Geneva03: the Bubble Bursts

Locked away in their lakeside resort, the G8 must reckon once again with their own abject failure. Met by demonstrations and the diffuse violence produced by systemic crisis, they have no answers except escalations of that violence. That is the same as no answer at all. Their opponents, meanwhile, have no programme but to celebrate the G8's eclipse.

Despite their outward performance of control, socio-economic management and domination, the g8 meeting takes place at a time when their structures are in decay, their power in crisis. They have abandoned the cities for their meetings, confronted by domestic and international protests which meet them even im their elite hideaways. Evian is a water town, and here again the bubble has burst.

The G8 meeting has failed even on their own terms, illustrating their impotency before the problems on their own agenda. Now they can only complain that they are surrounded by ´enemies´, ´threats´, which in the end they can no longer even identify. This is globalization´s new paradigm: everybody is an enemy.

In staged physical confrontations they may have superiority in weaponry, logistics, command and control, deploying resources or exploiting their shortage. Our pantomime assaults on their rituals will never result in anything but inflated media reports about massive damage. They can never be credible, only spectacular. The price of broken windows can easily be afforded; this is not the crisis. The crisis is an economy that has already bled workers dry, but now must find means bleed them anew. The crisis is a social world where human activity has been evacuated of meaning and can now practice only ritual. This system knows only how to enact and reenact its own tragic end.

Meanwhile the movement has the tools to create its own stories, to make its own stages, to make new meanings and relations. But this is a potential mostly unrealized: blockades and demonstrations, protest-as-usual, the tired manipulations by opportunistic politicians - this is the old world behind us. The opposition movement may have assembled the arena, the props, and set the roles but is now trapped in a show that has gone on too long.

The loss of content on the side of the protest mirrors the system´s failure to fulfill its former promise to provide ´the good life´. Once again we need new and creative forms, that return agency, the capacity to act meaningfully on our world, transforming it. The social movement must reject pop politics without meaning that fills the chatter of the newspapers, television and independent media such as Indymedia, but instead reach new ideas, recompose our forces and capacities, knowledges and practices.

We must insist on making our own way outside of the logic of reaction. If we accept a constant state of emergency then we can never have real control over our actions. The ´emergency´ imposes its theatrical imperatives, keeps us in a script written by others, inhibits our capacities. Instead we must exercise the agency to bring us beyond our current paralysis, and to assume our ultimate autonomy.

Geneva03 Group