Who are the anti-capitalists?

Submitted by Anon on 30 September, 2001 - 3:31

The anti-capitalist movement exploded onto the world political scene in Seattle two years ago. There is very little material available on the development of the constituent parts of the anti-capitalist movement. Many commentators say Seattle “just happened”.
In fact the movement seems to have different roots in different parts of the world. In the USA three streams converged at Seattle.

- Direct action groups, many with anarchist-inspired politics, had grown steadily through the 1990s; many had already staged effective local protests.
- Anti-globalisation NGOs, with significant staff, and pulling power, especially amongst students, also built for Seattle.
- US trade unions that had found themselves no longer as one with the Democrats on economic globalisation turned out to protest at the Seattle conference.
Some direct action groups in the USA had had links with the Mexican Zapatistas. Many NGO supporters had worked in elections and in trade union recruitment in central American countries, or with attempts to break the US blockade of Cuba. Activists who had a history of confrontation with state law enforcement were numerous. Because there is no Labour Party in the USA, and no significant Trotskyist organisation, young people developing a political consciousness were attracted to “direct action”, “reject ideology” ideology and to neo-anarchism.

Similar trends influence the anti-capitalist movement in mainland Europe. Ya Basta! — originally Italian, and now with groups in other European countries and the USA — say that they were inspired by the Zapatista rising. They define their difference with the rest of the Italian left as “we chose to abandon ideology, they didn’t.”

In much of Europe there was, through the 80s and 90s, a disintegrating Communist Party, which shed militants in many directions. Some of them wished to “abandon ideology” without abandoning the idea of confronting the state. Groups like Ya Basta! and the White Overalls have a cadre that have consciously broken with some form of Communism. They also have a wide layer of youth attracted to anarchist direct action in the absence of competing strategies. Almost without exception the Trotskyist left, where it exists, has been slow to relate to the developing direct action, confront-the-state movements. Even where the Trotskyists have attempted to relate to this movement, for example the SWP and its “children groups”, they have done it with the more conservative wings of the movement, such as ATTAC (the French NGO campaigning for the Tobin Tax), not with the anarchists. In the eyes of the militant youth of Europe and the USA, the stock of the revolutionary left is probably at an all-time low.

Anarchist groups in the UK don’t seem to have gained from the rise of the anti-capitalist movement elsewhere. The websites of the “established” anarchist groups are “business-as-usual” propaganda vehicles and hardly mention the protests. The direct action movement in the UK, although ideologically “anarchist”, is more likely to be partying than polemicising. Young people who want to challenge the system tend to do it by having “illegal” street parties. For example, the Urban75 website is very cool, very hip, very rave and party orientated, but it contains serious discussion and organising for various protests world-wide. Urban75 carried news updates from Genoa before almost any other UK website.

The revolutionary left has missed all this. The map of the international working class has changed — and we need to recognise the changes.

The kind of workplaces that young people work in often do not have unions. Politically-conscious youth are expressing their politics outside of work, through anti-fascism, through defending their right to party, through involvement in a counter-culture (in which the internet plays a large part). The internet gives young people contact with the world. They form ideas about their place in the world, without attending meetings. The internet makes it possible for young people in the UK to define themselves in relation to struggles for emancipation in Korea or Mexico, without the mediating role of an organisation in their home town or even home country. Lots of internet kiddies know more about the politics of the Zapatistas than they do about the political systems they live under. The Zapatistas are exciting rebels, even the best of the politicians available at home are either dreary careerists or patently unserious r-r-r-revolutionaries.

Many of the people who turned up to Seattle, or Quebec, or Genoa, did so under their own initiative. They didn’t know who they would be marching with until they arrived at the “convergence centre”. Seattle could, easily, have been a disaster, with only tiny numbers of participants and then we’d all have known nothing about it.

Rough figures for Seattle suggest that something like 10,000 people were there with direct action in mind, and a further 50,000 there from NGOs and trade unions intent on “non-confrontational” protest. The protesters didn’t even have an agreement about their objectives.

Seattle made it onto TV screens in the USA and, via the Internet, into homes around the world. We all saw the police brutality, and the fact that the protesters, all different, appeared united. What could have been a one-off protest became the spark for something more.

A defining feature of the new protesters is that they haven’t waited for the corporate media to decide whether they are news or not. Seattle set up bicycle-powered laptops in the streets so that people could write up their reports of events as they happened. They created Seattle IndyMedia — a collective dedicated to open-publishing of activist news. The IndyMedia site quickly became the focal point for learning about Seattle.
There are now fifty IndyMedia websites around the world. The Italian IndyMedia site carried photos of the protester killed in Genoa before any mainstream media. It carried reports from the barricades on regular intervals. For the activists not at Genoa, IndyMedia, not CNN or the BBC, was the means to finding out what was going on.
The anti-capitalist movement is growing. Genoa was a larger protest than those which had gone before, yet a larger proportion of the participants seemed willing to engage the police in direct confrontation, too. There is an enormous gap between the developed methods of protest being employed at the set-piece protests, and need for a movement that unites the whole working class in a day-to-day battle against capitalism itself.

The revolutionary left must learn how to engage with this movement and discuss with it. Our ideas, on the centrality of working-class self-emancipation, on the role of political struggle and industrial struggle aligned with the ideological struggle, and on the necessity for work in the trade unions, are irreplaceable in the class struggle — they are not very evident in the new anti-capitalism. Without them, the “anti-capitalism” of most of the protestors will be short-lived, sound and fury, and only an ephemeral small problem for the bourgeoisie.

Dialogue will not be easy. Repeatedly you encounter hostile reports of meetings and conversations with Trotskyists and Communists. To the new militants, the Trotskyists are authoritarian cults, desperate for new recruits but contributing nothing to the movement apart from sterile dogma and authoritarian organising methods. If we are to get an audience for Marxist ideas then we need to approach the movement with respect and openness and with a desire for genuine dialogue about the issues that concern its members.

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