A Call to form an Arterial Bloc
for Saturday November 18,
in the G20 protests in Melbourne, Australia

This is what we want: lives worth living, lives of dignity and autonomy and we want to work together against capitalism and the state to achieve this. We want to develop collective power and collective communication. Not to follow, not to lead, but to work out how we can organise ourselves.

We believe that an effective bloc is made up of many people who have many different skills and capacities. Sometimes the most crucial skills (such as the ability to care) can get forgotten when the focus is on more "exciting" things. But we all have something to offer, and we are equals. None of us are heroes; together we can help each other to be brave, happy and rebellious.

This is what we’re planning: To confront the G20 more directly: to go to the Grand Hyatt Hotel the morning of its meeting, Saturday November 18, prepared for radical disobedience. We want our disobedience and our creation of other ways of living to be effective as we can make it. We have no time for violent macho fantasy or delusions about Ghandi. Our bodies, our lives, our desires are too precious to fuck with. We want to be smart, joyful and defiant, not martyrs.

This is what we’re planning: To carry, as a bloc, white overalls and bright bandanas to cover our faces and to be ready, if we decided collectively, to wear them. We encourage those that want to struggle with us as part of the Arterial Block to organise this equipment

By having the option of becoming clandestine we are refusing the rules of the game of civil protest, the containment of the ‘good protester’. We are choosing not to be compliant citizens who make their wishes, and show their faces, to 'their representatives.' Rather we are relying only on our own disobedience and our co-operative power.

We are constantly subjected to the surveillance of the state and yet made invisible by the simulated reality of power, their media, their ideology, a world of things and their prices. By having the choice to become invisible, we can subvert this. They may not see our faces but we shall show our anger, our creativity and our ungovernable desires.

This is what we’re planning: there are many things to discuss. We support, and hope to work alongside, other groups taking action in whatever way they see fit. We encourage those who want to be part of Arterial Bloc to plan with us:

Thursday November 16, 4pm
Friday November 17, 6pm
at: A Space Outside. (http://www.aspaceoutside.org)

"Your friends will be there when your back is to the wall.
You'll find you'll need us cause there's no one else to call.
When it was hopeless a decision is what you need."
(theme to 21 Jump St)