GOING DOWN TO KANANAKSIS: PART II

The final decisions as to how the J26 march was going to be organised and how communications were to be handled were made in primarily closed meetings. This, to a certain extent, made sense. However, from there what became clearer and clearer was that we are- at least in the pressure cooker of such a brutally repressive and surveillanced atmosphere- starting to cave into an internal culture of fear and paranoia. With the breaking up of the Black Panthers being only the most glaring and obvious example, we need to be far more concerned about this than I suspect we are. This is a disease that comes out of very real repression coming from above. With the new "anti-terror" bills in place in Canada, the United States and elsewhere, we must take this very seriously and have a look at how it played out in Calgary and quickly learn these lessons. If we do not, we might very well end up suffocating under the new pressures we are being faced with. This is urgent.

What we need to know first, is something most of us already say we do. All of our organising is monitored especially when it comes to challenging these large summits. Any decision we make is most likely known by the police in a matter of a few minutes after that choice is made. When we say we already know that, we need to operate openly. A situation erupted in one of the spokescouncil meetings where the plans for the J26 march were being detailed to the crowd. It went like this. Many people, including me, were concerned that the overwhelming police presence in the city was going to mean that no one was allowed out of our starting place. I personally thought for some time that we wouldn't even get out of the park where we were set to begin, but that we would be initially surrounded and we would not be allowed to move. The police had been issuing threats, the march looked small and at this point, there was not a labour contingent ready to call out their members to the march (yet). "What was the contingency plan?" a woman asked. "We, for reasons of security are unable to tell you that", came the answer. The woman pressed that she didn't feel safe being told that "something" was in place, but that we couldn't know what it was. The answer came back, that well, there is a contingency plan if the police surround us, but for reasons of security we can't tell you. "we have a plan in place, we have worked to make this a safe march, but if you don't trust us, maybe you shouldn't come." The room went into a booing and hissing situation. Remember what was said at the beginning of this, that anything we plan the police know. Exact, absolute details were not called for here, but to absolutely deny people this information means:

A) the activists on the march will be confused and less likely to participate, and in any case ill-equipped to do so, B) The only people who will know what is going on are the police and the small coterie of organisers, C) We will achieve the job of dividing and confusing the march (or any similar event), without any help from the police. Who needs a plant when we break down our own communications ourselves, before we even take to the streets?

This is only one example of the sorts of actions taken, ostensibly for security, that end up being a comical farce, if it were not so deadly serious. The police will always be able to listen in on radio communications, yet during the march people who spoke to our communications team were rebuffed, including an incident where one organiser was explaining something to a woman while another was chastising them for sharing information about what was going on. Another example was that several of the organisers took to "street names" during the different events. I've got news for people: When we organise things, particularly of this level of scrutiny, then they already know who you are. This kind of behaviour again contributes to confusion during demonstrations and similar actions. We need to be open, honest and communicative and simply assume what we are doing is well known. When we took to the streets in Calgary at everything except the "Family March" we were already breaking illegitimate laws. None of the other actions were sanctioned. Yet we advertised our intentions to go to the streets. That, obviously, was the correct thing to do. We must stay open and honest and disclose as much as we possibly can- if we don't, it's at our own peril, and not the other way around. They are the only ones who have anything to hide. If we say we know that, but we act like we don't, then we need to give this serious attention.

I had arranged to be picked up by a comrade so as to not walk alone to the snake march. Walking alone to an unsanctioned event is simply not a smart move, people who are seen as organisers get picked off and "detained" when they are alone. Avoiding paranoia is not an invitation to recklessness. My ride showed up a short time after 6am and we were at the march thereafter.

The snake march gathered in Fort Calgary and upon my arrival I noticed huge amounts of union banners, particularly the CEP and the CAW. Once I saw this, I knew the march would get out of the park. The police may attack and beat on "uncouth" protesters, but they are loathe to get seen beating or gassing trade unionists. My anxiety dropped rapidly, and shortly after we "huddled up" to get our communications straight, the snake march got off of the ground. Aside from a few hitches, being held up at several intersections and the like-- there was never a time when the snake march was anything other than a loud, wandering band of activists, unionists, people marching simply because of the fact they had been told not to. There was another thing that had brought out a few people to this march in particular, a letter sent home by the Calgary School Board to all students in the public schools. It read:

"If you see a demonstration, get out of the area immediately. Do not stand and watch. Do not engage any demonstrators in discussion or debate. If you feel at any time that you are in trouble, approach an adult you can trust."

This letter infuriated many numbers of people, and it was quite the opposite to encouraging youth to think critically, as the school system likes to pretend it is about. A few parents had come out because of this letter (an unexpected bonus). The language and conduct guidelines were (my guess is, deliberately) of the same chatter that is used for warning children about pedophiles and abductors. It sent a chill through me to see this, reprinted in the Calgary Sun.

The march had, as previously stated, been organised under the banner of "diversity of tactics". As well, there were large numbers of anarchists who had made the trek out to the summit and had things other than a walk through downtown on their collective minds. A large bloc, perhaps 50-75 of them, were marching under a banner (in black, of course) that read "against capital, against the state" with a circle @ under it. The fact that they respected the call for a relatively "peaceful" march through downtown until 10am, even with their preferred cover of the large crowd and their own numbers being significant, was a sign to me of their growth. They put the interests of the march ahead of their own desires, and they also knew how to make a tactical choice not to engage police, who had not appeared in riot gear (something that also lightened people's fears right from the start). When the march itself ended (shortly after Starhawk and the Pagan cluster had asked us to stop by City Hall so they could do a "spiral dance") by the Harry Hayes building, a huge federal office building, the crowd was told where different safety levels had been laid out. At this point, cutting their losses, the Black Bloc-types marched around the city and several anarchists tried to engage the police in a game of "anarchist soccer" (the anarchists won by forfeit) in the streets. Two arrests occurred later when the group tried to rush and occupy a McDonald's restaurant, which was a very mild (although foolhardy) result of the end of the J26 snake march and associated actions.

There was a "Die-in" action that started at noon. The idea was to get people to the Olympic Plaza downtown to "die", lying down and remaining perfectly still for a half an hour to demonstrate and highlight the number of people dying of AIDS for lack of care and funds throughout Africa. It was also to highlight the total hypocrisy of the NEPAD initiative, that speaks in favour of "helping" Africa but didn't even make the AIDS crisis an agenda item at their talks, much less have any real way to address the issues. A few years ago, Nelson Mandela tried to implement generic drugs that would reduce the cost of treatments from astronomical to almost affordable, a mild reform. His government was threatened with sanctions and his ANC successor Thabo Mbeki has since become the architect of the neo-colonial NEPAD program. This "initiative" didn't even achieve stage one of their pathetic goals. As African speakers at the end of the labour march pointed out, Africa owes no one, Africa is owed- owed for colonialism, owed for slavery, owed for the AIDS epidemic and the IMF "restructuring" programs that have exacerbated absolute poverty and furthered landlessness and starvation. This is the real African debt, owed by imperialism, yet at the end of the summit African (mis)leaders were given even less that than the pittance of crumbs being discussed in the lead up to the summit itself inside the K-Country fortress. The "Di-in" was to raise these issues, and participation meant lying in the sun on a day where record heat prevailed (36 degrees celcius). Aside from sunburnt legs, this wasn't a problem at all.

After this, my friend and I were exhausted. But the day was not really even half over. The previous day, an "action" called the "People's Picnic" had been sanctioned, though a few days before the mayor "Bronco" was actually threatening a labour sponsored event with mass arrests for eating outdoors in a park. The rhetoric coming out of officialdom really took the cake so many times. but I digress. Arriving at the picnic hot, exhausted (being a runner at a march meant that I had personally covered the ground of approximately 18 snake marches), hungry and badly sunburnt (one of these years, I'll actually buy sunblock) my friend and I got in the line up for food. It was clearly a labour event, as there was far more meat-based fare than if it had been done by the activists, who are more and more seeing a need for a vegetarian lifestyle. A veggie-burger later, I was trying to find my mother to discuss the days events.

I arrived in Calgary about a week before my mother, and by the time she arrived in town I had already inserted myself as much as possible into the organising being done by the different anti-capitalist collectives and organisations. So, when my mom arrived, I asked her to come to the convergence centre where people were arriving, planning and congregating for most of the day. It was an extreme pleasure for me to "show her off" to the comrades there who had already become friends. As I introduced her to as many people as I could, I began to realise the importance even more strongly of our movement making cross-generational links. People I introduced her to mentioned to me I was lucky to have that; that my mother being willing to make an eight hour drive was "really fucking cool" (she overheard that comment, and retorted "That's alright, I am really fucking cool!"). Our movement runs a real danger of falling into a trap similar to what took place throughout the sixties: being looked at as a "youth" phenomenon. We don't have the "baby boom" dynamic of numbers, but we still need to make sure this does not befall us. People who may be physically weaker are often far stronger in spirit; I heard my mother say to me at the end of all of the weeks events about how she now felt in heart and not just her mind, a part of something bigger than herself absolutely. She also stated that she was now thinking in terms of "we", not "I" was one of the highlights for me on a personal level I wish I could share with every one of my counterparts. At the end, she bought me a beer and toasted the revolution (which I'll admit, made me squirm- this is still my mother, no matter how old I get). Having her take part in these demonstrations and doing so not at all because I asked her to (she informed me that she was going quite matter of factly, almost as if to say "try and stop me") was a microcosm of the kind of outreach our movement must undertake- and do so immediately. This will also add a great strength to what we accomplish. Apparently, after the day I introduced her around, for the rest of the week many 20 and 30-somethings kept calling her "mom". The matriarch of the revolution? Perhaps.

I never found my mother at the People's Picnic, but I had to leave fairly quickly: a final event, organised as a symbolic one by two comrades from the Toronto chapter of the International Socialists, was about to get underway. The idea had been put forward and organised earlier in the week to go on a caravan out to Kananaskis, and drive in as far as possible before being turned around by the military. The military of Canada had been positioned in K-Country, with the right to shoot to kill and nearly three times as many troops as in the entire Afghan operation of the "War on Terror". They had anti-aircraft guns across the mountainside. There were 22 checkpoints along the highway and many more RCMP officers. Each checkpoint had another breathtakingly large fence-like wall. The operation to put radio collars on bears to avoid seeing them get shot (mistaken for "protesters", no doubt) ended up killing two grizzlies. One would hope that the outrage expressed by some over this would have been as high if they had shot G8 dissenters. At any rate, the security operation was a massive violation, unprecedented, in fact, of our civil rights. People didn't want to leave this unchallenged. The caravan was planned and 30 vehicles, containing under 100 people, had signed up to make the hour long drive from Calgary in a convoy, going at 80km an hour, driving the entire way with the hazard lights of each vehicle on, so as to be able to identify one another. No one, it was agreed at the planning meetings, was to be planning to even get themselves symbolically arrested trying to breach a part of the perimeter. This was to be a no-risk event.

Things have a funny way of changing. When the caravan got under way, I saw something that is always a beautiful sight. Mass spontaneity. The caravan touched a nerve in many people's hearts, and when the announcement at the People 's Picnic was made that it was about to leave, the buzz spread quickly and soon there were over 100 cars making their ways down the highway. The police sent an escort due to the amount of congestion (and, no doubt, to watch for "terrorists"). These cars contained over 400 people, perhaps as many as 500. We arrived there in over an hour and a half, though the drive shouldn't take so long. Our police escort took us down to only 60 clicks. People are not willing to be shut out of these meetings, people are not willing to lie down for the state when they tell us to go home, and people are not interested in being told they don't have rights. The reason for so much interest in this action was clear: Anger. How dare they try to keep us out of our public spaces? How dare they protect terrorists with fences from hippies with dances? That kind of anger made the small stunt shift to a mass gathering, a people's movement. The organisers, who should be commended beyond the heights of the mountains surrounding the Kananaskis Valley for pulling together the action itself, never understood the shift in character. Or, if they did, they did not like it and were trying to reign in the aspirations of the people- something intolerable when the majority make a feeling clear.

The feeling in this crowd was simple: we are now "negotiating" with the police to get into the first checkpoint. From there, we want to try our luck at getting to the second one. Well, after an hour and a half in the baking record heat, we went to the first checkpoint. As soon as the convoy stopped, people poured out of their cars and amassed in front of the fence. It was about 30 feet high, and it stretched into the edge of the mountain face. There was a line of police in front of this barricade, all on bicycles, even with some guarding the ditches around the edge. There were 22 checkpoints, and one assumes they all looked like this. With the people in the streets to discuss what to do next, several police cars pulled up behind the several hundred people gathered around, listening to Starhawk and Gordon Christie (among others) tell us our options and to try to facilitate a deeply divided crowd. The organisers reminded us of the original plan for zero-conflict, but to Hell with that, many of us thought: we are trying to meet and see the leaders making decisions that effect billions of people. We want to press on, and the cop cars are now a negotiating tactic- they get through if we do. Personally, thinking of the fact that there were over 20 more checkpoints like this one to get through, I wasn't too hopeful at the tactics being discussed here. Nonetheless, the crowds' determination was far more important than the aspirations of the few who wanted the whole project abandoned. Then, when Starhawk was asking the crowd if we should let the cop cars through, the call came out "They are not cops, they are delegates!" and a buzz went through me I hadn't felt in many months. That buzz was power. We had, so it seemed, functionaries from Japan and the United States (of all places) blocked and unable to get through. Maybe, just maybe, we can stop these murderers from carrying out their meetings without a hitch. What a drug that feeling is, the simple power of having control over them. There is not much like it I have ever tasted. It was the first time I had felt that rush since the FTAA summit, there had been nothing like that in Calgary.

As quickly as the feeling came on, it was gone. Before we could decide whether to try to hold them in, they backed up and went out to the Highway One, where they would have undoubtedly gone down one of the back roads into K-Country. Just like that, the action had gone from stunt to movement, to militant action, back down all the way to stunt. At this point, the debates on the ground seemed lifeless and our caravan vehicle decided to round our people up and head back to Cowtown. What almost happened there reminded me in my gut of what had not happened in Calgary- we were never a threat of any sort. Not politically, not physically, not with our voices. This was our greatest loss.

In many ways, simply getting through all the actions in Calgary without a massive defeat on the ground was a victory, but only a small one, and one primarily for the local activists. If I lived in Calgary, this would now look like a new dawn. But it isn't that clear for the rest of us.

What I hope has happened is that we are saying good-bye to something we can never forget, and only give the greatest of thanks to: Summit hopping as an overarching strategy. We cannot continue in this fashion or we will perish and disappear from the horizon, something we simply cannot afford to do at all. In Europe, the peoples awakening continues unabated, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets on a regular basis. There are many reasons for this, but we cannot afford to get left behind. We need to leave this strategy in the dustbin of history, as surely as we intend to with their whole imperialist system. We face this fork in our road to the New World. We cannot pronounce the grand victory to make it true. This new reality can hopefully, given time and work, provide a new life to our entire movement, provided the death of summit hopping (as our main strategy, not to ignore it completely) gives us the spark to rethink where we are going.

What was the purpose of Summit Hopping? Does shutting down meetings or ripping down fences help slow down the advance of corporate globalisation? No more than smashing a Starbucks window actually helps create better working conditions in Guatemalan coffee plantations. What has been the point is that it allowed people to see they are not alone, that there are people willing to risk their very lives to oppose the current system- and that these same people have no recourse left to them but to take to the streets and challenge power wherever there is a possibility that we can be seen and heard. The point has been to be heard by other people, to get them thinking outside of the box, the sandbox of the playground we are all banished to in these "democracies". When people shut down the WTO in Seattle, we alerted the world that there would be no more business as usual for the leaders who put maximum profits ahead of the lives of children in every city, country and continent of the globe.

Summits have also been places where nearly the entire spectrum of issues that victimise all the inhabitants of the planet and the very planet itself are discussed. It provided the absolutely perfect place and forum for the coming together of activists from the multitude of issues to network and make the larger links in their own thinking. It also was a place where the symbols we were challenging represented the supra-state level of our current late capitalist era: the fact that decisions no longer are made at the level of a particular national state. Corporate power has gone far beyond the sovereignty of any particular state, even to a limited extent, the US. So has the response to these manoeuvres in the form of our "anti-globalisation" movement.

Summits have now been driven by our increasing strength, both militant and with ideas, into nowhere: not just in K-Country, but some have indeed cancelled face-to-face meetings all together, going online for their discussions instead. As this happens, we will become disoriented if we do not foment an idea that can move us to the next level. We cannot surrender the initiative. In fact, in order to get back ahead of the elites who run the world, we need to stop being, for lack of a more accurate word, reactionary. We cannot simply sit on our hands and wait until they call another summit in a location where we might possibly be able to have a convergence. Yes, it is great news that so many people decided to stay home and work on their own local struggles this time around- but the simple fact is that there are many other reasons why we had such a low turn out in the actions in Calgary and Ottawa. One of those is simple: repression works. This is a movement that has not come to terms entirely with our new situation on the ground, and people were scared off by the repressive measures, particularly in Alberta. This should not be condemned, everyone has their own safety levels and must have them respected. However, when people lose the sense that something in front of them is self-evidently the correct choice, then we are not going to win their allegiance in getting them to the "red zones", or even the cities that are under an unofficial form of martial law.

We also have yet to clearly put forward what it is we are for. My suggestion to many people is that they come out and see the planning and organising that goes into these convergences: so many of our people have made clearly defined choices to live now as they want to see the world organised, that we ourselves are trying to help create. Part of this can never truly be rectified, as the struggle itself will sweep away sloganeering and certain forms of collectivity will be made self-evident by the facts on the ground. To "blueprint" too many of our ideas for that better world would be to make false promises- ones we cannot necessarily keep. The starting point is that no real democracy can exist without economic equality. Anything else is inevitably hollow, and that is why we are the only real speakers for democracy. With every new law passed against dissent, the truth of this becomes self-evident almost to the point of parody.

We are in a period of our movement in North America where we see the people's awakening going from success to success in Europe, and growing in leaps and bounds throughout. Yet we ourselves are in a period of seeming stagnation. There are many reasons for this new turn, and a lot of them stem from a few planes in the air back in September 2001.

The best thing to come out of the Summit in Alberta was the action in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Their numbers were around 5000 for a militant action under the banner of "diversity of tactics" and the program of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. This was such a massive growth, because it represented the movement from one giant demonstration that everyone is supposed to attend to a movement that thinks in terms of itself regionally. In North America, unlike in Europe, it is simply too difficult to converge on one city for all the fighters for a just world. As well, as we move into taking our global analysis into our grassroots organising, we need to find ways to maintain our international character. In many ways, that there were large demonstrations to coincide with the K-Country summit speaks to the way forward.

A Call for New Ideas: Proposal

The first thing we must maintain, at all costs- is our regional contacts. We are making larger than our own backyard leaps in inter-networking. This is nothing but to strengthen us, and it makes our own work that much easier when we see it as part of the larger world. As we work on our local fronts, the way forward seems to do several adjustments to recapture the initiative of fighting corporate globalisation. I propose, loosely, the following:

We begin to set our own dates. We cannot wait for them to set things for us. If we do so, we'll become lost chasing people into the forests and getting nothing but a smaller and smaller turnout and dwindling sense of our own power, as people begin to realise that there is nothing we can do to stop these meetings. We have become horribly predictable, and we need to end that right now.

We organise our convergences under a banner of "building a culture of convergence" and make it clear that this is not only to demonstrate, but to get together with other activists that are not living in our backyards. Making contacts, sharing information face-to-face can never be replicated by the internet. We are part of an international movement, and we must know each other as family. Each convergence date must also continue to build a conference around it: with focuses on three basic areas:

1) The War on Terror (and all issues that are most directly related- immigration, imperialism, environmental degradation from the fallout of war)

2) Corporate globalisation issues (such as the AIDS crisis in Africa, the decline of unionisation the world over, the privatisation of water, declining environmental standards),

3) Local issues in the province/city or state that the convergence is to take place in. (Gordon Campbell and his attacks on everyone)

These will, clearly, have to be taken up as part of the same fight, making the links and avoiding seeing them as separate but similar. We cannot stand on one foot at a time, but see it as all in the same body of economic and political repression.

These conferences can be best brought together by bringing unions, student unions and NGO's into their organisation- and have the whole gamut of activities spearheaded by the anti-capitalists among our ranks. The organisation of these things should allow at least 6 months and should make very clearly defined choices as to where the convergence should take place. There could be bi-monthly meetings of groups of activists from several different centres, perhaps Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Victoria, Calgary and Edmonton could work on a North-Western convergence out here on the Pacific Coast. Each city can be independently responsible for organising a particular aspect of the conference, and we meet to share information and make group decisions as to how to bring people from our different areas to the convergence. Demonstrations should be built primarily by the organisers in the host city itself. Propaganda should be as unified and presented as a common front as possible, to help create the larger networks as a culture, and to share our own ideas and begin to synthesise an analytical framework that we can all agree upon.

These ideas are to hopefully get us out of our rut, and to help us bring the local to the global, and bring the global to the local. It must be seen as part of the same basic movement we have all been working in and around, or it will not clearly make itself known as the strategic jump it must become. Finally, it gets us from where we are right now to something new. Where we are right now, was heading down a one way road. but the fork in it can be seized, and we can sustain ourselves so long as we recapture the right to determine when, where and what we will do. We all know we can't allow the ruling class to determine what our rights are. We can even less afford letting them tell us how our movement is oriented.

The anti-globalisation movement must meet the contradictory glare of the
local and the global head on. We will find a synthesis in this contradiction or
else we will be nothing but another blip on history. However, remember the words
of Bertolt Brecht: "In the contradiction lies the hope".

The only thing I regret was that one of the best voices of our movement,
David Rovics, was stopped at the border and unable to pe