A-Infos (en) US, NYC, EVENT: 2008 NoG8!* Report Back from Japan

Monday August 4, 7:30-9:30 pm at The Change You Want To See Gallery 
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org 84 Havemeyer Street, storefront at 
Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn 11211 L to Bedford, G to Lorimer, J/M/Z to Marcy [& 
walk 7 blocks north] [ map http://tinyurl.com/66tkbz ] ----  Did you go to this 
year's G-8 mobilization 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. (www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org)

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. (www.free103point9.org)

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 rulers­of those who expropriate, devalue and divide­or 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

This email was sent to by info {AT} thechangeyouwanttosee.org
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* An antiauthoritarian anticapitalist initiativ
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