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Workers' Liberty'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class'Workers' Liberty Australia |
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In this issueglobalisation
1 globalisation
2 unions politics
1 politics
2 asylum
seekers Breaking chains: sexuality, gender and class politics by Riki Revolutskaya: queer students for S11. workers
power
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S11 - build the challenge to capitalismby Melissa White To activists on the left of the labour movement, September 11 in Melbourne directly poses the problem of how we will relate to new and younger militants who are radical and anti-capitalist but do not necessarily accept that the working class is the prime agency of social change. If the labour movement does not take the new anti-capitalist movement seriously, but instead sees it as an alien group of 'mad dogs', then a significant opportunity will be lost to integrate the socialist interests which lie latent in the working class with the impressive activist infrastructure that has been established in preparation for s11. The Labor premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks, has already attempted to intimidate the unions from lending their support to the S11 demonstration. And so far, the new anti-capitalist movement has not developed into more than a potentially big group of people with sufficient will and political interest to follow the representative bodies of multinational capital across the country. That is a great start, and undoubtedly the promise of a significant confrontation in which the police are prepared to use considerable force have informed the organizational activities of the s11 alliances (non-violent demonstration techniques, evasion techniques, medical workshops etc). The demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle last November-December had the advantage that they caught the US state forces somewhat off guard. Melbourne on September 11 will not have such an advantage. The preparations of the state forces are in an advanced stage because of the Olympics: the police are empowered with 'anti-terrorist' equipment and legislation is on the table, that if passed will explicitly empower the military to intervene against the civilian population in a situation of "domestic violence". But it must be noted that this itself is not qualitatively new. It merely codifies the States' powers in making requests for military intervention which already exist as federal powers and are granted in section 119 of the Australian constitution. The legislation aims to further empower the federal government to override the States to call on the military. All told, the state forces are 'flexing muscle' to show that they might be prepared to break up this demonstration, and if so, this will seriously undermine the political confidence of some activists who will subsequently focus their activities on building "alternative" politics. It is therefore worth pointing out in advance that it is nonsense to think that the demonstrations on S11 will affect the overall operations of globalized capital movements so that those demoralizing effects are not transferred on to the politics of the anti-capitalist movement at large. The future of the new anti-capitalist movement does not stand or fall on whether we manage to shut down the WEF meeting. If we do shut it down, the boards of the big corporations will still continue to meet, and still find ways to collaborate. If we do not, that doesn’t at all render the bosses immune to the greatest threat they face: the mobilization of their own workforces. The WEF is a business alliance of the world's biggest companies. It has no legislative powers to enforce global trade laws and regulations, and unlike the WTO, it is a not an international government organization. Unlike the World Bank, it is not a global alliance able to extend credit to the developing world in projects under the aegis of 'development' to impose structural adjustments as the price of credit. It is not an agent of the combined nation states, although its interests are certainly global and its links with governments are explicit. The WEF we will see in Melbourne constitutes a meeting of but one of the regional components of that organization - the Asia Pacific Summit (the WEF also includes sections for Africa and the Middle East, the Americas, Europe and Eurasia). The WEF exists solely for the purpose of enabling the intensive networking of its member corporations. After S11 While the anti-capitalist movement finds itself following the capitalist class around the globe in order to give itself political focus, that should remind us that it is the capitalist class, and not us, who sets the rhythm and agenda of capitalist policy-setting. Since it does so, and since there is no real opportunity to challenge capitalist organizations like the WEF more than briefly in September until socialist politics are properly integrated into the working class, the very maximum that we can hope to achieve on S11 is the mirror image of the WEF's objective of networking. Intensive networking by the various constituent alliance groups and individuals of the anti-capitalist movement can do important ground work for further united front activity. But we should not stake our whole success on closing down the Summit when the state forces have indicated they are prepared to ruin the demonstration and we have only limited resources to meet their political violence. We should, however, be very disappointed if the intensive networking that has occurred in the past few months is ultimately lost after S11 is over. This intensive networking provides the militants with real resources that create the rudimentary organizational nucleus of a united front. How can we achieve the proper integration of socialist politics into the working class? How can we avoid having activists turn consciously away from the working class after this demonstration? These two questions yield the same answer. An exclusive emphasis on "new" ways of challenging capitalist hegemony is but a limited part of the overall story, and this is our weakness that we must address. Seeking the democratization of consumption by curbing the excesses of luxury consumption and by the redistribution of wealth is a laudable goal, but it treats symptoms instead of causes. It is within the mechanisms of production that corporate domination is produced, organized, refined, and then continually replicated on an ever-expanding basis which allows, as we now see, even small peasant micro-economies to be hitched to the global capitalist macro-economy. It is at the site of production that the ruling corporate power, of which business groups like the WEF are only one expression, is able to mobilize, at its discretion, and with the governments of states and the mass media crawling over one another to help it, the entire world's working population on the basis of its exclusive ownership of the means of production. Not only does capitalist corporate power decide what things are to be produced on the basis of what will fetch it greatest profit irrespective of the people who produce, and the manner in which they will be produced irrespective of environmental and cultural concerns, systemically it also decides who will produce. And because it decides this, it also determines who will not produce. Capitalist corporate power uses its exclusive right to maintain the worldwide pool of unemployed people as the guarantee of competition it requires to keep wage push down and intimidate the working class from expressing its interest in organizing itself in democratic communities of producers in which it altogether ceases to be possible for the parasitic class of bosses to live off its back any longer. Capitalist corporate power literally decides who is a productive human being and who is not. A working class answer The world's growing working class has the latent potential to liberate us all from corporate power, create a fully self-organizing democratic society based on meeting human needs and desires, and end environmental destruction.The focus of S11 anti-capitalist activists then - whilst we are presently the most militant activist political layer challenging capitalist hegemony - should not be to isolate ourselves from the class that carries the ability to make our demands real. Our focus should incorporate not only strategies to challenge capitalist exchange (such as hacking into and diverting visitors from the Nike website), but strategies to address the domination of the points of production. In doing so we will strike at the very heart of capitalist corporate power, not by freeing up the choice to be a "consumer" who is able to wear shoes with a clean conscience since they weren't produced by child labour - not by getting better "consumers' rights", not by achieving equality in the market - but by dismantling the structure which allows a system of 'individuals' devoid of any individuality whatsoever to constitute itself as a pseudo-class of consumers. We should not lose our heads about what S11 represents on the whole. It should be remembered that whilst we might well be capable of disrupting the physical association of the various CEOs, politicians and influential media - and this would provide some temporary satisfaction for us - this falls short of confronting the ruling class directly. To do that, we need to get the working class on side: this is how the activism will begin to yield results for our politics, which are broadly socialist, but as yet undefined. It seems almost rude to point out, in light of the enormous organizational efforts of the various S11 alliances across the country, that the corporations of the ruling class could do their business with each other quite easily by a video relay conference! A get-together of the WEF members is entirely optional, and in this case is determined by the intentions of the major corporations' representatives to attend the Olympic Games. Our actions and the actions of the class we need to orient ourselves to should not be contingent upon the social calendar of the big bourgeoisie. We need to preserve all of the careful work carried out painstakingly by the various alliances across Australia and take it a step further so that we are not just organizing in reaction to WEF meetings but organizing independently to confront capitalist production as corporate oppression where it exists in its birth cradle - the factory, the mine, the wharf, the trucking depot, the office, the university: in short, all sites of capitalist production. Accordingly, in agreement with all activists, Workers’ Liberty thinks that we should aim to shut down the WEF summit. In addition to the activists' demands, we should also understand that the future of the movement rests much less on whether we can achieve that than on what we do after S11. Before S11, it is important to seek wider support from trade unions for strike action on the day and active support on the demonstrations. A conference on the topic of the effects of globalization on workers called "Other Voices, Other Values" is to be held on 10 September (11:45 a.m. at the Regent Theatre, 191 Collins St, Melbourne), which should be useful for us in making links. It is important, too, that new anti-capitalist activists should attend the demonstration called by the Victorian Trades Hall Council, "A Fair Share for Workers", on 12 September (10:30 a.m., from the Trades Hall, corner of Victoria and Lygon Streets, Carlton South). Finally, for all of us, it is vital to recognize the importance of studying and understanding the mechanisms of capitalist society, so that we can broaden the politics of the movement to incorporate activist strategies within capitalist production, not just on the streets or in the market place. |