Front: 10 pictures of global resistance (98cm long 6cm wide leaflet !!) with text
We are more powerful than they can possibly imagine
Back :
“If you listen carefully to the celebrating voices, those of the rich and the powerful in their corporate offices and government buildings, you can pick up a nervous undertone.
If you watch the policymakers closely, you may notice that the smiles are often thin and the hands that hold champagne glasses sometimes twitch, involuntarily.
If you listen even more carefully, you can discover why. In the background you can hear another set of voices – those from below – far, far more numerous. These are voices the powerful do not want to hear, but they are having a harder and harder time ignoring them.”
From 6th-8th July 2005, the G8, the rulers of eight of the worlds most powerful nations, return to Europe for their major annual Summit at Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, Scotland.
Groups and movements across Europe, involved in the Peoples' Global Action (PGA) network, have called for a global day of action against the G8 and all it represents on the opening day of the Summit. It is a call for people to converge in Scotland to disrupt the Summit, and for action to be taken simultaneously in villages, towns and cities world-wide. In the UK, organising and coordination by dozens of groups has begun through Dissent!, an anti-capitalist network planning radical resistance to the G8 Summit and building alternatives to the current social order.
In 1975, amidst a global oil crisis and a general upsurge in struggle, the G8 was born. Its intended role was as a kind of crisis manager for capitalism, a forum in which consensus could be constructed on issues of importance to global capital: drugs, migration, terrorism, security… A tool for the creation of stability: a stability of exploitation.
Everywhere we look around us we see the impacts and effects of a system to which the G8 attempts to bring longevity. A system based upon the separation of the majority of the world’s people from their means of subsistence, only to sell their right to survival back to them in return for ever increasing proportions their day. A system that wages war, creates famine and destroys ecologies so that it – a global order under which none of us can live our lives to their true potential – can survive. A system which is resisted daily, everywhere.
Some of the moments in which resistance to this system have been most spectacular have been in the acts of disobedience and direct action which have occurred around international summits: in Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Genoa, Evian and elsewhere. These mobilisations have had enormous repercussions, creating lasting connections and a sense of global solidarity between previously fragmented local struggles. A global ‘movement of movements’, historically unprecedented in many respects, has emerged at a phenomenal speed.
But how can this movement develop, growing in strength, numbers and potential? How do we, as a global movement, want to greet the G8 when they meet in their sumptuous Scottish Hotel surrounded by golf courses? To move forward we need to be careful not to fulfil the roles which are expected of us. We need to evolve and innovate, to take ‘them’ and ourselves by surprise and reveal the creativity and dynamism at the heart of our movements. Plans are already afoot for building inspiring convergence spaces, self-managed zones which can house and feed thousands whilst providing a living example of leaderless, free and ecological community. Some are planning on working together with groups based around Gleneagles, creating and developing social and ecological initiatives in the area, others are developing new blockade techniques. There are even rumours of a huge, rebellious clown army mobilising, and of a ‘peoples’ golf tournament.
What do you want to see happen? Get together with others, start planning how you want to be involved in this process and get in touch with the Dissent! Network. If we co-operate and co-ordinate we can start building a new world. It has never been so vital, or so possible.
Dissent! Network
infog82005@yahoo.com
Join the Dissent email
list, by sending an email to
resistg82005-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
- For international co-ordination join the
international e-list: email
international-g82005-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
Peoples' Global Action: www.agp.org
Info on social movements from around the world
Independent media: www.indymedia.org
News, as it happens, from the streets