BY PETER BOYLE
Activists in every capital city in Australia have begun organising
around calls for a worker-student strike and blockade of the stock exchanges
on May 1. The M1 coalitions have brought together veterans of the S11 blockade
of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne last year and other activists
inspired by the new global movement against corporate globalisation.
Militant mass actions are now planned in many countries on May 1, especially
in the Third World. The call for a global strike, initiated by the Democratic
Socialist Party and Workers Power, has also been supported by groups and
individuals in South Africa, Nepal, Pakistan and Indonesia.
A lively discussion has also begun on a number of internet discussion
lists. While there are a variety of local discussion lists, the main global
list is <m1-2k01@egroups.com>.
While started by activists in Britain, it has so far mainly been used by
Australian activists, as the M1 anti-corporate mobilisation is most advanced
in this country.
The discussion on the m1-2k01 list so far has revolved around the familiar
debate about movement organisation, with some anarchists making a fundamentalist
argument for a “affiity group/council of spokes” structure, which they
claim is the most democratic. Others, including the DSP and most socialist
groups, support open, democratic activist coalitions.
`Global strike'
Another discussion has focussed on the call for a “global strike”. Leon
Parissi of the Workers Liberty group, for instance, has argued that it
is a mistake for M1 activist coalitions to issue the strike call unless
union offiials agree.
Without such official backing, such a strike would fail, he argues,
and those workers who did strike for a day would be demoralised and conclude
that “left groups are not to be taken seriously”. This conclusion, he says,
would only serve to “leave otherwise militant workers even more firmly
in the grip of current leaderships, with no credible alternative pole of
attraction.”
At the heart of this discussion are differing political estimates of
the significance of the new global movement which has come together in
Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Prague, Seoul, Nice and other cities.
For its part, at its recent Congress held from January 3-7, the DSP
made a four-part assessment of this new movement.
First, the party assessed, the present character of the movement — as
a sustained, militant, mass movement against neo-liberal globalisation
and “corporate tyranny” — will be strengthened by a new round of major
actions which will take place around the world during 2001, just as occurred
in 2000. The next World Trade Organisation meeting, scheduled for November,
could be a turning point, especially if the governments of the rich countries
succeed in forcing a restart to the trade round scuttled at Seattle in
November 1999.
Second, the party sees this new global movement's power as lying not
only in the disruption caused to a few global summits but in the huge latent
support the movement has in the working class of the imperialist countries
and the oppressed masses of the Third World. The threat of a more direct
link with either of these mighty class forces poses a much deeper “disruption”
than the corporate rulers want to risk.
Third, this potential for the movement to link up with major class forces,
in a “leap”, is based on the pent-up discontent with two decades of global
capitalist neo-liberal offensive.
The traditional misleaderships of these classes, primarily the social
democratic and Stalinist parties, were massively discredited by their decades
of accomodation to the capitalist neo-liberal offensive. In Australia,
for instance, very few workers seriously doubt that Labor in government
serves anyone other than the corporate rich, even if they don't see an
immediate political alternative and still give their vote to the ALP as
the “lesser evil”.
Fourth, working against this is the weakness of the organised forces
for radical change. However, at very least, these forces ought to recognise
that this is a moment to be audacious and help build mobilisations that
can draw in the advanced detachments of the working class and other oppressed
classes.
On the basis of this general assessment of the movement and its context
— and its specific manifestation in Australia around S11 — the DSP concluded
that it was right to support M1 mobilisations which include blockades of
the stock exchange (and possibly some nearby corporate HQs), combined with
a call for a workers and students strike against corporate tyranny.
Don't hold back
Anti-corporate activists should try their best to get formal union support
for M1, including for the strike, but should not hold back from making
the strike call and wait for the trade union leaderships to take the initiative.
Because they won't.
The point of the M1 strike is not primarily to expose the trade union
leaders — but rather to practically build on the fact that the trade union
leaders are already considerably exposed. Unfortunately, some left activists
underestimate the growing political alienation of workers from their conservative
union leaders, at the exact moment we should be taking political advantage
of that alienation.
Another misconception is that workers and unionists will “sacrifice
a day's pay” on May 1 only if the strike is about immediate issues. But
that certainly wasn't true for the many workers who participated in S11.
Many workers can see the link between the movement against neo-liberal
globalisation and their immediate interests (not just industrial but social
and ecological). It is not hard to understand that global resistance to
the corporations' demands for more freedom to exploit us helps workers
all around their world in their more immediate struggles against the same
forces.
We should support any attempts to make this connection more explicit
by supplementing the main global “demands” of the movement — such as abolition
of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, the cancellation of the Third World debt,
opposition to “trade rules” stacked in favour of the corporate exploiters
and opposition to the corporate monopoly and abuse of technology — with
more immediate demands such as opposition to privatisation, individual
contracts, the Workplace Relations Act.
Deciding on such issues will be a big part of the task of the M1 coalitions
over the next few months.
If we're to link with militant workers, M1 activists will also have
to be involved in the major union struggles taking place now — such as
the Yallourn power struggle in Victoria and the CFMEU's fight against BHP's
individual contract offensive — and we should take the M1 call to arms
with us into the union movement.
But the other key to getting workers out on M1 will be to make sure
it really is a mass anti-corporate civil disobedience action. People are
sick of going through the “normal channels” of protest. If a blockade of
the stock exchanges on M1 can capture the imagination by going outside
those channels, then workers will back, regardless of whether their union
officials support it or not.
Of course, the call to strike on May 1 might be more or less successful.
But even if we get only the degree of worker and unionist support won at
S11, M1 will take the working class movement forward. And given how inspired
those unionists who participated in S11 were after the event, it should
be possible to surpass S11 and bring many more workers along.
Of course there are no guarantees about M1's success. But the decision
by militant sector of the movement to take the initiative and call a global
strike on M1 will not make it more marginalised.
Conservative union officials and ALP hacks in the student movement are
already acting to try to block the gathering M1 momentum precisely because
they are worried of the opposite: that, like S11, M1 will strengthen the
radical forces against the conservatives in the labour, student and other
social movements.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the national executive of the Democratic
Socialist Party.]
