S12 by way of S11

On September the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th, in the year 2000, exactly a year before the more famous 911, there was S11. ‘S11’ was the campaign we protestors organised to blockade the World Economic Forum (WEF) round held in Melbourne at the Crown Casino. Looking backward on the year 2000, from the year 2020, I recall things of little consequence, the stuff of idle chatter and gossip from that time. We wondered—inevitably—what we should be calling the days after September 11. Was S11 the entire protest, or just the first day? And if S11, why not S12 and S13?

Still pondering such quandaries twenty years later, I was struck by the 20^th anniversary mostly because people I both do and do not know began posting about it on twitter. Looking over these various comments, articles, pictures and other reminiscences, and ruminating on my own recollections, I stumbled across a mostly forgotten document on a mouldering hard drive. A draft of an email I sent to a friend soon after I returned home after the Melbourne protests.

Love & Rage was the group who I felt the most affinity with back then. I think I became a member either during or immediately after the S11 protests. I later helped set up a Love & Rage “branch” in Canberra. Among what I call the Love & Rage crew or gang in the email below, there were also probably people from the Revolutionary Action crew from Wollongong. When I wrote the email in 2000 I was not completely clear about the differences or relation between LR and RA. There was definite crossover. The LR and RA milieu were motivated by a variety of ideas that broadly were opposed to both Marxist and Anarchist orthodoxy. The group was a relatively eclectic mix of leftist and libertarian Marxist and Anarchist thinking, syndicalism, councilism, a dash of the situationists and post-situationists, feminism, queer radicalism, all of the posts (postmodernism, poststructuralism, and post-Marxism), and especially ‘Autonomist’ Marxism. I have written on Love & Rage, but only in passing, in an article called Dead Real (2013). I was also involved in editing a Love & Rage related zine called This Is Not A Commodity published in early 2001, and available here. Included in the zine is an eyewitness account of S11 by a comrade entitled S11: Make Crown a prison, the criminals are already inside. For more on Love & Rage, though unfortunately from a relatively hostile, syndicalist perspective, see two accounts available here and here . These articles are descriptions and criticisms of two different Love & Rage meetings in Sydney in February and July of 2001, published in Rebel Worker—the paper of the Australian based Anarcho-Syndicalist Network (ASN). I attended both of the Love & Rage meetings mentioned in these articles, and probably have notes on them somewhere, in some forgotten notebook.

Below, I’ve re-written my email from the year 2000 in part, mostly to clarify some of the more telegraphic sections. It’s mostly self-explanatory, and very much from a first-person perspective. Wisely, at the time I chose to concentrate on two distinctive memories, one of a frenzied fight and struggle with some security guards on the first day, S11. The other a clownish attempt to liven the boredom of blockading on the second day, so-called S12. That’s all it is, a fragmentary first hand account with little or no critical analysis. From the less than sublime to the more than ridiculous.

And so, with no further ado….

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Dear K.,

S11 was a blast! It was like nothing I’ve been involved in before. Despite the cop violence it was probably the most “peaceful” demonstration I’ve been involved in—a testament to the sheer size of it. I heard estimates of up to 20,000 demonstrators on Monday the 11^th of September.

Early on Monday morning I caught a train into the centre of Melbourne with some other comrades. I’d been staying at one of their places since arriving the day before. When we arrived in the city centre, I split off to go find the Love & Rage (LR) group from Sydney. I was a bit spooked as I walked alone across the grey concrete south bank of the Yarra toward the Crown Casino. The sky was overcast and dull. I remember thinking that if it poured down it would be a wash out. It did rain for a while in the morning, but not too heavily and it then it stopped. The first day was simply massive, we shut the Casino down and made life hell for the rich delegates and their willing stooge, Labor Premier Steve Bracks.

I was involved in some biffo, mostly on the first day. I helped hold back the horse cops on Monday morning on two occasions that were gloriously successful. The picture above is after one of those occasions (I can’t remember which—maybe the second?). S. was there at the first occasion. After that I lost track of him. I’m sure he was mixing it up elsewhere at the Crown Casino over the three days. I haven’t seen him since returning home. The last I saw of him he was handing out Texta-pens wrapped up in paper to assist in the beautification of the Casino.

Later that same Monday morning I was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the Casino. I found myself loitering around a picket line covering an access ramp to the Casino carpark, I think on the southern face of the building. At this point I think—I’m not sure—I was with some comrades from my town, L. and Z., not the LR gang. The picket was relatively small, somewhere between 10 and 20 people. This picket, away from the main entrances to the Casino, was not a very popular one at this point. After battling the horse cops I’d been scouting the perimeter with some comrades, pondering the possibility of breaking into the Casino and causing some havoc. A few of us had been hanging around a concrete ramp that led into a car park in the Casino. At the carpark picket the Casino’s private security detachment was relatively small, maybe around the same number as protestors on the picket, maybe not even that many—say around ten security guards. Me and my confederates thought this was a perfect place to break into the Casino, not much security, and no cops at that point. If only we had enough people to overwhelm the guards. Crucially we needed people who wanted to and were capable of breaking through. As luck would have it, at the exact moment we were discussing this, a column of several hundred protestors suddenly appeared behind us with a woman in the lead, a veritable new millennial Boadicea, eyes ablaze, hair streaming behind her, pointing at the line of security guards and yelling, “through the line!”, or something to that effect. I was electrified, who wouldn’t be?

Facing the column of angry and combative protestors bearing down on them, the security guards freaked out and went berserk, punching on with those of us up the front. And then it was on for young and old. The fact of our now overwhelming numbers should have secured us an easy victory. Unfortunately, there were a few people up front that didn’t want to be there, who had been caught by the sudden appearance of the column of demonstrators. I tried to help some of them out of the way, but it was too late. The press of the column of protestors was overwhelming, and the security guards had already begun to savagely attack us.

Unfortunately, because quite of the few of the picketers who were already there wanted no part of the flying column’s push to break through the security line, our frontline quickly fractured. All around us demonstrators were trying to get through the security lines. To be honest, I wanted to be fighting the security guards with my comrades, but I was also struck by the palpable distress and anxiety of those picketing comrades who didn’t want to be there. I knew what it was like to be in a hairy demo situation with seemingly no way out. At the so-called Federal Parliament House “riot” of 1996 (that’s what the law & orders called our mass attempt to break into the “people’s house” while the ACTU sold us out from their nearby “protest”) I remember being close to breaking when I thought I was about to be spattered by shattered plate glass amidst the crush to break through the main doors of New Parliament House.

Being at the point of the intersection of struggling demonstrators and security guards or cops is always shitty, even when you want to be there. It’s pretty easy to get badly injured by the blow of a baton, a punch or a kick. Under these circumstances, hemmed in by the sides of this concrete access ramp, and with the press of this column of protestors, the reality was that you didn’t have much choice in the matter, particularly because you had started up near the front on the picket line.

The strangest thing then happened to me and a few other protestors amidst the tumult. I recall trying to pull a security guard off someone only to have the guard turn on me. In the scuffle, the security guard who was attacking me, the young guy I had saved from the guard’s beating, and two or three other unfortunate protestors, ended up on the wrong side of the skirmish. Which is to say, behind enemy lines, on the far side of the security line.

We were precisely where the rest of the protestors who were struggling with the security wanted to be—but there was only three or four of us. What to do, make a quick dash to the door and get into the Casino? But just as we found ourselves here, so deliriously close to the entrance, more and more cops began to show up on the side we found ourselves on. Quickly the idea of making a dash seemed a bad idea. The far side of the security line was rapidly becoming a bad place to be. I recall myself and at least one of my other harassed comrades trying to placate the security guard who was still facing us there. I even tried to shame him for having beaten the young guy I had saved.

Somehow, we got back to our side of the line, with the rest of the protestors. But by such time our chance had passed, and the cops had arrived to reinforce their beleaguered private security comrades. Perhaps it had been a crazy idea trying to break in at that point. Later we knew that there were at least one thousand cops in the Casino and several thousand private security. But hell, it would’ve been fun to have run rampant in the Casino before being caught.

At some point while the skirmish was still on we were treated to the bizarre sight of cops pulling some of the security berserkers off protestors. The private security had totally lost it, savagely attacking the picket and the protest. Which isn’t to say that the cops were much better, considering the yet to come brutal cop assault by the Tactical Response Group on one of our pickets on the following night, Tuesday the 12^th. But on that morning, Monday morning, the security dogs were much worse that the cops.

With all this talk of columns and skirmishes and yelling and punch ups I’m sure I’ve given you the wrong idea about what S11 was really like. Despite the florid length of my account, the confrontation with the security guards took up all of about 5 minutes—it was a slow and frenzied time of abrupt and violent action. The confrontation with the horse cops earlier in the morning had been a little scary too, but then there were a lot of us, and we forced the cops withdraw. But mostly, over the next three days there was a lot of waiting, walking, talking, silliness and other stupidities. Just like in any war!

Unlike Monday the 11^th when I’d been one of the wandering horde of protestors, on Tuesday I spent most of the day on one of the blockades with the Love & Rage (LR) crew from Sydney. By the afternoon my co-blockaders and I had become bored. To address the boredom LR gathered together and we discussed the possibility of alternate actions.

What did we discuss? After the Monday shutdown, we knew that the state, Crown management and the cops had shifted to transporting WEF delegates in and out of the Casino by launch. As a result, our blockades that had worked so effectively against car traffic on the Monday, were now more hostile encampments than a watertight siege.

The jetty entry points on our side were both heavily guarded and somewhat mysterious in nature. But on the far side, it seemed as if no one was guarding the jetty at which delegates both embarked and disembarked by launch to and from the conference. So, someone suggested in the LR meeting, how about we occupy one of the jetties on the unguarded far side?

So, after much talk and a little wandering, we did precisely this. We set off, running across the nearby bridge to the far side. But as so happens at times like this (like the carpark and the fortuitous column of protestors) a launch full of delegates just happened to set off and head for precisely the jetty we were heading for. We descended upon the jetty, whooping and leaping and shouting at the approaching launch and whoever. What a noise. Sure enough, the boat veered off and proceeded further down the river. Victory! Of sorts. The other jetty was too far away to stop them, so we returned a little deflated and desultorily back to the blockades on the other side of the bridge.

There’s about 20 Love and Ragers at this point. As we start back over the bridge, a cry rings out, “Delegate! Delegate!”. Someone has seen a WEF delegate. And then we’re all running back the way we came, but veering off toward an entryway to the Melbourne Exhibition Centre near the Casino.

I’m pretty buggered by this time, too many cigarettes god damn. I recall trailing the LR pack with C. We were talking loudly in cheesy Russian accents about our despicable plans for world conquest. The performative space of the protest is so alluring. We follow the rest of the gang into the entry of the exhibition centre, a through road that runs through the building and out the other side. As we pass into the road, low and behold we’ve stumbled into a cop staging area with tonnes of horses and cops wandering about. Strangely they leave us alone. It’s damn spooky as we wander through, as if all these horses and cops are a part of a conceptual art installation. And then we come out the other side with the rest of the LR gang to see the “Delegate!” in question being bundled into a car and driven off at speed. So, there we are, pondering our unsuccess, and I suggest that we get the hell out of where we are. So many cops and security float about—too many for us to get away with anything. I remember thinking that I should climb onto a nearby barricade and begin performing at the cops, in my best seductive movie star style, but decided against it in the face of some rather mean looking security-thugs near the barrier in question.

So, we wander off, back through the exhibition centre. But sure enough the call goes up again, “Delegates! Delegates!” rings out and the point of the LR gang are running up a ramp that takes you into the bowels of the building. By the time I arrive at the top of the ramp the Love and Ragers are plastered against a glass wall that looks upon an escalator void in the building. All of the comrades plastered against the glass are hammering on it and shouting, “scum! scum!”. As I stand there, bashing on the glass and yelling insults at the besuited figures crowded onto the escalator, I notice that they are all women. All of them. Not a single man on the escalator. Pretty much we all begin to realise this at the same time, and our thumping and yelling starts to diminish. The women on the escalator look at us strangely, their faces a mix of fear and disgust.

It’s another conference entirely. Fuck! As we walk away, embarrassed and a little ashamed, a door pops open from the exhibition centre. A woman exits, looking a little frazzled, one of those we shouted at on the escalator. One of our number calls out, jokingly, “that’ll teach ya for going to a conference!”. More usefully, a comrade walks up and reads the conference logo on her backpack: they call back, “It says The Nth Women’s International Conference on Healing”. Fuck! And then there are more women, all attendees of the conference on healing pouring through the exit, past the remorseful and shamed eyes of their onetime attackers. We all, simultaneously, start calling out apologies, “sorry!”, “so sorry!”, “we thought you were from the WEF!” etc., etc.

Having, hopefully, learnt our lesson, we shuffled back to the blockade of the Casino with our collective tails in hand. Whoops! And let us never speak of this again… until now!

Yours,

signed, Me.