Reclaim the streets!?!?! - What about them waddaya think?

[Fiskebat]

Reclaim the streets and Reclaim the city or the parlament of the street(or whatever they r called) i think the orginate from britain. However they have spread to many countries in Europe and I was on one of their demonstrations.

I dont know how many of u who know anything about them. But they r a communist/anarchistic orgainization that´s trying to reclaim the streets and city by partys in the centre of cities.

What do u people think of them im sure u have heard about the.. Not sure if they exist in Usa though.

[Ian]

They are sort of stupid in that they piss off motorists, and we have never owned the streets. I am not a fan.

[Pete]

#Moderation Mode

More activism than world/national politics.

Moved here (http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=14&topic=533)

[Kez]

me neither,
they merely create a diversion for the real workers struggle.

An example of their "direct action":
"Liverpool, NOW (last we heard) a camp to defend Park Nook - a 3 acre area of mature woodland which lies in the heart of Toxteth and the only mature woodland in the area."
-waste of fuckin time

"Friday 14 March at a secret meeting point - to be announced on www.spacehijackers.co.uk
Circle theme including pole dancing, hula hoops: come in quick-change fancy dress. "
- yaeh great, the revolution is really gonna take off with tits like these....

"Sydney, Australia, 23 March. Sydney RTS is hosting the 2nd active Sydney fair!

The fair is a huge party for all the activist groups in the city to mingle, recruit, spread the word and generally have a good time with each other...

Expecting a peaceful day, repeating the successful approach of 1 December last year..."

""This road closed - chaos in progress"
-good one you bellends, piss the workers off, and try and get them fired from work, good one.
Theyre not even a workers organisation, not remotely connected to the workers movement.

in other words....
fuck 'em

[Valkyrie]

I like them. It is Mardi Gras with a motive. It's a RAVE with rebellion.

And they seem to be very active.


Reclaim The Streets

Ultimately it is in the streets that power must be dissolved: for the streets where daily life is endured, suffered and eroded, and where power is confronted and fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed, created and nourished.

The street is an extremely important symbol because your whole enculturation experience is geared around keeping you out of the street... The idea is to keep everyone indoors. So, when you come to challenge the powers that be, inevitably you find yourself on the curbstone of indifference, wondering "should I play it safe and stay on the sidewalks, or should I go into the street?" And it is the ones who are taking the most risks that will ultimately effect the change in society

The street, at best, is a living place of human movement and social intercourse, of freedom and spontaneity. The car system steals the street from under us and sells it back for the price of petrol. It privileges time over space, corrupting and reducing both to an obsession with speed or, in economic lingo, "turnover". It doesn't matter who "drives" this system for its movements are already predetermined.

The privatization of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion of neighborhood and community that defines the metropolis. Road schemes, business "parks", shopping developments - all add to the disintegration of community and the flattening of a locality. Everywhere becomes the same as everywhere else. Community becomes commodity - a shopping village, sedated and under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form. A TV soap "street" or "square" mimicking the arena that concrete and capitalism are destroying. The real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through not to be in. It exists only as an aid to somewhere else - through a shop window, billboard or petrol tank.

Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problems of the city, of the social division of labor, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life.

One place for work, another for "living," a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labor in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

Won't the streets be better without cars? Not if all that replaces them are aisles of pedestrianized consumption or shopping "villages" safely protected from the elements. To be against the car for its own sake is inane; claiming one piece as the whole jigsaw.

The struggle for car-free space must not be separated from the struggle against global capitalism - for in truth the former is encapsulated in the latter. The streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious.

At first the people stop and overturn the vehicles in their path... they are avenging themselves on the traffic by decomposing it into its inert original elements.

Next they incorporate the wreckage they have created into their rising barricades: they are recombining the isolated inanimate elements into vital new artistic and political forms. For one luminous moment, the multitudes of solitudes that make the modern city come together in a new kind of encounter, to make a people.

The streets belong to the people: they seize control of the city's elemental matter and make it their own.

We are about taking back public space from the enclosed private arena. At its simplest this is an attack on cars as a principal agent of enclosure.

It's about reclaiming the streets as public inclusive space from the private exclusive use of the car. But we believe in this as a broader principle, taking back those things which have been enclosed within capitalist circulation and returning them to collective use as a commons.

http://www.reclaimthestreets.net/


Coming up...
UK, 5-6 April: Reclaim the Bases See www.reclaimthebases.org.uk


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Fairford, Gloucestershire, 22/03/2003: National day of protest and action. Coaches will be leaving Euston at 9am, returning in the evening. Seats cost £10 or £5 concessions. Crash accommodation and training is available. Please contact us for more details. Legal support will be provided. Please book your seat soon if possible as demand is likely to be high. Telephone 07817 061183 or email [email protected] More: www.gwi.org.uk


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Liverpool, NOW (last we heard) a camp to defend Park Nook - a 3 acre area of mature woodland which lies in the heart of Toxteth and the only mature woodland in the area. More...


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Not long gone...
London, 14/03/2003: CIRCLE LINE PARTY II. We knew naaathing. See www.spacehijackers.co.uk (requires Flash).

The Space Hijackers are very proud to announce: Circle Line Party II
Friday 14 March at a secret meeting point - to be announced on www.spacehijackers.co.uk
Circle theme including pole dancing, hula hoops: come in quick-change fancy dress.
Meet 7 - 7:30 pm at the back of the Spitz Spitalfields Market Commercial Street London E1, it says at 18:00


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London, 18-19 January Disrupt the Masters of War - see Justice not Vengeance, www.j-n-v.org


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London, 01/02/03 Reclaim the Future 2 an all-day event in a self-organised space...


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DAVOS, Switzerland, 25/01/03 Appeal for demonstrations - details


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22 September, many places in Europe Damn, recuperated again... official Car-free day


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Dublin, 22 September 2002: Reclaim the Streets!

Meeting at Stephens Green at 14.30

get flyers here


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Zurich, 31 August 2002
Reclaim the Streets Meet Bückeranlage 19:00 sharp

Reclaim the Streets Zurich 31 August 2002 / Treffpunkt Bückeranlage / 19 Uhr pünktlich: http://rts.egocity.net - er, website not working 15 Aug 2002 - pix coming soon...


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London, 1 May Many things... RTS ran a free market and there's lots else. For news see uk.indymedia.org and www.indymedia.org.


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Dublin, Monday 6 May: Reclaim the Streets, party with a purpose, it says in this Indymedia posting


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Seattle, 20 April Street Paarty! - Indymedia report


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Sydney, Australia, 23 March. Sydney RTS is hosting the 2nd active Sydney fair!

The fair is a huge party for all the activist groups in the city to mingle, recruit, spread the word and generally have a good time with each other...

Expecting a peaceful day, repeating the successful approach of 1 December last year...

Links (not working 10 March!)

Sydney RTS: http://rts.cat.org.au/
The active sydney fair www.active.org.au/sydney/fair/

Sydney, 1 December 2001 "This road closed - chaos in progress"

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Barcelona 2002, 8-16 March Actions against the Summit of the European Council

Reclaim the streets, reject the presidency of the EU Heads of State, defeat the National Hydrological Plan, protest against the LOU (law enforcing privatisation of education at universities), struggle against speculation, debate about the worlds we want to live in, exchange experiences with people from other places, have a few glasses of vine in the Raval or whatever you feel like...these are a few of the things you will be able to do in those days in Barcelona (and not only those days).


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Munich / München, 2 February Carnival against NATO. Meet 10am, Jakobsplatz.


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New York City, 31 January-3 February World Economic Forum.


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Brussels, 15 December Street Party - Reclaim our City: meet Esplanade de Europe / Europsplaan, near Gare du Midi 15:30, for a festive and political reappropriation of the city...

See www.bruxxel.org


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www.the-spun.org
Go Alena! Just the sort of tactical frivolity that encourages other senseless acts of beauty. Give her the Turner Prize - and Dad, give her credit...


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London, 18 November March against the Massacres - Anti- capitalist- bloc participation in a wider action.


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Sydney, 1 December
Crazy fools speak truth in a mad world
www.rts.cat.org.au


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All over, 9-13 November Actions around the World Trade Organization meeting - which is conveniently due to take place in Doha, Qatar. People's Global Action call to action.

We have seen the horror and desperation in the faces of plain people affected at random in the attacks on New York and Washington. We know this pain; we have daily experience and memory of terror and unnecessary violence.
Declaración de Cochabamba
Lists of action reports from indymedia and nadir.org.

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UK, 9 November Some action on privatisation


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Paris, soon Reclaim la rue bientôt...


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Docklands, London, 11-14 September 2001
DISARM THE ARMS TRADERS www.disarm-trade.org


Ultimately it is in the streets that power must be dissolved: for the streets where daily life is endured, suffered and eroded, and where power is confronted and fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed, created and nourished.



Updated 16 March 2003
"...a masterpiece of consummately organised agitprop." New Statesman (optimised for 640*480 recycled monitors)

[BOZG]

I think the idea of RTS is pretty good but in some ways it is not that practical. I do agree with the pedestrianisation of city centres but all RTS really does is piss people off. I'm sure most people would prefer to leave their cars at home but in a lot of countries, public transport is absolutely terrible and some people have little choice but to use private means of transport.
Also the problem with RTS in this country, is that its predominantly run by anarchists and they really couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery over here. There's an extreme problem with them and their inability to understand that a "leader" figure does not necessarily mean a dictator or a ruler but can be a person who is responsible for organisation and guidance. Because of this, nobody ever really knows what's going on at RTS parties besides a small number of organisers (sounds somewhat elitist and secretive for anarchists to me).
I'll give you an example. At a RTS party here last year, the police began attacking people unjustifyably. I'll be the first person to come out and say that they viciously attacked people but what happened was somewhat a case of bad organisation because when the police asked to talk to people to just find out what was happened most people just said they were following everyone else and thus there was no organisers to be found.

RTS can be an interesting action if its properly organised and if people understand what's planned etc.

[Kez]

BOZG, its not only anarchists that are poor at organisation, its also shit groups in general, such as the SWP. With poor planning the people who take part are the ones that suffer.

Lions led by donkets comes to mine

wankers

[BOZG]

I know but anarchists are incredibly bad at it.

[Valkyrie]

Hey you two!

Now....... I don't think it's that these RTS's are unorganized -- because obviously someone thought of it... and obviously word got out and people showed up. and if people just happened to be in the vicinity, saw it and dropped by, than, even better. Yes, it is probably mostly a grass-roots type thing. Unstructured. Which I'm sure it's meant to be. It's highly doubtful that anarchists are going to send the necessary paperwork to get a petition to hold these things. I mean.. come onn... they are anarchists! and it would be pretty costly in $$$, I would assume, to have a protest without the paperwork --- so, in that respect it's doubtful that when the cops come to bust the thing up that someone is gonna point out the organizers. And that should be the only rule -- don't give your comrades up to your enemy.

Anyway--- Do you know how many more protests there would be if people had the balls to go ahead without getting the neccessary "permission" from the capitalist bureaucracy.

LOTS!






(Edited by Paris at 12:33 am on June 4, 2003)

[BOZG]

I'm not saying they should go out and ask permission etc but this whole "We're all organisers" routine is ridiculous because no one has the slightest clue what the fuck is going on.

[Kez]

lol

an organiser that puts me in a demonstration where the cops start bashing us and i dont know where the organiser is not a comrade of mine.

[Valkyrie]

WEll, Kamo, you had better stay home then, because these protests -- all of them --- do tend to become violent. The cops generally do always use pepperspray and tear-gas. and Someone always does get arrested.

The organizers aren't responsible for the people who show up. You are basically responsible for yourself once you are there.

As it is, these demonstations aren't even organized by one group of people. The recent anti-war protests were organized by everything from the Left to Environmental to Church groups and everything inbetween. So are the G-8's and the FT's. Unless you are specifically travelling with one of those organizations, I don't know how you could claim anyone responsible for your being there.

The problem as I see it, is that you want to seize control of dissent to whom you think it belongs to....

noone can quell dissent. It belongs to everybody.

[onepunchmachinegun]

An organization? I have organised a Reclaim the Streets party in Denmark with PGA. But I've never heard of it as a movement or organization. Are you sure that it is movement or so? I've heard of Reclaims all over Scandinavia made by movements such as: AFA, SUF and PGA.

[BOZG]

R T S (http://www.reclaimthestreets.net)