F.L.A.R.E. convergence call out

If we look, we can see the power of collective struggle across the globe. Yet we also witness war and oppression, and the power of the ruling class can seem greater than ever. This callout is an invitation to explore and confront this situation. While the functionaries of capital and the state meet in Sydney this year for the APEC conference, to discuss how to further their neoliberal assault on the earth and our lives, we too will meet, to discuss and organise our continuing struggle against them, and for liberation and a world we make together.

This is an open invitation for people to put on workshops, provide new ideas and help organise in the lead up to and during the convergence. We know that everyone is struggling in their own way: what we want is to share these experiences.

While the convergence might also be a space to plan actions that coincide with the APEC meeting, that’s not all it can be. We do not wish to act solely in response to the meetings of the bosses, but to build our own bases of power.

We want to bring together our experiences of resistance and struggle, individual and collective, from daily life, political campaigns and anywhere else.

The struggle for liberation involves an array of strategies of resistance and subversion: from conversations to liberating space, from cooking together to jamming the circuitry of capital at work, from actions in the street to calling each other on our shit.

It sometimes seems that our various struggles are just small cracks in the global capitalist system, but we can think about how these cracks meet up to form a network of global resistance, a network that has power. This is why it’s important to meet and to talk about our daily struggles against global capital, to have an opportunity to listen to each other and teach each other.

We want to take time to think about the weaknesses as well as the strengths of what we do. We want to celebrate the ways we are powerful and the times we are able to combat the repressive power of capital.

We want to see an open and inclusive space with room for commonality and difference, in which solidarity – and a culture of care and love – can grow.

September in Sydney will see a climate of heightened police repression, the continuation of the fear politics that are so central to the current global state of war. The intensification of state repression has real effects on our daily lives, on how we feel and how we think about resistance. We have to find ways to support each other, so we can recognise our fears but continue to struggle.

The convergence is a space of both exodus and resistance. Exodus because we are not only refusing the imposition of capitalist social relations, but also creating alternatives through the ways we refuse; and resistance because we are not simply retreating from a grim reality but confronting the machinery behind it.