Workers' Liberty

'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class'  

Workers' Liberty Australia  

On 11-13 September, tens of thousands will protest in Melbourne against the World Economic Forum, a get-together of bosses from big multinational corporations. We hope to copy the impact of the demonstration last November-December in Seattle, USA, where street action scuppered a meeting of the inter-governmental World Trade Organisation. If ingenuity, courage and daring can interrupt the World Economic Forum, then it will be a resounding slap in the face - or squirt of capsicum gas in the eyes - for the top profiteers. But the question is, how do we get a real choke-hold on global capital? How do we stop them running and ruining the world? Capital is not just greed, or money, or machines, or wealth. It is a social relation which arose at a certain stage in history. It is the social relation between a minority, owing large-scale means of production which can be used only by cooperative labour, and a majority who sell their labour-power to live. Within that social relation, production is regulated by the inbuilt drive of capital to expand itself - to reproduce its cycle of investment in means of production, buying of labour-power, production, sales of the product, and reinvestment, on a larger and larger scale. Whether you have a "soulful" capitalist - an Anita Roddick or a Ted Turner - or an unabashed Mr Nasty, makes little difference. What makes a continuing spiral of profits, goes; what doesn't, sinks. Over 150 years, in one country after another, from the first Factory Acts in Britain to the late 20th century welfare states, some checks were imposed on capital. They were imposed by working-class struggles, mostly by trade unions. Capital is most vulnerable at its heart, where it produces. The riches and the new technologies of modern capital are produced not by money-men, or financial speculators, or sharp managers, but by the collective efforts of workers, from machine-minders through engineers to research scientists. The profiteers appear as the active agent of the whole process only because they can impose a social order in which the cooperation of labour and science can be expressed only through the presiding voice of capital. As soon as the workers become even halfway conscious that we, not capital, are the creative force - and that we can stop capital's flow of profit whenever we have enough solidarity, organisation and determination to stop production - the rule of capital is endangered. At the least, it has to concede restraints and limits. Over the last twenty years, we have seen that those restraints on capital are always tenuous and unstable so long as capital itself continues to rule in society. Capital saw off a great world-wide upsurge of workers' struggles in the late 1960s and the 1970s, whether by direct, brutal showdowns like the 1973 military coup in Chile, the 1975 Governor-General's coup here in Australia, or the 1984-5 miners' defeat in Britain, or more piecemeal. It has then taken its revenge, in an era where rapidly-reduced transport and communication costs, technological revolutions through microelectronics, and the maturing of new regions as sites for capitalist production, have enabled it to twist, turn, cavort and restructure itself with unprecedented nimbleness. The old schemes for "regulating" capital have lost their grip. The enemy is not globalisation, or large-scale production, or advanced technology. On the contrary, all those are assets, created by the working class itself, which we must reappropriate for our struggle. The enemy is capital. The "call to action" for 11 September sets its aim as protesting against "the violence and inequality of corporate globalisation" and promoting "a global movement towards fairness, environmental sustainability and genuine democracy". Fairness, sustainability, and genuine democracy can be won only by abolishing the rule of capital - that is, by the working classes of the world becoming aware that our creative power can be expressed through our own conscious cooperation, rather than via each worker, individually, selling her or his labour-power to the supervising overlord of capital, and by us acting on that awareness. Once capital is abolished, the means of production must be owned in common, and thus their use must be decided democratically. Production must be planned for a sustainable future, instead of being geared to the short-term profit of a few. Democracy can no longer be limited to the cross on the ballot paper every few years, and can no longer stop short at the workplace gate. For the distribution of goods, we cannot immediately and completely replace the market mechanisms we inherit from capitalism and previous modes of production - to do that will require a higher level of social consciousness than capitalist society can prepare - but we can immediately suppress blatant poverty and blatant excess, and move progressively towards the rule of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". This future - which can be called socialism, communism, the cooperative commonwealth, the free association of producers, or what you will, but in any case is even further removed from the model of the old USSR than it is from modern capitalism - can be won first by seeing through the claims of capital, and then by demolishing the power of capital in practice. Easier said than done - but if enough people say it then the victory is half-won. To defeat capital is the decisive step, but to win the majority of the working people, both young and old, both daring and cautious, to the cause of defeating capital is the first step. The greatest impact of the Seattle demonstration is that it has set going discussions inside the trade unions, and between trade unionists and student or community activists, such as have not been heard in the USA in living political memory. They have created the possibility of a movement of resistance which is as multifarious, as nimble-footed, as little limited to set-piece spectaculars, as capital itself, and which also is capable of drawing in and offering channels of involvement to every worker and to every person willing to ally themselves to the working class in the great worldwide struggle between capital and labour, between profit and life. The new movement of resistance is already beginning to take on capital, not just in its assembly halls and ceremonial chambers, but in the clatter and roar of its production lines, by organising new unions, by exchanging information, and by supporting strikes through picket lines, stunts, boycotts, and publicity campaigns. From September 11, we should work to build a widespread resistance movement, rooted in the process of production, in Australia too.

To protest at the domination of corporate greed over human need, the Initiative Against Economic Globalisation (IMPEG) have planned a week of events, actions and protest to coincide with the annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank in September in Prague.

Thousands of activists from across Europe and beyond, united by an opposition to capitalism and a belief that people should come before profit are expected to converge in Prague during that week. The week kicks off on 23 September with a demonstration in Prague called and organised by the Czech trade unions. IMPEG are also organising a counter-summit and cultural festival beginning on that day and running until the 24th. The counter-summit will examine the social and economic costs of the IMF and World Bank's "development politics". On the 24th there will be a parade and demonstration on the streets of Prague.

The week of action culminates on 26 September with a Global Day of Action. Around the world activists will be organising protests in solidarity with those planned in Prague. In the city itself a series of actions and demonstrations are planned to unite activists, socialists and environmentalists in opposition to the corporations and institutions whose desire is to maximise profit and to pillage the world.