1 May is an important date in the history of the workers’ movement. This article is the collective account of how some of our activists in London spent their May Day.
Willis cleaners
The day kicked off with a picket at multinational insurance brokers the Willis Group in the City of London. In mid-2007 cleaners at Willis began to organise under the umbrella of Unite’s Justice for Cleaners campaign for the ‘living wage’. The living wage was won but the company immediately hit back by putting the cleaners on unworkable night shifts. When they refused to work the shifts, those involved in organising were sacked.
Unite abandoned the workers, arguing that re-instatement campaigns are too difficult to win. The aim of J4C had been little more than to recruit; it has now been wound up. The cleaners have independently called these demonstrations and they have been held weekly for three months.
Afterwards we marched together to join the Latin American Workers' Association contingent for the main demo.
The May Day demo and the Tamils
We got to the main central London demonstration, which, as it is every year, was a weird mix predominantly made up of old timers with Stalin banners. Amongst this jumble of the left and pseudo-left was a block of around 20 Sri Lankan Sinhalese, who appeared to be a socialist group, complete with red flags, banners and holding up the faces of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The group in question are in fact the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna - a Sinhalese chauvinist Stalinist group.
The first thing to make absolutely clear to anyone encountering the JVP or anyone involved in solidarity with the Tamils but unfamiliar with socialist ideas is that these people have nothing to with socialism. People like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky gave their lives forming and fighting for a set of ideas that stood against the savagery inflicted on the peoples of Ireland, Ukraine and all oppressed nations. Any socialist should raise the call of ‘self determination for the Tamils.’ The JVP on the other hand back their government’s war. Their ‘socialism’ has nothing to do with ours.
The last issue of Solidarity carried a back page account of the stepping up of the conflict in recent months. This Monday, 11 May, news has come in of 3,000 killings in a single day, a massacre that ups the total deaths since January to perhaps 10,000. There have been mobilisations against the war of 200,000 on the streets of London and an ongoing protest on parliament square. At a time like this, the presence at a left event of a group like the JVP, backers of the communal the slaughter, is intolerable.
We took it upon ourselves to disrupt the JVP block, heckle them, argue with them, we help up our paper with it’s back-page headline ‘Stop the war on the Tamil people!’, prevented them getting a photo and chanted "Stop genocide".
The JVP then began to call over, first the police and then the stewards. These were old hacks who told us to ‘have your arguments about politics in a room somewhere, we’re busy having a march’. We said, no, not when 300,000 people are in concentration camps and these people are effectively banging their government’s war drum. This is something quite different to a disagreement we might have with another left or labour movement group, where we share a basic commonality of ideas about the world. At a point where there is such a clear and ghastly instance of oppression, they are siding with the oppressor. The shame is on the organisers for ever letting them on the demonstration in the first place.
Whereas the JVP have come to May Day for years, this year’s was the first on which there was a British Tamil Forum contingent, perhaps 60 or so strong, with banners and placards against the genocide.
As the march moved into Trafalgar Square some of the Tamil youth came over with drums from their group. They had until that point stayed up ahead, possibly not knowing that there were people sharing a march with them advocating the extermination of their friends and relatives. They stepped up the noise and we were joined by another of our comrades, themselves Tamil. We started to get in their faces, chants changed to "Fascist scum, off our streets!", "JVP, go home!" and "You’re not welcome in the workers’ movement!"
More, younger Tamils now came over and we urged them to get the rest of their lot down. This proves to be the turning point, a good portion of the Tamil section roll up with megaphones and join in with the chanting. The JVP rolled up their banner, packed up their placards, they call in the police to make an attempt to stop the harrying, this fails and after a few minutes of standing around, looking increasingly intimidated, turn and head down into the tube station.
After the end of the rally we briefly dropped by to the demonstration at KPMG, called by Visteon workers and the support group, about the company’s instrumental role in the Visteon closure. It has not been lost on any of the Willis cleaners the parallels between the treatment of these two struggles at the hands of Unite. Alberto, a cleaner activist, was unequivocal:
“When I saw Steve Hart up at Visteon I thought, ‘Don’t fucking believe him! They don’t have the same interest as the workers. What is he earning? More than a hundred thousand pounds?'”
Public meeting – amnesty for a few or papers for all?
The meeting had been called by the Coordinadora Latinoamerica and Campaign Against Immigration Controls to debate the position of ‘papers for all’, in response to the Strangers into Citizens campaign, who were to hold a large mobilisation on 4 May. SIC asks the government to regularise the status of some migrants – those who have been in the UK for 6 years, who have clean criminal records, speak proficient English and can get sponsorship and character references from employers! Alongside these ridiculous conditions they call for a tightening of border controls and a cap on the number of new migrants entering the country. And all this while asking marchers to carry Union Jacks and sing the national anthem.
The public meeting planned a leaflet, bloc and alternative speaker rally at the 4 May march arguing against this dangerous division of migrants and the hypocritical rhetoric of “good” migrants who are willing to integrate. This discourse conceals the reality of a great majority of migrants in this country, of anti-social working hours, social exclusion, police oppression, and discrimination in the labour market and society at large. Not Amnesty for SOME, Papers for All and Justice for Migrant Workers.
Sri Lanka again
The day ended with another public meeting, this one called by the SWP on Sri Lanka. Prior conversations with several members have shown that their comrades have an understanding of the situation in Sri Lanka that is not all that different to ours, they are aware of what is objectively necessary, aware of the island’s Trotskyist history, will acknowledge that the key to ending the oppression of the Tamils is Tamil-Sinhalese working-class unity. They also, privately at least, recognise the bourgeoisie-nationalist character of the British Tamil Forum, who have organised and hold political hegemony over the demonstrations.
When our comrades, both Tamil and non-Tamil, have brought leaflets and literature to the BTF mobilisations, particularly at Parliament Square, from CAIC, from the Visteon support group, and even the Stop the Slaughter of the Tamils campaign (initiated by the Socialist Party), we have faced hassle. More often than not any material other than the officially sanctioned is met with several young organisers rushing onto the scene to check out what is being given out. During the first week of the Parliament Square protest, we brought down Brent Trades Council banner. Given that some 40,000 Tamils work in Brent this would seem a most basic and straightforward act of working-class solidarity. However we were greeted by the organisers who told us to put it away as we do not have ‘permission’. They then got on their mobiles to some higher authority before eventually telling us that we could stay.
The message was not lost. Anything other than flat, apolitical support, is made very clearly unwelcome. We should ask; why is Tamil nationalism the only acceptable framing for solidarity with oppressed peoples in Sri Lanka?
The SWP and the organised left in general are not asking these questions. Comrades’ interventions in this meeting went no further than to salute the bravery of the Tamils’ collective action and generalise about ‘their’ right to armed struggle for national liberation. The pretence was always of the ‘us’; the trade unions, left groups, the British working class, and the ‘you’; the Tamil community. SWP speakers expressed a clear intention to ‘work with’ the BTF, but made it equally clear that it was ‘not their place’ to have anything to say about the LTTE. This reticence to talk frankly about the Tigers, about the politics, amounts to a soft ambiguity which makes for a very cheap internationalism devoid of class politics.
We were very clear; we vehemently oppose the genocide, the internment, the rapes, but will not drop our analysis of the Tigers. We will not give unconditional support to an organisation that has liquidated all political opposition, carried out ethnic cleansing and defines the emancipation of the Tamil people as an issue of nationalism.
Yes, this frank stating of our politics was met with disapproval. But just as many people were nodding along with what we had to say and we ended up having much more useful conversations. People by no means agreed with us but appreciated our honesty and clarity. More importantly, spending our afternoon hammering the JVP had shown us to have an understanding of Sri Lanka and seriousness in action.
SWPers we talked to, rather then look to collaborate in further work, responded in a predictably sectarian fashion. They have not even acknowledged the Stop the Slaught of the Tamils campaign or sought to build it. Instead they were quick to the draw analogy with our disagreements over Palestine/Israel, which quickly descended into the usual stuff about the AWL being apologists for imperialism.
In one sense they are right. Our approach to Sri Lanka is consistent with the 'third camp' politics that inform what we say about Israel/Palestine. While there are clearly important differences between the two, in both instances we see a part of solidarity as being to take a sharp and clear stance against reactionary and anti working-class politics in the second camp. The situations are not fully analogous, of course, the histories are different. The Tigers are a world away from a group like Hamas. They have been progressive in certain respects. They abolished the caste system, they have armed and militarised Tamil women alongside the men and the basic premise of their armed struggle, self-determination, is legitimate. However our position remains.
Carrying out this role of the third camp is, to a large extent contingent on having been amongst the fiercest fighters against the first camp, whether it be the aggression of the Israeli or Sri Lankan ruling class. The onus is on Workers' Liberty to consistently be that if we are to be able to make interventions such as these, to do the two things at once. There is a massacre going on, and in the immediate term the Tigers appear the only form of defence against it. To come and loftily denounce the Tigers without having done the first would be objectionable. But that is not what we have been doing, those are not our politics. You open these discussions by first standing shoulder to shoulder with a people against their main oppressor.
We are in solidarity with the Tamil people, and real working-class internationalism doesn’t just flag wave the existing force acting on behalf of a group. We have a positive programme of working class solidarity and if what exists is an obstacle to that then we should confront it openly.
There was talk at the end of the meeting of a campaign to boycott Sri Lankan goods. In the last paper we called for an international campaign of workers' boycotts against the war; this is still our position. However a general consumer boycott is something else entirely.
Again we need to stress that the key agency in ending the suffering of the Tamils is the Sinhalese working class. They themselves are exploited, they are oppressed. The principle tool of social control and therefore their subjugation is mass racism towards the Tamils. Right now they are overwhelmingly behind their government’s war, as demonstrated by the existence of bastards like the JVP.
Dr Moorthy, a Tamil human right’s activist who spoke at the CAIC meeting, was tortured and driven out of Sri Lanka for trying to build solidarity in both Tamil and Sinhalese areas. It is this kind of courageous work we should support. Making a ‘pariah state’ of Sri Lanka will only drive the Sinhalese working class further into the arms of the hard-line racial supremacists, who propagandise about a conspiracy of the Tamil diaspora to destroy the Sinhalese nation.
Lessons – where does this leave us?
This brings us to the basic question, how do we make solidarity? These May Day events, in different ways, bring this into sharp question.
This emergence of highly politicised migrant worker struggles and their coalescence, into things like the papers for all bloc at Strangers into Citizens is something we should look to as very significant. The conditions and organisation of migrant workers in general remains utterly grim, however where self organisation and resistance has happened it has often been on the basis of a level of politics seldom found elsewhere in the labour movement. In what other section of the working class in Britain would you find people whose own stories constitute such a full picture what is wrong with the world?
Clara Osagiede, secretary of the tube cleaner’s grade gave an account of the struggles against paper checks and sackings following the living wage campaign on the tube. Her speech burst out of the confines of narrow trade-unionism, this is best conveyed by her conclusion;
“Who is legal? What does this mean? If a cleaner is raped by her manager and is unable to speak out because she is illegal then what does it mean to be legal? We have to talk about why people are here, about British imperialism, about exploitation of people, of land and resources. Look at Nigeria – Shell devastated the country, Shell’s executives travel on the tubes that are cleaned by migrant Nigerians; we were made into cleaners by these people.”
This affirmation of ‘we are here because you were there’ should be the starting point of fighting against the exploitation of migrant workers at the hands of the bosses and the use of the state’s border regime to suppress them. The line of struggle should not be to bring migrant workers ‘under the wing’ of the wider ‘British’ working-class movement. Of course they are uniquely vulnerable part of our class and urgently need solidarity but we should them as a key part, a key agency in our fight against the bosses, against union bureaucracy and against globalised capitalism.
Practically speaking, there are three main tasks for us;
Firstly, it is to fight on these ideas in the labour movement. The position of the main organised left is that ‘the working-class is not ready’ for a no borders politics. We should forefront this at every level and win over working-class activists to making this a central orientation of their work.
Secondly, we need to start a concerted programme of building and organising within migrant communities. While the programme and class collaboration of SIC is abhorrent, their mobilisation has been impressive. They focus their work on church communities, finding key leaders and winning them over to do the grass-roots mobilising. A good percentage of the marchers on the SIC march did not know the SIC demands, many believing that they were all there fighting for Papers for All. These contradictions make it an arena ripe for intervention and CAIC is beginning to do this. The Papers for All bloc wsa a good start, and there are more migrant groups who share this position who we should make concrete solidarity with.
There remains a debate as to what space is it best to have conversations, make solidarity and organise. Shift work, stress and apprehension about victimisation mean that often migrants’ workplaces may not be the best place. This is a challenge for a left that is on the whole white and not engaged in the social and community networks of these communities and whose activity is often at trade union branch or trades council level.
The third and perhaps greatest task is to take on the current ‘leadership’ of the trade union movement. As Alberto put it; “They have more in common with the rulers than they have with us. For me inside the union we need a revolution, the capitalists run the union. If we do that, it can be a very powerful instrument to change society.
There is one thing that is all too clear; the challenges and sharpness of this area of class struggle. Last Wednesday, 6 May, after going to a picket of workers at the Olympic site, Alberto was arrested by police and immigration officials who had waited at the offices of his employer, no doubt with their collusion.
In this instance Alberto was not deported - he has papers - but the reality of this use of border agencies remains. This is the kind of repression we are going to face and are facing. Alberto is from Colombia and when we spoke to a friend of his outside Peckham police station where he was being held, he made the obvious point:
“This is terrible, but in Colombia, if you organise, you get killed.”
We need a movement that is courageous in the face of these adversities, that sees itself as part of a global working class and its struggles. That is what we mean by solidarity.
