Road Trip to the G20 protests and People's Summit

As most of you know, Mac and I spent a lot of time helping to organize the G20 protests of 2010. It was a wonderful and horrendous experience - that I won't go into here. As things were winding down then, we had begun to plan our trip to France. And then we learned that the G20 was meeting this fall in France. Honestly it wasn't intentional. But because of our recent experiences, we felt it was appropriate to attend the days of action etc etc.


As one can imagine,over the last ten years, there have been long discussions in the global justice movement and associated movements about the utility of protesting at summits. Its obvious that they are highly policed, ritualized encounters that often end up with exhausted and imprisoned activists, and little direct impact on the decision-making itself. And yet it seems wrong to ignore the fact that some of the most powerful actors, who are making decisions about the global economy are all in one place, along with a good helping of international media. Anyway, I wont' go on about this. Its a trap, but a trap we entered into. Many of the grassroots organizations in France had opted out of this one - choosing instead to focus on 'local actions' - which seemed to primarily be local manifestations of the Occupy/Indignado/99% movement. So we knew it wouldn't be a big mobilization. We also knew that Cannes, where the summit was happening was a war zone. There was going to be no way to get there. So we headed for the People's Summit in Nice.

We got there a day late, because of our commitment to Halloween - but when we arrived, we headed for Les Abbatoirs - the old ... erm.. abbatoirs of the city which had been loaned to the organizers of the People's Summit and anti-G20 mobilization. There were workshops going on, a row of port-a-potties, organic beer on tap, and lots of leaflets, flyers etc. We got programmes and stowed our bags and settled in. That first afternoon I attended an amazing meeting that was supposed to be a meeting of movements around the Mediterranean but was expanded to include other movements erupting around the world. There were folks from movements in: Portugal, Tunisia, Israel, Greece, Egypt, France, Wall Street, Belgium, Spain, London, Italy, Canada, Venezuela, Amsterdam, Berlin. Amazing to hear what's going on in their different arenas and figure out how to communicate better. Sage words from the Egyptian fellow
who said "we can get rid of what exists, the question is, we have to be ready to replace it with something better."


That night we met up with our hiphop friends from Toronto, Test Their Logic - who performed to a pretty empty hall - we didn't realize people were outside meeting, and then we went to a local gym to sleep. Sidney is really good with all this. He was quite fascinated to sleep in such a big place, and although there were snores, it was pretty quiet. 


The next day we went to Monaco for a protest against tax havens organized by Attac, a large French organization which has been campaigning around these issues, and for the banking tax for years. It was pretty theatrical, with clowns tying up fake bankers, balloons and confetti. Sidney had a great time. However it disappointed some of the young punks, who wanted something that felt a little more 'direct'. Understandable - it was a media spectacle, but one that was relatively well done. 


The next afternoon mac went to a bunch of workshops that he found interesting on climate justice movements etc. But both of us were disappointed that outside of the 99%/Arab 'spring' discussion participants I'd met, most of the people were either pretty staid NGO folks or young drunk punks. 


A couple of points on the culture of the meetings that differed from what we're used to
1. no other little kids. Seriously. none. weird. 
2. serving beer and wine all day in meetings will influence some people more than others. Those people will want attention. 
3. simultaneous translation of everything into french, spanish, english and arabic is amazing. 
4. people still smoke in meetings here. I can just imagine a discussion of 'fragrance free!'
5. the police are really serious here. On the turn of a dime, they whip out giant pepper cannisters, launchers of tear gas, and they pull on masks. They were ready to rumble and its a bit of a miracle that confrontations didn't ensue. 



The final day we went to two small demos - one on Tibet and an ATTAC die-in at a bank. Small, symbolic but spirited is really the best way to describe them.


And off we went in the rain to Marseille, and then back to Perpignan. It was raining cats and dogs throughout the whole week and we spent a good night in a cheap hotel drying out and cleaning up. aahhh.