## mail vom 20.10.04 weitergeleitet/fwd by LPA Berlin [lpa@free.de]

Statement from the WSF list:

To what the previous contributor wrote, let me add my personal = experience.

First of all, one general remark: compared to Florence and Paris, the = London SF was by far the more policed one. I was sort of shocked by = that. I mean, maybe it is a British cultural tradition, I don't know, = but I am not accustomed to have policemen walking around and shooting = with photo and video cameras anything that moved, without anybody being = bothered by that.

Now for the Trafalgar events. I spent most of Sunday evening outside the = Charing Cross police station, along with other friends and comrades, = trying to show moral and practical solidarity to the arrested, and more = particularly to Konstantinos Ioannou, a guy from the Antiauthoritarian = Movement of Thessaloniki. During all this time, not one person from the = organising committee was there or did anything to help these people as = far as I know. This shocked me too at the time. Now I know it shouldn't, = since, as I see, the SWP practically approves of these arrests as it = labels these people violent and dangerous anarchists.

[SWF = Socialist Workers Party; LPA]

Let's get something straight. Konstantinos, for one, is certainly no = violent "black blocker". I had met him Friday morning at the Tottenham = Campus autonomous space and he told me he was planning to do a workshop = on Gilles Deleuze - not to throw Molotov cocktails or anything like that. = He was arrested during the King's Cross events, on Sunday afternoon. The = accusation against him is "disorderly conduct": he allegedly spat on a = policeman. You can tell that this is one of the accusations the police = usually invent in order to justify otherwise unjustified arrests. Monday = morning he was brought before a judge who released him on bail, without = any fine or financial guarantee imposed on him.

While waiting at Charing Cross, about 11 o'clock, I met there Javier = Ruiz from the London Indymedia collective, who was also arrested but = then released later in the evening, and had a short talk with him. He = was absolutely positive that a person from the organisers had asked the = cops to arrest him at Trafalgar square and told us that he was going to = make a detailed written account on all that and publish it. Maybe he = already did, I don't know. [He did; LPA]

Let me add something: according to Alex Callinicos, Javier and other = people tried to "violently interrupt the speeches" at the Trafalgar = square after the end of the march. This may be so, or not; but before = that, more importantly, may I ask: why were there any speeches at all in = the first place? If I am not mistaken, the decision of the ESF was not = to have any speeches after the march, just a concert.

ESF UK PLC

I don't know when I first began to feel the first faint buzz of conversion - perhaps it was listening to Alex Callinicos in the Great Hall on Saturday afternoon damning the imperialist war-mongers, spectacles slipping down his nose, stumbling over his words in excitement and clad (rather suitably, I thought at the time) in a black shirt.

Or maybe it was hearing the high-octane pitch of Faustino Bertinotti, calling for a Europe of peace and justice, a Europe of equals in which = war would be a thing of the past, a Europe that wasn't for sale.

Either way, the road to Damascus began to open for me.

I'd been finding the ant-war rally a sad, depressing and angry experience; here was Alex proposing the RESPECT coalition and George Galloway in particular as a new, exciting and ethical political party of the left. Not a dozen meters away in the same hall, there were groups of women from Iraq campaigning for the victims of torture and the disappeared of Saddam. Wasn't George Galloway the man we saw in 'that' video, cringing and fawning in front of Saddam, praising his bravery and courage, even whilst Iraqis were being tortured and disappeared? Wasn't it George Galloway who'd received money from that same Saddam through various Iraqi 'charities'? How could he still be posing as the champion of the Iraqi people?

Alex himself swore blind that the Socialist Workers Party was a model of grass-roots democracy - I wondered, is this the same SWP that colluded with the SA and GLA to exclude the other UK groups in Paris when bidding for London? The same SWP which declared through Jonathan Neale that local social forums weren't 'representative', and sought to exclude and marginalize the ones that weren't set up by the SWP? The SWP that had already secured agreement on the Alexandra Palace as a venue for the ESF UK even before there was an ESF UK? The list went on.. How could this be?

Pondering this depressing reality however didn't calm the excitement I felt rising inside me, speech after speech: "democracy. peace.. Justice.. Equality", on and on in my brain in some mad, hypnotic rhythm.

And then I got it.

Just as the retired Israeli supreme court judge Naim Cohen said that a jew was anyone who said they were, it was a question of will and perception - in the same way that the national socialist german workers party of the 1930s (the nazis) were socialist because they said they were, so the socialist workers party is a workers party because they say they are, Alex Callinicos is a democrat because he says he is, and Redmond O'Neill is a socialist even though he gets paid over 3110,000 a year as a consultant to Ken Livingstone. They are what they claim to be, because identity comes through will.

By the time Sunday came I could watch the blue-jacketed Alexandra Palace security and the police confronting my erstwhile colleagues of the truly radical left with equanimity, even a smile. What did it matter if the Marxist-Leninism espoused by Alex is really about as radical as tucking = your shirt into your underpants, or that the Socialist Worker paper is as rigid and doctrinaire in its writings as the Daily Telegraph? What did it matter if the bidding and organizing process of ESF UK had been run roughly along the same lines as the recent referendum run by Lukashenko in Belarus?

So I say along with Lenin that the vanguard of the revolution is quite entitled to use the violence of the state to advance the dictatorship of the proletariat! Clearly, property can't be private if it's at the service of the Revolution, and so the ESF Trading Regulations are a legitimate arm of the insurrectionary proletariat...

As the sun came up clear and bright on my Pauline conversion, I found myself standing on the steps of the Alexandra Palace along with my comrades of the Socialist Workers Party shouting: "Lay on with those truncheons, you boys in blue! Clear this anarchist rabble out of the path of the leaders! I'm with the Revolution, and we've got an empire to build!"

Sorry, but this statement made by mr. Callinicos is not going to be very helpfull, since it only ads more false information to the description of what has happened in London in the past weekend.

And above all it makes some very unjust accusations that will only highten the tensions between different currents.

First of all there was no such thing as a 'black block'. There were angry demonstrators, after friends of them had been unjustly arrested without any reason at all. All they wanted was that this news would be told on the stage, but nobody was given any access to the stage, that was being protected by SWP/stop the war-guards. A scuffle broke out, people became more angry, police moved in, started to arrest more people (some reports say; on advice of SWP, but others state police operated on their own initiative).

Nobody wanted to "destroy" any event. There was no 'black block', the people involved where form very diverse background.

The same goes for the description of the action on saturday evening, when a huge crowd entered the FSE without registering and paying. They interrupted the session going on indeed, but not because it was about anti-fascism (as Callinicos tries to make believe) but because Ken Livingstone was the speaker at the event, as you know mayor of London and prominent figure of the Labour Party. Again there was some shoving and pushing, from both sides it has to be added. Some reports state that the main squirmish started from the side of the ESF-organisers who wanted to prevent a representant of Bables to speak out through the microphone. Also good to know is that after 30 minutes the session went on as planned (!).

As somebody remarks in indymedia-UK, previously there had been a session that was disrupted in it's totality by unrelated 'protesters' (because they didn't like what one of the speekers wanted to tell them about Iraq, see

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ uk_news/ story/ 0,3604,1330098,00.html) but this does not seem to bother mr. Callinicos at all...!

If you want to label the protesters anything, you might call them anarchists, not 'black block' although i'm sure many people will not feel represented by that label. Many of them participated in (parts) of the ESF as well as in alternative parallel programs.

For a clearer view of all the events people might want to use the UK Indymedia website (as long as the FBI allows it to be operational):

http://www.indymedia.org.uk You'll have to surf a bit through different postings, as different people are writing their views.

In fact the message mr. Callinicos has posted is a good example of why so many tension has risen before and during the ESF. Many activists do not trust the notorious avantgardist and 'entrist' strategy of an organisation like the SWP and their satellites in other countries. I don't always agree with all the criticism of the 'anarchists', which is often too easy and can be quite sectarian too. But the behaviour of a group like the SWP is of much more threat to the forum-network (it's function and content) than that of their critics. Like it or not, if you want the Forums to keep existing, you should take that criticism in account.

21.10.2004

LPA-EN