Tactical Frivolity - Role in International Anti-capitalist Protests

Role in International Anti-capitalist Protests

Large scale International anti-capitalist protests are widely seen as dawning between 1998 and 2000 with events such as the protests at the Birmingham 1998 G8, J18, the Seattle 1999 WTO protests and the Prague 2000 IMF protests.

The 1999 Seattle demonstrations saw extensive violent clashes with the police. For the 2000 protest in Prague, demonstrators divided themselves into three broad groupings based in part on the way they wished to engage with the authorities. There was a "Yellow march" for traditional non violent protest, a "Blue march" for those who were up for physically taking on the police, and a "Silver and Pink" group which is described as employing "tactical frivolity" and also in being the most successful in terms of penetrating the security cordon around the IMF meeting. Attending Prague was also a small group specifically calling itself "Tactical Frivolity", which consisted of a Samba band plus thirteen women from Yorkshire dressed as pink fairies.

Ten months later, a group of protesters dressed in carnival outfits and again calling themselves the Pink and Silver bloc, or Pink Fairies, used the term "tactical frivolity" to describe their own methods when protesting at the 27th G8 summit in Genoa. These included waving "magic fairy wands" at the police and training "radical cheerleaders," as well as the deployment of a "revolutionary spaghetti catapult" designed to "splatter the leaders with pasta". The device failed to hit any leaders with spaghetti, but according to journalist Johann Hari the Pink Fairies did succeed in causing mass laughter among the crowds.

In the early 21st century, tactical frivolity was often used at much smaller events than global summits, for example by the group Billionaires for Bush who would stage humorous events at US Republican conventions. According to David Graeber, this upswell in the use of humorous protest tactics can be traced in part to the Yippies of the 1960s and the Zapatista which began operations in the 1990s.

At the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland, tactical frivolity was again used by protesters such as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army a group whose theatrical and carnival like performances succeeded in attracting considerable media attention and were funded by Arts Council England. The large scale use of tactical frivolity at the 2001 and 2005 G8 protests failed to deliver any tangible change in policy. But the method continued to be used, for example at protests held concerning air travel at Heathrow, England, during 2007.

Tactical frivolity was used at the 2011 London anti-cuts protest. Some of the tactical frivolity protestors integrated fully into the main march - others trailed in the wake of black bloc anarchists, while remaining non violent themselves. Adbusters, the magazine credited for starting the global Occupy movement, called for Occupiers to use tactical frivolity, though the method has only been used sporadically. Author and academic Luke Bretherton has suggested that tactical frivolity allows protestors to represent the otherwise inexpressible sacred power of imagination, which is achieved partly through the "use of huge puppets, dance and street theatre".