June 18th 2009
Ten year’s ago today and a global Carnival Against Capital was erupting across the world with co-ordinated protests taking place in over 40 countries on June 18th 1999.
Directly targeting financial centres the J18 day of International Action was stunning in its scale and ran alongside the G7/G8 meeting in Koln Germany. It followed the Global Street Party that had been held alongside the G7/G8 meeting in Birmingham in 1998 and co-ordinated through Reclaim The Streets.
To remember it, here’s a set of 23 pictures from London J18 courtesy of a photographer who was there for the morning and the party, but who missed the ensuing riot as police fought to regain control of the City of London.
The reasons for struggle are greater now than then, and climate change and economic meltdowns threaten the lives and livelihoods of us all.
There’s too much to mention about J18, from the sheer joy of taking the City to the full-on battles, from the dancing and the masks to the spoof FT paper to pirate radio broadcasts, from the bricking up and storming of the London International Financial Futures Exchange to the knocking out of CCTV cameras, from the electronic disturbance actions to the beginnings of Indymedia, from the exhaustion to the recriminations and the state backlash against RTS and everyone else protesting for a better world.
But most of all it was GLOBAL: “Our Resistance is as Transnational as Capital”
See this collection of 2 pages of web links to original reports, websites, analysis, pictures and video:
http://www.delicious.com/directmedia/j18
Enjoy.