Next Reading Circle : critical reading about the anti-2010 Convergence

BLOG POST posted on October 31, 2009 by vanrad

→Original Peoples, →Canadian Foreign Policy, →Environment, →2010 Olympics

Start: 2009-11-01 15:00

We will read these texts 

Convergence 2010 ? Convergence now !

convergence 2010

the Olympic Resistance Network supports the international resolution passed by over 1500 Indigenous delegates at the Intercontinental Indigenous Peoples Gathering in Sonora, Mexico to “boycott the 2010 Olympic Games” based on Resolution #2 of the Gathering which states “We reject the 2010 Winter Olympics on sacred and stolen territory of Turtle Island–Vancouver, Canada”. Based on this, we are working towards a global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial convergence from February 10th-15th 2010.

(from ** Callout to Anti-Olympics organizers across Turtle Island **)

To open a discussion, we post those texts expressing some of our feelings and critics about the 2010 Convergence (see the text on top)

We want to share more experiences of life and struggles against the olympics here and/or in general

***
(Wrote before an ORN meeting)

I will not be at the meeting for a question of location. I just want to say that some personalities are taking a lot of place in this organization and its contrary to the horizontal level of our politics. The lack of natives involved in the ORN is a very important question. Do we want to continue to act like a center of the struggles where imposant persons (most from white/middle class) are more appreciated to anybody in the streets fighting the disaster of 2010 in there daily life in the DTES or on the lands occupying their spaces to block the process of capitalist development ? How we reach directly with our own community in Vancouver in other ways than thinking about organizing this people ? Do we pass time to know the more destructive reality of people dying in the streets or do we only recognize their existence by our principles, texts or other ideological and abstract comprehension ? Do we pass time to feel and live this reality outside of our politics ?

The anti-capitalist perspective also supposed to be an important point, but what means anti-capitalism in our views and practices ? Are we taking the opportunity of the struggles against 2010 to fight the entire system of exploitation ? Do we support in our daily life bureaucratic and authoritarian organizations or ways of living (forms of individualism) thinking that its the good way ? Do we think the NDP, the workless party (who's supporting the state process of election, a constant hierarchy), the Canadians council or whatever leftist/reformist organization are anti-capitalist if they are not oppose directly to the entire state who reproduce constantly the full system of exploitation ? Do we fight against 2010 like a particular event or do we fight against every part of this oppressive world who made the Olympics like most of other things ? Do we want to recognize the state also by asking him to change, making demands to our bosses and politicians when the reality proving this impossibility ? Do we recognize that our interests are completely oppose to any kind of social regime supported by the state ?

Do we want to be organize in our communities to fight every day in an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist perspective... supporting each other of us ?

Do we want to confine the major struggle against 2010 in february 2010 when the impacts of 2010 will be mostly irreversible ? Do we want to express our rupture with the entire system only through demonstrations control by the cops, their fences, their strategies, in a symbolic way... Do we only want to show our solidarity in a unpowerful way of actions only by agitating banners and flags in front of the mainstream medias ? How do we think the people and their communities can act to fight the Olympics everywhere and fight on a more important level the entire system who support them ? Are we OK with any kind of reformism to ameliorate parts of this system of exploitation and not destroying it all ?

A lot of summits and international events were contested with very much repression and only the noise of some actions that are most of the time recuperated by leftism to support the continuity of our shitty life ? Everywhere is the state, everywhere is life under capitalist exploitation, everywhere the white man continue to rule, everywhere is a possibility of other Olympics...

What kind of rupture do we want to live ? What kind of communities in struggle every day we want to live and express ?

Revolution is the only solution ! Insurgency against 2010 ? Insurgency now !

What do we think about those major texts :
www.no2010.com/Resources/riot-2010-riot-now-printversion.pdf

http://www.warriorpublications.com/?q=node/28

Bring the war home !

War is everywhere. What is our strategies and tactics to combat in every aspect of our daily life ?

***
…corporathe tycoons, city officials, real-estate mogols, and culture mongers, have set the time and space of the Olympic and Anti-Olympic convergence. Invited or not, there is a plate set for the disobedient amung the olympiads, spectactors and police. In times of concentrated contestation, the police are more apt to be re-inforced, using the convergences to test new biometric technologies, cutting-edge weaponry, and apply new strategies of surveillance and crowd control. In this way, even if security lines are breached, if police control is lost, a victory on the side of the pigs can be claimed in the aftermath.

Perhaps a few market windows are smashed, a beaurecrat is pied in the face en route to her hotel; the electric lines remain in place, the trains remain on schedule, the factories run on into the night. The symbology is felt around the world, but the world in itself remains in

chains. The old adage of banner dropping and (blackades,) is looking tired in the face of an increasingly creative (and tatical) police presence.

Oakland California, Greece, Watts, and Seattle too, stripped of their mythology- offer to us the most potent recipe for open revolt; born not of micro-managed assembly of sheer numbers, or predetermined territories of confrontation. Their potency lept from rage and sponteniety, from the aknowledgement that time is not on our side. No roving festival of summit hoppers was needed to agitate the locals, no welcoming committee was needed to brief the riotous as to the lay of the land; where to run, where (and when )to rise. Neighbours knew thier Neighborhoods, their camrades, thier enemies. The police where given no schedule in which to call for reinfocement- they were not handed an invitation to combat.

The convergance is a center to where we can discover new allies, explore new methods of direct action, test new lines of communication, share ourselves, and re-animate dead environments. These opportunities should not be taken for granted.

More than an opportunity to paralize the capitalist machines, summits are used primarly as a method by which we distribute our rage to the world through corporate and independant medias- to hijack the spactacle by means of the spectacular. And yet the message and emotion lived is rutinely filtered through slanted lens. They are far from objective, accurate portrayal and endeavors as so much childs play. And now, more than ever, the whole world is yawning.

Amongst the transient, who are to fight alongside those more rooted in lonstanding community struggles, (based on specific localities and needs) questions arise as to what will exist in the aftermath of the 2010 convergence. Worries of a romantic-solidarity existing amung festive tourist-activists, who unconciously create a homogenous Native movement without considering the diversity inherent to all peoples and struggles… Who crash the party but never break the surface.

A celebratory festival of rival networks and their elected comandants, a spectrum of zones and blocks dancing between yawning riot police, and a holiday that pries the revolution from daily life; a sensationalized news flash broadcast between mealtimes to global spectator. These are the mass mobilizations we have come to know so well in recent years. Depending on our desires, the anti-olympic convergence could be many things beyond these narrow strokes. Even if the games are successfully arrested, the ….must not end there..

contestation

***
since 2003, the crisis here is getting clearer because of the coming olympics that legitimate and accelerate development destruction gentrification surveillance social cleaning and all that shit (check out 10 reasons to opposehttp://no2010.com/node/18). It's not like these systematic threats don't exist elsewhere-it's global right, but the Olympics make it happen faster, so it may be more obvious for people that ignore what this world/massacre is all about : profit, propriety, power... and what are the negative impacts of these interests.

It gives an opportunity to brake status-quo ya know... normality, this atmosphere of . Cuz suddenly, what we usually take for granted becomes things we have to defend if we don't wanna see it invaded or displaced, let's say our hood, our neighbors... our home basically.

That's what bring me here kinda. A place where i want to be part of a community that recognize common enemies like police, rich, landlords, government... and that have common desires too which are heartfelt like revolt, like feeling, like freedom... I starve for meeting each other in a way that we get together to fight the abuses, to stop its perpetuation, to organize so we actually protect what we stay up for and to fucking throw our chaotic and crazy and outrageous emotions out there to shatter the ordered cells were all trapped in. Converging, in that sense, is a need for me.

Nothing to do with struggling for hiding the real misery of my existence. It's
not about removing me from the world... i can't anyway.

What i feel is the need to arm, to aim my rage towards the ones who deserve it.

Don't you wanna kill the motherfuckers that always put us down, right back to our enslavement…?

I don't want to shut the fuck up no more. I wanna shout now that . I'll fight till the end... And i know many of you will and that many of you care. But how can we
brake isolation, division... And how can we find each other outside of
formal political organization as well as other places than in a relationship
to the market, the drug, the boss, the cynism, the entertainment... ?
I say that because i'm tired of meeting each other either cuz we're reacting to the "oppressors"
or
because we're their "victims"...
living for them more than with the people we want to see exist, to share with, to love, to care of and to defend.

...

To converge in the sense that i need to exist in dailylife with people for who
it's also a need to fight so we can build trust in confronting together this fucked up world which keeps us scared shitless, where there's no exit but space to liberate, prisons to brake, time to take, possibilities to create...