The Tranquillity team are available 24 hours per day to support the camp in challenging oppression, resolving conflict, and keeping to collective decisions. We can arrange access to conflict mediation, and offer a fair and accountable process for dealing with concerns about behaviour. You are very welcome to contact us with any concerns, questions or feedback.
You can contact us at tranquillity et fucing cetera.At the camp, at the Tranquillity tent, around the site (identified by green sashes), or via your neighbourhood Tranquillity reps.
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haha, Tranquility Reps, they should suggest that one to the trade unions:
¨Worker: Bob, you´re the Tranquility Rep aren´t you? Could you have a word with my supervisor, his aura´s really purple today and it´s upsetting me…¨
Class.
Essentially self appointed middle class soft cops, using their unspoken privilege to dominate people and enforce their own “ethics” on others. Utterly woeful, and actually quite dangerous.
At one brief point (Heathrow), Climate Camp did have potential to help articulate working class anger against rapacious and damaging capitalist development, in alliance with real community based campaigns, but it has now been fully absorbed by wet, radical liberal professional activists and the green capitalism they provide cover for.
Seems worrying the way they want to be both mediators and enforcers as well as both officially sanctioned and autonomous.
One is cover for the other, although they probably don’t realise it themselves.
Just what we need, a liberal far left lefty bible warrior, helping the uncertian bedwetters. So is this now a meeting place for the helpless anarchist??? I thought this was about co’operation, tactics, ect…They’ll be no tarquillity when V division come a knocking.
if you leave aside the stupid name, they are effectively a mediation team. they mediate when there’s conflict, they don’t decide when there’s conflict. it’s for everyone to ‘enforce’ the collective decisions reached by the camp, and the mediation team are there to facilitate conflict resolution when DIY isn’t working. it’s not that complicated. also they have consciously discussed how not to be the police, but I’m sure they’d appreciate your constructive feedback
or do you just have a problem with living collectively and being accountable to others in your community??
if you’ve got a problem with the collective decisions made by the camp, you can propose an alternative at your neighbourhood meeting. if you don’t like the decisions made, put up or fuck off.
also, there’s no question there’s unspoken class privilege in the meetings that make the collective decisions, just as there’s unspoken gender privilege, but that’s a constant struggle that isn’t eliminated just because we say we’re anarchists. plus the safer spaces agreement does attempt to set out that this is going to be the case and ask people to actively challenge it.
the bear with a shining face – ‘capitalism is crisis’ is very green capitalist banner, isn’t it? also, the community-based campaigns at heathrow don’t have a straightforward class formation, there are middle class and working class elements, united by their lack of power. there are vestas workers at the camp this week. maybe it’s worth going along and helping them articulate their working class anger?
actually having seen them( the T/T) in operation a few years ago, i think it is quite a good idea, in fact I may have helped the idea to fruition at earlier meetings along with ‘buddies’ to help disabled people, etc. imo, the C/C’s were/are one of the best organised and yes, supportive political events i have ever been to, now ‘retired’ from such things, i do regret not being able to go, etc. There certainly is a problem with the ‘class makeup’ of these events and the middle class’s lefts obsessions with ‘big issues’, but it doesn’t merit such bile.
great blog btw
If there’s an unspoken class privilege that goes unchallenged and is defended by their charter, brain.
“the bear with a shining face – ‘capitalism is crisis’ is very green capitalist banner, isn’t it? also, the community-based campaigns at heathrow don’t have a straightforward class formation, there are middle class and working class elements, united by their lack of power. there are vestas workers at the camp this week. maybe it’s worth going along and helping them articulate their working class anger?”
First of all with regards to Heathrow, I’m aware of the class composition of the community groups in the area, that does not contradict what I was saying.
Secondly, I’m glad Vestas workers have been invited (un)fortunately I have a job that will keep me away from Climate Camp this year so I will be unable to attend.
Hmm, sneer or take part, sneer or take part. Let’s go for sneer, eh?
Green activists work hard, run campaigns with community groups, and actually have an agenda that makes sense (for a recent example with sufficient working class cred for you: Mainshill, in Lanarkshire), yet over and over the petty-minded elements in the left choose sneering. Others are there, working together, incidentally.
As is pointed out above, if they’d search’n'replaced tranquillity with mediation we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Chip on your shoulder any?
Jesus, the hippies are out in force in the comment section today
James: Are you an employee of the Green Party or the two utterly useless Green MSPs as your website seems to imply?
James any comment about your leader’s opinions on the rights of GLBT people?
It’s the function and the mission James, the name doesn’t help – calling it mediation wouldn’t change things, that you imagine it would it pretty telling -rebrand t it, don’t change it.. Have you seen the expanded policy – shall we gn into that, for example:
“We reject any form of language and behaviour that perpetuates oppression, however unintentionally: for example a racist or sexist joke, or interrupting someone on the basis of unspoken privilege..”
Now, why would being prodded in the chest by a posho telling me about unspoken privilege wind me up somewhat – esp when interrupting them when they’re doing it counts as oppression.
Grow up. This is the poltics and the language of the boss, of the socially powerful of the domineering middle class. It has zero to do with emancipatory potential. Aim that scope right back at yourself not the chippy posters here. Ask why we’re reacting like this, then come back and tell us, and we’ll see where we are.
What, in practical terms does “challenging oppression” even mean”? Considering they defined it as including interrupting people – if you’re jusrt waiting for people to come to you with your problems of people intereputing you, or their found examples of oppression then…what are you?
Are you challenging or are you waiting? Has this Human resources wank speak really piecred the sould of the young? Are people really that acased up they can’t sort their own problems out without a junior agency looking to get its paws dirty? Independence?
I want to know why they didn’t pitch up in Greenwich Royal Park next door – parts of which is actually under threat because of the Olympic planning … and instead (and without prior consultation) enclose an area of common ground – heathland under ecological threat. Fucking hypocritical idiots.
There’s lots of information about Blackheath and how it’s managed here: http://www.lewisham.gov.uk/Environment/CleanerGreenerLewisham/NatureConservation/ConservationSites/Blackheath/OwnershipAndManagement.htm
The ecological aspects are described together with how carefully it’s managed to balance with public needs of sports and recreation.
Contrast with Greenwich Royal Park next door, completely different. Carefully tended and very busy, but with plenty of space for a camp. Open to the public but still owned by the Crown. The bandstand, a children’s boating lake, some very old trees etc etc are under threat to be cleared for the Olympic Equestrian Centre. The obvious place to choose for consistency.
So why not choose there?
Answers, Tranquility fucking Team?
Yes, I work for the Greens. And there are plenty of self-described socialists who work with us and respect environmental campaigning.
For example: http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=4590
Did Jonathan Porritt look at you funny once, or have you just swallowed the Living Marxism uber-industrialist line here?
Actually James, nobody is attacking useful environmentalism. What is being criticised here is environmentalism shorn of class politics, presented as a consumer lifestyle by capitalist politicians. Like your bosses in the Green Party.
Similarly, nobody is attacking useful activism. What is being criticised is a hilarious attempt by a bunch of over-privileged hippies to play “soft cop” and impose their ethics on others. I’ve spent too long surrounded by useless hippies talking about facilitiation processes and waggling their fingers at each other in a circle to have anything but contempt for such nonsense.
James, do you not see the irony of mainly middle class ecology lifestylists, ENCLOSING common ground*, within a larger perimeter of wealthy houses facing out onto the heath, attracting positive attention from the wealthy homeowners from that immediate perimeter ?
But it’s the people of Lewisham that are paying for the management of Blackheath, Lewisham, just down the hill from the Climate Camp. Are the Tranquility Team et al out and about in Lewisham Market for example, encouraging people to come and have a look? Or are they only interested in the immediate perimeter residents that have money and influence?
* at ecological risk … yeah, go them, parking their 4x4s and other vehicles actually on the fucking grassland.
And another thing, lol.
Where did they deliver this retrospective letter to the residents? The houses around the immediate perimeter of the heath? Or to all residents of Lewisham that maintain the heath by council tax? Are they concerned with Kidbrooke, Mercator, Catford? Or just the well-off immediate perimeter mummies and daddies that are financing the kids doing this in the first place?
“the well-off immediate perimeter mummies and daddies that are financing the kids doing this in the first place?”
Always good for Tarquin & Jocasta to have somewhere to go for a shower after a hard days’ conflict resolution.
Loads of harsh words. The CC mob were lovely…
I love you wraeth.
The views above are embarrassing.
A thoughtful analysis of the Climate Camp by the Anarchist Federation is at this link.
http://afed.org.uk/blog/state/122-climate-camp-and-us-a-perspective-paper.html
I was just reading that TopCat, and wondering which blog article to post it under
It might be worth providing the link on all 3, as aspects of the AF article apply to all?
Will do.