I’ve been looking for a copy of this wee comic for years. It’s by the fantastic Pete Loveday and describes the day that we shut down the financial heart of London for a day, had fist fights with mass murderers… I mean bankers and traders, fought running battles with police, and generally had a whale of a time smashing the spectacle in he very belly of the beast. Thanks to faraway at the 1000 Flights blog for preserving this.
The riots of June the 18th 1999 were part of a global “Carnival Against Capital” that was timed to coincide with the G8 summit in Kölne, Germany. The idea was to show that the resistance to the degradations of capital are as global as capital itself. It was a fantastic idea that saw demonstrations in over 40 cities around the world including in Montevideo (Uruguay), Port Harcourt (Nigeria), Tel Aviv, Minsk, Madrid, Valencia, Prague, Hamburg, Cologne, Milan, Rome, Siena, Florence, Ancona, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Zurich, Geneva, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, Austin (Texas), Boston, and Eugene (Oregon). Cracking eh?
Unfortunately this was the last of the “global street parties” saw gawd knows how many people all over the planet come out in protest against capitalism and the machinations of the bourgeoisie. After this a group of, for the most part, middle class full time activists decided that we should all go to the places where the elites were holding their shindigs. Great idea if you can easily take a week or more off work and can afford to travel across the planet. Not so great if you’re a single parent or have other care responsibilities, are unemployed (without middle class parents), or working a shitty minimum wage job. So after this we had the WTO protests in Seattle (which, predictably, is where many Americans seem to think this stuff started), the IMF/World Bank meeting in Prague, and the G8 summit in Genoa in 2000. These protests carried on in ever reduced form until the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles Scotland whereafter things really petered out.
One day I may write a book about my experiences in all this, perhaps I’ll call it “It Was Shit and We Achieved Nothing.”
Still, we got a brilliant Pete Loveday comic book out of it at least. 🙂
