This is a short response to one of the points Al makes in his essay, I’d like to pick up on some of the other stuff, particularly the question of leadership, but hopefully I’ll get back to that later. The prose style will no doubt be idiosyncratic and ill formed because it won’t benefit from being reworked within the collective. Working that way is slow and probably unsuited to quick fire responses. Anyway, first thanks to Al for getting the essays up on NarcoNews and for his informed and engaging commentary, we can never get enough of that, or book sales of course…

On to substance, I’m intrigued by Al’s use of ‘fixed, brittle rather than fluid’ to describe the North American and European movements, as this runs very much counter to my own sense of where we’re at, albeit my experience is essentially limited to Europe at the moment. Equally, I’m not sure the idea of repeating Seattle has ever held much sway in Europe, largely because there’s been a strong undertow of criticism over summit mobilisations that constantly informs and critiques our grander intentions towards the spectacular.

I think what has happened in the ‘North’ is that there’s been a certain understandable response to the degree of violence meted out and this has reconfigured the movement along with other more benevolent and interesting forces, leading to an explosion of deliberative and specific (rather than generalised) forms designed at reassessing our potential. These include social fora, communications projects, transnational solidarity initiatives and local organising.  This is not a sign of fixity or brittleness within the movement(s) merely a recognition of the time-boxed utility of a particular strategy or tactic - summiteering. It also shows that we’re learning the lessons of the south where, as the Zapatistas demonstrated, declarations of war can be used to open discursive space for the movement(s) leading to more fruitful and interesting encounters. Encounters where links can be built, issues deliberated upon and strategies formulated without the need to then don a gas mask and be ritually beaten up or shot at. Encounters where differences and singularities can be explored.

I don’t want to minimise or downplay the necessity for confrontation, it will always be necessary, but I do want to recognise that we must ‘fight’ on the terrain of our choosing and that means occasionally we have to exit, to disperse and to regroup. As Gilles Deleuze suggested ‘to flee, but in fleeing seek a weapon’. In Europe we had a rather stark awakening to the fact that if you ‘declare war’ against the G8 as the Tute Bianche did in Genoa, albeit in an ironic and somewhat self-referential way, you shouldn’t be too shocked when the ‘local’ state (Italy) decides to take you seriously! Of course, none of this is particularly novel, particularly in the context of the south, but I do think we shouldn’t confuse the pursuance of one tactic and its increasingly diminishing returns as somehow symbolic of a more generalised fixity.

The other point to make about summits and indeed many of the other events we organise, participate in and celebrate is that we often valorise these in the language of spontaneity and vitalism and ignore the hard work, planning and preparation that goes on, something that we tried to redress in We Are Everywhere. In complexity theory the process of emergence is one that takes place when a certain threshold is crossed, when the conditions become amenable to interactions that lead to forms and outcomes that are irreducible to the some of their parts. Something magical happens, but it happens precisely because we actualised a capacity that was otherwise virtual. Realising that capacity takes lots of hard work, as Al suggests at the end of his essay. I fear that our rhetoric has occasionally made this appear as though it were easy, as if we can just turn up and be amazed at how the walls will crumble and the powerful fall. We have a responsibility here not to reconfigure the past, to tell it as it was, the Zapatistas are important, not because of something they did on January 1st 1994, but because of the ten years before, and the 500 years before that. Reclaim The Streets didn’t just wander into the streets and kick off a global party, they organised, worked, planned and played. As we know moments are only moments, processes continue. I think that’s what is happening now and it has many aspects: latency, capacity building, reflexivity, deterritorialisation, all of which are indicative of processes with the potential for emergence.

Graeme.