Who are the ‘G8’? And why should we protest against them?

The G8, the summit of the heads of government of 8 of the world’s most powerful countries (well, really 7 of the most powerful ones ‘- the US, Japan, the UK, France, Italy, Canada and Germany – plus Russia) will be held in the UK, in an as of yet undisclosed location. In the summer of 2003, some people in the UK began planning a mobilisation around and against this event, and came together in the network ‘DISSENT’. This text arose in the context of discussions over we felt it was important to begin mobilising against the G8, but it is not an expression of the network’s opinions. Rather, it is my own rambling attempt to answer the difficult question of what good will come from yet another mobilisation against a summit of the rich and powerful, after so many of these mobilisations fizzled out in mediocre marches, or erupted in set-piece confrontations which left many activists in jail, and radical movements socially marginalized. Also, it has been suggested by some after the recent wave of summit protests that focussing only on big, spectacular events like summits tends towards obscuring the fact that fighting global capitalism isn’t simply a matter of attacking some big institutions (like the WTO, or the IMF), but of challenging capitalism as a social relation that defines much of our everyday lives. So this is simply one attempt to explain why I think we should continue taking actions against summits – because summits matter for capital, and because our actions against them matter.

First of, who or what are the G8?

As I said, they are a loose organisation, meeting once a year at a summit, of 8 of the world’s most powerful countries. They first started meeting in the mid 70s, when things hadn’t been going too well for (mostly Western) global fat cats: starting with colonised countries gaining their independence in the early 60s, the world had been shaken by uprisings in the ‘developing world’ against their former, or new, masters – Vietnam was only the most publicised of these; in the West, the social unrest of the late 60s and early 70s, exploded into and contributed to a growing economic crisis, and when in 1974 the global oil crisis seemed close to snuffing out the lights of global economic growth, the global ruling classes lost their way, they simply didn’t know how to respond.

Thus were the G7 (then without the Soviet Union) born: as a place where the world’s top politicians could hob-nob, with each other, and with representatives of global capital. The goal: to find ways out of the social and economic crisis engulfing the world, ways consistent, of course, with them retaining their power and privilege. This point is kind of important: while neoliberal ideologues often tell us that markets work best when nobody messes with them, they actually tend to generate crises, and these crises don’t resolve themselves, but have to be resolved by people, by people who act together under one common banner, with one solution in mind. And this is the crucial function of these kinds of global summits: to provide a space where global elites can meet each other, and together develop ways out of crises, which are then sold back to us as the only way to go. Summits create unity among the global ruling classes, and are therefore important institutions that organise and facilitate global capitalism.

This general function is almost more important than what ‘actually’ happens at such a G8 summit, where participants – again, primarily from Western elites, with some fig-leaf delegates from the global South, or maybe even the odd NGO that has lost its way in the corridors of power – discuss the particular issues of concern to them: global economic management (one summit declared, after pressure from a variety of movements, a debt-relief programme, which has hardly provided and benefits to developing countries), international trade, energy supply, and of course, particularly popular nowadays, such ‘global threats’ as ‘terrorism’. From these discussions, they develop positions that are intended to act as guidance for the ‘international community’, defining issues as well as possible solutions; respond to sudden crises and shocks; and give guidance to other global economic institutions (the IMF, etc.).

Now, why should be protest against them?

That seems fairly obvious, then, doesn’t it: if these kinds of summits are so important for global capitalism, then the main thing we can do is to organise some kinds of actions that will directly disrupt and maybe even entirely shut down the meeting. This way our fat cat friends don’t get to hang out and devise their devious ‘solutions’ to the current global (economic, social, political…) crisis. The problem is, of course, that after a couple of years of being faced with sometimes pretty militant protests at their summits, our enemies have figured out ways to police these events in ways that makes it, while not impossible, very difficult for us to effectively disrupt the meeting. I’m not saying it’s impossible for us to so – only that it is sufficiently likely that we won’t stop the meeting from going ahead that we need to have a justifications for our actions that doesn’t rely entirely on us hoping to actually disrupt the meeting.

But this problem – that we almost certainly won’t be able to shut down the meeting – is actually not as big a problem as it might seem: basically, the function of events like a G8 summit is highly ‘symbolic’, that is, while they are important in order to construct unity among global ruling classes, they also represent, demonstrate that unity to us, ‘their’ citizens. Once consensus among the elites has been reached, we are meant to believe that everything is fine, that the crisis is being handled by the relevant authorities, and that the way they have chosen to deal with it is the only reasonable way: nothing expresses this better than Maggie’s famous ‘There Is No Alternative’.

In this light, it becomes important that we continue the recent ‘tradition’ of actions against summits, because, whatever practical or ‘direct’ impact our actions might have in terms of disrupting/stopping the summit, effective and visible disruptive action shows that dissent exists; that, contrary what we’re asked to believe, we don’t think that the authorities dealing with the global crisis are the right ones to do that, we don’t think that the ways they chose to deal with it are the right ways. This was what made Seattle so important: not just that the direct action there disrupted the meeting for a day, but the protests finally shattered the previously widespread belief that there was simply no relevant opposition to neoliberalism. If the function of summits, then, is to show that everything is fine and dandy in the global political economy, then the function of our actions must be to demonstrate the opposite, to show that there is dissent, that it is fundamental, and, if need be, outside the law.

This leads me to one final point: why is it important to show that there is dissent by engaging in mass demonstrations and actions? Many of us in the UK direct action scene like to believe that what we do exhausts itself in mass protest (the spectres of one too many boring march from A to B surely motivate this feeling), but more about what we do with our affinity groups, at a local level, at the smaller scale. But: often there is simply no political space at the local level for our alternative projects, if it seems as though there is total, unanimous agreement with the projects of global elites, with the powers that be. What is the significance of a radical social centre, or producers’ coop, if they are seen as simply isolated instances of marginal(ised) protest, if there is not a wider critique within which they can be understood?

This is where mass actions against summits become important, even for those of us who think that their primary concerns lie at the local, the small-scale level: they disrupt the smooth construction of global consensus, they show that there is dissent, that there are other ideas about what the world(s) should look like – and by doing that, they create the space at the local level for us to do the kind of projects we want to do, local, autonomous, and radically democratic. Without these kinds of projects, big mobilisations become empty and meaningless, simple manifestations of symbolic dissent without any alternative to the current world order in mind; but these projects in turn become invisible, and thus politically irrelevant, if they exist in isolation from a wider social sense of protest and dissent. The choice is not for the small scale, or against it, for the big action, or against it: without either, we are condemned to remain inconsequential, marginal, and ultimately defeated.