Hatred of the rich is back in fashion

06 June 2007

Ross Clark says that the anti-globalisation rioters protesting at the G8 summit in Germany and Labour’s deputy leadership contenders are part of a new and dangerous trend towards wealth-bashing

In Rostock this week, however, the anti-globalisers wanted us to know that they are back in business. A rally involving 25,000 protestors quickly erupted into violence, leaving a reported 400 police officers and 520 demonstrators injured. The violence followed protests in Hamburg the previous week. And that was even before a single G8 delegate had touched down in Germany.

It is no accident that the revival of anti-globalisation protest coincided with the visit of the G8 summit to Germany. It is in the German Autonome — anarchist groups of the 1960s and 1970s — that the anti-globalisation movement has its origins. It was Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned terrorist who lent her name to the Baader-Meinhof Gang, whose justification of vandalism as a political tool still rings in the ears of German anarchists: ‘If I set a car on fire that is a criminal offence. If I set hundreds of cars on fire that is political action.’

The difference is that whereas the Autonome were underground organisations, today’s anarchists are increasingly open about their methods. You didn’t exactly need to be a spy to find out what protest groups were planning for the G8 summit: anyone with an internet connection would have been able to read the detailed plans of where and how protestors were planning to strike — such as outside the Rostock-Lichtenhagen branch of the budget supermarket Lidl, where on Monday 4 June at 10 p.m. a group called the Dissent Network, along with the Andalusian union of agricultural workers, were planning to gather in protest against Lidl’s ‘lousy working conditions’ and its ‘ruinous price dictates’.

Anyone who imagines what happened in Rostock was caused by a small rabble disrupting a larger peaceful protest and being picked upon by over-reacting police, should have a look at the Dissent Network’s website. For a self-professed anarchist group, it is remarkably well-organised. Long before the G8 summit it had set up two camps, one in Rostock and one outside, for a total of 11,000 protestors, complete with soup kitchens and medical tents. Prospective protestors were told that the object was to close all entry points to the G8 summit and were given detailed advice as to the most effective way of doing it: you might consider, for example, linking arms with the aid of metal pipes set into concrete blocks which you prepared earlier, and then lying down in the street. ‘There is little you can do against armoured police vehicles,’ it goes on to advise, ‘but they do for example hate paint on their windscreens.’