BY SEAN HEALY
The two letters — M1 — are certainly getting around: they're on flyers, on lamp posts, stencilled onto footpaths, they've even started to get into the mainstream media. The idea is getting around too: "we're going to blockade the stock exchanges on May 1 to protest against capitalism". But who are the people behind this?
Well, there are lots of them, for a start. There are M1 coalitions of one sort or another in more than half a dozen cities, there are suburban groups, there are M1 clubs on campuses, there are lots and lots of activist groups planning their own part in the M1 blockades.
And they're a diverse bunch too: socialists, feminists, anarchists, unionists, student activists, environmentalists, even people without an "ist" attached to them.
As such, there's no way to get a "representative sample" of those individuals who're working hard to put M1 together. So Green Left Weekly spoke to just three M1 organisers — Felicity Martin, Federico Fuentes and Zanny Begg — all of whom are members of the Democratic Socialist Party, one of the main groups involved in the new and emerging anti-corporate movement. Martin and Fuentes are active in Melbourne's M1 Alliance, while Begg is involved in M1 Sydney.
All three are full of optimism and enthusiasm for M1, but all three also seem to still be in a bit of shock at organising something of this scale.
Would activists have planned something like this, a simultaneous blockade of all six stock exchange offices, a year ago? Begg is blunt: "No."
"A year ago, we wouldn't have thought it was possible", she explains. "In fact, activists have organised anti-capitalist demonstrations like this before, like last year's May Day or J18 the year before, and they were fabulous demo's, but they weren't of this scale or ambition. What's changed things is S11. The spirit of S11 is a real force. Everyone who went through S11, or heard about it, believes that we can do it again."
Fuentes agrees about the impact of last September's three-day blockade of the World Economic Forum. A 19-year-old social studies student at Melbourne's RMIT, who has been involved in the M1 Alliance since the start of the year, he said "S11 showed us all that there really is a lot more people out there who are angry at the system than we really thought there were. There's such a variety of people who're interested in our message and they actually have a pretty similar approach to what the alternative to corporate power should be."
He talks about the response he's got from students at RMIT and nearby Melbourne University to the M1 plan. "People know about it, they've heard of it, they're willing to hear more. A lot of that again is because of the S11 example, it's really inspired a lot of people to think that resistance can be effective, that you can fight back."
He points to the first meeting at Melbourne University of a new M1 club. "Fifty people turned up and 35 of them wanted to get involved because of the S11 example, and because of the wider example of protests overseas like Seattle", he remembers, referring to the 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation.
Union involvement
Martin, a 27-year-old staff member for a Melbourne student union, says S11 and the broader international movement have pushed people who otherwise wouldn't have to "attempt to seriously engage with the issue of globalisation, to start to see at least why it's imperative to take action".
She's particularly thinking of the trade union movement. A unionist herself (she's a member of the National Tertiary Education Union), Martin is involved in the M1 Alliance's union liaison group and has spent much of the last two months meeting with union leaders and seeking their support for the stock exchange blockade.
"There is still some hesitancy, a wait-and-see attitude from some", she admits. "But in the light of S11, unionists and union leaders are a lot more willing to engage, with the issues but also with our movement. Previously, they'd only really deal with community groups or the left on a single-issue basis, if that. Now, for the first time, S11 and M1 are challenging them to take on one particular evil: capitalism, globalisation, the corporations."
She expressed confidence that unions, especially the more left-wing ones, will come on board with some level of support for M1. She explained that there's already considerable discussion from those unions about "crossing the river" on M1, a reference to the debates in union circles between more militant and more moderate unionists about whether the September 12 demonstration would march over the Yarra to join the blockade of Crown Casino.
One other thing has also changed, according to all three: left activists and groups have started to realise that they have to work constructively together in order to make the movement work. All three believe that collaboration has improved greatly and that this has been a significant new source of strength.
Begg gives a practical example: "During S11, I found myself in a blockade line in Clarendon Street with the police on horses poised to attack. On one side of me, there was a greenie who'd been involved in forest blockades and things like that, on the other side there was a construction worker, with himself lots of picket experience. We had to come up with a strategy to fend off the cops — and we did, by managing to combine all our different experiences."
"If that single incident is a picture for what this movement is going to become, I think it'll prove pretty powerful."
'Qualitative step forward'
An activist pretty much from the time she was selected to attend a United Nations environment conference at the age of 17, Begg, now 28, says she has been involved in a "huge number" of campaigns and movements. But, she adds, of all those she's been involved in, "this has to be the most exciting, it really is a qualitative step forward."
"The range of groups I've been active in have mainly been single-issue ones; they've drawn short of a critique of the whole system. So while they've been worthy campaigns, I've always felt like they've addressed symptoms and not causes. It feels good to now be part of a movement which is challenging capitalism itself."
Martin, who's been involved in various campaigns since she first got into student activism during the battle against Jeff Kennett's "voluntary student unionism" crusade in 1994, says something very similar.
"M1 is much more exciting", she says, no shadow of doubt in her voice. "We're not fighting against one particular instance — education cuts or atrocities in East Timor — as important as they are. We're fighting against everything, the bigger problem of capitalism, and that's exciting."
"Finally everyone can see that their struggles are quite clearly linked and joined together."
None of the three activists believe it's going to be easy to build an explicitly anti-capitalist movement; M1's success is no sure thing, they all warn.
"It's easier to sell a single-issue atrocity", Martin says, "rather than to take on something as iconic as the stock exchange. All the activists think they can do [M1], but they also still doubt themselves, or are tempted back towards just letting someone else, like the unions, take the lead. Old habits die hard."
Martin's views are coloured by her experiences of the anti-capitalist movement. While most of her comrades spent September in Melbourne, she spent it in Prague, where she was part of the massive S26 protests during the annual meetings there of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The repression there was fierce, far more so even than that experienced by S11 blockaders and she saw how easy it is for such a disparate and new movement to be pulled apart.
She says that the M1 Alliance, as the central organising body, "has a huge responsibility: to provide a lot of the infrastructure and the information and the coordination to allow something like this to work, to allow people to communicate with each other and to get involved themselves. There needs to be people who've done the hard work of establishing the framework or the whole thing will fall apart."
Challenges
Fuentes lists other challenges, saying that the movement has to strike a tricky balance between talking about the big issues of globalisation and "bringing it home to people" through issues closer to them. He worries that the movement might veer away from the big issues, "because Third World debt doesn't specifically affect, say, students at this university".
He gives one example of striking such a balance: a campaign being run by the M1 group at RMIT to remove a member of university board who's been involved in oil giant Shell's notorious Nigerian operations. "It's local, it's about RMIT, but it touches on global issues, the operations of a multinational in a country on the other side of the world".
Begg isn't surprised that the movement faces a lot of major challenges, but that's what she likes about it.
"What's particularly exciting is that this movement is fresh, by which I mean it's full of new leaders. It's not dragged down by old leaders who've made their peace with the system. Instead, it's uncompromising. It rejects the mistakes of the old left but it doesn't make its peace with capitalism. This new left has the organisational capacity; now it has to chance to prove itself."