Just over ten day back I reposted the text of my talks to the Prague 2000 counter summit and the detailed account I wrote of the riots of S26 and what the events moved for the emerging movement. As with the other sequences of articles I’ve been
Just over ten day back I reposted the text of my talks to the Prague 2000 counter summit and the detailed account I wrote of the riots of S26 and what the events moved for the emerging movement. As with the other sequences of articles I’ve been posting I intended to blog them but life got in the way as it sometimes tends to do so this entry is late.
The reason I ended up doing three seperate talks to the counter summit was because our Czech sister organisation of the time, Solidarita, was one of the main forces behind the local organisation. They were keen to include a class struggle anarchist perspective in the presentations and I guess I must have been the only one willing to step forward so I ended up with a crazy workload of three talks over three days. This was the first time I’d ever spoken in front of more than a couple of dozen people so it was also as intimidating as hell. I flew in, dropped my stuff off and was almost straightaway in the first presentation Imperialism, globalisation and the rule of the few.
I was towards the end of a load of speakers who had overun their time (the only name I remember is Alex Callinicos of the British SWP) so the chair was hassling me about speaking time before I’d even started. So I pretty much paniced when I looked at the hall full of people and chopped chunks out of the prepared text as I went along, I remember the experience as excruciating and I’m probably fortunate in never having come across a recording of what I actually sounded like. On the positive side some nice guy from the British trotskyist group Workers Power did come up and congratulate me afterwards for raising a critique of the UN so it can’t have been complete gibberish.
Prague was where I discovered the mobile phone. Previously I had considered them as useless yuppie toys as I associated them with being in London in the late 80’s when initally yuppies were the only people with them. But after that session when we went out to a bar with the some of the Prague anarchist organisers I realised just how useful they were as they were able to continue to take calls and sort things out. This probably seems like a stupid observation of the obvious to anyone a little bit younger then me but at the time it was a blinding revelation!
I was staying with a Prague anarchist couple who lived in a single room flat with a baby and who were putting up around 15 other Czech anarchists that weekend. This meant there wasn’t a empty meter of space on their apartment floor at night as we all slept piled on top of each other. The huge benefit of this was that I got to spend the entire period with local anarchists centrally involved in the organisation of the counter summit and protests and picked up a huge amount of information about the problems encountered and what was happening in the background. This was scary at times, we’d regularly run into fascist spotters on the way to and from events and I heard of the various ambushes that were happening of people who looked like leftists on the subway. This wasn’t a one way street, there was an antifa security mobilisation that was counter ambushing and guarding the various venues and which came out on top as the days passed.
On the Saturday I was talking at the trade union stream of the talks. I’d prepared a lengthy discussion of the Celtic Tiger which was by then been sold as a model all over Eastern Europe as Irish workers and the Celtic Tiger : The reality behind the neoliberal ‘success story’ Large sections of this are cut and pastes from work down by Des Derwin & Eddie Conlon for the anti-partnership campaign pamphlet Portraits of a "Partnership" as well as earlier writings I’d done on the Celtic Tiger which I’ve yet to reproduce on this site. My main memory of the other speakers on the day was of the leader of the farm workers union whose union was rapidly going out of existence as the economy was restructured. Also on the Saturday I took part in the illegal anti-fascist demonstration, there was a neo-nazi rally in a park in the suburbs and we played cat and mouse with the police in trying to head for it before heading back to the city centre where there were substantial scuffles on the subway system with fascists who had made the mistake of trying to slip into town.
By Sunday large numbers of people were arriving in town and I took part on a panel in the morning with Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Mark Leven and Naomi Klein on Where did the anti-capitalist movement come from? By now I’d got over my stage fright so despite the fact this was a big crowd I remember enjoying this session. There was a very cack handed intervention by the British trotskyist SWP at this one which consisted of various members of their leadership getting up and making identical points one after the other. – the exact content I don’t remember but it was something along the lines of the needs to build links with the workers movement, something few in the hall actually disagreed with. As you’ll see from my account of S26 itself the SWP would continue to play a negative role in events that in the long run did them a lot of damage in the developing movement. I’ve never got their tendency to sacrifice all credibility in the interests of short term recruitment, it seems so obviously counterproductive but I guess its based on disdain for anyone who doesn’t join.
Towards the end of this session the word came through the train from Italy carrying Ya Basta! and others had been stopped at the border. A demonstration was called outside the foreign ministery (possibly in the same place the fascist rally had been the previous day). Eventually Ya Basta would be allowed through and a lot of both mainstream and alternative coverage of events would focus on their theatrical attempts to cross the bridge to the congress centre brandishing water guns and festioned in inner tyres and ballons.
On the Monday we had a gathering of members of the various anarchist communist organizations that were present at a pub in the suburbs. I’ve three memories of this. Firstly of getting locked in the toilets and being fearful of getting stuck there overnight and missing everything! Secondly of a half dozen or so local punk anarchists who also happened to be steel workers, this was amusing in the context of the normal polarization that might be assumed to exist. And lastly of our decision to call a ‘Red & Black’ bloc to head up the blue section of the demonstration and to advertise this and call a meeting at the convergence center.
The rest of the events are more or less carried in my long account of S26 itself, whose republication here I’ve titled ‘Report from the Prague September 2000 World Bank riot‘. One detail since I last edited that is that I’m pretty sure the cyclist who alerted us to the poorly guarded back road to the congress center was Brad Will, the indymedia photographer who filmed his own murder during the Oxaca insurrection of 2006. I recognised his picture after his death and on checking found that he had been in Prague that day as a bicycle scout.
Apart from that long account, written in part because the lack of accurate information as to what had actually happened, in the aftermath of the riots on my return I did a speaking tour with a Czech anarchist around Ireland and at the London anarchist bookfair. The text of my talk is published here as Anarchist globalisation after Prague S26. During the tour we raised around 700 dollars in donations for the legal fees and fines of those detained in Prague. In a shorter attempt to try and present an accurate account of events I wrote the article ‘Victory in Prague – IMF and World Bank closed down‘ for Workers Solidarity 61 published in November of that year.
As with much of the other republication I’ve been doing since setting up this site its quite strange to be re-reading all this material after all this time. I really don’t remember the process of writing much of this stuff, in fact my distinct memories are mostly ‘freeze frames’ of the riot itself, the explosion of stun grenades and the clouds of tear gas. It’s a big advantage to be able to look back at these texts and reconstruct the rest of the events of those days around the memories they jog.
WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )