Why We Are Winning

LARGE-SCALE mobilisations against capitalist summits are still vital for the global resistance, ten years after the Battle of Seattle.

That's the view put forward in an article called Why We Are Winning posted on the American infoshop website.

It declares: "Without militant protests, every summit meeting would be a self-congratulatory public relations spectacle for the ruling class, a carefully scripted celebration of the wonderful job the neoliberals are doing running the world.

"Instead, because of us, they are increasingly exercises in naked repression that have to be defended rather than celebrated. After the riots in Seattle, the WTO held their next meeting oin the Doha peninsula in Qatar along the Persian Gulf. (As David Graeber put it, they preferred "to run the risk of being blown up by Osama Bin Laden rather than having to face another DAN blockade.").

"They didn't stay there, of course. The image of a group of unaccountable elites handing down unappealable edicts from a remote stronghold was too damaging to the neoliberal narrative of "democratic capitalism."

"Today, as the economic collapse radicalizes ever more of its victims, we have an opportunity to force all summits to be held in such protest-proof locations, to trap summit organizers in the PR equivalent of a secret undersea lair defended by sharks with lasers on their fins (only not as cool). But we can't do it by staying home and starting more reading groups. We need to be out in the streets, confronting our oppressors wherever they show their faces."