Emmy Hennings on the APEC protests in Sydney:

Despite the relentless and constant demonisation there has been no cap-in-hand pleading with the State - not from those I have organised with. The “but I’m just an ordinary person, sir” line of liberal democratic defense; the division into “good” and “bad” protestors. If some are excluded then we are all excluded. Citizenship is conferred upon some by denying it to others; we must become uncitizens. Ghosts inside capital’s machine.

I wrote a rant about APEC over the weekend, and then shelved it, because I was dismantling my computer/bedroom at the time and too busy to fill in the background that would have made my rant comprehensible. I’m glad Saturday’s protest went off without too many heads getting kicked (even though the police went sick, as expected). And I’m glad some friends who were there are safe.

But the footage I saw — people ‘marching’ in place, surrounded on all sides by lines of cops, pretty much stationary — makes me wonder what the point was. For the Stop Bush Coalition, the obvious aim was to Stop Bush. Ages ago, A. was questioning why people should fixate on killing the father as the symbolic APEC protest gesture rather than engaging with the real political situations specific to Australia’s participation in the Asia-Pacific as a region. (Uriohau has a lot to say about the latter, too.)

Anyhow, the point was to Stop Bush by mind control, apparently, since the rally organisers were convinced that displaying ‘peaceful protest’ was the most desirable strategy. Those organisers stooped to new lows to get their way. At one stage it looked like anyone diverging from that strategy of compliance might be forced into ‘peace’ by the Stop Bush Coalition’s own security force, aka the protest marshals. I guess this didn’t happen after all, but really, the question is (for those who are interested) why participate in such a managed event? If we must become uncitizens — a sentiment I agree with, totally — why try to intervene within the confining spaces of ‘democratic’ decision-making, when ‘democracy’ is already flawed, almost entirely symbolic and designed for subsumption into deal-brokering and meeting stacks? Why not leave the corral to the cows, and do something completely different?

I guess this harks back to long dead conversations within the uh ultra-left about why choose autonomous organising principles instead of forcing people to make decisions on behalf of the ‘mass’, assuming that everyone can finally come to the same agreement; why spokescouncils are not fora in which decisions are ever made on behalf of anyone; and why representational politics suck, completely. Maybe it’s time to revisit those conversations.

Meanwhile, the Chaser affinity group were on their own trip and made everyone look ineffectual — the top brass, the police state security force, the top-heavy, trot-heavy protesters. Yay for the Chaser. And yay for the rerouting of state resources into a completely pointless court case, which will be paid for on both sides, don’t forget, by the Federal Government.