A ROUGH GUIDE 29hardly need listing, they are so familiar. The point about these geographies is that they are
about the ways in which people circulate – or are forced to circulate – around the world,
about how they settle in – or are uprooted from – places, and about how they interact – or
don’t – with people as they live in the world. These questions do not have straightforward
answers: segregation is no more a universal solution than is the compulsory mixing of people.
Contained in the events of London 1999 are the very paradoxes of how people come to live
with one another or apart from one another, and how they come to form hatreds and affilia-
tions. More than this, though, we should also recognize that the protests on 1 May 1999 also
saw the intersection – and joining – of divergent protests against racism, homophobia and the
injuries of class.
Although 1 May 1999 was marked by the intersection of different protests, they were
focused on the single issue of the bombings. Protests on 1 May 2000 and 1 May 2001 reveal
a developing trajectory around so-called ‘anti-capitalism’. There is something very remark-
able in this. On 1 May 1999, the ‘anti-capitalist’ elements were Turkish communists and a
small group of Socialist Workers. Little attention was paid to them. However, events in
Seattle in late November and early December 1999 had become part of the folklore of popu-
lar radical politics. London had staged its own disorganized protests by 18 June the follow-
ing year. Almost unnoticed, a new form of radical politics had sprung up – unnoticed,
perhaps, because it had no overbearing or singular system of ideas underpinning it. Some
complained of the lack of a positive political agenda, i.e. the lack of a formal, institutional-
ized, politics. However, it is more accurate to say that many positive agendas were now
jostling to be heard, and to make themselves heard.
The noise of these different agendas can now be heard across cities in the west, wher-
ever the leaders of self-styled democracies gather to talk ‘power’. In many ways, the ‘big’
geographies of corporations and states were being contested by the ‘small’ geographies of
protest groups. In fact, these groups are hard to map and track, and this is their strength.
They spring up from all kinds of ideas and places: they form connections that are wide
and unpredictable. They are, almost literally, uncontainable. But we should be careful not
to romanticize the plurality and disorganization of these resistances. One irony of the 1
May 2001 protest is that, having been trapped for hours in Oxford Circus, it was the
highly organized Socialist Workers’ Party that had the capacity – as the police wished –
to negotiate the release of the protesters from the Circus. More than this, they also had
legal observers monitoring the police for illegal action – including the detention of people
at the Circus.
If there are diverse geographies of resistance in these stories, then there are multi-
farious geographies of capitalism too. NikeTown takes us down other paths, from
London, around the world, to its factories in the ‘developing’ world. Following these
chains of commodities can lead to some fairly predictable tales of exploitation. These
tales, of course, are still worth telling, lest we forget. However, they also show that there
is no singular capitalist relation. Or, put another way, they show that there are multiform
capitalist social relations, and they do not come in a neat ‘capitalist versus worker’ pack-
age (except in those circumstances where they do, of course!). The papers were quick to
point out that one of those trying to burn down NikeTown was wearing Nike trainers.
More than one of the protesters, of course, was wearing designer gear. A small fight even
broke out amongst the protesters when one group decided to burn designer gear, and
attempted to take such items off the backs of others by force. Perhaps paradoxically, the3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 29