United Kingdom - John Jordan

Interview Details

• Region: Europe - UK
• Language: English
• Interviewee: John Jordan
• Interviewer: Michael Reinsborough
• Date: 2019
• PGA Affiliation: Reclaim the Streets
• Audio File: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z0r8b2ngrelafgc/PGA%20UK%20Jordan%20pt2.MP3?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/h7w2kasqvluomb5/PGA%20UK%20-%20Jordan.MP3?dl=0
• Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/01f9yh682997vamhf6xch/PGA-UK-1-John-Jordan.docx?dl=0&rlkey=p566jxs8zki7w4za4kpp0vnfr

Transcript

Michael Reinsborough: For the purpose of the tape, do you wanna say your name?

John Jordan: I’m John Jordan.

Michael Reinsborough: Okay, and I’m [redacted], and we just happen to be in London. [Redacted] gave a very marvelous talk last night, and it was in London, so I’m taking advantage of doing an interview. So this is an oral history interview and we’re not really expecting you to know dates and times. People’s memory from events that were 20 years ago are often more confusing than the actual looking at the details and some people in the oral history department have done a good amount of that kind of.. um. documentary looking at the historical details um but so it’s an interview about how you feel about things from NOW um looking back with retrospect so really that’s what you should think about but um tell me a little about how you became an activist.

John Jordan: ……wow..ahhhh how I became an activist? Ahhhh depends where you start. There’s kinda stories and I can start it when I was 9 years old and I played in a kinda what people know as wastelands and waste because these were not lands that were productive to capital. They were productive to other ecosystems and cultural systems such as kids playing, so we played on this so-called ‘wasteland’ in Brussels and place of play and a kind of, you know, kind of commons in a sense. A “kids commons” where and I remember turning up one day and being fenced off and then they knocked it all down and built a supermarket. I think that was in a way the first, I think deeply, that kinda subconscious level, on a level of the imaginary, I now realize that all of my activist life was kind of based around trying to bring down fences that were enclosing commons ahhh and that were also places of creativity and play as opposed to product and consumption and the economic growth and the economic exchange and stuff so, you know, I didn’t become an activist then but I think my sense of justice and….and injustice and stuff began perhaps there. And so I was involved in the art world really for a while. Art world and theatre world and then and was very frustrated with that. Frustrated with ummm not being part of movements. I didn’t really know what social movements were. Someone handed me a situationist book when I was at art college, which blew my mind and and I started to realize that I didn’t really want to show the world to be [can’t decipher]. I wanna make art and picture about politics and I wanted to change the world directly using creative means and then got involved in Plant Form London, which was for many years just over there near Tower Bridge, which is a collective which still exists. At the time, we were 3. Now they’re like 14 fully paid members and collective that brought together art, activism, and research meant to be the role of the oil industry in London and the role of oil as a kind of economic and cultural life blood of this city and how to change –

Michael Reinsborough: And this was roughly the 90s?

John Jordan: This was in the 80s.

Michael Reinsborough: 80s.

John Jordan: Ahhh and then in the 90s, I got involved in the anti-roads movement, which was a British movement inspired by first in the States and some of the stuff in Australia against big dams(?). Using direct action, I had read books about it first and was like ‘Fuck. This is what I wanna do.’ Tried to get involved. In those days, you sent post cards to P.O. boxes and often didn’t get a reply hahaha.

Michael Reinsborough: Right.

John Jordan: So I didn’t know how to get involved and then, by chance, got involved well by chance and contact on the envelope and campaign, which was a road that was going to destroy 350 houses in East London to save 7 minutes on a car journey and….and there I really saw how bodies could be put into use in terms of disobedience and for me, it was theatre. It was a kind of political theatre that was effective and practical and, at the same time, beautifully poetic and it totally changed my life. I never looked back really from that moment onwards and realized that within the activist world there was a level of creativity that was as strong as within the art world and yet it was much more coherent politically and so much less egocentric and ahh yeah! That changed everything. And my son was born at the same time, which I think also kind of politicized me because I’d been talking about ecological … I got in through ecological politics really and I’d been talking about what we used to call ahhhh what did we use to call it? Planetary limits? No, we called it…fuck. There’s a word we used to call it, which you don’t use much now, which was about the kinda limit of the biosphere to deal with the waste and the resource extraction and remember showing my students - I was a fine art lecturer at the time - I often was showing them graphs of, you know, the planetary limits running out well probably about 5 years ago now hahah ahhh and suddenly my son was born and it was like, oh yeah all those dates I’m talking about..that’s really real and my son is gonna be like 30 or 40 at that time and whatever ahhh and it kinda radicalized me a lot, having a kid. It gave me less time to be involved in movements but ahhh yeah.

Michael Reinsborough: Um how did you first learn about the people… People’s Global Action?

John Jordan: Ummm… sooooo after, so after people from Claremont Road. .Claremont Road was a…so there was this campaign, the M11 campaign ahh at that moment, in the 90s, there was a huuuge anti-road movement, which was both rural and urban. I was involved in the urban bit mostly, because I lived in London at the time. There was also rural bits, such as Newbury and Twyford Down and so on. The M11, we had at one point occupied 45 houses. We occupied this whole street for months that was due to be destroyed to build the road and create this kind of autonomous zone and that was, we heard about the Zapatistas during that moment. I remember hearing about the Zapatistas uprising while we were in that zone, so there were these kind of links between…. discourses of autonomy and stuff…annndd what happened is so, I think in 90…ahhhhh..6, you’ve got the 2nd encuentros. I might be getting the years wrong actually here. By that time, the folk that had been on Claremont Road where we’d occupied this street for months.. okay we’re no longer gonna be waiting for the State to come and evict, which happened eventually. It was the most expensive eviction in the history of British politics. And they evicted us, but the campaign against roads was kinda successful in that 700 roads were cancelled throughout Britain through the fear of direct action and costing enormous amounts of money ahhh and so the people from that movement.. we set up Reclaim the Street and the idea was that we’re not gonna wait to be attacked by the cops. We’re gonna be proactive. We’re gonna create spaces in the city, which are car free, because we saw the street as a commons. For us, the street was a commons that was privatized by the car. We were influenced by everything from situationism to Dada to Murray Bookchin to Audres Gortz(?). There was a kind of green, red, black kind of merger. There’s artists, anarchists, and ravers and communists and ecologists and the idea was to reclaim the streets from the cars, return them to the people, and do big street parties and push them as a pleasure and turn radical politics into something really fun. So we held a series of these street parties, which was really successful. Started with 595, ended up having tens of thousands of people coming. During ..in 96.. [name redacted] went after the 2nd encuentros in Spain…and he come back from the 2nd encuentros in Spain and everyone thinks he’s on a permanent acid trip, because he comes back with this energy and this enthusiasm and is like “Ohmygod, there is something happening. There’s a connection between all these social movements.” Now remember, most of us haven’t used computers. I remember during this period that, you know, there were people in the office of the campaigns who would use computers, but you didn’t really know what you were using them for. And there were fax machines. I kind of understood a fax machine. I had a fax machine, but, you know, the way of getting in touch with movements on the other side of the planet was not.. you didn’t click a button and suddenly see pictures and sound of other movements. So he came back from the encuentros totally fired up, like describing this web of international connections like some kind of acid trip and was like, “We have to get involved! We have to get involved! There’s this thing happening. It’s called the PGA, which came out from the call-out of the 2nd encuentros and we’ve gotta go to that”. And that was the invitation to the 1st encuentros, the PGA, assembly of the PGA in Geneva, in a factory next to the river in Geneva. I’m thinking it’s February. I’m thinking I got the train ticket as a birthday present from my Mum hahahaha to go ahhhh. I think it was February ‘98.

Michael Reinsborough: So how you’d become involved in the network then is the next question. Sounds like you’re leading into that.

John Jordan: Soooo, we went to that and it was…

Michael Reinsborough: What was it called?

John Jordan: PGA 1st…fuck, I can’t remember. PGA 1st meeting…PGA 1st………I can’t remember to be honest.

Michael Reinsborough: Okay.

John Jordan: Ahhhh and it was mind blowing. I mean, you know, you were sitting ‘round tables with Maori activists, and fisher folk, and Brazilian landless peasants and squatters from all over Europe and…ah yeah, Zapatistas and Indian farmers who could mobilize millions and were ripping up and burning, you know, GMO crops. Yeah. It was a pretty extraordinary moment of suddenly seeing the politics of direct action and autonomy and refusing lobbying and having this critique of Capitalism was shared by seemingly people from so many incredibly diverse cultures and…that was were hallmarks were written. The famous hallmarks, which, you know, became this pretty important document for movements for decades afterwards. I wasn’t really involved in the nitty gritty bits of sitting down and writing those hallmarks ummm…..but I remember it wasn’t easy. ..And so, we came back from that meeting and PJ was launched. I don’t remember when, but I think at that meeting we suggested Global Street Party. I might be getting this all wrong, but because Reclaim the Streets, so this is 90?….ahhh…I’m just wondering ahhhh……no, I’m not gonna look at the history timeline. Let’s try and use my fish light memory. Ummm so we… the G7 or G8..I can’t even remember if it was a 7 or 8 at the time. We’re gonna meet in Birmingham that year and we had already been working, we’d done work with the dockers ahhh the Liverpool dockers, so Reclaim the Streets had kind of gone beyond the ecological…simply ecological commons thinking to really looking at capital as the problem. Capitalism is the source of all these problems ummm and ahhh…..we’d just done a big street party. We’d had a massive street party on the M41 in London with, you know, 8000 people. There was Reclaim the Streets groups popping up a bit all over the Western world and doing street parties and so in parallel to this PGA network, there was kind of this Reclaim the Streets network bringing kind of anarchist groups together who wanted to have different ways of, different forms of resistance that were proactive, more prefigurative in a way of not only resistance, but showing the kind of world you wanted i.e., reclaiming the street without cars and also having more pleasure involved. I think there was kind of a craving for that stuff happening in the early and the mid-90s, so we suggested having this global street party….and it was interesting. It caused quite a big rupture within Reclaim the Streets actually and there was…which was quite gendered in a sense and mostly the guys, we wanted to go for the PGA network, get involved in the launch of the global street party, have simultaneous street parties throughout the world. They, the PGA, were meeting in Birmingham and the women in the group were more like “No, no, no. We’ve gotta stay local. We’ve gotta do local stuff. We’ve gotta have a territory”. At the time, we were trying… we’d even done two street parties at the same time in London. In North London and South London one to try and localize even within London. Not just have a London street party and we did a simultaneous one in Brixton around that period. So, I think it was very heated. It was a very heated, conflictual ahhhh meeting..series of meetings. And that ended up in a split…..ahhhh.. anddddd….a lot of the women stopped being involved after that and it would be super interesting to hear their, to hear their point of view actually now, in retrospect….and so yeah, so we launched the global street party ummm which took place in May on the 16th of May. I was particularly excited by the date of the 16th of May, because it was ahhh the day the Vendome -

John Jordan: Yeah, so this is the 1st global street party. 1998. 16th of May. The G8 meeting in Birmingham, so we called the global street party, and yeah, I’m excited by the date, but it’s the day the Vendome Column is brought down during the Paris Commune. This moment, kind of, our actions and destruction of the Empire as this kind of huge festival of resistance during the Paris Commune on May the 16th. It was also the day that the 68th general strike was called, funny enough, from the factories near Nott(?), which is where I now live. So, the 16th of May was kind of, you know, dates have certain resonances so we called it. There were street parties all over the Western world simultaneously. There was one in Birmingham, one in Prague, New York, Seattle ahhh Australia, Sydney, Athens. I can’t remember how many. All this is pretty well documented in the book I did with the News from Nowhere Collective. Notes from Nowhere Collective. We Are Everywhere. So, We Are Everywhere has… actually, I should’ve brought a copy to check the dates. I don’t have my [not sure of this word] with me unfortunately. It’s in boxes, cause hahaha has been for 7 years, which is very sad. So, ahhh, yeah. Annndddd that was the 1st kind of PGA project we did as Reclaim the Street. And the 2nd, on the success of that, we decided to call, the next year, ‘99, on June the 18th. We decided to call for Global Carnival Against Capitalism. We didn’t call it the global street party. We called it Carnival Against Capital and called to people to replace the sound of profit with the sound of pleasure in the financial districts across the world. Annnnnnddd that, it feels to me, that space between May the 16th, 98 and June the 18th, 99 is really a kind of ummm ahhh kind of edge space, a kind of …..ahhhhhh… ugh! Fuck, I’m getting the words in English and French mixed up. What’s it when you on a edge between a doorway or another word for edge?

Michael Reinsborough: liminal

John Jordan: Yeah, liminal space between old world forms of face-to-face assembly organizing, leaflet productions, posters, press releases, communique, faxes, all that and the internet world, cause we were all starting to get online at that point, and it was super new. I think the success of the movement was partly due, and this is an intuitive thing, that liminality enabled something really special to happen. Eventually, the lost the liminality, and we went into this world of global organizing simply using internet, but, you know, during that experience we were connecting people through email, there was email, and there were email lists. Web wasn’t, i mean there was the web. We had a website. I remember I even designed the fucking website for the global street party. I can’t design websites anymore, so god knows how I did that hahaha. I can’t really design a website. But there was also posters, and you know, we were stuffing envelopes and sending envelopes all over the world of posters and flyers and so on. And what was interesting was we couldn’t decide what to call it. We thought ‘Oh fuck. We need a title that’s kind of international, but works internationally". We had long discussions, and that’s when we came up with calling it J18. To kind of, you know, to give it an international flavour. Again, that idea of J18 got used again and again. This idea of putting the first letter of the month, day, time..the, the date. Again, a model that was used for several decades afterwards… or a decade afterwards. Sooooo, yeah. So that, I mean, I can go into the details of that day or do you want to ask another question?

Michael Reinsborough: Um, the next one I have is “What role did you take in networks that started?” Explain that one. Tell a little bit about the J18.

John Jordan: Ummm… soooo we kind of, Reclaim the Streets took on a double role in a way, at that point, of really promoting June 18th internationally. Trying to get this global day of action, so I did a lot of the comms and worked with graphic designers and so on and a lot of the writing, the texts, a lot of the call-outs and so on, including [unable to decipher this word] thousands and thousands of flyers with a igam(?) quote hahahaa, which its meaning was subverted by my, my dyslexic failure to get the quote right haha. I don’t think anyone noticed, well they should’ve, because the quote came out something totally different, but ummm and so we.. it was interesting. So we realized we wanted to go for the city. We wanted to go for the financial district and before doing that, I had been part of actually the first riot I have ever got involved in is in the ‘80 in ahhh what’s called Stop the City and it came out of Greenham Common. It came out of the peace movement, and the growing anti-Nuclear peace movement in the ’80s. A bunch of anarachists thought right now is the moment to go for the city, you know, it’s not just about bombs. It’s about the whole military industrial complex. It’s based on finance blah blah blah. We should go for the City. So, there was a series of Stop the City actions in the ’80s. Pretty full-on. Thousand got arrested at times. There was damage and so on to the City, and I remember going there when I was like 20 and never being to a riot before. I remember nearly being…it’s a personal anecdote, but nearly being crushed by a bunch of punks. It was a kinda crass punk culture. And being surrounded and kettled by the cops and haha being under this large group of punks and being like “Ohmygod, they’re gonna die, and I’ll be buried by punks. What is my Mum gonna think?” hahaha. And so we went to talk to people who had organized that, people such as [named redacted] from the [unsure of this word - 26 minutes, 43 seconds] campaign. Later known, as the [can’t decipher] campaign. We went and talked to him and said “Look, you know, what was your experience with that, and do you think this is the moment to go back? For certain movements to hit the city?” And they were like, “Yeah, this is exactly the moment. We did it at the similar kind of cycle of the peace movement and now there’s the similar cycle of the radical ecological movement and so on and growing anti-Capitalist or seeds of the anti-Capitalist movement so go for it.” So we did, and we spent 6 months organizing pretty much or a year. A year in the end, organizing ahhh for that umm……I don’t know how much you want me to talk about the localness of it or the local London, cause in the end, so we were doing a lot in the promotion of the global stuff, but there wasn’t actual nation, it was like get people involved and then ahhhh, you know, sign them up, and then that was it. They were free to do their own autonomous factions. You know, so then we put a lot of effort into.. I’m pointing right now at the city, cause we’re looking in on it and working on what we’re gonna do here. So here we knew police were gonna try and shut down what we were doing. We decided, it was on a Friday, the G8 were meeting in Cologne at the time, and it was a Friday, so it was a work day, and all the press, days before were like in a terror, a terror, anarchists are gonna invade the city blah blah blah blah. We developed this choreography using masks inspired by the Zapatistas where we produced 8,000 masks of different colours; red, green, black, and gold. So we’re representing these colours of the movement in a sense and the gold for the city, the red for communism, black for anarchism, and green for ecology, and on the back of the mask was a very poetic text, very inspired by Zapatista writing about surveillance and about the mask and carnival and then we had this whole system where 8,000 masks were handed out in Liverpool Street Station and we went off into different directions to get to London International Futures Exchange, which was the target of the action. Then people will follow their colours on the signal ‘follow your colour’. We had these kind of puppets that we’d built based on the figures from the PGA, so we had a puppet which was a Canadian postal worker, we had a puppet which was a Zapatista, we had a puppet which was a landless Brazilian peasant. I can’t remember how many we had and hidden in the heads of the puppet was a sound system, and the idea was that on the signal we would have the Mission Impossible [sings Mission Impossible theme] soundtrack and that would set off the crowd and people would.. the crowd would split into four colours and there would be people who knew where we’re going who would bring out flags of those colours and go off on foot in different directions. We actually lost 1,000 people on that bridge, that very bridge there, cause the Liffe building is just there. Literally you see those two spires. That’s Cannon Street Station -

John Jordan: - and that blue building with the blue and the brown just underneath well that is basically, well that is the Liffe building if I remember, yeah. Anyway I could talk for hours about that day. It was us and we got to the Liffe building inside and it was a good lesson of always plan to win, and we never planned to win. We didn’t think we were even gonna get there and once people were inside, we didn’t know what to do, and we could’ve got the whole crowd of 8,000 people turned up on a Friday. We could’ve got them inside the London International Futures Exchange. We could’ve got the sound system on the fucking Futures Exchange floor if we organized to win, but we hadn’t organized to win, so we started hearing news of all the actions coming through. No one had a smart phone at those times. We had mobile phones. We rented them out. I think we hired out for mobile phones. I don’t think I had a mobile phone. Some people did, but I didn’t. So I think we went back that night and would go and look at computers and see if news was coming in of the actions all over the world on that day……….yeah. And that was really, yeah. It was really incredible to see actions coming in from Brazil, from yeah, from everywhere………

Michael Reinsborough: So how did the network facilitate international collaboration? The question presumes it did. Maybe it didn’t.

John Jordan:………….. I, would be interested to [name redacted] about some of this stuff. You’re gonna go talk to him about it. I mean, my memory of this.. I wasn’t really, I don’t feel I was in the kind of office stuff doing all that. I was doing like more kind of like the strategic, on the ground like how are we gonna move on these streets and, you know, designing the masks and thinking about the kinda on the ground choreography of the actions and then sending out flyers and stuff and designing flyers and all that and the text, writing the text and I wasn’t that involved in the actual coordination of stuff umm.. but, to me, it wasn’t like..I think the coordination was a simply, I think, I could be wrong, but I think the coordination was simply, we would coordinate a date, we would decide a date together. The whole network would decide okay this is okay. We’re gonna go to the G8, and, therefore, we’re gonna go to the G8 Summit and, therefore, we’re gonna do global action on that day.

Michael Reinsborough: They decided by post or by meetings?

John Jordan: I think these were decided at the meetings. I think, yeah. And then you just went and did it. I mean, I think there was nothing else beyond that. It was more a network of inspiration and solidarity, rather than a kind of a network where you..yeah…from what I remember, that was more of the case…….

Michael Reinsborough: Um, do you want to comment a little bit, just briefly from that point, you know, in 1999, the J18, what kinds of things, just loosely um..

John Jordan: Happened around the world?

Michael Reinsborough: Yeah. Not on that day, but after that. In the following years.

John Jordan: Okay, well I mean..

Michael Reinsborough: When did you -

John Jordan: You know, I mean -

Michael Reinsborough: - continue to be involved with PGA? Were you doing other things?

John Jordan: So June the 18th was a huge deal. You know, the front page of the Financial Times in London. Well, published in London, but read worldwide. Was anti-Capitalist [word unclear] City of London. It was the first time that term ‘anti-Capitalist’ came, had come back on a big, media way. You know, you’ve gotta remember that the ’80s, you know, and the early ’90s, you know, I mean, you got, I mean, the Spice Girls. You have Thatcher, neoliberalism everywhere. Capitalism is not named. It’s really not named. I mean, you’ve got all the old Trotskys groups and so on tryna continue what they always did, but didn’t have grassroots movement talk about Capitalism… not in a visible way. So it really visibilized the term anddd ummm and it was also the beginning of things like, I think west coast and Australian hackers, but again, I can’t remember details of indie media, of the beginnings of a kind of, what is now, obvious social networking, but basically somewhere where you, as a user, could post anonymously, something onto a website and post photos. I mean, it was unheard of at the time. It was the logic of what is now social media. The logic of Facebook and social media was indie media, where anyone could post something without having skills. Coding skills and so on. And sharing that, that stuff publicly. And then I went to do, after June 18 –

Michael Reinsborough: Did that come from the U.S. or did it come from –

John Jordan: Ah, I think it was mostly West, I think it was U.S. and Australian, but there were folk here, notably in the kinda hacker space, not far from where we are now, which ironically, I remember it was called ummmm AH fuck. What was it called? BACKSPACE. Right next to the Thames in an old warehouse. Ironically, I remember watching the first live videos I’ve ever watched there…of Seattle. And I watched the Starbucks being trashed there on live video, on a screen projected, which was kind of science fiction at the time, and, ironically, that building became a Starbucks; not long afterward; the same space became a Starbucks. So it was kind of a hacker art space called Backspace. I think they were also involved in some of that stuff or..and they were folk London indie media folk, but I think..I, I, yeah, you’ll have to ask. I can give you contacts of other people for that history, but then they(?) went in the Autumn to train people at the Ruckus Camp in Seattle or just outside Seattle, in crowd movements annndd thinking creativity about actions and talking about J18 and J18 was a real inspiration for the crew in Seattle who were then, you know, famously shut down the World Trade Organization ahhh and, you know, and certainly put the so-called ultra-Globalizational, anti-Globalization movement onto the world stage, but, of course, all the pre- stuff had been the Zapatistas, the PGA, Reclaim the Streets, Global Street Party, that was kind of the precursor, the kind of, you know, we were preparing the soil and applying the seeds for what exploded in Seattle umm and then went on to be the anti-Globalization movement, doing the summits and everything and we had the whole cycle of the Prague IMF Summit, where we closed the summit down. They couldn’t meet the second day. Where we, you know, managed, again, it was this thing of the traditional Left, as always, wanted to cooperate ahh recuperate the thing and ahh I remember going to meetings in Prague to organize the IMF summits with folks from the PGA and stuff and you suddenly had all, so this was in September 2000, so it’s a year later, you suddenly have the kind of traditional Left waking up ‘oh, oh look, there’s something anti-Capitalist going on. This is exciting". Not understanding the culture of it at all. Coming these meetings, big assemblies, not understanding really the assembly culture. Not understanding horizontality and all wanted us to have one slogan and one march, as always. And I remember this huge meeting in this farm house outside Prague, arguing with [name redacted] being the facilitator, with all these kind of Trotskyists, mostly, from Europe who suddenly kinda organized to come and recuperate the thing and they were like, “One march, one thing” and we were like, “No, we’re gonna be different colours. This is diversity. This is unity and diversity, and we’re gonna have diverse tactics and, you know, there’s gonna be violence, and there’s gonna be carnivalesque stuff and if you wanna do your fucking march with your banners and your slogan, you can do that too, but we’re all gonna do it, all at the same time”. And they pushed and pushed to, you know, have a single slogan and a single march, and it didn’t work, and [name redacted] did, what I think was an act of magic that night and managed to get a kind of consensus around different blocks of different colours, so this idea of the colours that we had launched at June the 18th, with the masks, then got taken up with the different blocks. So there’s the blue block, the pink block, ahhh the yellow, and I don’t remember the other. I’ve got a map of it somewhere. In Prague. And that ended up with, you know, a fairly big confrontion in Prague and the IMF not being able to meet on the second day. So, you know, the PGA will put the focus on global capital, but also the institutions of global capital that had been a bit in the shadows in the West, of the IMF, the WTO, what was called the GATT, previous to the WTO, and, of course, the G7, G8s. Those models of horizontal organizing of, I mean, they’re kind of normalized now I think, you know. So a lot of that stuff was very prefigurative in many ways to what was then ClimateCAP, and Occupy, the Yellow Vest movement in France. This idea of kind of systemic critique, critique of Globalization, and horizontal forms of organizing, and direct action rather than lobbying. All of these things which were part of the PGA hallmarks are pretty normalized now within radical social movements.

Michael Reinsborough: So after Prague, were there more events? Other events? Did it start to slow down?

John Jordan: No, there were loads. There were loads, but the repression was pretty quick. Then Genoa happened in 2001. There’d already been Gothenburg, there’d been a European summit, so some of the stuff..and there’d been ahhh I think it was a European summit in Gothenburg, in Sweden, and the police shot ahh the police got firearms out and shot activists. Didn’t kill anyone. Ummm then there…then what happened was ahhhh 9/11 happened. So, basically, there was also a plan, there was a huge IMF meeting planned in the States and MASSIVE mobilization was planned, which was gonna kind of be Seattle 2.0. It was gonna be huge and 9/11 happened, and that was cancelled. And 9/11 really came at a perfect moment for basically wiping out this movement. The movement already had been, you know, the FBI had put the Carnival Against Capitalism as ahh public enemy number one or two. I can’t remember. Before 9/11. I mean, the irony was, you know, the Carnival Against Capitalism wasn’t a group hahaha. It was an idea, but it was way up there on their terrorist lists of terrorist groups and targets for repression. So the repression really began in earnest after 2001 and then literally Genoa happened just.. Genoa happened in July 2001. Just before 9/11. September. July, August, September. So three months. So between Genoa, where you suddenly have the kind of State Apparatus of the entire elite of the world saying that movement is way too strong. It’s getting wins. They’re delegitimizing us. We’re gonna really go for it and repress it big time. I never experienced repression like that. Really understanding what a state of terror is, when the State decides to put a city under terror and everyone is terrified and, you know, they kill Carlo Giuliani and then they go into the Dias School. I was staying with my 7-year-old son in the school opposite the Dias School. They tried to do the same to our school. Partly because my son, they didn’t do it, but they basically went in and beat people in their sleeping bags and pulled them out of the school in fake body bags and yeah. It was super, super repression. Then 9/11 happened -

Michael Reinsborough: When you said they pulled people out of the school with fake body bags.

John Jordan: So they brought all these body bags pretending people had died in the school, they’d killed people in the school, yeah. I mean, it was -

Michael Reinsborough: And you saw that?

John Jordan: Yeah, yeah. Everyone saw that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Reinsborough: Oh, so, like the amount of rumours there was actually not just an accident. It was actually quite deliberate.

John Jordan: Oh yeah. It was quite deliberate, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was blood all over the walls in the school and yeah. Um, so…and then 9/11 happened. And then the war. Then there was the call out of the war ahhh luckily, I think…clears throat I didn’t do the uprising of 2000 ahh well, cause in December, which was a kinda little chink of hope based on some of the principles of the PGA and stuff and, you know, that was a little chink of hope, but then the war was announced, 2nd war against Iraq, and suddenly, this systemic anti-Capitalist movement became recuperated, again, by the traditional Left into an anti-war movement and so all the systemic critique got forgotten, and all the direction action got pretty much forgotten, and we ended up with big, million strong marches, which made fuck all difference to the war and that..so this short burst of energy and global networking pretty much died out following that. That left a lot of traces and a lot of principles that remain and a lot of inspiration.

Michael Reinsborough: Yeah….ummm so we talked a little bit about how the network did international collaborations. What did it do best?

John Jordan: I mean it…I kind of.. I think it really inspired people to feel a connection with people who were so different and yet had a similar political critique and a similar political desire for autonomy, critique of capital, ahhhh I think it was really a network of inspiration rather than organization in that way.

Michael Reinsborough: Ok, so this is June the 7th, and I’m Michael. This is the same interview continued. We’re about halfway through and I I did not hit the pause button. I had to stop button. And you want to say your name?

John Jordan: John Jordan,

Michael Reinsborough: Correct. So we’re just continuing the same interview. And the question is, what did the network do best?

John Jordan: I think it just, that inspiration was also being able to share the imagination between people who seemingly are so different from squatters in London to fisherfolk in Bangladesh to. Yeah, it was that ability to kind of share a radical imagination across the world in the different cultures and think, yeah, we’re not alone. We’re going to have solidarity between each other and capital is affecting all of us. You know, we had this slogan that I stole, actually, I used as a slogan for the global street party and I stole it from, Oh my god, what’s his name? He wrote. There was a chapter in the book about the Zapatistas and used it Ball. And he’s an American academic. Writer on social movement. But I remember his first name, but and which was ‘our resistance is as transnational as capital’. And that’s what it made us realize is like, Fuck yeah, we can. You know, it brought back this notion of internationalism, which, you know, wasn’t new, it existed in the 30s. And, you know, and there’s always been elements of trans nationalism, but, you know, to have a kind of trans international movement against capital, having happened before, I think decades and notably one that wasn’t based on kind of workers struggle; simply workers struggles. There were workers struggles inside it. But it was much more complex than that. And that was pretty unique. And it gave us hope, you know, it gave us, it did give us hope that it was actually, you know, there were moments where we actually I think there were moments where we truly thought that it was possible that this movement would build something eventually so strong that it would manage to destroy capital. Fuck knows what it would replace it with. But you know, we had vague ideas of, you know, confederations of communes and all that stuff. But yeah, but I think there was real moments where we thought that this thing is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more interconnected.

Michael Reinsborough: [00:02:44] And do you that type of radical imagination? How did it do that? Why? Can you give? I mean, if there’s not an answer don’t.

John Jordan: Kind of through radical storytelling in a way; through telling each other stories about the different struggles in different parts of the world. And I think those stories were shared through the meetings. Yeah.

Michael Reinsborough: And the people who came to the meetings then took them back.

John Jordan: It wasn’t a formalized thing in that way, but yeah, I mean, you know, I think you heard you heard witness, you know, you had witnesses of the same destructive stories of capital and stories of people resisting it. Know. And yeah, but it was it wasn’t a formalized thing.

Michael Reinsborough: Yeah. Got a question here on the network, what challenges did it face?

John Jordan: I think one of the challenges was that. You know, when you create these kind of global networks, you it’s very hard to continue a kind of horizontal entity because you’ve got a certain amount of people who have a certain amount of capital and time and the privilege of time to travel. You know, it’s money to be able to travel to these gatherings. And so the money, of course, is paid by some movements. But you know, not all the movement; I don’t know how many people went from the reclaim the streets for the first PGA thing. But there was a bunch of us. It was a minibus and I went on the train for some reason and not the minibus. I think I couldn’t take the same amount of time off because I was working. And so it did create a bit of a kind of elite of people who would go to these meetings. Uh, and uh, and maybe and get all this inspiration and so on. And yeah, and then a grass roots and you’d come back to your neighborhood or your city or your territory and be back in your grassroots social movement. But you know, most of the people in the grassroots social movement hadn’t had the hadn’t been able to go to these meetings. So they could read the minutes and they could hear the stories. But I think that did create a…; that was a problem and I think it was one of the reasons the PGA didn’t last actually. It Was due to that kind of kind of construction of this kind of elite who would go to all the summits of the PGA and be a bit separate from the grass roots movements.

Michael Reinsborough: How did it handle differences in resources between the different movements?

John Jordan: That I don’t remember that I wasn’t, to be honest, I wasn’t involved in that level of organizing, so I wouldn’t really know the yeah

Michael Reinsborough: And was were its weaknesses?

John Jordan: Beyond the one, I’m just talk about the elite. I mean, I think, you know, I think one of the weaknesses was the event ness of it. It gave strength to movements because people were visiting different movements, going to Chiapas, going to MST settlements. You know, people were going and learning, and there was a lot of shared knowledge and learning between everyone. But I think one of the weaknesses is also that it became a bit event led. So, you know, it became the kind of summit what Tony Blair famously called the anarchists travelling circus kind of ended up a bit less like, you know, people going to these summits and protesting the summits and and putting a lot of energy nationally into those summit mobilizations that maybe weaken local organizing and create a lot of repression when actually a lot of that energy may have been more useful kind of focusing on neighborhood organizing and so on. So it’s you know. Um, but it’s yeah, that’s a kind of messy answer to a complicated question.

Michael Reinsborough: Yeah, so and the question is, I sort of say, oh, this network and refer to it, but and you want to comment on the nature of of what the relationship didn’t say using the word network or the PGA and the social movement.

John Jordan: I don’t get the question.

Michael Reinsborough: I guess maybe the nature of referring to the People’s Global Action Network and saying, Oh, well, the PGA did this, it did this,

John Jordan: Did this, how would you?

Michael Reinsborough: Is that so? Would you say the PGA organized the J18 team?

John Jordan: Uh, well, J18 came out of the PGA networks and was, yeah, it was part of the PGA network. I mean, nodes in the network of PGA organized J18. Yeah, but I mean the network. I mean, not every node organized on that day, I don’t think I can’t remember it. To be honest.

Michael Reinsborough: And the people who came. How many of them would have known about the PGA?

John Jordan: On that on the day in London? Not many, you know, not. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, no. I mean, it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t branded in that there wasn’t a brand. There was no idea and no desire to brand in a way that was interesting in the way that, you know, now you look at international NGOs and stuff. And uh, so no, I think a lot of people who came on the day, I think they all knew that there was, not all, but a lot of people who were aware that this was a global day of action. Because, the poster for J18 was a golden poster with that. I think it was a Salgado picture of the movements sim terra (MST) reflected in, you know, Skyscraper, you know, so you know, and there was, you know, I think, a list of all the countries that were going to be involved. And so it was, I mean, anyone who had seen the publicity and stuff knew that it was a global day of action. So that but but knowing that it was the PGA who organized it, I think everything no.

Michael Reinsborough: Was public knowledge really didn’t say people’s global action.

John Jordan: I don’t think so, but I don’t remember.

Michael Reinsborough: Ok. And if it was in small print,

John Jordan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Michael Reinsborough: Definitely not as large as your Trotskyites in Prague wanted.

John Jordan: Yeah, yeah.

Michael Reinsborough: Ok, so roughly, I’ve got two questions how is it similar or different to other international solidarity networks? And what effects, if any, do you feel the PGA had on later mobilizations?

John Jordan: I mean, I haven’t been involved in many. I’ve been mostly involved in local struggles, I haven’t been involved in many international solidarity networks since then, so that’s hard for me to answer in a way.

How did it influence other events? Well, as I said, I think it kind of created a culture, a certain culture of resistance where things like horizontal organizing; desire for autonomy from the state; capitalism being pointed to as the problem; direct action, rather than lobbying all these things were in the principles. These things became really normalized within radical movements. You know, it no longer became about building the party. And, you know, I think it was a real, real kind of shift in social movement organizing structures and that we then saw, you know, emerge in Occupy and so on. I think those were the influences and summit mobilizations continue to this day, I mean, they weren’t invented by the PGA. I mean, they were big, some mobilizations and there was a one against the IMF, I think, in the eighties in Berlin, but it put them on the map and it did them more regularly than before. And you know, I remember I went to the G7 summit In London in nineteen eighty Nine, I think. I’m not sure when it was, but you could virtually touch whoever the presidents were at the time. You know, they had little barriers, you had a bit of police around because you’ve got the presidents of the world’s richest countries in your city, but you have not got a security apparatus of fencing. So, you know, so it did change that massively. I think we’re now seeing the kind of reversal of that. I mean, so many years later. So when you’ve got Angela Merkel saying it’s us who decide whether summits are. And she said that about the G20 last year or was it last year, G20 in Hamburg last year or the year before? You know, it’s so many years later. And finally, they’re getting the confidence again to say, you know, we’re not going to have it in a mountain top because the last time you had it in Germany, it was in a mountain top in Bavaria or it was on islands or whatever. And now they’re like, No, we’re going to go. So they go for even cities that had a radical history, that they go for Hamburg. So I think it shows a certain confidence a capital, a return of confidence of capital; in a a way or the performance of a confidence of capital by saying, Yeah, we’re going to do it in Hamburg. You know, City with one of the longest versions of autonomous anarchists and squats and so on in Germany. So of course, they knew it was going to be a massive riot and massive repression afterwards that continues to this day on an international level. I’m really worried about the G7 summit in Biarritz this August, and I’ve got loads of comrades who are organizing for that and I’ve refused to organize and I’m like, It’s a trap. It could be Genoa 2.0. And, you know, it’s the same as Hamburg, but you know, the G7 and France also say, Yeah, we’ll have it in the fucking Basque Country. You know, the country with the biggest traditional of autonomous organizing and, you know, radical left and so on. So yeah, I don’t know how I feel about summit mobilizations. Now, but I’ve done too many; that’s for sure.

Michael Reinsborough: And so how would you link sort of summit mobilizations to local organizing?

John Jordan: I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, I think that I think that the problem is that they can take up so much time from local organizing people for all the resources. And then it’s just an event. It lasts a day, you know, normally two days and then months of repression afterwards. And in a way, it’s purely symbolic. I think it was really important that we did them. I, and in a sense, still don’t want the G7 to fucking go and be able to meet without there being some kind of resistance at the same time. I feel that it’s become kind of ritualized, you know, like summit mobilization; riot; repression. And I feel there’s been a kind of lack of creativity to think about what we can do. I mean, what what was good about J18 and it’s actually the summit itself, the G8 in Cologne, there was loads of police and stuff because they thought something huge is going to happen, but actually very little happened in Cologne. But it was a decentralized thing. So, you know, I mean, so the, you know, 10 million pounds or whatever million pounds worth of damage were done to the city of London. And we got, you know, and I think it’s I think it was a it was a bit of a shock to the British system for sure. And the international system of capital, I think it was, you know, it was like, Oh, fuck on a Friday afternoon. You know, one of the world’s most important financial centers gets invaded. So, you know, but the G8, the G7 weren’t there. And when the G20 met in Docklands and then we did the climate camp in the city and was heavily repressed by that and doing that, that wasn’t a global day of action. So. So there was something I think powerful about this the decentralized nature of the summit mobilization when when they worked for me, it was when they were decentralized.

Michael Reinsborough: Ok, great, so that’s the the bulk of the interview, I mean, just you’ve heard the sort of list of questions and kind of roughly what I’m covering. Do you think there’s stuff that you say, Oh, well, he should really know this, but I haven’t told him because he hasn’t asked that question or he isn’t really asking if it’s something that’s missing.

John Jordan: No, I think it’s yeah, I mean, I’m so sorry, my memory is so fucking bad again.

Michael Reinsborough: That’s all right. It’s good. All right. Well, great. Well, thank you very much, John. And this is June 8th, and we’re looking over the financial district from a large art building. Yes.