Posted by John, September 16th, 2010 - under Resistance.

Tags: Fighting back

As commentators argue over the legacy of the 9/11 attacks this week it is worth remembering another September 11 – S11 2000 – where for three days thousands of anti-corporate demonstrators battled police for control of the streets of Melbourne in what was one of the most militant mass protests in recent Australian history writes Corey Oakley in Socialist Alternative.

S11 united a wide range of protest groups around the call to “shut down the World Economic Forum” (WEF), which was meeting at Crown Casino on the banks of the Yarra in central Melbourne.

The WEF is a talkshop of the super-rich, whose members include many of the most powerful corporations in the world. Like institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, it stands for unbridled corporate power, deregulation, privatisation, and the undermining of union rights and environmental regulation.

The anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999 had inspired many on the Australian left. Still, when the idea of a mass blockade of the huge Crown Casino complex was first suggested, it seemed to many a highly ambitious proposal. In the US or Europe, maybe, but was it really possible to bring the energy and militancy of the global anti-corporate protests to sleepy ol’ Australia?

As it turned out, it was. In the weeks leading up to the protest hundreds were involved in organising meetings, universities and high schools saw an upsurge in activism as increasing numbers were drawn in to help build for the blockade, and a media frenzy developed as politicians and media commentators gave the impression that we were planning a small-scale revolution.

By the week of the protest Melbourne was abuzz with discussion. You could hardly get on a tram without hearing an argument about the merits or otherwise of the protest. On September 10 organisers started setting up outside the main protest venue. The casino had been heavily fortified with 10-foot high fences and barricades. As Socialist Alternative members got together on the lawns to have a discussion of tactics for the following day, we suddenly found a police helicopter hovering menacingly over our heads. It was a sign of things to come.

The next morning we gathered before dawn. Just before the scheduled start time the skies opened, torrential rain quickly exposing those who had painted their banners and flags without waterproof paint. “They’ve privatised the weather”, yelled one wit.

Within an hour though, the rain had cleared. By then Socialist Alternative’s Red Bloc was part of a blockade of King Street, one of the main access roads to the casino. Already it was clear the best laid plans of the police were falling apart. People had started grabbing the police’s barricades and dragging them out onto the road to defend our own lines. Everywhere you looked there were groups of people running this way and that, waving flags, cheering, yelling and chanting. Rumours swirled – some delegates had got in, a busload were trapped here, police were attacking demonstrators there.

But it wasn’t until a large group of us marched the long distance all the way to the Clarendon Street side of the casino that we got a sense of the scale of the protest. At every potential access point hundreds of people were linking arms, jumping, staring down the menacing rows of police. Makeshift barricades were strewn across street after street.

As we reached the main entrance to the casino, which was blockaded by several thousand people, the police were trying to break up the protest. But to no avail. It was now clear that a large number of delegates had been unable to get in, and – their born-to-rule mentality upset – were becoming increasingly apoplectic.

One of them was the WA Liberal Premier Richard Court, a notorious racist whose mandatory detention policies were responsible for the locking up of countless young Aboriginal people. He ordered his chauffeur to drive through the protest, but was quickly besieged by hundreds of demonstrators. One, an Aboriginal man, leapt on the roof of his car, yelling at Court to wild applause: “This is how you kept us for 200 years!” It was one of the most poignant political episodes I have ever witnessed.

Now the police charged, hundreds of them swinging their batons wildly. But they underestimated the mood of resistance. The surging crowd pushed them back down Clarendon Street, a hundred metres or more. For once it was these bully-boy defenders of power and privilege who had fear in their eyes. They retreated, beaten. The mood among protesters was ecstatic. We ruled the streets. Our numbers and our determination were turning this summit of the most powerful people in the world into the fiasco it deserved to be.

S11 brought to life arguments socialists make about the nature of society and social struggle that, in calmer times, can seem unreal to many people.

Not only did the possibility of militant resistance to the system, and the power of mass action, suddenly seem self-evident. The protest also unleashed courage, creativity and a sense of political agency in the people there, many of whom had not been involved in any political activity before. High school students yelled defiantly at police in the face of brutal attacks. People found all kinds of ways to secure the blockade – one of the most memorable being those who took to the Yarra River with canoes and surfboards to try to stop delegates like Victorian Premier Steve Bracks getting in by boat.

The true nature of the class society we live in was also plain to see. The fact that the whole apparatus of our political system is geared to the protection of wealth and privilege was never so clear to me as when I stood there with thousands of people battling the police as helicopters roared overhead carrying John Howard and Bill Gates into the plush conference rooms that towered above us.

The next morning we got a lesson in the level of force the state will bring to bear when its right to rule unchallenged is threatened. From the middle of the first day the media had waged a hysterical campaign against the protesters. Not only the usual suspects in the Murdoch press and the commercial TV, but also the ABC and The Age had wall-to-wall coverage accusing us of mindless violence, and declaring that mob rule had taken over and a bloody crackdown was required. Steve Bracks – the Labor Premier – denounced demonstrators as fascists. The WEF delegates, enraged that we had dared to oppose them, were baying for blood.

And they got it. On the morning of September 12, and then again in the evening, hundreds of riot police launched terrifying charges against the blockades, leaping over the barricades slamming their batons into the heads of protesters who were sitting peacefully in front of the fences.

One of the protesters, Melbourne comedian Rod Quantock, described his experience to the ABC:

Nothing would justify the violence that was there. I was on the ground. I couldn’t see who was batoning me. It wouldn’t have made a difference. They didn’t have ID on anyway. I was hit all over the body and eventually kneecapped as I tried to stand up. They just came at us. They just attacked us. I saw people with so much blood on their face you literally couldn’t tell if they were men or women.

The savage police assault was a bitter reminder of the strength of those we were up against. In the final analysis the 20,000-30,000 people who were part of S11 were no match for the power of the state once unleashed.

But on that day we also got a hint of how that power can be challenged on a more fundamental level. The union leaders had tried to distance themselves from S11, but at the last minute agreed to call a march of mostly blue-collar workers down to the blockade. Over 5,000 walked off city jobs to join the protest, and it is notable that while the union contingents were at the blockade the police made no attempt to break it.

This wasn’t just because wharfies and construction workers posed more of a challenge to baton on the head. It was also a result of the social power that stood behind what was in the scheme of things a fairly modest mobilisation of unionists. The capacity of organised labour to bring production to a halt through industrial action is a power much more threatening to the rich and powerful than any street protest, however determined. This is why the conference organisers, particularly the Victorian Labor government, did everything they could to try to stop the union movement throwing in their lot with the protesters.

But the police attack on the second day of S11, though it broke the blockade and a few bones along with it, could not prevent the protest from being an overwhelming success and a rebuff to the neoliberal agenda of the WEF. For months afterwards the politics of S11 were the subject of fierce debate in Victoria, and to a lesser extent nationally. To this day there are walls in Melbourne bearing graffiti denouncing the police violence, and mocking the government response.

On the last day of the protest, September 13, 10,000 people took part in a celebratory march through the centre of the city. What was impressive was not only the turnout but also the overwhelmingly positive response that we received. As we walked through the CBD people came out of cafés, offices and bars to cheer us, and yelled their support from balconies.

In spite of everything the media, the government and the police had thrown at us, S11 was a victory for our side, and an inspiring, insurgent chapter in this country’s history of resistance to the powers that be.