The Practical Considerations on Building an Effective Anarchist Program Today Part II

From The Left Winger

Note: This is a work in progress. Many of these ideas have been stewing in my head and the heads of some comrades of mine for quite some time now, but in writing them (specially in a blog) I tend to forget things or downplay others. I’ll probably revisit and re-write this thing when it is all written (The golden rule of good writing – rewrite it!). Much of these ideas are based out of Huerta Grande, the work of Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks and several years of conversation with my good comrade Adam at Machete 408, plus others. My thoughts on strategy, I must admit, owe much to the analysis of Carl von Clawsewitz’s On War, which I guess is not a very kosher confession for an anti-militarist anarchist. And still further, some ideas of the Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists will make an appearance. If there is a point with which you agree, disagree or would like to see explained further, please say so, it would be very helpful. Ok, here we go again.

*  *  *

Strategical program of action based on the political analysis

Class warfare is nothing if not a war. It is the “act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” The will is the political objective of the different parties who engage in the war. The will of the bourgeoisie is the maintain its dominant class status – our will is the elimination of class society and social hierarchy.

We are forced here to expand our idea of war to include the ideological groundwork for the actual event itself. The Iraq war was not started on March 20, 2003, with the bombing of the Al-Dora farms. In fact, the war had already started on February 5th,  when Colin Powell made his now infamous presentation to the UN security council, because the White House had already decide to go to war.

The class warfare between the bourgeoisie and the different exploited classes (peasants, proletariat, the dispossessed or lumpen proletariat, etc.) has been going on for at least two centuries, sometimes as open physical warfare, and sometimes as an ideological warfare. Antonio Gramsci defined these two situations as a war of maneuver and a war of position.

Yet the idea of war of position is too broad and vague to be of any practical use to us. It can refer to any moment from the reactionary times we live in to the eve of the “storming of the Winter Palace,” but these two situations have very little in common and we cannot fathom to use the same strategy in both cases. To be more precise, we must first decide if we are in the offensive or the defensive. It is not a question of actions being offensive or defensive, but if the overall movement of working people (be it local, national or transnational) is winning new ground or trying to defend the ground already won. The sentiment expressed by the “we are winning” tag in Seattle reflects the first analysis, while S.T.O.R.M. based its strategy on the defensive mode of the people’s movement.

The question of the movement being defensive or offensive is a crucial one, and should be analyzed in depth by the organization seeking to create a program. It is also important to understand that each situation carries a difference in outlook and a different set of problems.

Offense

If you assume an offensive view of popular movements, the primary analysis should be to detect what are the defenses of the State and which weaknesses they present.  The defenses of the State may be physical (arsenal, police, army, etc.,) or ideological (the law, “deterrents” like prisons or torture, the media and the formation of public opinion). More likely, it can be a combination of all of them in different degrees.

After detecting the weaknesses of the defenses of the State, we must proceed into using our analysis of our own power and that of allies willing to join, and create an assault plan with the possible allocation of that power to the weak point of the State machinery.

I put this forward because I am trying to create a broad how-to manual on creating a political program. I have yet to be presented with any slightly convincing argument for this view, and I find it quite dangerous to the overall health of popular movements.

Defense

Defense is the strongest form of struggle. This might conflate with some people’s romanticizing the periods in which social movements were in the offensive, such as the thirties and the sixties.Yet it is worthwhile to notice that decades after these movements were crushed by the State, their legacy remains, if a little eroded. The reason for this is that once that ideological ground is won, it is hard to be lost. It has been chipped away, perverted and attacked constantly, but the ideas that racism and sexism are bad are still a big part of the general discourse. (Clearly things are much different in practice, and the idea of racism has been stripped of all its systemic value and made into a individualistic relationship, but my point is that the need for racial equality wasn’t part of the discourse of this country until very recently.)

The aim of defense is preservation, while the aim of offense is conquest. A defensive outlook for social movements would aim first at defending the terrain won on previous struggles, such as the great labor unrests from the thirties and the civil rights struggle from the sixties and seventies. From a defensive perspective, the lack of activity is a gain.

It is also important to say that while defense aims at preservation, it cannot be its endgame. Defense aims at amassing ones forces to the point that one can then engage on a offensive. And it is paramount to find the breaches that might open in the ideological battlefield against the ruling classes, attack at those points and win them over, and then hold them.

Keeping all that in mind, the defensive or “war of position” strategy should first analyze what are the areas attacked by the State that must be defended. Priorities should be assigned based on:

1. the organization’s proximity and prior level of engagement with the struggle,
2. the prevalence of popular directive and organization against top-down bureaucratic control,
3. ability of the ruling-class of sustaining the attack and the ability of the people to defend against it,
4. The sphere of influence of the organization and the ability of it to affect change.

*          *           *         *           *         *

Ok. Again I didn’t get to all I wanted to say. Next, I’ll talk about tracing goals, and methods of achieving goals. Also, will take about the particular difficulties that anarchist organizations face when creating a program.

 

Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality

From Anarkismo

“Without justice there can be no love.”–bell hooks

Anarchism can learn a lot from the feminist movement. In many respects it already has. Anarcha-feminists have developed analyses of patriarchy that link it to the state form. We have learned from the slogan that “the personal is political” (e.g. men who espouse equality between all genders should treat the women in their lives with dignity and respect). We have learned that no revolutionary project can be complete while men systematically dominate and exploit women; that socialism is a rather empty goal–even if it is “stateless”–if men’s domination of women is left in tact.

This essay argues that anarchists can likewise learn from the theory of “intersectionality” that emerged from the feminist movement. Indeed, anarchist conceptions of class struggle have widened as a result of the rise of feminist movements, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian liberation movements (and, perhaps more contemporarily, the queer movements), disability rights movements, etc. But how do we position ourselves regarding those struggles? What is their relationship to the class struggle that undergirds the fight for socialism? Do we dismiss them as “mere identity politics” that obscure rather than clarify the historic task of the working class? If not, how might anarchists include their concerns in our political theory and work?

Why Intersectionality? How We Got here

Many people locate the beginning of the feminist movement in the U.S. with the struggle of women to gain the vote. This focus on electoralism was criticized for its narrowness by many turn-of-the-century radical women. After all, what did the vote provide for working class women? How could voting for a new set of rulers put food in their mouths and the mouths of their families? In fact, many radical women of this time period refused to identify as “feminists”, as they viewed feminism as a bourgeois women’s movement unconcerned with the class struggle (for an interesting discussion of this in the context of early 1900s Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, see Ackelsberg 2005: 118-119 and 123-124). Indeed, many working class women saw their “feminist” contemporaries as being in alliance “with all the forces that have been the most determined enemies of the working people, of the poor and disinherited”–that is, they saw the early feminist movement as a purely bourgeois women’s movement that had no solutions to the pervasive poverty and exploitation inherent in the working class experience in a classed society (Parker 2001: 125).

Anarchists of this time period, on the other hand, at times anticipated some of the arguments to come out of the feminist movement regarding intersectionality. We argued against the class reductionism that often occurred within the broader socialist milieu. Early anarchists were writing about issues such as prostitution and sex trafficking (Goldman 2001), forced sterilizations (Kropotkin 2001), and marriage (de Cleyre 2004 and 2001) to widen the anarchist critique of hierarchy to give critical concern to women’s issues in their own right, while also articulating a socialist vision of a future cooperative and classless society. Much of this early work demonstrated connections between the oppression of women and the exploitation of the working class. The refusal of many working class women to join their “feminist” contemporaries likewise demonstrated some of the problems of a universalized identity-based feminism that saw women’s oppression as a hierarchy that can be fought without also fighting capitalism.

This is not to suggest that anarchists weren’t at times reductionist. Unfortunately, many anarchist men were dismissive of women’s concerns. Part of the reason that the Mujeres Libres saw a need for a separate women’s organization around the time of the Spanish Civil War was because “many anarchists treated the issue of women’s subordination as, at best, secondary to the emancipation of workers, a problem that would be resolved ‘on the morrow of the revolution’” (Ackelsberg 2005: 38). Unfortunately, in some contexts, this attitude isn’t just a historical oddity, though it should be. And it was these kinds of assumptions that became an important theoretical backdrop for feminism’s “Second Wave”.

Competing Visions in the “Second Wave”

During the late 60s through the early 80s, new forms of feminism began to emerge. Many feminists seemed to gravitate to four competing theories with very different explanations for the oppression of women.

Like their historical bourgeois predecessors,liberal feminists saw no need for a revolutionary break with existing society. Rather, their focus was on breaking the “glass ceiling”, getting more women into positions of political and economic power. Liberal feminists assumed that the existing institutional arrangements were fundamentally unproblematic. Their task was to see to women’s equality accommodated under capitalism.

Another theory, sometimes referred to as radical feminism, argued for abandoning the “male Left”, as it was seen as hopelessly reductionist. Indeed, many women coming out of the Civil Rights movement and anti-war movements complained of pervasive sexism within the movements, being relegated to secretarial tasks, philandering male leaders, and a generalized alienation from Left politics. According to many radical feminists of the time, this was due to the primacy of the system of patriarchy–or men’s systematic and institutionalized domination of women. To these feminists, the battle against patriarchy was the primary struggle to create a free society, as gender was our most entrenched and oldest hierarchy (see especially Firestone 1970).

Marxist feminists, on the other hand, tended to locate women’s oppression within the economic sphere. The fight against capitalism was seen as the “primary” battle, as “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”–that is, human history could be reduced to class (Marx and Engels 1967). Further, Marxist feminists tended to believe that the economic “base” of society had a determining effect on its cultural “superstructures”. Thus, the only way to achieve equality between women and men would be to smash capitalism–as new, egalitarian economic arrangements would give rise to new, egalitarian superstructures. Such was the determining nature of the economic base.

Out of the conversations between Marxist feminism and radical feminism another approach emerged called “dual systems theory” (see e.g. Hartmann 1981; Young 1981). A product of what came to be dubbed socialist feminism, dual systems theory argued that feminists needed to develop “a theoretical account which gives as much weight to the system of patriarchy as to the system of capitalism” (Young 1981: 44). While this approach did much to resolve some of the arguments about which fight should be “primary” (i.e. the struggle against capitalism or the struggle against patriarchy), it still left much to be desired. For example, black feminists argued that this perspective left out a structural analysis of race (Joseph 1981). Further, where was oppression based on sexuality, ability, age, etc. in this analysis? Were all of these things reducible to capitalist patriarchy?

It is within this theoretical backdrop that intersectionality emerged. But it wasn’t just abstraction and theory that led to these insights. As mentioned before, part of the reason feminists saw a need for a separate analysis of patriarchy as a systemic form of oppression was due to their experiences with the broader Left. Without an analysis of patriarchy that put it on equal footing with capitalism as an organizing system in our lives, there was no adequate response to male leaders who suggested that we deal with women’s oppression after we deal with the “primary” or “more important” class struggle.

But these tensions were not limited to the Left, they also existed within the feminist movement. Perhaps one of the best examples of this on the ground was in the pro-choice movement in the United States. Before Roe vs. Wade in 1973, abortion law was considered an issue to be dealt with on a state-by-state basis. Feminists mobilized around Roe Vs. Wade to see that legal abortion would be guaranteed throughout the country. The ruling eventually did give legal guarantees to abortion through the second trimester, but the “choice” and “legalization” rhetoric left too much unaddressed for many feminists.

And this experience set the stage for re-thinking the idea of a universalized, monolithic experience of “womanhood” as it is often expressed in traditional identity politics. Black feminists and womanists, for example, argued that focusing solely on legalized abortion obscured the ways that black women in the United States underwent forced sterilizations and were often denied the right to have children (see Roberts 1997). Further, working class women argued that legalized “choice” is pretty meaningless without socialism, as having abortion legal, but unaffordable, didn’t exactly constitute a “choice”. True reproductive freedom meant something more than just legal abortion for working class women. Many wanted to have kids but simply couldn’t afford raising them; some wanted a change in the cultural norms and mores of a society that judged the decisions women made about their bodies; others wanted proximity to clinics for reproductive health–in short, a “reproductive freedom” framework would take into account the interests of all women, not just be structured around white, heterosexual, middle-class women’s concerns (the seeming default position of the “pro-choice” movement).

Intersections

These experiences within the feminist movement and the broader Left raised many questions for feminists. How do we create a movement that isn’t focused around the interests of its most privileged elements? How do we retain our commitment to socialism without being subsumed into a politic that sees women’s issues as “secondary”? What might political organization look like based on a common commitment to ending domination rather than an assumed common experience based on some single identity? These questions began to be answered largely by feminists of color, queers, and sex radicals with the theory of intersectionality–a theory that was critical of traditional class and identity politics (see especially e.g. hooks 2000; Collins 2000).

Intersectionality posits that our social locations in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation of origin, ability, age, etc. are not easily parsed out one from the other. To speak of a universal experience as a “woman”, for example, is problematic because “womanhood” is experienced quite differently based on race, class, sexuality– any number of factors. As such, a non-reflective feminist movement centered ostensibly on the concerns of “women” tended to reflect the interests of the most privileged members of that social category.

As well, our various social locations and the hierarchies they inform intersect in complex ways and are not easily separable. People don’t exist as “women”, “men”, “white”, “working class”, etc. in a vacuum devoid of other patterned social relationships. Further, these systems of exploitation and oppression function in unique ways. To name two rather obvious examples, class is a social relationship based on the exploitation of one’s labor. As socialists, we seek the abolition of classes, not the end of class elitism under capitalism. This makes class unique. Similarly, the idea of “sexual orientation” developed in the 1800s with the invention of “the homosexual” as a species of a person. This effectively created an identity out of preferred gender choices in sexual partners, more or less ignoring the myriad other ways that people organize their sexuality (i.e. number of partners, preferred sexual acts, etc.). It also effectively limited sexual identity to three categories: hetero, homo, and bi–as if there could not be a large range of attractions and variety within humanity. Part of liberation based on sexuality is troubling these categories to provide a viable sexual/social existence for everyone. This makes sexuality, likewise, unique.

These structured inequalities and hierarchies inform and support one another. For example, the labor of women in child-bearing and rearing provides new bodies for the larger social factory to allow capitalism to continue. White supremacy and racism allow capitalists control over a segment of the labor market that can serve as stocks of cheap labor. Compulsory heterosexuality allows the policing of the patriarchal family form, strengthening patriarchy and male dominance. And all structured forms of inequality add to the nihilistic belief that institutionalized hierarchy is inevitable and that liberatory movements are based on utopian dreams.

Proponents of intersectionality, then, argue that all struggles against domination are necessary components for the creation of a liberatory society. It is unnecessary to create a totem pole of importance out of social struggles and suggest that some are “primary” while others are “secondary” or “peripheral” because of the complete ways that they intersect and inform one another. Further, history has shown us that this method of ranking oppressions is divisive and unnecessary–and worse, it undermines solidarity. As well, when organizing and developing political practice, we can self-reflexively move the margins to the center of our analyses to avoid the biases of privilege that has historically led to so many divisions in feminism and the Left.

A good contemporary example of intersectionality in the context of social movement practice is Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. Incite! “is a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and our communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing” (Incite! 2009). One reason Incite! stands out against other anti-violence organizations is their systemic analysis. They see women of color who have experienced violence as living in the “dangerous intersections” of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and other oppressive structures and institutions. Rather than simply reducing the experiences to the individual, they recognize the systems that oppress and exploit people and have structured their approach in such a way that calls for the “recentering” of marginalized folks, as opposed to a method of “inclusiveness” based on one single identity or social location. Incite! argues that “inclusiveness” simply adds a multicultural component to individualistic white-dominated organizing so common in the United States. Instead, they call for recentering the framework around the most marginalized peoples. This push is to ensure that their organizing addresses the needs of those historically overlooked by feminism, with the understanding that all people benefit from the liberation of their more marginalized peers–while focusing on the more privileged elements within a given social category leaves others behind (as in the examples we gave in the struggle for the vote and the legalization of abortion). Incite! makes a point to focus on the needs of the working class who have generally been neglected (i.e. sex workers, the incarcerated, trans folks and injection drug users). By centering these people in their organizing, they are focusing on the people standing at more dangerous intersections of oppression and exploitation, therefore tackling the entirety of the system and not just the more visible or advantaged aspects. Additionally, Incite! views the state as a major perpetrator of violence against women of color and seeks to build grassroots organizations independent of and against it. Anarchists could learn a lot from Incite! about the importance of addressing the needs of ALL sections of the working class and their attempt to check the tendency of the Left to ignore or dismiss the concerns, needs, ideas and leadership of people living in the dangerous intersections of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.

And What Can Anarchism Provide the Theory of Intersectionality?

We firmly believe that this learning process is a two-way street. That is, when synthesizing our practice to include these concerns raised by feminists, feminism could stand to benefit from learning from anarchism as well. We see the contributions of anarchists to intersectionality in two major areas. First, anarchism can provide a radical base from which to critique liberal interpretations of intersectionality. Secondly, anarchists can offer a critical analysis of the state.

Too often people using an intersectional analysis ignore the uniqueness of various systems of domination. One way this is done is by articulating a general opposition to classism. While we believe that class elitism exists, often this opposition to “classism” does not recognize the unique qualities of capitalism and can lead to a position that essentially argues for an end to class elitism under capitalism. As anarchists, we do not just oppose class elitism, we oppose class society itself. We do not want the ruling class to treat us nicer under a system based on inequality and exploitation (i.e. capitalism). We want to smash capitalism to pieces and build a new society in which classes no longer exist–that is, we fight for socialism. Anarchists, as part of the socialist movement, are well-placed to critique this liberal interpretation of intersectionality (see especially Schmidt and van der Walt 2009).

Likewise, as anarchists, we are well-placed to put forward our critiques of the state. The state, in addition to being a set of specific institutions (such as the courts, police, political bodies like senates, presidents, etc.), is a social relationship. And the state has an influence over our lives in myriad ways. For example, former prisoners are often unemployable, particularly if they have committed felonies. One only needs to take a cursory glance at the racial and class make-up of US prisons to see how intersectionality can be put to use here. Former prisoners, workers who are targeted for striking or engaging in direct actions and/or civil disobedience, etc. all have specific needs as subjects in a society that assumes political rulers and passive, ruled subjects. And the state tends to target specific sets of workers based on their existence within the dangerous intersections we mentioned above. Anarchists can offer to the theory of intersectionality an analysis of the ways that the state has come to rule our lives just as much as any other institutionalized system of domination. And we can, of course, argue for smashing such a social arrangement and replacing it with non-hierarchical social forms.

Refusing to Wait

In many ways, anarchists have historically anticipated some of the ideas in intersectionality. Further, anarchism as a political philosophy–and as a movement against all forms of structured domination, coercion, and control–seems well-suited for an intersectional practice. Unfortunately, we still have debilitating arguments about what hierarchy is “primary” and should be prioritized above others. Like in times past, this leads to easy division and a lack of solidarity (imagine being told to give up some struggle that directly involves YOU for the “correct” or “primary” fight!). Further, the smashing of any structured hierarchy can have a destabilizing effect on the rest, as the simple existence of any of these social divisions serves to naturalize the existence of all other hierarchies.

We’ve tried here to explain the rise of the theory of intersectionality within feminism and describe its contours. Perhaps more importantly, we’ve attempted to relate it throughout this piece to political practice and social movement struggles so as to avoid complete abstraction and theorization apart from practice. We hope that more anarchists become acquainted with intersectionality and put it to positive use in our political work. Finally, it is our hope that more people from marginalized groups refuse to wait, that we recognize the value of all fights against injustice and hierarchy in the here and now–and that we build a reflexive practice based on solidarity and mutual aid instead of divisive prescriptions about what struggles are “primary” and which ones, by extension, are “secondary” or “peripheral”. Rather, they are all linked and we have good reason to refuse to wait until after “the revolution” to address them!

Bibliography

Ackelsberg, Martha A. 2005. The Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women. Oakland: AK Press.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

de Cleyre, Voltairine. 2001. “They Who Marry do Ill”. Pp. 103-113 in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, edited by Peter Glassgold. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

_____. 2004. “Sex Slavery”. Pp. 93-103 in The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader, edited by A.J. Brigati. Oakland: AK Press.

Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Morrow.

Goldman, Emma. 2001. “The White Slave Traffic”. Pp. 113-120 in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, edited by Peter Glassgold. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

Hartmann, Heidi. 1981. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” in Women and Revolution, by Lydia Sargent (ed.). Boston, MA: South End Press.

hooks, bell. 2000. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Incite!. 2009. http://www.incite-national.org/. Last accessed, October 2009.

Joseph, Gloria. 1981. “The Incompatible Menage à Trois: Marxism, Feminism, and Racism.” in Women and Revolution, by Lydia Sargent (ed.). Boston, MA: South End Press.

Kropotkin, Peter. 2001. “The Sterilization of the Unfit”. Pp. 120-123 in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, edited by Peter Glassgold. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1967. The Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Parker, Robert Allerton. 2001. “Feminism in America”. Pp. 124-126 in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, edited by Peter Glassgold. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.

Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage.

Schmidt, M. & van der Walt, L. 2009. Black Flame: The revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism. Oakland: AK Press.

Young, Iris. 1981. “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory.” in Women and Revolution, by Lydia Sargent (ed.). Boston, MA: South End Press.

 

New SAC Statement of Principles 2009

From Anarcho Syndicalism 101

1. THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD are exploited in the capitalist profit-driven system of production. Under capitalism, the means of production have been monopolized by a few. They have therefore the social power to acquire all the wealth created. At the same time we, the overwhelming majority, are forced to work without power over the business, and for a wage which does not correspond to the value of what we produce. Where capitalism is allowed free range, violence and destruction are following in its wake, as well as a ruthless exploitation of natural resources that threatens the human environment and living conditions worldwide. From these circumstances arises the class struggle, in which the workers can only rely on their own actions.

2. SYNDICALISM is not primarily an ideology but a tradition of struggle among workers. We are driven by our desire for freedom and socialism. We nourish a dream that one day we will put an end to wage slavery. By building up industrial workers’ organizations, with the workplace as a starting point, we can mitigate the effects of capital’s exploitation and the state’s coercion, in order to finally overcome this inhumane economic and political system which gives all the good things in life to the exploiters.

3. DESPITE THAT THE WORKING CLASS today, as well as in history, is layered and fragmented in many ways, for example by industry, trade, legal status, gender, ethnicity, age, and employment status, SAC thinks that all workers have basic common interests. Therefore, the SAC consists of Local Union Confederation (LS) that organize all workers regardless of trade. As all workers have common interests, an organization that brings together all workers are needed. Through our organization we combat divisions within the working class and increase our collective power. If we are to hold together as workers, this requires us to act in solidarity. SAC understands solidarity as a common struggle for common interests.

4. THE EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKING CLASS takes different forms depending on where in the social hierarchy the work or workers are located. Heavily exploited groups of workers are employed to lower the standards of more established workers’ groups and migrants and the unemployed are used to press down wages. Women’s work is often valued less than men’s. This affects the workers’ mutual relationships in the workplace and creates tensions within the working class. The interests of heavily exploited group must be given decisive impact in the fight. No form of discrimination or subordination can be tolerated. SAC is a feminist and anti-racist organization.

5. IN SAC, WE BELIEVE unreservedly in the working class’, that is, our own, strength and skills. We do not need the blessing of power to give legitimacy to our fight or justify our existence. We know that neither libertarian socialism nor organization will be possible if we do not believe in our own ability. SAC believes that the workers must organize themselves free from any outside interests, like those expressed by the state and employers. SAC is an anti-authoritarian organization and sees direct action as the means to change society and our living and working conditions.

6. OUR POWER IS BASED on the way we organize ourselves. For a union to achieve maximum impact, it must be free from any interests outside of their members. In order to achieve maximum impact, the union must be organized in a federalist manner, which means self-determination in own affairs and cooperation on common issues. Centralism, bureaucracy, and other authoritarian forms of organization weakens unions. Our inner strength is derived from the principle that those affected by a decision should also be those who have taken it, and that all elected representatives are directly recallable. To avoid division in the workplace, and between trades, a powerful union must be organized industrially. Unions organized by trade are an anachronism. A powerful union must further more have the will to fight. A powerful trade union must also have the ambition to win their battles.

7. IN THE PRODUCTION OF GOODS and services, the workers have the power needed to change society. The social power of the working class is latent in the production process. Therefore the workplace is our premier venue for organizing. The labor market which provides the framework for the workplace struggle, must also be an arena of battle.

8. WE WORKERS HAVE NO FATHERLAND, our living conditions are intertwined with our sisters and brothers throughout the world. Global solidarity is a prerequisite for the liberation of the working class. SAC is opposed to all violence used by governmental and supranational institutions, as well as paramilitary groups, in order to maintain capital’s world order. SAC believes that workers always have the right to defend themselves against such violence.

9. SAC’S GOAL IS libertarian socialism: a society that is no longer divided into ruling and dominated classes; a society that no longer consists of exploiters and exploited; a society free from state coercion. In libertarian socialism, production is governed by society’s needs, which gives work meaning. The workers control the organizing of production, which gives the work content.

10. WE HAVE A BIG TASK ahead of us. But we know we can organize and win victories. We are fighting on our own merits, we struggle where we live our lives, so simple and so obvious it that. Only thus can we develop the self-responsibility that is the foundation of free socialism. See also:
http://www.sac.se

 

Audio: Class classification and its limitations

From Anarkismo

Recording of a WSM branch education that looks at ‘what is class’ and outlines many of the different classifications that have been used before asking whether this is right approach to the question at all. Followed by a brief discussion of class in relation to a popular Irish phone in radio show phone ins demanding a public sector pay cut.

Areas covered in talk

A certain Chinese encyclopedia
How rational are our categorization schemes
Objects and relations
The ABC12DEs
The Class Pyramid
Class and Marx
Kautsky, Orthodox Marxism and socialist consciousness and false consciousness
Why your position is bourgeois
The new left & EP Thompson
The 60’s, self management & Parecon
Autonomia & workerism
Negri and the right autonomists
Malatesta on class – 1907 Amsterdam conference
Class defined by struggle

Discussion
Joe Duffy & the public sector wage cut and orthodox marxism
Racism & housing
Lenin, Malatesta, the syndicalist wave and the need for specific organisation

Educational was given late September 2009, the occasional electronic interference is because it was recorded on a iPhone and I forgot to turn off the phone radios.

The audio was first uploaded to indymedia.ie and can be accessed there at http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2009/paulbowmano…n.mp3 It is about 45 minutes long and is a 20mb mp3 file

 

French metalworkers detained at U.S. airport for union activity

From International Metalworkers Federation

Members of the CGT were held for four hours by U.S. immigration officials for taking part in protesting the closure of a Molex plant in Villemur-sur-Tarn, France.

USA: Two French trade unionists from the Fédération des Travailleurs de la Métallurgie (CGT), an affiliate of the International Metalworkers’ Federation, were held by U.S. immigration officers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on October 29 and questioned about their involvement in a protest at the French operations of U.S.-based company, Molex Incorporated.

The two unionists, who were detained for four hours, were part of a delegation of CGT members who travelled to Chicago to take part in an action at the company’s shareholder meeting on October 30. Chicago unions contacted local U.S. Congressional offices calling for their release.

Molex, an electronics parts manufacturer which supplies products to major car manufacturing companies, announced on October 23, 2008 that it would close its Villemur plant and lay off 283 workers. The company has repeatedly refused to disclose financial information to worker representatives, a violation of French labour law, and has illegally locked-out workers and refused to pay employees’ wages and bonuses owed since August 6, 2009.

The CGT, who represents Molex workers in France, is calling on the company to adhere to French law and keep its commitment to work with the trade union to preserve jobs and respect basic labour rights and worker protections.

The French metalworkers were joined by some 80 trade unionists from Chicago-area unions including the United Steelworkers (USW), International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), Workers United/SEIU, United Electrical Workers (UE), AFL-CIO, and Jobs with Justice. Despite having valid proxies, CGT members and a representative from the AFL-CIO were denied access to the shareholders’ meeting.

In a letter sent to Molex management in France prior to the shareholders’ action, IMF general secretary Jyrki Raina urged the company to respect rule of law and its commitments to French workers. “Should Molex Incorporated continue to blatantly violate French labour law, undermine the rights of its workers and fail to work with the French government and French unions to reach a fair and just resolution, the IMF will pursue global action and use our influence with Molex customers to refuse your products,” he warned.Nov 03, 2009 – Kristyne Peter

 

China: crisis, class struggle, and the ‘harmonious society’

From LibCom

The global economic crisis had a severe effect on China. However, there has been much talk recently about its impressive recovery and the return of its economy to growth. This article analyses the situation in China, and argues that the economic crisis catalysed a wave of struggle which has continued into the present, regardless of the supposed health of the economy.

If we’re to believe the commentary to be found in the mainstream media, China is the economic powerhouse that will pull us through the global economic crisis. Though the economic slowdown which hit the country in late 2008 was widely reported, and led to claims that China’s meteoric rise was stalling, the country’s ‘recovery’ since has been the subject of many excited column inches. The growth of its economy in 2009 has been seen as part of Asia’s ‘astonishing rebound’ – or at least that of rising powers like China, India and Indonesia – by publications such as The Economist.1 The implications for world recovery and the balance of power are significant, it is argued.

Likewise you could be forgiven for thinking that the inhabitants of the worlds’ most populous country are increasingly enjoying the fruits of economic growth and the bright future that faces them. As has been well reported, automobile and electronic goods consumption in China is up, the Chinese are entering cyberspace in droves, and Western consumer outlets like Wal-Mart are springing up in Chinese cities. To the Chinese government, this is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the ‘harmonious society’ of state propaganda marching along the path of success and development. The biggest threat to this picture of successful development seems to be ethnic tension and threats of regional secession: the rioting between Uyghur Muslims and Han Chinese earlier in the year received much more media coverage in the West than ‘mass incidents’ of a similar scale but which lack the racial element often do, and the same can be said of the unrest in Tibet last year.

However, what we want to argue here is that behind this picture of growth and success lays class conflict on a huge scale. The conflict between Chinese workers and their employers – along with their friends in the ruling Communist Party – has increased in intensity as the economic crisis has hit China, and has continued to deepen and continue as workers learn important lessons from struggles. This wave of struggle has continued well into 2009, and has yet to break.

China and the world economy
Though we may be familiar with the talk of China as a rising economic superpower, the tendency of the media to discuss the matter simply in terms of competing national blocs, with China playing the role of a growing threat to US hegemony , has meant that China’s overall role in the global economy is less well understood. While China certainly does engage in geopolitical rivalry with the US, and boasts rival financial, energy, and increasingly high-level manufacturing industries, the country also plays an important symbiotic role with the US and other western economies within the capitalist system. The relationship of mutual economic dependence between the West – the US in particular – and China has been important in recent years, as debt-fuelled consumption in the US served to stave off threatened crises at the turn of the century (most significantly following the collapse of the dot.com bubble). China’s export-driven manufacturing industries pumped out the commodities to meet this burgeoning demand, fuelling the growth of China as a centre for the accumulation of capital. Meanwhile Chinese capitalists increasingly became global players in the world of investment and credit.

It was not difficult to predict that the current financial crisis which began last year would have significant effects on China. The intricate practices of packaging, trading and reselling debt which laced the global financial industry led to the spread of risk throughout the system in a way which was nigh on impossible to follow. As crisis quickly spread throughout the system, confidence fell away in the face of financial disaster. The subsequent collapse in growth and attempts to claw back wealth from workers through cuts and layoffs in the West led to a drop in consumption, and hence a drop in demand for China’s export-oriented manufacturing industries. China’s economy virtually stalled at the end of last year, leading to huge numbers of layoffs and a concurrent wave of struggles over sackings and unpaid wages. Through late 2008 China saw a fall in the rate of investment, a fall in economic growth, a fall in state income and a fall in output.

However, since then there has been much coverage of the upsurge in the fortunes of the Chinese economy in 2009. Between the first and second economic quarters GDP growth was up by 15%. Manufacturing output increased by 11% from July 2008 to July 2009. It has been argued by some that 2008’s downturn was only in part due to the export-oriented role of large sectors of its economy and the subsequent turbulence they experienced due to the global crisis. According to these commentators, it was also influenced by the explosion in the prices of oil and food pushing down levels of consumption, along with the Chinese government’s anti-inflationary money policies. As the scale of these problems decline, it is argued, China’s economy can pick up the pace once more.

On the other hand, other commentators argue that job creation and increases in purchasing power are largely non-existent, and that total spending is in fact being carried by a thin sector of the population – well paid urbanites – while the majority is frozen out of the economy. The Chinese government, less hobbled by debt than Western counterparts, has launched a huge fiscal stimulus package which has pushed up output artificially. The unused capacity in the Steel industry is equivalent to the steel output of Russia and the US combined, for example. Likewise the stimulus has functioned to create bubbles in real estate and the stock market. It is argued that all of this defers crisis for the sake of short-term recovery, or at least the appearance of it.

Either way, it is undeniable that the crisis had a severe impact on the living conditions of Chinese workers, with cities in export-oriented zones such as Dongguan being hit by huge waves of layoffs. The situation for Chinese workers has remained largely unchanged despite the changing fortunes of the economy. The question of the precise reasons for GDP growth becomes moot when one million workers out of Dongguan’s workforce of ten million have been sacked. Millions of migrant workers have returned to the countryside as job opportunities in the cities dry up, and the purchasing power of many working class Chinese has been squeezed by wage cuts. What is vital, however, is that none of this has transpired without struggle from the working class in China.

A wave of struggle
According to Chinese government, the first quarter of 2009 saw the highest number of “mass incidents” recorded to date. The euphemism refers to strikes, demonstrations, protests, roadblocks and the like which involve over 25 people. The state claims there were 58,000 such incidents in the quarter, and should the trend prove to be consistent throughout the year, 2009 would be the most volatile since records began, with nearly twice as many incidents as the year before. While information can rarely be taken from the Chinese government on trust, the fact that unrest is building in China is undeniable, with large struggles over layoffs, withheld pay, land seizures, corruption, pollution and so on occurring on a daily basis, alongside strikes, occupations and protest over a range of workplace grievances.

News of much of the unrest has barely filtered through to the West, with the exception of certain high-profile incidents. The killing of a boss by an angry mob in Tonghua in the North-East of the country during rioting which accompanied a takeover of a steelworks was one such incident, an incident which also saw 30,000 steelworkers battle riot police.

Nonetheless, the broader trends are observable to those able to carry out the research. In recent months China Labour Bulletin has published a report which examined a hundred struggles, and found that workers are increasingly acting autonomously, and becoming powerful enough to force governments to intervene and end the dispute.2

Moreover, struggles are consciously being spread and replicated, with protests moving throughout regions like wildfire. On top of all this, workers are frequently going on the offensive, making demands in their own interests rather than just carrying out defensive struggles as confidence increases.

One important aspect of developments covered by the report has been the fact that workers are often bypassing the official trade union bodies altogether. Trade unions in China form little more than another layer of the state apparatus, locking workers into government and party manoeuvrings. The sole trade union organisation in China is the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. With 174 million members, it is the world’s largest trade union organisation. The ACFTU unions frequently run closed-shop arrangements, and the organisation of independent, competing unions is illegal. The ACFTU has deep ties to the ruling communist party, and participates in the implementation of government strategies and policy goals in industry. Moreover, it makes no secret of this, recently making public its “five-faceted and unified” plan for the protection of workers’ rights: “1.leadership of the party, 2. support of the government, 3. cooperation of society, 4. operation by the unions and 5. participation by the workers.” These points were ranked in order of importance.

What this means in practice can be seen in a recent case. When workers in Shaanxi attempted to set up a congress which would seek to put workers in control of unions and shopfloor organisation, the ACFTU swung into action, threatening the workers involved and claiming that the congress was a “reactionary organisation.” According to ACFTU officials, the congress was an attempt to destroy China’s “harmonious society”, and was being controlled by foreign interests.

Unsurprisingly, workers are increasingly seeing the ACFTU as part of the problem, not the solution, and have been attempting to bypass it altogether. They have sought to spread their struggles, causing enough trouble to disrupt the normal functioning of society and force the government to intervene, leaving the official unions and their petitioning tactics far behind.

A recent example of such developments is that of the taxi drivers’ struggles which have swept the country since 2008. Taxi drivers in Chongqing – who had previously been subject to repression when organising autonomously – went on strike en masse in November 2008. Faced with 10,000 workers undertaking determined action, the government changed its approach and sought to placate the strikers. After initial threats of repression, it ruled that their treatment was illegal and enforced their demands on employers. Following this victory, copycat strikes spread throughout the country, with drivers in Hainan and Gansu provinces beginning stoppages over similar grievances. In Yongdeng, a county in Gansu, the drivers blockaded the offices of the traffic bureau. Again, the government acceded to their demands. Fujian and Guangdong provinces were hit next, once again forcing the government to impose the demands on employers in order to stave off further unrest and to stop the struggle spreading further. The wave of strikes spilled over into December, with drivers in Guangzhou stopping work en masse. More mass taxi driver strikes have occurred this year, with 5,000 out in Quinghai province in June. Chinese taxi drivers have discovered that they didn’t get their demands met by petitioning officials, but by terrifying them.

Other workers have made use of similar tactics. In the November of last year 7,000 Factory workers in Dongguan – a major manufacturing centre – went on strike, occupied their workplace and blockaded roads after three months’ pay was withheld. The government was faced with paying the wages or the risk of unrest spreading through the city, and coughed up the money.

This wave of struggles has continued into 2009, and such incidents are happening at a higher rate than ever before. It is clear that workers are learning from their experiences, and their tactics are developing accordingly. They are taking control of their own struggles, and leaving behind the official unions as the dead weights they are.

Where next?
Though these are important developments, and show the potential for a movement of the working class acting in its own interests, they have not yet come near to challenging the ongoing rule of the party or threatening capital in a significant sense. The state is still capable of cracking down on organisers and militants, and has handed down lengthy jail sentences to those involved in strikes and protests in recent years. Even if it is current finding that backing down may be safer than attempting to crush struggles in many cases, it would certainly swing into action in the most brutal way if it felt seriously threatened.

On top of this, it is unclear whether the image of the CP as a party of paternalistic ‘socialists’ trying their best to look out for the interest of workers and peasants has been siginificantly dented. The belief that the CP is doing its best for the ‘Chinese people’- despite events and developments – is common. Workers still articulate struggles of the most confrontational type with reference to the revolutionary heritage of the Communist party. For example, during a demonstration by factory workers in Liaoyang in 2002 which demanded the release of imprisoned workers’ representatives and the sacking of the Liaoyang Party secretary, and which saw the attendance of between 30,000 and 80,000 people, workers lined up behind a huge portrait of Chairman Mao as they marched through the city. More recently, authorities have attempted to contain protests and struggles by focussing attention on inept local officials and party representatives, so as to draw attention from more systemic problems.

Just as it is important that workers break with any illusions in the Communist Party, it is also important that any alternative political perspectives that arise do not gain new illusions in Western-style democracy. While rights snatched from the state in the course of struggle are important, they are meaningless without the collective clout to enforce them on employers and the state. It would be a disaster if Chinese workers were to discover their power only to invest it in the cause of re-organising state-capitalism in favour of a less severe-looking set of ‘democratic’ rulers. Russians have had to learn this lesson the hard way, as the fall of the Communist party in that country has led to a collapse in living standards, incomes and employment for the majority of the population and the rise to power of a new ruling class of billionaire oligarchs as transparent in their self-interest as their ‘red’ predecessors.

An alternative political perspective is vital. This perspective must reflect the developing grassroots power of the working class in China, and maintain a perspective focussed on imposing change on employers and the state through direct action and solidarity. Consciousness develops alongside struggle, and we are seeing increasing confidence accompanying snowballing unrest. Radical new perspectives are not impossible, and are not without precedent in China. Any major unrest which threatens the rotten state-capitalism system must be accompanied by an outlook which maintains a healthy distrust of employers, the unions and officialdom alike. Only with such an understanding does the working class in China and around the world stand a chance of escaping the ongoing disaster that is capitalism.

Originally published in Organise! issue 73 (Winter 2009) under the title China: the working class against ‘the harmonious society.’Copies are available from the anarchist federation website.

1. 1. See The Economist, August 15th 2009
2. 2. See here: http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100507/

 

International anarchist statement of Solidarity with the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha

From A-Infos

Yesterday, Thursday 29th October, the Civil Police of Rio Grande do Sul, under the command of Governor Yeda Crusius, broke into the premises of the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha. Police seized various materials such as posters, minutes of meetings, the hard disk of a computer and also the contents of refuse containers that were at the headquarters. They also tried to intimidate those who came to show their solidarity and names contained in  the records of the organization’s website. Two comrades were arrested and charged.

The comrades of the FAG have spent years fighting against exclusion and casualisation, defending justice and decent living conditions. They are well known for their work with the “catadores” (collectors of cardboard and recyclable refuse), with the homeless and with the landless. In short, work they have been carrying on for years with those at the bottom of society.

This is the reason why the police of the State of Rio Grande do Sul is repressing the comrades of the FAG, a State immersed in corruption scandals, which takes a repressive stance against collectives and organizations that freely exercise their freedom of speech in order to criticize various anti-people policies of the government. This is the government’s response to social protest. And the FAG is not the first to be attacked – we must remember the murder of the landless peasant Elton Brum or the death of Marcelo Cavalcante last February.

We condemn these acts of repression in the strongest terms. We denounce the incongruity of Brazilian government policy, a policy of the right with left-wing words. A policy that is governed by the economic parameters dictated by the multinationals and therefore their militaristic, repressive tactics.

Not only do we reject this government repression, but we also express our solidarity and  support for the comrades of the FAG, for the constant and tenacious work they do with the ordinary people of their city, which the government and police authorities are seeking to silence by terror, intimidation and repression. We are sure they will not succeed.

It is important now to show support and solidarity. For this reason, we appeal to all anarchist, libertarian and grassroots organizations and collectives to protest against this attack.

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (Italy)
Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (South Africa)
Alternative Libertaire (France)
Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (Australia)

30 October 2009

This statement is based on the one issued by the Confederación General del Trabajo

 

LAPD officers won’t be charged in MacArthur Park melee

From LA Times

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office will not file criminal charges against any of the LAPD officers who discharged rubberized bullets and wielded batons during the 2007 May Day melee at MacArthur Park, officials announced Friday.

After a lengthy review, prosecutors said there is insufficient evidence to prove that any of the 30 officers who were investigated violated the law when using force, although some might have used “questionable tactics.”

The melee, which occurred at the conclusion of a pro- immigration rally and received national attention, resulted from poor police training, leadership and communication, prosecutors said. Their finding echoed the Los Angeles Police Department’s own scathing report on the officers’ actions.

Officers were videotaped wielding batons and shooting less-than-lethal rubberized bullets in an attempt to disperse the mostly peaceful crowd after a small group of agitators confronted police. Dozens of protesters and journalists were injured as officers cleared the park.

The department’s “planning, tactical and command failures” were the backdrop for the officers’ actions against “both violent protesters and nonviolent protesters and media personnel,” prosecutors said in their report. “The media had innocently and unwittingly positioned themselves in an area directly in the path of officers attempting to clear the park.”

In the immediate aftermath, Police Chief William J. Bratton removed a deputy chief and commander from their posts. Deputy Chief Caylor “Lee” Carter retired shortly thereafter.

Bratton also said he planned to discipline several officers and called for the termination of others for their roles in the melee.

But internal disciplinary panels gave no officer more than a 20-day suspension. Some officers, however, were demoted, according to their attorney.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles City Council agreed to pay nearly $13 million to people injured or mistreated in the May Day melee.

Carol Sobel, a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs, said that although the LAPD admitted errors in the incident that the “the whole approach toward disciplining officers . . . has been a total whitewash. They could have filed charges against the officers that were seen repeatedly beating people.”

But in their report, prosecutors concluded that “not every push or shove amounts to excessive force. We cannot establish that any particular officer’s actions were unreasonable or without lawful necessity in light of the tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving circumstances.”

They said that tactical gear worn by police made it difficult or impossible to identify specific officers, which is key to any prosecution.

Prosecutors noted that 20 officers and supervisors were subject to department punishment.

Los Angeles Police Protective League President Paul Weber praised the district attorney’s review, saying that it “sought only truth and justice, and was not influenced by any political agenda.”

 

Event in Seattle: No Olympics on Stolen Native Land

From Common Action

Tuesday, November 10th, 7:00pm

Cascade People’s Center
309 Pontius Ave N
Seattle, WA

In February 2010, Vancouver (Canada) will be host city for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Due to the negative impacts of the Olympics, including homelessness, ecological destruction, huge public debt, and a greatly expanded police state, a movement has arisen to challenge the Olympic industry & expose to the world its true nature.

Beginning in mid-November, 2009, organizers from No2010, an Indigenous anti-Olympics organization, will travel down the West Coast of the US to conduct a speaking tour on the resistance to the 2010 Olympics, to share their experiences, and to promote an anti-colonial & anti-capitalist convergence that will coincide with the opening days of the Games in February, 2010 (Feb. 10-15, the Olympic Games begin Feb. 12).

The event will feature 1-2 speakers from No2010 and the Olympic Resistance Network, a short video, with time for questions and discussion.

Sponsored by Common Action and Democracy Insurgent.

For more info: www.No2010.com, www.OlympicResistance.net

Bus Routes: 8, 25, 70-73, 74, 77, 79, 304, 317, 355, 377.

Cascade People’s Center is wheelchair accessible. If you have any questions about accessibility or require any other accommodations, please call 206-612-2962 or E-mail lambert@riseup.net. If you require childcare call or Email and we will work to arrange it upon request.

 

Anarchist Federation Gaucha FAG premises raided by police

From A-Infos

In this moment the Civil Police of Rio Grande do Sul under the command of the governor Yeda Crusius is searching the headquarters of the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG). The government’s search warrant allows them to seize political propaganda material accusing the government of corruption, files regarding the World Bank loan and the murder of landless peasant, Eltom Brum. This is an act of pure provocation by the Gaúcho executive, which is tainted by corruption and unexplained situations, such as the death of Marcelo Cavalcante in February this year. We call upon the forces of the Gaúcho left to react in a more unified way to this outrage.

In solidarity,
Federação Anarquista Gaúcha

Translated by FdCA-International Relations Office

In this moment, 5.31pm on 29th October 2009, comrades are making statements at the 17th Department in Rua Voluntários da Pátria, 1500, near the Porto Alegre bus station. The Civil Police have seized printed material,
files and even the computer at the FAG headquarters. This is an official conspiracy designed to attack the forces of the non-parliamentary left with a social base in Rio Grande do Sul! —– Such a reaction was to be expected, since the FAG has always acted with modesty but tenacity. We are amongst the stiffest in our defence of the interests and strategic objectives of the Gaúcho people. This act will be publicly denounced, proving to the oppressed classes of Rio Grande do Sul the nature of this vile attack ordered by a government which is accused of much more serious crimes.

Those who struggle will never die!
Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG)

Translated by FdCA-International Relations Office

 

Obama’s Dirty War On Immigrants

From Upside Down World

Under Bush, immigrant communities lived in a constant state of fear. “Homeland Security” agents terrorized citizens and workers alike, arresting anyone who appeared Latino or lacked ID.  Families were separated, children left parentless, property abandoned, and long-lasting relationships severed.

This scenario has changed only slightly under Obama, and some say for the worst.  Obama’s campaign promise of undoing Bush’s immigration strategy was, like nearly every other promise he’s made, a blatant lie.  Instead, he’s adopted the “enforcement first” immigration approach: John McCain’s campaign platform which Obama once mocked.

The Obama Administration is taking immigration policies created under Bush and expanding them, much like he’s done with Bush’s war policies, bank bailouts, civil right restrictions (the Patriot Act, torture, unlimited/unchallengeable imprisonment, etc.).

As Obama’s head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, admits: “We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way.”  In this case the ‘right way’ is a continuation Bush’s way, though modified for public consumption.

While ending the large, media-attracting factory raids that Bush endorsed, Obama is intensifying “…a shift in federal law enforcement that began under George W. Bush and now has taken a particularly callous turn under President Obama,” according to Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times.

Rutten refers specifically to the recent firing of 1,800 mostly immigrant workers in Los Angeles, who suffered the same fate as thousands of others around the country victimized by the Obama administration.  Companies that are suspected of hiring immigrants are targeted and closely monitored, “…but instead of concluding with a raid, Immigration and Customs Enforcement simply compels the employers to fire anybody whose papers aren’t in order under pain of ruinous civil penalties.”  Rutten concluded, “…the most appalling aspect of the Obama administration’s wretched conduct of this affair is its studied indifference to the fate of the men and women it has thrown out of work.”

When immigrants are fired from their jobs, they receive no unemployment insurance. Thus, the heavy burden of being jobless during a severe recession is multiplied, and families who’ve lived in the U.S. for years suffer terribly. Obama’s merciless attitude to immigrants was displayed nationally when he proudly declared that, under his health care plan, “illegal immigrants will not qualify.”  When asked later about the health care of immigrant children, Obama seemed to show a moment of compassion. Exceptions may be granted, he said, “partly because if you’ve got children who may be here illegally but are still in playgrounds or at schools, and potentially are passing on illnesses and communicable diseases, that aren’t getting vaccinated, that I think is a situation where you may have to make an exception.”  The President is astonishingly clear: caring for the basic well-being of immigrants or their children is of zero concern.

This coldness is reflected in all aspects of Obama’s immigration approach — programs born from the Bush administration. Julia Preston of the New York Times explains:

“… Ms. Napolitano has expanded a program that runs immigration checks on every person booked into local jails in some cities. And she recently announced the expansion of another program, known as 287(g) for the provision of the statute authorizing it, that allows for cooperation between federal immigration agents and state and local police agencies.”

The first policy means that any immigrant that lands in jail for whatever reason faces potential deportation.  And although the law was created by Bush to deal with immigrants who committed “serious crimes,” Latino communities have long known this claim to be a fraud.  Officers instead arrest immigrants on minor or manufactured charges and alter their lives forever.

The second mentioned program will greatly increase these injustices. Before Bush, immigration laws were enforced by the nationally-run immigration department, with the rationale being that local police were meant to protect and serve communities. Now, local police are being enlisted to hunt down immigrants, most of whom are no danger to anybody and are productive members of their communities.

The dangerous result is that immigrant and Latino families will be pushed further into society’s shadows: they will be less willing to call the police if they witness or fall victim to serious crimes, suffer from domestic violence, or are victims of hate crimes.   If they are not paid by their employer — a very regular occurrence — no one will be held accountable.

These types of crimes will be greatly encouraged by Obama’s new policy, alongside another form of abuse.  Many Latino communities have become familiar with police picking up suspected immigrants off the street and sending them to deportation facilities — even though no crime has been committed. Knowing that these racial profiling abuses would likely increase with local police becoming immigration enforcers, the Obama Administration gave lip-service to the increased “oversight” of the expanded policy, but little action is likely to follow, and civil rights violations will almost certainly increase.

Another Bush policy being expanded under Obama is the controversial E-verify system, which gives governmental access to employers’ employment records, with the intention of verifying the legitimate documents of employees.  Aside from the above-mentioned hardships this is already creating for thousands of families, the system is accused of being highly dysfunctional and error-ridden, like its predecessor the “no match” letter.

“No match” letters were mailed to workers and employers alike to notify them that a worker’s social security number didn’t match — implying that the worker was using a fake number to gain employment.  The “no match” system was recently scrapped, likely due to the enormous number of errors it committed and consequent outcry (I can personally attest that the system was flawed, as my Caucasian, Indiana-born domestic partner received such a letter).

Obama’s policies do represent a drastic swerve to the right on the issue of immigration, but, on the other hand, he’s just following the Democratic Party line, which is itself becoming hysterically anti-immigrant.  High ranking Democrat Charles Schumer is leading the Democrat offensive, helping create a highly punitive “immigration reform” bill that includes Bush-era border militarization.

So far, this bill consists only of “general principles,” polices agreed upon to appease big business sectors that benefits from immigrant labor. Highly skilled immigrants will be favored and the lower skilled deported; some immigrants will be allowed to stay and work, while others are hunted down like animals.  This divide and conquer strategy has already won over some immigrant and labor groups, who wrongly view the bill as “a step in the right direction.”  The Democrats have spoken at length about their immigration philosophy; they want to provide corporations with sufficient cheap labor while demonizing “undesirable” immigrants.

Why the right turn?  Since having taken power of both Congress and the Presidency, the Democrats have proven to be a very proficient tool for the corporate elite, following much of the same polices created by Bush.

The enormous public anger over these policies creates in the Democrats an urgent need for distraction.  Rather than focus on the super-rich that are profiting from the recession and the politicians feeding them trillions in tax dollars, the Democrats would rather have our scorn funneled toward society’s most vulnerable population.

Always left out in the immigration discussion are the factors that drive immigrants to enter the U.S. at all.  U.S. corporate-controlled foreign policy — under NAFTA and CAFTA — forced cheaply produced U.S. goods into the markets of poor countries to the south.  Impoverished farmers and others were forced out of their country (where they would rather have stayed) to feed themselves and their families. U.S. corporations took further advantage of the situation by paying slave wages across the border and by paying immigrants in the U.S. below-poverty wages with no benefits. Workers who speak out against these injustices can be conveniently deported.

Consequently, wages for both U.S. and Latin American workers are lowered. The scapegoating of immigrants is absolutely crucial to the functionality of this strategy.

Therefore, the only progressive solution to immigration is to unite all workers against the planned corporate offensive: CAFTA and NAFTA must be eliminated, and all workers in the U.S. must be given not only equal rights, but a livable wage.  To achieve this, unions must fight harder to organize not only immigrants, but the millions of other workers who have little or no rights on the job.  By doing so, corporations will be unable to exploit any worker so as to lower the wages of all workers.  These lofty goals would be easier to accomplish if immigrant and labor groups diverted their energy and resources away from the Democratic Party, so that they could be used instead for real social change.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org).  He can be reached at shamuscook(at)yahoo.com

 

Kansas City UAW plant workers reject Ford contract

From Yahoo News

DETROIT (Reuters) – Union workers at Ford Motor Co’s Kansas City assembly plant overwhelmingly rejected proposed contract changes that include a “no-strike” provision on wages and benefits, the local president said on Monday.

The vote at the plant where Ford builds the F-150 pickup truck and Escape SUV was a setback for the automaker and United Auto Workers union national leaders who have recommended approving changes that would bring Ford’s labor costs in line with rivals General Motors Co and Chrysler.

UAW members voted 92 percent against the agreement, citing in part a blurring of job classifications for skilled workers, the “no strike” provision and a lack of limits on hiring of entry level workers, UAW Local 249 President Jeff Wright said.

The vote was 1,712-147 against the contract changes at the plant, where Ford has more than 3,700 UAW-represented workers.

Wright took no position on the proposed changes.

Ford’s 2007 contract with the UAW covers some 41,000 workers at plants across the United States. Ratification of the proposed changes requires a majority of votes cast.

Workers at five Ford plants in Michigan and Ohio that have about 4,800 UAW workers last week backed the tentative agreement reached on October 13.

UAW workers have made a series of givebacks to Ford since 2005, most recently in February for changes executives said would save the automaker $500 million per year.

About 59 percent of production workers and 58 percent of skilled trades workers at Ford supported the contract changes earlier this year, but several local officials have said they expected more push-back against additional concessions.

Analysts see Ford as in a better competitive position than GM or Chrysler and some believe Ford could return to a full year profit as soon as 2010. The automaker has said it expects to be at least break-even in 2011.

Ford said agreements GM and Chrysler made with the UAW around their government-supported reorganizations would put the company at a disadvantage over the long term.

The proposed concessions include a wage-freeze for entry level workers, a reduction in the number of job classifications for skilled workers and arbitration on wages and benefits.

Ford affirmed or added to production commitments as well and is offering a one-time $1,000 bonus next year if the automaker meets quality targets as sweeteners for the changes.

Ford shares fell 16 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $7.47 Monday on the New York Stock Exchange.

 

Industrial Worker – Issue #1719, October 2009

Headlines:

• Another Starbucks Barista Unjustly Fired
• Sydney Bus Drivers Take Wildcat Action
• Berry-Picking Vietnamese Guest Workers Go On Strike

Features:

• Delegate Convention Ushers in New Era of IWW
• Steve Early’s “Embedded With Organized Labor” reviewed
• South African Ladismith Cheese Stinks

Download a free PDF copy of this issue.

 

The Anarchist Federation – annual report (Nov 2008 – Oct 2009)

From Anarchist Federation (UK)

An abridged version of this report is published in Freedom to coincide with the London Anarchist Bookfair.

The Anarchist Federation has experienced another good year of growth and now exceeds 150 members in England, Wales and Scotland.

New groups formed in Brighton, West Kent and Edinburgh. We can report a significant and active presence in Scotland, a highlight being members’ involvement in the Glasgow schools occupations. Numbers are smaller in Wales but increasing and a Cardiff group is in the making. In England it’s worth mentioning that since the last London Bookfair, Nottingham AF co-launched The Sparrows’ Nest library and archive which is building its collection and is open to visitors. Groups continue to involve themselves with social centres and helped open the most recent Sheffield one. Members participated in the Anarchist Movement conference and got stuck into most of the actions of national importance such as the Gaza demos, G20, Camp for Climate Action and support for the Lindsey Oil Refinery, Ford Visteon and Vestas Blades occupations. We wrote a well-received leaflet about Gaza and an intervention/perspective paper for Climate Camp.

The AF meets four times a year. We had a very enjoyable summer camp in Derbyshire, which as usual incorporated one of our national delegate meetings and featured daily cook-ins plus optional hiking, drinking and singing of anarchist songs (usually in that order). At our annual conference we discussed our involvement in education workplace networks and groups, as workers and students, and consolidated our two new caucuses. The women’s caucus has met at all of the last national meetings and the Fed as a whole is having ongoing stimulating internal education and discussions on feminism, gender and sexuality. The Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Trans/Queer (LGBTQ) caucus is producing another newssheet building on from What’s Wrong with Angry? and members intervened at Manchester Pride.

New publications since the last bookfair have included pamphlets on workplace strategy and nationalism. London AF have added to their Stormy Petrel series and Manchester AF have launched their own publishing outfit Peterloo Press which has so far concentrated on reproducing council communist classics. We increased Resistance bulletin to 8 pages, and members wrote for Freedom and Black Flag as well as our own twice-yearly Organise! magazine. Many groups also produce their own local anarchist free-sheets such as the Fargate Speaker in Sheffield, or collaborate on others such as the Hereford Heckler. We have supported the ongoing growth of local anarchist bookfairs, running stalls in Bristol, Belfast and in Manchester which the local group co-organised. Not least we have a shiny new website and an enhanced blog to encourage debate and comments.

The International of Anarchist Federations met in Prague earlier in 2009 following the 40th anniversary congress in Italy last summer. Since the IAF-IFA secretariat passed from Britain to Spain last year, we have helped develop deeper links in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Holland, and our international secretaries continue their correspondence across the world. With the repression of anarchists in Serbia, international solidarity is more important than ever.

Near future activity at home includes opposing the likes of EDL and in 2010 we hope to grow the number of local groups and so continue to spread anarchist communism far and wide. As usual we welcome joint activities with other organisations.

The Anarchist Federation, October 2009
BM ANARFED, London, WC1N 3XX
http://www.afed.org.uk (see website for regional and local group contacts).

 

The Practical Considerations of Building an Effective Anarchist Program Today Part I

From The Left Winger

Much of my time today is spent advocating for the need of an objective and functional program for anarchists in the United States. This is an ever present and paramount need, yet there’s very little out there about what an anarchist program ought to look like, what it is composed of and what exactly are its practical applications.

There are prerequisites to creating an political program, and attaining these prerequisites will shape our program and subsequently our strategy as anarchists. It is also important to note that, most likely, there will be not single, unified program and strategy to all anarchists in the U.S., but many different yet similar and complementary strategies.

The Political Analysis

The analysis of the current situation – its different forces and the relationship of power they share now – is the first and perhaps the most important step in creating a strategy.

Much of what we see being called political analysis today tends to focus on the other, particularly the other of the activities of the ruling class (the most recent war or attack on working people) or the other of movements outside our immediate range (Bolívia, Palestine, Argentina or Korea, for example.) While all these factors are important, the political analysis should be primarily focused on the situation in the United States; it should tally up the forces of reaction and the ones for revolution, it should try to understand what those forces aim at and consider how they might act to reach their goals.

To be a practical tool, political analysis must be precise. It cannot be optimistic (the Oscar Grant protests are the beginning of the uprising of the black youth!) , nor pessimistic (Fascism is here!), no matter what our feelings may be. It should not be one-sided, but it must take in consideration that every social act requires at leas two protagonists, even if one is just passive. We should be brutally honest with ourselves as the Left in considering our strengths – yes we are tiny, but how tiny? Where is our sphere influence? Where can we affect change?

We should use words and concepts carefully and specifically to mean what they mean – we are not living in a fascist society, nor in the Great Depression of the thirties. While comparison can be an useful tool, it is only so when we are clear about the difference as well as the similarities between the two or more situations.

Political analysis should also be clear about the motivations and needs of social forces, and separate possible consequences from what those needs are. Glenn Beck’s bosses are not keen on fascism, but did not disparage at whipping up fascistoid elements in the American right in order to reach their goals, specially because they think they can control those elements. If we keep a historical perspective, which a good political analysis should do, it is debatable if they can.

The best political analysis will be still incomplete, but it should give a clear picture of the historical elements and forces at play in at a determined moment.

The Analysis of Our Own Power

This is a refining of the previous exercise, but focused entirely specifically on anarchists. Sometimes it can be even more focused, and be entirely focused on one particular organization or region of the country. The more focused it gets, the more helpful it will be.

I particularly think that, given the current situation of anarchists and anti-authoritarian left forces in the in the U.S., there can be no real national strategy except building local power. Strong local organizations can later on get together to try and formulate a national strategy. There are some that disagree with that, and that is fine. The question to be answered is where and how can you affect the most change? That includes not only different social struggles, but different groups in that social struggle, different situations (material, geographic, etc.) and different angles of the same struggle.

Again, precision is everything. We must not let our aspirations and politics blur our vision when categorizing these aspects of a social struggle. There isn’t just the revolutionaries and the masses; there is the conscious revolutionary (libertarian or authoritarian), the movement activist (normally espousing a uncoalesced vision of “social justice”), the active participant (those participating in the movement for particular gains such as housing, better working conditions or an end to police brutality against a specific community). There are movements of the lower-middle classes and upper-working classes (such as the movement around foreclosures), the movement of the working poor (such as movements of the unemployed) and movements of the most economically brutalized (such as movements of homeless people). I could go on giving examples of other different categorizations, but what I am trying to say is that these different categories are affected is different ways by our ideological propaganda, by our actions and by our proposals (both practical, on the ground proposal and proposal for a future, re-organized society).

Well, that’s all for now folks, I’m not trying to write a book in this post. Next time I’ll be looking at the intersection between the political analysis and analysis of our own power, and the hurdles around creating an anarchist political program.

 

FAI: The Bolivarian Government Against Union Autonomy

From Tierra y Libertad

From the Iberian Anarchist Federation’s Tierra y Libertad website, an article describing and criticizing the government of Hugo Chávez and its attempts to co-opt the Venezuelan labor movement.

Orlando Chirino, a revolutionary Venezuelan labor leader, has recently denounced the Bolivarian government as “anti-worker and anti-union.” It would be difficult to accuse Chirino of being a “golpista” [1] or an “ally of imperialism.” In the year 2002 he condemned the coup, mobilizing to defend the state oil industry from the work stoppage driven by management leadership. In each occasion presented him, he supported and accompanied workers’ attempts to control factories closed by their bosses. He is rooted among the workers and was made a leader in the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), the labor union promoted by his own president Chávez. If Orlando has been part of the so-called Bolivarian movement for many years, what has happened in 2009 to get him to make these kinds of statements about the government he once defended? The main part of the answer is: because Chirino is an iron defender of the unions’ autonomy.

The attempt to control the workers’ movement from above began as soon as Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela. In 1999 a clash began with the traditional Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), a labor union created in 1947 by the influence of Acción Democrática (AD) [2], and changed, since 1959, into the main negotiator of the labor policies developed by the state. Nevertheless, in spite of Chavismo’s questions about the irregularities and vices of this organization, in the abscence of their own labor movement, they participated in its internal elections in October 2001. The Bolivarian candidate, Aristóbulo Isturiz, was defeated by the AD candidate Carlos Ortega, who became the president of the CTV. A year and a half later, repeating the same history of the CTV, the government created by decree what it called “the real labor union”: the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), which quickly reproduced the corruption that it claimed to fight. One Marxist organization that participated in its foundation, Opción Obrera, says it more clearly than us: “The UNT was born under agreements from above, and was ridden for a show for the rank and file; few authentic union leaders had power in it… [3] The UNT was born with governmental protection, which lifted it up. The criticized “perks” of the old CTV unionism are now granted to the leaders of the UNT, who are staunch supporters of the government.” Paradoxically, before the limited acceptance of the new labor union among the mass of workers, and the resistance of some sectors of the union to their cooptation, the Bolivarian power promoted new organizations in order to displace the UNT, as is the case of the Frente Socialista Bolivariano de los Trabajadores (FSBT).

A second milestone, justified with the argument of weakening the CTV bureaucracy, was the promotion of the so-called “union parallelism” [4] from the seat of government, creating unions artificially, from outside, in the principal industries of the country. In this way Chavismo would be able to publicize that with almost 700 registered unions, the Bolivarian process has promoted the organization of workers like nothing has before. However, this rise of the unions did not mean their greater influence on labor policies. One indicator is the end of the discussion of collective contracts in the public sector, counting 243 expired, paralyzed and unsigned contracts at the end of 2007, in a sector that in May 2009 employs 2,244,413 people, a quarter of those contracted by the private sector.

The decisions on salaries, labor conditions, and labor law are made unilaterally by the institutions of the state, after which they are mechanically ratified by the spokespersons of the UNT. In addition to the fragmentation and loss of capacity for pressure and negotiation, union parallelism has exacerbated the disputes for control of those workplaces in the areas of oil and construction – in which the union can place 70 out of 100 recruits – which have increased the cases of assassination of union leaders and workers in inter-union strife. Between June 2008 and when this text was written, there have been 59 murders that spread with the greatest impunity.

A third element is the creation of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), a partisan body that, in president’s own words, should absorb all organizations that support the Bolivarian process, including the unions. A few defended the independence of the workers’ organizations, but dissent from the official line was not tolerated. In march of 2007 Chávez affirmed in a speech “The unions should not be autonomous… we must end with that,” which was followed by successive declarations in the same line, reaching the zenith in march of 2009, when after ridiculing the demands of the basic industries of Guayana – the biggest industrial belt of the country – he threatened to use the police to crush any attempts at demonstrations or strikes there. For a revolutionary like Orlando Chirino, it was unbearable, stating at the time that it “constituted a declaration of war against the working class.”

Various initiatives are currently being developed to increase control over the country’s workers. For one thing, laws have been passed that limit and criminalize protest, requiring people to report periodically to the courts, in addition to prohibiting them from participation in meetings and demonstrations, such as occurred this past July 13 to 5 union leaders of the oil refinery of El Palito, in the west of the country. According to figures from spokespersons of the affected communities, at least 2,200 people would be currently subject to the scheme. It must be brought out that, curiously, more than 80% are part of the movement to support the national government. This detail is significant because since 2008 has come increasing social unrest in the face of the miseries and limitations of material life for workers on the ground. The protests for social rights have displaced the mobilizations for political rights, that set the scene during the years 2002 and 2006. The failure to meet the expectations generated by Bolivarian rhetoric, the weakening of patronage networks by declining oil revenues and the stagnation and decline of effective social policies, known as “missions,” have catalyzed the accumulated unrest in the absence of profound transformations that significantly improve the quality of life for the majority of the country. Another initiative underway, again by decree from above, is the replacement of unions with “workers’ councils” for discussing work conditions in companies, a proposal entered in the reform of the Organic Labor Law (LOT), a regulation that has been discussed in secret in the National Assembly, an executive that is promoted around the world as a champion of “participatory democracy.”

Other laws, that seem to have no connection to the world of work, have also been restricting workers’ rights. That’s the case with the reformed Law of Land Transit, which in its article 74 prohibits the closure of streets to obstruct pedestrian and vehicle traffic, which has been the historical practice of protest by the popular sectors, especially in demanding their labor rights. Meanwhile, on August 15 an Organic Law of Education was passed, which has provoked protest by opposition groups for its secularism and for establishing strict regulations for private education institutions. However, what this center-right and social-democratic opposition does not question, much less Chavismo, are the limitations to the right of association, unionization, and collective bargaining, which is not guaranteed. One sign of the reactionary character of the order is section 5.f of the first transitional provision, which states that teachers and professors engage in serious misconduct “by physical aggression, speech, and other forms of violence” against their superiors. To make matters worse, the fifth transitional provision regulates the use of scabs “for reasons of proven necessity” in order to break strikes and work stoppages, a practice that has become habitual in so-called “Bolivarian Venezuela.” In addition, the Chavista movement has driven an onslaught against the media outlets that don’t accommodate the government, whose principle motivation is the visibility of the conflicts and protests that they provide, in contrast with the scarce coverage of the state and para-state media, self-declared “alternative and community,” but without editorial and financial independence of any kind.

The role of Venezuelan anarchists in this moment of fracture of Bolivarian hegemony is to participate, accompany, and radicalize the conflicts, from below and with the people, and in this way to stimulate the recovery of the belligerent autonomy of the social movements. They must also become actively involved in the construction of a different, revolutionary alternative to the inter-bourgeois conflict for the control of the oil revenues that has engulfed the political scene in recent years, fighting the Bolivarian bourgeoisie in power with the same impetus as the potential rearticulations of those political parties it has displaced. In this way we walk, as always, without giving any concession to power and having our old values (self-management, direct action, anticapitalism and mutual aid, among others) as a bright horizon.

1. Literally a “coup-ist,” the connotation is a national traitor
2. AD is a Venezuelan center-left party
3. Literally “in the direction converged few authentic leaders with union trajectory”
4. “Parallel association” might be a better translation

Translated by Dan Knutson

 

Local Puerto Ricans Hold Layoff Protest

From NY1

Local officials and Puerto Rican New Yorkers took to the streets Thursday to rally against thousands of government layoffs on the island.

They converged on the steps of City Hall to call on Puerto Rico’s governor, Luis Fortuno, to stop the dismissal of public workers scheduled for next month.

The governor defended the layoffs, saying they’re necessary to close a $3.2 billion deficit and to pull the economy out of a three-year recession.

“People who are severely underserved already are being hit hardest. Unemployment is increasing. And the people of Puerto Rico took to the streets today to say no more, it’s too much. We are here with our people in solidarity with our people on the island,” said Vincente “Panama” Alba of the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights.

“To lay off over 20,000, some people are saying 30,000 workers in Puerto Rico, that is unacceptable. And that is not a way to deal with nay fiscal crisis. Fiscal crises can not be solved on the backs of working people. They have to be resolved with working with those unions,” said Sonia Ivany of the Labor Council For Latin American Advancement.

A mass demonstration was also staged in Puerto Rico on Thursday where thousands swarmed the island’s financial hub, blocking highways and setting fires in the streets of the capital.

 

Puerto Rico: Socialists call for an indefinite general strike (Machine Translation)

From Socialist Workers Movement (Puerto Rico)

Drafting

Socialist Workers Movement (MST)

San Juan-The Socialist Workers Movement (MST), in Press Conference today called on the workers of the country to carry out an indefinite general strike by multiplication of protest actions across the country.”All we can reverse these layoffs is to create a social situation untenable for the government and the rich of this country.” Sentenced Scott Barbés Caminero, MST spokesman.

The actions of civil disobedience must be propagated to the extent that Fortune is to make it impossible to govern. Only then can receive pressure from their real bosses, local and foreign millionaires, which would compel him to reverse the dismissals. This government and private enterprise only understand when they start to lose money. . And this only happens when you interrupt the process of buying and selling what they produce.If the people manage that situation is long enough to force the government to yield, may reverse dismissals. “Barbés said Caminero.

Socialist leader also indicated that the proposed Stop October 15 calls for the widest participation and planning of the bases of trade unions and workers of public and private sector and the thousands of unemployed. “ “It is necessary that the enrollment of all marriages require his leadership the broadest possible participation in this process and to retain the government.  We must challenge the Act 45 as did the Teachers Federation. The last teachers strike showed that despite the decertification, the union is more alive than ever achieving wage increases, halting the privatization of schools and stopping the offense of layoffs of thousands of teachers. However, those union leaders who chose passivity and alliance with the former government of Acevedo Vilá and the PDP and left alone in the Federation, now face a crossroads.  The government is leaving no fees. Or challenge the law by calling the strike and resist or the government destroys the joints.  Workers and workers in these unions have nothing to lose and much to gain from the strike indefinitely.  The pink slips are now a reality, or fight to rescind them or go to unemployment with serious personal consequences. “He added.

Scott Barbés leaders pointed out the opportunism of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) is now painted as allies of the labor movement in the past term, the government closed, implemented the SUT and continued privatization.  “They would have done the same as demonstrated by its record in government are so complicated because of the rich and Fortuño, the House of Representatives and the Senate.  Let us not come with crocodile tears now.  The real culprits of this economic crisis know well who they are.  They are great entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in their little profit imported them leave the streets thousands of mothers and fathers. “

“The government has dropped its mask, not a facilitator of the working people is their enemy and as such must be” finished.

 

Engaging with the Class

From Anarchist Writers

One of the deep insights of anarchist theory is that means and ends are inseparable. The method of struggle will have important repercussions on the realisable ends. The development of Anarchist theory and practice has been a search for liberatory methods that are likely to create the society that we hope to see. The role of the organisation then has to fall in line with those tactics and strategies that are liable to bring about a libertarian society.

“The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists” [1] (Abbreviated: The Platform) was first written after the failure of the revolution in Russia and the Ukraine. An attempt was made to give solutions to those factors in the struggle which had lead to failure.

In 1936, a syndicalist revolution was attempted in Spain. This attempt also failed. The Friends of Durutti Group [3] formed in 1937 in an attempt to guard the ideological purity of anarchism, and to advocate against the regimentation of the military. This initiative however, came too late, after the argument had already been lost.

Again, starting in 1956, we see the emergence of the FAU [6], also in rough agreement with the guidelines given by the Platform though likely developed quite independently. Later we see the FARJ [5] express a slightly more nuanced understanding of how the anarchist organisation should function in relation to the mass movement. This understanding was born out of the practice in working with various social groups, including the unions and students.

None of these initiatives were ultimately successful. However, the notion of Platformism, the Anarchist Vanguard group [2] [3] and Especifismo [4] have seen growing interest in recent years. This interest grows out of repeated failure by anarchists to gain traction since the failed revolution of ‘36 and a look at the (qualified) successes of the Especifismo approach.

In order to have a libertarian revolution, the manner in which the power of the state is dispensed with is essential. The “seizure of the state”, as Leninist groups approach the problem, simply replaces one form of rule with another. In order to change the structures of power fundamentally, from the base, it is necessary to have a social revolution.

Specifism

Specifism is an hypothesis. One which has not fully been tested or seen unqualified success. This hypothesis however is rooted in experience, of both success and failure, gained in real struggles. Since the working class is at such a disadvantage, we have not seen any unqualified successes, and therefore those techniques that look promising must be evaluated with a combination of theoretical probing and active attempts at implementation.

The hypothesis is that anarchists should organise into specific political organisations with the intention of promoting the development and radicalisation of elements in those sectors of society which can represent the interests of the working class. These sectors might include the unions, students, unemployed, community groups or anywhere else that strategic and tactical analysis would point towards as a promising sector.

This interaction with particular sectors, which we will call social engagement* involves the active participation of militants in these mass organisations and sectors in ways that will advance the class. The basic rule of thumb for determining advancement is summed up in the following maxim “anarchists should actively promote the increasing participation and power of the working class”. That is, we would like to see self-actualisation, self-organisation and the building of prefigurative libertarian structures. This rule of thumb, however, is insufficient. We must attempt to express the libertarian worldview simultaneously. This can happen in the ideological vacuum that is a consequence of struggle, when the illegitimacy of the common sense notions that we inherit from capitalist society are exposed.

We need to be bold in widening the division in thinking as the working class begin to see the bankruptcy of ruling class ideas.

Towards Non-Substitutive Engagement

Political revolution is the revolution of heroes, the revolution of a minority. Social revolution is the revolution of the common people, a revolution of the great masses. – Liu Shifu

Social engagement is an alternative to both the substitutionism of Lenin and Guevara, and its tacit rejection so often characterised by those who define themselves in opposition to Leninism in the anarchist milieu and the ultra-left. While not all Leninist or Guevarist tactics are substitutive, they tend to have no critique of the practice. If the revolutionary vanguard, the active or militant classes or the guerrilla armies substitute themselves for the working class then there is no libertarian revolution.

This is true because the elements who substitute can not know the aims of the working class. In the subjective sense, this class can’t even be said to exist in the absence of the realisation of their own position in society. In the absence of their own consciousness of existence, they can’t have any collective sense of needs. Their needs would then have to be assessed by a group that did not include them, but was outside them. Liberty is about the capacity to make choices. Any revolution in which decisions are made in ones stead, or on ones behalf, is not libertarian.

Neither can this substitutive element increase working class participation by acting in its stead. This participation is a crucial ingredient towards the creation of a new society run by the working class, for the working class. A substitutive group will eventually develop its own class interests.

History has born out this lesson with impressive regularity including the great “communist” revolutions of Russia and China. In the end, both Russia and China devolved into oligarchic capitalism as the substituted revolutionaries relaxed naturally into their position as the new ruling class.

The negation of the Leninist programme, which was embraced by the ultra-left and later by many groups including the Forest-Johnson tendency, and various anarchist and other libertarian communist groups, is now widely accepted in the libertarian left. This negation views Leninism’s direct active participation in struggle as so dangerous that any sort of activity is in danger of being substitutive. Interaction bears a threat of infection. In this atmosphere most libertarian groups have become either closed or interact only through propaganda, attempting to enlighten the class, but not to guide them.

Social engagement however asks for a third path; interaction for the realisable gain of libertarian advantage. This means that anarchists would actively take part in organisations and communities attempting to build class power. They would argue in their unions for progressive politics and revolutionary goals. Pushing beyond arguments for improved conditions towards the complete removal of capitalism. They would argue in their schools for open access to education. They would argue in their communities to for common ownership of resources and services. All of this would be done by including and assisting cooperatively with the class.

* This has sometimes been called Social Insertion by South American comrades

[1] The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, Dielo Truda (Workers’ Cause)

[2] The Manifesto of Libertarian Communism, Georges Fontenis

[3] The Friends of Durutti Group: 1937-1939, Agustin Guillamón

[4] Especifismo, NEFAC

[5] Interview with the Rio de Janeiro Anarchist Federation (FARJ)

[6] The FAU’s Huerta Grande

 

Against military violence : CNT supports the struggle of the Guinean People.

From CNT-F

The « Confédération nationale du travail-France » (CNT-F), stands firmly side by side with its Guinean comrades as they face yet another bloody repression. “Half a century of civil and military dictatorship is enough !” : these are the words you can hear from the Guinean workers’ mouths today. After the regimes of Sékou Touré (1958-1984) and of Lansana Conté (1984-2008), it is now the junta led for the last nine months by Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara that is suffocating the Guinean People’s thirst for freedom with its butchery and brutality.

Yet, for more than one month at the beginning of 2007, Guinean workers and the population stood up and answered the call from the “Inter Centrale Syndicale” (CNTG, USTG, ONLSG, UDTG) to claim their rights to freedom and dignity. The cost was more than 137 deaths and thousands of wounded.

Still today, the Guinean People are demanding nothing less than their due. We give them our full support in their struggle to put an end to the reign of this neo-colonialist African dictatorship that flouts the workers’ rights, treats the population with contempt, and blocks youth in a dead end.

We invite all trades unions and individuals everywhere to circulate the enclosed declaration of the Guinean social movement and send us messages of support at africa@cnt-f.org ; we will forward them to our CNTG comrades.

An outrage to one is an outrage to all !

International syndicalist solidarity ! Long life to revolutionary trade unionism !

The International Secretary of the CNT-F

 

The strike does not break the deadlock (Machine Translation)

From El Nuevo Dia

Following a demonstration attended by thousands in Hato Rey, opponents of redundancies in the Government announced yesterday a new phase in their struggle, to the Executive’s refusal to back down to layoffs.

Coalition spokesman All of Puerto Rico by Puerto Rico, Methodist Bishop Juan Vera, the main speaker of the activity, said the group will enter a phase of “peaceful insurrection and civil resistance will not stop” until the government lay down their intransigent attitude and outrage. “

Other Coalition spokesmen said they would prepare a general strike if the government does not agree. However, yesterday reiterated that Fortress will not reverse the layoffs of more than 20,000 employees. The layoffs stem from the Fiscal Emergency Law 7.

“Nowadays people do not ask, today declared a state of peaceful uprising of the Puerto Rican people and this will be until the government give up her attitude of intransigence and outrage,” explained Vera.

“We proclaim it to the resistance and civil disobedience that we went,” said Vera.

The demand was immediately rejected by La Fortaleza.  The Secretary of the Interior, Marcos Rodriguez-Ema, said that claim “is impossible to respond in the moment.”

Trade union and civic leaders agreed that the campaign of strikes and protests increased. “We will be preparing for a general strike when we understand that we are prepared,” said the chairman of the General Workers Union, John Eliza.

Federico Torres Montalvo, of the Puerto Rican Central of Workers (CPT), said a general strike lasting several days or unlimited is among the actions of the labor movement to increase pressure on the Government.

“Obviously, the fight does not end here,” said Pedraza Leduc, coordinator of the Association.

The mass protest gathered in the area of Plaza Las Americas and the nearby Roosevelt Avenue.

Pedraza Leduc said the protests paralyzed the commercial center of the island and most of the activity on the Golden Mile “In the banking area just saw people running through the area apart from the protesters,” he said.

The activities began at dawn with the demonstration of truck drivers in the port area and the picketing of the conductors of the Metropolitan Bus Authority (AMA) in Monacillos.

The crowd was mobilized from different parts of the metropolitan area in massive marches and caravans to converge in Hato Rey, with virtually all the unions of the country and dozens of environmental groups, civic and religious.

Roberto Garcia Lopez, “regular guy” who threw an egg against the governor last month, was the most requested character to take pictures. “Thanks for the support. I am willing to go to jail if necessary, “he said.

Among the marchers were countless redundant. “They dumped us personal leave that has the same time (in employment), but in positions of trust,” said Cruz Nicole Melendez, who lost his job in the Regulations and Permits Administration.

 

Puerto Rico: Reflections on the National Strike

From Global Voices Online

On October 15, thousands of people in Puerto Rico flooded the streets to protest the government’s decision to lay off around 17,000 government employees (in total there have been around 25,000 lay-offs this year). Workers and members of trade unions, women, environmentalists, religious groups, students, teachers, professors, lawyers, and the LGBT community, among many other groups of the civil society, answered the call of the labor movement that initially convened the strike. Universities, schools, and stores closed for the day.

The organizers of the event estimated that 150,000-200,000 people participated in the massive demonstration that started from different points in the heart of the metropolitan area of San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, particularly from the financial district, and converged in the immediate surrounding of Plaza Las Américas, the largest mall of the Caribbean and whose owners contributed to governor Luis Fortuño’s campaign. There have been no official estimates, although government officials minimized the number. The Governor and his Chief of Staff, Marcos Rodríguez Ema, immediately stated that the law (Law 7 of Fiscal Emergency) that made the lay-offs viable would not be repealed. There were no incidents, although at the end of the demonstration there were moments of tension between students and the police.

The methodist bishop Juan Vera, one of the keynote speakers of the demonstration and a member of the coalition of civil society organizations Todo Puerto Rico por Puerto Rico, declared that the country would be in a “state of pacific insurrection” until the government changed its policies and that there would be more acts of civil disobedience and resistance. Other organizers of the event are already talking about future strategies and another strike that would paralyze the entire Island.

The Puerto Rican twittersphere was extremely active. The conversation flowed under the hashtags #paropr and #twittericans. The people at @caribnews, @qiibo, and @microjuris, among many other citizen journalists, were constantly tweeting updates and news about the strike, and providing links to photos and videos. Many twitterers proclaimed the strike was the first event in which Twitter was used as a platform to transmit Puerto Rico to the world. These are some examples of the conversation:

@edwinvazquez: Este es el día que Puerto Rico pasó el curso Twitter 101. #ParoPR (This is the day Puerto Rico passed the Twitter course 101)

@blogdiva I thought liberation theology was a thing of the past – am glad it still has influence. #ParoPR

@comatoso
Para quedar claros: denuncio el incumplimiento de la unicameralidad, la mala administración, el sabotaje al Colegio de Abogados. #ParoPR (I want to make clear that I denounce the non-compliance of unicamerality, bad administration and the sabotage of the Bar Association)

Pero si respaldo la reducción de empleados de gobierno y no tengo nada en contra de las APP si logran generar empleos y bajar costos.#ParoPR (But I do support the reduction of government employees and I have nothing against the APP if it generates employments and reduces costs)

@elchascas Consigna anticipada en #ParoPR: Si la poli da cantazo, contrarresta con twitazo! (The message for the day in #paropr: If the police gives blows, counteract with a tweet!)

@zerock: No apoyo a los mantenios. Que van a su trabajo de empleado publico a bochinchar y no hacen un carajo. #ParoPR ( I do not support people who don’t work. People who go to their jobs as government employees to gossip and do nothing)

@elsorbeto Fortuño has Bush’s same trickle-down stimulus. Stimulate rich friends pockets and trickling-down on everyone else. That’s why we #ParoPR

Flows of information, opinions, videos and images also traveled through the Puerto Rican blogosphere like lightning. Here are some reflections on the national strike.

In his blog Sobre la comunidad LGBT y el mundo [ES], José Joel Degado comments:

Hoy las diferencias se fueron a un lado. Jóvenes, adultos, pastores evangélicos, metodistas y católicos, homosexuales, lesbianas y transgéneros, estudiantes, profesionales, abogados, médicos, independentistas, PNP’s y populares; todos unidos en un sólo reclamo. No hubo incidentes mayores, aunque hubo intentos de provocación.
Puerto Rico se levanta del letargo. Es hora de que exijamos nuestros derechos de pie, de frente y sin miedo.

Today differences were set aside. Young people, adults, Evangelical ministers, Methodists and Catholics, homosexuals, lesbians and transgendered people, students, professionals, lawyers, doctors, people who believe in Puerto Rico’s independence, statehood, and commonwealth status, joined under one single claim. There were no major incidents, although there were some acts of provocation. Its time that we demand our rights, with our heads up, and without fear.

Feminist blogger Amárilis Pagán talked about solidarity in Brujas y rebeldes [ES]:

Hemos estado sufriendo las agresiones continuas de un gobierno caracterizado por la violencia sicológica e ideológica. Todavía hoy, ese mismo gobierno menosprecia nuestra inteligencia y cree que somos un pueblo manipulable a través del miedo y del individualismo. Por eso, han hablado de terrorismo, de independentismo, de minorías supuestamente violentas y malintecionadas. Están apelando a prejuicios que en el pasado le han servido para hacernos creer que el pueblo carece de poder y que el gobierno de turno es la única entidad con la inteligencia suficiente para tomar decisiones a nombre de todas y todos. Quieren que nos miremos unos a otras con sospecha y que nos atrincheremos en causas fragmentadas para que abortemos un movimiento democrático sin precedentes en nuestra historia…Estamos ante un muerto que aún no se ha reconocido como tal y que está dando sus últimos aletazos de desesperación para detenernos. Es sólo un fantasma opresivo al que hay pasar por el lado fijando nuestra mirada en la equidad y la justicia que están vivas y necesitando nuestra acción solidaria.

We have been suffering continual aggressions of a government characterized by its psychological and ideological violence. Still, today, this same government undervalues our intelligence and thinks we can be manipulated through fear and individualism. That’s why they have talked about terrorism, independence, and of allegedly violent and malicious minorities. They are appealing to prejudices that have served them well in the past in order to make us believe we are powerless, and that the government is the only entity with enough intelligence to decide for us. They want us to suspect each other and divide us into fragmentary causes so we forget about a democratic movement that has no precedence in our history. But the only thing that has died is the idea that the government is infallible…We are before a dead entity that has not recognized itself as such and that is desperately trying to stop us. Its just an oppressive ghost that we must ignore while we look towards ideals of equity and justice that are alive and need our solidarity.

Gil the Jenius has another take:

We are already too late protest. That level of activity had a window that slammed shut back when two stupid men were shot by viciously stupid policemen. Since then, We’ve been largely spectators in a victimization society, both observers and victims, sheep watching wolves fleecing “others,” unwilling to see that “they” are also “Us.” Who’s the target We should be aiming at? Even We can figure that out now… But We don’t want to. It sucks to grow up and learn to accept responsibility, right?. Like We have a choice…

In Cargas y descargas [ES] Biology professor and blogger Edwin Vázquez made a list of his 10 reflections on the strike. One of them is:

A la prensa estadounidense no le importa lo que sucede en Puerto Rico, a menos que haya tiros y catástrofes.  Lo sucedido prácticamente pasó desapercibido en EEUU.  CNN le dedicó más de una hora a seguir un globo donde no estaba el supuesto niño perdido (el niño apareció escondido en su casa) y quizás una línea al paro histórico nacional de Puerto Rico.

The Unites States’ press does not care about what happens in Puerto Rico, unless there are gun-shots or a catastrophe. What happened in Puerto Rico was practically was ignored in the United States. CNN dedicated more than an hour to follow a globe that was supposedly carrying a lost boy (the boy later appeared in his house where he was hiding), and maybe a sentence to the historic national strike in Puerto Rico.

Cuerpo de Documentación has uploaded photos and videos of the strike. For context about the national strike and the situation in Puerto Rico, please see previous posts “A Crisis with Many Names”, “Such is Life”, “The Battle over Public Lands,” and “Ready for the National Strike”. The people at the nonprofit Center for the New Economy have also been  posting in-depth analyses on the Island’s economic situation.

 

Protests chase Fortuño (Machine Translation)

From El Nuevo Dia

The governor and chairman of the New Progressive Party (PNP), Luis Fortuño, today led the work of the State Board of that party at the amphitheater Julita Ross of Toa Baja, where the protest was staged outside.

Until there came protesters Hostosiano National Independence Movement (MINH) to speak out against the dismissals of thousands of civil servants in a time when the unemployment rate is at 16.4% through September.

Fortuño arrived without problems to the activity, where supporters of the PNP had also showing their support.

“The protests will continue, and where you go Fortuño will be the people behind. And this protest is not only MINH, there are people from the community  this is the protest of the people. We’re helping organize the unrest, yes, and we will continue doing, “said co-chair of the political, Héctor Pesquera at a radio station (WSKN).

He warned that protests will also come to Fajardo where it takes place there next week’s conference on the controversial public-private partnerships (PPP).

“There will be the people of Puerto Rico and all this week and all the time it takes and if it reconsiders Fortuño will lead the country into a general strike because here is to win,” he said.

“We will not stop harassing this privatization project in the country and causing more unemployment and misery.The people of Puerto Rico and said no and when people say no, no, no army, no police, no (Joseph) Figueroa Sancha, no one can put up with, “he said.

He argued that Fortuño and his Secretary of the Interior, Marcos Rodriguez Ema, need to understand that the people demand democracy and “they are employees of the people of Puerto Rico and can not do whatever they want.”

 

Shipyard workers clash with police in Athens

From Libcom

Shipyard workers clashed with police forces in Athens after the workers blocked the exit of the minister of Labour from his ministry following inconclusive negotiations.

Serious clashes broke out on Thursday 15/10 morning between shipyard workers and riot police forces outside the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity, blocking the main road from Athens to Peiraeus.

The clashes, which left two protesters hospitalised, erupted after inconclusive talks with Minister Lomberdos over demands by the workers of 1.500 euros urgent monthly payment to all workers and unemployed workers of the Shipyard Zone of Perama, a rise of the unemployment benefits to 80% of the salary, the immediate retirement of all shipyard workers over 55 years of age, and a freeze on loan payments to banks by shipyard workers.

The workers gathered first in the central square of Perama and formed a motorised protest march to the Ministry of Labour, in Peiraeos street. There they demanded to meet with the minister and were accepted through the strong riot police forces lined across the entrance of the ministry. After they presented their demands, Mr Lomberdos claimed to be in the middle of other negotiations with unions, and asked two days to discuss the demands with other members of the cabinet.

This brought about the workers’ fury, and as a result they refused to disperse and allow the minister to leave the building. After repeated failed attempts to salvage the minister from back doors, the police attacked the workers with blast and flash grenades and tear gas. The workers in response formed flaming barricades, and counterattacked the police, leading to extended clashes.

The police brutality against the workers, two of who were hospitalised, proves once again the empty words of the Socialists who have promised to eradicate police violence and place any policeman who attacks citizens or not outside the force. Typically, the government rep claimed “the use of police violence was necessary because the workers tried to occupy the ministry”.

 

Puerto Rico Unions Protest Job Cuts

From New York Times

MIAMI — Thousands of Puerto Rican union members gathered Thursday in a financial district outside San Juan to protest the government’s plan to lay off more than 20,000 workers in a territory with a jobless rate of 15 percent.

A general strike began at 6 a.m., bringing the bustling city to a holiday-like calm, as crowds converged on a large mall under the watchful eye of the police. There were no reports of violence, though several stores and private schools had closed.

“Today we are declaring the state of peaceful insurrection of the Puerto Rican people,” said a Methodist bishop, Juan Vera, one of the organizers, as he stood before the afternoon rally. “Today we go from protest to resistance and from resistance to civil disobedience.”

Several protesters, holding signs demanding work, directed their criticism at Gov. Luis G. Fortuño. He was elected to his first term last year as a Republican, promising to jumpstart the economy, but so far, job losses and negative growth have continued, punishing the island with its fourth year of recession.

Governor Fortuño has said repeatedly that he did not want layoffs, but had no choice. In interviews on radio and television on Thursday, he said that it was the only way to avoid a government shutdown because of the territory’s $3.2 billion deficit.

“There was no alternative,” Mr. Fortuño said. “And there is no turning back.”

This year, the governor cut more than 5,000 jobs; this round of layoffs will eliminate nearly 17,000 jobs next month from the Department of Education and other agencies.

Anger over the governor’s plan has been simmering for weeks. On an island with little industry, the public sector plays an especially large role, employing about 25 percent of all workers.

There is widespread consensus that many public agencies in Puerto Rico are inefficient, but with estimates suggesting that the layoffs could push the island’s unemployment rate to 17 percent, some economists have criticized the governor for throwing thousands out of work instead of cutting people’s pay or hours.

“What worries us is this was done in an only fiscal mind-set, looking only at expenses, and not looking at the other impact on the greater economy,” said Miguel Soto-Class, executive director of the Center for a New Economy, an independent research organization.

The protesters generally agreed. Maria Diaz, 39, a 13-year employee at the Highways and Transportation Department, said the administration’s approach showed a lack of compassion. “Where are these people going to work?” she said. “They did not think this through.”

Even Pedro Ortiz, a 35-year-old graphic artist at a San Juan advertising agency who described the cuts as “a necessary evil,” criticized the government for a firing process that he said seemed to single out lower-paid workers, like janitors and school counselors rather than higher-ups.

Mr. Ortiz said the protesters were driven more by passion than reason — echoing the criticism of those who said their efforts should have been focused on Mr. Fortuño’s office, not private businesses — but he said this reflected the spread of class-oriented anger.

“The government is claiming it needs to cut expenses,” Mr. Ortiz said. “But the leaders are a little unwilling to make a contribution.”

John Marino contributed reporting from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 

Trash tabloid “news”paper in Athens attacked in solidarity with imprisoned anarchists; Exarcheia residents fight back

From After the Greek Riots

“Espresso” is a tabloid so-called “news”paper in Athens, the sort of greek equivalent of “the Sun” in the UK or “Bild” in Germany. In-between soft-core porn and showbiz “news”, the paper has developed a habit of publishing the names of people arrested – but not convicted – for various, mostly political cases, in a clear defiance of even the state’s own laws. The paper’s immunity stands largely thanks to some of its very convenient links to the greek state: A “journalist” of Espresso was previously the spokesperson of the ministry of public order (in charge of the police force). When the police arrested and charged four youths for the conspiracy of the cells of fire case, Espresso was quick to assume their guilt and even publish “juicy” articles on the supposed relationships between the accused.

Shortly after noon today, around ten people arrived outside the headquarters of “Espresso”. Armed with pots, hammers, crowbars and sticks they smashed the glass facade of the building and trashed some of the cars parked right outside, while writing slogans in solidarity with the accused for the “conspiracy cells” case.

Pictures on Athens IMC

Meanwhile, in the police-occupied neighbourhood of Exarcheia, the residents have started taking things in their own hands. Seeing that the police are trying to build a heavier permanent presence in the area, an impromptu daily meeting has been called for 7.30pm every evening at the neighbourhood’s square, with only one immediate demand: Cops out of Exarcheia!

 

Still fanning the flames: An interview with Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt

From AK Press Blog

AK PRESS: There has been quite a buzz around Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. This is, am I right, volume one of what you call Counter-Power. Can you tell us a bit about what how people have responded to the book?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: The response has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re very happy with it. Of course, not everyone agrees with us on everything: that’s only to be expected, and anyway, we make it clear in the opening chapter that we want debate and welcome critique. Some folks, of course, don’t like the book at all—but no book can please everyone! Anyway, we want to stir things up a bit.

AK: Who is the book aimed at?

MICHAEL SCHMIDT: We have three main audiences in mind: activists on the left, university students and faculty, and the general reader interested in ideas, history and politics. The book is pretty much free of jargon, and tries to be as accessible as possible.

AK: What makes the book different to the existing general studies, such as Woodcock’s Anarchism?

Michael: Let’s start by making it quite clear that we greatly respect the earlier syntheses of writers like Woodcock, Joll, Marshall, Kedward—not to mention writers from within the movement, like Max Nettlau and Daniel Guérin. These inspired us, and helped lay the basis for our own project.

That said, one of the distinctive contributions of Black Flame is its global scope. We have set out to develop a genuinely global history of anarchism and syndicalism. In most studies, the focus has really been on parts of Western Europe, and to a lesser extent North America. In our project, we have placed movements in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Latin America centre-stage.

This is a single global story we are telling, though: we are not setting up any arbitrary divisions, positing any sort of binary “Northern” versus “Southern” anarchism. There is one movement, although it varies according to local conditions and initiatives.

AK: Why does a global perspective matter?

Lucien: It has a number of concrete implications. For one thing, “Spanish exceptionalism”—the notion that Spain, alone, developed a significant anarchist mass, popular, movement, especially in the early 20th century —simply cannot be defended anymore. It only works if you compare Spain to a narrow range of West European countries, and even then it falters when you look at the strength of contemporaneous movements in France and Portugal.

And once you look globally, you find mass movements of comparable, sometimes even greater, influence in countries ranging from Argentina, to China, to Cuba, to Mexico, to Peru, to the Ukraine and so on. What gets a bit lost in studies that focus on Western Europe is that most of anarchist and syndicalist history took place elsewhere. In other words, you can’t understand anarchism unless you understand that much of its history was in the east and the south, not only in the north and the west.

AK: The book also spends quite a lot of time looking at issues of tactics and strategy.

Michael: Exactly. Looking at the movement, looking globally, trying to find patterns, you are forced to think seriously about the issues that mattered to the movement. The existing general works have rather little to say about the debates over tactics and strategy that preoccupied the movement.

Lucien: But you can’t, for example, get into the literature on, say syndicalism in South Africa, without seeing that people were always debating, grappling with immediate pressing issues, like colonial domination, trying to relate the big theory to their concrete circumstances of racial animosity and a deeply divided working class.

Michael: So, part of the strength of the book is that looks at how actual movements grappled with issues like nationality, colonialism, race and women’s oppression, and immersed themselves in organised labour.

AK: You have also raised questions about how we define the core of the anarchist and syndicalist tradition…

Lucien: Once you look globally, then you certainly have to start to rethink the “canon” of anarchist and syndicalist theorists. Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin, the giants of anarchist thought, obviously feature heavily. They had a truly global impact. Kropotkin was, for example, the best known socialist writer in East Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century.

But beyond the Big Two, the movement had an amazing array of writers and thinkers, truly cosmopolitan. In our view, a serious list of key figures has to be global and include figures from within but also without the West, such as Li Pei Kan (“Ba Jin”) and Liu Sifu (“Shifu”) of China, Armando Borghi and Errico Malatesta of Italy, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno and Piotr Arshinov, of the Ukraine, Juana Rouco Buela of Argentina, Lucia Sanchez Saornil and Jaime Balius of Spain, Ricardo Flores Magón, Juana Belém Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Antonio Gomes y Soto and Praxedis Guerrero of Mexico, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis of the Netherlands, Ōsugi Sakae, Kōtuku Shūsui, and Kanno Sugako of Japan, Lucy Parsons of the USA, Enrique Roig de San Martín of Cuba, Shin Ch’aeho of Korea, Rudolph Rocker of Germany, Neno Vasco and Maria Lacerda de Moura of Brazil, Abraham Guillen of Uruguay, S.P. Bunting and T.W. Thibedi of South Africa and others.

AK: What about Proudhon, then?

Lucien: In the book we argue that Proudhon (along with Karl Marx) was a formative influence on the anarchist movement.

It was to Proudhon—above all—that the movement was indebted for its stress on anti-statism, anti-capitalism, anti-landlordism and its focus on autonomy from the state, on radical democracy, and self-management. In this sense, Bakunin could say that Proudhon was the “master of us all”. Marxist economics were also absorbed (critically) by the anarchist movement, praised by Bakunin as “profound”, “luminous”, “scientific” and “decisive”. Some of these ideas themselves owed a debt to Proudhon.

However, Proudhon’s basic approach was to undermine the system by the creation of a non-capitalist sector based on cooperatives and self-employment, creating a sort of market socialism complete with competition. He did not favor strikes or direct action or unions.

Proudhon’s vision of transformation from below through building an alternative economy remains far more influential these days than many recognise. To take an example, many South African unions, and even the local Communist Party, favor building a self-employed “social sector” as a step towards socialism. This is straight from Proudhon.

Michael: The problem is that this strategy—sometimes called “mutualism”—is that it’s not very practical for most people, who lack basic resources. It does not really address the question of big industry, which cannot be replaced by piecemeal initiatives. Besides, Bakunin felt that it was unlikely that cooperatives could really win out against big business.

Bakunin proposed direct action instead: strikes, uprisings, the collectivization of the means of production and the abolition of the market. All defining features of anarchism as we argue below. That is why Bakunin stated that anarchism was “Proudhonism, greatly developed and taken to its ultimate conclusion.” It was indebted to Proudhon, but it was not Proudhonism.

AK: How exactly did you undertake a work on this scale?

Michael: Two things! One is the practical side: we worked for nine years on this project, debated endlessly, ran it by numerous reviewers and checked and rechecked everything. So, part one of the job was just plain old hard work.

On the methodological side: we defined the project clearly, and we embarked on a work of synthesis. It is simply not possible to undertake a project on this scale solely—even primarily—on the basis of primary, original sources. Like all such works, we drew heavily on existing scholarship, critically engaging a vast and diverse secondary literature by an amazing array of writers.

AK: Many studies view anarchism quite loosely as a general tendency opposed to centralism or to statism throughout history. Others identify figures like William Godwin in the 1790s, and then onto Max Stirner and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, before we get to Bakunin and Kropotkin. You disagree quite strongly. Why?

Lucien: Seeing anarchism as a universal tendency in human history is only possible if we define anarchism very loosely indeed, allowing all sorts of really quite unrelated ideas and movements to get grouped together.

You can’t put an extreme anti-social individualist like Max Stirner in the same camp as Bakunin, a libertarian socialist committed to class struggle … unless you use a very vague understanding of anarchism as a loose anti-statism. And then you have to also keep “anti-statism” pretty vague: Stirner, for instance, did not advocate the actual abolition of the state.

But reducing anarchism to anti-statism is very problematic. At one level, it’s actually pretty meaningless. The dictator Joseph Stalin’s declared goal was the withering away of the state. The neo-liberal Margaret Thatcher built her career on popular anti-statist sentiment. If anarchism is simply defined as opposition to the state, there is no logical reason to exclude either from the story of anarchism. They are usually excluded, of course, which is either arbitrary, or a tacit admission that the anarchism = anti-statism equation is an inadequate definition, because it can’t provide clear criteria for inclusion or exclusion.

Even so, there is a great deal of arbitrary inclusion going on in many works: you can find wildly different people ranging from Lao Tze, to Mohandas Gandhi, to Ché Guevara, to Murray Rothbard, to John Zerzan, labeled “anarchists” these days—and why not, anyway, using such a definition?

So, you need to have a more solid definition than anarchism = anti-statism, with better developed criteria. Otherwise there is nothing to distinguish anarchism from any other set of ideas, whether Marxist-Leninist, or neo-liberal, or primitivist or whatever—and no point looking at anarchism-as-anarchism since it’s an empty label.

At a second level, reducing anarchism to anti-statism is quite a-historical. It is only possible to posit a universal “anarchist” tendency throughout history, regardless of social conditions, if we treat anarchism as a sort of built-in human impulse. But if that is the case, then society should be naturally anarchist, and an anarchist movement would never have had to emerge anyway. Besides, the bloody history of humanity is hardly supportive of claims that people are somehow inherently hard-wired anarchists.

AK: What’s your solution?

Lucien: You need to explain the emergence of anarchism in relation to specific social contexts. The fact of the matter is that a conscious, identifiable, anarchist movement only emerged from the 1860s, and it emerged in the context of the rise of the modern working class.

That is, anarchism emerged as part of the struggles of the working class in the context of the new world of industrial capitalism and the modern state, and as part of the left, the socialist movement. More specifically, it emerged in the First International (1864-1877), and around the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, founded by Bakunin and joined by Kropotkin.

This is very significant.  The First International was a global body, bring together radical workers and intellectuals from Europe, the Americas, Australasia and Africa, among them Bakunin and Karl Marx—it was a hothouse of ideas and debates, an early example of globalisation-from-below.

And if we look at the actual writings of that movement, and its organized expressions, it’s clear that anarchism is about libertarian, revolutionary, internationalist, class struggle for a classless, stateless, egalitarian, self-managed and cooperative society. This all gets lost when vague notions, like anarchism = anti-statism, are used. As if anti-capitalism, for example, or an orientation to the masses, the broad working class and the peasantry, are not absolutely central to anarchist history, theory, and struggle!

Michael: So, for us, the broad anarchist tradition does not include figures such as Lao, Godwin, Stirner, Zerzan and so on, who reject the positions that emerged from within the libertarian socialist, labour union, majority of the First International. Anarchist history is the history of the movement, the tradition, which started with Bakunin and the Alliance.

Lucien: The tradition’s ideas draw heavily on the economics of Karl Marx, a profound thinker, and even more deeply on the revolutionary ideas of the great French radical Proudhon. Both men made an immense contribution—Proudhon, for example, was the key source of anarchist ideas like self-management—but anarchism, proper, was neither Marxism not Proudhonist mutualism.

AK: You speak nonetheless of the “broad anarchist tradition”. As part of this, you set up a very close link between anarchism and syndicalism. Can you tell us more about this?

Michael: By the “broad anarchist tradition” we mean the tradition that shares these basic ideas, and the class-centred analysis of society in which they are embedded. Accepting these ideas, this lineage, places you in the broad anarchist tradition regardless of what label you personally prefer. The label is not the main thing. You can call yourself an anarchist and have nothing to do with anarchism. You can consider yourself, I don’t know, a good classical Marxist, but actually embrace anarchist praxis—that would actually make you part of the anarchist, not Marxist tradition. The ideas, not the label, are the key.

Now, syndicalism—revolutionary trade unionism aiming at direct workers’ control of production—is a labour movement rooted in anarchism, emerging in the 1870s. It emerged within anarchism, with Bakunin. It is not an unrelated movement that anarchists latched onto because of structural and ideological similarities.

Lucien: The broad anarchist tradition therefore includes the syndicalist movement—even those syndicalists who did not call themselves anarchists; the content, not the label, is what counts. So, as far as we are concerned, then, if Stirner has nothing to do with anarchism, Big Bill Haywood and the revolutionary syndicalist IWW, for instance, are integral parts of the broad anarchist tradition.

AK: So why keep speaking of anarchism AND syndicalism?

Lucien: We don’t phrase things that way because we want to set up a false division between the two. No. It’s just that two terms are not precisely interchangeable: not all anarchists accepted syndicalism, not all syndicalists identified overtly, or even consciously, with anarchism. Plus, precisely because of some of the confusion about the anarchism/ syndicalism relationship that’s out there, we couldn’t assume that the label “anarchism” would be understood to include syndicalism.

AK: What distinguishes anarchism, or should I say, the “broad anarchist tradition”, then?

Lucien: Like liberalism, anarchism opposes the oppression of the individual, by race, gender, class, arbitrary law and so on. Against liberalism (and like the larger socialist movement), it stresses that capitalism is inequitable, exploitative and divisive, and so totally incompatible with real individual freedom. Yet unlike mainstream Marxism and social democracy, it does not see the solution as more state control.

The aim is individual freedom through a cooperative, participatory, stateless socialist society controlled and planned from below through assemblies, groups and councils. It was, and is, resolutely modernist, aiming at conscious human control of history, and the use of science and technology to better the human condition. It is something quite different to an “anything goes” approach, or to a post-modern scepticism about radical change.

Of course, once the movement emerged it developed some of its own myths, some of which have backfired a bit. While Kropotkin’s early work stressed that anarchism emerged in the First International, his later work pioneers the claim that anarchism was a universal tendency in human history. This is simply propaganda, an attempt to legitimize a new and very controversial movement—and has caused a great deal of needless confusion.

AK: But doesn’t this narrower definition lose some of the richness and diversity of the anarchist tradition?

Michael: We are perfectly happy to debate our approach: all we ask is that people engage seriously with our reasoning and evidence, and avoid just asserting that we are wrong. Saying that Woodcock or whoever used another definition does not actually refute us. Saying we are being “sectarian” or have an “agenda” does not—in any way—show that we are wrong. That’s not debate; it’s actually closing down debate. We ask that engage with our methodology, and assess in concrete terms the usefulness of our definitions of that tradition.

Besides, you can’t really engage with the ideas of anarchism until you know what they are, and define them clearly. So, while we sacrifice the illusion of breadth that loose approaches provide, we gain focus, precision and depth. Godwin is out, for example, but Shifu is in, and we can get into the ideas of the latter in detail, and usefully examine them as part of the same intellectual and political tradition as those of Guerrero, or Makhno, or Parsons, or Thibedi.

Lucien: This allows us to really get to grips with the real debates and developments in the movement. And the result—which was a surprise to us, too, as the project developed—was a genuine, international breadth to the movement that has most often been too focused on the North Atlantic. So, a precise definition allowed us to actually work very systematically, and unearth an amazing amount of material, an incredibly rich history.

As we indicated earlier, we really are talking about a very diverse and contested tradition. For example, anarchist analysis has usually seen class, understood in terms of both power and wealth, as central. But while figures like Bakunin used a very open, non-reductionist, non-determinist approach to class, there were certainly currents that were crudely class-reductionist and economically determinist.

Likewise, the question of syndicalism. It was hotly debated—could unions provide a concrete, practical means of attaining the revolutionary future it sought, or would they weaken struggles, bureaucratizing and co-opting workers? Or national liberation: should anarchists and syndicalists involve themselves in anti-imperialist struggles, and, if so, to what end?

AK: Does your book attempt to incorporate current academic thinking on issues such as race and gender?

Michael: What we do is locate these debates within the historical circumstances of the times. We recover, we tap, the rich veins of anarchist and syndicalist thought on the national question, on women’s struggles, on union strategy …

Lucien: Our aim is not to “update” anarchism by blending it with current academic approaches; not at all. What we set out to do was to find out what the actual historical anarchist and syndicalist movement actually thought, actually did, in relation to national and racial oppression, in relation to labour movements. Only with this historical depth is it possible to make judgements, and realistic to develop comparisons and contrasts with other approaches.

So, readers waiting for us to incorporate, say, so-called “whiteness studies”, or “intersectionalist” approaches to race, class and gender are going to be left waiting.

First, because we want to understand anarchism / syndicalism in its own terms. Second, because it’s a distinct intellectual tradition that has a great deal of insight into issues of social and economic inequality, as well as a strategy around these issues. Its interesting in itself, it does not have to conform to academic or leftist fashions. It’s not an abstract lecture room theory, but a tradition defined by a combination of theory and practice—a radical, libertarian praxis.

AK: Anarchism has an image of being extreme, purist … even utopian …

Michael: Generally speaking, though, most anarchists were quite pragmatic, most supported syndicalism and immersed themselves in unions and community movements, and most were active anti-imperialists. Most anarchists were what we call “mass anarchists”: they favoured immersion in the movements of ordinary working and poor people, pushing those movements through anti-authoritarian education and example to develop along the lines of radical democracy and direct action.

To take an example, anarchists and syndicalists founded and ran powerful unions in many countries (including Brazil, China, Peru and many others), while and anarchists like Yu Rim and Shin (to take an example) are famous anti-colonialists in their homeland, Korea.

Actually this is where our series title comes from: by “counter-power” we have in mind the attempts of the anarchists and syndicalists to organize right now, immediately, alternative ways of doing things, of relating to each other, and of fighting back against the parasitic ruling class. The idea was generally to build tomorrow today, acting to create the new society in the ruins of the old.

Lucien: As for utopian, sure, anarchism is utopian if we think a world of justice, equality, fellowship is utopian. But utopian outlooks are not to be despised. Unless we can really think out of the box, aspire to the best of all possible futures, we set our sights very low. Way too low. Unless we see the present as a passing moment that will one day seem absurd, and disgraceful, we end up accepting far too much of its evils. I mean, it would have been dismissed as utopian to think, 200 years ago, that forced labour like slavery could be abolished, or 100 years ago to say women were full human beings. Right now, it seems utopian to think we can get rid of hunger, militarism, racism!

AK: In closing, why would the book be of interest to the general reader?

Lucien: Well, the question is itself a bit problematic. Given its subject matter, the book already has quite a defined audience: it is going to be of particular interest to people who are interested in issues like unions, working class history and anti-colonial struggles and so on, to people interested in political theory and ideas, and it is going to be of interest to people on the left more generally.

Why? Well, for people interested in unions and history, we think the book tells a very important part of the story of ordinary people’s struggles. It’s a history that has often been lost, obscured or misunderstood, but it’s absolutely critical to understanding the history of those struggles. For people interested in political thought, the book provides a very thorough introduction to anarchist ideas and debates, comparing and contrasting these to classical Marxism, nationalism and liberalism. And for activists, we think the book will be stimulating and revealing—at worst, it will provide food for thought, and, at best, a new way of looking at things and hopefully, a spur to further research and exploration of the rich international praxis of anarchism.

AK: So, now we wait for Counter-Power volume 2, a global history of the movement, Global Fire: 150 Fighting Years of Anarchism and Syndicalism?

Michael: Yes. Black Flame lays out the theory, and the big historical themes, like the role of the movement in rent strikes, or in organizing in the colonies and so on. Global Fire is the big narrative, aiming at a truly global coverage of the movement. Like we said, there is so much stuff out there. One book really can’t cover it all. From Albania to Zimbabwe, it’s going to be here if we can find it.

Lucien: Black Flame is quite a rich work, which repays several readings. Global Fire, likewise, is ambitious and bold. As for its release date, there is much work in the rewriting and peer-review process still to be done, so we are keeping that close to our chests for now!

AK: Thanks for your time, and good luck!

Lucien: Thanks for the interview and the support.

Michael: Red and black regards to AK Press!

Michael Schmidt is a Johannesburg-based investigative journalist and journalism trainer, with more than twenty years experience in the field as a reporter for South Africa’s leading newspapers including the Sunday Times and ThisDay, and as a co-editor of the anarchist news and analysis website anarkismo.net. A seasoned activist, his work has taken him to Chiapas, to Guatemala during the civil war, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Rwanda, Darfur, Lebanon, and beyond.

Lucien van der Walt is based at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he teaches in development, economic sociology, and labour studies. His recently completed PhD on anarchism and syndicalism in early twentieth-century South Africa was awarded the prestigious 2008 Labor History international prize. He has written and lectured widely on contemporary working-class struggles and the relationship between race and class, and, together with Steven Hirsch, he is the editor of the forthcoming volume, Anarchism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880-1940: the praxis of national liberation, internationalism, and social revolution (Brill 2010).

 

Iowa Antifascists Disrupt Delay David Irving Event In Des Moines, IA

From Infoshop

On Sunday, October 11 at the Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, antifascists mobilized to confront Holocaust-denier David Irving with the aim and intent of disrupting or shutting down his book-signing tour and speaking event.

Irving is a notorious pro-Nazi antisemitic historian who concentrates on downplaying or denying the Holocaust while attempting to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Third Reich’s genocide. He has associated or publicly agreed with ultra-right, fascist or neo-Nazi ideas and organizations for almost half a century. He has been deported or refused entry into numerous countries and was imprisoned in Austria for “glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party”, a punishable crime there.

He is currently on a countrywide tour here in the United States, attracting various sized crowds of white supremacists, anti-immigrant xenophobes, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists in a variety of venues which include churches, hotels and diners.

We in Iowa became aware of Irving’s arrival about a week beforehand, thanks to the call out by Trenton Anti Racist Action on Infoshop.

Due to a number of prior disruptions and shutdowns, the venues where his events occur are not announced until 30 minutes beforehand and are announced only to people who have preregistered and prepaid to attend. In the past, different forms of redirect points have been used, but despite these security measures, all it takes is a little work to discover the location.

Shortly prior to the start of his event, we learned that it would take place at the Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Des Moines. We spread the phone number of the hotel throughout our phone network and internet. Others reposted the request to call the hotel and let the business know what we thought about them allowing someone like David Irving to hold events at their establishment. This tactic frustrated and seemingly overwhelmed the phone lines, blocking them up and creating busy signals.

We entered the hotel and immediately began looking for possible meeting places and areas. Thanks to a Phoenix New Times article, we knew what Irving’s personal assistant, Jaenelle Antas, looked like. Unfortunately, while clearly looking for a place in the lobby to hold the event, she spotted us and got spooked. She talked to the front desk, then jumped into an elevator. We saw which floor she got off on and all headed up there, temporarily avoiding security/management walking towards us. We lost her and then split up, circling different floors of the eight story building.

The hotel was sparsely populated. Nearly every room with lights on was either being cleaned out or clearly empty. It seemed to be the case that, frightened, Irving, Antas and whoever else was with them turned off the lights in their room to make it appear unoccupied.

The hotel security/management had been alerted to our presence, and soon caught up with some of us and said we needed to leave. Several of us split off while some were escorted out of the building. Those of us who were still left played a multifloor and elevator game of cat & mouse, continuing our search for Irving while evading the security/management.

As five police vehicles and a K9 unit arrived, we decided to regroup outside and discuss our next move. Six police officers eventually walked over to us and asked what was going on. When we told them who Irving was and what he represented, the cop talking to us eye’s widened. Despite this surprise, they, of course, relayed to us that the hotel was private property and we were not paying customers. Two of us walked back in with a police escort and attempted to rent a room, but the hotel refused our money.

Embassy Suites will rent rooms to Holocaust deniers but not to the antifascists opposing them.

Eventually, because of the nearly deserted downtown and the prospect of guaranteed arrest if we re-entered the building, we decided to leave. Despite the lack of a real confrontation, we declared our intervention a success. Their meeting was confined to a hotel room, with one attendee, who’s vehicle apparently became angry and forcefully burst the air out of its own tires.

We showed Irving that there are people in Iowa that will make it as difficult as possible for him and his ilk to operate openly. We crashed his party, and the handful of misguided fools who showed up to hear him speak were forced to settle for a mere ’stop and chat’ with Irving in a private hotel room with the lights off instead of meeting in a public area. We hope that communities and assorted antifascists across the country will greet him as warmly as we did for the remainder of his tour.

Signed,

Iowa Antifascists

Embassy Suites in Des Moines 515-244-1700

David Irving’s Cell Phone Number 305-923-6779

Trenton Anti Racist Action Callout + List Of Dates & Locations

Portland, Oregon Account

Non-Radical Media Account in Phoenix

Pictures of Personal Assistant, Jaenelle Antas

 

Update From Local Grand Jury Resister Carrie Feldman

From Twin Cities

Update from Carrie, who was subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in Iowa on October 15th:

Today I had my first appearance before the federal grand jury in Davenport, Iowa. I was represented by a federal public defender (although he could not be present in the grand jury with me). After reading a brief statement expressing that I would not testify, I was released with a subpoena to reappear before the grand jury again on the 17th of November at 9:00 A.M. It is likely that at this time I will be held in contempt of court for continuing to remain silent, and could face jail time up to the length of the grand jury (it convenes for 12 months total, which leaves 11 remaining after my November appearance). We are still looking into legal questions regarding how long they could hold me.

Although the prosecutor has still not been forthcoming as to what the are investigating me for, I now feel confident in assuming that they are looking into an ALF action that occurred at the University of Iowa in 2004. Many different signs, including a question from one of the jurors, have indicated this.

Some info about federal grand juries in Iowa:

The federal grand jury in Iowa has sessions for two days at a time, once a month. They are convened for 12 months at a time. There is always a grand jury going on and they hear a variety of cases–they are not convened for any specific thing. They are secret, and even the public defenders working on those cases are kept very much in the dark. The current grand jury convened on October 14th.

Here’s the statement I read to the grand jury:

First of all, I would like to state, unequivocally and most certainly for the record, that I have no intention of testifying before this grand jury. Based on information from the prosecutor indicating that I may be a target of this investigation, I am invoking my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. But beyond that, I am refusing to cooperate based on a sincere belief that to do so would run counter to my deeply held convictions and values.

Grand juries were originally created to prevent arbitrary indictments, but are now used as a tool of the prosecution to gather information. Grand juries undercut basic rights supposedly granted in the Constitution by denying access to counsel and coercing testimony. They are now, and have been for some time, used to investigate and intimidate those who would express dissent.

This is only effective when we are complicit, when we are frightened, when we are divided. Today my voice may waver, as I stand alone in this room. But I know I speak with the voice of every one of my friends, loved ones, and comrades when I say this: We will not be intimidated. We will not cooperate. I have nothing more to say to you.

Thanks to everyone for how much support I’ve gotten already. It means so much to me to know you have my back.

If you want to stay updated on my case, visit supportcarrie.wordpress.com

And remember–stay safe, stay strong, and fuck grand juries!

 

New book: “The International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam (1907)”, edited by Maurizio Antonioli

From Anarkismo

In August 1907, Amsterdam hosted an international anarchist congress with delegates from 14 different countries. Over the space of a week, it dealt with a series of questions, such as anti-militarism, anarchism and organization, anarchism and the workers’ movement, syndicalism and the general strike, etc., and also the foundation of a new anarchist international.

These were, of course, the years immediately following anarchism’s so-called “terrorist phase”, when anarchists realized that they had to go back to their roots among the working people, where anarchism was born in the days of Bakunin’s First International. Of all the matters discussed in Amsterdam, the most important for the future development of the international workers’ movement were undoubtedly the relationship between anarchism and the new syndicalist movement and between the specific anarchist organization and the mass labour organizations. How should they interact with each other? Should anarchists participate in the workers’ struggles as members of a political organization?

A century later, the various positions of anarchist militants and organizations have lost none of their value or polemic charge and serve as an excellent point of reference for all those today who are facing similar situations and asking the same questions. It is historical testimony of an indisputable value. The debates of the congress are enriched by Maurizio Antonioli’s introduction, which serves to place the congress is the correct historical context, highlighting the repercussions it would have on the social struggles at the time. The appendix on the 1905 Russian Revolution is also a mine of information and includes one of the most complete accounts available of the events in Russia.

Maurizio Antonioli is a full Professor of Contemporary History in the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Milan. He has published numerous studies on the Italian labour movement (in particular on the metalworkers federation and on the Milanese and Lombard camere del lavoro), revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism, including: Armando Borghi e l’Unione sindacale italiana (1990), Pietro Gori, il cavaliere errante dell’anarchia (1995), Il sol dell’avvenire. L’anarchismo in Italia dalle origini alla Prima guerra mondiale (1999). He was also one of the editors of the Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani (2003-2004).

Nestor McNab is a teacher and translator living in Rome, Italy. He has edited La Piattaforma Organizzativa dei Comunisti Anarchici – origine, dibattito e significato (2007) and has also translated pamphlets such as Anarchist Communists: A Question of Class (2005) and other material on behalf of the FdCA, of which he is a member.

The International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam (1907)

Edited by Maurizio Antonioli – English edition & translation by Nestor McNab

2008 – Black Cat Press, Edmonton, Canada.

$22.00

ISBN  978-0-9737827-3-8
280 pag.

INDEX OF CONTENTS:

Preface to the English edition

Introduction: Anarchism and/or Syndicalism, by Maurizio Antonioli

Editorial Note

The International Anarchist Congress

• The Preliminaries – 24 and 25 August

• First session – Monday 26 August – Morning session
  Drawing up the agenda. Proposal to reconvene the session on anti-militarism at the Anti-Militarist Congress.

• Second session – Monday 26 August – Afternoon session
  Reports on the state of the anarchist movement: Belgium, Bohemia, Holland, Romandy, USA, Holland (II), Vienna (Austria).

• Third session – Monday 26 August – Evening session
  Reports on the state of the anarchist movement: Germany, London’s Jews, Russia, Serbia, Italy, England.

• Fourth session – Tuesday 27 August – Morning session
  Anarchism and Organization. Voting.

• Fifth session – Tuesday 27 August – Afternoon session
  Anarchism and Organization.

• Sixth session – Tuesday 27 August – Evening session
  Anarchism and Organization.

• Seventh session – Wednesday 28 August – Morning session
  Anarchism and Organization. Motions on Organization.

• Eighth session – Wednesday 28 August – Afternoon session
  The Anarchist International. Motion to found the Anarchist International.

• Ninth session – Wednesday 28 August – Evening session
  Anarchism and Syndicalism.

• Tenth session – Thursday 29 August – Morning session
  The Anarchist Congress and the press. Changes to the Agenda. The Russian Revolution.

• Eleventh session – Thursday 29 August – Afternoon session
  Motion on the Russian Revolution. Syndicalism and the General Strike.

• Twelfth session – Thursday 29 August – Evening session
  Syndicalism and the General Strike.

• Thirteenth session – Friday 30 August – Morning session
  Anarchist and syndicalist movements in Argentina. Motions on Syndicalism and the General Strike. Declaration on Individual Rebellion. Anarchist Congress vote for Motion on Anti-Militarism.

• Fourteenth session – Friday 30 August – Afternoon session
  Anarchism and Anti-Militarism. Anti-Militarist Congress vote on Anarchist Motion on Anti-Militarism.

• Fifteenth session – Friday 30 August – Evening session
  Alcoholism and Anarchism. Productive Associations and Anarchism.

• Sixteenth session – Saturday 31 August – Morning session
  Resolution of support for imprisoned French anti-militarists. Election of the Bureau of the Anarchist International.

• Seventeenth session – Saturday 31 August – Afternoon session
  The Integral Education of Children. Motion on Alcoholism and Anarchism (not voted on). Resolution on Productive Associations (not voted on). Motion on Esperanto (not voted on). Motion to study the problem of an International Language. Closing address. Singing of the Internationale.

• Two Syndicalist Meetings

Appendix: The Russian Revolution

• The Activity of Anarchists in Russia, by Orlovskiy and Rogdaev

• On the Anarchist Movement in Russia, by N. Rogdaev

• The Preachers of Individual Anarchism in Russia, by Vladimir Zabrezhnev

• The Russian Revolution, by D.A. Bullard

Index

You can order this book from AK Press or directly from Black Cat Press by mailing orders@blackcatpress.ca or writing to Black Cat Press, 4508 118 Avenue Edmonton, Alberta T5W 1A9 Canada.

Related Link: http://www.blackcatpress.ca

 

Puerto Rico Engulfed in Massive Labor Unrest

From In These Times

To many Americans, Puerto Rico may be best known as a distant tropical idyll. But this vestige of American imperialism is rocked by economic shockwaves that hardly register on the mainland.

That might change on October 15, when activists plan to launch a general strike to protest mass layoffs and the devastation wrought by pro-business economic policy.

Last month, the government announced plans to lay off nearly 17,000 workers, starting primarily in November, which may drive unemployment up to 17 percent. The move has catalyzed opposition to Governor Luis Fortuño’s conservative administration, which activists say is deliberately strangling the public sector workforce.

In the lead-up to the call for a general strike by union activists, direct actions and protests have sprung up across the impoverished territory, as reported by Labor Notes, Puerto Rico IndyMedia, and the SEIU blog.

Earlier this month, student activists led a  demonstration at the Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico that culminated a school-wide strike.

Union activists have staged actions at government offices, including a blockade of the Governor’s mansion that led to a clash with police.

Brendan DeMille at Huffington Post reports that officials are preparing for the general strike as well:

the Governor’s administration has now threatened to charge picketing civil servants for engaging in terrorism if their actions during a planned October 15 protest infringe upon the flow of trade at the island’s ports, shocking civil liberties advocates who say the right to protest is clearly protected by the Puerto Rican and U.S. Constitutions.

According to the UGT union, reports the Latin American Herald Tribune, the planned layoffs are part of a broader campaign to gut the public sector workforce, which could eventually hit a total of 30,000 workers.  Teachers in public schools face some of the deepest cuts. Public transportation and social welfare programs will also be slashed, deepening the economic desperation in poor and marginalized communities.

Commentators point to the backdrop of a pro-business political agenda. Reinaldo Millán of Ventanasur (via Global Voices) says the layoffs are a prelude to wholesale privatization, under policies that enable corporations to control public services and to “administer public funds that were previously handled by public agencies that have been eliminated.”

Following a high-profile egging attempt, Deepak Lamba-Nieves at Trans(actions) places the labor strife in the context of government oppression:

[T]hey have pounced over the poor and destitute by displacing residents from informal settlements, curtailing the advancement of progressive grassroots efforts, and deploying police riot squads to deal with minor manifestations of civilian unrest. In sum, the middle and lower classes are the ones being punished.

At the same time, organizing is impeded by a well-worn internal rifts between the mainstream and radical elements of the labor movement, says José A. Laguarta Ramírez, an activist working with the teachers union.

Protest actions over the summer were virtually nonexistent. The success of the May Day march and rally was due in large part to simultaneous work stoppages by five of the island’s independent public sector unions, including the Federation of Teachers (FMPR), which was the cornerstone of that mobilization. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions, however, refused to walk out that morning, opting instead to rally at the Department of Labor in the afternoon, with a much poorer turnout, about 5,000.

While California’s fiscal crisis has become legendary on the mainland, Puerto Rico is in a much deeper hole, despite help from the federal stimulus. After three years of economic recession, it suffers the worst budget shortfall, as a proportion of its budget, of any U.S. state or territory. The Financial Times reports that Fortuño recently pleaded with the Obama administration for more assistance while touting “partnership” with foreign investors as a mechanism for economic recovery.

The unrest stirs memories of an earlier wave of labor protest back in 2005, in response to a similar fiscal crisis tied to social service cutbacks and foreign investment.

If activists pull off a general strike this week, the action will signify a kind of cohesion and militancy that has largely eluded embattled American unions on the mainland. Yet Puerto Rico’s labor crisis has a more complex social and cultural overlay. Workers are marching at a crossroads between the “developed” and “developing” worlds, rooted in the crumbling legacy of imperialism.

 

Legacy of Struggle: Re-examining the “Survival Programs”of the Black Panther Party and the lessons to be taken for present day revolutionists

From The Left Winger

The Black Panther Party “survival programs” instilled terror in the U.S. national ruling class all the way to the head – at the time, Johnson and Nixon, and the fierce hand of J. Edgar Hoover. While many in the Left like to sensationalize the armed and bellicose aspect of the Black Panthers, it is really telling that their survival programs ranked so high in the threat scale in the minds of the ruling elite.

The Black Panthers survival programs started from the premise that, in order to be able to wage a struggle, people should first be able to live. As my Comrade Ian Martin puts it:

“The BPP’s Ten Point Program was indeed a simple statement of desired reforms to strive towards.  But again, the situation of African-Americans then (and now) was extreme, with extraordinary levels of violence, police brutality, infant mortality, poor health, and poverty common.  As the Black Panthers conceived it, the Ten Point Program was a program for survival, to keep the community alive long enough to form some kind of revolutionary movement.  Perhaps some may scoff at demands such as affordable housing that is not squalid, crowded, decaying, and in horrible condition, or not having to be at the whim of capricious, uncaring, and greedy landlords, but to the poor, these things are essential.  It is difficult for any human being to pay attention to and fight against relatively nebulous concepts like militarism and the State when they are forced to fight concretely for the very necessities of life everyday.”

Ian Martin – From Reforms to Revolution

A strategy of building a long-lasting movement able to wage a protracted struggle against the State must encompass both a element of destruction as well as an element of construction. Not only must we bring out the contradictions of capitalism to the forefront, we must also show that those contradictions and problems that capitalism cannot resolve are not unavoidable but can be resolved through collective means and an non-capitalist framework.

Institutions are based on needs, real or perceived. Institutions like the State, police and “the free market” are perverted creations that satisfy needs like the organization of things, safety and delivery of goods and services. Our argument should not be that those things are not important, or that capitalism does not address those issues, but that they can be addressed better under a different system, in a more equitable manner so all will have those things, without sacrificing our freedoms and forgoing a fulfilling life. That we cannot have “pursue of happiness” under capitalism.

Constructive and destructive – our program must be both. Not in some future communist society, but presenting an inkling of what this future might look like and building today the capacity for self-organization and self-defense of the working-classes.

The BPP’s “survival programs” had a two-pronged aim – to deliver where the State and capitalism was lacking, and as a extremely successful propaganda tool. The first aim we must put in the forefront, the second aim is a consequence.

These acts must be, however, built on the premise of collective action, not on revolutionary charity. People must be engaged not just on receiving the services but also in delivering it. As anarchists, we must built on people the idea for self-sufficiency and expose the waste of capitalism and the superfluousness of the State apparatus.

What does that mean? Programs like Copwatch and Food not Bombs are not revolutionary or reformists in nature. Neither is a strike, a riot or a a march. Who is engage in it, and the proccess in which they are engaged is what makes an act revolutionary or reformist.

What we must be for, then, is the expansion of the creative capacity of those inside the movement – to create a space for reflection and analytical development for those that in general do not have such space or that are led to believe that they do not have such capacity. We must be destructive towards the outside, constructive towards the inside. It is not the victory in and of itself that matters (although that is also very important) but that the participants have ownership of such victories.

It has been fashionable for a while, for example, to praise SEIU as a paragon of defending workers, because they engaged in highly successful organizing drives. They were giving the union movement something it had lacked for a long time – victories. Yet many never looked at how those victories were achieved and the price that the labor movement payed for those victories to be achieved. The SEIU model of corporate unionism spread like a wildfire in the minds of many “progressive” elements of the union movement. If now the monster is being unmasked to many, it has to do a lot more with Stern’s own statements and power-grabbing than with a clear analysis of the situation.

I’ll be visiting this subject again later. This text is long enough for now; but the situation of working people in the U.S. is dire – much more now due to the “crisis”. Much like when the BPP create its survival programs, the need for programs that address the open spaces left by the State is ever present. While we must be in the defensive stage of the revolutionary struggle, any ground left open must be taken and held on to.

 

Industrial Worker – Issue #1719, October 2009

Industrial Worker – Issue #1719, October 2009

Headlines:

Another Starbucks Barista Unjustly Fired
Sydney Bus Drivers Take Wildcat Action
Berry-Picking Vietnamese Guest Workers Go On Strike

Features:

Delegate Convention Ushers in New Era of IWW
Steve Early’s “Embedded With Organized Labor” reviewed
South African Ladismith Cheese Stinks

Download a free PDF copy of this issue.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
http://www.iww.org/PDF/IndustrialWorker/IWOctober2009.pdf

http://www.iww.org/en/node/4820

 

Change in khaki: a very Socialist repression looms in Greece

From Libcom

Continuing waves of mass police operations in down town Athens set the pace for new era of repression in Greece

Everyone thought it was just a show of power – but it proved to be the Socialist government’s plan for “change” after 5 years of brutal right wing rule.

The police invasion of Exarcheia, the Athens alternative-radical hub, on the early hours of Friday 9 October was evaluated by most journalists, activists and veteran politicians as a power-show of the new government, in response to a limited solidarity attack against banks in the area just out of Exarcheia earlier the same day. Minister of Public Order Mr Chrisochoidis, the notorious anti-terrorist mastermind of the last Pasok administration, appeared to many as just typically determined to show who is the new boss. But the continuing waves of police invasion (3 by Friday 19:00 pm) into an area which is commonly acknowledged as the most vibrant intellectual, student and political hub of the country, with hundreds of people stopped and checked, many manifold times in the same day, shops stormed, and locals humiliated by being made to kneel on the pavement and body-searched, has come to prove the new government’s self-professed “antiauthoritarianism” a bitter joke.

Pasok, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, now in power has a long record of police brutality. In its first 8 years of rule, the “democratisation of the police” was revealed as a sham with the execution of 15 year old anarchist Michalis Kaltezas in November 17 1985 during the usual protest marches commemorating the 1973 Polytechnic uprising. The identification of Pasok with police rule at the time was reflected in a popular slogan about the chief of the Athens police: “Change cannot happen without Arkoudeas; he is not a man, he is an idea!”. In the second round of Pasok rule from 1993 to 2004, the Socialists gave away any remaining scruples by ordering the evacuation of the Polytechnic on November 17 1995, breaking for the first time the academic asylumtime since the student massacre of 1973, with 500 people arrested. Also under the 1990s Pasok administration the Golden Dawn, the infamous neo-nazi organisation of thugs, was allowed to form a paramilitary unit and participate in the Serbian sacking of Srebrenica, and the consequent massacre of thousands of muslims.

The new Pasok administration under Papandreou the third (son of Andreas Papandreou, founder of Pasok, and grandson of George Papandreou, the PM who led the British tanks against the people of Athens in December 1944) has assumed an antiauthoritarian gloss of postmodern proportions. The PM has called his government “antiauthoritarians in power” whereas Mr Chrisochoidis has gone public today saying that he is good friend with many anarchists and agrees on many things with them – pointing out that he is against vandals not political groups. Mr Chrisochoidis also claimed that from now on no police violence will be tolerated and any cop who brutalises citizens or has connections with the Golden Dawn will be immediately sacked. These official announcements have received great media coverage but also the scorn of people whose memory is not too short to remember Mr Chrisochoidis’s 2002 chemical torture of Savas Xiros, the first arrested member of the urban guerrilla group November 17.

 

Anti-anarchist “pogrom” launched by Socialists in Greece

From Libcom

One day after assuming power, the Socialists launched a massive invasion of Exarcheia, the Athens anarchist enclave, with mass detentions and brutal intimidation of locals.

On the early hours of Friday 9 of October, four days after the landslide victory of the Socialists in the greek national elections, and only a day after assuming power, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) proved its intentions towards the social antagonistic movement that has swept the country since the December Uprising: brutal repression.

Almost one thousand cops of all corpses, riot police, motorised police, secret police and usual uniformed officers swept Exarcheia, the anarchist enclave of the greek capital, at 01.30 am. The mass invasion of the police-free area was orchestrated by the new Minister of Public Order (or as the Socialist newspeak has it Minister of Citizens’ Protection) Mr Chrisohoidis, infamous for his unorthodox methods in capturing and interrogating members of the November 17 urban guerrilla group in the summer of 2002 – i.e. torture. On his side the genius of repression has as of yesterday Mr Vougias, a well-known ex extreme-leftist eager to share his knowledge of things revolutionary with the State.

During the invasion, which came only a day after the new PM, Mr Papandreou the 3rd, announced that his government is “antiauthoritarians in power”, hundreds of people were stopped and harassed by cops who broke into 26 bars, camped in the liberated park of Navarinou street and generally portrayed a most avenging and brutal attitude towards anyone who just happens to be within the invisible boundaries of the radical area.
Reports claim that several young people were seriously beaten during the operations.

According to the press more than 60 people were detained during the pogrom. Mr Vougias announced that “anomy will be abolished” and connected the invasion with an attack launched the previous morning by more than a dozen activists against banks and a fascist bookshop in the centre of the city as an act of solidarity to the 3 boys arrested under the anti-terrorist law.