Baxter05 -- sublogo: "a convergence for human rights" -- begins with a quote from John Pilger: "Places like Baxter belong in totalitarian countries, not democracies. They take away the basic human rights that ought to be the cornerstone of a democratic state, and their presence diminishes every one us. They should be closed down."

Leaving aside that Pilger is a paternalistic git (and I'll get on to why he's so wrong later), I'm not sure why "human rights" and "democracy" have resurfaced (after a thankful respite) as the preferred rhetorics of mobilisation. Of course, Baxter05 is politics-as-recycling, but just that little bit worse: politics-as-makework, politics as the aggregation of bodies-as-consumers of leftoid product. I'd be surprised if there was a protests (by those outside Baxter) within 5kms of the Baxter internment camp -- as the trotocracies try and persuade themselves that they're the true representatives of the working class by representing protesters to police. So, the prospect that events -- some kind of encounter between detainees and those outside the fences, beyond the ritualised megaphones, passivity and spectacular -- will reconstitute the horizon of politics is slim.

But all the conflicts over centralisation / decentralisation won't really confront some underlying assumptions (about representation, unity, etc) unless notions of "human rights" and "democracy" are contended with. And, more importantly, without escaping the political horizon of "human rights" and "democracy", there really isn't much prospect of responding to the internment camps in any significant way.

Pilger is wrong: internment camps are the necessary counterpart of democracies, the point at which those who are excluded from definitions of the demos ['the people'] are subjected to the reign of the kratos [the state]. There's no such thing as a consistently anti-racist democrat: at some point the democrat will place a limit on who belongs and who has rights, and in order to rationalise the denial of human rights, will dehumanise those whose rights have been denied. There are not many ways to get around Aristotle.

But in the immediate context of the organisation of the protest at Baxter, there's just not much thought about relating content to form. Decentralised, disseminative forms of organisation aren't just a question of which brand-name you follow: trot v anarch or autonome. It's a question of which form of organisation doesn't reproduce the problem you're setting out to confront. In this case, the politics of "democracy" and "human rights" are part of the problem of the internment camps, not just in form, but in content.