<nettime> counterpowers - after Quebec

[Brian Holmes <106271.223@compuserve.com>]

How to create new forms of expression, exchange, debate and decision? How
to maintain them over time? How and where - at what scale - to take and
institute new spheres of popular sovereignty, and how to link those spheres
together in the planetary society?

You think about these kinds of questions, after... After the "legislative
theater" of the Peoples' Summit and the street theater of the Peoples'
March, orchestrated on a vast scale, blending new democratic procedures and
old, raising echoes in the press and elsewhere, creating spinoffs and
facing parallels in the city, the province, the nation, and across the the
hemisphere. After the Carnaval against Capital, where so many individuals -
from the blackest clad anarchists to teachers, local residents,
intellectuals, artists, children, average folks if there were such a thing
- all felt the need to touch the violence of the state, to feel and shake
the wall it builds around corporate interests, to taste the tear gas it
spits out into the faces of the crowd.

We are not the only ones. Think back on the recent decades: How many
anti-IMF riots in Latin America, Africa, Asia? How many local commitees,
social movements, single-issue and electoral campaigns, how many formal
victories for democracy that brought back the police with other
explanations? 

The ethics, the intelligence, the analysis, the openness, the energy, the
creativity, the disruptiveness and the violence of this dissidence are
changing my life, changing the lives of everyone touched by it, from near
or far. The stakes are the autonomy and coexistence of all the varieties of
human time, against the clock and grid of market exchanges. When we
reflect, read and debate for years, not as experts but as passionate
amateurs, it's a very different kind of time. When we dance all night
around a huge fire beneath a freeway bridge, drumming with rocks and
sticks, it's a different kind of time. When we talk between the bursts of
tear gas and the intense work on out own projects, we open up an infinite
well of freedom. We are fighting for another time, each other's time.

For anyone who went to greet the IMF in Prague, or who took part somewhere
in June 18th, Quebec could come as a kind of revelation. Here, the city
gave protestors the warmest welcome - because it was mobilized first, long
months ago. And support poured in from across the country. All the
complexity and agency of a highly articulated political society was with
us. Tactical debates nothwithstanding - "civil" disobedience, or just plain
disobedience - the movement in its different facets showed a coherency that
will affect the province of Quebec and the nation of Canada in enduring
ways, while serving as a model and an inspiration to the worldwide effort
that made these revolutionary days possible. The neoliberal project is
being torpedoed by those who were to be its "beneficiaries" - the citizens.
Its rhetoric is proving as weak as the absurd wall that fell at the first
blows of the crowd. 

Brian Holmes

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