S11 Spring
Edited by Lee Rhiannon, Dan Cass & Ben Oquist
16 pp.
Available from the Australian Greens, phone 1800 017 011
As the Greens' Senator Bob Brown and NSW MLC Lee Rhiannon explain in their foreword, this is a "quickly produced, partial record of s11, put in a broader context". As a contribution to a big picture still being put together in countless publications, videos and photo essays, S11 Spring has its place.
Many of the articles are first-hand accounts by some of the 11 Green parliamentarians and local councillors from Australia and New Zealand who were part of the successful September 11-13 (S11) blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne. These accounts capture the mood of a turning of the tide in the progressive movement. The accounts by Brown and NZ MP Nandor are moving indictments of the unprovoked violence of the police.
However, there is little analysis of what made S11 a success except for a reprint of an article by Arena editor Guy Rundle. Rundle argues that S11 was an advance on the Seattle and Washington protests because, "This was the first protest in this 'series' in which the decentralised affinity group structure meshed effectively with a tightly coordinated 'marshalling' structure".
Sounds interesting, but if all you had to read was S11 Spring you would be scratching your head. There is not a single mention in this publication of the S11 Alliance, which carried most of the responsibility for making sure the blockade ran as smoothly and democratically as possible. Indeed, Dan Cass, one of editors of S11 Spring, tries to make out that S11 was run on the "Seattle model" of autonomous affinity groups loosely connected by S11 AWOL (Autonomous Web of Liberation).
This might be a convenient way of screening out the role of the radical left at S11, but it's simply not the truth. S11-AWOL was a split-off led by some anarchists from the Melbourne S11 Alliance. It did play a significant role in spreading the word about S11 and organising the convergence before the blockade, but frankly, if things had been left to S11-AWOL, the blockade would have been far from the success it was.
Not all the Greens are trying to write the left out of S11 history; indeed, a few leading Greens have congratulated the socialist groups that helped organise S11 and the key organisers of the Green bloc worked very closely with socialists in the S11 Alliance. But some Greens, in particular NSW Greens MLC Ian Cohen, have been accusing groups like the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance of initiating violence against the police at S11. Fortunately, S11 Spring keeps to the truth on this question and identifies the Victorian police and the Victorian Labor government as those responsible for the violence at S11.