Comrade Matt, T writes:

"The Forbes Convergence"

Comrade Matt, T

While in London during1862, Dostoevsky once wrote of that "apparent disorder that is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order”.

Jump forward to Sydney 2005 and there is disorder — not conducive to bourgeois order — in the streets. Over the last few days from the 30th of August through the 2nd of September there has been numerus anti-capitalist and anti-war actions carried out to coincide with the Forbes conference.

The Forbes conference was a meting of around 350 CEO’s and politicians of the neo-liberal or economic rationalist persuasion, Steven Forbes, Rudy Giuliani and John Howard were all present, which give you an idea of the politics represented.The first day of the Forbes convergence on the 30th of August was planned to be held at the Sydney Opera House, starting with a cocktail party giving the elites a space for introductions and networking. I spent the beginning of that day working on banners, discussing anti-capitalist politics and philosophy at the University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) Student Association.

At around 2:30 the affinity group ‘Mutiny’ met at ‘The Clare’ a retro bar across from UTS on Broadway to finish organising the Anti-war actions against Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) a war-profiteering corporation. At around 3:30 we concluded the meeting and headed back over towards UTS where a crowd was gathering for a March toward the Opera house. After waiting for about half an hour the March started to move down Broadway towards circular quay and customs house. There were a few hundred protesters in this March, 500 being a high estimation comprising many anti-capitalists but also people with more specific concerns, such an assault on unionism and the anti-student organisation legislation (ASOL) which are often seen by the protesters as interrelated policies driven by neo-liberals.

As the protest moved down towards costumes house it passed central station and one of the main bus stations, where “Christians Against Greed” joined in the main march amidst supportive cries which surprised me not only of the group but of myself more so. The ‘left’ is normally pro-secular and highly critical of any strong shake-their-finger type religious morality or religious foundation in politics. These Christians I was told latter were from the Uniting Church.

The procession continued on towards the quay with a large police escort of motorbikes, cars, mounted and police on foot. The police also guarded corporate icons along the route but we won’t give them advertising space here.

Along the way groups of protesters left the march to pull corporate advertising off the walls and place anti-capitalist slogans and stickers. We stoped outside different corporations such as ANZ chanting “100,000 Iraqis dead, who’s made a profit ANZ?” and then “Shame” louder and faster while pointing at their buildings. At this point the sprits where high and it was particularly funny watching suits trying to weave their way through the protesters with their heads lowered.

When we arrived at customs house which was our designated ‘safe’ area there was indecision as what to do next. Some people were of the mind that we should push forward while the police were on the back foot and make a run for the Opera House. Other such as a red-headed socialist alliance girl with a megaphone announced we should wait here because it was the ‘plan’. A man by the name of Dan who I assume was a libertarian socialist of some description because he was at Subplot (a convergence for radical idea’s held at Newtown Community Centre) shouted out that we should wait until more people came and then go; I thought this was reasonable.

While waiting for the numbers to show up we stood around and listened to speeches delivered by ‘significant ‘activists of different varieties, trade unionists, socialists, refugee supporters, aboriginal rights campaigners and greens. Kerry Nettle a green senator was the only remotely interesting speaker but I couldn’t tell you even an approximation of how long the speeches were they bored me, I wanted to leave but a comrade told me to have patience. I was told latter on that many people left the rally because they didn’t know if any further action was going to take place or if we would just be subjected to speeches.

The speeches finally ended and the large group of people numbering around 2,000 started to march toward the Opera House. This was not the 10,000 people the police had expected but it was enough for the Forbes Convergence to change its location. NBN News reported this as an ‘embarrassment’ for the protesters but we already knew they had changed their venue and couldn’t or wouldn’t face us.

Latter on in the night protestors went to the Overseas Passenger Terminal at West Circular Quay to confront the neo-liberals. The march to the Opera House — despite there being a lack of capitalists — had an air of defiance, but we were walking into a police trap like the Persian fleet into the Battle of Salamis.

There was a narrow corridor to the Opera House from customs house with the harbour on one side and restaurants to the other. At the end of the narrow corridor the area opened up more but was surrounded by large fences around two meters high weigh down by large concrete bases. Once the protestors were packed into this area police surrounded the whole area keeping a distance with most staying behind the temporal barrier. Almost immediately people started to attack the fences by claiming on them with enough numbers and thus changing the fences centre of gravity enough so they would fall over. Shaking the fence also helped to speed the process.

The number of people attacking the fence from my viewpoint was small around 20 to 30 people maximum, though this did not stop them from being able to fall a section of the centre fence leaving most of the fence untouched. The falling of the fence was a surprise and as far as I knew was not planned unless done so by a small affinity group. This is doubtful though, because a friend of mine helped to fell the fence though it is also not an absolute that he told me all his plans for the action.

At the same time the reaction of the majority of protestors was indecision, there was no great surge to overwhelm the police. The police reaction was an overreaction. Their first response was to send in a large group of police on foot from the back of the protest into the area where the fence had fallen. I thought at this time that this would be the extent of their response and enough for them to quell the small group of aggressive protestors. But they had not finished with their offensive coming from the right of the protest (I was facing the Opera House with a fence to the left of me and the harbour just beyond that) a group of mounted police rode through the crowed of protestors to just beyond the section of fallen fence and then doubled back and left the scene almost as fast as they had come. We are lucky to live in a country where police don’t just shoot protestors, but seeing the police tactics used on that night was horrific. They rode through a crowd of unsuspecting individuals who were for the most part peaceful and in a celibately mood. People who hand nothing to do with the fence were injured by mounted police and I saw one young man with what looked like a broken arm waiting for an ambulance. It is hard to explain how one feels when seeing peaceful protestors being ridden over, you are fearful for their safety and develop a hatred for the police with their intimidation and violent tactics.

After the police charges things started to settle back down looking half like a street carnival and half a protest. Lots of people that I talked to thought the police action was detestable and a complete overreaction. For a while longer I watched people dance and bang drums while the police looked on and guarded heavily the section of the fence that had fallen. I found out latter on that eight people had been arrested at the Opera House and some more were arrested where the power elites had run off to. But I had left the protest before the break away group went to confront the power elites.

The second day of the conference and its contra-convergence Wednesday 31st of August started early for some protestors who went to blockade the Opera House at around 5 AM. Very few people turned up at such an early time, but a friend of mine who did go down to the quay told me about his experience there. He had gone with two other people and, realising there was not going to be a blockade, they sat down out of the way and ate fruit. This scene of three youths eating fruit in a public space was enough to draw the attention of the police, who searched their bags before letting them go. The power to search someone without reasonable suspicion within the foreshore area is part of the “Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority Bill 1998” which gives police many new powers and waives many old rights.

At around 12 o’clock people started to gather at the steps of the Town Hall for a reclaim the streets procession; at around 12:20 we started to move. Many people ran late and missed the beginning of reclaim the streets (RTS). When the lights went red and the little green men began to flash, the procession leapt from the steps onto the road, but when the littlie green man turned red we were still on the road. There were around 150 people in this march and it started to move down George Street past Queen Victoria and the over priced shops with scant items on their shelves. Amongst the sounds of car horns the protestors went forward and police rapidly showed up and tried to surround the protestors and push them onto the pavement. The tactic of the police was to ride motorbikes into the crowd on diagonal angles one after another, closer and closer to the footpath, while police on foot created a line just outside of those motorbikes. Anyone who walked outside of this line or close to it was shoved around and particularly hard if they had a covered face which is totality legal but annoys the police.

When RTS was finally pushed onto the footpath we run along the footpath past the police line and then we jumped back onto the road to form the procession once more. Changing things like “Whose streets? Our streets” the politics of RTS is about reclaiming space which in modern capitalism is never really public but private and state-owned. The original message of such processions was Anti-Car, but very few keep to that orthodoxy. After a while a group of us from Mutiny broke off from RTS around Martin Place and headed back towards Hyde Park, along the way we met many people who were trying to catch the RTS procession because they had arrived late.

We arrived at Hyde Park around one o’clock to find that most people had already found their way to our meeting place just to the right of the train station entrance. Our action was to be aimed against The ANZ branch on York and Market Streets, but before we could move from our meeting place police started to arrive. First we noticed the helicopter over head watching us in the park and then police on motorbikes turned and normal police on foot. At this point we decided to break up into littlie groups and meet up again outside of the bank groups moved off number 3 to 4. I had gotten up and spoken to the police man who was standing over us. He introduced himself as mike at first I thought he was foreign because his accent was quite peculiar but he was a lifelong Sydneysider as he told me. Mike the policeman tried to ascertain information about our activities, where we were going and so forth, but when I wouldn’t give him the information he withdrew a few meters. We broke off into littlie groups to travel the short distance to the bank.

Upon arriving at the bank we walked past it and started to congregate were we could not be seen from inside. Most of us arrived quickly and about the same time but the other in the planed theatrics were running behind understandably because one of the girls had to change into costume, a dead person covered in blood. We decided to move on the ANZ branch we walked up around the coroner and into the bank. At that point all the nerves went and the adrenalin took over, the night before I had agenized over the different possibilities and went through different moods of enthusiasm and physical sickness therefore I got little sleep. Once in the bank we declared things like “this is not a robbery, we don’t want you’re money, we think it’s dirty” and other throwaway lines of a similar description.

After about 15 minutes of chanting “100,000 Iraqi’s dead, who’s made a profit ANZ?”, ripping up deposit slips and writing anti-war slogans on them, being generally disruptive by creating noise and scattering ANZ pamphlets around.

Finally the stretcher and the “dead girl” arrived and I went outside to help carry her into the bank. We took her covered in fake blood with ANZ pamphlets scattered upon her to where the management and consultant staff stood in the far right-hand corner of the bank. We put her down in front of them and tried to exchange the dead person for cash. I said to the staff ‘look I didn’t have any money so I killed her and I thought you know she’s not an Iraqi but she's got be worth something.’ Someone else said, ‘if you don’t have any cash that’s ok we’ll take oil’. Other people joined in explaining why we were there and the point of the demonstration. The staff members for the most part were stone-faced, though we got a smile out of one of them.

Soon after the theatricals were over the police finally turned up, after about 20 minutes. They must have been stretched in numbers because there were two other banks being occupied and disrupted and other corporation’s offices by other affinity groups at the time and a RTS procession still moving around the city streets. This was not bourgeois order we were not the official left on official marches in official out of the way places. We were in their faces and they had to deal with us, it was beautiful and empowering to see the drones and the "little Eichmanns" shaken out of their normal pattens.

On the police arrival, though, we left the bank carrying our dead person with us, we had pre-planned our action vaguely depending on the actions of the police. There was about 4 police in special uniforms for occasions of civil disobedience and they threaded us “get out or we’ll arrest you”. When we were all outside the police blocked of the bank for us and did not try to disperse us, they didn’t have the numbers to try it yet.

After a while of chanting and handing out flyers (we handed out 400 in the 40 minutes we were there) for a while the special police left probably to deal with the trouble at martin place that we were just starting to find out about through mobile phones. Normal police came after a while two of them and stood in front of the door. During this intermission and change over of the guard a man wnet to use the ATM’s but we wouldn’t let him trying to explain our position he declared that he didn’t care about dead Iraqis and just wanted his money. But there was also positive public response one ex-police officer came and talked to me about how he used to be one of those ‘guys’ and how his had a total change of perspective furthermore supporting what we were doing saying that people need to take this sort of action. After a while the women police officer tied to more us on from ‘private property’ though we were on a footpath. I tried to paraphrase some legislation but she didn’t response with anything intelligent but rather a hard shove. She then tried to arrest a member of our group but people stepped in breaking her grip on the protestor. She gave up trying to move us and we continued to chant and talk to passers-by. After about 20 minutes outside the bank police on motorbikes and paddy wagons arrived and we quickly dispersed moving towards martin place where we new protestors were under siege from police.

The ANZ branch at Martin Place is the state headquarters of the corporation, which might indicate why the police reaction was so harsh there. Upon arriving at Martin Place I couldn’t seen any protestors, only hundreds of police on foot and mounted in this little public square. I was told that within that sea of police were in fact 25 to 30 protestors. The police tactics were blatant intimidation, but after a few minutes of my arrival the protestors were let out. The whole group of protestors, those once trapped and those in support, were herded toward Customs House. Along the way a salesman with a microphone was selling his products to a particular demographic, “all you who’re protesting need cheap camouflage and bandannas” and other such items. Upon arrival at Customs House people were pinned in with cops on all sides. I quickly removed myself from the situation. After a while the protestors slowly slipped out of the pen made for them by the police.

The next target that the protestors went to was the Stock Exchange, I arrived a bit after 3:30 and there were about 80 protestors and a few police.

I saw members from Mutiny and crossed the road to talk to them. There was no collective dissection on what we should do and it was left up to individuals. A few people sat outside the Stock Exchange, while more police turned up and guarded the entrance way. At one point before the police turned up on mass I saw a man in a suit attack the protestors and then retreat back into the stock exchange. But not much happened after that point and I joined a group of people heading towards the police station were protestors where being held 8 in total. We walked from the stock exchange to Hyde Park were groups of protestors converged and decided upon further action there was no consensus dissection individuals just declared that they were going to surry hills police station in solidarity with the people arrested. I arrived at the police station around 5 and waited for the last person to be let out around 8 meaning the people kept the longest were kept for 7 hours, the people kept the longest were the people of colour. The prison solidarity was the last action of the day.

The next day saw action but with dwindled numbers, (I was not there personally) I heard of actions carried out by small groups against the ANZ war-profiteers on 2nd of September which managed to shut down all the ANZ branches in the CBD again like we achieved on the 31st of August, though this time we incurred arrests.

The lessons we learn from these actions is that preparation is half the battle. The ANZ actions worked well because they were thoroughly planned, while the Stock Exchange occupation had littlie planing devoted to it and more decision had to be made on the day, which took away our initiative and advantage over the police.

The inspiring thing about these events is they breed hope and show a way of escaping the everyday, counter to the bourgeois billboard I saw at Hornsby Station advertising chips which read “Escape the everyday with *****(1)”

Notes.

1) A crappy brand name."