Reclaim the Streets - what happened??

[Taxamo Welf]

ha ha ha laugh it up mr 'the boss just came in and served us canapes and we've been on the beer since 2' :x

 

[Taxamo Welf]

But it also likes to party sometimes.

see now that *would* be in the remit of RTS. You could book yourself a really edgy and real event that would put you head and shoulders above the competition in terms of social talking-point capital - a market which needs to be cornered if your product will identify with today's post political youth.

Just say your about the whales or something.

If any ad types are reading this,i offer my services. I can throw you a riot for less than £80,000 or a cool mil if you want clowns.

Clowns are extra.

 

[kyser_soze]

ha ha ha laugh it up mr 'the boss just came in and served us canapes and we've been on the beer since 2' :x

Tax I haven't worked in ads for about 3 years now, please try and be current.

Besides, go back 500 years to before capitalism and you'd still find a rich minoroty opressing the majority. Go back 2000 years and you still get the same thing. Until someone, somewhere works out why large scale human societies gravitate toward hierarchies not a single thing will change, because so far no one has come up with a convincing argument for how 6bn people can self manage without hierarchy of some kind.

 

[Taxamo Welf]

sorry there was meant to be a smiley there you touchy cunt i was only kidding you

why, what do you do now, care work?

(genuine question actually - been ages... come to my night in march )

 

[free spirit]

Interesting post, esp given what ShaneC says about the roots of RTS, and refreshingly honest about the perception held by the w/c in the UK.

So essentially while it was clearly a good party time, fuck all was actually achieved in terms of changing the UKs car culture or the situation of the w/c in the UK.

woah there... I never said fuck all was actually achieved.

there's a hell of a lot of stuff that was in the RTS manifesto's that is now pretty much mainstream thinking, car free days, cycle lanes, priority for public transport, moving away from the dominance of the car and accepting that we can't just go on building more and more roads to acomodate every car journey everybody might want to make. RTS essentially set the scene IMO for ken's congestion charge, and ramping up of london's public transport. I'd also bet serious money that if you were to do a survey of people now implementing public roads and transport policies for councils, virtually all of them that have graduated in the last decade would have used RTS literature at some point in their degree's, and a fair few of them would have participated in at least one.

Then you've got the anti-capitalist, anti G8 / WTO thing... it's no coincidence IMO that we had the 'millenium develpment round' of the trade talks focussing on debt relief and developing countries, or that the g8 in Gleneagles at least paid lip service to issues like climate change, debt relief etc. I'm not saying this was all down to RTS, but it was a response to the huge protests that were now taking place outside every international trade meeting - a process of global protests planned and initiated by People's Global Action, the international grouping for whom RTS was the UK convener, and as stated above it was RTS who inspired the first true global day of action to protest against the G7 at the request of PGA.

Then you've got most of south and central america turning radically left wing, and venezuala effectively leading the way to set up a left wing alternative version of the IMF to effectively kick the IMF out of south america... much of this came out of the huge Social Forums organised by the various local PGA conveners across south and central america in the mid to late 90's - the same movements that RTS were both raising awareness of, and supporting by supporting their calls for global days of action.

Basically you can't look at RTS in isolation, it was a major part of a global movement, a movement that has unquestionably changed the face of much of the world, and given an alternative to the US led neoliberal hegemony that looked like happening in the 90's.

 

[co-op]

Tax I haven't worked in ads for about 3 years now, please try and be current.

Besides, go back 500 years to before capitalism and you'd still find a rich minoroty opressing the majority. Go back 2000 years and you still get the same thing. Until someone, somewhere works out why large scale human societies gravitate toward hierarchies not a single thing will change, because so far no one has come up with a convincing argument for how 6bn people can self manage without hierarchy of some kind.

Yes, and go back 50,000 years to the ancestral environment (or the "environment of evolutionary adaptation", ie the 100,000 year or so period when our brains turned into what they are now, & all our basic social-emotional coding was laid down) and you find no evidence at all for major hierarchies, nor do you among groups that have survived in similar cultural forms into the modern age. In fact all the evidence is that the "wealth gap" (which would be represented by social approval from group members - a form of power) was very slim indeed.

Looks like we aren't evolved to live in highly unequal societies, and maybe that's why a deeply hierarchical conception of govt and society (such as the one you describe) has produced so much war, social violence, unhappiness and - finally - a new super-destructive economy that looks like screwing our species' ability to live on the planet. Most animals, and certainly the 'higher' mammalian forms, seem to become self-destructive when placed in intolerable conditions or captivity, often self-harming and indulging in ritualistic, repetitive behaviours and consumption patterns which will accelerate their own decline.

 

[laptop]

there's a hell of a lot of stuff that was in the RTS manifesto's that is now pretty much mainstream thinking, car free days, cycle lanes, priority for public transport, moving away from the dominance of the car and accepting that we can't just go on building more and more roads to acomodate every car journey everybody might want to make. RTS essentially set the scene IMO for ken's congestion charge, and ramping up of london's public transport. I'd also bet serious money that if you were to do a survey of people now implementing public roads and transport policies for councils, virtually all of them that have graduated in the last decade would have used RTS literature at some point in their degree's, and a fair few of them would have participated in at least one.

Then you've got the anti-capitalist, anti G8 / WTO thing... it's no coincidence IMO that we had the 'millenium develpment round' of the trade talks focussing on debt relief and developing countries, or that the g8 in Gleneagles at least paid lip service to issues like climate change, debt relief etc. I'm not saying this was all down to RTS, but it was a response to the huge protests that were now taking place outside every international trade meeting - a process of global protests planned and initiated by People's Global Action, the international grouping for whom RTS was the UK convener, and as stated above it was RTS who inspired the first true global day of action to protest against the G7 at the request of PGA.

Then you've got most of south and central america turning radically left wing, and venezuala effectively leading the way to set up a left wing alternative version of the IMF to effectively kick the IMF out of south america... much of this came out of the huge Social Forums organised by the various local PGA conveners across south and central america in the mid to late 90's - the same movements that RTS were both raising awareness of, and supporting by supporting their calls for global days of action.

Basically you can't look at RTS in isolation, it was a major part of a global movement, a movement that has unquestionably changed the face of much of the world, and given an alternative to the US led neoliberal hegemony that looked like happening in the 90's.

All the best reforms are the result of would-be revolutionaries' work - much to their annoyance





Then there's the phenomenon I've talked about before, by which:

• people start off with specific demands
• in the process of working for these, they become revolutionaries
• they have kids and "retire"
• only after that are the specific demands won

 

[free spirit]

All the best reforms are the result of would-be revolutionaries' work - much to their annoyance





Then there's the phenomenon I've talked about before, by which:

• people start off with specific demands
• in the process of working for these, they become revolutionaries
• they have kids and "retire"
• only after that are the specific demands won

I think thee and me are pretty much on the same page on this.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

It was definitely much fluffier earlier on. My mum even attended one of the earlier London ones, in Camden High Street (I think I was in India at the time).

 

[co-op]

It was definitely much fluffier earlier on. My mum even attended one of the earlier London ones, in Camden High Street (I think I was in India at the time).

The fluffyness is easy to mock - especially in the context of revolutionary politics and revolutionary thinking - but it was quite intoxicating I thought - beautiful parties in public space, genuinely passing strangers would slow down and stop and talk because they knew that whatever it was that was happening it was warm, interesting, humane and fun.

God that made a change after being corralled by rows of police on marches or events which were just broken up with casual violence so easily it was utterly demoralising.

 

[kyser_soze]

Yes, and go back 50,000 years to the ancestral environment (or the "environment of evolutionary adaptation", ie the 100,000 year or so period when our brains turned into what they are now, & all our basic social-emotional coding was laid down) and you find no evidence at all for major hierarchies, nor do you among groups that have survived in similar cultural forms into the modern age. In fact all the evidence is that the "wealth gap" (which would be represented by social approval from group members - a form of power) was very slim indeed.

Looks like we aren't evolved to live in highly unequal societies, and maybe that's why a deeply hierarchical conception of govt and society (such as the one you describe) has produced so much war, social violence, unhappiness and - finally - a new super-destructive economy that looks like screwing our species' ability to live on the planet. Most animals, and certainly the 'higher' mammalian forms, seem to become self-destructive when placed in intolerable conditions or captivity, often self-harming and indulging in ritualistic, repetitive behaviours and consumption patterns which will accelerate their own decline.

Hmmm...that sounds a bit like Marx and his orginal state of man period, not to mention being a secular retelling of the Eden story - I think there's something in what you say, but you're not comparing like with like.

From what I remember reading about this time, human groups tended to be small, highly mobile hunter gatherers - groups for whom size, lifestyle and environment would have created very high levels of interdependency on each other for survival. Mass agriculture, the foundation of modern civilsation, changed all that - post ice-age there was an urban population explosion, driven I suspect by migration to warmer climes and the increased population densities that followed, which required an new social strucutres, or more likely the formalisation of pre-existing 'loose' hierarchies based around age, religious standing etc...what I really want to know is how the switch to hierarchy happened, how the concept of land ownership arose (again, I suspect that this grew out of pre-existing concepts of hunting and living territories).

Looks like we aren't evolved to live in highly unequal societies,

Hmm, again, we don't evolve toward something, we adapt into an environment - the primary difference with humans is that we create much of the environment we exist in through culture, which in turn drives changes to the physical environment. You're wrong, however, in saying that capitalism is unique in it's environmental destructiveness - the ethics that permit the use of the land by humans are very, very old, and cross many cultures in the proscriptions against how not to use it, and there are several records of large city states and other civilisations dying off through destruction of local natural resources, over population, poisoning of the water table etc.

I'd also take issue with you that war is something that comes from mass-hierarchies. Within existing traditional cultures and tribes there are often conflicts that are small in scale, but can be devastating for both - if your tribe is only 20 people and 4 of them die you've lost 20% of your population, a higher % of casualties than any country has ever experienced in a major conflict...and they do happen - hell, one was practically documented by Bear Gryhlls when he did Tribe and was in Papua NG with the last cannibal tribe who had a dispute with a neighbouring group and 3 lives were lost in what was a small, brief war between them.

 

[co-op]

Hmmm...that sounds a bit like Marx and his orginal state of man period, not to mention being a secular retelling of the Eden story - I think there's something in what you say, but you're not comparing like with like.

From what I remember reading about this time, human groups tended to be small, highly mobile hunter gatherers - groups for whom size, lifestyle and environment would have created very high levels of interdependency on each other for survival. Mass agriculture, the foundation of modern civilsation, changed all that - post ice-age there was an urban population explosion, driven I suspect by migration to warmer climes and the increased population densities that followed, which required an new social strucutres, or more likely the formalisation of pre-existing 'loose' hierarchies based around age, religious standing etc...what I really want to know is how the switch to hierarchy happened, how the concept of land ownership arose (again, I suspect that this grew out of pre-existing concepts of hunting and living territories)..

Big subject...

Hmm, again, we don't evolve toward something, we adapt into an environment - the primary difference with humans is that we create much of the environment we exist in through culture, which in turn drives changes to the physical environment.

Correct - when I said "looks like we aren't evolved to live in highly unequal societies", I should have said "looks like our brains evolved in highly egalitarian societies". But that does imply a cost in living in a different environment - it is very likely to be extra "work" in the evolutionary sense - (eg plants will survive in certain conditions, but flourish in others, the difference in quantity and quality between the two = the "cost")

There is a good body of evidence that the experience of inequality on a sustained basis is just bad for us - even in the absence of any "absolute" poverty - this is the basis for the whole Relative Poverty measure. Poor people die younger even when all other factors are controlled for (smoking, diet, medical care etc). And they die younger at a greater rate in a nice neat correlation with the degree of inequality in a society. That's some good evidence. The exact pathway is unknown but it seems likely to be related to evolutionary roots - permanently suppressed status in the group would have reduced the likelihood of reproducing that's a classic environmental stressor in Darwinian terms. Probably something to do with parasymapthetic nervous system.

This is why the NHS is doomed in an increasingly stratified society. You can pour all the billions of pounds you want into it, it will get clogged up with the poor with chronic debilitative diseases, the diabetics, the obese, the cancerous - and you can spend billions treating them. But you will never undo the process that produces them without broad structural change to our economic system to reduce inequality.

In brief; inequality is bad for us.

You're wrong, however, in saying that capitalism is unique in it's environmental destructiveness - the ethics that permit the use of the land by humans are very, very old, and cross many cultures in the proscriptions against how not to use it, and there are several records of large city states and other civilisations dying off through destruction of local natural resources, over population, poisoning of the water table etc.

I didn't mean to suggest that only capitalism is capable of it, just that it's a rather good example of it. The other examples you talk of also come from highly stratified (?pathologically so) societies.

I'd also take issue with you that war is something that comes from mass-hierarchies. Within existing traditional cultures and tribes there are often conflicts that are small in scale, but can be devastating for both - if your tribe is only 20 people and 4 of them die you've lost 20% of your population, a higher % of casualties than any country has ever experienced in a major conflict...and they do happen - hell, one was practically documented by Bear Gryhlls when he did Tribe and was in Papua NG with the last cannibal tribe who had a dispute with a neighbouring group and 3 lives were lost in what was a small, brief war between them.

I don't mean to idealise the ancestral environment. If, by "war" you mean "organised violence", then I'd suggest that there weren't any wars, but not because there wasn't violence but more because there wasn't any organisation. There's certainly very good evidence that the murder rate in hunter-gatherer societies was very high indeed compared to settled urban ones (x80 times more according to some studies).

It's clear that we are capable of adapting our behaviour to new situations, but whereas inequality always seems to produce basic physical level detriment to people, suppressing the urge to violent revenge for slights produces great benefits and has no "cost" (except arguably the extra workload required to sustain whatever punishment or reconcilliation mechanism you choose to install to replace individual vengence).



Anyway - this isn't really about RTS now, maybe we should do another thread?

 

[kyser_soze]

Maybe, altho that was an early morning, just had the coffee blast of intellect

It is a subject of great interest to me tho...

 

[ska invita]

how did it link up? - it didn't really, but would have inspired people just getting into politics (regardless of their class background) in many ways to follow certain forms of activity.
...
Its organisation is a group of people who will organise said street party. It cannot be criticised for not being an organisation that could fight on class issues/social issues then, cos unless they need a street party done then its not in their remit.

how was it perceived? - dunno.

I think the Brixton one makes an interesting example, becasue unlike the others a lot of people there jsut lived there and joined in. The atmosphere was great, and I think people just saw it as a good thing to do, and may well have been radicalised by it, just a little.

*on the subject of what happened to RTS: I think one problem is that in a 'campaign' like this you can never consolidate your gains - all you can do is to provoke the state/police into reacting in more restrictive ways.

The only way around this that I can see is to make the parties less regular and more random, and try and catch the police on the backfoot (hint hint - throw another part asap!)

 

[co-op]

one was practically documented by Bear Gryhlls when he did Tribe and was in Papua NG with the last cannibal tribe who had a dispute with a neighbouring group and 3 lives were lost in what was a small, brief war between them.

Just a point of info; the 'tribal' organisation of PNG is not in the devolved hunter-gatherer form that is believed to have existed in the evolutionary environment. Firstly, there's quite a lot of internal variety within PNG - but secondly, in general, it is closer to what is often called the "Big Man" state - a semi-chief led form of semi-settled living. If you arrange these things hierarchically - you fascist - it's often considered the next step 'up' from hunter-gathering, although there are h-g forms of Big Man organisation which sort of loiter in between.

 

[free spirit]

The fluffyness is easy to mock - especially in the context of revolutionary politics and revolutionary thinking - but it was quite intoxicating I thought - beautiful parties in public space, genuinely passing strangers would slow down and stop and talk because they knew that whatever it was that was happening it was warm, interesting, humane and fun.

God that made a change after being corralled by rows of police on marches or events which were just broken up with casual violence so easily it was utterly demoralising.

precisely, the fluffy, deliberately non-violent ethos was a way better strategy than lobbing bottles at the police IMO... the rotten fruit and veg from the end of the market in birmingham was one thing, the bottles and stuff at j18 was another (though the police did provoke it, we shouldn't have allowed ourselves to be provoked - and to be honest the fluffies like us should / would probably have stuck around and tried to de-escalate it had there been a clear policy of non-violence so we'd known where we stood with it, instead we fucked off and left the brewcrew to it)

 

[chilango]

precisely, the fluffy, deliberately non-violent ethos was a way better strategy than lobbing bottles at the police IMO... the rotten fruit and veg from the end of the market in birmingham was one thing, the bottles and stuff at j18 was another (though the police did provoke it, we shouldn't have allowed ourselves to be provoked - and to be honest the fluffies like us should / would probably have stuck around and tried to de-escalate it had there been a clear policy of non-violence so we'd known where we stood with it, instead we fucked off and left the brewcrew to it)

It wasn't just the brew crew though was it?

There were as, we've seen from this thread, people within the movements who felt the time was strategically right to escalate.

 

[TopCat]

It's insulting to label those who wanted to escalate confrontation with the police as brew crew.

 

[free spirit]

It's insulting to label those who wanted to escalate confrontation with the police as brew crew.

ay, well it was the brew crew lobbing bottles from 50 yard back that were my final memories of the day, and they were drinking cans of special brew...

I do realise feelings were running pretty high with that lass getting run over, plus the police deliberately escalating things by sending in 50 odd riot police to get stuck in the middle of us all so thay had an excuse to come and rescue them... but IMO rising to the bait was a mistake.

 

[free spirit]

It wasn't just the brew crew though was it?

There were as, we've seen from this thread, people within the movements who felt the time was strategically right to escalate.

yes ok so it wasn't just brew crew, though there were a fair amount that'd fit that description by that point in the afternoon.

and yes there were people within the movement who felt it was strategically right to escalate... if by that you mean dropping the non-violence, than they were strategically wrong IMO.

eta - thinking about it, I'm not entirely against strategic use of violence in some circumstances, my main gripe really is with pissed up arseholes hiding at the back and lobbing bottles in the vague direction of police lines, but not really giving too much of a shit whether they hit the police or those of us who have the balls to be at the front facing the police directly who are neither wearing helmets or have eye's in the back of our heads to tell us to dodge the bottle.

I'm also not a fan of the smashy smashy crew attacking property, after the experience in scotland where we went from one day having tacit support from the majority of the locals (that we'd won over 2 weeks of hard work sorting the site out, and doing outreach stuff), to the day of the protests being hated because 10-20 people had taken it upon themselves to smash up the local business park, including the diy shops we'd been using to buy the kit to get the site running, and the supermarket that had been feeding us. Stirling didn't care if we went and blocked roads etc over in gleneagles (their historic rivals), but they were well fucked off when we trashed part of their town, after the council had stepped in and given us the site for the campsite and really helped us out a lot.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're going to use violence then pick your target's carefully, and make sure it's not a few pissed up hangers on that end up dictating what get's smashed up, and losing a lot of hard won support in the process.

 

[chilango]

yes ok so it wasn't just brew crew, though there were a fair amount that'd fit that description by that point in the afternoon.

and yes there were people within the movement who felt it was strategically right to escalate... if by that you mean dropping the non-violence, than they were strategically wrong IMO.

eta - thinking about it, I'm not entirely against strategic use of violence in some circumstances, my main gripe really is with pissed up arseholes hiding at the back and lobbing bottles in the vague direction of police lines, but not really giving too much of a shit whether they hit the police or those of us who have the balls to be at the front facing the police directly who are neither wearing helmets or have eye's in the back of our heads to tell us to dodge the bottle.

I'm also not a fan of the smashy smashy crew attacking property, after the experience in scotland where we went from one day having tacit support from the majority of the locals (that we'd won over 2 weeks of hard work sorting the site out, and doing outreach stuff), to the day of the protests being hated because 10-20 people had taken it upon themselves to smash up the local business park, including the diy shops we'd been using to buy the kit to get the site running, and the supermarket that had been feeding us. Stirling didn't care if we went and blocked roads etc over in gleneagles (their historic rivals), but they were well fucked off when we trashed part of their town, after the council had stepped in and given us the site for the campsite and really helped us out a lot.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're going to use violence then pick your target's carefully, and make sure it's not a few pissed up hangers on that end up dictating what get's smashed up, and losing a lot of hard won support in the process.

Sorta what I've been saying throughout this thread.

 

[TopCat]

June 18th was not a bunch of pissed up hangars on dictating the violence. To assert it is is disengenouous at best.

 

[chilango]

June 18th was not a bunch of pissed up hangars on dictating the violence. To assert it is is disengenouous at best.

True.

As I did point out above.

Yet the strategy of escalation pursued by a minority since the 80s at least has often relied upon the availablity of the brew crew to facilitate the kick off. J18 was a rare exception to this.

 

[butchersapron]

It's insulting to label those who wanted to escalate confrontation with the police as brew crew.

Aboslutely. I think this is getting into the realms of better done in person than on here though.

 

[TopCat]

Aboslutely. I think this is getting into the realms of better done in person than on here though.

Yeah, no statute of limitations in the UK is there!

 

[TopCat]

I think the debate of non violence and limited violence vs total kick it till it breaks would best be carried out when/if anything builds in the future, then and only then will the context be truely apparrant.

 

[chilango]

I think the debate of non violence and limited violence vs total kick it till it breaks would best be carried out when/if anything builds in the future, then and only then will the context be truely apparrant.

Well, having witnessed the "almost" revolution in Mexico last year, the APPO etc. my points have been made with a relevent context...

 

[Paul of Medway]

free sprit...

"if you were to do a survey of people now implementing public roads and transport policies for councils, virtually all of them that have graduated in the last decade would have used RTS literature at some point in their degree's, and a fair few of them would have participated in at least one"

Bingo!

 

[The Black Hand]

True.

As I did point out above.

Yet the strategy of escalation pursued by a minority since the 80s at least has often relied upon the availablity of the brew crew to facilitate the kick off. J18 was a rare exception to this.

Rubbish. You clearly have no experience of the many 'Offs' in London. Brew crew just lurked around at smelly gigs most of the time. I remember one fight in Stoke Newington when a brew crew lady knocked one of our ladies off a table and the fight just escalated... We came out of it OK but the night was ruined.

 

[chilango]

Rubbish. You clearly have no experience of the many 'Offs' in London. Brew crew just lurked around at smelly gigs most of the time. I remember one fight in Stoke Newington when a brew crew lady knocked one of our ladies off a table and the fight just escalated... We came out of it OK but the night was ruined.

*bows down before Attica's praxis*