View this link:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/03/another-tenth-anniversary.html

Lenin:

Slightly less than a decade ago, I skipped London’s first anticapitalist protest to go to work…I thought it was an inspiring first glimpse of resistance to New Labour, which was already mired in sleaze, ripping up its most modest election pledges and reviving the very crackpot Tory ideas that voters had just overwhelmingly rejected. But I didn’t think it would last.

And then there was Seattle…And then Prague, and Genoa. Ten years on, the ideas of that extaordinary movement turn out to be more relevant than ever. The methods of protests and carnivalesque spectacle were never going to work on their own, but they could have - sometimes did - lead to more militant action. And that is what we’re looking for today, with the G20 protests and the amazing strike waves across Europe.

Check out Lenin’s tomb for an hour long documentary about the protests. It would be nice if Lenin were right—there’s been a fairly large wave of protests over the past year or so starting with the ones that began in Greece (up to the recent New School occupation). Plus the financial collapse and the anger it unleashed at the fraudulent bailouts and the most recently unveiled Geithner plan, which does little to alter the conditions that brought about the crisis to begin with, might certainly contribute to a larger than average protest at the upcoming G20.

But on the other hand, unlike the WTO strikes, there doesn’t seem to be a well-coordinated or well-articulated “message” on the Left. No unified movement, no unified narrative. At the very least, populist anger seems to be articulated along the lines of there being a few bad apples, but overall the system is good. On the other hand, though, one shouldn’t factor out the element of spontaneity (like with the use of mass-cellphone messaging in China), but in cynical times it’s hard not to be cynical.