Communique issued by coalition of antifascist groups in Portugal on the current situation there. Sharing from enough is enough (Originally published by Portugal Indymedia. Translated by Contra Info).
Portugal: Communiqué by the Portuguese Antifascist Movement
In the last few weeks, several news has come to the fore in the media about the growing of the extreme-right in Portugal and about the violence perpetrated by these nazi-fascist groups.
This growing wave of violence comes as no surprise for us. In the last years, we have been denouncing it, and organizing to face the gratuitous, racist and xenophobic violence. At the moment, there are several antifascist groups in Portugal, from north to south, which have been calling people’s attention to this problem, but these groups have been discredited by persons and political parties who minimize the antifascist struggle, and who, in many cases, call themselves antifascists. Once again, reality demonstrates that what we have denounced about groups such as the “Hammerskins” or political parties such as the “Partido Nacional Renovador” (“National Renovator Party”) or the more recent “Nova Ordem Social” (“New Social Order”) is more than true and that we must not overlook other groups that walk undercover and hidden. Besides these groups, we won’t overlook the successive governments who feed and let people with such connections circulate through public institutions. We also want to mention that, once more, the media has used the word “skinhead” in a wrong manner.
In a very brief but explicit way, skinheads emerged in England, they were youngsters from the working class who identified with certain aspects of the Jamaican culture brought to England by Afro-Caribbean immigrants with whom they socialized, the music they listened to was mainly reggae and ska, and for these obvious reasons they were not racists or xenophobes.
We are antifascists of different age groups, from various parts of the country, with political views that are many times different, but with a common idea and struggle: antifascism. That said, and contrary to what the media might say, we cannot be compared to these groups or parties from the extreme-right, because we are no criminals, we call on tolerance, we want to fight racism, xenophobia, homophobia, chauvinism and all types of oppression.
It is urgent that people inform themselves, that they organize, that they join the antifascist struggle, that they support antifascist groups and movements in their cities.
April 2018,
Núcleo Antifascista de Braga, Núcleo Antifascista de Viana, Núcleo Antifascista do Porto, Núcleo Antifascista de Ovar, Núcleo Antifascista de Coimbra, Núcleo Antifascista de Lisboa – Margem Sul, Núcleo Antifascista da Madeira, Coordenadora Antifascista Portugal, Movimento “Um Ativismo por dia”, Left Pride Portugal, GRRAP, Redskins / RASH Portugal, Sharp Portugal
Getting By is the result of ethnographic research by sociologist, socialist, and social housing resident, Lisa McKenzie in her own council housing estate: St. Anne’s “Stanzville” in Nottingham in England. It is an important read for understanding how class works in Britain today. Class is not just a relation to the means of production – it is a social relation defined by being fucked around and having to get through difficult circumstances on a daily basis to get by. Through telling the stories of residents at St. Anne’s we get an idea of the difficulties people have to face on a daily basis and of the strategies used to manage and negotiate these circumstances. In doing so it provides an important counter-narrative to what you might hear from the mainstream media or stereotypes about the scum and worthless benefit scroungers. Instead McKenzie is motivated by trying to show the value of who and what is there on her estate. What she gives us is a picture of a community who are constantly considered worthless by the outside and in response create their own internal systems of valuation and respect (and a lot of this value system is something the outside word should learn from, for example being black or mixed race is envied in St. Anne’s). Highlighting these kinds of things is important in order to show the value of what is there in working class communities. Because without this you have ‘community development’ programmes, designed by outsiders which miss the whole point of council estate problems. The example is given of a mentoring programme claiming that “As a result [of our programme] a ‘mentor’ feels more valued in his own community” (p 162). As McKenzie points out, “This is a very simplistic approach to exclusion and disadvantage, […] and works within a limited framework. Being respected in your community is not the problem: it is being respected outside the neighbourhood that residents of council estates struggle with” (p. 162).
Image from the publishers, Policy Press
The most interesting part of the book is not by design of research. The book talks about how the estate is stigmatised by the outside and in response the residents are creating their own value system and systems of respect. Luckily for the researcher, just as she was finishing the research, the whole business of the 2011 riots happened, and the alternative value system that Stanz people had been creating in place of the one that rejected them began to accelerate. (alternative value systems are usually ignored, and when they are looked at, they are assumed to be statically existing rather than developing). And this gives a very interesting picture of what happens. The value system they are creating values belonging to the estate and an in-group identity. As this accelerates, this identity becomes counterposed to the identities of other council estates, and with that came intra-estate violence and riots. This is what McKenzie calls ‘estatism’:
“While boundaries were put up by those who lived on the estate in order to feel safe […], at the same time those boundaries acted as a wall, keeping in a closed and suspicious group of people, whose fear of stigma and ‘being looked down on’ often prevented them from engaging in pursuits that might make real and positive differences to their lives […] I have described a tight-knit community, which has been built on pride, a sense of belonging, humour, and sharing, but also fear, instability, and stigmatisation” (p. 149).
One of the chief directions of this wall was against other council estates, something that led to turf wars, even in the city centre of Nottingham, where some areas and shops were seen as Stanz territory, and others belonging to other estates like Meadows or Radford. And when the riots came, these inter-estate rivalries became battlelines. It would be fascinating to know how it changed in the aftermath of the riots. The main outcome seemed to be that the police and the courts, spurred on by the right-wing media and politicians, cracked down on any scapegoats they could find. We hear about the stories of people who had no involvement in activities but who were imprisoned by court systems that thought they needed to sate the appetite of a right-wing press and political class.
Like the example of Perry, who was walking home with his take-away dinner on the night of the riots, when he found himself being chased by police and was arrested and later trialled and convicted by jury and sentenced to three years in prison:
“The main argument of the prosecution was that Perry had been on the street in order to ‘get up to no good’, otherwise why else would he have been there? Another part of the prosecution’s argument was that Perry was wearing a red bandanna, which, they argued, was a signifier that Perry was part of a gang in St Ann’s. This line of defence seemed to go along way with the jurors, even though there was no evidence that Perry had done anything apart from being on the street that night, and he looked like a rioter. The police went through Perry’s phone records and contacts – he was not in contact with anyone else who had been arrested that night, and the police admitted that he didn’t seem to know anyone else who he had been arrested with. But among the furore about the riots, and the rising fear of ‘the underclass’ and inner-city ‘gangs’, 12 men and women from Nottingham believed that Perry was a ‘rioter’” (p.190).
This can only feed into the existing perspectives that everybody is against them. McKenzie describes how the talk among men in the boxing gym or or barbers was always about “conspiracy theories they had read on the internet, and swapped information about new sites with ‘new evidence’, which, for them, explained ‘their situation’” (p. 98). The most popular conspiracy theory was about the Illuminati,
“an organisation that is centred around Jewish bankers and Zionist politics, which holds politicians, the media, the legal system and the banks in their hands […] and their racism towards black people is purposeful and political, with the aim of keeping racial order and continuing inequality, thus keeping poor people in poverty, while its members and the Masonic order become more wealthy and more powerful” (p. 98).
What struck me reading this is how much of ‘their situation’ they are trying to explain: racism, poverty, inequality, the1% hoarding all the wealth, the political system, the media and the courts as tools keeping them down… However, as she continues, “while these theories are discussed in the greatest detail, argued about, and the men enjoy the debates that come from new evidence they find on the internet, there is little interest and even less knowledge of national and local politics, apart from the consensus that all politicians, like the police, cannot and should not be trusted” (p. 99). And this distrust leads to a process of looking inwards towards the safety of the estate, something which manifests itself as the inter-estate rivalry and violence. What I’m wondering is if the enemies can be more concretely pinpointed and if different working class communities might come together on the basis of this shared bad treatment after the riots.
An important thing about the book is that the author is working class. This is somebody telling the story of the community she is part of, rather then somebody looking in at them. It is important that knowledge is produced by the working classes rather than for the working class by outside middle class observers. One tendency of university-educated working class people is that the university values and encourages writing for academic or policy-making audiences and the use of language that reflects a grasp of social theory or the management/corporatist ethos of the neoliberal state. This has the effect of bribing/conditioning the brightest of the working class to ‘graduate’ and become culturally middle-class. McKenzie seems to resist this. She makes use of social theory to reveal aspects of estate life, but she doesn’t make theoretical points or convolute her language with references that prove to university audience how much she knows but just make reading it difficult for everybody else.
This poses a question though: who would read Getting By? Is it likely that people from the St Anne’s estate will read this? I don’t know, but it is probable that at least some from other working class estates or communities will read it. And it is here that the biggest potential is. If there is a way to autonomously develop awareness of common experiences of (gender, racial, class) oppression and common interests, surely it must be through recognising oneself in the stories of another. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of remedy to the chief problem that she identifies. Although she tells the story of St. Anne’s from the perspective of the people who live there, she is not shy to be critical when she notices the tendency towards estatism. What this book and other estate-produced knowledge have the potential to do is to counter this division that estatism seems to create by helping people to recognise that WE are all the same (because we are all fucked over by THEM – the true enemies e.g. punishing state, upper class demonisation and complicit media, racism, capitalism, etc…).
And here there is a bit of a contradiction that I don’t think is picked up on by the author. Elements of ‘naming the enemy’ are already there: “since the end of 2010, apathy has been replaced by fear that things are getting worse, and that no one cares, that it is state policy to purposefully run down council estates, and their residents, through death, prison, or both” (p 98). But this anger gets channelled into estatism. This estatism became most pronounced and most visible during the riots that pitted groups from one estate against the others. But the source of the riots was the police murder of Mark Duggan. Somehow, council estates and working class communities all across Britain knew that it was them whose time had come to rise up. It might not be the kind of mobilization that those on the activist or organised left would hope for, but it was undeniably a working class uprising, where people (ok, men more often than not) responded to circumstances on the basis of a shared identification as council estate people – even if this mobilization was channelled intuitively into inter-estate rivalry rather than unity.
So, contrary to the idea that the working class is hopeless, the riots showed that the working class is perfectly capable of self-mobilization, even if is not on the basis of a class identity that ‘we’ would hope for, and even the mobilization it is not of a form that ‘we’ consider strategic or even recognise, and even if it is targetted at groups who should be comrades rather than enemies. Still, this is how the working classes mobilize and if leftists want to have any relevance, the 1st step is in understanding and engaging with this type of mobilization. Getting By is not an analysis of the 2011 riots, but it is an important part of understanding the last part of that contradiction in particular – when people identify as part of but against the working class.
Diversity commentary: single-author monograph written by a working class woman, although she is white and heterosexual she has a mixed race family. University educated up to post-doc level but she was the first in her family’s history to go to higher level education. From and living in and about an English-speaking, European, advanced capitalist country.
Something I’m going to start doing on this blog: reviewing diverse books. What does this mean? Well a blog called read diverse books had this challenge to read diverse books in order to fight against the cultural industry’s tendency to tell us stories about how great white people are, particularly males, particularly middle class, straight, heteronormative whites, etc. It looks like a good idea so I’m adapting it here.
I say adapting because the original challenge (and a similar one at wocreads) is mostly oriented to fiction, so it focuses on lead characters. I’m more into non-fiction political books, so I’m adjusting the challenge to focus on authors rather than protagonists (except for biographies, then it is about the authors and the protangonists). I’m also adding some additional dimensions beyond gender/sexuality and race: things like class, experience of state repression, and linguistic communities. And instead of just reading I like to review so as to engage with the ideas and hopefully share the most useful thoughts and tools with those who can make use of them.
The challenge looks like this. I have to review:
A book authored/edited by a woman
A book authored/edited by a homosexual
A book authored/edited by somebody from Latin America
A book authored/edited by somebody who grew up as an ethnic or racial minority in their country
A book authored/edited by somebody from Africa
A book authored/edited by somebody who identifies as part of an ethno-national community that is without a state
A book authored/edited by somebody from Asia
A book authored/edited by a biracial person
A book authored/edited by a transgender person
A book authored/edited by a refugee
A book authored/edited by somebody with a disability
A book originally written in a language other than English
A book authored/edited by somebody without university-level education
A book authored/edited by somebody who was imprisoned for at least a year
A book authored/edited by somebody who lived under state socialism
A book authored/edited by a collective
One of the problems with checklist challenges is that the goal often end up being to complete it so you can say “look how fuckin diverse I am”. The main reason I’m doing this is to show how uniform the anti-capitalist literature tends to be. The checklist will be used mostly as a commentary during reviews about how diverse or undiverse the books are. And the emphasis is on commentary – not a rating. I don’t want this to end up like a judge in the oppression olympics.
Looking back at what has been reviewed so far on this blog, two were written or edited by individuals (How to change the world, and New forms of worker organisation), both white males from the US and the UK, employed (currently or at some time in their lives) as university professors, presumably straight, abled bodied, and originally written in English for English-speaking audiences. The two books on Rojava reviewed here are also written for US/English-speaking audiences, but they at least are edited by collectives, and include some essays and interviews translated from Kurdish and Turkish. Both collectives do seem to be north america-based though.
On the other hand, Teaching Rebellion, is also edited by a collective, this time Mexico-based, and although it is unclear whether it was written originally for a Spanish-speaking or English-speaking audience, almost the entire bulk of the book is composed of interview/testimony pieces which are certainly translated. Clearly the most diverse book reviewed so far here, but it just shows how much things need to improve. Looking forward to seeing what books this challenge leads me to.
A few months ago, in the happy days before Trump stole the election or the Brexit referendum or the escalation of Erdogan’s repression following his gift from god, I went to a film. No Pasaran, directed by Daniel Burkholz. A documentary comprised of interviews with veterans from the International Brigades. It was very inspirational. For the most part, it was the events and motivations that led them to join the Brigades that were discussed. Again and again, different interviewees stressed that the Spanish Civil War was a fight against European Fascism in its entirety, and the war in Spain only represented the best place to confront it at the time. As one German Jew recounted how after fighting in Spain and then seeking refuge in France “we proposed to the French army that we could join their army and fight Nazi Germany. They agreed and suggested to us that we enlist and they would station us in North Africa to relieve Foreign Legion soldiers who would be deployed to the German front. So we got together and had a meeting to discuss this and we all agreed that No. Our fight was with Nazi Germany, not to defend the french empire” (warning: quote is a misquote).
A few years ago, 2012 or so, I read The Age of Empire by Eric Hobsbawm. I was very taken with it at the time, in particular the idea that there was a sense of crisis that permeated every aspect of society: the generalised crisis in modernist certainties of progress caused by global recession of the capitalist system, which was only averted through the imperialist project in Africa, something that only temporarily displaced the internal systemic contradictions, but which in a short amount of time just led to renewed inter-national capitalist competition amongst the ‘great powers’, which in turn led to world war and the working classes embracing nationalist sentiment and standing against and slaughtering one another. What amazed me reading it in 2012 was how similar this pre-war period was to the austerity regime we were going through then. Now having seen No Pasaran I’m more inclined to say our period resembles the period prior to the second world war with the changes that have come in the last 5 years. The fascist right are having electoral success in Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, France, Hungary, and the US. In other countries they are strong on the streets, they have infiltrated the police, or even the army, in places like Greece, Britain, and the US. And they are to be seen wearing new clothes in the form of ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and in the likes of Putin and Erdogan in Russia and Turkey. And another similarity with today that was highlighted in the film (although I don’t think they meant to make this analogy) is that in the same way that those fleeing Franco’s Spain to France were put in camps, only to be handed over to the Nazis when France fell, we are doing the same thing today by containing and shipping those fleeing ISIL off to the likes of Erdogan’s Turkey under the EU’s scandalous deal. If you think back to how it was through Coup d’Etats that the Fascists came to power in Spain and Austria in the 1930s, all it would take today is for the military to make a move against Syriza’s government or possibly in Italy, and the ‘refugee camps’ with their razor wires would be a gift horse they wouldn’t look in the mouth. The same with the prison industrial complex which have played up anti-terror hysteria to escalate their practices of policing and imprisoning racial minorities. Although we don’t call them “concentration camps” now, de facto concentration camps is exactly what are being built.
What is clear is that an anti-Fascist movement that is Europe-wide and further towards the Arabian Peninsula is needed. And it is necessary to see all the distinct issues – the far right, austerity, ISIL, refugees, police killings, drone attacks – and to unite them as part of the one system: 21st Century Fascism. Above all, this is a struggle for humanity, and in the spirit of the first intercontinental against neoliberalism and for humanity, the struggle for humanity is the struggle of the left. Although the socialist revolution looks further away than at anytime since maybe the 1980s (with the exception of Rojava), the road to revolution will only be made through walking. As another Brigadista interviewed in No Pasaran described life in Franco’s POW camps: “every morning they would line up three people to be executed. Any last words? Long live socialism, long live anarchism, long live communism! And they were shot” (also a misquote). They died believing that by fighting the fascists they were making the revolution.
There is a lot of work for this anti-21st Century Fascist movement to do. Included within:
Direct aid to refugees, particularly ‘new arrivals’.
Fight the policy whereby refugees are shipped to Turkey
The fight against ISIL is the fight of the Left. Eventhough it is dominated by hostile powers (US, Russia, Turkey), ISIL are the most extreme manifestation of right-wing nationalism, and as such it is our fight. Like the International Brigades went to Spain as the most strategic place to fight European fascism, today we need to unite with the Kurds in Rojava (because with the growing budiness between Erdogan, Putin, and Trump, I reckon the days of US support for Rojava are numbered – although I don’t yet know what to make of the strike on the Syrian military airbase).
Stop the further success of the far right in Europe, whether in elections or on the streets.
Practice community self-defense with targeted groups.
Fight borders. Whether this is physical construction of barriers, intensification of policing the borders, or bio-political-economic control from a distance – where people are dissuaded from crossing or even approaching borders by their associated costs like the dangers of traveling through hazardous routes, extortion by smuggler cartels, the precarious existence of ‘irregular’ living on the other side. The ultimate aim should not just be freedom of movement and refuge for those arriving from unsafe places, but also legal, safe, and free (as in free speech and free beer) passage for all.
Fight against the conditions that strengthen the right: the state of things where the costs of economic crisis are being lumped onto the working classes, or where domestic economies are boosted by fighting foreign wars.
Be prepared to work with liberals where this is likely to lead to direct material improvements in security for targeted groups. But constantly remind the world that it was the liberal centre that empowered the rightist surge by sitting-out and eventually exhausting the left-led mobilisation in the earlier years of austerity.
Work with groups that specifically push beyond the confines of the liberal response. This can include for instance Black Lives Matter, who’s very existance insists that the liberal doctrine is false. I.e. that All Lives Do Not Matter to the US state, regardless of how many times it is written in some laws that they do. Also groups who campaign on the basis of migration as reparation for colonialism, to push beyond the whole ‘migrants are not a threat to our way of life’. We are a threat – we are a threat to and we aim to take down the whole capitalism-colonialism-nationstate nexus.
“Fascism is on the rise” declares Neil Hannon, singer in the Divine Comedy, as he introduces his new song, The Pact. It’s a song about coming together to stem the rising fascist tide, and has lyrics like:
When they attack
And you can be sure that they shall
We shall without delay
Come to each other’s aid
And man the barricades together
Unlike most activists or theorists that I usually quote on this blog, Hannon is not of the radical left, eventhough lyrics such as these would not go amiss as part of our philosophy. Instead, Hannon describes himself as a “Wooly kind of liberal” and when he told the guardian in 2010 that he was wary of extremisms I imagine he was talking more of aversion to the left – as that was the current on the rise following the crash – rather than the Fascist right. But this woolly liberal seems to have been moved by these darker times to make his anti-fascist views known. And he is far from the only one who has ventured out of their generally apolitical worlds to voice opposition. A lot of otherwise politically apathetic people are speaking out and if not nailing their colours to the mast at least making it visibly and vocally known that they are against this kind of thing. Which presents a bit of a dilemma for radical leftist activism in terms of the best strategies and alliances for anti-fascist resistance.
There is no question but that the priority is front line defence of communities targetted by the fascists whether this is simply practicing anti-racist solidarity by making it that bit more difficult for police and arseholes to act with immunity by crowding around, documenting, and possibly intervening in racist activity, or the more medium term construction of community networks to develop a degree of autonomy from attacks.
What one may lack
The other party will provide
And everyone must know
You mess with one, you mess with both
And together we’ll beat the bastards back
But beyond this, the traditional pre-figurative tactics and alliances of the autonomist and anarchist left are less equipped to getting the bastards out of power. In the immediate term, the only solution to state power being captured by racist bigots is to have somebody nicer at the wheel. Usually this kind of strategy is bollox – its only a matter of time before the nicer people betray us – but the threat to all things progressive with the fascists in charge is so great that it seems to be an option worth pursuing for the moment: anything to get us out of fascism.
And this kind of strategy entails cooperating with some of our enemies: liberals, both wooly liberals and consciously committed neo-liberals. And make no mistake, both will sell us out in the long term, the committed will do so deviously to avoiding sharing any of their new-found power with those of us who helped them get is, and the woolies will sell us out in the name of moderation and restraint. But rather than just putting our hands up at the outset and refusing to work with anybody in the name of anti-fascism because they are not going towards exactly the same destination as us, the threat is too serious, and too many people are already being hurt to play the moral anarchist high ground.
We need to join The Pact, but we need to do so in such a way that we are always pushing past the limits of liberal strategising. Both Brexit and Trump are outcomes of electoral politics – and no matter how much the liberals refuse to admit it, the solution to voting is not more voting. When working with ad-hoc alliances, we need to remind people that it is the demand of liberals for the support of people yet at the same time their refusal to truly represent people that has gifted the platform to the fascists. By portraying extra-parliamentary direct action and prefigurative resistance as either illegitimate or purely auxiliary to representative politics, yet at the same time sabotaging any ground made by the electoral left (e.g. the Democrats deliberately undermining Sanders, the coup against Corbyn and the general political and media alliance against him, or the cooptation of any leftist party that managed to get into power during the post-crash neo-liberal restructuring, most scandalously and brazenly with Syriza in Greece) how did they expect people to act out their opposition?
A popular front is what is needed, but we need to participate in it as we would in any campaign that doesn’t work along perfect purist anarchist principles but that actually has real people participating in it. The immediate goal is community defence and then getting the fascists out. In working towards these goals, our role is to push for prefigurative tactics built on mutual aid which make an injury to one an injury to all, and for strategies that frame these goals within a broader horizon that sees past our liberal allies’ goals to give the shaft to us and to the vast majority of people once they get the liberal peace they want.
A bond born of brotherhood
A friendship forged in fire
To benefit the common good
What happened on the 8th of November was truly disastrous. I remember in 2000 when Bush won with this program to re-launch Star Wars (the satellite nuclear missile defense system from the Cold War – didn’t happen in the end) and to go back to Iraq (did happen), that this was terrible for the world. But now this is far worse.
Since the results announced that Clinton had won the vote but the fucked-up anti-democratic system was handing the most powerful state machinery in the world to a Fascist, hate crimes have predictably rocketed as bigots feel empowered by the moral authority that he has unleashed. And this is still 2 months before he actually takes power – lets see the kind of pain he is prepared to inflict on people then, both in the US and in the rest of the world.
This is all tragic, but it is important to remember that it did not start with him. He is part of a wider pattern where the extreme-right have taken whole or partial electoral power. Even when they only have partial power this has seen a buoyancy of hate crimes – e.g. Greece when Golden Dawn won 21 seats in the (first) 2012 election, or Netherlands when the liberal People’s Party and the Christian Democrats accepted the support of the PVV for their minority government in 2010. But when the power of the state has been handed to them they have used all its machinery of violence on whatever scapegoats within its territory (e.g. Hungary and the UK targeting of ‘immigrants’; Poland’s trend of increasingly controlling legislation of womens’ bodies and movements) or outside its territory (e.g. Turkey extension into Syria of its ongoing genocide against the Kurds; Iran’s and Russia’s support for Assad’s mass murder of a people risen to ensure their own people know what is coming to them if they assert any basic democratic rights).While all certainly unique to their own circumstances, they do share a pattern that was already there before Trump’s arrival. But it has now announced itself with a bang with this pig (because the power of the US state machinery makes it so much more dangerous and because of US-centric world media that means it unfortunately is the centre of the world and as they say, if its not happening in america then it isn’t happening) although with tight elections around the corner in Austria and France and who knows where else as the trend plays out, it is clearly not limited to one man’s victory.
Nor is it likely to be limited to a handful of sets of states. As mentioned, many have regional police-man ambitions, while the weird and erratic economic shifts they instigate are going to have repercussions in trading partner states. Which is important because while for better r worse neoliberalism has been seen since the 1970s as the only political-economic order possible, its hegemony has been in crisis since 2008 and despite all our efforts it now looks like it is the right who are set to claim this ground. As Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen wrote a few years ago
“whether neoliberalism is ending is perhaps not the main question we should now be asking. Such hegemonic projects have relatively short shelf-lives, induced by their declining ability to meet the interests of the key members of the alliances which underpin them. The real question is more one of how much damage neoliberalism will do in its prolonged death agonies; and, even more importantly, what (or more sociologically, who) will replace it and how”
There are a number of essential actions that need to be taken immediately: neighbourhood organising to protect victims (this does not have to mean vigilante-ism; sometimes it is as simple as racially privileged people accompanying racially targeted people just to lessen the sense of immunity that police or bigots might have), actions targeting specific policies or wars, pressures on elites in states that have yet to fall to the right to withdraw moral support from and condemn the actions of these bigots so that they are not permitted to pretend to be legitimate participants in democracies (aside: a few months ago I had a conversation with an elderly life-long lefty from France, who told me that worse that the socialist party’s move to the centre-right was that socialist or other left politicians now agree to sit on discussion panels with the Front Nationale, whereas 20 years ago all lefties would leave their seats and refuse to facilitate the masquerading of hate speech as democratic debate – this is the long process of how we have let the likes of Trump come to pass). But beyond this, there is a need for movement-building that seriously comes to terms with a possible post-neoliberal world order, although far from the one we have been trying to bring into being.
That is a huge task, and even starting to think in this way is huge (not to mention depressing) and clearly cannot be dealt with here. So I’m going to finish this post by casting blame. For better or for worse, neoliberalism is dying. Due to its own inherent contradictions but also because of capitalist elites who transformed their own growth and profitability set-backs into an unprecedented economic crisis, neoliberalism has had an image-problem as a legitimate order since 2008. But because of their allies managing policy making institutions who refused to let bad investment and greed get what they deserve – nothing – and instead sucking wealth from the rest of society, because they relentlessly imposed such policies against all resistance, and did everything to stop a left-wing democratic and humane discourse from building itself as an alternative to neoliberalism, because of this, the have let the monsters take over. Obama created Trump, Hollande fostered La Pen, and Gordon Brown made Theresa May. The blood of fascism’s coming victims will be on their hands.
The “Jungle” camp in Calais, where refugees attempting to reach britain lived, was dismantled last week by the French state, with people being ‘redistributed’ to different centres around the country, in complete disregard for the choice of people forced to leave war conditions. Image shared from Liberation.
The biggest story is still the inspirational prison strike in the US. Most important to share is a compiled list of calls for support. Resources and contact details for offering
Front page of the National following the uk conservative party conference where they announced plans to expel non-essential foreigners, have schools and workplaces report their foreign pupils and workers, exempt the army and police from following human rights legislation, revive a class-appartheid education system, among other atrocities. Source: The Canary
“With solidarity and self-organisation we defeat facsim” – Syrian activists in Greece at anti fascist demonstration in august. Image from the New Internationalist.
I came across two statements worth sharing today. The first is from the Korydallos Womens’ Prison in Greece, where prisoners have been protesting for months about issues of overcrowding, excercise facilities, and medical mismanagement. It is significant that the highest concentration of solidarity actions with the US prison strike have come from Athens, many of them from inside prisons. Therefore it is only right that the rest of us share the stories of the struggles in greek prisons. Text shared from InsurrectionNews:
On Friday Oct. 14th a delegate from the Ministry of Justice came to the women’s prison as per our request. During the meeting we discussed in depth our issues and proposed solutions in order to re-allocate the prison space and satisfy the needs of women prisoners. The main issues concern the integration of the story below our wing into the women’s prison in order to achieve decongestion as well as the necessity of an area for our yard time where we could spend time outside in humane conditions. The discussion moved within the framework of providing information without the ministry making any commitment. However, there was a mutual understanding of our fair demands and a promise to provide solutions to our problems. Until those promises become actions we decided to continue our mobilizing which basically means that the prison will remain open during midday lock down and delay evening lock down by one hour.
Korydallos Women’s Prison
And secondly, The Ferguson National Response Network have issued a call for support for Joshua Williams, jailed for taking part in the Ferguson uprising in response racial murder by police. He has been placed in level 5 custody with violent offenders. The message is simple – if you protest against the institutions of the state you can be tossed in the worst parts of prison where fuck knows what will happen you. Call shared from itsgoingdown.
Josh Williams, who was jailed for his role in the Ferguson uprising, has been placed in level 5 of the prison, a violent environment which threatens his safety, and is asking for help in first getting moved to a different level, and also to be moved to another prison closer to home.
Message: “Hello, I am a concerned citizen contacting you on behalf of Joshua Williams #1292002, who is currently housed at the ERDCC in Bonne Terre, MO. Joshua Williams has been unjustly housed with violent offenders in level 5 at this facility, when he should be in level 2. Joshua Williams is a non-violent, wrongly convicted young man with no priors. Because the prison has jeopardized the safety of Joshua Williams and housed him haphazardly, we are also demanding that Joshua Williams be transferred to a facility closer to his home in St Louis, MO.
We need Joshua Williams transferred from level 5 to level 2, and his transfer papers should be approved and in process immediately.
I need this message to be passed on to the director, deputy director, and any other parties who can expedite this process. This is an emergency and of the utmost importance.”
You can also drop Josh a line with a few words of support at:
Josh Williams #1292002 E.R.D.C.C. 2727 Highway K Bonne Terre, MO 63628
“Dignity can’t be imprisoned” – banner drop in Korydallos Prison in Athens in solidarity with prison strike in US. Image from insurrectionnews.
The event of the month this month in my opinion is the prison strike in the US. I’m not getting great coverage of it here but the following articles are worth sharing: a good introduction piece here about slave labour and the prison industrial complex and the organising (or lack thereof) which led up to September 9th, although it was published on the first day of the strike so probably out of date at this stage and doesn’t really tell us anything about what happened. A more recent discussion article about reasons why women prisoners are not joining the strike in large numbers (yet!), most of the reasons rooted in patriarchal nature of grievances and tactics, and an exploration of ‘everyday resistance’ and how the movement might strategise around this. And finally a really useful summary of events day-by-day, and and most importantly with resources for how you can help. Support-wise, it is a bit US focused, but there are somethings there that people elsewhere can use. As I said, with lack of media interest it is kind of difficult keeping track of what is going on there. If somebody does have some good overview readings on the strike – preferably ones that don’t rely on the US dept of justice or other official sources for their info – then please do share.
On the same note, I haven’t come across any really good writings on the protests following the latest killings of black lives by police in the US, so please share if you have one or two to recommend.
A huge demonstration against racism in Helsinki following a recent murder by militant far right group. Image by @yonatankelib.
The best thing I read this month came out just on the last day of September: a piece written by a group of militant organisers trying to organise among the low-wage immigrant working class in London. The focus of the article is about a text written in the 1970s by a US group – the Sojourner Truth Organisation – who had similar objectives, on the subject of how race and class intersect and the challenges this poses for collective consciousness. The London group discuss how the Sojourner Truth Org document is relevant and not in their context, what potential and problems there is for race-focused campaigns in London (such as Black Lives Matters in the US), and what are their principal challenges to organising with immigrant workers in racist UK.
Although not as lively as the strikes that brought France to a standstill in June, the movement against the Loi Travail continues. Image liberated from Liberation.
Demonstration in Poland in June against restrictive abortion laws. Polish women are to initiate a work stoppage Monday 3rd October in response to recent proposals to further restrict and criminalise abortion – essentially a complete ban. Image shared from Lebedev’s notindependent.co.uk.
Elsewhere:
Banner to commemorate Abdelssalam Eldanf. Shared from Struggles in Italy.
A striker killed by trucks ordered in to break the picket line in Italy. Abdelssalam Eldanf was born in Egypt, and was on strike demanding the reinstatement of fired precarious co-workers. Needless to say, the police did their jobs of policing the strikers, not the management who directed the trucks to push through the lines.
Two YPJ (Womens Defense Units) soldiers take a break from defending Rojava’s experiment in autonomous democratic confederalism from both ISIL and Turkey to raise fists in solidarity with Irish campaign to legalise abortion. The sign reads in Irish “There is no Liberation without Womens Liberation”, above “Repeal the 8th”, a reference to the 8th amendment to the irish constitution outlawing abortion. Image shared from wsm.ie.
The civil war in Syria gets worse, with Assad seeing success with his strategy of starving territory back into control, and Turkey crossing the border. Yet again, the establishment media has done little more than regurgitate the official spin: that Turkey is responding to the ISIL terrorist attack on its territory by committing ground troops to the fight against them in Syria. When in fact, the bomb attack was in (Turkey-occupied) Kurdistan, at the wedding of a Kurdish political activist, which was used by Turkey as an excuse to implement a plan it had drawn up not to fight ISIL but to attack the autonomist project of the Syrian Kurds in Rojava, who are the most successful grouping gaining back territory from ISIL. And the US has gone along with it and finally ended the uneasy ‘temporary’ relationship with the Kurds, possibly because they don’t want Turkey getting closer to Russia, possibly because they too see the Rojava autonomist project as a threat, probably both. Either way, it shows that for the US and Turkey alike, fighting terrorism is less of a priority than imperialist hegemony. See this and this articles on the deal.
Puerto Rican street art by La Puerta collective calling for a revolution against US colonialism. Image from ROAR.
Protest by students at a formerly white-only school in Pretoria, South Africa, where a ban on afros is the trigger leading to outburst, but only the latest of a series of policies that has led students to connect the dots of institutional racism. “That is what forces us to realise that no matter how hard we work or how well we speak, we remain black. That is what forces us to realise that we are still niggers. That is what forces ‘coconuts’ to become conscious”. Photo from Daily Maverick.
Efforts in the Netherlands to shaft the CETA deal through forcing a citizens’ referendum on it: How the Dutch could derail CETA.
A surprisingly fair article about an open letter written and signed by 597 sex workers in Kazakhstan demanding legalisation of their work. It outlines points made in the letter rather than finding some organisation to make the argument on their behalf, there is little room given for bigotry critics, and the rest of the article caricatures the government. That said, the accompanying photograph is dreadful, and there is the usual irresponsible wild bandying of baseless figures for sensationalist purposes.
An interesting interview with an activist in Naples involved in the squatting and social-centre community, about the state of the left and strategising there.
French-Chinese community in Paris organise and take to the streets to protest against violent, anti-Chinese racist violence following recent murder. Image from Liberation.fr
And finally an excellent intersectionalist analysis queering marxism – looking at the many ways heteronormative society pushes LGBT*Q people into precarity. I usually don’t like overly materialist left-wing analysis because they tend to reduce form of oppression to just the economic impact, but this one does a great job.
socialisestruggle 