State of Emergency is a series of panels, seminars, workshops, forums and ad hoc events that will happen in Melbourne from May 21st to May 24th. It will be a space in which we can share tactics and skills for disruption. A space in which we can debate, talk, find connections, think, learn, engage, dance, make art, make out. We want to bring it all together for a few days of grace -- and we want you there.
We will be holding panel discussions, screenings, music, and other random events. But we want to make the time open for your participation and input. Run a workshop, make a puppet, make some art, show a film, give a performance, or hold a discussion. We want this to be an open space, a space created by the people who enter it.
See the State of Emergency
website at
http://stateofemergency.nomasters.org for a workshop / contributions form
that you can fill out on-line.
The basic structure of State of Emergency will be:
10.30am - 12.30pm: MORNING SPACE
12.30pm - 1.30pm: LUNCH + screenings
1.30pm - 3.00pm: MIDWAY SESSIONS
3.00pm - 3.30pm: break for coffee / tea / ciggies etc / catch ya breath
3.30pm - 5.30pm: MAJOR PANELS
5.30pm - 7.30pm: DINNER
7.30pm - onwards: EVENING EVENTS
The SOE collective has scheduled the following panels, seminars and workshops but there is plenty of space and time for anyone to organise their own stuff. If you would like your event scheduled and up on the website you can fill out the on line form. Otherwise just rock up on the day and there will be space for you to do what you want!
Keep an eye on the website for programme updates…
Friday May 21st 2004
10am
LOCATION !! LOCATION !!
State of Emergency will reclaim a warehouse in the inner north of Melbourne area, squat it and make it public for four days. It will be meeting-place, bar, cafe, cinemas, music hall, accommodation and play-space. We do this as a declaration of our intent to reclaim our worlds and our lives. We squat to resist private property, to create an autonomous space, organised without bureaucracy.
The location of State of Emergency will be released on Friday, May 21 at 10am. Call the info desk on 0400 655 014 or check out the website at around 10 am and make your way down to the venue as soon as possible after that.
In the event of the location not going ahead as planned a number of back-up options have been arranged - if all else fails head to Irene Warehouse (5 Pitt St, Brunswick. Catch tram 1 or 22 and get off at Stop 22). Irene Warehouse will be operating as a forum venue, childcare space and a chill out space and you’ll be able to find out more information there. Where events are not scheduled to happen at the State Of Emergency squat the location will be clearly marked on the program.
2pm
WELCOME TO COUNTRY
In addition to the “Welcome to Country,” Annette Xiberus will discuss what it really stands for and means for indigenous people. How has the Welcome to Country changed over time, as it has become a more common practice or accepted protocol? How does this relate to the broader changes in the movement for land rights and other developments in the struggle for Aboriginal peoples' right to self-determination?
- Annette Xiberus of the Wurundjeri People
3.30pm - 5.30pm
PANEL: WHAT ARE THE STATES OF EMERGENCY?
Alert but not alarmed. Beyond the lights and sirens of the latest round of crises - 9-11, Iraq, the Pacific Solution, etc. - is the permanent state of emergency where the poor, the different, the disenfranchised have long held squatters' rights. For capital, work, war, and the bloody wreckage of history are simply business as usual. But the occupation of everyday life faces its own guerilla resistance. What are the prospects for a State of Emergency of our own?
- Tony Birch speaking on Redfern
- Camille Barbagallo on labour and neo-liberalism
- Jude McCulloch on Terror Laws
- Tahir Cambis (recently returned from Baghdad) on the situation in Iraq
5pm
SPECIAL MEETING: USERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE: SHOOT BACK IN THE WAR ON DRUG-USERS
Venue: Irene Community Warehouse, 5 Pitt St, Brunswick
A mass meeting of drug-users organised by drug-users, to discuss the realities of existence under the ‘war on drug-users’: prisons as cages in which governments dump impoverished drug-users; police routinely using the reality or fear of withdrawal in a cell to coerce confessions; drugs as the excuse for sexual assault-by-strip-searching, on the basis of appearance, age, ethnicity or previous encounters; by making drugs illegal and expensive, the state deliberately enforcing addiction to drugs such as methadone which are more addictive than heroin and physically destructive; the profitable exploitation of drug-users in sex work and the ‘second hand goods’ industry; and the proposals to legalise virtually all discrimination against drug-users. We need to begin to organise ourselves against the ever-increasing poverty, violence and exploitation imposed upon us, to seize some control over the conditions of our lives.
6pm - 8pm
Dinner
8pm
Excerpts from ANTHEM - a film by Helen Newman and Tahir Cambis
Saturday May 22nd 2004
9am - 10am
WORKSHOP: ON YER BIKE: MAINTENANCE WORKSHOP (BY ADAM)
Your mobility is important you know? And your bike needs a repair or just a tune so you can stop blowing money on PT or a car. So come and have some bike therapy, learn how to fix it, share a story, whatever. Bring yr bike and some tools if you can.
10.30am - 12.30pm
SEMINAR: THE ECLIPSE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?
As the ALP tightens the link between neo-liberalism and social democracy, this seminar will discuss Latham’s Third Way policies and the difficulties for worker organising posed by enterprise bargaining. A third theme will be discussion of what new social and economic forms need to be developed to sustain us against these developments.
Speakers include:
- Rob Watts on the coming dark era of Latham
- Bruce Lindsay on enterprise bargaining
SEMINAR: WHAT HAPPENED TO RADICAL QUEER ACTIVISM?
In 2000 and 2001, another wave of radical queer activism appeared in Australia in the form of queer anti-capitalist groups such as Queers United to Eradicate Economic Rationalism (Q.U.E.E.R.). Since then, as queer images proliferate on our TV screens and homophobia is becoming SO last century (at least in some areas), a radical queer critique seems to have been silenced and little has sprung up in its place. Some questions arise - is there a future for queer activism? How should we organise as queer radicals? And what should we be organising around? This seminar will attempt to discuss some of these questions.
Speakers include:
- Graham Willett on After equality – where to for queer activism?
WORKSHOP: CALLING ALL IT WORKERS!
A discussion space around issues facing workers organising in the IT industry
WORKSHOP: PEAK OIL PRIMER (BY ADAM/LIAM)
George Monbiot calls it our generation's taboo. Bush energy advisor Matt Simmons calls it the most serious problem the world faces. Author James Howard Kunstler sees it as part of a global clusterfuck which will destroy suburbia and probably the entire industrial system. Scientists and oil geologists refer to it as "Peak Oil," and amongst them a growing consensus suggest that before the end of this decade, the world's global oil production will enter a period of terminal decline. Adam and Liam will present a briefing on the facts and the profound implications of this event, including some challenges for autonomous organising.
WORKSHOP: GECO ACTIVISM - ACTION & REACTION IN THE FOREST (FIONA)
The bust of Australia's longest running forest blockade at Goolengook saw an unprecedented government crackdown on forest activists. This has implications for activists everywhere as tactics used become more and more repressive. As activists, are we confined to being reactive rather than proactive? How can we continue to be effective?
12.30pm - 1.30pm
Lunch
1pm
FILM SCREENING - ‘THE UNORGANISABLES’
Footage from the Justice for Janitors campaign, sweatshop organising in the USA and ‘debugged’ of Silicon Valley.
1.30pm - 3.00pm
SEMINAR: WORK/SLAVERY IN A NEO-LIBERAL WORLD
This seminar will discuss where workers find themselves after a decade of economic and political restructuring. We will look at the effect of casualisation and intensification of work levels and at the coercive methods needed to prepare workers for the labour market.
Speakers include:
- Lyn Beaton on precarious work
- Leigh Millward on Work for the Dole
- Vaughan Sanderson on the modern workplace
- Marcus Banks on welfare and neo-liberalism
SEMINAR: PRISON/CAMP
SPECIAL VENUE: Irene Warehouse, 5 Pitt Street, Brunswick
Mission, Reserve, Internment Camp, Prison: Since white invasion, the Australian nation has been constituted not simply through the exclusion of migrants who are denied the ability to cross the national border, but by the establishment of zones of exclusion within the geographical space of the ‘nation.’ These denationalised spaces, with their often ambiguous relationships to the legal system, the idealised notion of ‘Australia,’ and ideas of ‘human rights,’ continue to punctuate and define what we know today as the Australian nation. This seminar will address the relationship between these various spaces of exclusion, the role they have played in the racial construction of ‘Australia’ and the relationship of such spaces to state power and capitalist exploitation.
Speakers include:
- A refugee speaker
- A speaker on prisons and detention centres
2pm
WORKSHOP: THE ACTIVIST LEGAL RIGHTS GUIDE (ANTHONY)
A workshop about activists confronting the police and legal system, developing legal support structures, legal observer teams, how to access and distribute legal information and support. An overview of Fitzroy Legal Service’s new Activist Legal Rights website to be published later in 2004.
WORKSHOP: SCREEN PRINT YOUR SHIRT.. (ROZE E)
using screen printing to print statements on your clothing.....
WORKSHOP: NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP (HILLEL)
Secrets and Lies the Truth behind the development of Australia's first national nuclear waste dump and new national nuclear reactor
WORKSHOP: BETRAYING RACE: WHITENESS AND REVOLUTION (TANYA/DAVE)
Whole sections of the multitude remain chained to Capital through Whiteness. Whilst being granted certain priveledges, the costs- submission to the state, the commodity, work etc- are horrendous. The purpose of this workshop is to raise a revolutionary critique of whiteness that engages with multiple threads of liberation and challenges the Leftist/Social Democratic nature of traditional anti-racism and multicultralism.
3.00pm - 3.30pm
break for coffee / tea / ciggies etc / catch ya breath
3.30pm - 5.30pm
PANEL : SOVEREIGNTY / BORDERS / CAMPS
In Australia today the 'defence of sovereignty', is used as permanent and self-evident justification for everything form desert internment camps to the deaths of hundreds of asylum seekers on the SIEV X. This panel begins from the assumption that national sovereignty is neither natural nor self evident, but contested, in both form and content. As the Australian state seeks to extend its military and economic dominance across the Pacific region, this panel will ask: is there more to sovereignty than the brutal re-assertion of the state's right to take life? Where do Indigenous struggles for land rights fit within (or against) this dominant picture of sovereignty? Is a humane sovereignty possible, or must we struggle against all sovereignty in order to genuinely contest its most brutal manifestations.
Speakers include:
- Achmad Raza on detention
- Jess Whyte on the myth of a humane national sovereignty
5.30pm - 7.30pm
Dinner
8pm
Squat Fest + Jelly Wrestling and other bouts of silliness
Sunday May 23rd 2004
9am - 11am
WORKSHOP: ON YER BIKE: MAINTENANCE WORKSHOP (ADAM)
Your mobility is important you know? And your bike needs a repair or just a tune so you can stop blowing money on PT or a car. So come and have some bike therapy, learn how to fix it, share a story, whatever. Bring yr bike and some tools if you can.
10.30am - 12.30pm
SEMINAR: GENDER WARS / WALLS
While our rulers begin to care about women's rights when they provide an excuse to bomb a country or jail Muslim men, the Blackshirts are left unhindered to threaten single mothers and lesbians, and football players are left free to rape. Bodies remain sites of contention, policing and violence, at the hands of both individuals and the state, and the male/female binary is reinforced through 'crises of masculinity' and the re-imposition of rigid gender roles. This seminar will investigate how we can resist oppression without resorting to exclusionary identity politics.
Speakers include:
- Meryan Tozer on the campaign against the Blackshirts
- Tanya Serisier on race, gender and rape
- Lee Caldwell on gender multiplicities
SEMINAR: AUSTRALIA, IMPERALISM AND THE PACIFIC REGION
The Pacific is home to resistance by indigenous people, unauthorised migrants and other oppressed group fighting against the ecological and social destruction of capital, states, multinationals, the World Bank, foreign armies and religious fundamentalisms. Capital and the state have redrawn the borders of the Australian nation (excising islands) while occupying and plundering resources and often aiding or committing oppression and genocide in PNG, Bougainville, West Papua, East Timor, Solomons. This panel seeks to ask, “How does this reflect capital's ‘State of Emergency’ and the emergence of real states of emergency in opposition?”
Speakers include:
- Dan Nicholson on Timor Sea Justice Campaign
- Dave Eden on the South Pacific
- Jason McLeod on West Papua
WORKSHOP: PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PLAY (ELLEN)
What are the limitations placed on our sexual, political and friend-ish relationships by our world, and its economic and social structures? How can we transcend these limitations and relate in a more radical way?
WORKSHOP : CALL CENTRES: THE NEW HIGH TECH SWEATSHOPS (CAMILLE)
(SEE TITLE FOR EXPLANATION)
DISCUSSION : A POST-MORTEM FOR THE ANTI-CAPITALIST MOVEMENT? (ANDREW)
9/11 signalled a dramatic decline in Australia for the anti-capitalist direct action movement built around S11. Neo-liberalism has changed, but rolls on. At a time when direct action and radical initiatives seem more necessary than ever why has the movement become so dormant and fragmented? Don’t mention the war! The invasion of Iraq went largely unchallenged by any sustained level of radical action; older activists failed to make links with radicalised school kids; the US/Australia "free trade" agreement and occupation of Iraq hardly raise a spray can. The format will be an open facilitated discussion sparked by short interventions. Bring your ideas and ears.
WORKSHOP: NON-VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION (ANTHONY)
(SEE TITLE FOR EXPLANATION)
WORKSHOP: SEARCHING FOR THE SAND: THE PRACTICE OF PRACTICES (BEE)
What is to change through practice? How to we come to find or construct our desires and the desires of those around us so that practice of desire leads to political and social change that is lasting.
12.30pm - 1.30pm
Lunch
1pm
FILM SCREENINGS
1.30pm - 3.00pm
SEMINAR: FUCK THE DEGREE FACTORY - CLASS AND THE CLASSROOM
This seminar will discuss student debt and the imposition of work in the context of the Nelson reforms to higher education. How do we resist implementation while avoiding lame slogans? Is there space for fun in the factory? Can and should the student movement survive? The questions abound, the answers elude.
Speakers include:
- Rjurik Davidson
- Liz Thompson
SEMINAR: BIOMETRICS AND BORDERS: NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF THE HUMAN
Sci Fi is creeping up on us these days. When Tom Cruise’s Minority Report character, Chief John Anderton walks into a department store to be greeted by talking advertisements which personally identified him on the basis of his iris scans, we are faced less with a bizarre projection of a possible future, than an extension of an already existing technology that is changing the relationship between the human body, capital and state power. From biometric databases to internment camps typified by the ‘dehumanisation’ of those detained, the nature of the human is being redefined and life itself is increasingly entering into the calculations of power. This seminar will investigate the notion of human life, its manipulation by biopolitical technologies, and the role of biometrics in reshaping bordrs, whether national borders, geopolitical ones, or the borders of the human itself.
- Boo Chapel on terrorism, biotechnology and the human
- John Cleary on the history of biometrics
- Shane McGrath on border control and biometrics
- Marcus Banks on Centrelink, data surveillance and identity indicators
-2pm
WORKSHOP: PLANT PROPAGATION AND GARDENING (ELEVEN)
There are as many reasons to produce your own food as there are reasons to avoid the horrors of Big Business biotechnology: the hyper production of waste in the food and horticulture industries: the ill-health associated with working with/consuming chemical residue on food: the cost of organic produce. There are as many reasons to create green areas as there are reasons to maintain physical, mental and emotional health: create fabulous design scapes: connect with your community: reuse household waste. The question is HOW? How can we garden for free? Save seeds for the next season? Treat pests and diseases safely and effectively.
WORKSHOP: OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH AUTHORITY AND THE LAW (ELLEN)
Between moments of transgression, individual and collective, most of us settle into passivity and obeying the law, in the workplace and elsewhere. Why is this? Is it possible to live an actively disobedient life?
WORKSHOP: READING GROUP ON IRAQ (BEN)
The current conflict in Iraq raises important questions of how we understand the contemporary capitalist system, the nature of states, and the relation of war to what we used to call class struggle, to name only a few of the more obvious. Not that long ago the French group Theorie Communiste produced a text called 'A Fair Amount of Killing' as a supplement to their regular publication. The first part of a longer discussion of issues around the war in Iraq, it has been translated into English on their web-site. Because it is one of the more interesting texts I have read about the significance of the war, and because I find TC texts in general quite difficult, I think that a reading group on this text would be helpful. This text appears at: http://www.theoriecommuniste.org/TractAnglais.html.
3.00pm - 3.30pm
break for coffee / tea / ciggies etc / catch ya breath
3.30pm - 5.30pm
PANEL: A STATE OF PERMANENT WAR
This panel explores current and emerging forms of systematic violence - different aspects of the general violence essential to the planetary system of exploitation and control. Areas discussed include: the directly military assault upon an insubordinate Iraqi population over the last fifteen years. The ever-developing efforts at social control and exclusion/incorporation undertaken in the name of a 'war on drugs'. The 'welfare state' as imposition of 'labour market participation' on the worst terms. Money and work as the limit of life and survival. Frozen peace, total war.
- Speakers to be announced.
5.30pm - 7.30pm
Dinner
8pm
State of Emergency Party – details forthcoming
Monday 24th May 2004
3pm – 4.30pm
SEMINARS: WORK: ILLEGAL / INFORMAL AND HYPER EXPLOITATION – THE SEX INDUSTRY, MIGRATION AND LABOUR
Speakers to be announced
3.30pm – 4.30pm
WORKSHOP: MAKING SENSE OF THE APOCALYPSE (ANWYN)
(SEE TITLE FOR EXPLANATION)
WORKSHOP: CLASS COMPOSITION AND ITS RELEVANCE TODAY
Does class composition analysis have anything to offer for making sense of the changes occurring around us? This workshop aims to address this question in a relaxed and convivial manner.
WORKSHOP: RADICAL EDUCATION AND STUDENT CAMPAIGNS
(SEE TITLE FOR EXPLANATION)
WORKSHOP: GET YOUR ARSE INTO GEAR, QUEER
(SEE TITLE FOR EXPLANATION)
WORKSHOP: GUERILLA SCREEN-PRINTING (TOECUTTER)
(SEE TITLE FOR EXPLANATION)
4.30pm - 5.30pm
break for coffee / tea / ciggies etc / catch ya breath
5.30pm - 7.30pm
PANEL: WHAT ARE THE STATES OF EMERGENCY? # 2
After four days of discussion, dancing and the sharing of food and ideas, we will come together again to leave behind the state of emergency imposed on us by states and capital, and discuss ways to create a real state of emergency through our creative resistance and shared hope and inspiration. With no pre-arranged speakers, this session aims to circulate sparks of resistance created over the previous few days, and give us space to share our visions and tactics for liberation.
