[Imc-uk-features] Fwd: Charlotte Raven in the Guardian

[press]

---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ----------------
Date:        25/4/2001 2:56 pm
Received:    28/4/2001 1:21 am
From:        N.Woolley at city.ac.uk
To:          press at indymedia.org.uk

Hi Indymedia,

for what it's worth I sent the following e-mail to the Guardian letters 
page in response to Charlotte Raven's outstandingly ignorant (or 
deliberately misinformative) piece in Tuesday's (24/3/01) 
Guardian... probably won't be printed of course....

Love and Rage,

Nick.

--------------------------------------------

Charlotte Raven's belief that '..the anti-capitalists are fools' (G2,  
April 24) is based on a number of wrongly held assumptions.
 
Raven maintains that the current 'anti-capitalist' movement has little 
sense of history, and subsequently fails to acknowledge any 
'ideological antecedents'. This is not true. In the UK for example, 
grassroots direct action groups like Reclaim the Streets (RTS), and 
Earth First !, amongst others, have always acknowledged in both 
publications and through action, inspiration drawn from previous 
social and ecological movements - from the Diggers of seventeenth 
century England to the Situationists of sixties France.
 
Raven also bemoans the lack of links between the movement and  
'lefties' and trade-unionists, but fails to mention the links groups 
like RTS have made with workers groups like the Liverpool Dockers 
or Tube Workers.
 
Raven goes on to claim the movement has a 'paltry reformist  
agenda'. While this may be true for many of the NGO's involved, it  
is equally not true for many grassroots groups, who - whether RTS  
in the UK or the Zapitistas in Mexico - have visibly articulated a  
desire for a more radical transformation (i.e. revolutionary change)  
of society.
 
Raven's understanding of the 'anti-capitalist' movement appears to  
have been culled mostly from corporate media. Unfortunately, few  
journalists are making any effort to find out what the people involved 
in the movement are either for or against, instead preferring to  
sidetrack public debate into more sensational stories - the current  
attempt to create mass hysteria in London about the forthcoming  
Mayday protests being a recent example. The emphasis Raven  
places upon the words of Naomi Klein is also misleading. Naomi  
Klein is an author and journalist ; a commentator upon - but never  
representative or spokesperson for - the 'anti-capitalist' movement.
 
Raven believes that protest has become 'too much fun', but why  
shouldn't revolution be fun ? Being po-faced about social justice  
and environmental issues doesn't make anyone more qualified or  
justified in what they say or how they act.
 
Yours unfoolishly,
 
Nick Woolley,
 
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