by Naomi Klein
These coalitions make RTS extremely difficult to categorize. “Is a street party a political rally?” asks Jordan rhetorically. “A festival? A rave? Direct action? Or just a bloody good party?” In many ways, the parties have defied easy labeling: they camouflage identifiable leaders, and have no center or even a focal point. RTS parties “swirl,” as Jordan says.
Playing Politics
Not only is the confusion deliberate, but it is precisely this absence of rigidity that has helped RTS to capture the imagination of thousands of young people around the world. Since the days when Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies infused self-conscious absurdity into their “happenings,” political protest had lapsed into a ritualized affair, following a fairly unimaginative grid of repetitive chants and scripted police confrontation. Pop, in the meantime, had become equally formulaic in its refusal to let the perceived earnestness of political conviction enter its ironic play space. Which is where RTS comes in. The deliberate culture clashes of the street parties mix the earnest predictability of politics with the amused irony of pop. For many people in their teens and twenties, this presents the first opportunity to reconcile being creatures of their Saturday-morning-cartoon childhoods with a genuine political concern for their communities and environment. RTS is just playful and ironic enough to finally make earnestness possible.
In many ways, Reclaim the Streets is the urban centerpiece of England’s thriving do-it-yourself subculture. Exiled to the economic margins by decades of Tory rule, and given little reason to return by the right-of-center policies of Tony Blair’s New Labour Party, a largely self-reliant infrastructure of food co-ops, illegal squats, independent media and free music festivals has emerged across the country. Spontaneous street parties are an extension of the DIY lifestyle, asserting as they do that people can make their own fun without asking any state’s permission or relying on any corporation’s largesse. At a street party, just showing up makes you both a participant and part of the entertainment.
We visited the Virgin at the place of the cathedral, who certainly didn’t expect us and therefore didn’t join the dance. In spite of this we offered a very nice sunny show till later that night, past eleven o’clock, reclaiming the street for about five hours.
—RTS E-mail report, Valencia, Spain, May 16, 1998
The street party is also at odds with the way our culture tends to imagine freedom. Whether it’s hippies dropping out to live in rural communes, or yuppies escaping the urban jungle in sport utility vehicles, freedom is usually about abandoning the claustrophobia of the city. Freedom is Route 66, it’s “On the Road.” It’s eco-travel. It’s anywhere but here. RTS, on the other hand, doesn’t write off the city or the present. It harnesses the urge for entertainment and raves (and its darker side — the desire to freak out and riot) and channels them into an act of civil disobedience that is also a festival. For a day, the longing for free space is not about escape but transformation of the here and now.
Of course, if you want to be really cynical, RTS is also flowery eco-poetry about vandalism. It’s high-minded talk about blocking traffic. It’s wildly dressed and painted kids screeching at extremely confused and possibly well-meaning cops about the tyranny of “car culture.” And when RTS events go wrong —because only a handful of people show up, or the antihierarchy anarchist organizers are unable or unwilling to communicate with the crowd —that’s exactly what the party becomes: some jerk demanding the right to sit in the middle of the street for a loony reason known only to him. But at their best, RTS actions have been too joyful and humane to dismiss, cracking the cynicism of many onlookers, from the hip British music press, which declared the party at Trafalgar Square “the best illegal rave or dance music party in history,”7 to one striking Liverpool docker who noted that “the others talk about doing something —this lot actually do it.”8
And, as with all successful radical movements, some voice concern that the mass appeal of RTS has made it too fashionable, that the subtle theory of “applying radical poetry to radical politics” is getting drowned out by the pounding beat and the mob mentality. In October 1997, Jordan told me that RTS was going through a process of rigorous re-examination. He claimed that the 20,000-strong Trafalgar Square party was not the sort of climax RTS had been moving toward. When the police tried to impound the van containing the sound system, protestors didn’t cheekily blow kisses as hoped, they hurled bottles and rocks and four people were charged with attempted murder (the charges were later dropped). Despite the organizers’ best efforts, RTS was spiraling into soccer hooliganism and, as one RTS spokesperson told The Daily Telegraph, when the organizers tried to regain control, some rioters turned against them. “I saw some of our people actually trying to stop yobbos who had got tanked up on beer and were mindlessly throwing bottles and rocks. A few of our contingent actually put themselves into the firing line and one was beaten up….”9 Such shades of gray, however, were lost on most in the British media who covered Trafalgar Square with headlines like “Riot Frenzy —Anarchist Thugs Bring Terror to London.”10
“The Resistance Will Be as Transnational as Capital”
After Trafalgar Square, Jordan says, it became clear that “it was too easy for the street party to be seen as just fun, just a party with a hint of political action…. If people think that turning up to a street party once a year, getting out of your head and dancing your heart out on a recaptured piece of public land is enough, then we are failing to reach our potential.” The next task, he said, is to imagine a takeover bigger than just one street. “The street party is only a beginning, a taster of future possibilities. To date there have been 30 street parties all over the country. Imagine that growing to 100, imagine each one of those happening on the same day, imagine each one lasting for days on end and growing…. Imagine the street party growing roots … la fête permanente. …”11
The police attack was so hard and brutal that even the Czech public was shocked…. Sixty-four people were detained including 22 of those younger than 18 and 13 women. During the police action, innocent people (who were just walking around) were also beaten. All detainees were beaten, mistreated and humiliated until morning hours.
—RTS E-mail report, Prague, Czech Republic,
May 16, 1998
I admit that at the time I spoke to Jordan I was skeptical that this movement could pull off that level of coordination. At the best of times, Reclaim the Streets walks a delicate line, flirting openly with the urge to riot but attempting to flip it into a more constructive protest. The London RTSers say that one of the goals of the parties is to “visualize industrial collapse” —the challenge, then, is for participants to inspire one another enough to dance and plant trees in the rubble, rather than to douse it with gasoline and drop a Zippo. But shortly after our interview, a notice went out on a couple of activist E-mail lists, floating the idea of a coordinated day of simultaneous street parties around the world. Seven months later, the first-ever Global Street Party was under way. To make absolutely sure that the political underpinning of the event didn’t get lost, the date chosen for the Global Street Party was May 16, 1998 — the same day the G-8 leaders gathered for a summit in Birmingham, England, and two days before they would proceed to Geneva to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the World Trade Organization. With Indian farmers, landless Brazilian peasants, unemployed French, Italian and German workers and international human-rights groups planning simultaneous actions around the two summits, RTS took its place in a fledgling international grassroots movement against transnational corporations and their agenda of economic globalization. This was definitely not just about cars.
Though rarely reported as more than isolated traffic snares, thirty RTS events were successfully mounted around the world, in twenty different countries. On May 16, more than eight hundred people blocked a six-lane highway in Utrecht, the Netherlands, dancing for five hours. In Turku, Finland, two thousand partyers peacefully occupied one of the main bridges in the city. Almost a thousand
Berliners held a rave at a downtown intersection and in Berkeley, California, seven hundred people played Twister on Telegraph Avenue. By far the most successful of the Global Street Parties was in Sydney, Australia, where an illegal political rally cum music festival went off without a hitch; between three and four thousand people “kidnaped” a road, setting up three stages for live concerts with bands and half a dozen deejays. There were no Levi’s, Borders, Pepsi or Revlon sponsorships (the sort of backing that supposedly makes high-priced festivals like Lilith Fair “possible”) but, somehow, Sydney’s RTS managed to offer “three chai stalls, a food fund-raiser, a skateboard skate rail, a five terminal sidewalk Internet station, two sandstone sculptors, poets, fire twirlers, street gardeners … and loads of mayhem and frivolity.”12
Police reaction to the Global Street Party varied wildly from city to city. In Sydney, the officers stood back in awe, asking only for the sound to be turned down as the party stretched into the evening. In Utrecht, the police were so friendly that “at one point,” reports a local organizer, “they mingled with the crowd, sat on the pavement waiting for the sound system to arrive. When it finally arrived, they really assisted in getting the generator going.” Not surprisingly, these were the exceptions. In Toronto, at the party I attended, the police officers let the event go on for an hour, then went into the crowd of four hundred partyers with open knives and (absurdly) began stabbing brightly colored balloons and energetically slashing streamers. As a result, the party degenerated into a series of incoherent cops-are-pigs skirmishes that led the six o’clock news. But Toronto’s crackdown was nothing compared with what happened in other cities. Five thousand people danced on the streets of Geneva, but by midnight the party “had turned into a full scale riot. One car was set alight and thousands of police charged the main encampment, firing tear-gas into the crowd. The demonstrators smashed hundreds of windows, mainly banks and corporate offices, until 5 a.m., causing over half a million pounds in damage.” With protestors anticipating the arrival of world leaders and trade officials for the WTO anniversary, the rioting continued for several days.13
Next time it’ll be bigger …
—RTS E-mail report, Berlin, Germany, May 16, 1998
Sorry for the screw-up but since only about ten of us turned up, we decided, after a walk around town with placards and a drummer, to bugger off to the beach for the rest of the afternoon.
—RTS E-mail report, Darwin, Australia, May 16, 1998
In Prague, three thousand people showed up for the Global Street Party in Wenceslaus Square, where four sound systems were rigged up and twenty deejays were ready to play. Before long, however, a police car drove into the crowd at full speed; the vehicle was surrounded and overturned and once again, the rave became a riot. After organizers officially dissolved the event, three hundred people, mostly teens, marched through the streets of Prague, some of them stopping to hurl rocks and bottles through the plate-glass windows of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. More bottle throwing took place at the Berkeley, California, RTS, as well as several other inane activities including throwing a foam mattress into a bonfire on Telegraph Avenue (creating toxic fumes at an environmental protest —brilliant!) and smashing the window of a local independent bookstore (way to get those corporate bad guys). The event had been billed as a celebration of “art, love and rebellion” but police called it “a riot” — “the biggest in eight years.”14 There were at least twenty-seven arrests in Cambridge, four in Toronto, four in Berkeley, three in Berlin, sixty-four in Prague, dozens in Brisbane and more than two hundred over the days of rioting in Geneva.
In several key cities, the Global Street Party was most certainly not the “fête permanente” that John Jordan had envisioned. However, the immediate international response provoked by nothing more than a few E-mail notices proved that there is both the potential and the desire for a truly global protest against the loss of public space. If anything, the urge to reclaim that space from branded life speaks so directly to so many young people of different nationalities that its greatest liability is the very force of the emotions it inspires.
That emotion was in full sway on May 16 in Birmingham, headquarters of the Global Street Party. The eight most powerful politicians in the world were busy trading hockey jerseys, signing trade agreements and — one cringes —having their own global sing-along to “All You Need Is Love.” Against that backdrop, eight thousand activists who had gathered from all over Britain gained control of a roundabout, hooked up a sound system, played street volleyball and recaptured the RTS spirit of celebration. As in other cities, there were confrontations with the police who surrounded the party with a line three officers deep. This time, however, creative absurdity won out, and instead of rocks and bottles, the weapon of choice was that increasingly popular piece of slapstick ammo: the custard pie. And a new banner —a huge red kite — was hoisted amid the tripods, signs and flags, bearing the names of all the cities where street parties were taking place simultaneously in twenty countries around the world.15 “The resistance,” one sign said, “will be as transnational as capital.”
RTS AGITPROP
The privatization of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion of neighborhood and community that defines the metropolis. Road schemes, business “parks,” shopping developments —all add up to the disintegration of community and the flattening of a locality. Everywhere becomes the same as everywhere else. Community becomes commodity —a shopping village, sedated and under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form. A TV soap “street” or “square” mimicking the area that concrete and capitalism are destroying. The real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through not to be in. It exists only as an aid to somewhere else —through a shop window, billboard or petrol tank.
—London RTS
What I’ve noticed is that all of these events and actions had one thing in common: RECLAIMING. Whether we were reclaiming the road from cars, reclaiming buildings for squatters, reclaiming surplus food for the homeless, reclaiming campuses as a place for protest and theatre, reclaiming our voice from the deep dark depths of corporate media, or reclaiming our visual environment from billboards, we were always reclaiming. Taking back what should have been ours all along. Not “ours” as in “our club” or “our group,” but ours as in the people. All the people. “Ours” as in “not the governments” and “not the corporations.” … We want power given back to the people as a collective. We want to Reclaim the Streets.
—Toronto RTS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BAD MOOD RISING
The New Anticorporate Activism
The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have names and addresses.
—Utah Phillips
How do we tell Steve that his dad owns a sweatshop?!?
—Tori Spelling, as the character Donna on Beverly Hills 90210,
after discovering that her own line of designer clothing was being
manufactured by immigrant women in an L.A. sweatshop,
October 15, 1997
While the latter half of the 1990s has seen enormous growth in the brands’ ubiquity, a parallel phenomenon has emerged on the margins: a network of environmental, labor and human-rights activists determined to expose the damage being done behind the slick veneer. Dozens of new organizations and publications have been founded for the sole purpose of “outing” corporations that are benefiting from repressive government policies around the globe. Older groups, previously focused on monitoring governments, have reconfigured their mandates so that their primary role is tracking violations committed by multinational corporations. As John Vidal, environmental editor of The Guardian, puts it, “A lot of activists are attaching themselves leech-like onto the sides of the bodies corporate.”
This leech-like attachment takes many forms, from the socially respectable to the near-terrori
st. Since 1994, the Massachusetts-based Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy, for instance, has been developing policy alternatives designed to “contest the authority of corporations to govern.” The Oxford-based Corporate Watch, meanwhile, focuses on researching —and helping others to research —corporate crime. (Not to be confused with the San Francisco—based Corporate Watch, which sprang up at about the same time with a nearly identical mission for the U.S.) JUSTICE. DO IT NIKE! is a group of scrappy Oregon activists devoted to haranguing Nike about its labor practices in its own backyard. The Yellow Pages, on the other hand, is an underground international cabal of hackers who have declared war on the computer networks of those corporations that have successfully lobbied to delink human rights from trade with China. “In effect, businessmen started dictating foreign policy,” says Blondie Wong, director of Hong Kong Blondes, a group of Chinese pro-democracy hackers now living in exile. “By taking the side of profit over conscience, business has set our struggle back so far that they have become our oppressors too.”1