#J11: Rinse and Repeat

June 11, 2013

G8_Inline

In a small region of Northern Ireland, a temporarily reconfigured microstate of security and surveillance has been rapidly erected. Complete with aerial surveillance drones and arrestee processing centres built from shacks, the G8 conference will be hosted at Lough Erne resort in Co. Fermanagh for two days next week. Today people took to the streets of London, taking part in a Carnival Against Capitalism organised by Stop G8.

The imagery is very familiar, everything reduced to the same background hum. ‘Veterans’ jeered at the inefficacy of the action on Twitter, before it had even begun. There was the sound of samba, distant grime and dubstep beats, the occasional formulation of police lines formed to defend utterly abstract patches of ground as hastily abandoned as they were chosen, all the time being shouted down by those whose only recourse to justice is to scream their disapproval at disdainful masked faces. People ran, dressed in black, shops and unassuming offices were shouted at. Puzzled bystanders gazed, seemingly lacking any understanding that this was all about a conference on another landmass. The same old chants. Photographers pushed protesters out of the way to get their money shot to go alongside hastily scribbled articles which could have been, and possibly were, written before the day’s events.

There have been a number of notable differences in ‘public order’ policing at recent events/actions – already notoriously violent against protesters. We’ve seen prearranged buses steered into the edges of police lines, ready to receive what must logistically be prearranged arrest quotas. There would appear to be a desire to use snatch squads again rather than closed ‘kettles’ and, this morning, we saw police raid the convergence space for the action hours before it was due to start, echoing previous “anti-globalisation” protest policing in Europe. There are now reports from inside the convergence space that, amongst other troubling uses of violence and force, Tasers were used on occupants. Currently, the police are categorically denying this.

The arbitrary nature of who becomes a target of this state violence is matched in its surreality only by the nature of watching it play out.

There’s always a justification in the importance of people having a right to access space and put it to use in whatever fashion they feel they should – we only have to look to Turkey in recent days to see the importance of people choosing to demand the right to put their cities to use again. It’s always exciting to see the streets take the form of something other than a traipse to a London park to be lectured by an irrelevant speaker from a distant era. It was heartening to see people plunging into the fray attempting to de-arrest comrades, often under a hail of blows. It was a blessed relief not to notice a single SWP placard or person calling for passive submission to violence from the police. But it does seem to be like a good song stuck on repeat with both police and protesters trapped in a death grip, reliant on each other to stay ‘on message’ and perform in an almost ritualistic manner.

This isn’t to cast any aspersions on those who now find themselves in police custody at the behest of this latest wave of the suppression of valid, utterly necessary protest. Neither is it to question the motives or credibility of those on the streets today. The options are few and the possibilities to find cracks in the daily reproduction of capitalist social relations are rare and difficult to expand. What choice is left to us than to repeatedly find ourselves in a direct confrontation with those tasked with preventing us from ever reaching the intangible roots of power?

By Jack Dean | @Jack__Dean