BY PHIL HEARSE
LONDON — Ten thousand police were mobilised here on May 1, against the "threat" posed by 5000 anti-capitalist demonstrators. This grotesque overkill was accompanied by a weeks-long barrage of press hysteria, warning of "anarchy" and mayhem.
Prime Minister Tony Blair condemned the planned demonstrations as representing a "spurious cause" and warned that demonstrators would be dealt with. Former Labour left-winger Ken Livingstone, now mayor of London, chimed in with strident support for the police.
Huge numbers of police were used in London's Oxford Street to entrap large crowds of demonstrators, and keep them penned in for up to seven and a half hours — together with bemused Japanese, Chinese and other tourists. Oxford Street had been chosen by demonstrators because of the presence of Gap and other shops which use cheap Third World labour.
The police operation cost ٟ.2 million, including 㿀,000 for breakfasts which for some reason the cops couldn't have at home.
Before the demonstrations, there were heavy hints that plastic bullets and tear gas would be used, and a warning from senior police officers that all demonstrators could be arrested and their photos and details taken. As it turned out, the clashes were small-scale, and mainly caused as some demonstrators tried to break out of the police pen.
The trouble was on a much smaller scale than the rather tame riot which occurred on May Day 2000, which itself mainly revolved around the trashing of a small branch of McDonald's. Both events were small beer compared with the 1990 poll tax riots.
So why the huge police mobilisation? Why the hysteria in the popular press? In fact, the political and police offensive against the anti-capitalist movement on May 1 was not an isolated incident.
In February, the umbrella organisation Globalise Resistance found that two successive venues for its huge weekend conference were cancelled at short notice. Clearly "someone" had talked to college authorities and warned them off — finally the conference was held at the town hall of Labour-controlled Hammersmith.
International pattern
The events in Britain follow an international pattern, vividly demonstrated by the police riot against anti-capitalist globalisation demonstrators in Quebec City in April. This in turn followed the pattern established in Seattle, and followed in Washington, Prague, Melbourne, Nice and many other major cities.
The leaders of the major capitalist powers have declared a "get tough" policy against the global justice movement. They are attempting to isolate, demoralise and criminalise the movement — and to divide it on the issue of "violence". They are in effect issuing a warning that daring to demonstrate against global capitalism will carry a heavy penalty in terms of repression. In the short term, this policy has had some limited success in Britain.
Leading global justice campaigners George Monbiot (author of Captive State) and Naomi Klein (No Logo) have contributed misguided articles to the London Guardian, the former arguing that the movement has to deal with its "violent" element, and the latter calling for less attention to public demonstrations and more involvement in the community from "rootless" rebels. Both arguments are way off the mark.
Neo-anarchist street fighters are a tiny grouping in Britain, and nothing new — they were much more in evidence during the poll tax riots 10 years ago. The conditions for confrontation are created by the heavy hand of thousands of riot police.
Counterposing working in communities to public demonstrations shows a rather limited knowledge of what anti-capitalist campaigners in Britain are actually doing, not least in the huge election campaign being prepared by the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party (but also in a plethora of local campaigns against privatisation, racism, etc).
Debate in the movement over tactics is perfectly normal, and in every country campaigners will have to discuss out what methods lead to the biggest and most politically influential mobilisations. But so long as the capitalist leaders have decided on repression, street confrontations are bound to occur.
Not even the whole of the capitalist press was taken in by the police-government charade. Mirror political columnist Paul Routledge attacked the police action as a threat to democracy. London's only evening paper, the Standard, gave a page to its columnist, Zoe Williams, who was on the demonstration, to denounce the police methods.
Williams wrote: "This is not just about whether the police are stupid, or even about globalisation, this is about whether the police should have the right to trap 5000 people for up to seven and a half hours, for no better reason than they might break something."
And further: "the police proved that in the event of revolution they might possibly be able to quash it, provided only 5000 people turn up!"
On Ken Livingstone, Williams pointed out that he strongly supported the Seattle demonstrations, despite the (police) violence but "unfortunately his firebrand principles only seem to apply to his own political advancement — when it's his own back yard, he falls in line with the police like the miserable little tick he is".
The Guardian asked the rhetorical question "What did the demonstrators achieve?" The answer, of course, is they raised the whole issue of capitalism, with activists invited to the BBC's Newsnight to debate with MPs, the Daily Mail rushing to publish an article "In Praise of Capitalism" and acres of publicity about the demonstration. Of course, the media was overwhelmingly hostile, but huge sections of the population are cynical about what the press tells them.
Bad press
If the demonstrations had been completely peaceful, that wouldn't have reduced the hostility one little bit. Media hostility won't stop this movement; global justice campaigners can't avoid a bad press unless they stay at home and keep their mouths shut.
The truth is that the offensive against the global justice movement follows a pattern of vilification and repression which has existed for centuries, one which any major movement for social justice will eventually face.
However, repression and propaganda barrages can only have a limited effect. An opinion poll this week found that a large majority of British people think transnational corporations are only interested in profit, not the needs of people. When Tony Blair appeared with Nelson Mandela at the South Africa Day concert on April 29, he was booed by the whole crowd.
The leaders of world capitalism — in governments, corporations and institutions like the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and International Monetary Fund — are scared of the global justice movement. Campaigners used to decades of neo-liberal domination and triumphalism sometimes find this hard to accept. But the reason for it is obvious.
For the first time in the post-war world a global mass movement has emerged which sees its enemy being the system itself. This is the delayed pay-off from the collapse of Stalinism, and the West's victory in the Cold War.
Socialists predicted in the early 1990s that the battlefield would be cleared, the issues simplified, and the cause of the world's major problems — capitalism — more starkly posed. As ever with enthusiastic socialists, the time scale was optimistic — but this time only slightly.
From January 1, 1994, when the Zapatista rebels emerged from the Chiapas jungle to challenge the poverty and misery of the indigenous people of Mexico, a growing challenge to neo-liberalism, and then capitalism itself, has been evident.
For the capitalist leaders, a challenge to the system itself is obviously an explosive issue. The more clear-sighted of them can see the danger that the anti-capitalist movement can link up with the trade union movement, greatly strengthening the already growing revival of the international left — which capitalist ideologues hoped was dead and buried.
New pattern of repression
In consequence a new pattern of repression is emerging. The astoundingly repressive new "anti-terrorism" act in the UK is in effect a new "anti-subversion" law, potentially criminalising any form of political activity in opposition to the status quo. Similar legislation is being prepared in several European countries.
Since the attempts to disrupt the 1996 Amsterdam demonstration — by, for example, stopping demonstrators from Italy's Party of Communist Refoundation continuing their train journey through Germany — police forces in Europe have been closely co-ordinating their actions against the global justice movement.
The fundamental answer to this repression lies not in knowing how to rebuff police aggression and defend demonstrators, necessary though that is. The answer lies in building the movement and promoting its alliance with the trade unions.
Therein lies the indispensable role of socialists and socialist organisation, and why, for example, Socialist Alliance activists in Britain see election work not as counterposed to the global justice movement, but opening another front for it.
Building unity with the trade union movement necessarily involves a debate about overall objectives. This was hilariously demonstrated by the May 1 self-parodying London banner, origin unknown, which declared: "Abolish capitalism and replace it with something nicer!"
More seriously, George Monbiot has begun to argue that the solution may be in capping the size of corporations, not abolishing them outright.
But as US activist Dan La Botz has put it (in the magazine Against the Current): "Ultimately the struggle over the control of capital raises the real question: whether corporations, whatever they may have contributed to economic development, should even be allowed to exist at this stage of history. Do private banks and companies have the right to invest money or decide to open, close or move a factory, when those decisions can destroy the environment, throw thousands of workers out of their jobs, bankrupt a community, or even take control of the government of a foreign nation?
"Historically the idea of the democratic collective ownership and control of the economy by the people has a name: democratic socialism."