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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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by Martin Thomas
6.30am, Monday
11 September.
It is raining hard, and very dark, as we walk to the Crown Casino. Cold, too.
Melbourne, on the edge of Australia nearest to Antarctica, has a different climate
from the rest of this continent. On the way we meet a group of young women from
the Jubilee 2000 anti-debt campaign. They tell us that they plan to go first
to the platform set up by S11 at the end of Queen's Bridge, opposite one corner
of the Casino complex, and then see what's what "but try to avoid the more radical
elements". They don't mean socialists, they mean violence. For weeks the media
has been running scare stories. At meetings yesterday, Sunday, we've met a good
few other people in the same mood - determined to protest, but worried about
being caught up in excesses.
The Casino complex is huge, covering more than two whole city blocks. At Queen's Bridge we hear the loudhailers of the ISO (Australian offshoot of the SWP) summoning people to block the road. Since all we can see through the darkness is that this roadblock is blocking nothing at all, we carry on round the Casino. The police have put high temporary fences round a large part of its precincts. As we pass one opening in this fence, the police are shoving aside a group of protesters sitting in the road to let through a busload of workers. They do it efficiently and easily. Not good so far.
As we carry on round the Casino, we're overtaken by a large, purposeful group. Meeting by chance someone who had come to our Workers' Liberty pre-protest meeting the day before after noticing publicity for it on the Internet, and falling into conversation with her, we quickly find we're in the middle of an organised blockade of the entrance to a Casino car park. There will be 14 blockades in all, round the long perimeter of the building.
Someone tells us that this blockade and the neighbouring ones are being run by "Green Block"(environmentalist), while others are the job of "Red Block" (socialist) or "Black Block" (anarchist). Should we be in "Red Block" instead? It doesn't seem to matter. When we go to other blockades later the same day, we never find anyone taking any notice of whether they are "green" or "red" or "black".
The drill for the blockade is that people in the front row link arms and lock their hands together, while those in rows behind link their right arm round their neighbour's left arm and use their own left arm to grasp the belt of the person in front. Not much use for anyone who wants to start throwing punches at the police. But no-one wants that. And, despite all the worries we've heard beforehand, no-one seems to want to opt out when the marshals tell us that by joining this blockade we are declaring ourselves "arrestables".
Buses and cars arrive - and all turn back. Some Casino workers try to push through the blockade. (Mostly, from their manner and dress, these are security guards). None succeed. The marshals ask us to vote on letting in a journalist from Melbourne's liberal newspaper, The Age. We agree, then she has some trouble getting through the police lines behind us. No-one else gets in.
Marshals arrive hot-foot with news from other blockades. The police have made big pushes to clear a couple of them - and failed. The blockade formation has proved its effectiveness, even pushing police horses backwards. A flurry of sceptical discussion about whether horses can actually walk backwards is settled by a comrade who has worked with horses: yes, it is quite possible.
A big passenger helicopter joins the police surveillance helicopters overhead. Apart from those who have got in the previous night or very early in the morning, the only delegates who will get into the Forum today are those who come by helicopter or by boat. (The Casino complex is built along the bank of Melbourne's river, the Yarra). The Forum starts with only one-third its scheduled numbers present, and nearly one-third of the delegates do not get in at all on Monday. The gambling floors and the shops inside the Casino complex are closed - costing the Casino owners $10 million, or so they claim - and food for the delegates has to come by boat. Three bridges across the Yarra, and several major city-centre roads, are shut down.
It's looking a lot better. All the media coverage has presented this as a protest "against globalisation", and will continue to do so, but the popular slogans are anti-capitalist, not anti-globalist: "Human need, not corporate greed", "Global justice, not corporate greed", "Globalise resistance". One S11 marshal makes an impromptu speech arguing that it's a lie to claim that we are Luddites or against technology, and gets cheered, even though, remember, this is the "Green block".
Our confidence rises. The rain has stopped, too. Protesters make barricades of wheely-bins to strengthen our blockade. A spirited contingent of high school students who have struck for the day to join the protest marches round the building, cheered as it goes. Small groups with union banners circulate.
A new arrival on the blockade tells me that he used to be a stalwart of perhaps the most rigidly "economic-determinist" neo-Trotskyist group, but is now rethinking. We exchange views on the class nature of the Stalinist USSR. He says he now thinks Marx's critique of capital must be supplemented by the critique of technology by the German philosopher Heidegger. Fortunately there is a comrade close at hand who has studied Heidegger, and they are soon in keen philosophical disputation. Meanwhile the people on the next blockade along dance the can-can to keep warm, and street theatre groups pass by.
By now the blockade seems secure enough for us to venture out and circulate, distributing leaflets and selling papers. No-one shows any hostility to Marxist leaflets, and our sales are good enough that by Monday afternoon we're sending a comrade off to get more literature printed up, and by Tuesday afternoon we're scraping around to find who's got a couple of magazines or newsletters left to sell. There are sellers from other groups, too - the ISO and the Castroite DSP - but thinly spread enough that no-one can feel themselves "swamped by paper-sellers".
By midday and early afternoon the numbers on the protest must be well over 10,000, swollen by city centre workers on lunch breaks or coming off shifts and students coming from school.
A lot of the conversations are still about the logistics of the protest - how many delegates have got in? what are the police doing? - and people surge and eddy as announcements and rumours come round about one blockade or another being under threat. Richard Court, the Liberal premier of Western Australia, decides to spurn the helicopters and the boats and stage a confrontation by driving his car into a blockade. The car is surrounded and forced back. Later, four minibuses full of security guards drive up to the blockade on King's Way - a major city freeway which runs through the middle of the Casino building and then across the river. After a tense stand-off, they retreat. There are dozens of other mini-crises.
But there's time for more general talk, too. One man tells me that his path to the protest has been through the anti-nuclear-power movement in Adelaide. A woman says she supports the protest but believes the only way to change the world is first to change our personal lives. Another man says that he was first activated by the campaign against the Multinational Agreement on Investment, and then by protests against genetically-modified crops. A young worker who has been moving round Australia, from short-term job to short-term job, comes to our stall because he's sure that he's a socialist but he's put off by the celebration of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro on the neighbouring DSP stall.
There are lots of anarchist graffiti around the Casino complex, but no anarchist leaflets or papers, and no noticeable word-of-mouth advocacy of anarchism.
By 5.30pm the S11 marshals are touring the blockades to celebrate our victories and advise us to call it a day and be fresh for Tuesday.
6.30am Tuesday.
It's not raining, but still cold and dark. We go to the King's Way bridge blockade.
Only about 20 people there - scarcely enough to make a thin line across a slip
road leading into a Casino car park. On King's Way itself, heavy traffic flows
freely. The only consolation is fairly frequent hoots of support from the drivers.
The blockaders are passing round copies of the morning's newspapers. The front page of the Herald Sun, Melbourne's tabloid, screams: "Shameful". "Ugly protests forced Crown Casino to shut last night as the World Economic Forum was held hostage to violence. At least four police were injured..."
Police had received a few knocks when they charged with batons and horses to free Richard Court's car. But of all the large demonstrations I've ever been on which have received that sort of treatment from police, this is probably the most disciplined - no-one panicking and running, almost no-one lashing out. It's very impressive organisation indeed, from a new, loose, ad hoc alliance.
All the pictures in all the papers are of police bashing protesters. The writers feel no need to bring their prose into line with the pictorial evidence. Inside the Herald Sun, articles complain that the police are too "reluctant to use force" and claim that the protest has been engineered by the revolutionary left groups and the CFMEU (Australia's miners' and builders' union) in order "to impose communism - the totalitarian credo which has caused misery wherever it has been tried..."
The Australian, supposedly a "serious" newspaper, is not much better. Under the headline "Melbourne under siege", it claims that "thousands of protesters laid violent siege to Melbourne's Crown Casino yesterday".
Even worse, the Labor government of Victoria, the state of which Melbourne is the capital, runs scared from the media. Premier Steve Bracks promises that the police "will use greater force" on Tuesday. Bob Carr, Labor premier of New South Wales, tops him by calling us "street-fighting fascists".
The cops are in an ugly mood. They have (illegally) removed their name-tags, so that they cannot be identified when bashing protesters. "One of us got hurt yesterday", they say. "It's your turn to get hurt today". They lead someone up the ramp from the Casino car park and push him over into the blockade. "He's one of yours". It's a man with his face and neck bloodied and bruised, sobbing and shaking. He was on another blockade, and stood in the way to block the entry of some men in suits whom he took to be delegates. They grabbed him, dragged him off, put him in a choke-hold, and beat him up. They were plain-clothes police.
This will be the pattern of police action throughout the day - picking on isolated or vulnerable blockaders, beating them up for the sake of revenge and intimidation, but making very few arrests.
A few minutes later, the police suddenly surge forward, pushing us out of the slip-road and onto the sidewalk. Here we are, cornered by a line of police in fighting trim, with nothing behind us except the bridge-side railings and the river beneath. It looks grim. Almost all the delegates have got in this morning, by boat or by slipping through entrances before they got blockaded.
But more blockaders arrive. The police make no further move. They do not even try to take any traffic up or down the slip-road they have cleared. By 9.15am we are numerous enough to surge out and seize the whole road with a sit-down protest. King's Way will stay blocked all day.
Myself, I find that my joints and my back are so stiff that sitting down in the road is very painful. I'm hobbling and aching for a good while afterwards. If the class struggle is going to warm up like this, then I'm going to have to put more effort into keeping fit. The consolation is that in the crowd in the road, I see no-one else looking less than 20 years younger than me, and most looking 30 years younger. Although the general crowd milling round the protest is pretty mixed, the hard core at the blockades is overwhelmingly young, and my impression is that a clear majority are young women. Certainly most of the marshals who do such an impressive job are young women (as are the majority of the unaffiliated activists in the S11 organising committee back in my home city of Brisbane). Is this the first rehearsal for a new generation of revolutionary activists?
With King's Way safely held, we head off up to the Trades Hall, where a trade union demonstration is assembling. En route we meet a group of workers headed the other way. "Isn't this the way to the Trades Hall demo?" "It's just people with green hair and that up there. The workers aren't there. We're going down to the AMWU [manufacturing workers' union] office". In fact, though some unions do assemble their own contingents separately to join the march, it is a solid working-class protest, better than 10,000 strong, with the best representation from the AWMU and the CFMEU. Going round the rally after the march has arrived at Queen's Bridge, I find that in the first contingent of building workers that I approach, maybe half will refuse, politely but distantly, to take our leaflet. They don't want to talk. I suppose they think that following a union call for protest against the World Economic Forum fat cats is one thing, but getting mixed up with the leftist babel is another. Other groups of workers were more interested, taking pamphlets, sometimes asking to buy a newsletter or making a donation.
The official chant on the march is "Fair trade, not free trade". We try to raise a rival chant of "The workers, united, will never be defeated", and have some success. At Queen's Bridge, Sharan Burrow, president of the ACTU (Australian TUC), is among the speakers. She is a "leftist" in terms of the traditional line-ups in the union hierarchies, but she will have nothing to do with the blockade - in fact, she has crossed it to go in and plead with the assembled exploiters and profiteers for development "in which people play a part" (as if people didn't make capitalist development! The problem is, which classes of people, in struggle against which other classes...) Like all the speakers, she gets polite applause, no more, no less.
The standard line from the trade union platform is that the unions are only marching, not blockading, but it's up to each individual to decide where they go after the rally is over. In fact, the bulk of the trade-union crowd has melted away by the time the last speaker finishes. Some have gone to the blockades. For a while one blockade becomes the property of the AMWU. It's hard to get an overview of the whole Crown Casino perimeter and make an estimate of just how many trade-unionists join the blockades, but it seems pretty certain that few stay on the blockades very long.
Doug Cameron of the AMWU and John Maitland of the CFMEU differentiate themselves from the other union speakers, openly supporting the blockade. Maitland reports that in Perth, workers on a big building site have struck for 72 hours in protest against Court's attempt to drive his car through the blockade on Monday.
Cameron, though, is vocal for "fair trade", which here is just a euphemism for restored tariffs on imports. The "fair traders" try to square their circle by insisting that they also support workers in other countries. The rally has a speaker from a new independent union in Indonesia. Michelle O'Neill from the Textile, Clothing and Footwear union makes a remarkable speech openly counterposing international workers' solidarity to economic nationalism.
In the afternoon, on the King's Way bridge, I meet a young blockader who tells me that he works at the Casino. Yes, there are a few Casino workers actively supporting the blockade, mostly, like him, students doing casual work there. The regular staff are strongly unionised in the LHMU (Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers' Union). The LHMU has a contingent on the union march, but rather than calling the Casino workers out on strike, or forcing the Casino to pay workers unable to get in because of the blockade, the union officials are devoting most of their effort to saying how bad it is that the blockade stops their members reporting for work.
The blockades are edgier today. There are repeated alarms, repeated small incidents of police violence. On one blockade, the police appear in full riot gear with dogs, and stand there menacingly for a long while before withdrawing. Still, all the blockades hold. The police are keen to intimidate by taking on small groups and individuals, but they are not game to tackle well-established blockades.
As I leave to get my plane back to Brisbane, about 5.30pm, the S11 marshals are going round with a proposal to wrap up the blockades with a march round the whole perimeter and then to the Hyatt Hotel, where Australian prime minister John Howard is speaking this evening. They are conscious of the danger the police mood poses to small remnant groups of protesters, and addressing the problem well. Some blockaders, though, with high emotions invested in the patches of roadway they have courageously defended all day, are unreceptive. At one blockade, the protesters respond to a call from an S11 marshal for a vote on the proposition by turning their backs to her and ignoring her.
That blockade decides to continue until 8pm. When I arrive back home in Brisbane, I get a phone message. At 7.45pm, a thousand police have charged into the small numbers remaining on that blockade, batoning and kicking. Three ambulances have been needed to take away 15 blockaders too badly injured to be dealt with by the trade-union first-aid team on the spot. Journalists on the spot have also been bashed.
Wednesday daytime.
Most of the students at the high school where I teach are uninterested in where
I've been Monday and Tuesday. One class of 16 year olds, though, wants to know.
I tell them. Am I against globalisation, then? No, I'm against development dominated
by big-business profit at the expense of workers' lives and the environment.
They ponder the argument. And what about the violence? I explain what I saw.
Yes, says the most talkative of the students, the police are trained to intimidate.
Wednesday evening.
I phone Melbourne to get a report. There were more people on the blockades first
thing Wednesday morning than there were on Tuesday. But the protesters were
weary. For the first time, a minority have refused to take our socialist leaflets,
apparently because they identify the S11 marshals' move to wrap up the blockades
on Tuesday evening with the socialist groups who do have some role in the marshalling.
By 12 noon it was time to bring the protest to a close with a march through
the city to the Stock Exchange - and that march was able to transcend the weariness
and conflicts with a confident, defiant, triumphant assertion of strength.
The wretched Steve Bracks praises the police for their work on Tuesday, and the newspapers are as foul as ever. But that just shows us our enemies in clearer array: the big bosses of global capital in the background, and, at their feet, the media they own, the police, and the time-serving Labor politicians. They have been served notice of a new generation gathering for battle against them.
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