From: "Peter Jovanovic" <peterzoran-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Fwd: Report on the International People Global Action Forum in Milan-Italy
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 13:50:27 +1000


hi all

Antti wrote:
>What do you  Peter mean with "going biff with the pigs" and "storming the
>summits", in the contrary white overalls have been criticized a lot due to
>their anti-riotism and maintaining the protest in symbolical level! This is
>a point where I agree with them - the big achiement of white overalls has
>been developing a  middle way between passive civil  disobedience and
>rioting, two unbeliavably boring ways of protest.

I said that a lot of anarchists admire Ya Basta for fighting the cops 
especially after Prague. They are of course mistaken partly because most of 
the anarchists in Prague were on the Blue march and Ya Basta the Yellow. It 
would be possible to utilise Ya Basta style tactics to attack the police 
rather than push through them. In Prague Ya Basta trod a pretty fine line. 
They hit police shields with clubs, apparently with the intention of 
smashing the shields but not hurting the cops. I talked to a Ya Basta member 
on the night of September 26 and when I told him that some people had thrown 
Molotovs on the blue march he said something like 'i don't agree with using 
molotovs but it is a debate the movement has to have'. Quite a refreshing 
change from dogmatic pacifism.

It will be interesting to see what the NYC and London white overalls do on 
April 20 and May Day respectively.

>As for links to leninism, I have only one somewhat strange article of Bifo
>to which to refer to. I am sure many italians would be able  to tell more.
>But in general I feel many of the arguments about organising movements
>in the "post-modern" era weak, often also mixing goals with means. Income
>not connected with work is definitely no any goal, only a mean for me. But 
>I
>have no space here to go in detail with this.

British autonomists Aufheben have recently published a pamphlet called 'Stop 
the Clock' which criticises the guaranteed income campaign as a leftist 
attempt to manufacture a movement out of nothing.

>As for non-transparent hierarchies - that is what has caused the most
>bitterness in Finland. After Prague, Finnish anarchist movement has
>effectively splitted to two fractions, majority identifying with Ya Basta!
>and the rest maintaining more traditional anarchist approach. Even Finns
>co-organising yellow block in Prague felt that Ya Basta! did not offer a 
>lot
>of lip-service to the "official consensus-frame" in which the events were
>organised. In another hand they also felt that the whole consensus in
>assemblies was mostly symbolical and tortuous process, but Ya Basta! did 
>not
>even tried to get something like that organised - instead they had their 
>own
>agenda and goals, for which to pursue. I was not very much involved in the
>Prague process, but in some discussion I got a feeling that some tendencies
>saw it like competition between their parties/pseudo-parties, in order to
>gain as much influence to European movement as possible: "We (autonomists)
>beat the trots  in -69 when we networked with Detroit autoworkers, now we
>well beat them (SWP) again..".

I thought the organisation in Prague was appalling. I've never been a fan of 
consensus decision making but Prague was far worse than other examples I've 
seen. It was impossible to hear anything if you were even two rows back from 
the front of the circle because the meetings were in a very big and echoing 
empty old factory. There was also the problem of attempting to translate 
stuff into multiple languages. These problems would have also applied to 
majority voting but that would at least have taken less time. I gave up 
trying to participate in the decision making in Prague because it was so 
long and boring and it seemed a lot of other people did likewise. I think 
the important decisions had been made beforehand anyway like the pledge of 
no violence. Which worked extremely well ha ha ha. So I can understand why 
Ya Basta wanted to do their own thing but they could have been more open 
about it especially as they took command of the yellow march.

peter

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