REVIEW BY DANNY FAIRFAX
You are G8, We are 6 Billion
By Jonathon Neale
Vision Paperbacks, 2002
262 pages, $27.95
In the last year, books by Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Tariq Ali have been prominent in the bestsellers lists. You can buy Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore, in supermarkets, and Naomi Klein's new book, Fences and Windows, in airport newsagencies.
You are G8, We are 6 Billion is a different kind of book. Rather than solely chronicling the ills of the present capitalist system, Neale focuses on the mass resistance to this system and, specifically, on the anti-G8 protests in Genoa in July, 2001.
It is a personal account of those tumultuous days and, though Neale is an accomplished novelist and non-fiction writer, he writes from the perspective of an activist, protest organiser and long-term member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain.
While it discusses the issues which have inspired this "movement of movements", the book comes into its own with Neale's description of his experiences organising and participating in the protests, from the earliest organising meetings to the July 21 unity march of 300,000 people and ensuing police repression.
There are significant gaps in Neale's account of the protests. The book does not, and does not intend to, broadly reflect the gamut of protests and protesters who participated in Genoa. Neale admits, "If you were in Genoa yourself, you will often think while reading this 'That wasn't how I was feeling then'. And of course it wasn't."
Everyone who was at these protests has an incredible story to tell. Everyone had moments where they felt that their safety, or even their life, was in danger. Everyone can relay their brushes with the police brutality, but more importantly, they can relay their feelings of immense power when marching with hundreds of thousands of people against the system behind the brutality. A worthwhile project would be to collate all these stories, to give an overview to Genoa from all perspectives.
Neale offers his own perspective in an incisive yet accessible and highly compelling, manner.
Neale had been part of the anti-Vietnam War movement and joined the SWP in 1974. He has stuck with revolutionary politics through the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s. "I held on, hoping for a return of the movement of my youth, the feel and hope of 1968. When Seattle [1999] happened and the anti-capitalist movement came along, I threw myself into the new movement", he writes.
As a representative of the anti-capitalist group Globalise Resistance, Neale was organising for the protests from the first international planning meeting onwards, even though it drew only 150 people and was criticised by Neale for its disorganisation.
But all the tension in the lead-up to the G8 meeting melted into inspiration on the first day of protests, July 19. This was the day of the entirely peaceful immigrants' march, which took place under the slogan "Siamo tutti clandestini" ("We are all clandestines"). It was only a "taster" of things to come, but it drew as many people as demonstrated in Seattle in total, and far outstripped the organisers' expectations.
The next day was one of diverse actions, with the most confrontational taking place around the "red zone" (the area, which included the entire inner-city, that was sealed off from the outside world with six-metre-high fences, inside which the G-8 met). Here is where the biggest contradictions of Neale's account show up.
Neale is very critical of the division of protesters into seven different actions: "We were coming at them in seven different columns. In Prague, we had been three and I thought that was a crazy division of forces. This was worse."
Yet he justifies having a 1500-strong Globalise Resistance contingent, made up largely of members and sympathisers of the SWP and its sister groups from other countries, separate from the 20,000-stong "civil disobedience bloc", made up largely of the Italian autonomists (Tute Bianche) and the Young Communists, protesting in a completely different part of the city with no co-ordination between the blocs.
At no point does Neale explain the decision to hold a separate demonstration, although he does explore at length the differences between the tactics of the two protests. Both were pitched as "invasions of the red zone". The Globalise Resistance contingent used affinity groups and blockade tactics imported from the Seattle and Washington protests; while the Tute Bianche used what Neale calls more "elitist tactics", creating an advanced guard equipped with large shields and makeshift body armour.
In the end, nearly all the contingents were attacked by the police, though the hardest hit was the civil disobedience bloc, which Neale maintains was mainly due to the large number of young Italians in it.
The killing by the police of Genovese autonomist Carlo Giuliani on that day was one of the major talking points of the time. The graphic footage of his death was shown on Italian television, accompanied by Vittorio Agnoletto from the Genoa Social Forum who declared to all those at home watching: "I ask you to forget about what you were planning to do tomorrow. Get in your car, get on a train, get a bus. Come to Genoa tomorrow. March with us."
More than 300,000 people responded on July 21. It was clear that nobody expected the police to attack a crowd of such a size, which as Neale points out, had not taken place in Europe for 50 years: "This was a crowd the police should not attack, I thought ... this crowd was not looking for a fight. People wanted a peaceful march. You could feel it."
But the police, being directed by the "post-fascist" deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini, did not read the script. Members of the Black Bloc, a small group of anarchists who were widely believed to have been infiltrated by the police, smashed windows and torched cars, but the police "watched [them] and did nothing", Neale notes.
Instead, according to Neale, the cops targetted the peaceful sections of the crowd. Splitting the march in two, the police attacked protesters viciously with clubs and rounds of tear gas. Of this attack, Neale says, "They were rewriting the rules of European protest".
That night, the rule book was thrown away. Neale's description of those events is the most chilling part of We are 6 Billion. In what was described by Italians with shame as their "Chilean night", the national riot guard was sent into a school building where activists were sleeping. Brutal, cold-blooded beatings, torture and hundreds of arrests followed. Neale did not directly experience the raid, but he repeats the stories told to him by his comrades. A couple from Britain, who were in the school building, were beaten, arrested and incarcerated for four days.
However, We are 6 Billion ends on an extremely positive note. On July 24, 500,000 people protested across Italy against the police brutality. Since then, in Italy and across Europe, the global justice movement has marched inexorably forward, as the manifestazione have grown ever larger, including the march of 1 million behind the banner of "No global war" at the end of the European Social Forum in Florence last November.
The slogan adopted by this global movement has been "Another world is possible", reflecting both the complete rejection of the values of neoliberalism and the confidence that the movement "of 6 billion" can create a new world without the misery, inequality and insanity of the present system.
At the end of his book, Neale states: "In Genoa, for the first time, I felt that world is possible in my lifetime."
From Green Left Weekly, February 19, 2003.
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