EVENT: 2008 NoG8! Report Back

Monday August 4, 7:30-9:30 pm
The Change You Want To See Gallery
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org
84 Havemeyer Street, storefront
at Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn 11211
L to Bedford, J/M/Z to Marcy, G to Lorimer

Did you go to this year's G-8 in Japan or do you want to know more about what went on? Come to an event this Monday, August 4th to hear, see, and share information.

Participants include:
Jim Fleming, Autonomedia
Abraham Greenhouse, Palestine Freedom Project
Brandon Jourdan, Filmmaker and Independent Journalist
Diane Krauthamer, IWW and Indymedia
and you!

Key questions framing the discussion will be:
- How to navigate new forms of authoritarian repression in global justice movements
- The benefit or disadvantage of summit hopping for non-locals in mass mobilizations
- How lessons learned at this year and preceding mass mobilizations can help us in upcoming demonstrations (e.g., Olympics, RNC/DNC, future G-8s, local campaigns, etc.)
- Pray tell, the Japanese had such kick-ass graphics and how can we reform the design aesthetic of the Left
+ (whatever questions you want to voice!)


The Change You Want to See Gallery is a multipurpose event space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that hosts free lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations.

free103point9 is s a nonprofit arts organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists who explore transmission mediums for creative expression.

Pond: art, activism, and ideas is a non-profit organization dedicated to showcasing experimental art in a non-competitive and accessible environment. (www.mucketymuck.org)

Other relevant NoG8! links:
http://www.ainumosir2008.com/en
http://www.gipfelsoli.org/Multilanguage
Reproduced below, a text written by the Emergency Exit Collective (Bristol, 2008) provides helpful information for this conversation.


TEXT: The 2008 G-8 in Hokkaido, a Strategic Assessment

by Emergency Exit Collective
Bristol, Mayday, 2008

0

The authors of this document are a collection of activists, scholars, and writers currently based in the United States and Western Europe who have gotten to know and work with each other in the movement against capitalist globalization. We’re writing this at the request of No! G8 Action Japan, who asked us for a broad strategic analysis of the state of struggle as we see it, and particularly, of the role of the G8, what it represents, the dangers and opportunities that may lie hidden in the moment. It is in no sense programmatic. Mainly, it is an attempt to develop tools that we hope will be helpful for organizers, or for anyone engaged in the struggle against global capital.

***

I

It is our condition as human beings that we produce our lives in common.

II
Let us then try to see the world from the perspective of the planet’s commoners, taking the word in that sense: those whose most essential tradition is cooperation in the making and maintenance of human social life, yet who have had to do so under conditions of suffering and separation; deprived, ignored, devalued, divided into hierarchies, pitted against each other for our very physical survival. In one sense we are all commoners. But it’s equally true that just about everyone, at least in some ways, at some points, plays the role of the rulers—of those who expropriate, devalue and divide—or at the very least benefits from such divisions.
Obviously some do more than others. It is at the peak of this pyramid that we encounter groups like the G8.

III
The G8’s perspective is that of the aristocrats, the rulers: those who command and maintain that global machinery of violence that defends existing borders and lines of separation: whether national borders with their detention camps for migrants, or property regimes, with their prisons for the poor. They live by constantly claiming title to the products of others collective creativity and labour, and in thus doing they create the poor; they create scarcity in the midst of plenty, and divide us on a daily basis; they create financial districts that loot resources from across the world, and in thus doing they turn the spirit of human creativity into a spiritual desert; close or privatize parks, public water taps and libraries, hospitals, youth centers, universities, schools, public swimming pools, and instead endlessly build shopping malls that channels convivial life into a means of commodity circulation; work toward turning global ecological catastrophe into business opportunities.
These are the people who presume to speak in the name of the “international community” even as they hide in their gated communities or meet protected by phalanxes of riot cops. It is critical to bear in mind that the ultimate aim of their policies is never to create community but to introduce and maintain divisions that set common people at each other’s throats. The neoliberal project, which has been their main instrument for doing so for the last three decades, is premised on a constant effort either to uproot or destroy any communal or democratic system whereby ordinary people govern their own affairs or maintain common resources for the common good, or, to reorganize each tiny remaining commons as an isolated node in a market system in which livelihood is never guaranteed, where the gain of one community must necessarily be at the expense of others. Insofar as they are willing to appeal to high-minded principles of common humanity, and encourage global cooperation, only and exactly to the extent that is required to maintain this system of universal competition.

for the rest of this text, please click here: http://info.interactivist.net/node/11074