October 2002 Archives

Racism, Civility and the “War on Terror”

Seminar Paper, National Union of Students Education Conference, July 2002

Ben Hoh

What the hell is actually going on with the “war on terror”, and how do we come to grips with the situation? Consider an article by Guy Rundle that appeared in Melbourne’s progressive weekly The Paper, in January 2002. Rundle argues for an effectively liberal defense against the Australian Government’s impending antiterrorism legislation, claiming that

[d]efending the liberal political sphere – or such as exists – is now our most urgent priority… This seems to me to be a time that demands a popular front and common cause with left-liberals and even the libertarian right in an urgent mobilisation against the infinite extension of the national Security State. [Rundle 2002]

Rundle warns, in portentous tones, that

we have seen the beginnings of the shutdown of the liberal political sphere and the final consequences of that are unknowable – the darkest possibility being that some of us will end up in prison sooner rather than later. [Rundle 2002]

Where does this kind of thinking lead us? I don’t doubt his commitment to a free society, but as Angela Mitropoulos and Steve Wright have noted in a reply to Rundle, some of us are already in prison – namely, in concentration camps as “illegal immigrants”. Mitropoulos and Wright contend that our liberal democratic concepts of justice are already founded on the ability of the nation-state to create such states of exception and naked control, and that any struggle to defend ourselves against the State must have a qualitatively different orientation.

Nowhere in his assessment of the “terror laws” does Rundle even consider that particular, raced communities – Arabs and/or Muslims especially – will no doubt bear the brunt of measures like increased ASIO powers or the creation of “terrorist guilt by association”. Under the current regime and in the months following the World Trade Centre attack, Arab and Muslim homes in Sydney’s southwest were raided indiscriminately by ASIO. Doors were smashed down. Breastfeeding women were held at gunpoint by officers of the State. People were simply targeted because of their religion or ethnic background. Peter Reith made rhetorical links between Middle Eastern refugees and terrorism. A Muslim man from Sydney, Mamdouh Habib, is currently interned without charge in the US Military’s maximum security Camp X-Ray, where inmates are blindfolded for months on end, while the Australian Government does nothing about his situation, preferring to assume that he is guilty of unknown “terrorist” crimes. (And that’s just direct, State sponsored violence; within the Australian body politic, there has been a marked upsurge in racist violence since 11 September: Muslim women have been attacked in the streets, mosques have been firebombed, and media hysteria abounds.)

Arab communities around the world, from Sydney to Jenin, are familiar with this kind of racial profiling; to the authorities, they are terrorists: uncivilised, fanatical, prone to violence. And just prior to the World Trade Center attack, Australia was living in an ecology of heightened fear about communities who had been basically transformed in public discourse into “Lebanese gang rapists”. These are the communities that “antiterrorist” laws will attempt to repress. But rather than calling to join the self-defense of communities under State-led attack, Guy Rundle instead emphasises the defense of “our liberal traditions”. He fetishises concepts and institutions whose universalising impulses have not only been hollow but individualising, always erasing the social. Let’s be in no doubt that our rights granted under the State mean something. And yes, the disappearance of these rights is even more telling. But at best, those rights signified the partial gains of more radical struggles – struggles that have a racialised, social specificity. Seeing these aspects of the State as worth fighting for in themselves is to mistake the forest for the trees, to orient oneself, in a really basic manner, away from acknowledging the particularities of racist power, away from the tasks of building solidarity with those under racist State repression, and to reinforce, in the long term, the system that enacts that repression.

The struggle around the “terror laws” is one of several antagonisms that can demonstrate the complex ways in which racism now operates, and what this says about the world in general. Take the bombing of Afghanistan as another example. While the people there were counting the cost of Operation Enduring Freedom, liberals in the West who were opposed to the bombing were struggling to be heard in the language of “reason”. Why? Despite real, decent impulses for justice amongst some, it may simply be the case that there’s no longer any room left for opposition within liberalism’s “reasonable” rhetoric. Most liberals take bankrupt US aggression as a given, even if it’s distasteful. The progressive pole of liberal thought seems to have gotten really lame. What does this mean?

It’s a pity that in practical terms the Left usually conceives of liberalism as effectively being a lack of radicalism, rather having any actual political qualities of its own – that we only have to inject a bit of “lefty serum” into a liberal framework to heighten its radicality. But what are the geopolitics of the liberal tradition? Take a few words from John Stuart Mill, the granddaddy of liberalism:

The word Civilization is a word of double meaning. It sometimes stands for human improvement in general, and sometimes for certain kinds of improvement in particular… which [distinguish] a wealthy and powerful nation from savages or barbarians. [Mill 1875, p160]

And on the subject of British colonialism in India, Mill writes:

There are… conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization.

Liberal thought has always invested in violent narratives of white supremacy that are not necessarily based on crass xenophobia or fixed, biological theories of race, but on the cultural power of “Western civilisation” as an enlightening and progressive force. This isn’t an historical aberration that we’ve somehow “progressed” from – the recent popularity of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, against the backdrop of the “war on terror”, is testament to its currency. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe this in their book Empire as a “new racism” – a “racism without race”, following Etienne Balibar’s formulation. But it’s not new; rather, its configuration has changed somewhat: where xenophobia and biological racism are now less able to flourish, we can still say hello to newly buffed notions of “progressive” white cultural superiority that have always been with us, informing everything from French colonialism (which continued in the spirit of “liberty, equality, fraternity”) to Australian multiculturalism.

“Our” “civilised” Western liberal democratic identity has always been, from the beginning, constituted in opposition to those who are simultaneously defined as “uncivilised”. And we all know that any repressive construction of an identity is never complete, and is always manic, especially when it encounters any reminders of this fact. For example, “Islam” has long been a major symbol of all that “the West” has constructed itself against – it is Western capitalism’s “constitutive outside”. In its encounter with the spectre of “Islam”, liberal democracy is manically incapable of tolerating calls for “sanity” in the face of war, and such calls will begin to lack meaning or weight, even though the nominally progressive aspects of liberalism would seem to demand this. This isn’t because liberal anti-war commentators are liars or that they’re simply “not radical enough”, but because they can’t face the fundamental chauvinism and hysteria of liberal democracy and its racist geopolitics. And in the face of the tragedies of the last year, that’s scary.

This whole situation complicates the usual idea, so common in the Left, that “racism is a bunch of lies used by the capitalists to divide the working class”. Repeating such mantras can provide an alibi for the imperatives of power through which racism operates. It’s as reductive and instrumentalist as saying “sexism is a bunch of lies used by the capitalists to divide the working class”. Racism isn’t simply an imaginary ideology used to justify certain economic factors in a narrow and mechanical sense. Rather, we must recognise that irrational urges happen on the material, economic level of geopolitics – that we can’t abstract what we call our “ideological justifications” from the “economy”. Power and desire may be given an ideological investment, an attempt at rationalisation on the level of ideas, but they’re not necessarily ideological in themselves.

Back in the 80s, the activist and philosopher Felix Guattari recognised this complexity in the rise of Le Pen and National Front in France, which is so relevant now given Le Pen’s recent popularity in the French Presidential elections. Guattari writes:

If you think that Le Pen is only a simple resurgence, or some flaky throw-back, you’re dead wrong! … Le Pen is also a collective passion looking for an outlet, a hateful pleasure machine that fascinates even those that it nauseates. … Really, one can immediately think of the imagery of the National Front, and forget that Le Pen is also fed by the conservatism of the left, by trade union corporatism, by a beastly refusal to address questions of immigration or the systematic disenfranchisement of the youth, etc. … Let’s face it, the economy of collective desire goes both ways, in the direction of transformation and liberation, and in the direction of paranoiac wills to power. [Guattari 1995, p14-15]

Guattari sees racist violence as desire gone cancerous, and that it is vital to engage on this terrain. He thus addresses the problem of leftist appeals to liberalism in anti-racist work:

[I]t is clear that the left, and the Socialists above all, have understood nothing. Look at what they did with the movement ‘SOS Racism’: they think that they’ve changed something with their million buttons, but they didn’t even consider talking to the people at stake. Has this publicity campaign changed anything in social practice, in the neighbourhoods or in the factories? I know some Algerian-French people who have been rubbed the wrong way by this new kind of paternalism-fraternalism. I don’t deny the positive aspects of that campaign, but it’s so far off the mark! [Guattari 1995, p15]

Guattari raises questions as to what a real, antagonistic engagement with racism is all about. A recognition of its impulses in the social fabric, and a commitment to working with those affected by it rather than towards self-congratulating displays of liberal tolerance. It means effectively making a challenge to the racist foundations of the entire system of nationalist immigration control. Actually breaking the borders. It means mixing physical resistance with a cultural politics, the creation of meanings – what we usually reduce to a mere, empty “symbolism”. Because now more than ever, a politics of race is a politics of culture. Not as something we can crudely use, but as something that we do. If we ignore these tasks, we run the risk of reinscribing the culture under which fascism can breed, and of leaving non-Anglo communities to live with the mundane, everyday experience of that fascism.

This also has an immediate impact on the whole issue of formulating “demands”. An effective anti-racism movement shouldn’t just be talking about tying everything down to demands that both liberals and radicals can agree upon. If we don’t question liberal “tolerance”, we’re in danger of falling into the vacuum that yawns just beyond the demands to “FREE THE REFUGEES”, or to “DEFEND OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES”, or whatever. That vacuum obscures a bigger question: what kind of society do we really want to live in? Do we just want to make the current nation-building system of multiculturalism more coherent? A system that reinforces white culture’s centrality as the tolerant controller and consumer of domesticated “diversity”? Really, what kind of society created our concentration camps in the first place? One managed by a Federal Labor Government – let’s never ever forget that – a government that at the time was creating extensive rhetoric about a sophisticated, postmodern and multicultural republic with an “openness to Asia”. But those coloured people who can’t quite fit into your enlightened plans for economic progress, you punish. There’s no contradiction. Whether it’s illegal immigrants or “uncontrollable” Arab kids who wear their baseball caps backwards, it’s always policing. State multiculturalism has always been about social engineering for market systems. In the world of the commodity, “ethnically tolerant” markets and concentration camps go hand in hand.

• • +

One very big question remains: why have these problems of “civilising liberal power” and racism come to a head so forcefully in the current juncture? One could say “capitalist globalisation”, but that’s almost a truism with little descriptive power. Yes, the contours of repression inevitably recalibrate along with the globalisation of capital, and this volatility makes the friendly supremacist powers of the West such a tempting form of crisis management.

But there’s a more precise factor within this general picture that could be forcing the issue in a much more specific way, and that’s Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s idea that civil society is withering. As they define it, civil society consisted of the institutions that mediated between the State and the population. In order to co-opt (rather than directly bludgeon) society into a capitalist consensus, the State used those voluntary institutions that weren’t technically part itself, such as the media, unions, churches, etc., as vessels to indirectly convey its authority. This always suggested a certain amount of ambivalence – because they weren’t State institutions, the institutions of civil society were a battleground on which different forces struggled for hegemony. Thus, there was a space, a cushion for left-liberal ideas about fairness to flourish within certain sectors of society.

But Negri and Hardt argue that these days, capitalist social relations are now produced everywhere in society – that all of society is now a factory. We’re faced with the spectre of endocolonialism: the logic of colonialism applied to every space inside a society – capital setting up ultraexploitative and ultrahierarchicalising occupations of untapped and vulnerable spaces within what we’ve always called “First World”. As an example, the tertiary education sector could be said to be undergoing endocolonisation as it moves into an era of mass commodification, market gearings and corporate profit, which is cheap for everyone except those who are the producers and the product of the system: students, who have to buy the education, put the effort into making themselves disciplined workers with it, and then internalise a simultaneously exploited and consumerist relationship as a given condition of their presence in the system. Suffice to say that with this kind of penetration happening generally in society, those mediating institutions of civil society can do little but go through the motions. Official spaces of negotiation become simulations when the rug has been effectively pulled from under all of us, and those institutions cease being mediating ones that can deliver gains or cushion a progressive intelligentsia, and become ones that either just tread water or act as repressive watchdogs for the State. Hence the idea that civil society has effectively withered, even if all those institutions still technically exist.

Now this situation actually has a lot to do with specific things like extreme anti-Arab racism and anti-Islamic racialisation. “Oriental” societies, and Islam in particular, have always been characterised in Western supremacist discourse as having a propensity for violence and despotism, and this is sometimes specifically explained – often by both the Left and the Right – as an absence of civil society. (For example, for Marx, “oriental despotism” was a characteristic of the Asiatic mode of production — a unique arrangement that was effectively outside the narrative of historical progress.) But whether or not the term “civil society” is technically used, the general idea, which I think we can all recognise, is that such a social layer provides a mediating and liberal ambivalence that acts as a marker for a “free society” – a marker for progress, civilisation itself, and hence white cultural supremacy. The absence of civil society, conversely, is marks a tendency towards various kinds of social stagnation on one hand, and the breeding of irrational violence on the other. Hence “the Middle East”.

This may sound reductive, but I think this fetishisation of “civil society vs oriental despotism” has always actually been a defensive projection of Western capitalism’s uncertainties about insurgent class struggle, which is that which needs to be “mediated” in the first place, and the spectre of “oriental despotism” is just the return of the Western capitalism’s repressed despotism. The Australian sociologist Bryan Turner recognises this:

[B]ourgeois individualism… was challenged by the mob, the mass and the working class which was excluded from citizenship by a franchise based on property… The orientalist discourse on the absence of the civil society in Islam was a reflection of basic political anxieties about the state of political freedom in the West. In this sense, the problem of orientalism was not the Orient but the Occident. These problems and anxieties were consequently transferred onto the Orient which became, not a representation of the East, but a caricature of the West. Oriental despotism was simply Western monarchy writ large. The crises and contradictions of contemporary orientalism are, therefore, to be seen as part of a continuing crisis of Western society transferred to a global context. [Turner 1994, p34]

This kind of racialisation as a defensive and displacing madness against the motor of class struggle can clearly be seen in 19th Century pseudoscientific attempts to physiognomise the relative “negritude” of Northern English and Celtic working class communities [c.f. Young 1995].

So what about the current context? If civil society has effectively collapsed and is merely being simulated, perhaps there’s a double dose of racist reaction within Western capitalism: first, there’s hysterical Islamophobia as the repressed recognition of everybody’s loss of civil society, which is the loss of the Western badge of cultural superiority – under endocolonial capital, we are all despotic barbarians now! Secondly, this manic surge of racism is left unchecked by any notions of fair justice, because any of the vaguely tempering effects of liberalism no longer have a layer in society in which to flourish. It’s a feedback loop that will continually amplify unless we intervene. Unless we interfere. Unless we commit sabotage. And any real attempt to disrupt the spiral of violence that has been compensating for a lost “civility” cannot, by definition, be about reconsolidating any kind of civility.

What does this mean? It means that liberalism is no longer structurally capable of delivering any progressive gains, so making appeals to liberals, or their ideas of “enlightened progress”, is like chasing a phantom while everything gets worse around us. It means that we can’t rely on a liberal intelligentsia for anything. We can’t reinflate the liberal public sphere, because it has burst like a balloon. We can’t rely on our mediating institutions, our leaders, our representatives. This sounds all quite obvious, but when trying to formulate a radical course of anti-racist action that is also accessible, it’s amazing how easy it is to slip into these kinds of implicit or explicit appeals. We’ve got to break out of the bind between “crazy ultraleftism” and blind populism, and work towards qualitatively radical orientations that are accessible to all.

Our situation isn’t cause for despair. It only re-emphasises our priority: grass-roots community defense. We’ve got to build spaces of resistance amongst different people, not necessarily based on extending ideological similarities, but on an sympathetic or parallel kind of mutual orientation and respect that builds counter-power to the State and communicates struggle, linking different spaces to form an altogether different kind of public sphere. Rather than getting “political mileage” out of any situation, we’ve simply got to work together against the system, in real ways, and hence build radical situations from which new ideas can then arise.

It’s very easy to say “NO TO RACISM” at a rally. What we’ve got to do – non-Anglos, whiteys, indigenous peoples – is go the hard yards and actually create those alliances between social forces that can actually resist, rather than building brand names. Whether we’re part of particular besieged communities or not, we’ve got to let go of preconceived programmes and look to resistance that people have already put into play that might be implicitly political, that might be explicitly communicating resistance, that might be a great machine of wildfire struggle. A great frustration of mine within the antiwar movement last year was hearing that the local Afghan community was organising shift-based physical self-defense of mosques in Western Sydney, but that Left was by and large not very interested in such activity, preferring to say “NO TO RACISM” at rallies. This isn’t a flip condemnation – it’s really hard to make those links, to build that solidarity. And because racism is much deeper than just an instrumentalist lie that divides us, I think it’s really simplistic to say “black and white unite and fight”, as if the scales will fall from our eyes overnight and we’ll be able to join each other a new kind of homogenisation.

Meanwhile, the newly intensified experience of endocolonial policing could mean that we might gain lateral inspiration from experiences of imperialist military occupation. The tasks ahead could involve the formation of neighbourhood action committees in communities under siege, following the example of the first Intifada in occupied Palestine, to deal with the everyday experience of State repression – to speak back, organise legal defense, train in physical self-defense, act as information hubs, plan “civil” disobedience. On a longer term basis, we need to weave new and resilient social fabrics via a flowering of cultural politics. Underground schools flourished under the noses of the authorities during the first Intifada. Derry in Northern Ireland has a history of public art projects that can’t be instrumentalised for simple propaganda value – they have an organic kind of community autonomy – but which inextricably remain as everyday focal points for public political struggle.

Of course, we run the danger of fetishising these anti-imperialist struggles, which are radically different from our current situation in Australia, but the real task is to reconfigure whatever they have to offer for redeployment in our context, in which occupation means different things. But it’s also useful to remember that “our” context does not have a monopoly on being subtle, porous or hybrid – as if Palestine or Northern Ireland are starker, simpler and affairs whose concepts of struggle cannot be made mobile. The everyday experience of resisting racist policing around the world must always contend with complexity.

• • +

Warning: don’t take this critique as an advertisement for an adrenaline-pumping kind of negation that regards liberalism as “wussy”. Because that’s not why political liberalism is bad. Along with many of us (especially the prisoners ) who were at Woomera earlier this year, I cried during our contact at the fences. People on both sides of the fence were confronted with that which was almost indescribable. We were crying together. What we must do is feel and act our pain and sympathy in a manner that doesn’t create narratives of sentimentality, of sainthood and martyrdom, or which reinforce our ability to patronise or condescend.

We need radical sympathy. An acting together. Here I want to draw on some of the other, non-sentimental meanings of “sympathy”, some of which may be dodgy and New Age, but which I think are of conceptual use. First there is “sympathy pain”, which you can experience if you’re attuned to someone else’s bodily state. Then there’s “sympathetic magic”, which you might experience, if you believe such things, when someone pushes pins into a voodoo doll that represents your body. But most of all, there’s the physical phenomenon of “sympathetic vibration”, which is what happens when you put two tuning forks close together – they both start humming, and louder, because each reinforces the other. So rather than a sentimental sympathy that reinforces liberal individualist statehood, I think what happened across the fences at Woomera was that people were vibrating in sympathy. Acting together. Resonating.

What does this mean for the hard work of building solidarity on a planetary scale? Given the global scale of Empire now, and the endocolonial realities that are always before us in every pore of society, I guess all questions of race and class, while not able to be universalised, have a global significance that we can be attuned to, wherever we are. The fact that our global market depends on enslaved workers of colour who are often punished like dogs when they try to escape their lot, or exterminated like cockroaches when they fight back, and the fact that this doesn’t matter in the scheme of things because they’re not white, is perhaps one of the most important thing facing the planet today, and it can be felt everywhere.

I fully believe that engaging with the differences generated under globalisation also means tuning into those ripples of planetary significance. I’m tempted to say that the significance of the racist exploitation boiling underneath the “global market” can be “generalised”, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. Rather, we can tune into a significance which is neither particular nor general – the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this “whatever”, which he figures as the key to the impossible project of “community”. That is where we must go.

• • +

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993

Felix Guattari, “So What”, Chaosophy, Semiotext[e], New York, 1995

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, “Postmodern Law and the Withering of Civil Society”, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-form, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1994

John Stuart Mill, “Civilization”, Dissertations and Discussions, Volume I, London, 1859-75

Angela Mitropoulos & Steve Wright, “The State and the Liberal Political Sphere”, Arena 57, 2002

Guy Rundle, “The 8-step guide to a happy left”, The Paper 25, 2002 ([http://www.thepaper.org.au/issues/025/025the8-stepguidetoahappyleft.html][3])

Bryan Turner, “Orientalism and the problem of civil society in Islam”, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, Routledge, London, 1994

Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Routledge, London, 1995

a dialogue between Ben and Claire (2002)

We were encamped in an isolated location, like a bunch of contestants in a reality TV show, and in some way those parameters forced us to make contact with our material context. For those of us outside the concentration camp, there was no escaping the fact that a bunch of people were locked up behind razor wire, very close. We had come to make contact and to contribute to the creation of freedom. Disengagement was not an option. Nobody could be a bystander.

This dialogue was born in various debriefing, late-night phone conversations between us that occurred after the Easter Woomera 2002 protests. We wanted to capture our thoughts on paper about the significance of the protests and what we thought could be taken from them. We came to the Woomera protests from very different starting points. Claire had been involved in the “refugee campaign” for the past year with groups like the Refugee Action Collective and No One Is Illegal and had visited Woomera twice before. Ben felt like he’d just been “rentacrowd” at rallies. We felt, along with everyone else, that Woomera was very significant both personally and politically, but why? We also felt, like many* *people, that the Woomera protests should not be overly fetishised, but what would this mean exactly? This is by no means an attempt at a definitive piece. There are big black holes because maybe some of this stuff cannot be theorised outside of particular contexts. We wanted to throw out some ideas, ask some questions and perhaps begin a dialogue.

no sequels: s11 + m1 + o3 + woomera 2002 does not equal …

[claire] What I didn’t want to see was the kind of politics that has abounded since the 11th – 13th September 2000 protests against the World Economic Forum. The climate of attempted “recreation” proliferates amongst a Left which surprises itself with its success and then is left floundering, unsure where to go next. But every attempted sequel has been a failure, or at least not as successful of the original that it tries to rehash. These events are fetished to the extent that all we see is an endless horizon of letter/number combinations — s11, o3, M1 — that increasingly lack meaning.

Part of the problem has become the fetishisation of a tactic – the blockade – or in the case of Woomera 2002, the tearing down of the fences at a detention centre. Suddenly the politics of the protest becomes subsumed to the tactic. Blockade becomes larger and larger on the propaganda and the politics drops off. For the September 11 - 13 anti-WEF protests the rallying cry “Stand Up for Global Justice” dominated the poster, encapsulating, in a very limited way, what the protests were going to be about. For May Day 2001, the words ‘shut down’ and ‘blockade’ suddenly became more important that trying to transmit the politics of the event in any way. Given that the May Day 2001 blockade at the Melbourne Stock Exchange were about one tenth of the size of s11, it seems that this kind of sequel event had no meaning for those outside the radical milieu. It also indicates to me that there is no nostalgia for a recreation of events outside certain left-wing elements.

Moreover I believe that the lack of turn out for the May Day 2001 protests was in part because it was widely known that the blockade of the Stock Exchange wasn’t actually going to work in any real way. It was widespread knowledge that the Stock Exchange operates mainly through computer systems and that accessing the Stock Exchange building is not essential for the operations of the Stock Exchange. To then expect people to turn out to take part in something that is a foregone conclusion seems ludicrous. A similar thing occurred this year at the insipid May Day protest when Melbourne people were asked to come and blockade the DIMIA offices, a questionable target in the first place, even more so once the building was closed for the day. That this happened so soon after the Woomera protests, where the spirit of direct action and civil disobedience was so inspiring, was incredibly disheartening.

The lessons that can be learnt from the Woomera protests then I believe are not ones about giving a protest a particular tag that seems to have worked previously and expecting people to turn up simply on that basis. What worked about s11 and Woomera 2002 is not what they were called or the fact that particular tactics were used, but the politics on which they were built. In some ways it I believe it is because they were in some ways quite non-specific about the “reasons” people should attend, rather there were general statements or rallying calls put out – stand up for global justice, make the connections, make the journey – that people could relate to without having to subscribe to a certain political line. Then there was the fact that these events were about taking action – shutting down the World Economic Forum, with our bodies against the camps – rather than idly waving placards and linking arms outside of an empty building.

[ben] I think there are two kinds of problems that can occur in attempts to build a kind of brand-name momentum for mass mobilisation. First, there is the tendency to posit the event as a content-free thing in itself, which nobody would ever admit to doing, but which happens nonetheless. It’s particularly dangerous when one endlessly repeats call-to-action mantras that try to blanketly transmit political messages outside of any social context, so I think this is linked to another problem that cuts a little deeper: how we conceive of the transmission of politics itself. I think most attempts to simultaneously be accessible and yet still make political links between situations are unfortunately self-defeating – there’s a reduction to a really thin kind of rhetoric that makes sense to nobody. Which is what made Woomera 2002 so interesting, because I think that it briefly circumvented some of these problems of politics and communication.

finding a common enemy

[claire] Woomera was interesting in terms of the lack of social democratic demands made. This was a refreshing and appreciated aspect of the protest for me. I think the making of demands of the state is a politically corrupt tactic, in that many of those responsible for formulating these demands are of the opinion that the state will not be able to meet them anyway. But they rationalise that by making these demands, campaigning around them and failing to achieve them will lead those involved in the campaign to “see the truth” about the role of the state under capitalism and become revolutionaries. More often than not in my opinion, constant loss, rather than turning people into revolutionaries, turns them into cynical, disenchanted political actors who chose to give up activism rather than to constantly fail. So to attend a protest that was organised with no overarching political program and no social democratic demands was refreshing and real. In fact such demands would have appeared ludicrous and rightly so. What was wanted was the closure of the detention centres and there appeared to be a realisation amongst the camp that the only way this was going to be achieved was if protesters did it themselves. It was quite clear from over a year of campaigning for the closure of the camps demands on the Federal Government or the Immigration Minister to act were ridiculous. As an article on the freespeech.org website states: “Too much of the time anti-globalisation amounts to an appeal to the state to take account of the wishes of some of its citizens and return to the good old days of social democracy and national autonomy and sovereignty so that it can protect us against the worst excesses of the corporations … We should understand that states and government are complicit in the process and act accordingly” (freespech.org). The same goes for the “refugee” campaign. We should understand that the government and the state is responsible for the ethnic caging of asylum seekers and act accordingly.

The protests’ refusal to engage with the state by making demands is reminiscent of the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program that was established in 1969. The Panthers did make demands of the state, however the defining feature of the Breakfast for Children was that it demonstrated the Panthers’ true emphasis on social reality rather than rhetoric. They were programmatic Lenninsts who did the right thing. Cleaver says of the programs: “Breakfast for Children pulls people out of the system and organises them into an alternative. Black children who go to school hungry each morning have been organised into their poverty, and the Panther program liberates them, frees them from that aspect of their poverty. This is liberation in practice … If we can understand Breakfast for Children, can we not understand Lunch for Children, and Dinner for Children and Medical Care for Children? And if we can understand that, why can’t we understand not only a People’s Park, but People’s Housing, and People’s Transportation, and People’s Industry and People’s Banks? And why can’t we understand a People’s Government”.

Therefore, in terms of the Woomera protests, if most of those attending can understand the uselessness of making demands of the state to close the detention centres, can they not understand the uselessness of any demands of the state or in fact a state at all? This kind of thinking is one that is more and more prevalent under 21st century capitalism. The kind of lead-them-down-the-garden-path thinking that has been so prevalent in progressive movements throughout the 20th century is long outdated and deserves a re-think. In some ways the kinds of thought linkages that are expected of people previously are not such huge jumps any more. Capitalism is becoming nastier and nastier and in that nastiness more blatant and obvious. Perhaps it is not that people are disinterested in politics and but rather the methods of progressive organising that are on offer are distasteful because of some of the assumptions they make about people’s ability to draw their own conclusions about the current state of the world.

So if you believe then in protesters ability to draw their own conclusions and to have their own reasons for attending protests, how then do we relate to each other? Certainly not by getting on a megaphone to remind everyone of why we are here. In 1995 Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army said: “We … ask in the name of all men and women … that you save a moment, a few days, a few hours, enough minutes to find the common enemy”. We have identified a common enemy, let’s get on with naming that enemy and acting against it.

[ben] I think that Woomera 2002 was a really powerful demonstration that there are meaningful alternatives to an impotent politics of “protest”. Over the last few months, especially since the antiwar movement started, I’ve realised that putting a reified image of “protest” at the centre of political action absolves one from the work of making mutually challenging connections amongst people in communities of resistance, and of actually creating the collective actions that will materially challenge the current system. It leaves one open to making empty demands of the State which actually help to obscure the actual politics of our current situation, which is the punitive tightening of national borders to contain people’s attempts to counterglobalise capital.

One possible exception to this dire “state of demands” is if one cannily approaches this kind of stuff in terms of “blackmailing the State” – “do this or we’ll make your life unlivable”. But by definition, this is only tenable in a wider context of action: telling the British government to drop the Poll Tax, in combination with a “can’t pay, won’t pay” strategy of refusal; telling the Italian government to stop the rises in basic services in the 1970s, in combination with a similar strategy of mass refusal of payment, in an attempt to financially bankrupt the State. Sabotage, for the politics of the concrete. Meanwhile, a politics of “protest” leaves one free to “extract”, in one unsympathetic Woomera 2002 participant’s brazenly instrumentalist language, “the most political mileage” out of any given situation, in terms of increasingly meaningless symbols. And all this while the fabric of people’s lives hung in the balance. Is it no wonder that many people in the world think that “politics” is dirty word? More on this later.

But regardless, when it was working well, Woomera 2002 remained for me a different kind of “demonstration”, and it really helped to challenge my ideas of what “politics” were all about. As in, “we can intervene like this; let me demonstrate”. Thus, it was a practical, performative action that showed us something about the world, and in a small way, it changed something about that world. This is never an easy or natural thing; I think it has to be monstrous, in a good way. Socialist feminist critic Donna Haraway has noted that the figure of the monster always stands at the border of whatever we consider the natural human condition, and that the word “monster” shares the same root as the word “demonstrate”. So how can we have more monstrous and challenging demonstrations, more collective convergences of desire that don’t submit themselves to disengaged and idealist rhetoric?

This will inevitably come across as “sectarian”, but I don’t think the logic of political identification is that important (hey, I still don’t know what the fuck “autonomist” means) – what’s important is if people’s actions have a qualitative orientation towards creating situations that can bring about radical change. People act differently from what they say, which is why we have to help create those situations where crap ideology (ours and others’) commits suicide. What happened at Woomera was really interesting in this regard – perhaps primarily because

1. the event was built on really particular material circumstances (and yes, this is a good thing, and not a reason to disqualify the possibility of waves of future actions drawing inspiration from such a unique event), and

2. the gestures made by the visiting protestors were connecting in a very real way with people’s everyday life of resistance within the camps.

So, what does all this usefully tell us about the relationship of radical action to materiality and everyday life? Hmmmm…

I also think it’s crucial that this practical evaporation of ideology – which happened in spite of whatever dodgy rhetoric was indeed floating around at Woomera – wasn’t just a nice sandpit for the protestors outside. Rather, it happened across and through the fences as well: there are people in the Woomera detention centre who (defying attempts to fetishise them as either revolutionary symbols or objects of pity) no doubt nominally come from “authoritarian sects”, but we managed to make a modest but radical kind of mutual action. Cool.

Survivor : The Australian Outback : Outwit, Outplay, Outlast

[claire] What was amazing for me about Woomera was the do it (y)ourself. ethos that pervaded all aspects of camp life. There were many affinity groups that had organised previous to the camp and that were really well set up – the legal team, the health and medical service, desert indymedia – but also people were really into doing things for ourselves. One incidence that really illustrates that for me was when I saw these young women cleaning out the toilets. I hadn’t seen them before and I didn’t see them again, it’s not like they were “organisers” of the event, they saw a problem and got down to fixing it. They were refilling the porta-loos that had stopped functioning because of lack of water. Instead of looking around for someone else to deal with the problem, they just undertook to do it themselves which encapsulated the whole feeling of the camp for me.

The camp had a feeling to it which was unlike any other protest I have ever attended. There was a basic infrastructure established that people had been working on for months that was set up to facilitate people’s ability to take action and simply that. The idea that you can create a situation that facilitates action but doesn’t dictate what form that action takes is not one that seems to have much currency amongst the Left in Australia but in this case it certainly worked. The most successful spokescouncil was one which operated in a similar way. Previous to facilitating it I went to a couple of previous facilitators and a few other people and asked them how they thought it should be run. The suggestion that they came up with to run it as a timetabling exercise seemed to me to work the best of all the spokescouncils. In this statement there is also a recognition that by the Sunday morning a lot of the pressures that had been on previous spokescouncils had dissipated, allowing a more relaxed and cooperative atmosphere amongst the participants. But to run the spokescouncil along similar lines as the protest had been organised worked excellently. There was no attempt to achieve consensus or unanimity amongst the participants, rather spokes were asked to propose actions that were then written up on a piece of paper so that all at camp could see what was happening and when and participate if they wanted to. This style of organising has many problematic aspects, too many to go into now, but in this particular situation and case it worked amazingly well and was an empowering experience for me to be a part of.

[ben] There seems to be a mythology of spokescouncils being considered a perfect decision-making space. For some there’s a pretense (whether “for” or “against” spokescouncils) that they mean “anything goes”, allowing participants to be absolved from any collective responsibility. Following the idea that it should be a perfect decision making space, others assume that it should act as a yet another boring forum for atomised individuals to vote on binding decisions, and get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

But instead, the spokescouncils at Woomera were more like campfire sessions from a reality TV show. They were a space to air contentious issues. To invite and communicate decisions, but not necessarily to make them as a totality. And like reality TV, it was contentious stuff, but luckily, in contrast, it’s stuff that now can’t be really aired in public – it remains almost unrepresentable, lost to that instant. And in the final reality TV irony, the material circumstances (i.e. being effectively stuck in the middle of the South Australian desert) meant that we couldn’t just “leave the island” when we didn’t get our way and spat the dummy. No retreats to the relative safety of anywhere.

with our bodies against the camps

The most effective way to stop machinery is to throw a wrench into it. Most of us can’t afford wrenches, so we have to use our bodies instead.
– Howard Zinn

[claire] What also impressed me about the protests was how ready people were for direct action. Nothing I have ever been to before had ever been like that – not even the Jabiluka blockade where there was a strong emphasis on direct action. I missed the Friday night “fence event” but took part in the trespass actions on the Saturday and Sunday. I was amazed how prepared people were to cross that mythical line into illegal action without any fear. It was like the situation was so severe that people no longer could sit on the sidelines. The normal fear of repression, police response or arrest didn’t see to exist for the protest campers. It was like the old cliche of being faced with other people’s oppression making you stand up and be counted had come true in an inspiring and courageous manner. Andrew Kopkind, an American activist, writes of his involvement with the radical Weathermen grouping’s actions at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention: “… simply not to fear fighting is a kind of winning”. The same I believe can be said of Woomera, simply not to fear state repression for the multitude of reasons people had was a sort of victory, and one which should be celebrated.

The mind is more apt to perceive many things adequately, the more its body has in common with other bodies.
– Spinoza, Ethics

[ben] I think that true engagement, in which your practice is always in life-changing dialogue with your material conditions, is hard to do. Nobody really “knows” how. To do it properly, you have to give up a little of that idealist will-to-control that usually comes with political programmes, that comes with the painfully artificial separation between “politics” and “everyday life”.

While on a recent community music exchange in London, Koori hip hop artist MC Wire was rapping about racism. He was challenged by some who questioned his need to rhyme about “politics”. “There’s no word for ‘politics’ in my language,” he replied. “This is my reality “. Everyday life is where everything goes on. He may have been making just that point, but perhaps also for Wire, “politics” has largely abandoned this grounding. We have to overcome our predictable readings of people’s contempt for “politics” as being a rejection of the possibility of social change. We’re all familiar with the use of the word “politics” to mean Machievellian power games (“office politics”), or participation in State officialdom (“a career in politics”). But we’re less able to see how our programmes-of-worship, our empty and flattened slogans, are just as removed from reality as these more familiar bastardisations. Yes, we need plans and techniques beyond the immediate. But everyday life is the fire in which we forge them, from those little moments, and not the reverse.

Where do we go from here?

1. Why is the Left usually so unable to create situations that engage deeply with the world? Why does it always come off like a bunch of evangelical cults? This isn’t the centrist’s automatic equation of radical politics with “dogmatism”. Rather, it’s an observation that politics seems to be all about convincing people of various ideological Truths, converting them to your cause, wrapping the world in ideas from above, rather than generate of useful concepts in interventions. And no, “politicising people through involving them in actions”, contrary to its potentials, usually means getting people to act on panicky autopilot in accordance with “our” wishes. No more angry zombies!

2. Why are most people in the world able to write and design really cool personal party invitations, full of clever and engaging calls to action, as if by instinct? They always seem to look much better than you’d expect. There’s a set of social skills mobilised in the making party invitations that I think are vital to the question of acting and organising politically. If used at all in the traditional Left, these skills are usually instrumentalised as mere tools within a grand plan, and hence reified. How can we act with these skills, rather than manipulating them? How can we deploy them without crushing them with our weighty intentions, our dry authority? How can we allow revolutionary new relationships and actions arrive?

3. At an anti-borders forum held in Sydney a few months later, a comrade made the ambivalent observation that “Woomera happened by accident”. I think that this is really interesting, because it puts the spotlight on what I think was really important about Woomera 2002. What’s actually going on in the spaces that the programmatic sides of our brains describes as an “accident”? The wonderful kind of limited engagement that happened at Woomera was like a deus ex machina plot twist that happened at the beginning (rather than at the end) of the play that was our mutual action. God out of the machine. It seemed to just arrive. Hundreds of people, ready to do what it took to challenge the fences (and what they stood for), on both sides — whether it was breaking the law or to providing a network of support. A general and uncanny resolve. I’m not trying to mystify this by suggesting that it was inexplicable. And leave behind the religious connotations of the word “God” for a second, and focus on the concept. Out of the machine.

4. In the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a machine is an assemblage of forces that produces desire. We need machines of struggle — or as Deleuze and Guattari call them, war machines — that can produce the revolutionary deus ex machina situations. These machines need a consistent social surface on which they can assemble themselves; Deleuze and Guattari call this (in post-psychoanalytic terms) the body without organs. How can we be a body without organs? A body without organs has a “plane of consistency” — it isn’t “consistent” in a homogenous sense, but consistent in a way involving disparate elements that have a common intensity holding them together. That’s what we have to do. Be disparate and together, and intense. How was Woomera like this?

5. Deleuze and Guattari note that you can build a body without organs with a programme — one that has a sensitivity to the moment. A chief example of theirs is S&M: a body opening itself up to a different kind of consensual training that steps beyond cliches of pleasure and pain, or of (the authority of) “strength” and (the weakness of) “submission”. Revolutionaries need to train in ways that go beyond cliches of everyday life and politics, strength and submission, in ways that open them up in unexpected ways, not all of them “morally pleasant”. How was Woomera like this?

6. I think that at brief moments at Woomera 2002, our bodies came together with a consistent intensity to form bodies without organs and machines of struggle. At those points, dead ideology ceased to matter. Concepts always matter, but the illusion that we were going to first convince people of ideas first, which would then leading to homogenous action, was broken. The distinction between these things became untenable, and whatever predictable rhetoric about “us” “locking up Ruddock” and “freeing the refugees” evaporated as we enacted concepts together. Concepts like freedom. Concepts that were uncoded by liberal, or social democratic, or socialist, or whatever ideology.

7. Most of “us”, whether we’re in the camps or outside them, don’t agree about much ideologically. It’s important for those of us outside the fences to stop fetishising those inside as somehow being the incarnation of certain ideological fantasies, especially since many of us who were there inside the detention centre have belonged to an assortment of radical organisations that, like any other, have serious disagreements with others. What matters is that we’re actually trying – possibly against our “better judgement” — to effectively act together against capital’s border control mechanisms. From that common action we can work with, contest and develop concrete concepts that may just render many of our disengaged, ideological fantasies irrelevant, like the useless slogans at Woomera.

8. Of course, the best way to do this is being contested all the time, and we have to create examples and grounds for the most effective kind of a common action. Talking about deus ex machina and assemblages of bodies doesn’t mean being a hippie and waiting for shit to arrive from the heavens. It involves programmatic thought, but a different kind of programmatic thought. It involves work, but a different kind of work. And much of this work has to do with the invitation. Woomera 2002 was a particularly good party invitation. It was an engaging call to action. Did it have demands? No. Did it attempt to represent? Not really. Did it set a basis for how to come together? Yes.

[claire] The whole idea of a separation existing between politics and everyday life brings to mind an argument that was had recently at a dialogue on borders organised by No One Is Illegal. One of the participants criticised no border politics as not being connected with people’s reality or “where people are at”. This raised the question for me of who is being referred to when it is declared that this is outside people’s reality? As MC Wire said – this isn’t politics, this is my everyday life. Same goes for those interned inside Australia’s concentration camps, those living in border camps on the Thai/Burma border, undocumented migrant workers and those living in Palestine where, as Alex Kouttab says, the border literally shoots at you.

I was always really bad at designing party invitations. One of the houses I’ve lived in was in Bent St – so we always had party invitations that entreated people to get bent at Bent St, ha ha. So I’ve always left that expression of creativity to other people. However I am an avid consumer and intensely attracted to a political praxis that is creative, engaging and interesting. In recent times I have loved the mergence of big puppets, get into costumes and radical cheerleader at several protests, Woomera included. Music has also been used effectively on and off during my protesting years. To dance and sing and act crazy at a rally always fills me with joy and lends to the event a spirit of revolution that I do not find at more traditional rallies where I am speechified at then led passively through the streets whilst being berated to join with the bland sloganeering emitting from the megaphones. Rallies are mostly boring, painful, disempowering events that I hate attending and yet occasionally feel compelled to as my duty. What kind of politics is this? To dredge up the old Emma Goldman quote: if I can’t dance, it ain’t my revolution. However cliched that may sound it acts as a powerful reminder that the project of radical social change needs to employ creativity and joy.

Again the recent forum on borders – one of the other critiques also raised by aforementioned participant was the idea that in a borderless world we will all look the same, eat McDonalds and be overwhelmed by a homogenous Americanised culture. One of the strongest arguments I heard against this was the notion of human creativity. The question this raises is how do we trust in this notion of human creativity and cultural resistance in envisioning a post-capitalist society and yet are so bad at actually employing or mobilising it in our struggles. This is not at all to dispute whether this creativity exists – I believe very strongly that it does – but rather to point out that much of the politics that is in existence is not only disengaging, but also bland and intensely boring. I have just finished reading ‘Radical Melbourne’ and one of the things that struck me about the left groups in existence pre-1945 was how they had their shit together in terms of the social aspect of their organising – they knew how to have fun. Despite the immense political differences I have with these, often Stalinist, organizations it all sounded very appealing – the picnics, the summer camps, the footy games. When did the tradition of such organising leave Australian radical culture? There seems to have been a re-emergence in recent years, and I’m sure it never left certain movements, but it’s certainly not a widespread phenomena. When will we learn that to march people around the CBD to buildings that are protected by a line of blue is the antithesis to engaging politics? When will we take up concepts like empowerment and actually employ them in our protest strategies?

decoding and recoding the camp

[ben] What was deflated at Woomera? Instrumentalism: the objectification and use of movement in the world for a fundamentalist and teleological Grand Plan. As an alternative to this, what happened at Woomera was a regrounding of “politics” as a series of collective, ethical interventions into the present, with those in the middle of those struggles, creating spaces where new kinds of social relations can suggest themselves. A different “way forward”.

Of course, it’s possible to give all of this an ideological gloss, and there have been plenty of reinterpretations of the event – mostly as an underwriting of liberal humanist politics: that in the face of such an experience, what we could most clearly apprehend was “our common humanity with the refugees”. While the sincere orientation of these kinds of declarations towards an attempt at solidarity cannot be doubted, there is no doubt in my mind that it is useless to appeal to or extend the kind of logical demarcations (of commonality and difference) that can underwrite nationalist exclusion in the first place.

Yes, there are things in common on both sides of the fence, but when the fence comes down the differences do not suddenly dissolve. Yes, against all the propaganda of the war on terror, the people in the camps really are men, women and children who are suffering from appalling punishment. Yes, the State’s attempts at “dehumanisation”, at erasing their desire, pain and anger, must be undone. But towards what? Surely we must escape the whole setup of homogenising logic. Surely solidarity means making contact with and standing together with people who are different? And whose differences are not reducible? Crying together, coming together in resistance is all about friction, exchange and mutation rather than a comfortable homecoming. Isn’t this what a revelatory moment of understanding is all about? Yes, compassion must be an answer to all of this, but we must be sensitive to its different flavours in our current context, some of which may be highly recuperative.

Of course, all of this must be situated in a context. It’s very different for someone subjected to the most appalling abuse to claim that they’re not an animal, that they’re human. To suggest this, as many asylum seekers do, is not a comfortable homecoming for them. But is it for local activists? Is it not a covert reinscription of our own nationalism to simply extend that border of “humanity”, just as it is to speak with Statist authority that “refugees are welcome here” rather than question the position of that authority in the whole setup? Doesn’t the fundamental aspect of that logic need to come tumbling down? The frictions that occurred over issues of indigenous power at Woomera 2002 (and their attempted absorption via a practice of “respectful listening” that papered over real differences) only re-emphasises the fact that any feel-good investment in a “common humanity” is a lazy way of processing the decomposition of “Politics” that was actually occurring.

[claire] What was also deflated for me was the positioning of the protesters as “good white nationalists” at the centre of the imagined community of the white Australian nation. Not only was there a refusal to posit ourselves to speak with Statist authority on who is welcome but the notions of the nation-state were critiqued and attacked. The language utilised by some local activists in asserting that “refugees are welcome” here falls into the nationalist practices critiqued by Ghassan Hage in his book “White Nation” where he states:

“Like the ‘evil nationalist’ engaging in exclusion by categorizing the other as undesirable, the ‘good, tolerant nationalist’ engages in inclusion by categorizing the other, if not as ‘desirable’, at least as ‘not that undesirable … If racist violence is better understood as a nationalist practice of exclusion, ‘tolerance’, in much the same way, can be understood as a nationalist practice of inclusion. Both, however, are practices confirming an image of the White Australian as a manager of national space.”

I would argue that, in similar ways, the declaration that “refugees are welcome here” only serves to reinforce the idea of the Australian nation with local activists vying for control over the right to determine who crosses our borders – the State establishes criteria for who will be allowed to immigrate, activists assert that those categories should be extended. Bad form.

However, at the Woomera protests the chant “no borders, no nations, no deportations” was a chant regularly and refreshingly heard. To take up such adages as well as contending that we are all barbarians * goes some way in questioning the logic of a *politics based on nationalism. We need to move beyond the nationalist practices of speaking for the nation intrinsic to the claim of who is welcome and in the “othering” inherent in the arbitrary classification of those seeking asylum as refugees. We need to make it our project to reach what ben refers to earlier as a coming together in resistance which may be uncomfortable, difficult and fractious but will be ultimately real.

[ben] Warning: don’t take my critique as an advertisement for an adrenaline-pumping kind of negation that regards liberalism as “wussy”. Because that’s not why political liberalism is bad. Along with many of us (especially the prisoners) who were at Woomera 2002, I cried during our contact at the fences. People on both sides of the fence were confronted with that which was almost indescribable. We were crying together. What we must do is feel and act our pain and sympathy in a manner that doesn’t create narratives of sentimentality, of sainthood and martyrdom, or which reinforce our ability to patronise or condescend.

We need radical sympathy. An acting together. Here I want to draw on some of the other, non-sentimental meanings of “sympathy”, some of which may be dodgy and New Age, but which I think are of conceptual use. First there is “sympathy pain”, which you can experience if you’re attuned to someone else’s bodily state. Then there’s “sympathetic magic”, which you might experience, if you believe such things, when someone pushes pins into a voodoo doll that represents your body. But most of all, there’s the physical phenomenon of “sympathetic vibration”, which is what happens when you put two tuning forks close together – they both start humming, and louder, because each reinforces the other. So rather than a sentimental sympathy that reinforces liberal individualist statehood, I think what happened across the fences at Woomera was that people were vibrating in sympathy. Acting together. Resonating.

What does this mean for the hard work of building solidarity on a planetary scale? Given the global scale of Empire now, and the neocolonial realities that are always before us in every pore of society, I guess all questions of race and class, while not able to be universalised, have a global significance that we can be attuned to, wherever we are. The fact that our global market depends on enslaved workers of colour who are often punished like dogs when they try to escape their lot, or exterminated like cockroaches when they fight back, and the fact that this doesn’t matter in the scheme of things because they’re not white, is perhaps one of the most important thing facing the planet today, and it can be felt everywhere.

I fully believe that engaging with the differences generated under globalisation also means tuning into those ripples of planetary significance. I’m tempted to say that the significance of the racist exploitation boiling underneath the “global market” can be “generalised”, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. Rather, we can tune into a significance which is neither particular nor general – the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this “whatever”, which he figures as the key to the impossible project of “community”. That is where we must go.

Thus, we need to experiment with models of political affiliation that enable us to act together, engaged in the reality of our current circumstances. We need a practical and faithless process that sidesteps the increasingly meaningless idealism and programmatic posturings required of traditional political organising.

And so it’s about a real movement. Not an ideological one. It’s about working together to destabilise border control. “Refugees” and “citizens” alike. It’s a real resistance to the enclosures of globalising capital. As always, we always have to ask ourselves, what is the concrete political reality of the current situation? What are people actually doing to resist? The movement is to escape the enclosures. People are doing it. This is the politics we must grasp.

[claire] The idea of resonance for me encapsulates two important points – of thinking about how capitalism affects you and of solidarity. For me it is part of an instinctive reaction against the self-interest type of politics which says we must show hot you will benefit from the liberation of others because I hate the way this discounts the beautiful human ability to resonate, to emphasise, to radically sympathise. I don’t think people were crying at the fences/border because they were intellectualizing that they had nothing to gain from the detention of those inside. I will never give up a politics which creates the space, or at least attempts to, for people to cry, get angry, outraged and upset, because this politics is real. It engages not only with our everyday lives but our humanity and our collectivity.

I went to Woomera because it felt like the right thing to do. Once I had decided to go I was questioned by someone who was (and is) intensely critical of the protests because he believed we would find ourselves in a situation where the detainees would escape with our assistance and where we would be unprepared for this, therefore how could I be complicit in this. In the end the only answer I could come up with was that it felt like the right thing to do at the time. This kind of instinctive desire to do something when you find yourself in a situation which is almost too horrible to contemplate – living in a country where people who come to us for help are locked up in cages – is not something that should be rationalised away. Sure I have a desire to educate myself further in political theory but I have absolutely no desire to lose the passionate side of my political nature which is necessary for me to resonate, intensely.

Extracts from a diary

09-NOV-2002 03:58

I was going to get into why I’m thinking these strange thoughts, but it got too hard. Instead, here’s something I wrote (on a mailing list) immediately after the Woomera 2002 desert protest against the Australian refugee concentration camps in April this year:

been watching the TV news coverage of the protests.. every news network is reporting and focusing on the violence. the ABC which i thought had the best coverage, reported that there are splits among the organising groups. can anyone who is there/ in touch with people there give us an account of what’s gone on?

I’m back from Woomera, and will be writing a much fuller account when I get time, as I suppose will others on this list who were there.

The Woomera 2002 action was one of the most inspiring and emotionally wrenching events in which I’ve taken part. People from all over the country came to work together in a remarkable spirit of goodwill — often practically full time as legal advisors, as medics, as cooks, roadies, etc. This commitment often left me speechless. The basis of the event was that many diverse groups with different approaches were going to come and act together, in different ways. For some, there was some frustration in coming to grips with a structure that didn’t involve getting the numbers, but for the most part there was a distinct lack of meaningless or disengaged rhetoric — the material situation was overriding, and the imperatives involved meant that the flaccid demands that have for so long demobilised radical action in this country basically evaporated, however briefly. It was the politics of the concrete. It was refreshing. So there was diversity and inevitable disagreement, but no “splits” within a fake or homogenised “unity”.

Most of the media coverage has been of the activities of Friday afternoon, so I’ll give my perspective on that.

The only violence that we had to really think about that day was visited on the asylum seekers inside the concentration camp during the night. As attested by those in long-running contact with those inside, the asylum seekers were beaten, handcuffed, locked in their rooms and canisters of tear gas were thrown in. Contrary to many conservative commentaries, this was not a consequence of our “irresponsible” actions, but “merely” the latest in a long line of violent actions against the asylum seekers. Often it’s particularly in response to their protest actions, which was why we were there that day — to show solidarity with an already existing action — to have a positive repsonse rather than the endless negative ones.

So we marched to the centre to join an existing protest, to create some solidarity, dialogue, freedom. Many of us climbed up the perimeter fence to wave to the refugee protestors inside. After a few shakes it fell down. We did the obvious thing: we took advantage of the situation to get closer to the people who’ve been facing the most barbaric isolation and violence. These fences are there to be broken down. They must be. Some people weren’t personally comfortable with breaching the perimeter in the immediate situation, and they stayed clear, which is fine. Obviously it’s not enough to just break down this particular fence, but I think breaching the perimeter in this case was a key part of a much bigger movement to dismantle all of the camps.

When we got to the inner fence, we were greeted by asylum seekers who were chanting “ACM: immigration mafia!”, “Where is human rights?”, and “Freedom! Freedom!”. We joined in. I shook hands with people who stretched their hands through loops of razor wire. One man told me that they were grateful to find that there were people in Australia who cared about their situation. Another told me that he’d been there for two years, and was desperate to get out, and that our government was rotten. I told them that I was glad to meet them and that people all over the country supported them, and would do all we could to help their cause. Most were from Afghanistan and Iran. We were all crying.

Then the cops came. I suppose a bunch of protesters, advancing resolutely to shake hands and speak with asylum seekers through the fence can be made to appear violent when a bunch of cops are trying to disperse them with riot gear and horses. When a horse came out of nowhere, pushing me aside, and the mounted cop lightly kicked me in the head, smashing my glasses, I just said, “What are you doing? I’m only trying to say hello!”. This kind of stuff was generally the extent of it as far as the visiting protestors were concerned — it was all quite mild, because we were largely Australian citizens who were able to disperse, unlike the people inside (who live with the obverse of our citizenship, whose relationship to authority, in the last instance, I resolutely refuse to celebrate or attempt to extend to others — the whole relation needs to come tumbling down).

[Meanwhile, on the front page of the Canberra Times there was a photo of me amongst a bunch of other people trying to avoid being trampled by horses, under the headline “BLOOD AND URINE THROWN AT POLICE”. It’s the same kind of bizarre fiction that has fueled so-called “moderate” groups to either condemn the protest out of hand or to imply that in contrast to our “violent” protest, any “real” movement to free refugees from the camps needs to somehow be “peaceful”. Such extremely leading distinctions are nonsense. Those who participated in civil disobedience were simply resolute in our challenge to the authority of the refugees’ confinement. Objects were broken in order to do this. Laws were broken. They need to be broken. Smearing this as “violence” is to fall into waiting hands of the State.]

Anyway, in the middle of this confrontation, asylum seekers were suddenly attempting to scale the fence. Banners were thrown to stop their hands being cut by the razor wire. The bars were being wedged apart. I saw the fence suddenly break, and people jumped through, disappearing into the crowd. I won’t say much more on this matter except to delcare that we all felt it was our duty to help these people do whatever they had decided. Some said that they would rather die than return. Others chose to simply enjoy what short freedom they had, and to face the consequences after recapture. In any case, away from any metropolitan resources, our options were limited. I have no details of what went on next, except that many visiting protestors showed remarkably fast thinking, respect and courage in helping these people do what they wanted. We never expected any of these events, and coped as best we could. I wish the best to those still at large.

• • +

I think Woomera 2002 was a watershed in the radical politics of solidarity and resistance in Australia. I’m thankful to everyone involved, especially the asylum seekers who gave the rest of us the example of resolute action, for the opportunity to have participated in a small way.

More later.

In solidarity,

Ben

• • •

09-NOV-2002 05:37

I guess I will write something.

I don’t think I’ve really dealt with what happened at Woomera. I don’t cry very often, but I cried a lot at Woomera. Crying in the South Australian desert is messy. The dust is fine, like talcum powder. It’s like being on Mars, as imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson — the dust gets everywhere: far, far up your nose, in your underpants, in your eye sockets. (I’d thought ahead and brought breathmasks for my friends, but they didn’t seem to make much of difference — my white mask was pure orange on both sides after a couple of hours.) Dust everywhere. And when you cry, you make your face all muddy.

A man with whom I shook hands through the fences had gotten his head caught in the bales of razorwire that were on either side of the double fence. The razors were cutting through his ear. Another had been cut all across the chest, and there was blood everywhere. Some of it was desperation to touch another, some was despairing self immolation (which happens on a daily basis in the camps).

Immediately after the breakout (I’m still amazed that they could break through the thick steel bars, since I’m pretty sure none of us had brought anything that could do such a thing), and during our retreat, I stood sobbing as a little boy who had broken through the fence was immediately reapprehended and bundled into a wagon by the authorities. A well muscled man was also tackled and thrown into the van. He was one with whom I’d exchanged words through the fences earlier. He began wailing. An older protestor, in his late 60s, fainted at this point, perhaps from heat exhaustion and dehydration, perhaps from the horror of it all. Federal Police forced us to move on, and we were unable to help him.

Back at our camp, which was a few hundred metres from the concentration camp, the remaining free asylum seekers were hidden behind a human wall of protestors, ten lines thick. (Other asylum seekers had been ferried out in cars immediately, making for Adelaide and Melbourne. A few are still at large.) I linked arms and joined the wall. Federal Police were all around us. Nobody moved. You could hear everyone breathing in the desert. Then someone started singing. “Peace, yeah peace, peace is possible / and you, yeah you you are responsible”. The sun was going down. The entire crowd began singing. People from an affinity group called Food Not Bombs were handing buckets of oranges around. Meanwhile, all this time, we had been surruptitiously smuggling the refugee children out of the human wall, and into a nearby tent, where they were given medical attention by volunteer doctors. The police were none the wiser.

After a couple of hours, the police gave up and dispersed. Most of our newly liberated friends ferreted themselves in our tents, and were provided new clothes so they couldn’t be easily identified by the cops. Some gave interviews at our desert.indymedia waystation. As in my original post, I won’t go any further into how we and the escapees dealt with their situation, for various overriding reasons.

The next day the police were much more prepared. They arrived with phalanxes of horses and were all kitted out in Judge Dredd gear. We attempted to make an offering of gifts for the imprisoned children: hundreds and hundreds of toys, which had been collected in the months leading up to the protest. (Some of the children inside grow up in the camps without anything to play with, let alone any education, and many attempt suicide.) The authorities allowed us to drop the toys off, but later we learned that they were immediately confiscated.

There was a tense standoff between us and the mounted cops. Unfortunately, I was in the front line. I’m not comfortable with animals at the best of times, let alone ones that are twice as tall and ridden by people with nasty jobs. I shared my water with my friend Tanya, with whom I’d locked arms, and then it ran out, and we were very thirsty. It felt like 40 degrees Celcius (104 degrees Farenheight), and it was midday. The horses moved slowly forward, their riders implacable. “I think I’m a bit scared,” Tanya said to me.

On the inside, the camp had been locked down. Nobody was there to greet us at the fence at first. (We’d managed to get some intelligence during the night that everyone inside had been locked in their dorms and teargassed.) Some managed to escape, though, and there was a heartbreaking moment when some women and children managed to get to the fences. All three layers of people — refugees, cops, protestors — were still. Nobody needed reminding that we were the first significant group of people that the people behind the fences had seen in Australia who weren’t involved in their processing or confinement. Who would call them something other than a number. (Prisoners are never referred to by name by the camp staff. They are routinely called “animals”, and are told that nobody wants them here.) Some of the police were crying.

Everyone (there were maybe 500 of us) made a sudden dash to the right, and then it was a mad dash for young and old. Our plan was to run around the compound, letting those inside know, even if they were locked in their rooms, that there were people outside. The police weren’t keeping up, so it was quite comical for a while. We met some more women and children (perhaps the authorities had decided, erroneously, that it was the men who were behind the events of the previous day, who were now under the tightest security).

“Don’t leave us,” the women inside were wailing. The horses arrived then. I looked further to the right and noticed that we were cut off — the camp’s armoured watercannon vehicle was edging around the next fence corner. Then someone threw a stone over the fence. My friend Claire picked it up, and when we examined it later we found this note wrapped around it:

Everything after that is a blur. I was wilting, exhausted and dehydrated, and so was everyone else. Throughout the day, the cops had regular visits from support personnel, and were well hydrated. We had some activist medics, one of whom gave me a swig of rehydration fluid, but it wasn’t enough. We were routed.

As we made our retreat, a few of us paused for to spell out the word “FREEDOM” with pebbles on the ground, for those we’d been forced to leave. It was instinctive, undirected, synchronous; we each worked on a different letter, and the word appeared within seconds.