Shut Them Down!: The G8, Gleneagles 2005 and the Movement of Movements

by Dissent! and Autonomedia

Bob Geldof’s appointment as an advisor to the Conservative party has provoked a reassessment of the momentous week last summer when the G8 met in Gleneagles. This reassessment is aided by the timely publication of a new book full of first hand accounts by those more interested in shutting the G8 down than lobbying it.

David Watts, one of the books editors, commented: "There seems to be a growing sense of disillusionment with the legacy of the Live8 concerts and the Make Poverty History campaign. You have to remember that the protestors of Seattle and Genoa didn’t see the G8 as the solution to global poverty but rather as the cause of it. In 2005, for the first time in the G8’s history, there was a major campaign to welcome the summit. Perhaps now we can see how MPH and Live8 ended up simply as PR cover for the Blair government."

"What tends to be forgotten is that not everyone played along with the Geldof and Blair show and those who’d set out to shut down the G8 in fact came very close to achieving this aim. On the 6th of July, the opening day of the summit, road blockades brought central Scotland to a halt with many delegates unable to reach Gleneagles. Later that day, protestors attempted to rip down the fence surrounding the summit. It was only the London bombings that diverted attention and took the wind out of the protestors sails."

Edited by a group within Dissent!, the network which coordinated anti-capitalist resistance to the Summit, Shut Them Down! contains 35 chapters, including a hilarious cartoon, an editors’ introduction and dozens of powerful photographs over 368 pages. The book will be launched on 20th January 2006.

As well as first hand accounts from protestors, there are detailed accounts of how the various aspects of the mobilisation were organised, and analysis of the lessons to be learned. Shut Them Down!’s relevance, however, extends far beyond the Gleneagles experience; it addresses issues fundamental to anyone involved or interested in social movements, such as the nature of openness and ’horizontality’ and the limits of the ’activist’ identity. Most important of all, Shut Them Down! attempts to pose the question: how do we take those new worlds we glimpse in these moments and apply them to the rest of our lives?

Contributors include: Werner Bonefeld, George Caffentzis, Counter-Spin Collective, The Free Association, The Ginger, John Holloway, Colonel Klepto and Major Up Evil, Starhawk and Simon Tormey.

The book’s full details are as follows:

David Harvie, Keir Milburn, Ben Trott and David Watts (Eds.) Shut Them Down!: The G8, Gleneagles 2005 and the Movement of Movements (Leeds: Dissent! and New York: Autonomedia, 2005) (ISBN: 0-9552065-0-2)

Available from Shutthemdown.org for £4.95, €7.50 and US$9.95 plus p&p.

Review copies are available from the editors: editors@shutthemdown.org