Switzerland - Olivier de Marcellus

Interview Details

• Region: Europe - Switzerland
• Language: English
• Interviewee: Olivier de Marcellus
• Interviewer: Lesley Wood
• Date: December 21 2022 & January 16 2023
• Transcript 1: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/f9lj4eicswbh7khirbzno/PGA-Oral-History-Switzerland-Olivier-de-Marcellus-1.docx?dl=0&rlkey=u58gfs3njkz4qkvq0m9cgd3jx
• Transcript 2: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/scr6x75h50a4x4ph9ukoo/PGA-Oral-History-Europe-Olivier-de-Marcellus-pt.-2.docx?dl=0&rlkey=rk0dwxow2o25jyuz82np0n1eq

Transcript

Lesley Wood: All right. Its December 21st, 2022. I’m talking to Olivier de Marcellus. I want to start out with the story from your perspective, because I think I’ve heard some stories from others’ perspectives. But how did you get involved in this PGA tour? When did you first hear about this idea? What happened? How did this come about? Origin story, please?

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, first there was the Zapatista uprising, of course. And I went. I wanted to go to the first anniversary of the uprising in 95, January 95, but I got, unfortunately arrested and was imprisoned for about three months there. So that kind of blew that. And so I definitely wanted to be there for Christmas of 96 where I went with my partner. And it was very impressive and very inspiring. And of course, when they announced that in the summer of 96, there would be the first intergalactic Encuentro, I went and some 3000 other people From all around the world. And that was really… you know, in the American history books, when I was a kid, it used to say the American Revolution was “the shot heard around the world”, right? I don’t know if they are still telling that to children in grade school, that Lexington and Concord, was the shot heard around the world? Anyhow, the Zapatista uprising was really the shot heard around the world by activists everywhere. Because revolt was at an all-time low at the time. Basically with the fall of Soviet Russia, which was certainly no friend of ours, but they were a bulwark against US imperialism for many struggles, especially the global South. When they went down so did basically all the national liberation struggles in Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador and in South American countries. It was basically everybody thought that there was no longer any kind of a stop to American power. And I remember myself feeling… It was the only time I had a kind of little doubt about revolution. Are we really going to, Can we really imagine upsetting capitalism? Or must we just have to hope that capitalism is not going to be quite as nasty as we thought that it will be? You know, there was this kind of moment in the beginning of the nineties when it was really the lowest ebb of activism for me and for many people, I think. And the fact that I already had been working with friends on the economy and finance side of capitalism and alternatives for quite a while. So for me, “free” trade, I already knew what that meant, you know, and the fact that an indigenous community of people would rise up in arms against fair free trade was very inspiring. Over the years, we had been supporting all kinds of national liberation and indigenous peoples in struggle or whatever, but for me, and I think many people that kind of rang a bell. These people are really touching on the essential thing, and having the courage right underneath Uncle Sam to rise up. It was really very inspiring for many people. And so we went to that and and coming back, like all over Europe, there were immediately Zapatista committees organized in practically every city of Europe. And the Zapatistas say that no, next time, we are not going to organize the next Encuentro, somebody else has to do it. And the Spanish network of committees said, “Okay, we’ll do it.” Which was really very courageous because at the time, no one had any money at all, it’s much easier nowadays to organize this stuff.

Olivier de Marcellus: And so we went to the first meeting in Berlin to see how it’s going to be organized. And my friend Monica. Who was a member of our committee in Geneva. Monica Vargas. She went to another meeting in Austria, in Vienna, and she came back saying, Oh, I met this funny Spanish guy. He has some project about making a big international meeting in Geneva, and he needs someone to rent some halls and maybe do some visas, but they’ll take care of all the rest, the money and all that. No problem! And so my partner was always saying I got duped into getting into too many different things. But that time she said, Oh, well, that sounds nice. You should do that. Not too much work.

Lesley Wood: Oh, my. Gosh.

Olivier de Marcellus: And yeah, And so one day, this funny Spanish guy, young Sergio, turned up at my door with this plan and explained to me that he had been in contact with the Indian Farmers movement and that it was already clear that the Zapatistas, relatively clear, that they didn’t want to make .. I didn’t know exactly when that became clear, but I think it was already pretty clear that they didn’t want to organize international action. They wanted just a forum of reflection. And they weren’t going to take on that. And so Sergio and the Indian farmers were saying that there should be something being done. And the first inter-ministerial of WTO will be in Geneva, of course. The seat of WTO. And we want the movement to be there. So yeah, I went to the Encuentro in Spain. With thousands of other people. Was another amazing experience, they had “mesas” - Tables of discussion - in all the different Spanish cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao. Sevilla, I think several more, and then all of them - I was in Madrid with the economics mesa - and then they all came together and took a train that they had managed to organise a special train with the CNTs train union. And we traveled all the way down to Andalusia to this squatted farm called strangely, El Indiano. (Somebody who had been in Latin America before they called them el Indiano, the people who can come back from there.)

Olivier de Marcellus: And at the end of the Encuentro which ended in a really amazing way, Sergio talks about that .I don’t need to talk about that. Anyhow, there was this meeting of about 40 people who stayed on for two or three days to talk about this project. And that was where I met Swamy (Nanjundaswamy, leader of the KRRS farmers union of Karnataka) and there were people from MST, from the Sandinista unions of Nicaragua, from the Nigerian MOSOP. (Resistance to Shell in Nigeria), etc. Yeah, because the idea was to have organisations with such legitimacy of the South who convened this that it would work. That was basically Sergio and Swamy who thought it all up and it worked very well.

There was also The Communist Party farmers movement from the Philippines who said, well, well we’ll take on The Secretariat. So quite, quite simple. And then I went back to Geneva and started organizing. And it got less and less simple. And there was a bit in particular because these stupid Communists in The Philippines had one of their usual splits. And the people who would get all the faxes, at the time it was still working with fax. It was just the beginning of the Internet. But basically most movements didn’t have Internet and they were enlisting for this conference by fax. And all the faxes arrived in the Philippines and then some opponent faction got the keys to the office and wouldn’t let them in anymore. And so we didn’t get any, we weren’t getting any of these faxes. And so we had to start getting them in Geneva and contacting the people again to say, no, you must if you want to come, you have to send a fax to Geneva. And we were totally you know, we had about 15 people in this Zapatista committee, and none of us had any competence in this stuff. And I remember at one point we were just, must be the week before the conference or two weeks and I was really getting crazy with all the visa stuff.

Olivier de Marcellus: They were quite difficult to get.And mobilizing politicians to get the visas. And and we had to print these faxes and we didn’t even have a printer that was working! We had a friend of the Geneva Union who lent us an office in their thing, and there was a computer, but we didn’t have… we had four different printers that didn’t work lying on the floor. And I was going crazy, you know, because we were trying to borrow them, you know, we had so little money. So finally, Brigitte Brodmann, who was one of the committee members, she just went out and rented one for 50 francs, which I thought was an amazing expense, you know, But it worked. We started to get these things anyhow. It was. It was… And there was a guy there was a Indian intellectual, Avardoot who, he was studying in the States and going back to India. And he heard that Swamy was in this thing. He, he devoted himself. and came to Geneva to say, if Swamy is in it, it must be good, I’m going to help. And he was there and he kind of saved my life, because I was really in burnout and going crazy with this. And he just was standing there very calm and saying, “Do this”. And he would point to something lying around in this crazy secretariat and say “Now do this, now do this.”

Lesley Wood: And.

Olivier de Marcellus: And I got calmed down.

Lesley Wood: Oh, my.God.

Olivier de Marcellus: Anyhow, it was an amazing thing because at the time it was the city with the most squatters in Europe at the time in Geneva, there were like 2000 squatters according to police, squatting, and we had halls and lodgings all over the place. And so we lodged more than 300 people who came to this first conference from the Global South. And most of them were lodged in squats and most of the meetings were in squats and the squatters organized to make all the food. In the Usine, a kind of social centre that was that had become legal already but like alternative social centre.

Olivier de Marcellus: And so that was really great. And we had first in February, there was this conference before the days of action in May. And yeah, there were 300 people, including Medha Patkar (of the Narmada Dam struggle) and several other amazing Asian organizers. Thomas Kocherry of the International Fisher Organisation, and – what was her name? - the leader of the Garment Workers Union in Bangladesh?

She’s been in and out of jail several times since just one of these amazing warriors. And Swamy had also mobilized the Maoist peasant movements in Asia, South Asia, because apart from the farmer movements there are either Gandhian in India or Maoist everywhere else. So there was also this woman (Sivananda I think), really tough, hardline Maoist leader organising especially “Tribals” (indigenous peoples) from the north of India.

And people there was Dave Bleakney. Dave from the incredible Canadian Postal Workers, certainly the most progressive union in the developed world. He was there from right from the start. There was a Ramon Duran who was an amazing organizer and intellectual from Spain who I had met in the Encuentro, who had founded Ecologistas en Accion at the time. He was somebody my age, more or less, autonomous Marxist from Spain, but who was also at university and wrote a lot of interesting stuff. So he was there and Massimo DeAngelis, also, who’s another Marxist economist I had met in Spain. He’s still around, working on Commons. They were both there. I remember they were really important because basically there were the convenors and some others who were meeting to draft the PGA Manifesto, during the conference and maybe ten, 12, a dozen people like that. And they would discuss during the day, and at night Ramon and Massimo would try and make a text out of what had been said and you know, doing the secretary role for this. They did a beautiful job.

It was an amazing event for the Geneva political scene also, because we had public conferences the week before with Medha Patkar and Swamy and Vijay Jawandia who was another Indian leader who featured in these conferences. And it was really very, very new to actually hear the grassroots global leaders’ points of view which was not the point of view that NGOs of aid for the South had at the time. I remember Vijay did a conference for a meeting of the Federation of NGOs of Geneva and NGOs doing development, that kind of stuff. And he just said “We don’t want your aid! Just let us feed our people! We know how to feed our people. Just leave us alone!”

It was also the beginning of Via Campesina about the same time. But Via Campesina was definitely less radical, let’s say, than Swamy who was, of course one of the important people in in Via Campesina, but he was considered from what I gathered to be a little bit too radical by some of the European Via Campesina people who were financing and therefore having a lot of influence on la Via. And so they quickly kind of suspected that the PGA was a kind of - because Swamy was in both, and PGA had a more radical point of view on WTO -, since there was some kind of slightly too radical tendency within Via Campesina. They pictured PGA a little bit as a kind of subversive element with respect to their own control of Via Campesina. Anyhow, that’s the way that’s the way I got it from from Sergio. He was in more intimate discussions with Swamy and with the people of Via Campesina. Mm hmm. In fact, I got a rumour at one point that came back to me. There was a rumor that people in Via Campesina thought that I was kind of suspect because I had been… I had this slightly terrorist past and they wondered since I wasn’t in prison, if I wasn’t CIA or something. They were kind of thinking that I was definitely something weird. This American “radical” consorting with terrorists or whatever.

Olivier de Marcellus: So there was a kind of thing there. And at the time, Via Campesina was saying that agriculture should be taken out of the WTO and put into the UN. Which is a little bit jumping out of the fire into the frying pan, just maybe a little bit less hot. Well, UN’s not doing anything anyhow. And it wasn’t really in the cards. And Swamy just said “Scrap WTO !”, you know, he wasn’t taking the agriculture out of it. He was saying “Free trade is death for the South and has to be destroyed”. You know. So that was a definitely radical and there were several other NGOs at the time on less radical ground. A bit later there was ATTAC, which also started up around the same time, just a little bit after PGA. And they were also on a more slightly less radical line on these things. Afterwards bit by bit Via Campesina and ATTAC became more radical. But in the beginning ATTAC was just saying they should Tax international financial exchanges (Tobin Tax) to finance development. It was very, very reformist kind of plank and they actually evolved very well, because they become more and more radical. And now they definitely have anti-capitalist perspectives. And but at the time we were kind of the radical fringe of these different organizations that were starting up. And certainly the only one that was calling for civil disobedience, mass civil disobedience to stop WTO. And of course, that was that was you know, that was the basic mandate that Swamy proposed. There should be A conference of PGA called by the Convenors three months before every WTO Ministerial to make decentralised actions of civil disobedience all over the world against it. And three months later, there was, well, I guess two months. That was in February and in May there was the first ministerial in Geneva. And there was obviously a bunch of convenors who came. Among the Conveners were the Kuna people of Panama, who were conveners from the start and the PCN, Proceso de Communidades Negras (Process of the Black communities from Colombia). One of them just now elected vice president! Yeah, she’s very close to a couple of the comrades we’ve always been working with of the PCN. So most of the conveners came back in May for the ministérial.

Maybe I should also mention. Before the conference Swamy did a first tour with several Indian leaders in Europe to publicize the thing. Sergio had organized it, ending in Geneva and in Davos. And I remember we had this first meeting about PGA in Geneva, what was to be PGA. And there was Swamy speaking and somebody in the audience had the typical leftist “critical” question. “You say you’re against free trade, but you have NesTea to drink (someone unfortunately had put a carton of Nestle iced tea on the table to drink). And so a bit later, Swamy was talking and explaining what was nonviolence according to the Gandhians. And he said “Nonviolence is nonviolence against all forms of life, but this is not violence!” , as he threw the carton across the hall, against the wall.

And I was thinking, I hope that the Genevan Police aren’t present in the hall !

Lesley Wood: That’s amazing.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, it was. That was a kind of a signal to many people. Okay, yeah. And of course, Swamy was not violent, but for destruction of private property when it was necessary. Like they had burnt the GMO cotton fields in Karnataka. They had also totally destroyed a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bangalore. Because they were saying this is the kind of food that we don’t want, and we can feed our people and we don’t want this stuff or these multinationals. And they just went in and trashed the place. Threw the fridges through the windows, they just totally, totally trashed it.

Olivier de Marcellus: And so this was kind of a very… you know rang a bell with lots of anarchists and squatters all over Europe, but who but who weren’t necessarily willing to stay after on the spot like the Gandhians, who “break the unjust law” and want to go to court about it. And so it was always a little bit of problem with Swamy, who was saying, you know, if you don’t assume your act “that is not civil disobedience, that is criminal disobedience”. But at the same time, like Gandhi actually, he had the attitude: “Well, they do their thing”. I remember once he said, you know, look. If they do that, they do that. Basically, he was basically accepting a diversity of tactics but he wasn’t going to assume it. He didn’t think that was the best way to act, but that these things happen kind of. Yeah.

And these things definitely happened in Geneva in May 98. There was the first demonstration on the Saturday. There were about 8000 people, which for us was huge already. And the idea we had was that we would all march to the WTO and then there would be a kind of meal there, and the different NGOs and organisations could bring their stands to inform people. And end with a kind of a meal there and a concert. But WTO is slightly outside the centre inside a Park. And there’s not much movement there. And the people who had brought the sound system, some friends from Bern, who had brought a huge sound system by tractor all the way from Bern. And they got kind of nervous as it got dark. And they said, you know, we don’t really know if we should do this concert here because we’re all alone. The cops could do anything here. There’s no there’s nobody around to see what’s going on. We don’t really feel so happy.

So we said, okay, well, we’ll go back into town and do the concert in the centre near the station. And so already in front of WTO some people had overturned a big black diplomatic Mercedes. There was a rumour that it belonged to someone from the WTO. I never was really clear whether it was or not, but there was someone - there’s a beautiful photo of some anarchists standing on it with a big red flag. Anyhow, there was already those things a little bit strange going on which hadn’t really been planned. But Swamy and several other leaders of the conveners spoke there. Then we went back with this, with this tractor to the centre of Geneva and started the concert. And there were some squatters who had come, who had pushed an old car which they had found somewhere through the whole demo. And they wanted to do a kind of happening of breaking up this old car. And, and so they started beating on this, this thing with sledgehammers and late at night, with the music and everything. I guess some people didn’t realize that it was a car that had been brought just for that. They said, “oh, we can break cars!” you know! And just suddenly, all around the square, people were breaking windows. And of course, there were also some hardcore anarchists who had really planned to. Already during the demonstration, there had been some stuff. There was a black bloc from Zurich who had come all equipped with long poles which made them look like samurai of some kind. And they had attacked the McDos. I was supposed to be organising the demo, so I was in radio contact all along with the Chief of Police, who was a pretty pretty reasonable guy, really. And he was saying.“Oh. they’re breaking up the McDo downtown right now. But if it doesn’t go further than that, I guess I guess it’s all right.” You know they had a “doctrine of opportunity”, they called it. They said they don’t intervene, if they think intervening is going to make more havoc than not intervening, which is very reasonable kind of police strategy for a police chief. Yeah, but at the time that was an official position. “principe d’opportunite.” You don’t intervene against illegal things if it’s going to spark a riot basically. And then we got it in front of this railway station, There was another McDo. And there he called me and said, “they’re breaking another McDo, but its not OK because there is a kid’s birthday party on the second floor!” So I tried to run up there, but it was just over when I got there…

Olivier de Marcellus: Anyhow, so when they started breaking up this car and around the square, then the friends with the sound machine really got upset because they said, you know, this thing we rented, It’s worth 30,000 francs and we couldn’t get insurance on it. So we really can’t stay, you know. And so, okay, I said well, so much the better or so much the worse. But yeah, well, we’ll just call it a day. And so we started off with the tractor again to go to the other side of the river where there’s a big Square called the Plaine de Plainpalais, where there was a whole caravan of tractors and caravans that had come from Germany and Swiss Germany for the demo. The Germans had really done it , they’d come three weeks long, tractors with caravans, the squatters and alternative types of Germany. I had gone to meet them when they came over the border in Basel, coming over the bridge on the Rhine in the sunset, it was a beautiful moment. And then most of them, most of them got sent back because they stopped in front of the women’s prison somewhere in Swiss Germany to do a solidarity demo. And so the Swiss police expelled, expelled the German ones. But there were still about a dozen of these tractors and caravans from Switzerland who were camping on the square, on the plus the Plaine de Plainpalais.

Olivier de Marcellus: And so we wanted to go back there. The trouble was that when the sound system left, everybody followed us! The whole demo and the people who were breaking things and they basically broke all the windows they could find, all the way back to the other side of town. And then it just went into a riot, a total riot. And we were trying to protect the people in the caravans. And there we also had a hall from a church that was beside it where we had been giving conferences. So there were people in there and it was off in a full scale riot. And the police chief had the stupid idea of having a helicopter flying over the scene with a huge searchlight, you know, to apparently direct the police action. But what it did was attract everybody in the city on Saturday night, you know.

Afterwards some young people said they’d gone to the demo and then they went home. They lived outside town. And then they looked back and they said, Hey, there’s something going on. You can see the light. So they all came back, you know. So anyway, it went on until four in the morning and made my reputation as an organiser of riots. And then the day after; there were several days, the day after, there were debates at the university and the Monday there was another demonstration which I think went off more or less okay in the afternoon. And then Tuesday, we had organized with the youth of the unions a “night demonstration against night work”, because they were just trying to introduce the possibility of making people work at night without double pay or something of the kind. And it was a theme of struggle at the time. And so we thought this was a clever idea to do a night demonstration against against night work. But I think there had already been trouble the second night, too. And people were being arrested left, right and center, because a lot of people who were living in squats would come for the demo. And so we talked with the union people, and decided no, this isn’t this demo isn’t going to fly.

It’s just obviously going to go wild. So we went there and about 100 people were there already and we said, okay. “Sorry, but we would have to cancel this demo because the situation is too tense.” And we waited around a while and the thing seemed canceled, and then we went away. But of course, people continued to gather all the same. And it went off and into a second riot - all night. There were like three days of the biggest riots in Geneva since, I don’t know, anyhow, since the war. So that was.

Lesley Wood: This is this is May 16th to to 18 to 1998?

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: 97 was was the was the the encuentro in Spain.

Lesley Wood: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Olivier de Marcellus: And beginning of February 98, we did the conference and in May 98 we did the first PGA global day of action.

Lesley Wood: PGA that you were managing to do like all these meetings during the day as well. Yeah?

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, most of the conferences were done in February, but we did have something during the day.There was a week of public conferences, and then I think it was three days of the Conference of the delegates in February.

Lesley Wood: I see.

Olivier de Marcellus: And they finally approved the manifesto and the hallmarks.

Lesley Wood: Yeah. in February Right. That makes more sense to me.

Olivier de Marcellus: That happened all in February. In fact I’m telling this story completely badly. Because I go back and forth. But yeah, the only demonstration in February was totally spontaneous. At the end of the last day, somebody said, yeah, we should also be in the streets together! There was so much enthusiasm. The delegates were really very enthusiastic. About this conference, at the end of this conference. And then someone said we should all go together - I think one of the Indian women - we should go and demonstrate in front of the WTO. So we all went out of the hall and went down to WTO. Of course the police weren’t ready for anything and, like there maybe two, 300, maybe at the end of the conference. And that was beautiful. I remember they had put up barriers, the kind of mobile barriers in front of the WTO, with just a line of cops behind it. And this amazing group of people. The police must have been stunned because there were these graceful women in saris trying to climb over the barriers, you know, And there was a Maori woman. They were very important, they were among the first Conveners, too. And they were great. And there was this huge Maori woman. She was taller than I am and twice as wide. In fact, It took a while for me to realize she was a woman because she was really a giant, you know. And she was leaning over this cop, sticking out her tongue, you know, the way the Maori do to challenge the enemy. And he was kind of looking like, What the hell is this?

Lesley Wood: Amazing! So then just to get it clear in my head, in the sense of how many of those folks came back for May?

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, the convenors, basically the ones we could that we could bring back, because obviously I didn’t even get into how we financed all this, because it was totally crazy. One of the things about PGA was that it was not an organisation and could have no budget. So each time we had to basically find money for the thing. (Part of the money, was money I had got as compensation for the time I’d been in prison because I was finally released of all charges and my lawyer managed to get about 50,000 francs compensation. So that paid for part of it.) And then we got a little bit money from different places. I don’t remember exactly, but from Switzerland, from the Ecumenical NGO in Geneva, I think and basically everything in the city was free, but it was all done almost free by the squatters, the money was just for the tickets.. So in May we could bring back the conveners. Basically there were people from Nicaragua, several Indians. There was the Argentinian Teachers union, which was very strong at the time. They had the Carpa Blanca. They had set up a tent in front of the government building in Buenos Aires to win a long, long campaign of strikes of the teachers union. There was the PCN. There was someone from Nicaragua, from the Nicaraguan central union. Anyhow, there were all these. Someone, I guess I think there was someone from the Kuna people who were who were back for the demo. So that was basically what happened in Geneva. And of course, that was really a huge event, but the most important was that we had 65, something like that, different places in the world that organized demonstrations, which is nothing now. But at the time it was I think it was the first, the first decentralized international day of action ever, at least organized as such. I guess it happened before, like in 1830, or you know, that kind of international contagious demonstrations just spontaneously. Some were big, like in Hyderabad they gathered, they said 180,000 farmers. That was obviously the huge thing. But what was almost more important for me was that there was, for instance, a group of a dozen people who blocked a lumber road in California to protect old growth Sequoia. And they were doing it against free trade because these trees were going to be made into chopsticks for Japan. You know. And the fact that there were things going on around the world with a common theme made it not ridiculous to be 15 people acting against WTO and free trade. So it was for the small groups that PGA was really important. It gave them a meaning. It gave them a possibility of acting. Obviously the Indians could always act against Free trade. But they lent their legitimacy and their force to all these other smaller, startup movements.

And one of the other conveners who was very important in Europe, of course, was Reclaim the Streets, because we had discovered Reclaim the streets in Spain. Before things were much more divided. We had never heard of Reclaim the Streets in Switzerland, you know. And that was the great thing of the Zapatista Encuentros, the circulation of experiences and methods of struggle. So we met these amazing people doing things like, you know doing concerts in the streets, and blocking with tripods and tunnels to block road construction and all these things they had done. And so they came to the first conference in February. And, and everybody, I think that on the first day of Action, there must have been 20 street parties around the world. Because people all around the world said: “Street Party, that sounds great!” I think it was one in Brazil, for example and others, I don’t remember exactly. And of course, there was the one in Geneva, too, which ended rather badly because the Swiss Germans with the sound system were obviously inspired by Reclaim the Streets too.

Olivier de Marcellus: And so why did I talk about Street Parties? Oh, yeah. See, so there was this, this right away, this circulation of forms of struggle that was really important. First of all, the idea of civil disobedience. But the idea of street parties was really important. And then later on there were the Tutti Bianche. You know, when the Italians had this thing of Ya Basta of doing “offensive civil disobedience” in the sense of under their white overalls they had these cushions which allowed them to to take a beating and therefore push the cops, even if they were being hit upon, they could push them. And at the same time, it was so great visually, because any kid could see immediately who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. The bad guys all wore black armour, looking like Darth Vader, you know. And the good guys were kind of funny looking like, like, you know, clowns with strange shapes all in white and, you know, like the Bonhomme Michelin ad for tires. So you see immediately who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. Anyhow, that was also a form of struggle that traveled around the world, you know, through PGA very quickly.

Lesley Wood: 100%.

Olivier de Marcellus: I remember in fact, talking to somebody in New York who was doing this White overall stuff, and he didn’t even know it came from Italy, you know. It was just, you know, just something had appeared there and it’s a good idea.

Lesley Wood: Yeah, that was. Well, I remember. I think I know who you’re talking about. That’s awesome. I wanted to go back just a moment, because I think you have an inside view into what happened in February at the founding conference that other people don’t have, because I don’t think we have we’ve talked to some people who were there, but why it took a particular form the PGA and I’m curious about like the motive, like why it took the form it did of like no budget, deeply decentralized, rooted in the global South. Which made it quite distinctive, and this focus on direct action. Do you have any sort of background for why it took the form it did?

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, a lot of it really came straight from Swamy from the beginning, you know. Because Swamy. I won’t’ go into it because Sergio tells it much better in a much more authoritative way. But he had come to Europe before and the FAO had a meeting in in Rome where Sergio and a group of young sort of anarchist students had organized a counter-conference, The Hunger Gathering in a squatted social center. And when Swamy, who was disgusted by the official conference, saw that he realized something could be done with these young anarchists. That there was a real force there. And together with Sergio, they put together basically the concept in Spain already, for ex. the idea of the Hallmarks, being the thing that would be the the entry point to PGA. Anybody who followed the hallmarks could consider themselves part of PGA because there were no membership dues, no fees, no getting recognised by a committee. You just had to be agree with the hallmarks and organize during moments when the Conveners called for action. And that was it basically.

And I guess the question of not having a budget, that I don’t know exactly. I think that it was already proposed. I don’t know if it was Swamy probably also Swamy, because Indian farmers’ organisations operate without paid staff and hardly any money. And are very suspicious of organisations that have any. You would have to ask Sergio, actually.

But for me those elements were given right from the start and also the radical element. There was one discussion, for instance that Sergio recalled to me when I talked to him lately. There was someone who had come from the United States. I don’t remember the organization that he represented, but it was something, some kind of progressive NGO. And they were interested in PGA, but they had trouble with it being considered anti capitalist, which was not totally explicit, but in the hallmarks they talk about opposition to free trade and global capitalism. He didn’t want the word capitalism because he thought that “I will never sell this in the States”, you know. And there was a discussion which Sergio talks about in his testimony of how this guy was just told basically that this was the way it was. You know, they dropped out after basically. There were things that were discussed at the time, which made problems for some people in the South concerning Gender liberty. And there, too, that was cleared up during these meetings. And that was made clear that that was the way it was, you know. And so Swamy was great for that because he understood that that had to be part of it. I don’t know what his personal opinion was on that kind of thing, but it was clear for him that it was important.

Lesley Wood: A kind of bridge builder

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, he was a bridge builder. And he was really very, very intelligent, because he realized that something could be done with all this. Basically, PGA. In Europe was like squatters and anarchists, you know. With a few exceptions. But he made them go towards the farmers groups and religious groups or whatever to, And they could, they were legitimate because of the alliance with these Southern movements, to make some of these alliances - even though the big strength of PGA in Europe remained the young people. But there were other alliances and also sources of finance that were opened up through these alliances.

Lesley Wood: Perhaps also just the history of the Zapatistas also creating sort of that idea of seeing the farmers or peasants as a revolutionary force because of the history of Zapatista solidarity.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. That was, that was the thing that always amazed me was through this entire anti-globalization cycle of struggles: we never managed to get unions really involved, apart from the Canadian postal workers. There were almost no unions that ever got on board, you know. Although they should have been the first to be concerned with free trade. You know, globalization was going on. And they were just so, so embroiled in the system that there was, with a few exceptions, like we had the local unions in Geneva who supported us a lot. But even then, I remember Eric Decarro, the leader of the Swiss Civil Service Union, who was an ex-Maoist and very radical. But he told me, you know, when we organize these demonstrations against globalization, I see people from the union who are there, but they don’t think they’re there as part of the union, even though my union has called for the demonstration, you know, officially. But for them, it’s something else, more like solidarity with the South. (We were always also fighting to get the media to not pitch us as in solidarity with the South. PGA was about people North and South fighting for the same thing. Fighting for themselves as much as for others.) But for the membership, the union remains at best a local struggle, at worst, a service, you know, a personal service, you know, someone who will help you with unemployment, or, you know. Defend you if you’re going to be sacked or whatever. But he realized that they weren’t capable of giving union members an anti capitalist perspective or an anti globalization perspective, even though it seems so obvious to me, you know. I remember also, even just before the beginning of PGA, there was a march of the unemployed. That went all through Europe. Organized by the Trotskyists. And they came to Geneva. And I proposed that we make a stop in front of the WTO. And none of them had ever heard of the WTO and said Why WTO? You know, the link between unemployment and free trade. No one had made it! Even in this thing. It was organized basically by the French Trotskyists. So yeah, that link just never worked. And it always amazed me that, It’s still, unfortunately, rather the same. You know, there are very few apart from the Canadian postal workers. They invested, as you know I guess, they had this amazing educational program of their grass roots membership over decades which made that after, when Dave couldn’t come, sometimes they would send other people from the postal union. I remember one time a guy turned up in Geneva, who he literally was putting letters in mailboxes all year, you know, And he turned up at my place and started talking to me about Lukacs and amazing stuff I had never read ! And on indigenous rights and feminism - all these educational programs, they really have a base I suppose still do have a base of people who are really educated activists. Anti-capitalist activists who are open to indigenous struggles and feminist struggles and and, you know. But that’s just an exception. The total exception in the North. Unfortunately.

Lesley Wood: Well, I want to just kind of switch that. I guess move in the direction that we’re already going, which is, you know, what worked really well and what didn’t in terms of the vision. From your perspective.

Olivier de Marcellus: Well. What worked really well, first of all, was with the idea of decentralized actions, because at each Ministerial, they would mobilize up to hundreds of different places. And what was not, I think, really anticipated was that there was a kind of a positive feedback between decentralized actions and big, central summit mobilizations, in the sense that the decentralized actions prepared the ground for really strong, central demonstrations when WTO or another organization came in that direction. For instance in 98, there were already people who organized stuff in California and in Seattle. Little things, you know, relatively little. So when Seattle came around, Direct Action Network was already aware of these things and using the hallmarks. I don’t know if Direct Action Network actually existed in 98? Or if it was more like what’s the name of the organization of also doing training in California you should know more than I. There was an organization anyhow that was, you know, maybe Ruckus. Yeah. And there was another one, I think, also. Then there were people who had organized in California or I think also in Seattle. And so the ground was already laid in the States. There were already people who were aware of PGA and who were capable of organizing the Direct Action Network when the ball came their way.

Olivier de Marcellus: In 98, you know, and there was also Public Citizen who had helped us, who I think were active already in 98. Maybe even someone came from Public Citizen in 98. Then for Seattle they definitely supported us - also financially to organise the PGA caravan that crossed the United States going to Seattle. With a school bus, an old school bus and a very old Cadillac limousine (with a mock rocket on the top!) that went all across the States with people from all over. There was someone from India, and I think from PCN, from the Kuna people… Anyhow, a whole bunch of people who who went across the States

Lesley Wood: And a Cocalera…

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. From Bolivia. Who went through the States to Seattle. But anyhow, the fact that there had been, there had been stuff against WTO already in 98 meant that the seeds were there and for Seattle that it was possible for the Direct Action network to be so effective in Seattle. Mm hmm. And then and that reproduced itself more and more. Like for instance, in Prague, you know, when, when the IMF and World Bank met in Prague in 2000. There were already people, young people in Prague who said, they had already done something in 98 or, or in 99, I don’t know. And there were already people who were onto PGA who came to Geneva before. I met with this young Czech who came to Geneva and said, okay, okay, we can do something. And so were organizing when people swarmed to Prague. Several thousand people, from England, from Germany, from France, from Italy, from between 2000 and 5000 people, you know, also from Greece. As soon as there was something relatively close to them they thought it was important to act. And there developed a thing at one point, no kind of business conference could be held anywhere without some group organizing a protest. Then it was no longer necessarily explicitly PGA. It was just, you know, obviously something like…. You obviously do it, you do a counter-demonstration. I remember reading it was something, some specialised business conference in Cincinnati. I didn’t know of, I never heard of it. You know, there was immediately several thousand people who said, oh, we got to do something against this, you know? So that was a huge, huge success. And getting across the idea of the problem of “free” trade. It put it totally on the map, with an anti-capitalist perspective. That worked great. Um. And bringing civil disobedience as an explicit strategy to Europe (and elsewhere). Which was one of Swamy’s very explicit objectives. Of course, afterwards, thinking back one can say, well, I’ve been doing civil disobedience long before. For instance, Basically squatting is civil disobedience. Right. But it wasn’t conceived as such. You know, explicitly as such. And the idea of blockades as a form of struggle. Much more radical than a demonstration but without getting into - Without provoking anyhow - struggle with the police. More in a passive way. It’s up to the police to react.

Olivier de Marcellus: It’s not us trying to attack the police. More like the idea of blocking conferences or other such things in a nonviolent way. Was a really new idea at the time. Yeah. And that obviously also went over .and stayed I mean now it’s still central today even if people in the climate movement have mostly never heard of PGA, but nonviolent blockades are sustained as a form of struggle, you know? Mm hmm. I don’t know if it would have been like that otherwise.

Lesley Wood: Hmm. Well, I mean, I think. Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, the anti-nuclear movement used some of those tactics. The anti-nuclear movement used some of those tactics.

Olivier de Marcellus: Sure. Sure. In the past. The peace movement, of course, the women of Greenham Common and all that, they had. That’s true. That they had used it. But especially with the peace movement. And maybe more in the United States, the anti-nuclear movement, they used them more. The anti-nuclear movement in Europe was more into big demonstrations or sabotage.

Lesley Wood: You know, like those peaceful occupation.

Olivier de Marcellus: True, occupation of nuclear sites before their construction, like our big struggle in our area - against the fast breeder Super Phoenix at Malville. The first big demonstration in 76, there was definitely a nonviolent leader, Lanza Del Vasto. He was a kind of guru of nonviolence, who was one of the people inspiring that was in 76. And then in 77, there was a kind of a mix and switch, it was supposed to non-violently re-occupy the site, but was finally a classical demonstration put down very violently, with someone killed and others maimed. And the pacifist element was de facto kind of pushed out.

Yeah. So obviously it wasn’t the first time you had civil disobedience in Europe or in the West. But, you know, people always go back nowadays when they talk about climate movement, people generally refer to the civil rights movement or South Africa as inspiring non-violent action, you know, to that kind of stuff. But which is more pregnant historically, maybe for people.

Lesley Wood: But sometimes it’s frustrating. But that’s okay. That’s why we’re doing this oral history project.

Olivier de Marcellus: But I think that in fact, there was a continuum because if you take the climate movement, for instance, the anti-globalization blockades went on, more or less inspired by PGA right up until I guess 2007. Heilegendam I think was 2007. And in 2009 when there was the COP 15 in Copenhagen, it was people from PGA like me or Tadzio Mueller And a bunch of others who proposed the non-violent attack on the conference. We had several reunions before to see how we could oppose, how to mobilize in Copenhagen, as we had during the anti-globalization movement, but with the problem that we couldn’t really just say, “well, we must block the entrances,” the way we’d always done with WTO because we couldn’t say that we didn’t want the thing to happen. It’s just that we knew that it was going to happen badly. So there were the people who organized a kind of typical big demonstration on one hand, and then there was another group who organized, Never trust a COP, which was a nice name, Who were more like the Black Bloc kind of stuff, who decided to attack a fossil fuel thing. And we finally had this proposition of nonviolently entering the COP on the last day to say, “What you’ve done is shit and this is the people’s program.” And there were NGO accredited people who were ready to come out of the COP. And we were supposed to go in and were supposed to meet together, you know, come together and do a public assembly nonviolently in this thing. And of course, the Danish cops went crazy and they beat up the people trying to leave the conference. And they beat us up, trying to get in. And we had an amazing assembly, more or less under the teargas. But that was all explicitly a discussion we had been preparing, saying we can’t do that civil disobedience the way we did the blockades, the way we did for the WTO with PGA. How can we do for a conference which should be doing something but which won’t? And actually we organized two buses that went from a summit, a WTO summit in Geneva two weeks before the COP 15 to travel up to the COP in Copenhagen, with people from PGA from the South who were coming to the WTO summit. So there was continuity from that point of view too.

So that was a discussion we had, which was definitely. “What lessons how could we apply the civil disobedience that we were practicing in the anti-globalization movement to to the climate movement”, and with people like Tadzio for instance, who went on to be one of the big organizers, also of ENDE GELENDE who organize the biggest civil disobedience actions for climate in Europe. It’s an amazing organization that regularly invades the lignite coal mines somewhere in Germany, with 5000 people or more, because a coal mine is very difficult to defend, it’s huge. So one way or the other, they always manage to get in and occupy the machines and stop the mining for two or three days each time. They’re still going strong. Tadzio, for instance, went from one to the other. The link between the anti-globalization movement and then the climate movement as far as civil disobedience methods is very clear. You know, even if no one actually talks about it, but historically, people went from one to the other.

Lesley Wood: What the name of the organization?

Olivier de Marcellus: ENDE GELENDE. It basically means something like the “end of the road”, or so far and no further, something like that. It’s an expression in German.

Lesley Wood: Okay. It also has a real rhythm to it.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, it’s nice. Yeah, They’re amazing. They have other things that went from one movement to the other, like the kitchens, you know in Prague already. If not before there was this collective kitchen from the Netherlands. I can’t remember its name. It will come back to me.

Lesley Wood: Rampenplan

Olivier de Marcellus: Rampenplan. Exactly. Rampenplan how you know them?

Lesley Wood: I was involved in organizing or helping to organize the big anarchist gathering in London in 94. And they came and did a lot of the food, right.

Olivier de Marcellus: So in 94 already?

Lesley Wood: Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. It’s amazing because I don’t know if the first time I saw them was in Prague or maybe even before I didn’t know. But they are still organizing food for Ende Gelende. I have been to these demonstrations several times. In Ende Gelende, its always very inspiring, with groups from Geneva. And one day I said to one of these guys from Rampenplan,you’re such an amazing organization! I remember you making food for us 20 years ago, and this guy was only about 20, you know?

Lesley Wood: It’s good to hear that. They’ve got a new generation of people.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, but it’s just amazing. From what you say, they must be at least from 94. It means they’re going into their 30th Year.

Lesley Wood: Well, my sense is that they were very, very experienced when in 94. They were, in fact, far too far too bureaucratic for us. Unfortunately, we had difficulty. They wanted to have tickets and things…

Olivier de Marcellus: What? They wanted to have what?

Lesley Wood: Well, they wanted to have people commit to buying particular sorts of, you know, that they were going to, you know, they wanted to know the numbers of the food that they were cooking. So they wanted tickets in advance. And we just said we just don’t have that capacity to be able to tell you.

Olivier de Marcellus: I think I think they must have got less bureaucratic because I never heard of that now. But anyhow, they are just amazing, you know. The last time that I went to Ende Gelende, they were so well organised. They were like they were making food for 5000 or 8000 people outdoors on wood fires and, and they they had it so under control that they already made three meals a day, but they one day they, they actually offered a kind of special thing at 6:00 in the evening because the dinner was going to be late, because there’s going to be a demonstration or something. So they made four meals a day. You know, they could do this and the food gets better and better. I remember an Italian friend used to call vegan food, vegan slop. He thought it was horrible. He was an Italian, you know, But now it’s actually quite good. It really can be very good. Well, there’s a whole generations of people who’ve really developed a capacity for making food for thousands of people like this. It’s just amazing.

Lesley Wood: Incredible infrastructure. It gives you a glimpse, right? Anyhow, that’s slightly off topic.

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, not really in the sense that this is the kind of thing that developed through not only PGA, obviously, but in the anti-globalization movement that has continued straight through. Like the horizontal organizing, the hand signals, etc. Yes. But anyhow, no. We’re talking about that because of civil disobedience as blockades particularly as a method. Yeah.

Lesley Wood: And basically and the way I take it, also the legacies of PGA in Copenhagen and in different networks and institutions and ways of doing action. Yeah. In terms of things that didn’t pan out. I mean, I don’t know if you want to talk about that. Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: Well. One thing that definitely didn’t pan out from the beginning was the things running really by the conveners committee, because it was much too difficult to organize. Maybe it would be easier now with Zoom and etc.. You know, but, but at the time you had to actually bring people together to talk. And it was very complicated and very expensive. And the main thing, the way I felt with it was these organizations in the South have very limited cadre, you know. They’re relatively vertical, of necessity, you know. I mean, they’re very few people in the KRRS who speak English. You know, we had a disastrous experience, at one point of asking for someone who could. So anyhow, I’ll get to that later. And apart from the question of English, a lot of these structures, they do have relatively few leaders. Relatively, hierarchical and not necessarily antidemocratic, but. But there’s a huge base. And most of these people, most of them, especially for international things, they basically give their confidence to the leadership. And they don’t they don’t know anything about WTO or about what. But they understand that, yeah, free trade is bad for them. Basically, these movements can only send their leaders to talk about these things. And the leaders have very little time. So. So we could never get them together for more than three or four days, which is just not enough to have a more solid debate on the perspectives and what is to be done and how it could be done. And so basically we would bring them together and decide a minimum of things. And a lot of work had to be done by them at a distance. And they would go home and they would be involved in a coup d’etat or some kind of huge thing of repression or whatever and often, Sergio was the one who was spending hours and hours on the telephone or whatever, trying to get the conveners to fill their mandate, basically. And it was always very difficult because it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in it, but they were just, you know. Too much. So that meant that very quickly the conveners were giving the job basically to the support committee, the informal support committee, which was formalized afterwards. Because there wasn’t supposed to be a secretariat. But de facto, Sergio, me and a dozen other people, mostly from Europe, were the ones who were organizing the visas, buying the tickets, finding money, you know, doing Secretariat, basically. And so that was finally formalized and said there would be these people, this group was recognized as existing. But it also made difficulties within, especially in the European Part of the PGA, in the sense that some people felt that especially Sergio was in some way running things. People sometimes felt that white Europeans had too much influence, thinking mostly of Sergio and maybe a little bit of me. There was generally not explicit, but some people had the impression that we had taken some power in this. But really thinking back about it, I can’t think of one political decision we made. In fact, there weren’t many political decisions to be made! Basically the decisions were: we propose another day of action. You know, we would in principle have a meeting of the conveners before a day of action. And the conveners didn’t actually make many political decisions as such either. Even calling for actions quite quickly was not only a prerogative of the Convenors committee as such, because individual organisations sometimes proposed actions to the network. In fact, most important political decisions were made on a national basis. Like, “Where are we going to demonstrate? How are we going to do it? How far do we go?” It was Reclaim the Streets (maybe with English allies?) who decided to occupy the City of London, and actually trash the London Stock Exchange, one of PGA’s most striking actions. The support group had a certain amount of responsibility in the sense that we were the ones who had to find the money, send out the calls to action, reserve tickets, find lodgings, etc. We were doing a lot of jobs, but we never made a political decision. I can’t imagine what decision we could have made. The only important political decisions made during PGA as such, I would say, were the changes in the Hallmarks, for instance, which were made during Conferences, in debates and in the assembly. And on propositions from the conveners. I guess the people of the support group did get some sort of special “status” in PGA, because we were close to the Convenors and had their respect, because they saw that somehow things were working. But the support group didn’t actually make political decisions. So it was really hard, these criticisms on Sergio, because he was doing, you know, at least 50% of all the organizational work. This came to a head with the InterContinental Caravan. After the first Day of Action in 98, in 1999, before Prague there was the Intercontinental Caravan, another amazing idea of Swamy. It was really crazy (its informal name was The Totally Crazy Project), this idea of bringing three hundred Indian farmers (and about thirty Latino leaders) to demonstrate against seats of power all over Europe involved in agriculture and free trade. So we had 11 buses touring all over Europe for a month. Imagine what that meant in terms of logistics and money and of voluntary help, because each bus had to have a guide on the bus. (Weird anarchists and punks who really freaked out some turbaned patriarchs…). You had to have lodging every night, food every night. And in some cities, all the buses were together. So like 350 people. And then they would split up because some places couldn’t take all the buses. So there would be one bus going here and two buses going there and then coming together somewhere else. And it was just a totally crazy project. And it really stressed the possibilities of organization of the PGA Groups in Europe. To the extent that there was a moment when people thought that it wasn’t going to work. And then Swamy came and totally enraged some of the anarchists by saying: “you have to have some discipline. You know, you have to do it.” He used the word Revolutionary discipline or something like that, which they thought was absolutely horrible and…

Lesley Wood: You do need it !

Olivier de Marcellus: … and finally, they did, everything came together. It actually happened. It was amazing. But afterwards, there was a lot of hard feeling towards Sergio, saying, you know, this was too much. And you asked us to do this and we weren’t ready and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, people had gone through an amazing stress with this. And it all came out on Sergio and that was basically, after that he never really invested again in PGA the way he had before. And quite soon afterwards, he developed this project in Spain. He had this project, which also turned out badly; of a kind of center for training for the people from the South in Spain, where he was basically ejected and felt, rightly, that he was really badly treated. Of course, he’s a very, very voluntaristic person. And he has difficulty… Well, he’s very sure of himself, sure of his arguments. And as he’s very brilliant, he manages to generally win the argument for good reasons and for the common good. But people feel over-powered all the same. I have another very brilliant young friend who’s helping me now who has a little bit the same problem. He’s very democratic in the painstakingly democratic way he does things. But still, he has such a personality and so much charisma and so much intelligence and so much engagement that people feel overwhelmed, you know, And so there develops a feeling of like, this guy is too powerful, when he’s actually not doing anything politically incorrect. You know, it’s just, it’s a bit too much, you know.

Olivier de Marcellus: They take up too much space, you know? But how can you tell somebody to be just be a little bit less energetic, or just a little bit less intelligent or, you know… it’s a real problem! There must also be some will to power behind it, obviously, But it is very well sublimated in both of them. They’re not doing anything wrong.. But they still end up getting a lot of flack. So anyhow, one of the things that didn’t work well was organization of PGA in the sense that it was always a huge stress, and the money was always a desperate last minute kind of thing because we were not supposed to depend, on any other organizations. And certainly the convenors were incapable of finding the money. It had to be people from Europe. So that was the thing that didn’t work well. And one thing we realized also was that there were a lot of young people in Europe who got very Involved. Who would basically be working full time for PGA for nothing, living on next to nothing. And who traveled for PGA. So there was not only Sergio, but also Jurgen, and especially women like Inès, or Momo, or Bea from Spain or Yvonne for instance, a fantastic woman from Swiss Germany. After the Cochabamba Conference, she stayed in South America for two or three months in Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador. She made lots of contacts. She did fantastic stuff, you know. And Louca, Louca Lerch, who’s someone from Geneva, a young guy from Geneva. He actually went to Cochabamba before the third conference of PGA. And organized it for Evo Morales. And stayed afterwards for a month and, in fact, ended up living in Bolivia working for the vice-presidency for several years after Evo came to power. And there were people from Europe who were also in Asia. There were a couple of English guys, Pablo Kala and … who were very involved in India already and who continued to tour in India making contacts and organizing the caravan PGA Caravans in Bangladesh and Nepal, for instance. So there was this criticism which we were making ourselves saying that PGA is supposed to be driven by the South. But a lot of the interaction and the learnings it’s Europeans who are doing. Young Europeans are doing it because they are traveling. So several times I proposed to the conveners. You know, you should find young people in your organization who could do the same and we could find money for them to do it. You know, also send younger people to do a seminar, which, as I was saying before, could come for two weeks. You know, the Cocolero leader, Evo Morales, couldn’t leave Bolivia for two weeks. I understood that, and nor could Swamy, you know, there was just too much important stuff at home. So somebody else should come, you know, somebody else who could travel. But we never managed to get that to work. I had the feeling that basically younger people in these organizations don’t have enough legitimacy.. They just didn’t take it seriously sending a young Indian guy or woman of 20 years, 22 or 24 somewhere. You know, it’s starting now. You know, that younger people have some role, you know, But at the time. It wasn’t possible. Finally, I managed to push one thing that we were saying, that we should have exchanges, not only North-South of people coming to Europe. That happened often because they were coming for Geneva, for the UN for human rights or whatever. Or for conferences. There should be South- South Exchanges, too. So we finally asked KRRS to find someone who could go for three months to Bolivia, which was at the time the other really strong force with Evo Morales, who was already president at the time. That there was an exchange between these two amazing political experiences, you know, And they sent this guy who was really very enthusiastic, but actually he pretended he spoke English, but I couldn’t understand his English! And he was supposed to go - understanding English - to learn Spanish for a month! Enough Spanish to get around. And between the English and the Spanish, we imagined that he could learn something in Bolivia, But his English was absolutely nonexistent. So this was the best person that Chukki Nanjundaswamy could find. You know, there was nobody else in Karnataka who was willing to come, who spoke good English and who was involved in KRRS. Basically it’s farmers who are involved there. In Bangalore, there’s a million people who speak good English, but they are all in high tech, etc..

Olivier de Marcellus: So we got this guy and we had friends who were in Bolivia, Louca and others who fortunately were showing him around. And one of them told me that he did a radio program. And the woman was asking questions and he would translate them into English. And then this guy would say a whole speech in his “english” of which my friend didn’t understand a word or the vaguest idea. And then he had to invent a phrase, invent an answer of what he imagined that an Indian farmer would be saying, this was a total palimpsest, you know, absolutely ridiculous. But he came back with lots of recordings that he had made of people from the different organizations. He was enthusiastic. And he wrote a book which is published in Kanada, which he gave me a couple of volumes of, about Bolivia under the Bolivian movements. And I have no idea what if it is total nonsense? Well, I guess some of it must be good because he had interviews registered and maybe he found somebody who understood Spanish to translate them afterwards. But it was kind of a total farce anyhow.

Lesley Wood: Oh, my God.

Olivier de Marcellus: So that was the only effort that came through of having a south-south exchange. Finding young people who could take the place. So there was always this thing of young Europeans making contributions, which I think were almost always positive because these were really committed, intelligent young people and they had no ax to grind. They were also several books written by activist enthusiasts in Spain and Germany about PGA movements and all this stuff that was done. But it wasn’t done by people from the South because they just hadn’t the possibility to do it.

Lesley Wood: There’s some Brazilian scholars who are really trying to work on some of that right now. Listen, we’ve been talking for 2 hours now. And I’m going to need to stop, but I feel like I probably should. We may need round two.

Olivier de Marcellus: Okay. Well, see. I don’t know. What do you think? Yeah, well, I’m willing to do if you. If you have the courage.

Lesley Wood: I definitely have the courage. I’m totally loving this. And I feel like there’s pieces that are coming through in what you’re saying that haven’t come up in any of the interviews that I’ve seen. So I think it’s really important. And yeah, I mean, you’ve been on the ground in some very key moments, right? I appreciate your being patient with telling the stories. Yeah. No, it’s really good.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, well, I like it. Remembering all this stuff. It was a lot of fun, you know.

part 2

Olivier de Marcellus: So there was this friend called Pablo Cala and John, I forget his name. Two English people who were very involved in India. They got, in fact, banned from India at one point and from Bangladesh. So there were people who were support people quite independently from the supposed central support group. Got in more involved with one organization or another. And they organized they helped organize to find money for a couple of caravans that went from Bangladesh through India to Nepal. Must have been really interesting. But we never heard exactly what happened. But it happened. That was also one of the problems with PGA was that you never really got a written report because most of these people are not really into.. These oral cultures and oral functioning and they don’t think about, you know, making funders happy, but sending them the number of people that they.

Lesley Wood: Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: Results. You know, they could have sent back you know “100,000 people”, or “talks to whatever” but you know anyhow so there was lots of things happened. Decentralized but as I say more or less in confusion and I mean not organized centrally and depending a lot on different European activists who were pushing the thing you know, who were but not in a way of taking any leadership really like us. I mean, I really was thinking the other day, trying to imagine, did I or Sergio ever make a political decision in this? And we really didn’t because there were no political decisions to be made, that it was just, you know, make trouble every time there’s a WTO ministerial and have people come and organize demos and know apart. And so I guess we got a lot of status, political status, because we were the ones who were talking to the conveners.

So we looked like we were somehow leaders, but we weren’t really doing any political decisions. We were just basically administrating, you know, organizing the tickets and finding money left, right in the center. I just fell upon my what you could almost call my budget for Bolivia. The Bolivian thing, I didn’t remember. It was just it was quite a bit of money. Actually. Almost $100,000 for all these tickets with people like somebody coming from … they shouldn’t be called pygmies, but I can’t remember that real name, you know, who had to go all the way around Africa. And some someone came from Papua New Guinea.

Olivier de Marcellus: You know, they all had to come to Europe because they obviously don’t have consulates. So you couldn’t get a visa. You had to come first to Geneva to get the visa for Bolivia. And then some people then it was that was just happened, as you remember, a week after the Twin Towers. So a lot of people that their flights were cancelled or they were told they couldn’t come into the country. A lot of people were arrested in the airport in Bolivia because it was touted by the American ambassador as being terrorists. A friend of mine was visiting me the other day and he reminded me it was announced the American ambassador said that it was. Evo Morales was one of the few people who made a public statement, which something like, “well, we’re sorry about the dead, but now the Americans know what it’s like to be bombed. And we are quite we are in in in in solidarity with the people killed in New York, but just as much with the people killed the same day in 1973 by Pinochet know.” So the American ambassador afterwards, quite understandably, announced our PGA meeting that was going to happen in Cochabamba as being a meeting of the terrorists to to see what to do after the double Twin Towers.

Lesley Wood: So I remember they said something like narco terrorists.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. Yeah, of course. Because Evo was being a head of the union of coca growers. He was considered a narco anyhow. And yeah, in fact I also got apparently some what I learned later I got a police my dossier which is quite fanciful that I was suspected of money laundering because I bought money I bought cash from, from Switzerland to pay for part of the thing and gave it to, gave it to Evo. You know, so obviously money coming, cash coming back from Switzerland was obviously narco stuff.

As a result. I never dared to go to Colombia because I thought, you know, they still have that on their books somewhere. They’ll say that I’m a narco. Anyhow then and as I was saying, getting the money for that was all I have papers with scrawled notes, you know, so and so’s know $7000 from the feminist foundation for the women and this and that and some this. It was crazy. I also got help, which was. Which must have would have. I don’t know if the Americans ever found out about that, but it would have pleased them. From Ahmed Ben Bella.The one of the three people who had founded and led the FLN in Algeria.

Lesley Wood: Oh, wow. Okay.

Olivier de Marcellus: You know, he was he was the historic figure who was the one who was honest and therefore got thrown out quite soon. And he was living he was he was living in Switzerland is amazing guy. And he had a little foundation that was financed by Gadhafi. And they also gave me around 15,000 bucks or something for some. So you see the kind of scrawling around. We had no irregular foundations, you know, it just kind of basically since PGA wasn’t supposed to have budget each time, we had to kind of just and we didn’t know how to do this very well. People weren’t financing, weren’t financing grass roots or so much. And now nowadays the foundations, you know, know that financing grass roots is the most effective thing they can do, basically. So it’s much easier.

Lesley Wood: Yeah.

Even if they ask you how many people are you going to touch and what how many meetings do you go to organize and all this stuff. But yeah, so anyhow, that was, that was the kind of thing that we were doing. Was just finding money, doing getting visas. Putting people up, finding where they were stuck in some airport and logistics. Lesley : The logistics,

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. And for that and for Cochabamba, as I said, there was the after these declarations of the Ambassador. There was a bus that was that was coming from Colombia to Cochabamba. Through the Andes, through Ecuador and Peru, which is which is kind of a bad idea. It was one of Sergio’s quick ideas. You know, he kind of looked on the map and said, “oh, that’s not too far.” So obviously, it was already very late and they were always arriving the day after when there was supposed to be the mass meeting in each country. And it was kind of a disaster. And when they arrived at the Bolivian border, they weren’t allowed in at all.

So those people went back and did something in Peru. I don’t know what they did exactly. There was that. I came in through the airport with no problem and I was feeling a slight problem with the altitude. So I went straight to a hotel to sleep some. But many of the other people stayed in the airport because they were going to take another flight to Cochabamba. And suddenly the police appeared and started arresting people. Because they wanted to stop them from going to the conference.

And so while there was Luca, Luca was there with the Defensorio del Pueblo [or the people], the legal people for the human rights that they have in South American countries who got most of them out again. But it was just crazy. And it was a crazy beginning to that conference, which was already difficult because. Yeah, that was that was the other big problem we always had in the conferences was the difference in cultures, political cultures. But I think I talked about that already didn’t I?

Lesley Wood: You didn’t really, I mean a little bit just in terms of the type of groups that were coming from the Global north and types of groups that were coming from the global South and the differences in terms of the size and the hierarchy.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. And the way of conducting a meeting, you know, because in this conference, for instance, especially people were coming in very late because there was first of all, there was all this police harassment and then anyhow, people coming, the people coming from the Andes, they said to the conference, “I will come as soon as I can and whatever”. So, they were arriving all through the meeting there was some distinguished leader who would arrive and in the middle of the assembly we’re trying to have a kind of Western style assembly on a subject which would come to a conclusion, you know, And so they would raise their hand and say, “Saludos. I come with such people. They salute you from such and such and such. And we are doing this and, you know,” For a good 20 minutes. You know, it’s the way they do things. You know, I remember, the PCN, the Processo of the Communidades Negras in Colombia, they told us when they have a meeting, they have a meeting for a week. You know, they come and they camp and they talk and they, you know, and everybody says this kind of stuff, you know, and all the ceremonial kind of, you know, The Pachamama and this and that, you know, in the middle of a debate about what are we going to do about WTO, I don’t know what you know.

So the moderator said, say yes, yes, yes. Thank you very much. Now we get back to the subject know and it actually got some of the local people got upset about it because they said, “well, this is a Western way of doing,” Which is quite true. And I got involved with one of the guys who was saying this, saying, “please tomorrow, take over, do it your way.” you know. And he said, Okay okay.. And I said, “No, no, tomorrow you are the moderator, you organize.” And the next day he didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know why, but he didn’t feel it was, you know. So things were difficult. Often for that reason, I was always wanting to proposing that to the conveners that they make all a five minute video of how a meeting was conducted in their country, you know, in their organization. And I remember the Maori said, yes, well, when we have a meeting. People talk one, one after the other. Total silence. And the only thing you can do is say a kind of expression like, Whoa ho, ho, ho. Right on, you know?

Lesley Wood: Mm hmm.

Olivier de Marcellus: Mm hmm. If you, you know, encourage the person to really say his thing, and then it can be a long, long while to, you know.

Lesley Wood: Mm hmm.

Olivier de Marcellus: So when we had these assemblies and in Cochabamba or in Bangalore, there were there were German anarchists when they didn’t agree with something, they would stop doing like this or, [makes gestures] you know, whatever, you know, and intervening more or less, you know. Just really young people with dreadlocks you know, who didn’t think that old men with beards and turbans were particularly to be respected. So there was a lot of that kind of problem. But things worked all the same. But it was that was really one of the big problems.

Lesley Wood: I mean, it’s one of the things that’s most exciting about PGA in some ways, right? Because it was an actual face to face attempt at a dialogue across those boundaries, and figure out how not to just fall into a northern dominated culture of how to run a meeting.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. And getting over the also the imaginary of what these great Southern movements, you know, must be just like us and total democratic and horizontal. If not, they must be lousy, you know. And that was a big problem too, because. People had to get used to the fact.. I remember once during organizing the Caravan, I think I said this already, this thing about when Swami told the anarchists that they must have some discipline because there were difficulties. He said “because in India we do have leaders you know”, Obviously they have leaders. You know, only maybe 10% of the of these 10 million people they are supposed to be representing actually know how to write. And it’s all structured by village organization and then the local regional municipal kind of organization, county organization and it goes up like that and it’s all oral.

Olivier de Marcellus: The village names somebody who’s going to go to the next one further up and it goes up that until there are ten people meeting in Bangalore and they decide yes with respect to this problem it seems that we should take the train to Delhi and occupy the Capital. Then they send the word down again for all these oral loops. And that day, 5000 people turn up with a bunch of rice and squat the train to Delhi. That’s how it worked. You told me, we know we never make a flyer or a poster. We just talk, you know? So it’s still works that way. And now they have mobile phones. So, I guess that that has changed things.

Lesley Wood: Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: Even the farmers all try to have mobile phones because it’s really useful. But. At the time. That was the way things worked, and it still works mostly like that. So. When we said in the remarks, we talk about being as horizontal as possible it was as far as the working of the network, but obviously couldn’t imagine that these organizations were going to be totally horizontal. They just aren’t. And they can’t be for a while.

Lesley Wood: Well, and it’s a question of what actually works in a different place, right? You don’t want to fetishize a particular form.

Olivier de Marcellus: Sure. I remember when I went to Nicaragua in the eighties, the favorite slogan in the meetings was Direction Nacional ordene! It was yelling this, okay.

Lesley Wood: What does it mean?

Olivier de Marcellus: The National Direction orders! Whatever they say, we do.

Lesley Wood: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: It’s the same with the Indian leaders. There are so many that are corrupt or corrupted. And if they find one who they really believe in, like they believed in Swami, or Medha Patkar. They say whatever you say we do, you know.

Lesley Wood: Yeah. And this has a tradition of Maoist international struggle, I think. I don’t know the history as well as I should, but that was comfortable with sort of a central authority.

Olivier de Marcellus: And most of the organizations in South and East Asia were either Maoist or Gandhian. Like the Indian farmers are more Gandhian, but there were also Maoist organizations more working with the tribals. The people from Nepal were totally Maoist. I think basically linked with the guerillas at the time, but they never said so. But anyhow. And so obviously they have that central committee. The Philippine farmers who were the Communist Party of Philippines organization, there is no other. And they were lousy. In fact, they really I think I already told how they screwed up the first conference.

Lesley Wood: I remember.

Olivier de Marcellus: Then we really didn’t do anything with them afterwards but more because they were undependable than, you know, who likes Communist Party. But they are the ones who had the movement against WTO and the farmers movement. There was nothing else for the moment. So there were many cultural/political gaps like that. I remember in the conference in Bangalore. Maybe I already said that, but.

Lesley Wood: No, I haven’t heard much about the conference in Bangalore.

Olivier de Marcellus: At one point. At one point, someone from the Western delegation was talking about rights for lesbians. And there was a really nice old leader of the KRRS, Karnataka farmers who didn’t understand what it was, you know. Finally one when someone explained to him he had a heart attack and had to be kind of helped out of the room. But he didn’t make any problems of it. But he was just so; it was just so much too much for him. He felt bad. And in the first conference in in Geneva. There was a whole discussion about that because that was the Maoist woman who was a fantastic woman. Apart from that, working with stirring up trouble with the tribals. She was saying, oh, well, this, you know, this thing of homosexuality and lesbians and all that kind of stuff. That’s western. It doesn’t exist in our in our culture. And it’s just that’s Western culture. Well, I don’t think she said it was degenerate, but it was just a Western non problem and she didn’t want it on it. And Sergio was telling me he had to. I think he talks about it in his interview. I don’t have to go into it. But at one point, finally, there was the the woman from the Shining Path or the other thing was not Shining Path. It was the other one. There’s another movement from Peru at the time, pulled out the Wiphala and said, “We are all the colors are in the Wiphala, so why not? It wasn’t really the rainbow flag, but and that kind of shut up the Asian woman and we went on.

Lesley Wood: All right. I mean, that’s one of the things that seemed very brilliant about the strategy of keeping the hallmarks fairly inclusive, but very broad. Right. You didn’t have to agree on everything.

Olivier de Marcellus: No. And yeah, what it meant, practically speaking in one or another movement or culture was not spelled out. It wasn’t necessary. Yeah. I think that the hallmarks were really the essential stroke of genius about PGA, because it organized people. You know, people organized themselves without even referring to us. We would find out later that they were, you know, you would discover like when we went to the when the summit in Prague, which was to stop the IMF and World Bank meeting there. There was a whole bus of people who arrived from Turkey and said, “We are PGA Turkey”. “Oh, is there a PGA Turkey?” “Yes.” Yes. We knew there was a network of people. I don’t know what happened to them afterwards, but progressive, really very progressive people who saw these hallmarks. That’s for us. We’ll go to Prague.

Lesley Wood: Well, that’s definitely what happened around here. There was no real awareness of some of this other stuff that was going on.

Olivier de Marcellus: Direct Action Network used the hallmarks for Seattle. Right. And I went to Seattle I remember discovering their paper with which is using the hallmarks so that’s great.

Lesley Wood: But even in Canada afterwards like 2005-6 there was a PGA Bloc. In Ontario and Quebec of six cities. That was sort of the direct action wing of the movement doing antiwar work. And so it was really just known as the PGA BLOC.

Olivier de Marcellus: That’s great. They were doing other stuff, too.

Lesley Wood: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it’s still there’s a number of organizations in Toronto. Whose founding principles are the hallmarks.

Olivier de Marcellus: No, no kidding. Yeah, that would be interesting. That would be interesting to. And if someone’s interviewed you. But should maybe.

Lesley Wood: No. Well, I’ve interviewed my partner. Mac has given some of that, but. But, yeah, we were quite dislocated from the European conversation.

Olivier de Marcellus: There was also movement in the southwest of the United States. I don’t remember its name now, which you contacted us at one point who also organized around the Hallmarks. They’re working a lot on immigration. On the border.

Lesley Wood: In Arizona?

Olivier de Marcellus: They were really nice people. And there was we also found there was a group in Korea. If I remember correctly, and Michael in Ireland also they organized around the hallmarks and without actually ever being in contact with us. So that was really a stroke of genius, I think, because people just self-organized and came together when it was possible.

Lesley Wood: Yeah. I mean, I, I took, you know, at one point I created these databases of all of the different actions around the WTO on these different days of action. So I have those and all sorts of groups sent in their reports or somebody sent in the reports to the PGA website to say that we were part of this action. And like, I don’t know, you know, was it just one guy who thought, oh, well, we should just send this in? Or was it an actual kind of affinity? Like, so, yeah, like Korea. You think about the KCTU, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, which is an enormous militant wing of the Korean trade union movement, and they were sending their stuff in. But I’m like, does that mean that they agreed with the hallmarks? So I don’t know.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, and obviously I don’t think that you know, when there was a big rally in the Indian movement for instance, or. Swami would you know, or some person who was talking would at one point talk about PGA and the fact there was things going on in at least for the moment of mobilization for WTO. But how many of the people in KRRS actually were aware of PGA and what was going on? God knows. Maybe 100 people who of the more of the top organizing people, the others. It was just organizing against WTO in India. And we know there are other people, you know.

Lesley Wood: That even happens in the Global North. I know I’ve always been interested in international connections. And so in my local anti-poverty group, I tend to pay attention to those things and then bring them to the group. But nobody else cares, really. So I’m like, is it okay if we affiliate with this? Sure. Whatever. Yeah. And so it doesn’t necessarily shape that much of what goes on the ground, but it is still a potential link and then information.

Olivier de Marcellus: It was more than we sign up for such and such, you know, treat the thing without it being really important. It really had this contagious effect. There was a point where there was a moment when at least in the global North. You couldn’t organize people couldn’t organize any kind of business meeting without someone organizing a thing against it. I remember seeing some quite minor business fair in Indianapolis. And right away people say, “Oh, we organize a counter conference and a demo and civil disobedience.” You know, we’re using the idea of a global movement of civil disobedience on those themes definitely inspired people to act. It wasn’t just they were doing it anyhow. And they say well, we could also send in our report to such and such. So also that it gave people the idea that this was possible and that was a cool thing to do.

Lesley Wood: Absolutely. Absolutely. It was.

Olivier de Marcellus: Useful. And it was useful because people knew there was this kind of thing going on everywhere. So you know you could do it. A little demonstration somewhere if it was part of this global day of action. And it made sense.

Lesley Wood: Right. It amplifies it.

Olivier de Marcellus: I remember people blocking or loggers thing in the in the mountains of California on the the first day of action. And it must have been 20 people in a mountain road somewhere saying, “we’re doing this against WTO”. It was completely ridiculous if there weren’t big things going on at the same time.

Lesley Wood: That’s right.

Olivier de Marcellus: I always said the network is really important for the small groups, the big groups, the Indian farmers, they can make a problem for WTO or by themselves. So can MST. But the small people, the small organizations. It’s really important. And it gave us it gave a whole other political horizon to all the autonomous groups and anarchists and squatters, whatever, who mobilized in Europe. The social centers in in Italy, etc.. So that was really that was really interesting part.

Lesley Wood: What do you think the lessons are for today’s organizers.

Olivier de Marcellus: Hmm. Hmm. That’s more difficult to answer. I didn’t know. Well, for one thing, I think that there really should be more people trying to organize international solidarity and campaigns, because now it’s basically the State Department is doing it you know, with the National Endowment for Democracy. They are financing and organizing very concretely all these color revolutions all over Europe. They organize the putting down the government in Paraguay, in Brazil, in Bolivia. I mean, you know, it’s going on constantly. I read an article of Steve Bannon saying that that they had sister institutes working using the Cambridge Analytica kind of software on all the continents. And he said it’s not a joke. I think. He spent most of his time in Europe during the Trump era working with and they have an institute based in Brussels called the Movement. I don’t know if you heard about that, but they call it The Movement. You know, they really imitated PGA or that kind of thing. And they’re doing it with enormous amount of money. And know how. I read that when Bolsonaro was elected, he had 29,000 fake WhatsApp addresses putting out stuff. It’s industrial. And we are not even doing the stuff we were doing for PGA. That I know of.

The problem now is that there are before we were the only ones in the field, more or less. People, and there was not that much going on internationally, not much on the Internet. So it was quite easy to, you know, if people wanted to do something, they contacted us basically. If they knew about us because there wasn’t so much. Now there’s so many different networks trying to organize days of action, but generally on quite limited themes, you know, and completely separate. But it’s difficult because at the same time, there are probably already several people trying to organize a web page where everything will be. Where you can find all the information. And so that makes a web page, another web page you must put on the next Web page. And so, there has been solidarity between the more or less spontaneous movements, between M15 and the Arab Spring, etc.. But I don’t think it was as organized as what the extreme right was doing or what the Americans were doing to sabotage these things or derail them or preempt them.

So if it was possible. Sergio is in Colombia now. The first thing he says, when are you going to start PGA again? The Indians always say, “PGA was very good. Why don’t we do it again?” But they aren’t putting any energy into it. The end of PGA, we tried several times. I tried particularly to contact some of the conveners who were the most enthusiastic about it, like Casimira Rodriguez in Bolivia, she was the founder of the domestic Laborers Domestic Women Laborers Union in Bolivia, a fantastic woman. And she and the PCN were perhaps the most enthusiastic people about PGA in Latin America and saying, “Do we want to do something?” “Oh, yes, yes, we must do something.” So I said, okay, “well, how about contacting the Zapatistas and seeing what?” But. Well, at that time anyhow. I felt that people were very enthusiastic, but that in fact the priority for them had changed. It was, among other things, taking power at a national level because Evo came to power, the Ecuadorian movement came to power. So she was a minister of justice for a moment. Casimira So it was.

Lesley Wood: I think she’s been interviewed for this.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, that’s great. She’s a great person. But in fact, we contacted them. In the last meeting we tried to organize in in Haridwar. I wasn’t there, but there was a small meeting, supposed to be a conference of PGA, but which didn’t. Fewer people in India. But there too also the fact that WTO was effectively relatively blocked.

Lesley Wood: Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: Which was a huge victory, but at the same time there was no longer one objective. After they continued with the bilateral free trade agreements, which some people said was even worse. It was worse in the sense that the countries were subjected to the pressure individually and most of them caved in. We couldn’t really continue on WTO. Obviously, there was something that changed. You know, people often think it was it was the Twin Towers and Genoa. But actually it wasn’t. There were big, big mobilizations afterwards. There was the one in Geneva where we were 80,000 people, you know, for the G8, and that was basically organized by PGA Europe people, since we were the ones who organized the blockades. And in all the preparation people coming from all of Europe to push that with respect to a regular demo and then there was Gleneagles, where it was still like the Wombles who were also using the Hallmarks. And other groups who were blocking and did a fantastic job in Gleneagles of blocking the access to that hotel. They put a hotel at least 30 kilometres from Glasgow, right in the middle of the countryside. That’s not possible. And those crazy English people they left at four in the morning cross country hiking and they were blocking the road, the turnpike in the morning.

Olivier de Marcellus: They really were fantastic. So the things continued continue for a while. So it wasn’t really the repression which was getting stronger obviously in Genoa and in Goteborg, where they also shot using real bullets. But it wasn’t really that made it stop. I think it was really more politically that it was less a priority, certainly on the world level. And I guess the last things happening that I knew of, was where PGA people really involved on WTO was the German G8 meeting. Because it really shifted onto the G8. The WTO wasn’t so much. Heilingamdam that was in 2007. And then we started organizing in 2008 or so for the COP 15 in Copenhagen. Which was, again, fewer, but definitely PGA people or PGA inspired because we had this long debate on what would you do in a climate conference because you couldn’t block them. Say you shouldn’t be having this conference, you know? But we knew it was going to be lousy. So finally, that part of the movement said, okay, we will organize to interrupt non-violently the conference, go into the conference nonviolently the last day and establish a people’s agenda for the climate.

Lesley Wood: Yeah.

Olivier de Marcellus: And some of it almost worked, except that there were hundreds of huge Danish police who all look like Vikings or Nazis. They’re all much bigger than me and blonde. who stopped us kind of and beat us up. But we had like some people try to come out of the conference and some NGO people, people who inside they agreed to come out and we were trying to try to come in to make a People’s Assembly somewhere inside or outside or. And they got beat up by the police inside the conference, and we got beat up by the police outside. And then finally there was a kind of a truce where we were held a Popular Assembly in the middle with a certain smell of tear gas still just outside and basically decided that that nothing good was going to come out of this kind of summit and that it wasn’t enough and that we had to go home and organize grassroots on climate because the summits weren’t, you know, storming the summit wasn’t going to do it. And that’s basically what a lot of the movements did. So certainly that’s what we did in Geneva and I think was done in Germany and others like the importance, went back down to organizing grassroots, having really some permanent, permanent as possible mobilizations, because in the north with PGA in the South, there were these organizations that were real permanent organizations, day to day struggles. And in the north, it was basically the capacity of swarming when there was a summit or doing a decentralized day of action. But in between, people went on their business and basically it was there was nothing. There was nothing. And we weren’t really developing any kind of social base. So.

Lesley Wood: Yeah, I was wondering about that. Are the relationships, the north south relationships still in existence around questions of climate justice.

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, we’re trying to work on that. We’re joking that it was like a baby PGA. We had a meeting a couple of months ago in Brussels where we found some money for eight or eight or nine organizations, southern organizations, to be able to come to Brussels, or that was basically to lobby with the European Parliament because they were discussing regulation of finance for fossil fuels with the central bank. And now we’re trying to organize in the spring there’s going to be the Annual General Assembly of the International Bank for International Settlements. But BIS Basel, which is the like central bank of central banks. And originally, I guess it was just for making settlements between the central banks, sending gold left and right, I guess. But it’s also a place where they have conferences of the central bank directors. So the idea is to make a forum and a demo and whatever there they have to say. They have to agree among the central banks on real regulation to get out of fossil fuels. Because, well, strategically, that could be really interesting, because if one bank does something, they will say they won’t be competitive with the other banks, but they should be able to say, okay, on a world level, we’re going to do something. So there’s that going on.

We have reorganized we work with other groups in Europe. We’ve organised regularly tours of frontline communities that are impacted by directly by resistance against fossil fuel. Or in some cases, deforestation. In Brazil, people from Standing Rock came through, people from Canada working on the pipeline is going to the Pacific, Trans Mountain and Coastal Gas. And others like that. So. But that’s really a more traditional solidarity structure in the sense of trying to bring them. But it’s interesting because all these organizations are used to struggling against the local fossil fuel company or the mining company that’s doing things locally, which is often a subsidiary, doesn’t necessarily have the name of the real company, some Canadian subsidiary of something. But they have even less access to who are the banks that are financing these people. Whereas we have the possibility of doing research and knowing that the problem is the Credit Suisse, it’s the Central European banks or whatever. So at least the people who came to Europe, came to Brussels. They thought that was really interesting to have also be able to go up, know the entire chain of command of these projects and make the link more strong between what you’re suffering and the climate movement.

But I think that there should this there would be room, as you said, for much more because, the Southern movements don’t talk so much about climate, but they’re directly involved, either because of the climate change going on or because of the fossil fuel extraction going on. We had a rally last Saturday for Peru, and the woman there was saying that it was impressive. She said that two thirds of the ongoing struggles in Peru today are social-environmental, two thirds are about extractivism, basically. Yeah, of course, Peru is special because it’s just loaded with gold and iron and copper and oil. But that’s the case in lots of places. You know, the struggle of all the people in Vaca Muerte in the Mapuche in southern in Patagonia. You know, the problem is oil, you know?

Lesley Wood: Yeah. Well, one of the groups, one of the groups in Toronto that. I think uses the hallmarks is the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network.

Olivier de Marcellus: Oh, really?

Lesley Wood: Yeah. And they do a lot of kind of collaboration because Toronto is one of the heads of the mining industry. And so they bring out people from different struggles to do actions at the mining conferences here. So following the model and I was thinking about I was reading the paper this weekend and how Correa and in Ecuador, they had said, well, okay, we’re not going to plunder the rainforest and for oil if we can raise this money and now Correa is gone, but now they’re plundering the rainforest and you just think, oh, my God, we could have we could have been more active on that.

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah. That was that was a fantastic opportunity and a moment that passed. I actually went to Ecuador at the time I went to a conference there with, with Accion Ecologica who were pushing that thing. At the time they were together with the government and then afterwards when it didn’t work out for. I think, Norway was agreed to put up a few million, but no other country brought up the idea. And so then Correa said, okay, then it’s not working and. And so he split with the environmental movement, which was tragic because it weakened both. And finally, the right came back in. And now, even now for the last vote rotation, there was there was the post Correa faction and the indigenous and environmental who were totally opposed and therefore they both lost the election. … There’s that problem all over Latin America of the contradiction between the progressive governments that have to export some oil and gas because otherwise they just go die within a few months. Yeah. So Ecuador or. Or Bolivia. Or it could be Peru another time. And at the same time, the come into contradiction with their professed love of the Pachamama, etc. in Europe. I mean it’s really a stupid opposition in the sense that, Yeah, people tend to either be very ecological and say, look, they’re traitors, that they’re continuing to, you know, but when Evo tried to cut down the price support for gasoline in Bolivia you had a revolution on its hands in a week. You know just these countries depend on that as to develop or even have a minimum you know and so these progressive governments. It’s true they’ve been giving education, roads, whatever. When we visited Ecuador at that time, we talked to our friends from PGA, the CONFUNESC, and they were saying, “Well. We don’t really have a choice but to support Correa because our base supports him”, You know, a base for the first time. They have roads, they have health, they have, you know, the government has never done anything for them and they’re doing something. …

Lesley Wood: What are the lessons here from the global justice movement that could be applied here to the climate justice movement?

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, I continue to be very much in favor of mass civil disobedience. Yeah, that was something that worked for us and I think could work for the climate movement. That’s why I’ve been involved in civil disobedience since 2009 when we did that that action in the COP 15. We never got organized for any other COPs as such, but local stuff. And it’s been quite effective. More in small groups. And for me, the idea was always to inseminate the idea of civil disobedience, to do it massively, you know, and like. And I don’t see what else can change these governments. That’s why I think what’s happening in Germany is great. They managed to actually have 5 to 10000 people doing it in, which is just. I’ve been several times. It’s just so inspiring. And you take people there and they come back just totally, totally gung ho to do something because it’s just it’s very liberating. And in general, civil disobedience is liberating, I think mentally, spiritually, or as you say, oppression and being powerless is already depressing and takes away people’s energy. And disobeying is always good for that. But particularly in the case of climate because it’s so it is such a stressful subject that.. People can take 20 years to bring down a dictatorship. It’s a pity, but certainly it will work. But we have this thing of the next ten years, the next five years, we have to it has to change. It’s not changing enough. And so it’s quite anguishing. How do you say that in English? It provokes a lot of anxiety and breakdown, burnout and whatever, because people just feel or must be in denial. And so in that in that sense, civil disobedience is really a way that I think is really important for people’s mental health, so to speak, activist mental health. We just decided to do a new action this week and we hadn’t done for a while. We’ve been more taking care of the trials that come up and it was really funny because know the end of that meeting, everybody was hilarious. Everybody’s so happy, Oh, we’re on the road again. We’re going to do something, we’re going to strike back, you know? And you realized at that point that unconsciously the load has been getting heavier on people’s backs, you know, of feeling we can’t do anything. Things aren’t going well enough or whatever. So I think I would definitely think that for me, that mass civil disobedience would be would be a lesson to be to be learned, to be followed.

Lesley Wood: A key one, right?

Olivier de Marcellus: A key one, yeah. And as you were saying before. As you suggesting before. Uh, what would really probably change the change the deal would be if we had big Southern movements who were explicitly acting on climate.

Lesley Wood: Yeah. I don’t have names to name, but I’m like, definitely see the connection around the struggle for the funds to transform their economies, not sacrifice the needs of their people.

Olivier de Marcellus: Well, there’s certainly people arguing that on the governmental level. And they are like there’s a there’s a there’s a big there’s a big movement now for agroecology in India. You know, actually, even KRRS was one of the first, but now it’s actually one of the state governments that has started pushing it. And the central government is really trying to fight back to say, no you shouldn’t do this, whatever. But for the Indian farmers, it’s really the only way out because first of all, they’re going bankrupt anyhow with their pesticides and the land. Worse and worse. And at the same time, the climate is changing. So they can’t depend on the monsoon coming regularly anymore. So you have they have to go back to multicultures rather than monoculture where they just show something happening and saving water. I mean, it’s obviously the solution for the farmer.

And it’s a climate solution you know but so. The people were like Chukki and people like that who were really thinking they quite see the link, but no one, that there hasn’t been, for instance, a day of action on doing a COP where the Indian farmers would be there. That would be that would really change things.

Lesley Wood: I wonder if Via Campesina is making that argument. I think they are. I mean, they’ve always been.

Olivier de Marcellus: I should talk to Chukki about that, because she is she is active in Via Campesina.

And maybe one other lesson that came out of it was, was certainly that. First of all, that you would have to be a bit more realistic about having a budget and having some kind of Secretariat that’s paid rather than these crazy people running around doing things. It would work a bit better. You would have to have also people giving the time to the movements, the time to have a real reflection, because basically we never met for more than a week, at best, for five days. You can organise it in five days, but you can’t reflect. Um, so one of the things we wanted, I was trying to organize at the end to say, find some people, not necessarily the leaders, but, you know, if you spend two weeks together, you know, brainstorming about what to do, you know? I think that would be maybe a first step.

And also the other lesson that came out of this was also you don’t have to organize. Conveners don’t have to be always the ones organizing, for instance. That was supposed to be the how it worked. The conveners would and right away in 99 it was the Reclaim The Streets who said, well, if we want to do something for the G8 and we’re going to occupy the city. And that was that was one of the huge, huge victories of PGA. And it was it was one of the conveners. But they didn’t really ask us the rest of the conveners. Well, it was very quickly became a multi. The initiative could come from different places and that would be something that should keep, I think.

…[discussion of who to interview]

Lesley Wood: I was very involved in organizing the conference with the guy from Florida that was in Massachusetts, which was the North American or the Canada US PGA. And it was. We took a very we took a very hard line following the logic that we understood from the hallmarks, which was that it had to be led from the Global South. And by people’s movements, grassroots struggles. So we developed this elaborate framework of who was who could go as a delegate from Canada or the US to Cochabamba. And it had to be at least half poor people’s movements, at least half people of color, at least half women, and with regional representation. And then we divided the Canada and the US into different regions and we said, okay, you have to find two. You have to find two person from each region, and you have to find the funds for it. Only Canada could do it. The US really got all caught up in itself because who had shown up for the conference was mostly white global justice activists who weren’t necessarily that grounded in their communities.

Olivier de Marcellus: So you were more ambitious than the Europeans on that?

Lesley Wood: We were ambitious, and I think I remember having a conversation with David Graeber about it, and he said, we should just send who wants to go? If they if they want to go. But it was honestly, it was pushed primarily by Montreal, and I supported that endeavor. But Montreal had this. They just were like, we’re CLAC. They were like, We’re going to do it this way.

Olivier de Marcellus: It was very radical and very, very, very coherent about this stuff. But they had the capacity to do it. Whereas if there’s nobody. Just like. And I guess in North America, it’s also more important to be hardline on that because there are I mean, the most movements, the most important movements there are non-white and poor movements there, you know. Whereas in Europe, the non-white movements there are practically now there are some around in migration, but it it’s generally it’s not the same. Maybe maybe in in U.K. or possibly in Germany, I don’t know. But yeah, it doesn’t exist.

Lesley Wood: Yeah, I mean, but one of the downsides of what we did was that the delegates who went weren’t necessarily that connected to those of us who are in the Direct action movement. So they went and then they came back. But we didn’t necessarily get the information right. So it was like indigenous activists. Primarily, I think that people came from the Arctic or somewhere that went down from Canada. Yeah. And so. Yeah. So anyway, it was an interesting experiment at that moment, but it was also a different moment because it was I think 9/11 did hit harder in Canada, and in the US. Of course.

Olivier de Marcellus: In the United States it must have been just terrible.

Lesley Wood: It was really it was a lot.

…[discussion of CoVid and abolitionist organizing]

Olivier de Marcellus: Anyway. Yeah. Well, all right.

Lesley Wood: Thanks for everything. And we stay in touch, huh?

Olivier de Marcellus: Yeah, you too.

Lesley Wood: Bye.

Olivier de Marcellus: Bye. Bye.