheduled to begin in K-country people were being denied entry into Canada for declared spurious reasons and never admittedly the obvious. They were, in reality, denied entry for being opposed to corporate globalisation and coming to Calgary to voice their deep anger at the institutions of the G8 and their governing leaders- as is their right anywhere, whether governments recognise it or not. After tasting first hand what kind of brutal measures were being meted out to all who dare speak the truth to power, I decided that if we are to have any rights at all, they must be used in Calgary, and maybe even in Kananaskis itself. When our movement is confronted with draconian measures and manipulations such as these, both the legal and the machiavellian, we must respond with a show of unity and defiance. I decided to head home and try to organise people to come to Calgary to meet this dropping of the gauntlet by imperial hypocrisy. We didn't make the decision to have this summit simplified into an act of defending our rights to assemble, but we can answer this call, and indeed we must every time.

One of the greatest leaps in the analysis of many of our movements' people has been the dwindling interest in "Summit Hopping". When you have a movement that speaks of ending the economic suffering of the Third World, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the rapidly growing sector of the First World living in absolute poverty, created by the advance of the G8, WTO and the post-Cold War economic order of neo-liberalism, it is contradictory to base an over arching strategy based on trying to mobilise people to travel thousands of miles to attend mass convergences. This is one of the main reasons our movement, however much it might resonate with all the victimised sectors of society, has been overwhelmingly white, middle class, and economically privileged- secure enough in employment or sources of revenue to take large amounts of time out from home. Those who are not from these categories are people who have made a lifestyle choice to be so immersed in organising that they continually live off of scraps and dumpster-diving, travelling via train hopping and hitchhiking- again, not something that can galvanise people from all walks of society.

Another point to this is that we are no longer going to win the kind of victories we had in the first couple of years. We caught them napping in Seattle, which gave us the ability to shut that fucker down. That, and to see it retrospectively, the actions of the Black Bloc anger-laced actions later in the same day, put real politics back on the agenda and buried the notion of "the end of history" once and for all, and good riddance to it. After that, in several valiant showings of initiative we were unable to actually disrupt the meetings, but we were able to continue the advancement of our movement through picking clearly legitimate targets and successfully garnering our aims. We took down that ugly blight on the landscape of The Wall in Quebec. We demanded our right to assemble in Genoa, attacking that wall too- and the capitalist state showed its true colours by killing our fallen comrade, Carlo Giuliani. Despite his tragic loss of life, that demonstration was as clearly a victory as any of the others. There were 300 000 people at the march, and even more the following day protesting his assassination. We were not divided, even though some began to call for such actions to take place, even within our own movement. However, now that we have won the final victory of the convergence battles by chasing them into the hills and fortress of K-Country in Alberta, we have continued to seek the same strategic orientation as though we could do this forever. We cannot catch them here. As heartening as it was to hear Fidel Castro ask if soon these leaders would be forced to run away with their meetings to the moon, it still appears to be the end game of attacking summit sites as a strategy for galvanisation, winning victories of the will, and disrupting the real terrorists ' agenda for "business as usual". Summit Hopping in North America will lead us to oblivion unless we can demonstrate what we have at every other turn: our ability to grow, to be flexible in our strategy as much as we are in our tactics on the streets.

As well, and just as problematic, is the very nature of how Summit hopping works. People who are not working on the grassroots issues of the city holding the summit and the convergences against it are unable to contribute to a lasting legacy in these locales that can produce further activism and new activists. Community work cannot be done by people who are not part of that very community itself. To leave the city where you live to go elsewhere is often to make clearly counter-productive choices, though clearly not in every case.

To speak of what I know, I live in Vancouver, BC, Canada. This is where the most reactionary provincial government Canada has ever seen is in power (and that is to say a heck of a lot). Gordon Campbell and his 'Liberal' Party are in almost absolute power, holding 77 of 79 seats in the provincial legislature. They have already ratcheted up massive racism, holding a referendum on the rights of First Nations that are guaranteed by the UN. They have gone after welfare, casting thousands onto the streets, they have attacked the labour code, assaulted post-secondary educational funding, shut down women's shelters, eliminated pay-equity legislation and even dropped the minimum wage to six bucks (Cdn) for first time workers. This government has torn up existing agreements with labour unions, which even raised the ire of our vastly right wing press, who called it dishonest. They have scrapped and regressed almost all the existing environmental regulations, weak though they were. They even cancelled and are dismantling the provincial Human Rights Commission. They have created an atmosphere of panic and anger among the populace after they were swept to power in the wake of a reactionary and scandal-ridden (but relatively middle ground) New Democratic Party. In many of the cases, as a result of the mismanagement of the prior administration, the Liberals were pushing at an open door to make this full scale, corporate globalisation assault on the people of this province. In this atmosphere and with things here so urgent, what is the value in going to Summits if one is a revolutionary? As has been said in a different context by revolutionaries of days before, the number one enemy is at home. Yet, what is this provincial regime here, if not the smug, smiling face of corporate globalisation come to the homefront? What is our strength as a response to this government, if we lose the real-life connection to what created it in the first place?

The governments of Calgary, Alberta and Ottawa had tried extremely hard to prevent allowing what the APEC inquiry determined was our civil right: to see and be seen by government leaders when we protest. They had gone beyond that, and tried to kill our movement (or at least, to wound it severely) by preventing people from even peacefully protesting in the city of Calgary itself. They have gone so far as to intimidate churches into not hosting homeless travellers to try and prevent people from speaking to this gathering of terrorists being held over a hundred kilometres away. They want to destroy the cohesion of our movement right while we are hitting a turning point. They know exactly what they are doing; we must as well know what is being done and know how to respond. The fact that these leaders feel the need to retreat to the woods is a victory in and of itself, and that they fear our loud message enough to go to these lengths to prevent it from being above a whisper. This kind of direct attack on the aspects of our modern resistance to the attacks of capital that are global must be met directly- proving and demonstrating our unity in their face, despite their threats, intimidation and blackmail. We must always be prepared to stand up for our brothers and sisters who live and breathe in the same movement; we stand for a world that will be one, and we must reflect this thinking in our movement as well. As I believe Mao once penned, _A good comrade is one who is eager to go where the difficulties are greater._ While I have been assured that the story was primarily a plant by the very hostile _Calgary Herald_ (the amount of black propaganda in Calgary certainly outdid the work of the press in leading up to the summit of the Americas in 2001, Quebec City), there was a report some two weeks before the Summit quoting certain revolutionaries from Kansas, USA. Supposedly, they had denounced the work of Calgarians and Edmontonians as too scattered, too unorganised and responded that they were going to the better organised demonstrations in Ottawa, the "Take the Capital" and "the "No One Is Illegal" initiatives. I want to say, very clearly, to any who were thinking along similar lines: Are you serious about revolution or not? We have no business going out for "fun" or "tourism" in these situations where the vices of the capitalist states are clamping down on our collective heads. If you are truly concerned with building a revolution, you should be honoured to make the difficult tasks succeed. That means going into the situations where whatever skills you have are most urgently needed. Whatever my skills may actually be, that was the final reason I felt the necessity to go into Cowtown.

Our responsibility to not only attend, but to try and get involved in the dirty, on-the-ground work of the demonstrations, the conferences, the running of the Convergence Centre (banished to the edge of the city, in the prostitute and industrial wasteland district, in a building marked for demolition in the near future) is a reflection of the international character of our movement. It was not "their" demos, which "we" attended, it is _our_ movement. If Calgary were to suffer a great defeat at the hands of the Albertan fear mechanisms, or as a result of disunity among our ranks, then all of our anti-capitalist organising becomes weakened. We are as strong as the ties that bind us across the spectrum of states and regions. Our movement does have multiple front lines, and these include our homefronts, but this particular clash was a defining point of advance, stagnancy or retreat for us all. That directly affects our ability to work against the corporate globalisation agendas of our local situations. Once a major amount of work had been put into calling people out to the location of the summit and the nearby city centres, our future on the larger, global level hung in the balance.

I arrived back in Calgary, again hitchhiking to the city. I had been told by a friend that the CBC announced that the Alberta police were gearing up to rape our constitutional rights to free movement: they were planning on stopping people at the border between the provinces of BC and Alberta. As luck would have it, when I finally got my ride that would take me across the provincial border, I was in the car of a staff sergeant from the New Westminster Police Department. I was Safely ensconced in his car with a story about heading to Regina in one of the Prairie provinces to visit a friend (who I had warned about my cover story, and memorised his phone number) and sit around writing poetry. Thus, I now knew that should such a blockade be set up, I would get through. As it was almost two weeks before the actual Summit was to begin, nothing of any note was there, other than the giant "Welcome to Alberta, Wild Rose Country" sign. One more quick ride later, and I was back in the same coffee shop where I had tracked down summit activists two weeks before. Only, now people seemed to be even more afraid and there were not any posters up on the lampposts. Calgary media were asking people to report to the police any anti-G8 graffiti. They even set up a "volunteer squadron" of anti-graffiti citizens' patrols. Even as the air was relatively clear, the sun out and the wind blowing, the atmosphere felt utterly suffocating. I made my way out to the university to try and link up with any activities that might be going on out there. The organisers, it should be noted, did a horrible job of keeping their websites up-to-date as far as organising was concerned. It was easy for people who wanted to attend workshops to decipher what was going on by visiting the internet, but it as extremely difficult to find the actual planning. My hope was simply that this was a reflection of how busy finalising things the local planners were- and from my later experiences, this appeared to be the case.

By the next afternoon I had stumbled across a couple of the good people in the city I had met by this point. They alerted me to the logistics meeting going on, in a cafeteria where the noise and echo was more disruptive than even the "zamboni" clearing off the floors all around us. The meeting went well, being facilitated by a man named Charles from the Pagan Cluster (of Starhawk fame) already in Calgary. I asked what was actually to happen on the day of the summit itself, now being referred to as J26. I was told that there was a plan for three snake marches to leave from different meeting points across the outskirts of downtown, and that these snake marches were to disrupt traffic during rush hour, calling this a form of economic disruption. My reading of the term economic disruption tells me that this is not a form of it, but that wasn't my primary concern. It wasn't clear as to what our strategy actually was. I had previously read a call to action that had come out over the internet to the same effect. I couldn't- try as I might- see the actual target. Simply causing chaos in the downtown core was not going to make a very clear point, even if our communiqués detailed the different corporate "targets" that were to be passed by on the march. Further, the march was organised under the banner of Quebec City and similar, much larger marches: "diversity of tactics". People can argue all they want about how that means different things to different people, and it means respecting all forms of resistance. In our movement, in most cases at least, it is code for "on this march, people are not being asked to refrain from engaging in acts that can be construed as 'violent' by the police." Such a choice, made when there were 6000 police from across the country (Ontario Provincial Police[OPP], Calgary and Albertan police, Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and we had no idea how many people were going to show up seemed to me to be begging for a massive defeat. It seemed that possibly a sad satire of victories in places like Seattle, but this time ending in chaotic mass arrests were going to befall all of our organising. I decided to try and work to help avert the disaster. The lack of a clearly defined strategy was even more disturbing than the lack of clarity as to tactics. If we had a target that was so obviously correct- such as that blasted Wall in Quebec City-that no matter what spin it was given our message would get through regardless, then our physical safety would be the only concern. As I said to some people there, I am personally fatalistic about my physical safety, but the health and advancement of our movement has the entire planet and all the inhabitants therein in the balance. We cannot afford to allow ego to cloud our judgements. People who had been working on this project for nearly a year had every reason to be tied to their original plans: They had put heart and soul into this work, and it was conceived by them. However, for the sake of any who might have emotional rather than rational reasons for wanting to try something reckless without proper consideration as to the effect on the morale of our movement, we needed to evaluate what was going on here. This is in _no way_ a morality judgement, I personally am no pacifist; it is a practical consideration. Smashing a Starbucks window is not even on the same radar screen as compared to what is going to befall our city centres when the movement of the working class to reclaim what is rightfully theirs begins in earnest. The question is one of practicality and what works to our collective advancement in "tearing the fortress down", making sure we do whatever necessary to make that fateful eventuality come sooner, for we have no time to waste. Not a single day.

I had spoken directly with many different people involved in the plans, and there were as many different interpretations as there were people to talk to. As stated, there was no clearly defined target in Calgary, nothing other than the timing coinciding with the meeting some 100 plus km away. Worse still, we had no idea how many people would actually come out to these snake marches. There was and remains no place in our movement for ego about trying to be every bit as militant as the demonstrators in other flanks of our movement. It appeared that the organisation of this particular demonstration was being done in a vacuum, without paying attention to the reality of what was happening on-the-ground. We had very good reason to suspect that our numbers were going to be in the hundreds, not the thousands, for the snake marches. Labour had pulled out of the planning approximately a month before, citing safety concerns. Now, I am hardly the one to think we should ever bow before TUB's- their number of betrayals of the anti-capitalist leadership of our movement prior to this was so high I lost count long ago. However, this was not the same as in the other cases, not even close. In Calgary, the Trade Unions deserve the fullest marks at the end of all the organising.

In Quebec City, the smaller anti-capitalist marches were in the tens of thousands. The organisers took great pains to accommodate everyone, through the creation of "Red, Green and Yellow" zones. They were so clearly marked and set far apart from one another as to have been able to accommodate people who could not risk arrest or didn't want to eat tear gas, but who still wanted to march under an anti-capitalist (and even anti-imperialist) banner. When the TUB's deliberately diverted their march and took their rank and file to a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, it was a grotesque paternalism being enforced on the rank and file. The leadership, being dragged by the force of history that was being created by the radicals in the forefront, could not risk having their own members wander amongst those who might have a more clearly defined critique of corporate globalisation, capitalism and imperialism than simply "working people and their families need a raise" and other such blather spoken by TUB's all too often. Worse still, these leaderships had a clear hostility to being associated in the press with the anti-capitalist leadership that has emerged in our movement. They would not demand that people have the right to take to the streets, that capital and militarism are the main problems of the day, that the FTAA was only a microcosm of the greater forces at work impoverishing us in the Global North and murdering us in the Global South. This amounts to more than a betrayal- it amounts to doing the work of the capitalists themselves in glossing over the glaring contradictions in this wretched system. When these TUB's follow our anti-capitalist leadership to a demonstration, it is because they have no other choice, and even within that situation they will resist to the bitter end the radicals who have and will maintain a real critique of the dynamics of economic, gender and racial power. We don't want more of the pie, we want to control the pie-cutter; we do not want special treatment for minorites, women and all sexual orientations, we want real freedom and diversity in equality.

Calgary was not a situation where accommodation of different risk levels could realistically be done, at least not very easily. The scenario planning committee had a meeting, right after an open letter was written by one Rick Collier (of the Communist Party of Canada) citing several concerns. Some concerns I could not agree with at all- such as how he complained that blocking traffic would disrupt the lives of ordinary workers-- but on the whole the majority of what was in that widely circulated letter covered the bulk of the issues that were causing many of us to lose sleep. There were only 6 days to go until J26.

Being someone who has worked on projects for months at a time before having some jackass wander in at the last minute to tell people what needed to be changed, I was very cautious, as were most people, about making my concerns loudly known. No one "knew better", but only had less attached vantagepoints, being only partially inside and partially out. All of the people like myself who heard of the scenario-planning meeting and had major concerns about where all of this was heading went directly into this meeting. Rick read out his letter, which called for one march, the march not to start at 6am but 9 and for people to give real new consideration to the numbers of people likely to attend, and to base their conduct (or at least, plans for it) on these considerations. Approximately 85% of the room stated similar points, my main one being the grave concern about how we did not appear to the outside to have a strategy. We seemed to the outside to have no other plan than to "fuck shit up". That isn't revolution- that's a stunt, to be blunt. We needed a target. Several other people pointed out that almost no activism in Calgary ever takes place, and that to have a political disaster would irreparably harm an already almost dormant city, so militance should not take place at all. Although I don't think that would be true if a more militant action could have been more direct, obvious and successful, it certainly would be if there had been a small but ultimately crushed action that served no purpose but to allow a few people to vent righteous anger.

The planning committee took these concerns very seriously, and held an emergency meeting the following morning. The commitment to inclusivity was very clear, as all meetings, both semi-closed scenario planning meetings and larger, public (except to the media) spokescouncils were run via consensus. Many people complained about the amount of the work being done behind closed doors, but I think these people should give it a rest in many cases. The action that finally took shape came from a proposal at the next night's spokescouncil meeting, which was the first time I actually felt extremely elated after a 200 or so person assembly run via consensus. The enormity of the situation and the importance and gravity of keeping ourselves tight made for one of the most positive meetings I' ve ever participated in. The original time of 6am was kept according to plan, but the march had one starting place and only was to be one march. Further still, to allay concerns about personal safety of some who couldn't physically fight cops, the organisers strongly urged people to operate where only after 10am- the designated "official" end of the march-could so-called "red" high risk actions be carried out. This was a personal great relief to me, as my mother- a retired school teacher in her early sixities who has radicalised herself in the last three-odd years-had already announced to me her intention to take part in the snake march. I did not want to be in the very odd, uncomfortable position of asking her to stay away from the march. As I pointed out to a few of the people on the scenario planning committee, a 61 year old woman with a bad back taking part in an illegal snake march is already far more radical than anything any of us young'uns could do. More on that later.

Sunday June 23rd was the scheduled Labour-led march, the "Family March". The event got a permit a little less than two weeks before the actual event took place. There isn't much to report on about the actual event, other than it was spirited, and saw between 3500-4000 people in attendance. Personally, since the unions had announced their willingness to march without a permit, I was upset that they received one- it would have been very good to see them take the lead in defying the attempts to crush our movement through bylaws and attacks on our civil liberties. The atmosphere and the respect given from all the different strands of demonstrators to one another probably helped give labour the confidence to do what they did in response to the re-planning and re-working of the J26 snake march.

On the 23rd, the Canadian Labour Congress, the Calgary District and Labour Council, the Alberta Federation of Labour, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, the Canadian Auto Workers Union and around 40 steelworkers who flew out from Toronto (rather than go to Ottawa, because "Calgary needed the numbers") endorsed the snake march and announced their intentions to bring out their members. Many other unionists announced their intentions to bring out fellow workers, including leadership of the Alberta Nurses. The gravity of what it would mean to all aspects of the social movements, should J26 go badly, seemed to mean to these unions they could "risk" participation in the snake march. The CEP also donated $3000 to the legal team to help pay for the bail of four of our activist friends who had been arrested. Now, this was probably indicative of how small the event was in comparison to actions like Quebec City and how having a successful small march allowed people more room to wiggle in the province of Alberta, but the CEP, CAW and CLC contingents were acting in a principled solidarity fashion. There was almost no likelihood at this point of a physically confrontational march, and therein lies the main reasons they came out- but to see co-operation between anti-capitalist organisers and the trade union movement was very positive and these TUB's deserve full marks on this day of solidarity. It also goes to show that if the anti-capitalists continue to take the lead in organising and persevering to create a movement with that front and centre, eventually the TUB's will have to follow. This remains our strategy in building an anti-capitalist movement that can include the organised working class: Radical anti-capitalists of all stripes must continue to create the space that ultimately the workers movement will have to move into, as the struggle becomes more acute. If leadership and planning of the movement is surrendered to TUB's, NGO's and social democrats, it will whither and die. If a grassroots movement organises and shows the way forward, TUB's belatedly will have to come on board. I don't think there is anyway that Bono will join us, however. But Bono: We'll do it- "With or Without You."

People from all over the continent, albeit in small numbers, continued to arrive in Calgary for the two days time between the Labour "Family Walk" and the J26 action. In the intervening days, on June 25th, there was another demonstration that, whether deliberately or not, was to set the tone for the main J26 action. It was the "Showdown at the Hoe-down", a mass gathering outside of the site that was (ostensibly) where several of the delegates for the G8 were meeting the press and being "welcomed Calgary style", in a sickly western themed posh gala. People were to meet at Memorial Park and march a short distance to the outside of the Roundup Centre, where a street party was to be held. This gathering ended up with some 2000 people in attendance. At first, what evolved was precisely that: we held the street that was adjacent to the Roundup Centre and DJ's set up a stage, allowing me to dance to several house and even Drum and Bass sets. A trampoline was set up, police presence was minimal and I joked to the medic team that they would probably be needed at the trampoline before long. This persisted in being the basics of the gathering for well over an hour. Then a large contingent of the demonstrators decided they wanted to get closer to a line of police behind another one of those all-too-familiar fences that are being built up by capitalists to keep out the people. This involved walking down the street and into a parking lot- where people were hemmed inside by barriers. At first, people seemed quite content to be right at the fence, and Emma Goldman 's old refrain: "If I can't dance in your revolution, I don't wanna come!" (personally, while the sentiment is okay, I'm really tired of hearing that quote everywhere) was chanted over and over while people danced in front of the fence. Then something I'm personally convinced was an operation by provocateurs began. Two drunken idiots started yanking at the fence, yelling with all their passionate idiocy, the need to tear it down. Almost immediately, I spotted a group of around 20 or so Black Bloc-type anarchists make a snake-like link up of themselves and leave the area immediately, arm in arm. When these sorts-- no strangers to physical conflict nor do they shirk from it-- decide to leave a situation, that tells me there is something really fishy going on. The tone and mood of the crowd shifted very fast and it became ominous as to what was actually going on.

My personal concerns over what was happening took a few different thought patterns: A group calling themselves "the anti-globalism action network": a front for a neo-Nazi, White Nationalist organisation with connections to Tom Metzger and William Pierce had been making attempts to work inside the anti-globalisation movement. They had issued a communiqué in several places and cities and even passed themselves off as a "legitimate" group enough to get into the _Calgary Sun_. They had already been spotted at the G6B People's Summit, trying to set up a table and hand out their trash. They had issued veiled threats to make violent conflicts and I was wondering if this was their "big move". A lot of the people congregated there believed these were police. The task became, since it was going to directly effect what we were able to do in the snake march the following day, to calm down this idiotic outburst and let people see what was happening: we were being set up. After much yelling, a few people putting themselves in between the boneheads and the fence (and the media jumped all over this, but of course), a friend got on the bullhorn and managed to get people back out onto the street where the street party was happening. End of mini-crisis and disaster averted. The party began to break up in a trickle from there and I went back to the house where I was staying to get up early (5am, to be exact) and do "runner" work in the snake march.