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Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics 277
J18 overXowed with an inWnitely careful and chaotic process of face-to-face
meetings, grapevine communication, cut-and-paste production, and early
activist adventures in electronic networking. An information booklet on the
global operations of the City was prepared, under the name “Squaring Up
to the Square Mile.” It included a map distinguishing ten different categories
of Wnancial institutions. Posters, stickers, tracts, and articles were distributed
locally and internationally, including Wfty thousand metallic gold
Xyers with a quote from the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem saying “to work
for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing
for general insurrection.” A spoof newspaper was handed out massively on
the day of the protest, for free, under the title Evading Standards; the cover
showed a dazed trader amid piles of shredded paper, with a headline reading
“global market meltdown.” But most importantly, a call had been sent
round the world, urging people to intervene in their local Wnancial centers
on June 18, the opening day of the G8 (Group of Eight, leading economic
nations) summit held that year in Cologne. A movie trailer had even been
spliced together, with footage from previous worldwide protests and a cavernous,
horror-Xick voice at the end pronouncing “June 18th: Coming to a
Wnancial center near you.”
This event was imbued with the history of the British social movement
Reclaim the Streets, along with other activist groups such as Earth
First!, Class War, and London Greenpeace (a local ecoanarchist organization).
RTS is a “dis-organization.” It emerged from the antiroads movement
of the early 1990s, Wghting against the freeway programs of the Thatcherite
government. The protestors used direct action techniques, tunneling under
construction sites, locking themselves to machinery. It was body art with a
vengeance. References to earlier struggles emerged from this direct experience,
including a 1973 text by the radical French philosopher André Gorz
denouncing “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar.” 8 The year 1994 was a
turning point for this movement, in more ways than one. It saw a summerlong
campaign against the M11 highway link, which involved squatting the
condemned residential district of Claremont Road and literally inhabiting
the streets, building scaffolding, aerial netting, and rooftop outposts to prolong
the Wnal resistance against the wrecking balls and the police. But it was
also the year of the Criminal Justice Act and Public Order Act of 1994 (UK),
which gave British authorities severe repressive powers against techno parties
in the open countryside, and politicized young music-lovers by force.
After that, the ravers and the antiroads protestors decided they would no
longer wait for the state to take the initiative. They would reclaim the streets
in London, and party at the heart of the motorcar’s dominion.
The Wrst RTS party was held in the spring of 1995 in Camden