United Kingdom - Caravan1

Interview Details

• PGA Affiliation: Caravan
• Region: Europe
• Language: English
• Interviewee: anonymous
• Interviewer: Michael Reinsborough
• Date: 14 October 2022
• Bio: Participant was involved in supporting the UK caravan and organized a meeting space where Reclaim the Streets planned the J18 Action Day

Transcript

Speaker1: Okay, so today is October the 14th and we’re at the British Library. My name’s Michael Reinsborough, and we’re doing an interview.

Speaker2: (acknowledges)

Speaker1: Okay, great. And tell me how you first became an activist.

Speaker2: Um, okay. I come from a visual arts background. I pretty much hate galleries and everything that they embody. I started my career, I guess organically because I was always a squatter. I set up a squat in Brixton, Coldharbour Lane, which ran for four years. A headmaster’s house . To start as an artist, I squatted a public lavatory in Spitalfields in Bishopsgate. I started doing things in there. that kind of art, doing art that way, invariably contesting power relations in space, populations, the law, constant dealing with the police environment, that that practice as an artist, was as an activist. But equally, the work was actively about balancing social rights, imbalances of social rights, or something called visual ecology, which is something that exists outside of art, but something that happens constructed in society naturally by social interactions. So that kind of art was always activist by nature because it was always confrontational with the idea of what is the law in terms of what it is, in terms of contested space about land, property. So. And also it was called Strike. You know, my work, my working name was Strike. And that’s how magazines like the Big Issue and other magazines would call it. And they covered my work quite a lot in the early days. Pretty much everything that I did was ended up in a magazine somewhere. So it was always a strike.

Speaker1: Roughly when was this? Like years was?

Speaker2: I started the public lavatory squat in 1992, 1992 to 1997. I write, write as a squat. But it got fairly big profile within the kind of experimental art scene. By at the time it wasn’t wanted, but nonetheless, I had people coming from everywhere, from Korea to Brazil, you know, magazines and curators. people started throwing money at it like pop stars and people. then I had the idea of legalizing the space, but much more importantly, using that money to set up something bigger. then I leased a 6000 square foot warehouse in Fashion Street. And that became a hub. And a lot of other organizations were using it. I had my own interests, which was much more about Brick Lane, much more about homeless people, much more about the issues with National Front and also with decolonization generally within possibilities of a decolonial practice within an advanced economy like the UK, without it becoming, if you like, labeled in terms of identity politics, like black art or whatever it is, which had no interest for me at that time. I’ve changed in that respect. But certainly, I didn’t want to be identified within identity politics as black art. It was a decolonial decolonizing anarchist practice which took a radical view of identity politics as part of that. So being identified through ethnicity or anything like that would be kind of counter to the practice.

Speaker1: How did you first learn about Peoples’ Global Action?

Speaker2: I guess they came to me rather than the other way around. I was already active within, within Decolonial practices connecting with… independent groups in India to North Africa to so forth, because those are countries that I go to quite often now. When I had Fashion Street it was then used very actively by Reclaim the Streets, mainly for all the planning and operational work for June 18. Now June 18 kind of coincided with the international caravan project, intercontinental caravan project. So that’s how I really got in…, got involved with the PGA because the ICC, the intercontinental caravan project was actually also quite strongly affiliated with the PGA. Okay. So and we started holding all the organizing meetings, I guess, every other week with arts [in between]. We would have the caravan meeting at Strike, my space, where… and following week we’d have the RTS June 18 meetings. Yes. So that, that was a kind of involvement. Lot of people would come there like Katherine who then used to work for the New Internationalist magazine. I don’t know if you know her.

Speaker1: Okay.

Speaker2: She was quite active on PGA related issues. Michael used to come. David from, from Kingsley Hall, who then went on to host the Indian farmers. He used to come. A lot of people used to come. We used to have about 30 or 40 people. And of course, Rory. Do you know him?

Speaker1: I know I can try and track some of these people down and see if they want to do an interview.

Speaker2: Rory was there were four people effectively doing all the legwork for the caravan project. Okay. Myself. Michael. Okay. Rory and David at Kingsley Hall. And we were basically suffering from burnout because there was a lot of work to do, visas to get all these people, accommodation, sorting out a list of actions to do when they arrived. So, it was a lot of work, an enormous amount of work.

Speaker1: And so the next question was what role did you take in the network? Did you do much more with the PGA after that point, after the caravan went through?

Speaker2: We did, because of a lot of things we did. I’m going to go down with. Michael So quite a bit. The thing is that very soon after that, the world, the whole focused on to the World Social Forum structure. Okay. And after Seattle, things, things… direct, direct action went into kind of lull for a decade.

Speaker1: Here in the UK.

Speaker2: Pretty much everywhere. You know, I mean, first there was Genoa and then there was Seattle. After that, things definitely went into a lull. Because kettling started soon after that.

Speaker1: Yeah, I think technically Genoa was a gathering after.

Speaker2: So I got that wrong. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think Genoa affected people quite badly because of, of the sheer brutality of, you know, of, of the state. I would say there was definitely a lull and I write about it in… We weren’t as actively organizing large scale things as, as they were doing. I mean, in my space there was also an organization called GEN [Genetic Engineering Network] . GEN was also very closely related to a third world movement in terms of solidarity about, you know, property rights and GATT, you know, of, of seeds, Vandana Shiva, that sort of thing. So, whilst most of the anti-genetics activism here was white-led, it had a lot of solidarity with the global, with the global South. So they were also actively using Fashion Street. From what I recollect, the large scale meetings we used to have of 30, 40 people every week. that kind of ceased. After June 18 and Genoa. really we didn’t get that much activity. Doing large scale, you know, direct action.

Speaker1: And how did the network facilitate international collaboration and solidarity? So maybe you can talk about because you said you were slightly involved in PGA, but there was also involved in other things. How would you I don’t know how you would distinguish them, but how did the Peoples Global Action network facilitate international collaboration and solidarity? How was international collaboration and solidarity already going on in the PGA was just part of it.

Speaker2: I think PGA definitely informed the World Social Forum in terms of anti-globalization, in terms of scaling up to something. You know, that could contest the scale of organization that the corporations used to the world. You know, with the World Economic Forum. So there was definitely a sense that all the emailing that we were doing from the mid-nineties onwards, you know, could lead to something bigger. At that time there was also a belief in open data and the capacity of independent infrastructures building up in the digital world to create a, you know, an egalitarian sphere. That got lost after YouTube and so forth came around 2007 and after they got big. Outside it continued organically, though the direct action was missing after after 2000. In my perspective. But all the… I remember Tute Blanco came.[in 2021]

Speaker1: So specific for the caravan. The caravan was organized and connected with the People’s Global Action. Was part of these call outs. How did that work? Facilitate international collaboration and solidarity?

Speaker2: The main, drivers for the caravan project were the Karnataka Farmers Union. Okay. The Karnataka Farmers Union, one of the most leftist militant farmers unions in India. It couldn’t have happened without an enormous amount of dialogue and collaboration on a practical level, because they ended up bringing 400 farmers to Europe, to the Schengen. So they got 400 visas to the Schengen territories. So there was a lot of, a lot of collaboration between Europe and active activists and Indian activists to make that happen. The UK side were limited to 40, 45 visas. Okay. Because we’re not part of Schengen and, and visa constraints were. Jeremy Corbyn helped quite a lot, I remember. But Michael would know much more about that because I think, because he was the person dealing with that side of things.

Speaker1: What did you think the PGA network did best?

Speaker2: I think, keeping alive an internationalist, radical program. That has gone. I think the idea of universal rights as opposed to broken… Universalism is a very difficult concept now, I think because of various nationalisms and ethnicisms and identity politics. There isn’t a possibility of universal politics. Now. I think the PGA revived that possibility. As it was coming out of, I guess, to a certain extent the Non-Aligned Movement politics. We suffered very badly once the Soviet bloc collapsed. So it was coming out of that ethic, the universalist ethic of a common shared world. But driven by the global South. And I think that that driver from the start was a very important part of PGA.

Speaker1: What kind of challenges do you think it faced?

Speaker2: I think the biggest challenge is, is the hegemony of, the colonial hegemony, and that at that time was best articulated through GATT and WTO and the acquisition of property rights, intellectual property rights in the Global South. You know, like the DNA of basmati [rice] or whatever, you know. And also Monsanto’s, you know, suicide seeds. So all these things were having a massive impact in the third World, in the developing world at that time. You know, it was new, it was coming. So farmers were being given incentives by big companies like Monsanto, you know, to adopt these things. And the once you were trapped into it, they couldn’t get out of that cycle. So that was happening at that time. So this new colonialism of intellectual property rights. New trade relationships being imposed by the West through GATT, through WTO. I think PGA was at the forefront of, of… we feel like uncovering that.

Speaker1: So how did the PGA handle the differences in resources between different movements? So lots of people we had like in England, were in small groups but had lots of money. People in India in some ways had different resources, like huge movements, which is quite more than what people in some of the West had. But they also didn’t have as a whole per capita much money with those issues or now.

Speaker2: Of course, there were issues. Of course there were issues, and to a certain extent it resolved itself also at the Indian level, because most of the farmers we got in the UK, at least they were not the poor farmers, but the landowning farmers who had the money to provide some capital towards the caravan, you know, the cost of travel and so forth. So yes, the imbalances were there in terms of resources, I think the. ? the Karnataka Farmers Union did a much better job in Europe because they managed to get 400 farmers and while we didn’t get visas for the South Indian farmers who were the poorer farmers. We got visas for the Punjabi farmers who were the richer farmers. So the farmers who were quite militant, the ones who came here and are quite very active and very keen to get involved, full of energy, no holds barred, basically. Nonetheless, there were slightly wealthier farmers.

Speaker1: And where was the other group of farmers from?

Speaker2: From Karnataka. From South India. The KRRS. I would actually email you the mail out I did. Because I also did the fliers. I did all the fliers and banners. There’ll be in a garage somewhere.

Speaker1: Yeah.

Speaker2: Um, but they do exist. They’ll be in somebody’s ?. But I’m going to find them. But it’s going back, you know, 30 years.

Speaker1: So what do you think the weaknesses of the Peoples’ Global Action Network were?

Speaker2: Sustainability.

Speaker1: And why is that? What, what would you have to do to be sustainable?

Speaker2: Of course, the economic divide across the political divide. I mean. The PGA. Never, ever. I mean, this is where my, my, my contention is of activism in England are and still are, is that entities like Reclaim the Streets never embraced the PGA. And then they never really gave us support. So whilst in the one space it was in the single space we were organising on both sides. It was definitely a different crowd and they did turn up on the day, but they saw it as second fiddle. When we organised a farmer’s march to the Bank of England, I remember many activists, people did show up right at the end, but they saw it as a kind of second rate activism to June 18th. You know. There was definitely a kind of, I guess a cultural, partly racial divide.

Speaker1: And how long? the farmers weren’t -here that long to kind of work those things out anyway, were they?

Speaker2: They know the farmers were Indian and they were, it was mostly the first time they came here. They would not be conversant with them - Activism in English culture, though. So as soon as they got off the coach, they were, you know, shouting, you know, WTO Murtabad, which means death to WTO. And so as soon as they got off the bus, they were shouting, Yeah. So they came well-prepared with a political agenda. But June 18.

Speaker1: And when that issue of the caravan and rights as two slightly separate actions that organize in the same space, different days had an overlap. Obviously many people would see them as the same thing. The J18 as a particular day, which was a call out from the People’s Global Action Network.

Speaker2: But it wasn’t. It might have been, but it was not obvious. RTS a tribe by itself.

Speaker1: Here in England?

Speaker2: Yeah. Yeah, it was a tribe. Yeah. Yeah. And after, after 2000, RTS got their own space at LARC, basically.

Speaker1: Okay. So how was the PGA? Similar or different to other international solidarity networks? You obviously worked in lots of them. And you kind of touch this particular one briefly as part of the caravan.

Speaker2: I think. Elements in the PGA were very militant. Okay. But the entry itself was not about militancy. It definitely helped bring about something called an anti-globalisation alliance, which would be very, very important. And within them there were a lot of militant local groups. They were very unlikely to travel, whether in that whether from Port Allegro or, or from South India. They were there were totally committed grassroots activists, you know, committed to fighting for land justice and, you know, these things. So, they would, they would have plugged into the PGA in terms of the greatest sympathies. But there wouldn’t be PGA, right? In the same way that I was in PGA because I was working with local activism groups, you know, Movement for Justice and so forth.

Speaker1: So and from your perspective, then, who was PGA? Was it just certain people or was it somehow a call that came from somewhere else?

Speaker2: I think it came from something some time that was an umbrella, and I think it was quite catholic as an umbrella.

Speaker1: So in the sense of universal.

Speaker2: Yeah, yeah. And but then I never, ever did any work for PGA directly. So that’s why I say in some ways I’m going to talk to because I helped support and I helped. Implement one PGA project, which was the farmers project. You know, with fliers, space, meeting halls, logistics. But that was because it was the caravan project. So it was a PGA project.

Speaker1: Okay. And what effects, if any, do you think the PGA had on later mobilizations?

Speaker2: I think it was part of the chemistry of later mobilizations. And I’m sorry that it’s. It was lost. It came after 2000. It was, as I said, there was a lull. So. Somehow the energy and the drive wasn’t there and and became reformulated in new ways now you know. But I can’t imagine the anti-globalization movement without the PGA being mentioned. Okay. So it was part of that.

Speaker1: Okay. So that’s the questions I have. But like you’ve heard the list of questions and you might be thinking, yeah, that answers it all. Or you might be thinking, well, here’s something I would say, because he hasn’t really asked the right question or this is the direction he’s going, but he’s missed this. So anything else you think is relevant to add to this interview?

Speaker2: Things like at the moment what I’m doing, I’m trying to set up a Decolonising Decolonial decolonisation culture club, for instance [D3]. Which hopefully connects. With the Global South in a more direct way because that has been lost. I think the PGA had a role in that. And we are now further apart, especially with the Ukraine war. The idea of what the West is. It has redefined itself. So I think something like the PGA is definitely needed to a certain extent… There was a point with the with the with this with the movement of the squares in Tahrir, you know, and Tunis and so forth. There was a certain bonding, again, between Western activists and activists in, n the Global South. So got blocked off for a bit. But I still think activism between, between the West and, and the rest of the world, it needs, reconnecting in a new way so we can look at the PGA again, you know, what yhe things that it attempted.

Speaker1: What it succeeded in and what it didn’t. All right. Great. Now you feel free to get in touch with me if you have more.

Speaker2: Sure. Sure. Sure.