S11 BLOCKADE A HUGE SUCCESS
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM PARTIALLY SHUT DOWN A NEW GENERATION OF STRUGGLE
By John Tully

MELBOURNE: The three-day blockade of the Asia-Pacific wing of the World
Economic Forum (WEF) here on September 11, 12 and 13 has been a stunning
success. The blockade was organised under the general slogans of "From
Seattle to Melbourne, fight corporate greed!" and "Stand up for global
justice and the environment!" The S11 Alliance, the umbrella
organisation behind the protest, largely kept its promise to "Shut down
the World Economic Forum".

As one tired, but elated, picket said in a spirit of friendly
internationalist rivalry: "Hey, Seattle! Melbourne's right up there with
you!"

It rained, on and off, throughout the three days, sometimes
torrentially, and a cold wind blew off Port Phillip Bay, but neither
that, nor the brutality of 2000 police and a small army of security
guards, could dampen the enthusiasm of the tens of thousands of
protestors. The Forum was effectively blocked off for the duration, and
its gatherings sparsely attended. Small wonder that Australia's
right-wing Prime Minister, John Howard, looked more than usually
petulant, and Microsoft's Bill Gates looked glum. For their part, the
protestors enjoyed a huge range of bands, performers, giant puppets and
other entertainment that compensated to some degree for the weather and
police violence.

The Forum was held, most appropriately, in the ugly skyscraper tower of
the Crown Casino on the Yarra bank: an apt symbol of the corporate
cowboys and bribed intellectuals who make up the WEF.

Crown's owners include Australia's richest man, Kerry Packer, who
recently lost US$34 million in a single weekend at Las Vegas. Packer
will be even further out of pocket after S11. Crown was forced to
suspend operations for the duration of the conference, and admits to
having lost $10 million in takings. But more than Crown's profits have
taken a hammering. Rumour has it that the WEF organisers are so
demoralised that they are considering holding future events by
teleconference rather than brave the wrath of a new generation of
anti-capitalist campaigners.

The success of the S11 blockade shows that the world-wide upsurge of
revulsion against capitalist globalisation that began last year at
Seattle is set to continue. Tens of thousands of demonstrators sealed
off the conference and effectively disrupted its proceedings. All the
entrances to the conference venue were blocked by pickets. Ironically, a
four-metre high chain mesh fence erected by the police to keep out
protestors also served to keep out WEF guests and personnel, and its
metre-high concrete base was convenient for the spray painted slogans of
the demonstrators. A number of high-ranking conservative political
figures tried to run the gauntlet but turned back.

The premier of West Australia, Charles Court, a virulent opponent of
Aboriginal land rights, was trapped for an hour in his car by a group of
Aborigines. "This is the way you've had us for 200 years," jeered one
burly Aborigine at the clearly discomfited politician. "Now you know how
it feels."

The S11 blockade culminated in a "victory march" around the central
business district, with around 15,000 protesters in a jubilant mood. The
blockaders had maintained the pickets around the clock for more than
three days, despite massive police brutality and uncertain weather.

The march was a gigantic anti-capitalist carnival, with drums, whistles
and ear-splitting rap music. However, the shouts of "shame!" from
thousands of throats whenever the police were spotted underlined the
serious purpose of the marchers and their determination not to be
intimidated

A feature of the march was a gigantic banner inscribed with messages of
solidarity from individuals and groups (including supporters of the
Fourth International) who took part in the blockade. The banner will go
to Prague for the S26 protests against the World Trade Organisation
there: a symbol of the anti-capitalist internationalism that has taken
root around the world since Seattle.

The march wound through the city streets past the offices and shops of
such transnational icons as Nike (closed for the duration of S11),
McDonalds, the banks, and the Melbourne Stock Exchange; all heavily
guarded by riot police. True to his form as an unmitigated liar, deputy
police commissioner Neil O'Loughlin insisted that the marchers would
"ransack" the city. Like all of his other ridiculous allegations, it
proved baseless.

The blockade was organised by a loose coalition of forces, including
socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, environmentalists, indigenous
people, church groups and campaigners against Third World debt. The
umbrella group, the S11 Alliance, was responsible for the coordination
of events, but members of a bewildering number of "affinity groups"
essentially did their own organising and came together with others on
the days of the protest. One of the most inspiring aspects of the whole
struggle was the relative youth of many of the blockaders.

Many thousand high school students attended some or all of the protests,
giving fresh hope to older generations of activists that the struggle
for a better world will continue. Although reactionary media and
political figures attacked S11 for "involving children", these young
people refused to be patronised and made it clear that they knew what
they were fighting for.

Government and media hypocrisy was shown when many of these young people
were bashed by the police – we hear no cries of "child abuse" from
moralising newspaper editors and shyster politicians. Dozens were
hospitalised after unprovoked attacks by the notorious "Swat Squad", the
paramilitary tactical response unit. The police rode their horses into
crowds, savagely batoned passive demonstrators, and even stamped on
heads in a rampage of violence. In one of the worst instances, the
police bashed pickets early in the morning when other gates were
unattended. Several hundred police suddenly erupted through the gates,
catching a much smaller number of pickets by surprise from the rear, and
flailing indiscriminately with their fists, boots and three-foot-long
batons. All in all, several hundred demonstrators were injured, compared
with a handful of police. The attack followed demands by WEF officials
the day before that the police get tough with the pickets. In another
incident, the!
  police turned fire hoses on demonstrators around 3am, with
temperatures around 4 degrees Celsius, presumably in order to amuse
themselves, as the pickets were sitting down with their backs to the
police.

There were also reports that police used capsicum gas spray and many
police officers removed their identification badges before assaulting
demonstrators.
In fact, the police were sometimes so hyped up that they assaulted
journalists and damaged their cameras. There is also evidence of
plainclothes police acting as provocateurs. The writer's son, a
15-year-old high school student witnessed the arrival of a vanload of
provocateurs at one picket. These individuals threw tin cans and other
objects at security guards before being warned off by S11 organisers,
luckily before the police could arrive to "restore order".

It is to their credit that despite police violence, the discipline of
the protestors held. S11 had promised that the protest would be
non-violent, and the promise was kept. Pickets would link arms or sit
down in front of the gates to prevent the so-called "delegates" from
entering Crown Casino, but they would not fight back.

Injured pickets were thus particularly incensed by the attitude of the
Victorian state premier, Steve Bracks, who praised police for their
conduct whilst condemning the alleged violence of the pickets. Bracks is
a member of the Australian Labor Party, but his claims to have any
meaningful links with organised labour are extremely tenuous. He
attended the WEF conference at Davos in Switzerland early this year, and
flew back to break a strike of electricity workers. He brought enormous
pressure to bear on the leadership of the trade unions to boycott the
S11 blockade, but was only partially successful. One of the highlights
of the three days was a series of !
marches on the Casino by thousands of construction and metal workers.

Predictably, the bourgeois media attempted to whip up hysteria in the
weeks leading up to S11. They told and retold the big lie that
demonstrators had been responsible for the violence last year's
demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle. The
implication was that the same would happen in Melbourne. Rupert
Murdoch's local rag, the Herald-Sun, carried screaming headlines just
prior to S11, announcing: "POLICE: WE'RE READY FOR S11 VIOLENCE".
Several hundred S11 supporters retaliated by briefly occupying the
newspaper offices. The media also played up government threats to
re-open old asylums and dickensian police cells to ensure that there was
sufficient space to house arrested demonstrators.

Yet, for all of this hysterical hype, the demonstrators remained
uncooperatively non-violent and the police were able to arrest only 12
people. The non-violent tactics were very successful, however.
Hundreds of the so-called "delegates" were unable to get into the
conference. Many others, who had arrived earlier, were unable to leave
the premises except by helicopter and attendance at meetings was
well-down, with TV coverage showing dispirited clumps of suits in
echoing halls.

One news clip showed dejected groups of well-heeled individuals trudging
through a waterlogged field to their limousines after being evacuated
from the Crown Tower by helicopter. It must have rankled for these rich
and powerful individuals to have to creep about under massive police
protection, bleating about being "held to ransom by unrepresentative
minorities".

In fact, it is organisations such as the WEF which are the real
minorities, and which act against the interests of the overwhelming
majority of people on the planet. Although Forum bigwig Claude Smadja
claimed that the WEF has no real power, it is in fact it is an immensely
powerful rich man's club. The WEF is made up of representatives of the
richest and most powerful groups in the world. Its members include the
CEOs of the top 1000 transnational corporations, besides influential
political leaders, tame academics and gurus of neoliberalism, along with
representatives of the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the
Asian Development Bank, and the IMF. It was founded in 1971 by Klaus
Schwab as the European Management Forum, but was renamed in 1987 "to
reflect its increasingly global outlook", according to WEF literature.
The WEF's members are divided into a number of areas: media, mining,
textiles, pulp and paper, and so on. They include corporations such as
Exxon, Chase M!
anhattan Corp, De Beers Mining, Rio Tinto, Toyota, Western Mining
Corporation, Turner International, Royal Dutch Shell, Microsoft,
McDonalds, Monsanto, Boeing and Nike. Readers will be aware of the
anti-social, even criminal activities of many of these corporations.

The WEF meets annually at the Swiss alpine resort town of Davos. There,
amidst the kind of luxury that would seem like science fiction to the
huge mass of the dispossessed and the hungry of the world, the WEF makes
decisions which affect every citizen of the planet: and without being
elected by, or accountable to, anyone save the shareholders, the
corporations and the mega-rich. Contrary to the disingenuous claims of
Claude Smadja, the WEF admits that its annual Davos meeting is "now
considered the global summit which defines the political, economic and
business agenda for the year." WEF literature also admits that the
organisation spurred the launch of the Uruguay Round which led to the
replacement of GATT by the World Trade Organisation in 1995. It is also
unquestionable that the WEF is instrumental in setting the agenda of the
WTO Millennium Round. This latter round of talks aims to renegotiate the
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) "with a view to achieving
a p!
rogressively higher level of liberalisation" of the burgeoning service
sector.
The WEF's agenda, as the S11 Alliance has pointed out, is: "massive
global poverty; ever-increasing inequalities between rich and poor;
attacks on workers' wages, conditions, occupational health and safety
standards; and widespread environmental and human rights abuses." It is
an agenda of unchecked corporate power that quite literally means death
for the poorest people on the planet. It means the plundering of the
assets of whole peoples in the name of privatisation and deregulation.
It means a winding back of human progress in education and health care
for billions of people.

Far from capitalist globalisation being a "rising tide that will lift
all boats", it will sink those of the poor and fill those of the rich
with more booty than the pirate and slave ships of old. Yet, as the
protests in Seattle, Davos, Washington DC, and now Melbourne show, they
face stiffening resistance from workers, students, farmers,
environmentalists and many others. This movement is broad, pluralist,
democratic, anti-capitalist and internationalist in inspiration. It will
prove wrong those bourgeois ideologues such as Francis Fukuyama who
proclaimed free-market capitalism as "the end of history". The new
generation coming into struggle will not settle for such hollow
clichés, but will fight for a better world.

Margaret Thatcher be warned: there is an alternative!