direct action

By Anonymous Contributor - It's Going Down, September 23, 2017

To the people of Mexico

To the Indigenous Governing Council

To the National Indigenous Congress

To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

To the National and International Sixth

We are individual and collective adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, EZLN and CNI sympathizers and people from below and to the left in solidarity with the suffering of our brothers and sisters, victims of the recent earthquakes and the predatory system that is only death.

As in 1985, those who claim to govern remain totally surpassed by reality. Today their wonderland can’t be seen, not even by them. Meanwhile, we are the ones from below who suffered the consequences of these natural and socio-environmental disasters. Like 32 years ago, today the Mexican people are the ones going into the streets and towns to help, to give what little they have to help the other, the one who suffers, the stranger, the brother. Some who have much contribute much. Among those who have little, they contribute what they can, sometimes everything that is in their hands. Those who have nothing give their heart and offer to serve were needed. They are the ones who fill the streets and coordinate to gather aid and distribute it. Small business owners support by giving food and drink to those who give their time and effort. True hope emerges from these smiles and glances of solidarity.

To this communal, creative, inventive, self-managed response, the bad government replies in the only form it knows: with violence, labelling a repressive military occupation as civilian protection. Far from meeting its obligation, which is to help the victims, it sends the army, marines, and different police agencies to occupy civil life and prevent an encounter among those from below. With acts of banditry, its agents of violence rob the aid people have gathered and divert it in order to distribute it conditionally, promoting its figures, governments, institutions and parties. At the sites of the disaster, the state intervenes among those working, to keep them from even communicating and coordinating. During this time, we have seen how a version of Plan DN-III, named Plan-MX, has been implemented. As we’ve seen, the army goes to the disaster sites, where the people have been taking part in successful life-saving work for hours or days, and arrogantly pushes the rescuers out in order to take control of the location and work in a way that is useless, increasing the risk of death for those who are trapped in the collapse. At other sites, their entry is friendly and collaborative in front of the cameras, wearing the hat of solidarity with the people, but they change the strategy and impede or obstruct the rescue efforts. In any case, when a victim is rescued, they rush to stage a show for the media in which they appear as the heroes who risked their lives for Mexico. We could say that what the bad government has put together is not an operation that prioritizes saving lives, but a production that is seeking to revive its own corpse, the victim of a much larger collapse: of its legitimacy. A moment came when they stopped all rescue activity and didn’t allow anyone to come near, nor did they give information, abandoning those who could have been rescued and letting them die amidst the ruins of the fallen buildings. That they do very well. They are experts in murdering and disappearing the people.

For us, men and women from below and to the left, what the bad government and its criminal partners, such as the television stations, show is a deep contempt for life. For them it is just a macabre spectacle that suits their interests in militarizing daily life and to rebuild the social image of an army that, far from defending the people and what remains of the nation’s sovereignty, has proved to be the main protector of transnational capitalist interests and an implacable murderer of the people, especially those who resist the expropriation of their territories, waters, culture, and communal lives.

By Rigole Rise - It's Going Down, September 20, 2017

Recently we spoke with Dezeray about her organizing with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) in the weeks since Hurricane Irma and how spaces such as the hub in Tampa are crucial sites for building solidarity and stability during times of crisis. They’ve had an overwhelming amount of support from the local community, especially those who have realized the practice of mutual aid is a part of the work of anarchist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist struggles. The Reverend Dr. Russell Meyer from St. Paul Lutheran Church in Tampa—the church that has provided the building now known as “the hub,”—noted during a sermon following Hurricane Irma, “a week ago these people were known as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Terrorists. Have you ever seen a terrorist show up to a child with Pedialyte in their hand?”

Although this has not deterred the actions of neo-Confederate groups such as Save Southern Heritage from standing outside across the street taking pictures, filming, and documenting those who enter the space. In the days following Hurricane Irma Alt-Right 4chan users trolled the MADR hotline by making false rescue reports to take away time and resources from those actually in need. 3% Percenters have tried numerous times to call or show up in the space and say there was an emergency, state multiple people were coming to collect all of the supplies, along with a number of other faulty narratives all trying to disrupt their work because of the power that it holds.

With a visit by Richard Spencer in Gainesville, Florida at the University of Florida set for October 19th, a number of Alt-Right white supremacists have already been discussing on 4chan how they are going to use “Stand Your Ground” laws as an excuse to slaughter anti-fascists and turn it into a bloodbath. It is crucial to see how we can learn from and support projects such as these, as the organizers involved are experiencing repression, threats of physical violence, and doxxing for doing this crucial work and need our solidarity now more than ever.

By Mutual Aid Disaster Relief - It's Going Down, September 17, 2017

Thankfully, Tampa did not get “punched in the face” as much as anticipated. Still, if you are in the Tampa Bay area and need medical assistance or food/water/debris cleanup, or want to act in solidarity with your neighbors, or both! you can come to 5107 N. Central Ave, right next to St. Paul Lutheran Church. We are facilitating debris cleanup crews, providing first aid, engaging in mobile supplies distribution and more. We have cut down trees, removed debris, comforted neighbors, bought life saving medications, cleaned out fridges, put a family that didn’t have one up in a safe home. No Bureaucracy. No red tape. In St Pete, community-based relief efforts are coalescing at St Pete Community Acupuncture.  And similar efforts are underway throughout Florida. If you are coming from out of the area, you are welcome at these locations, but know that Tampa itself is back to “normal” for most of its residents – very far from an apocalyptic atmosphere. But we are using the Tampa convergence center to do relief efforts throughout the state focusing on harder hit, historically marginalized communities, including migrant farmworker and indigenous communities.

The Mutual Aid Disaster Relief convergence center in Tampa is growing by the hour. The first aid station has grown into a wellness center, including acupuncture, trauma counseling, peer support, herbal medics, and other alternative medicine modalities. Local community members know to drop off hurricane supplies that they didn’t need. Community members also know to come here if supplies are needed. And that these supplies can be received with dignity. Here, there are no powerful givers of aid and powerless receivers of aid. We are undermining that dynamic in a process that contributes to the liberation and consciousness-raising of everybody involved. Mobile distros base out of the space, channel their inner Robin Hood, and reach across Florida with supplies, especially to historically marginalized communities. We have funneled over 10 tons of food, water, diapers, and other supplies to hard-hit Immokalee, FL. a migrant farmworker town.

In Immokalee, we are working at the request of and in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a human rights, farmworker justice movement with deep roots in the community. Immokalee expects to be without power for weeks to come and food in the city is scarce. Other needs are self-standing already functional photovoltaic solar arrays, solar generators, other solar equipment, phone battery packs, large tarps, screening for windows, bug spray, mobile kitchens, and medics to staff the first aid station we constructed. In Tampa, we have partnered with Tampa Black Lives Matter, Tampa Food Not Bombs, Love Has No Borders, Islamic Relief, Suncoast Antifa, Tampa DSA, The Refuge, Tampa Bay Dream Defenders, Organize Now, POCA Clinics, Hillsborough Community Protection Coalition, and many other organizations with decades of community organizing experience in the Tampa Bay area to not only effectively and efficiently address the disaster of Irma, but also the ongoing disasters of social and economic inequality. Speaking of which, anti-refugee Floridians who crossed the border into other states to escape disaster: think about what this would be like if we weren’t allowed access to safety. That is a reality for many trying to flee war, natural disaster, and poverty. Borders are violent.

By Candice Bernd - Truthout, September 1, 2017

"It's been a hell of a few days," says Andrew Cobb, whose house in Houston's Fifth Ward was spared the brunt of Hurricane Harvey's flood waters. His decentralized, grassroots relief effort called the "West Street Response Team" started with a simple scouting mission to a nearby flood plain across Highway 59 on Sunday.

After he and his roommates arrived at the location, they began coordinating with neighbors from the area on social media to find specific addresses of people needing rescue. They paddled more than two miles out in an inflatable kayak to make their first rescue of a mother and son, who they brought back to their own home to shelter for a few days.

"We posted about that and there was just a huge response, with some videos from that. And so, people were like, 'What can we do? What's up?' And I was like, 'We need boats. We need trucks. We need to get out there, and ... people just responded in a big way," Cobb tells me over the phone after nightfall -- the only time when his team isn't actively on rescue dispatch -- earlier this week.

The group started formally raising money, and their house has since been transformed into a volunteer dispatch base running several rescue operations each day, including the rescue of a woman who was low on oxygen, whom they paddled and drove across town to another set of volunteers who got her across the final leg to a home with an oxygen concentrator.

Cobb's team's activities aren't limited to rescues. They have also been working to drop food, water, clothing and dog food for stray animals to shelters and to certain drop-off spots at cross streets in his area.

Cobb is just one of many Texans braving Houston's rapids from sun-up to sun-down to organize decentralized rescues in the early days of Hurricane Harvey's devastation. Pre-Harvey, he organized with a local Food Not Bombs chapter and with the Society of Native Nations to oppose Energy Transfer Partner's Trans-Pecos pipeline in far West Texas.

His work providing homeless people with food via Food Not Bombs has amplified his disgust for the journalists and city officials ridiculing Houstonians for providing for themselves during a time of crisis.

"Calling it 'looting' is just such an absurdity when you have no food in the neighborhood. So, people were getting what they need, but we were hearing that supplies were limited, and the closest real grocery store was Fiesta, and there was a four-hour line to get in," Cobb says. "It's a food desert in normal times, and right now it's even more so."

His team is already working with outside groups from Austin to coordinate resources, including acquiring more technical gear for rescues, in the coming days. It's a sign of the emerging coalitions among leftists, radicals and anarchists, including those involved in antifascist organizing, that are beginning to solidify in the wake of Harvey. While Cobb says his response team opposes fascism and supports a diversity of tactics, they do not identify specifically as antifa. But many other leftists, including those who do identify as antifa, are poised, ready and waiting, for the water to recede to begin providing direct relief.

James Cromwell interviewed by Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, Democracy Now! - July 14, 2017

AMY GOODMAN: Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell is reporting to jail at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time today in upstate New York, after he was sentenced to a week behind bars for taking part in a nonviolent protest against a natural gas-fired power plant. Cromwell says he’ll also launch a hunger strike. He’s one of six activists arrested for blocking traffic at the sit-in outside the construction site of the 650-megawatt plant in Wawayanda, New York, upstate, December 2015. The activists say the plant would promote natural gas fracking in neighboring states and contribute to climate change.

James Cromwell is well known for his roles in some 50 Hollywood films, nominated for an Oscar in Babe, as well as a number of TV series, including Six Feet Under. I spoke to him Thursday along with one of his co-defendants who’s going to jail today, as well, Pramilla Malick, founder of Protect Orange County, a community group leading the opposition to the fracked gas power plant. She ran in 2016 for New York state Senate. I began by asking James Cromwell about why he’s going to jail today.

By Angry Workers World - LibCom.Org, June 24, 2017

Dear sisters and brothers,

Some comrades from Frankfurt got in touch recently, wanting to set up a solidarity network. They approached us with some concrete questions. [1] We want to use the opportunity to reflect more generally on our limited experiences with our solidarity network initiative so far and about the political direction we want to take steps towards. We do this against the current background of post-election ‘Corbyn-mania’ and a surge in political activities focused on the Labour Party. The first part of this text briefly explains our opposition to the focus on electoral activities, whether that be through the Labour machinery or in the more post-modern form of ‘municipalism’ [2] – despite the fact that locally in our area, the election circus had less of an impact, given that most workers here are not allowed to vote anyway. And as an alternative to this electoral turn, the second part focuses on our political proposals towards a locally rooted class organisation. We then go on to talk in more detail about our concrete experiences with the solidarity network in west London.

The Labour of wishful thinking

• * We understand that ‘hope’ is needed amongst a divided and beaten working class and that Labour’s rhetoric of social unity and equality is welcomed.
• * We would criticise our comrades of the radical left if they merely proliferate this ‘message of hope’ and material promises (end of austerity), without questioning the structural constraints which will make it difficult for a Labour government to deliver on their promises. Syriza in Greece has shown how a hopeful high can quickly turn into an even deeper depression once ‘our government’ has to turn against us.
• * For us it is less about warning the working class not to vote on principle or focusing on Corbyn’s problematic power struggle within the Labour apparatus, but about pointing out the general dynamic between a) a national social democratic government, b) the global system of trade, monetary exchange and political power and c) the struggle of workers to improve their lives. In other words, all of the historical lessons have shown us that the outcomes of channelling working class energies into parliamentarism within a nation state that fits into an overall system of capital flows, has always ended up curtailing a longer-term working class power.
• * The Labour party proposals in general are not radical as such, e.g. their promise to increase the minimum wage to £10 per hour by 2020 (!) under current inflation rates would more likely lead to a dampening of wage struggles amongst the lower paid working class, rather than instigating them. The minimum wage regulation introduced by Labour under Blair in 1998 had this effect in the long run.
• * An increase in taxation to mobilise the financial means to deliver on their promises will increase capital flight and devaluation of the pound – most capital assets which bolster the UK economy are less material than in the 1970s, therefore it would be difficult to counter the flight with requisition (‘nationalisation’), a step which Labour does not really consider on a larger scale anyway.
• * While any social democratic program on a national level is more unlikely than ever, the Labour program focuses workers’ attention increasingly on the national terrain: struggle for the NHS, nationalisation of the railways etc.; (in this sense the leadership’s leaning towards Brexit is consequential and at odds with most liberal Corbynistas); while officially Labour maintains a liberal approach towards migrants, those Labour strategists who are less under public scrutiny as politicians, such as Paul Mason, are more honest: if to carry out a social democratic program on a national scale means to have tightened control over the movement of capital, by the nature of capital-labour relation, this also means to tighten the control over the movement of labour; it would also mean re-arming the national military apparatus in order to bolster the national currency that otherwise wouldn’t have the international standing the pound still has. [3]
• * A social democratic government needs a workers/social movement on the ground in order to impose more control over corporate management, e.g. through taxation. At the same time it hampers the self-activity of workers necessary to do this – e.g. through relying on the main union apparatus as transmission belts between workers and government.
• * In more concrete terms we can see that groups like Momentum or local Labour Party organisations have done and do very little to materially strengthen the organisation of day-to-day proletarian struggles on the ground, but rather channel people’s activities towards the electoral sphere, siphoning off energy and turning attention away from concrete proletarian problems. Many ‘independent’ left-wing initiatives – from Novara media to most of the Trot organisations – became election advertisement agencies.
• * While for the new Labour activists – many of them from a more educated if not middle-class background – there will be advisory posts and political careers, we have to see their future role with critical suspicion.
• * If a Labour government would actually try to increase taxation and redistribute assets, the most likely outcome is a devaluation of the pound and an increase in inflation due to a trade deficit, which cannot be counteracted easily (see composition of agriculture, energy sector, general manufactured goods etc.)
• * The new Labour left – trained in political activism and speech and aided by their influence within union leadership – will be the best vehicle to tell workers to ‘give our Labour government some time’, to explain that ‘international corporations have allied against us’ and that despite inflation workers should keep calm and carry on; wage struggles will be declared to be ‘excessive’ or ‘divisive’ or ‘of narrow-minded economic consciousness’. More principled comrades who told workers to support Labour, but who would support workers fighting against a Labour government risk losing their credibility and influence.
• * Instead of creating illusions that under conditions of a global crisis ‘money can be found’ for the welfare state we should point out the absurdity of the capitalist crisis: there is poverty despite excess capacities and goods (for which ‘no money can be found’ if they don’t promise profits for companies or the state). We have to be Marxists again, analysing structures rather than engaging in wishful thinking.
• * We should focus our activities to a) build material counter-power against bosses and capitalist institutions that makes a difference in the daily lives of working class people and b) prepare themselves and ourselves for the task of actually taking over the means of (re-)production. [4] For this we need to be rooted and coordinated internationally. We can clearly see that in the face of these big questions our actual practice seems ridiculously modest, but we want to share our experiences honestly and invite others to organise themselves with us. [5]

By Rob Jackson - Boulder Weekly, January 19, 2017

Some citizens of Lafayette never accepted the State of Colorado’s claims of preemption or the court’s dismissal of their community’s groundbreaking 2013 vote to ban fracking within their town’s city limits. So now these creative citizens are looking for another way to protect their community from the industry they claim will contaminate their air and water while hastening climate change.

On Tuesday, January 17, they made their case before the Lafayette City Council for legalizing the right of every Lafayette citizen to use “non-violent direct action” to enforce their right to a healthy environment and community self-government.

In front of an overflow crowd, including representatives from the oil and gas industry, proponents of a proposed ordinance titled Climate Bill of Rights articulated that direct action is the last thing standing between the local environment and the hazards of fracking. After approximately three hours of impassioned public comments, the Council tabled a vote until an unknown future date due to three of the seven council members not being in attendance.

If the Council eventually votes in favor of legalizing “peaceful direct action,” Lafayette would be following in the footsteps of Grant Township in Pennsylvania, which passed a similar ordinance in May 2016. For Grant Township, it was wastewater injection wells and the state of Pennsylvania’s refusal to honor their desire to ban such injection wells that was the impetus for legalizing direct action. Such wells are used to dispose of the oil and gas industry’s produced water which contains fracking fluid contamination as well as numerous naturally occurring contaminants such as mercury and radioactive waste. Injection wells have also been proven to cause earthquakes.

The Lafayette City Council’s consideration of its similar ordinance comes at a time when the industry has acknowledged that as many as 1,800 new wells could eventually be horizontally drilled and hydraulically fractured in Boulder County’s shale formations.

Lafayette originally voted to ban fracking through a Community Rights Bill, which passed with 60 percent voter support in 2013. That effort was quickly met with a lawsuit filed by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA). Both Grant Township and the citizens of Lafayette have been aided throughout their ordinance process by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which has offered pro-bono legal services to the Lafayette City Council for any further legal action that could be required as the result of passing the Climate Bill of Rights ordinance.

For the members of the grassroots environmental and human rights group East Boulder County United (EBCU), which was founded in 2012 and has co-authored the new proposed ordinance with CELDF, opposition to fracking is viewed as a matter of defending human rights to clean air and water and a healthy climate. Cliff Willmeng, a founder and leader of EBCU, said after the meeting, “We look at these rights as inherent to the whole Front Range and all of these expectations will be placed firmly across the dais of the Boulder County Commissioners. It doesn’t make sense that Lafayette doesn’t have a well if Boulder County has 1,800 of them. Our intention is to protect both of them. When we started this in 2012, we knew that the laws were unjust and our efforts had to bring that fact to the light of day rather than bargaining or negotiating with that fact. We’ve never wavered from that and we knew that it would come to the moment that citizens would have to place themselves between those drills and the local environment and that’s the stage we’re at right now. The intent of the Climate Bill of Rights and Protections is to enlist the support of the local government in exactly that.”

If the ordinance passes, it would forbid any law enforcement personnel employed by the City of Lafayette from  “arresting or detaining persons directly enforcing this law” via direct action.

Willmeng also said that he has led three filled-to-capacity civil disobedience trainings in the past month with 40-plus people in each session. These trainings have been hosted on a volunteer basis by local businesses in Lafayette and Longmont. More trainings are being planned. Willmeng’s mother, Merrily Mazza, is a member of Lafayette City Council and supports the legalization of direct action to empower her constituents to protect their community and environment from fracking.

Other speakers at the meeting cited historical examples of peaceful civil disobedience as a critical legacy of the United States’ most significant fights for justice, including the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, African-American voting rights and LGBTQ equality. A Lakota man and veteran of the Iraq War, Doug Good Feather recounted the feeling of putting his hands in the air at the front lines of the movement at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation — where he grew up and returned to recently as a “water protector” protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline  — only to be shot at with rubber bullets, concussion grenades and tear gas. He said that, as a United States Army combat veteran, he feels that the Iraq War is here now.

Opponents of the ordinance cast its supporters as “radicals” and “hypocrites” and claimed the ordinance would be a potential threat to business and the rule of law. A representative and attorney for COGA condemned the bill. Lafayette City Attorney David Williamson suggested earlier this month that much of the bill’s language was “unenforceable” due to state law.

Towards the end of the evening, John Lamb, a retired Boulder Valley School District teacher and musician from Lafayette, pulled out his harmonica and played the working class ballad, “Which Side Are You On?” He was joined by several women singing along with lyrics specific to Lafayette. Many in the audience joined in. Three of the four councilmembers acknowledged it was a moving moment.

By Kit O’Connell and Eleanor Goldfield - It's Going Down, June 23, 2017

We’ve got a hot summer ahead, and I don’t just mean record-breaking temperatures thanks to climate change.

Assuming the fuck-ups in the GOP clown car, currently careening out of control across our nation, can get their act together, we’re poised to see devastating legislation targeting some of the most vulnerable people in America. People are angry, and ready to active against the system, in a way we haven’t seen in years.

And huddling in corner number two — are the Democrats. And despite their feeble attempts at both resistance and distinct alternatives, their proposed “Resistance Summer” is designed to attract new activists and bring a flood of new liberal voters to the polls in upcoming elections.

Despite the catchy, chic, goes-with-a-beach-tote name, we’ve seen this sort of thing before from the Democrats. Indeed, while the party claims to support progressive causes, Democrats have a long history of sucking the life out of grassroots movements, taking their momentum for revolutionary change and directing the energy back into the American status quo at the ballot box.

Today we’re going to take a closer look at this “Resistance” based on the tried and true history of the party in blue.

By Ted Hamilton - Truthout, June 21, 2017

This month a group of climate activists were convicted in district courts in Mount Vernon, Washington, and Wawayanda, New York, for committing acts of civil disobedience against fossil fuel infrastructure. Each defendant (one in Washington and six in New York) had attempted to present a "climate necessity defense," arguing that their nominally illegal actions were justified by the threat of climate catastrophe -- in other words, that the real crime is continuing to pollute the atmosphere, not interfering with corporate property. The courts weren't having it: The activists were convicted on June 7 on charges of varying seriousness, although they anticipate appealing their rulings.

The activists aren't hanging their heads, though. Instead, they're doubling down on their civil resistance mode of political activism. In doing so, they're joining a growing movement of direct action climate dissidents across the country who have taken to the streets, the pipelines and the coal trains to do what the government won't: confront an industry that poses an existential threat to human civilization.

The Washington trial began with an October 2016 protest in which Ken Ward -- a long-time environmental leader who pursued conventional climate policy avenues for decades before turning to civil disobedience in recent years -- entered a Kinder Morgan pipeline facility in Anacortes, Washington, and turned a valve to cut off the flow of tar sands oil entering from Canada. His action was coordinated with other "Shut It Down" activists in Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota, who were responding to a call for action from the Standing Rock encampment, and together succeeded in temporarily halting the flow of all tar sands oil into the United States. At the time of his protest (which was preceded by a warning call to pipeline operators), Ward called upon President Obama to make this interruption of tar sands oil permanent, citing the fuel's particularly carbon-intensive nature and the need for much more aggressive federal action to curb emissions.

In the New York case, the six activists blocked a construction site for a Competitive Power Ventures natural gas-powered electricity plant. Plans for the plant have gone ahead despite ample evidence of inadequate environmental reviews and the plant's obvious detriment to the climate. In his decision finding the activists guilty, the judge acknowledged that "the pollution expected to be caused by this power plant once it is operational would be significant and contrary to New York State's policies on global warming."

By Angry Workers World - LibCom.Org, June 24, 2017

Dear sisters and brothers,

Some comrades from Frankfurt got in touch recently, wanting to set up a solidarity network. They approached us with some concrete questions. [1] We want to use the opportunity to reflect more generally on our limited experiences with our solidarity network initiative so far and about the political direction we want to take steps towards. We do this against the current background of post-election ‘Corbyn-mania’ and a surge in political activities focused on the Labour Party. The first part of this text briefly explains our opposition to the focus on electoral activities, whether that be through the Labour machinery or in the more post-modern form of ‘municipalism’ [2] – despite the fact that locally in our area, the election circus had less of an impact, given that most workers here are not allowed to vote anyway. And as an alternative to this electoral turn, the second part focuses on our political proposals towards a locally rooted class organisation. We then go on to talk in more detail about our concrete experiences with the solidarity network in west London.

The Labour of wishful thinking

• * We understand that ‘hope’ is needed amongst a divided and beaten working class and that Labour’s rhetoric of social unity and equality is welcomed.
• * We would criticise our comrades of the radical left if they merely proliferate this ‘message of hope’ and material promises (end of austerity), without questioning the structural constraints which will make it difficult for a Labour government to deliver on their promises. Syriza in Greece has shown how a hopeful high can quickly turn into an even deeper depression once ‘our government’ has to turn against us.
• * For us it is less about warning the working class not to vote on principle or focusing on Corbyn’s problematic power struggle within the Labour apparatus, but about pointing out the general dynamic between a) a national social democratic government, b) the global system of trade, monetary exchange and political power and c) the struggle of workers to improve their lives. In other words, all of the historical lessons have shown us that the outcomes of channelling working class energies into parliamentarism within a nation state that fits into an overall system of capital flows, has always ended up curtailing a longer-term working class power.
• * The Labour party proposals in general are not radical as such, e.g. their promise to increase the minimum wage to £10 per hour by 2020 (!) under current inflation rates would more likely lead to a dampening of wage struggles amongst the lower paid working class, rather than instigating them. The minimum wage regulation introduced by Labour under Blair in 1998 had this effect in the long run.
• * An increase in taxation to mobilise the financial means to deliver on their promises will increase capital flight and devaluation of the pound – most capital assets which bolster the UK economy are less material than in the 1970s, therefore it would be difficult to counter the flight with requisition (‘nationalisation’), a step which Labour does not really consider on a larger scale anyway.
• * While any social democratic program on a national level is more unlikely than ever, the Labour program focuses workers’ attention increasingly on the national terrain: struggle for the NHS, nationalisation of the railways etc.; (in this sense the leadership’s leaning towards Brexit is consequential and at odds with most liberal Corbynistas); while officially Labour maintains a liberal approach towards migrants, those Labour strategists who are less under public scrutiny as politicians, such as Paul Mason, are more honest: if to carry out a social democratic program on a national scale means to have tightened control over the movement of capital, by the nature of capital-labour relation, this also means to tighten the control over the movement of labour; it would also mean re-arming the national military apparatus in order to bolster the national currency that otherwise wouldn’t have the international standing the pound still has. [3]
• * A social democratic government needs a workers/social movement on the ground in order to impose more control over corporate management, e.g. through taxation. At the same time it hampers the self-activity of workers necessary to do this – e.g. through relying on the main union apparatus as transmission belts between workers and government.
• * In more concrete terms we can see that groups like Momentum or local Labour Party organisations have done and do very little to materially strengthen the organisation of day-to-day proletarian struggles on the ground, but rather channel people’s activities towards the electoral sphere, siphoning off energy and turning attention away from concrete proletarian problems. Many ‘independent’ left-wing initiatives – from Novara media to most of the Trot organisations – became election advertisement agencies.
• * While for the new Labour activists – many of them from a more educated if not middle-class background – there will be advisory posts and political careers, we have to see their future role with critical suspicion.
• * If a Labour government would actually try to increase taxation and redistribute assets, the most likely outcome is a devaluation of the pound and an increase in inflation due to a trade deficit, which cannot be counteracted easily (see composition of agriculture, energy sector, general manufactured goods etc.)
• * The new Labour left – trained in political activism and speech and aided by their influence within union leadership – will be the best vehicle to tell workers to ‘give our Labour government some time’, to explain that ‘international corporations have allied against us’ and that despite inflation workers should keep calm and carry on; wage struggles will be declared to be ‘excessive’ or ‘divisive’ or ‘of narrow-minded economic consciousness’. More principled comrades who told workers to support Labour, but who would support workers fighting against a Labour government risk losing their credibility and influence.
• * Instead of creating illusions that under conditions of a global crisis ‘money can be found’ for the welfare state we should point out the absurdity of the capitalist crisis: there is poverty despite excess capacities and goods (for which ‘no money can be found’ if they don’t promise profits for companies or the state). We have to be Marxists again, analysing structures rather than engaging in wishful thinking.
• * We should focus our activities to a) build material counter-power against bosses and capitalist institutions that makes a difference in the daily lives of working class people and b) prepare themselves and ourselves for the task of actually taking over the means of (re-)production. [4] For this we need to be rooted and coordinated internationally. We can clearly see that in the face of these big questions our actual practice seems ridiculously modest, but we want to share our experiences honestly and invite others to organise themselves with us. [5]