BY MARGARITA WINDISCH
Filled with excitement, anticipation and a fair amount of anxiety, I arrived at 6am outside Melbourne's Crown Casino on Monday, September 11 to meet up with the other marshals from the S11 Alliance to organise the blockade of the World Economic Forum (WEF). We needed to discuss the situation, any changes that occurred overnight, work out a plan of coordinated action and deployment for the marshals.
I was surprised at the low number of S11 Alliance marshals who, contrary to expectations and verbal agreements the night before, turned out for the coordinating meeting. Nevertheless, the mood was good, if somewhat nervous. Nobody was sure what to expect, how big the turn out would be and what surprises the police would have in store for us.
The police had barricaded off vast areas around the casino the night before, which facilitated the blockading for us, but we were concerned about the tactics they might use to try to get the WEF delegates through.
Marshals were sent out into the cold and wet morning with area maps to be spotters, check for police deployment and also to start communicating with arriving protesters. My brief was to marshal with another Democratic Socialist Party member — Julian Compton — in front of and near the stage, one of the main areas for people to assemble for the blockade.
Due to the howling gale at 7am it was impossible to set up the public address system which we deemed crucial in facilitating announcements and the coordinated sending of large groups of protesters to various blockade sites. So we had to be very pro-active, make do with our megaphones and use them as effectively as possible immediately.
At this moment Julian felt compelled to make a confession to me: he had never ever used a megaphone before in his life. Mortified, I had to reveal to him that I had only ever used a megaphone for a combined total of 30 seconds over the last seven years of my active political life. So there was no hiding behind each other's experience — we both had none! We were faced with the stark reality of having no choice but to throw ourselves into the action regardless.
As protesters arrived in dribs and drabs a few of us marshals encouraged them to stay around the main area until we had enough people to send them off in large groups to the individual pickets. We offered blockade training so that everybody who was interested and willing to participate in the blockading felt confident and comfortable in doing so.
Unfortunately, members of the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) and Socialist Alternative (SA) had their own agenda and started telling arrivers "not to worry about the stage", claiming it was "irrelevant" and "insignificant" and was only set up to "distract" people from the blockade. They urged those arriving to just head straight to some blockading points. They provided no information whatsoever on what was happening and obviously didn't find protesters' right to informed decision-making a necessary democratic concept.
It was therefore not surprising that a lot of protesters initially felt confused and disoriented.
Any attempt made by S11 marshals to reach some sort of agreement with the ISO and SA members in question fell on deaf ears. Despite their attempts to introduce chaos into an already difficult situation, we managed to amass large numbers of people around the stage.
Centralised organisation
The stage ended up playing a central and crucial role in the running of the blockade. It provided a coordinated system for much needed first aid, legal advisers and political motivation for the protest. Once the PA got working, the appalling weather began to clear up and as thousands of protesters had arrived, things really started to come together.
My assigned task from the S11 marshals' meeting was to provide information to new arrivers, do some blockade training, marshal at the two blockade sites by the stage, but also to take large groups of protesters to other blockade points as requested.
As the numbers of protesters swelled, the atmosphere became more and more exciting. Many supporters of S11 told me that this was the first protest that they had ever attended and found it thrilling.
Regularly, new arriving protesters would come up, ask where things were at, where they were needed and what I as a marshal wanted them to do. The trust people showed in the S11 organisers was astounding and heartening at the same time. For me, it was an indication that the majority of people are not opposed to good centralised organisation and actually appreciate leadership as a necessary aspect of a positive militant mass action, despite some hysterical outbursts by some anarchists and individualists claiming the opposite. Protesters commented on the organisation of the whole event and talked about the fact that they felt informed about and included in what was going on via marshals, announcements and speakers from the stage.
Right through the day people would come up and offer me a cup of coffee or something to eat, thanking me for the work I'd been doing in helping to keep up morale and the protesters' determination to persist in the face of fatigue and police violence at some pickets. Many appreciated the marshals not only for passing on up-dates and immediate information but also for using our megaphones to make political points, to talk about the socially and environmentally destructive role of the corporations in the WEF and to refute the argument of us being "anti-globalisation".
At many a blockade point people would clap and cheer loudly when I reiterated that this new emerging protest movement was for global solidarity with working people and supported the right to a decent life of the dispossessed in the Third World.
On my way back from a toilet break at Southbank an older man leaving the protest stopped me and shook my hand. He had been a political activist for decades and congratulated the S11 Alliance on the amazing work we had done. He said he was proud of the new generation "taking on the fight against capitalism". He told me that S11 had been the most inspirational political protest he had participated in since the movement against the war in Vietnam. One of the things he emphasised was that the well-organised nature of the event made it possible for everybody who supported and attended the protest to make an informed choice about what they want to participate in and how. It was, he said, an example of "people's democracy at work".
In the afternoon, while I was heading over to Clarendon Street — I had been sent on a mission to see if all was well on the "western front" and to check if any blockade sides needed reinforcements — a woman told me that my megaphone was not working, opened it up and threw my batteries on the ground. She then made her way over to her group of balaclava-clad mates who stood on the sidelines of the blockade and cheered her on. A passing protester who saw this came up to me and told me not to worry about her and her mates — they were irrelevant in the whole scheme of things.
While a tiny minority were hostile to marshals (and, I would suggest, to any centrally organised form of mass action) and actively tried to sabotage our work, the vast majority of protesters responded favourably and supported the high level of organisation of the protest.
Tuesday, S12
What a great start to the day. After telling the taxi driver on our route and, eventually, our mission, a fabulous conversation started up. The driver was from an immigrant background and wholeheartedly supported the protest and blockade. He wished us and all oppressed in the world the very best and emphasised the need to fight the corporate tyrants.
At the Trades Hall Council (THC) rally at lunchtime I got chatting to some workers told me they had never heard of the WEF and were unsure what the S11 Alliance protest was about apart from being a "fair trade issue". When asked if they were interested in joining some of the blockade points most refused and it was obvious that they saw themselves separate from the blockaders.
This mood began to shift when Anne O'Casey made a passionate plea to the THC rally for solidarity and support for the blockaders, who had just been attacked by police. Quite a few workers stayed, contrary to THC secretary Leigh Hubbard's frantic encouragement for them to go home. Partly this was out of curiosity and partly out of true solidarity.
Two of us marshals were asked to go and help out on one of the Haig Street pickets in the early afternoon, which seemed to be getting out of control and some people raised serious concerns about protesters' safety and possible police violence. As we arrived we saw that there was a large crowd of picketers, with the front rows whipped up into a frenzy by two ISO members on megaphones. It was one big, messy, throbbing blob of people with some shaking the fence, banging the poles with bottles and trying to draw the cops on the other side into some sort of verbal confrontation.
The police were getting more and more agitated and the aggression showed in their faces. There was a real danger that protesters' heads would get smashed in by police batons. If the cops had decided to charge it would have been a nightmare — largely due to the level of disorganisation at the picket.
When I went up to talk to the ISO members "in charge of" the blockade about possible safety issues, they told me to "fuck off". "This is our picket", they shouted. A few protesters told me that they had been missing the marshals and that they had started to feel vulnerable and nervous because of the way the picket was run — no information was being provided to them about what was happening.
Using my megaphone, I explained the need to continue our non-violent mass action tactic and its success so far. With the help of fellow DSP member and trade union activist Justine Kamprad, and focussing on the front of the picket to convince protesters of the need for picket-line discipline, we managed to diffuse the situation for a while.
Victory march, Wednesday, S13
Late in the morning of Wednesday, September 13, I went to a couple of picket lines with a proposal from the S11 Alliance to finish up the blockade by gathering in front of the stage, hearing some speakers and in a massive show of strength to take the protest for a victory march into the city.
The vast majority of blockaders ended up expressing their support for a march through voting with their feet. They had obviously decided that the time had come to end the blockading. As one protester put it to his comrades on the picket: "We have made our point, let's move on and go out with a bang."
The serious lack of marshals during the three-day blockade became glaringly apparent at the victory march. There were about four of us marshalling in the front, struggling against the wild testosterone of a few ISO members who were working overtime to subvert the march and turn it into some anarchic battle with police, newspaper vendors and McDonald's windows. They regarded it as futile to march down Flinders Lane and pick up workers who were prepared to walk off a job and join the march.
While the ISO contingent at the front managed to change the route of the march a couple of times through intense bullying and total refusal to cooperate with the marshals, they failed in their attempt to win political leadership of the march. None of their highly charged members at the front actually knew where they wanted the marchers to go and so confusion reigned high within their own ranks.
One of the ISO members expressed his frustration and sexism at our excellent marshalling rather explicitly and forcefully, calling me a "Stalinist bitch".
However, it was absolutely clear to us that if the marshals had not provided leadership for the direction and politics of the march, it would have degenerated in apolitical mess with a minority of frenzied protesters — led by the ISO — trying to occupy every building in sight. The amazingly exhilarating mood of the mass of protesters would have been turned into one of demoralising confusion.
Such an outcome would have given the bosses' media a pretext to ignore the mass non-violent blockade, and to paint the protesters rather than the police as the instigators of violence. The corporate rulers and their lackey Labor politicians would have gained the moral high ground in the battle for public opinion.
Such an end to the S11 protest action would have been a political disaster.
The three days of the S11 protest action were the most exciting, inspirational and intense days of my life as a political activist. Apart from having to climb an incredibly steep learning curve, I also got to see snippets of popular democracy. The streets belonged to us and everybody loved it. Those three days were like a window allowing us a glimpse into how a world ruled by ordinary people could actually be created.