The insurrection was sparked by systematic racist brutality by the police against indigenous people in the area, in the death of 17 year old TJ Hickey. TJ died after he was impaled on a fence pole. His friends and family argue that TJ was fleeing the police at the time, a charge that the cops deny. Since the insurrection there has been something of a political crisis that has gripped the country, and it is unclear how we can connect with and deepen the revolt throughout the social body.
The roots of the rebellion lie obviously in the inheritance of genocide. The invasion of the Australian continent by the British Empire, and the transformation of the land into basically a jail, mine, and military base (which in part remains the global funciton of Australia today), involved a protracted campaign of extermination against the indigenous population and a long series of 'border wars.' The indigenous population faced extreme attempts to shatter their social bonds and push them off the land. This took both the form of violence and exclusion, but also forcible integration into liberal and church institutions. Indeed children were stolen from their families and raised in foster homes and orphanages throughout most of the 20th century.
However, countering this is a hidden history of Aboriginal resistance, in which indigenous people have struggled both against their oppresion and have worked hard to reinforce and maintain social and cultural links. The Block in Redfern is such a spot and embodies the successes and difficulties of this process.
Aboriginal people have lived on The Block in Redfern for over 60 years (not counting the thousands of years prior to invasion). Since at least 1968, various state authorities have tried to relocate people out of The Block and into other areas of Sydney. The early 1970s saw a wave of squatting in the area. At the time the Builders Labourers Federation, which was quickly becoming the most militant union in Australia, was going beyond the constraints of trade unionism and was engaged in "Green Bans." This meant that the BLFers refused to work on projects they thought were environmentally or socially desctructive and tried to save cheap housing in the inner city. Going well beyond the terrain of legality they would often destroy the work done by scabs and made alliances with many in struggle. Indigenous people in The Block and the BLF and radical plumbers worked to transform the houses into a liveable condition, and the Aboriginal House Company became the official landlords. This of course happened in the context of the wave of social ferment that characterised the epoch. However, by the late 1970s, the BLF had been destroyed by union machinations and many social alliances amongst the multitude were broken by the strategies of incorporation and isolation the Labour Federation government used to implement neo-liberalism throughout the 1980s.
The Aboriginal Housing Company is now largely estranged from the community of The Block (which has formed the Aboriginal Housing Coalition), and has participated in the demolishing of 70 out of the 90 total demolished houses in the area. This is symptomatic of the effectivenes of social democracy in recuperating a layer of official leadership of oppressed groups to help with harmonious social management. Indeed both "sides" of official politics, the Australian Labour Party state government, and the Coalition opposition champion the AHC "redevelopment" plan (that is, demolition) as an alternative.
All this also happens within the context of the changing political geography of Sydney. Sydney is quickly becoming the Capital of Capital within the region. Of course, since Capital is a social relationship it has no true "home," yet many concrete functions of both the financial workings and cultural production of and for Empire in the Pacific take place in Sydney. This means that many people flock to Sydney to find work (of a total Australian population of 20+ million, approx. 5 million live in the greater Sydney area). This has led to a process of de/reterritorialisation in Sydney as previously poor inner-city areas are transformed into far more expensive locales, and a surge in the construction of high-density housing powers much of the local economy. The Block then stands as a thorn in the development of potentially very expensive land. In the last few months economists have started to predict that the building economy will (to use their term) "overheat" and go into recession. Access to this land therefore becomes increasingly important for Capital.
Since the night of the insurrection the aftermath has been telling concerning the condition of Australian politics. Whilst there has been some support of the revolt it has been unable to go beyond simple protest and symbolism and match the insurgent ferocity of the revolt itself. But we should not be too pessimistic. Indeed, the willingness of people to publically support and sympathise with direct confrontation with the police is quite advanced for Australia. What it does show though is two things: the containment of revolt within the world of the political, and the very real divisions of power and identity that chain the multitude in Australia.
Dissent in Australia (with a few exceptions) remains largely stuck in the world of the political - protests, petitions, the Left - and rarely matures into a real social clash. We could attribute this generally to the effects of neo-liberalism that have largely decomposed the more combative sections of the class war. It also arises from the inability to develop new methods to articulate and actualise our antagonism to Capital. We remain largely stuck in out-dated conceptions of social revolt. The very real moments of revolt and micro-networks of solidarity that do form are largely isolated from each other. This is in part due to the divisions of power and segmentations within the class. Capital has restructured the multitude within Australia in a way that accentuates divisions of power. The most obvious tool is race. The machinery of the system has worked hard to accentuate feelings of racial division, through the championing of a white racialist ideology, institutional privilege, and by ghettoising people through multi-culturalism.
The insurrection in Redfern showed both our potential strength and our weaknesses. It highlighted the lack of practical solidarity amongst the multitude - something we must work to deal with; the question remains how? How can we avoid the pitfalls of the Left or a fetish for building organisations, yet still weave real social bonds? There is no clear answer. My suggestion would be that we start from the perspective of circulating struggle. We work hard to spread the experiences and ideas of individual revolts throughout the class more broadly, and maybe in the networks we create, we will create a more practical resonance for revolts against the global order of Capital.
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(From Green Anarchy #16, Winter 2004, and Arson #1, Winter 2004)