Dreaming of a Reality where the past & future meet
the present
A report on the Second Encounter
for Humanity and against Neoliberalism
by
Andrew Flood
Imagine for a moment marching up a hill, lit only
by starlight and a distant bonfire on a hot July night in August, in
Andalucia, near the very tip of southern Spain. Looking at the stars
you point out the red twinkle of Mars to the comrade whose arm you
entwine. She comes from the opposite end of Europe. Behind you lies
an agriculture estate, left derelict by its owner but now seized by
agricultural workers. Behind you hundreds of comrades queue to try
and ford the shallow river in the dark. On either side olive grooves
stretch up the hills in neat rows, the red soil now dark and
cool.
Someone on the road ahead starts singing 'A Las Barricadas' (To
the Barricades) in Spanish, slowly this is taken up by others behind
and ahead, in Italian, Turkish and other languages, sometimes just
hummed or whistled by those who don't know the words. The Spanish
version is familiar to me from a scratchy recording an Italian
comrade passed on to me on tape. The original recording is of 500,000
people singing this working class anthem at a rally of the anarchist
CNT in Barcelona, July 1936, days after the revolution there.
Those on this road have gathered from all over the world, over 50
countries in all. They have temporarily left the struggles in their
own countries to come here to dream of a new reality together. Here
the weather beaten features of a male campesino from Brazil, are
found beside the sunburned features of an 18 year old female squatter
from Berlin. Do you feel you are imagining something impossible,
something from a Hollywood blockbuster or the past? Then add one more
detail, a gasp goes up from those on the road for overhead a shooting
star briefly appears. Were it not for the collective gasp each of us
may have imagined this was a vision we alone were seeing. But no, we
look around and realise we are marching, seeing and dreaming
together.
In our modern world The Power tells us such dreams are no longer
possible. History has ended, there is no dream just the reality of
alienation, work and obedience. Yet the scene above is not from a
film or from a history book, rather it took place on the evening of
August the 2nd 1997. This was the 'Second encounter for Humanity and
against Neoliberalism'. I could describe it in cold, political terms
alone but this would miss the 'for humanity' part and in truth for
every day we discussed organising 'against neoliberalism' we spent
another 'for humanity'. In this text I'm going to try and give a
sense of what it felt to be there. In the future I hope to write some
further pieces taking up the political and organisational points it
threw up
Like the
first
encounter the organisation of the second encounter in itself
deserves a few comments. The encounter was planned and organised on a
European level with three continental meetings, the first in Zurich
in December of 1996, then in
Prague
and finally Barcelona. The encounter was thus organised without a
central committee through co-operation on a continental level
demonstrating the possibility of a different way of organising.
The news of the encounter flowed down many paths in many
languages, It made huge jumps via the internet and fax and smaller
ones as leaflets, pamphlets, on radio shows, in photo exhibitions and
during a million conversations. In these ways the news of the
encounter to be was put into the hands of those marching in Derry in
February 1997 against the massacre of civilians by the British army
there 25 years earlier, but it also reached landless campesinos
occupying land in Brazil, refugees from the Western Sahara in camps
in Southern Algeria, anti-road protesters in Britain, 1st nation
activists in Canada, those running a 'pirate university' for workers
in Turkey, environmental campaigners in Columbia, academics in South
Africa, anarchists in Poland the list goes on and on. It echoed right
down to the villages in the mountains and jungle of the Mexican South
East where the idea of the first encounter had emerged from.
Back from all these places the same message bounced, I want to be
there. It flowed back through postal systems, on horseback, down
phone lines, out of fax machines onto the internet and found its way
to Spain. We are coming. Alongside this came longer messages bearing
titles like
"Resistance
to Neoliberalism: A View from South Africa" as dozens of papers
began to arrive to be translated and circulated.
Flowing to Spain
And so in July people from everywhere began to prepare and to
travel. The came on boats, by plane, by car and bus and train, even a
few by bicycle. They dug out multi-coloured ruck sacks and crammed
them with toothpaste and documents, sleeping bags and videos, they
got out their maps and compasses, took their bearing for Madrid and
started off. As we got closer the streams started to merge until a
river of people arrived from the Metro station to fill the public
buses to San Sebastian de los Reyes a small and dusty town outside
Madrid. On the bus we started to exchange smiles and questions like
'and you..where are you from'
We were all headed to the registration centre at the Leon Felipe
public school, where the Madrid organisers were confronted with a
Tower of Babel of delegates trying to register in dozens of
languages. Under the pressure people were tired and arguments flared
over seemingly pointless bureaucracy or stupid on the spot decisions
(like the brief but quickly defeated one to charge people coming from
the '3rd world' the full subscription rate). But then again this was
a massive international gathering of thousands of people organised
with almost no funds by unpaid volunteers. So let's not dwell too
much on such mistakes but instead learn from them for the next time.
That night we had the first of many fiestas in another nearby
school where we drank our first beers and exchanged our first
experiences. Another area of debate that, the attempt by the
organisers to fiesta us to death. By my reckoning I was at a minimum
of 6 organised fiestas in the course of nine days. As we also spent
two nights travelling between venues, this, added up to a punishing
schedule. Again a point to be consider next time in particular as the
cost of some of these fiestas could have been used to help finance
people travelling from poorer communities.
The inscription continued the following day and that evening the
opening ceremonies were held in the Plaza de Toros a nearby bull
ring. There the two delegates from the
Zapatista
communities read out greetings in which they prophetically warned
us that "As companions in the struggle for harmony in our world, we
say that it is necessary to put up with heat, thirst and tiredness,
like a farmer who puts up with everything because he has faith in his
work in the fields." These were indeed prophetic words for the week
ahead of us.
By now everyone had arrived who was travelling to Madrid but all
were not yet registered. The first of those registering that morning
at 7.00 were passing the survivors limping back from the party the
night before. Then it was onto the buses to transport people to the
massive Embajadores squat in the centre of Madrid where we stored our
bags while we demonstrated through the centre of the city. There were
banners in many languages and once the march started a very
impressive singing of Bella Ciao by the hundreds of Italians who had
come for the encounter.
From the end of the march we returned to Embajadores to eat and
collect our bags before we split up for the five different locations
in the Spanish state the tables were being held in. I set out for the
train station alongside others heading north to Barcelona for the
economics and culture subtables. In the station itself we sung and
chanted as we waited for our train to be ready. We travelled
overnight on a specially chartered train to Barcelona.
Arriving at 8.00 in the morning we first formed a cordon through
the train station for the 'security' of the Zapatista delegates who
had travelled with us. The we marched in a long column through the
streets, at one point passing under a squat from the roof of which
large exploding fireworks were being fired in welcome. This of course
brought the neighbours out on their balconies along the route to
wonder what this motley, tired and unwashed sample of the worlds
population were up to. In a local Sports hall we were fed and
arrangements for the week were explained to us. At this point the two
Zapatista delegates addressed us before we split up into our
respective sub-mesas and travelled to the squats, schools or
community centres they were located in.
Many of us felt Barcelona was a fitting location for part of the
second encounter. It was the centre of the
anarchist
revolution that had swept much of Spain some 61 years earlier, a
revolution that in the last few years had become a point of
redefinition for sections of the left. Some of the Italian and
Spanish activists related how they had marked this convergence of the
past and the present that morning
"...at the Le Pertuse frontier post on the
Spanish/French border, a frontier post through which members of the
International Brigades and Spanish exiles were forced to flee after
the Civil War. Here there is a monument which records their passage,
a pyramid-shaped monument with a broken apex. The Catalan, Italian
and French comrades already present in Barcelona that day brought
banners... and placed them at the foot of the monument."
Starting work
The information sub-table of the culture mesa consisted of a
hundred people meeting as guests of the Ateneu Popular
(Popular/peoples centre) in the Nou Barris suburb of Barcelona. The
first and only item on our agenda was how we were going to conduct
the discussions. Put 100+ activists in a room with this alone in
front of them and your asking for trouble, and indeed this resulted
in an afternoon of discussion on whether we should meet as one large
group or not and the following morning what areas of discussion each
group should have.
We came up with quite a novel solution which recognised the
different reasons people had in coming to the encounter and the
particular needs they had. There were three topics of discussion
- 1. A critique of the existing (neoliberal) media
- 2. Our experiences of alternative media
- 3. Constructing a the network of communications between
struggle
Rather then each group taking one of these the first group of
around 25 people discussed 1, 2 and 3. The second group of around 40
people discussed 2 and 3 and the third group also of around 25 people
discussed 3 only. This meant those who had come for developing an
analysis or an education could join the first group while those of us
in a rush to construct something practical joined the C group.
Although it wasn't obvious at the time the process of reaching these
decisions was in itself very useful in drawing the group of 100 or so
together and defining the purpose for which we had come.
Over the next three days I managed to send brief reports out onto
the internet, one of the strange features of this mesa was how many
of the delegates sleeping on mats in school halls were equipped with
portable computers, digital cameras and other playthings associated
with the rich and famous. But with these we succeeded in putting up
on the spot accounts and pictures of the encounter in process. The
sub-group I worked with dealt with the issue of how to form the
network of information between struggles. The call for this network
had emerged from the previous encounter in Chiapas and was contained
in the
closing
statement.
"That we will make a network of communication among
all our struggles and resistance's. An intercontinental network of
alternative communication against neoliberalism, an intercontinental
network of alternative communication for humanity.
This intercontinental network of alternative communication will
search to weave the channels so that words may travel all the roads
that resist. This intercontinental network of alternative
communication will be the medium by which distinct resistance's
communicate with one another.
This intercontinental network of alternative communication is not
an organising structure, nor has a central head or decision maker,
nor does it have a central command or hierarchies. We are the
network, all of us who speak and listen. "
The group developing on this started with people from the USA,
Denmark, Barcelona, Italy, Mexico, France, Ireland and Turkey and we
were soon joined by others including people from Belgium and
Columbia. Most but not all of these people had experience in
communication, from Pirate Radio and small circulation magazines to
regional TV stations. We decided to work in English and Spanish as
everyone there had a working knowledge of one of these languages.
This seems a fitting place to comment on the purpose of the
encounter. Too often such meetings are designed and judged only in
terms of concrete written outcomes. So everything becomes streamlined
to reach these outcomes and commonly democratic process goes out the
window. This may occur directly by having a pre-set and rigid agenda
and eliminating all discussion off this or in an indirect way by not
allowing time for translation and understanding of what is being
said.
It was a strength (if perhaps also at times a source of
frustration) that at the information table at least this was not
allowed to happen. Despite the fact that we were some 100 people
speaking many different languages and from widely varied experiences,
our discussions aimed at generating if not a consensus then at least
the formation of a question to be voted on that was reached by
seeking consensus. Perhaps using the more traditional way we would
have emerged at the end of the week with a massive blueprint of
intermeshing cogs in a global information network but like so many
grandiose documents before it this would have represented another
paper tiger destined to spontaneously combust in the heat of any real
struggle.
What we discussed
We spent much of our time deciding what needed to be discussed,
this in itself of course highlighted many vital questions. In time I
hope some of the detailed agreement reached in these discussion will
be made available on the net, for we made some effort to produce
agreed documents/statements. What follows is a sketch of the
discussion taken from notes and reports I kept at the time.
A. What is the purpose of the network
- How can we make sure the news/information we transmit is
reliable, what sort of guidelines can we have to also ensure it is
relevant?
- How can we prevent the exclusion of women and other groups
from the network?
We did succeed in producing an agreed statement of purpose after
much debate.
B. The Internal organisation of the network
- Should we be based only on local media, is this the same as
alternative media?
- How can we have solidarity between different information
networks, how can we make our information reliable?
- Should we have a logo to identify the network and if so which
logo?
- How can we finance this work?
- How can the network make 'expert' opinion and analysis
available to any and all of the nodes.
- How can we defend the network?
Much of the discussion around the internal organisation of the
network took place in a visual manner that is not easy to relate in
words. We started off by rejecting the traditional pyramid structure
of news media where local sources feed up to region level, which feed
to national and perhaps the global level before news trickled down
again to other regions. In discussing what a network without a centre
could look like but in recognising that some people have more time
and resources to dedicate to the flow of information then others, we
came to use the human brain as an analogy. Here the many nodes have
major paths that carry information between them but it is possible
for any two nodes to form a connection and for any connection to
improve in speed and the amount of information it can carry if this
is needed. Therefore many minor paths also exist. There is also a two
way flow of information and feedback on the information that is sent.
This image flowed out of what the network already is in practise.
We considered for instance the path a communique from Marcos might
take after he has written it in the heights of some Ceiba tree in the
mountains of the Mexican south east. Perhaps it goes on horseback to
the nearest settlement, from there by car to San Cristo'bel where it
is typed onto a computer, translated and suddenly takes more paths,
perhaps by fax to newspapers and solidarity groups on the one hand,
on the other it jumps onto the internet and runs down the telephone
lines to listserv's like
Chiapas95.
Here it replicates hundreds of times and make its way onto a desktop
in Ireland where it jumps onto web pages and more lists but also gets
printed out and stuck up as a poster in a bookshop or reproduced and
distributed in the
Mexico
Bulletin. Simultaneously it has arrive in Istanbul, where it is
also printed out and travels by bus to some distant town and a union
meeting. Multiply this path by thousands and consider all the
alternatives and we see the network already exists without a centre,
indeed the different nodes have not only never met but can be unaware
of each others existence.
So rather then invent and plan a new network our task was to see
what existed and see how we could, in a few days develop this
existence and improve the flow of information.
C. What methods of communication should we use.
There was a tendency to confuse the idea of the network with the
internet and many people there had either no internet access or very
poor internet access. So while the internet may form one of the major
fibres of information flow it could only be one among many which
would include printed words, fax, phone, radio and horseback
messengers. We also needed to be open to use new forms of
communication and indeed one of the most ambitious papers at our
table called for the setting up of a global TV/Radio satellite
channel.
Outside of the physical methods of communication we also discussed
other problems with communication.
- How do we minimise language and cultural barriers?
- How do we prevent a flood of useless information which drowns
the useful content in a sea of words?
- Can we have different layers of information so more
information can always be obtained from summaries?
- What sort of feedback mechanisms are possible?
D. Action
- How can we show solidarity between the different nodes of
communication?
- How can we develop the many media forms?
- Can we construct a network of exchange of people so those
travelling can come into contact with local activists.
- How do we prepare to defend the nodes of our network and the
network itself from the repression which will inevitable follow
success?
- How can we arrange an exchange of skills within the network so
that people can be trained where this is needed?
One problem with this discussion was the different expectations
people had of the network and of what was possible. Some had clearly
come with the idea that at the end of the week we would have a
detailed plan of a new network of communication and how it could be
put into operation. But the network we have described is an organic
one already in existence and already growing. Our role was more to
begin a description of it and come up with ways to encourage its
growth.
In the course of the week in Barcelona we also mobilised in
support of one of the squats where the encounter was being held. In a
piece of blinding stupidity the council had announced its intention
to evict this in the middle of the week. They actually backed down on
the day of the demonstration itself so this became a
victory march through the Hospitalet
district complete with Samba bands, stilt walkers and fire jugglers.
An enduring image from the demonstration is one of a Brazilian
carrying the flag of the MST, the movement co-ordinating the
occupation of farmland by landless campesino's on this demonstration
in support of the occupation of a building in one of the big
industrial cities of Europe.
Another highlight of the week was the showing of a video of the
Milan train
occupations. These occurred in June of this year when 4,000
Italians occupied two trains in Milan and succeeded in travelling
right across Europe to the demonstration against the EU summit in
Amsterdam, focal point of the European march against unemployment.
The video was produced by Italian autonomists from a social centre in
Rome that we were thrilled to learn was in an old military fort
complete with a castle and a drawbridge. Both of these were two among
many examples of how the encounter was bringing people from different
traditions of struggle into contact with each other so that we could
draw inspiration and learn from each others struggles.
Outside of the formal sessions, a constant one to one exchange of
experiences was also taking place, as we met over breakfast, dinner
and lunch or for a drink in the bar. There, criticisms of the
organisation of the encounter were mulled over, too many parties, too
much travel, not enough attention on subsidising the expenses of
people from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Alongside this were the
more personal experiences of struggle in our respective countries and
our individual experiences of organisations involved in those
struggles. These threw up many, many political issues, new
perspectives and new ways of looking at old problems. The value of
this sort of exchange cannot be over estimated, by seeing the
struggles of others we come to understand out struggles better. They
also created the conditions for new friendships to form. The
hospitality at the Nou Barris Atenou Populare was extraordinary, our
lunches were not only excellent but accompanied by enough wine to
suspect the intelligence agencies had come together with a new and
cunning plan to sabotage our deliberations.
The end of our period in Nou Barris came all too soon. We rushed
at the end to get as much down on paper as we could, our group
fragmenting into sub groups to draft statements and then in a final
session debating these into a form everyone could feel happy with.
This involved many compromises, mostly consisting of looking for new
ways to express old ideas so they avoided the jargonistic language
associated with one or the other political tradition. Then the three
sub-groups of the culture-information table came back together and in
the report back we discovered that at the end we had all arrived by
different paths to very similar conclusions.
Goodbye Barcelona
Our period in Barcelona ended with all the sub mesas gathering in
a public park to read back their conclusions and with yet another
fiesta before departing for Andalucia. I spent much of my time
rushing around finding people I'd met in Madrid and asking them how
their tables had gone. A common overall pattern emerged of the first
day being spent in a frustrating debate over how to organise the
discussion followed by a few days of discussion that was only really
getting going before it had to end. Facing a long journey right down
and across to Spain many people expressed reservations about the
amount of time being used up by internal travel in Spain. Time which
could have been used to give another day or more worth of discussion.
Many people had chosen not to make the long journey to El Indiano
so this was also the time to say good-bye to both old and recent
friends. The rest of us, carrying bags of fruit and sandwiches as
well as 5 litre bottles of water for the long, hot journey south set
out for the train station where true to (recent) tradition we passed
the time singing and chanting. Rumours were flying at this stage, the
journey was 18 hours, it was 50 degrees in Cadiz, we would have to
walk to El Indiano from the train station etc, as we boarded the
train, grabbed carriages and settled down for the night and the long
journey across the Spanish state.
Not everyone was as sensible. Some took refuge in the 'dining'
carriage where throughout the night and into the next day vast
amounts of liquid refreshment were consumed to the sound of
revolutionary songs from every corner of the globe. If the truth was
told, by the early hours of the mornings the songs were becoming
shorter as word were forgotten but the spirit was there. It is
probable that on that long train journey south many friendships
became more 'involved' as kindred spirits living in this temporary
and mobile 'free world' reached out to each other in the dark of one
hundred compartments. All through that night and into the next day
the train rolled south and as the sun rose so did the heat and it
kept rising and rising as further south we went into a land of red
soil, sunflowers and olive trees stretching into the distance.
The journey took 20 hours by train and another 30 minutes or so by
coach to the small town of Puerto Serrano. Here we were to stay for
the night in public schools and our arrival in the town was like that
of locusts, as hot and thirsty from the journey, we descended on the
local kiosks and shops to strip them of ice cream and everything
cold. Here too we ran into that most humorous form of (dis)
organisational chaos in the form of two gates each guarded by a large
bearded men shouting at us to go to the other one. Eventually
something was sorted out and the thousands of a activists flooded
into the schools and their grounds to stake out spaces for tents and
sleeping mats before heading for the showers and the legend of a
local swimming pool.
That evening there was the inevitable fiesta. We formed into a
long column outside the schools and marched there, although
definitely more of a manifestation then a demonstration. The locals
turned out in force to watch the world pass by. At one point an old
man stood outside the house, both arms above his head, cheering those
marching by. From his age and obvious joy we speculated that here was
a participant whose eyes had seen the struggle that Spain represented
to so many of us, the Spanish revolution of 1936. We were after all
in the olive groves of Andalucia where a previous generation had
fought and died for their vision of a new world.
An end, a beginning or a process?
The final day of the encounter confirmed the rumour that we were
to walk to El Indiano, a agricultural estate squatted by the union
'Sindicato de Obreros del Campo'. We were assured however that if we
rose early to miss the sun the 3km walk would not be difficult. So up
we got and off we marched being passed at one point by a JCB digger
its front bucket crammed with several punks who had hitched a lift
from a local. Revolutionary Spain briefly met Mad Max on that road.
The end was an anti-climax, throughout the long, hot day each
table reported back in three languages, Italian, Spanish and English.
This was an idea that had been lifted directly from the last
encounter and this time around it worked out even worse than then.
Basically each statement started with a neoliberalism is generally
bad, its bad for the issue that concerned our table because blah,
blah, blah and we need to create and alternative. The wiser or lazier
amongst us spotted this early on and vanished down to the river for
the day where to the neglect of out revolutionary duty we made the
most of the sun, the water and the surrounding nature. Which is not
to say no work was done, we choose to spend the day exchanging
experiences (gossiping) and making links (cementing friendships). In
the evening we returned to hear the closing words of the Zapatista
delegates before making our way back along the road, this is where
the shooting star appeared and this account begin.
From here there is little to tell or there is everything to tell,
the 2nd encounter ended but the encounter for humanity and against
neoliberalism goes on. Each returning activist is telling this story
in their own words, in their own language to their friends, their
organisations and within their struggles. From there perhaps many
more will take interest and come to see the need for
"... a collective network of all our particular
struggles and resistance's. An intercontinental network of resistance
against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for
humanity.
This intercontinental network of resistance, recognising
differences and acknowledging similarities, will search to find
itself with other resistance's around the world. This
intercontinental network of resistance will be the medium in which
distinct resistance's may support one another. This intercontinental
network of resistance is not an organising structure; it doesn't have
a central head or decision maker; it has no central command or
hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist."
We have fulfilled the promise of the first encounter through the
act of meeting again, let us continue this meeting and exchange into
our future, for humanity and against neoliberalism.
More articles by
Andrew Flood including
On
Revolutionary Organisation