COMMENT BY JORGE JORQUERA
MELBOURNE — Prime Minister John Howard and Victorian Premier Steve Bracks are now both on record decrying planned September 11 (S11) protests against the World Economic Forum as likely to be "violent". The protest organisers, in particular the S11 Alliance, have made it crystal clear that this isn't true, that the protest will be a non-violent community blockade of the Crown Casino venue.
At the S11 Alliance meeting on August 23, the International Socialist Organisation sought to revisit the debate on whether or not the S11 blockade should be committed to non-violence. The issue was raised in an agenda item on how S11 Alliance activists should respond to media questions regarding potential violence. ISO members several months ago moved the original motion for the blockade to be non-violent, a motion the alliance agreed to by consensus; now they've back-flipped.
According to ISO members, not everyone in the S11 Alliance is "serious" about shutting down the summit and the commitment to non-violent peaceful resistance will encourage participants to "go soft" on this objective. This proposition, that the S11 Alliance should adopt tactics for shutting down the forum other than those of mass action based on peaceful resistance, was disguised behind abstract sloganeering about the general nature of violence in capitalist society.
Socialists and violence
Socialists do not accept the "philosophy of non-violence" common among some in the environmental movement and typified by those who glorify Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. We reject non-violence as a universally applicable strategy in the struggle against oppression and exploitation: the violence of the oppressor cannot be pacified by the non-violence of the oppressed.
Rather, the capitalist state exists to enforce systemic social and political violence and will respond accordingly to social movements which challenge it. The greater the political challenge, the greater the likely repression.
The most effective means of fighting the violence of the capitalist state is by sustained and organised mass mobilisation. The power of the working class stems from its status as the overwhelming majority in capitalist societies, its determining role in social production and its subsequent capacity for organised cooperative action.
Because revolutionary change requires the mobilisation and participation of the majority in society, any tactics which undermine campaigns' ability to reach out to, politicise and involve an increasing number of working-class people are detrimental to building anti-capitalist movements.
The exact tactics of mass mobilisation are determined by the level of combativity of the working class and social movements and the specifics of state repression.
While socialists seek everywhere to organise actions that promote mass involvement, how this is done varies depending on the political situation. Repressive regimes, such as in South Korea and Indonesia, will force social movements to develop a range of self-defence tactics to preserve the movement's confidence in its ability to mobilise publicly. These range from street-fighting tactics that strengthen the confidence of workers against police repression to guerilla struggle, as was necessary in Cuba and Nicaragua.
Peaceful resistance
At this stage, socialists in Australia do not encounter savage repression as a systematic barrier to mass mobilisation. Protests in Australia should therefore seek to make the most of the democratic space we have open, in the main through using peaceful mass mobilisations.
Taking advantage of this organising space does not mean discounting the need to plan for possible police repression. But it does mean that street fighting should be well down the list of tactics used.
In the case of the S11 blockade, there is little doubt that the police and perhaps the military will use violence to attempt to break the blockade. Our choice is simple. If we respond by trying to take on the police in a street-fighting confrontation, we would be doing so in isolation, without a prepared social movement, and would inevitably lose and rapidly disperse our forces.
Alternatively, we can use peaceful resistance tactics (linking arms, lock-ons) in which we encourage all participants to avoid fighting the police. This way we establish an atmosphere that makes it politically less acceptable for the security forces to apply maximum violence and disperse us.
Much of what the ISO contributed to the S11 Alliance debate on non-violent tactics amounted to political posturing. They provided no serious set of street-fighting tactics that could keep our blockade united and effective. It was simply a show to look "militant" in the hope that activists attracted to the blockade will take them for the most "serious", "militant" revolutionaries.
But throwing a few tomatoes in isolation from a united and disciplined tactical approach to mass actions is just playing at revolution. To organise revolution, we need to be serious about it.
What after S11?
The ISO, like many anarchists, pretends that the S11 blockade will "shut down capitalism for a day", and that the degree of confrontation with security forces is a measure of its success. There is no consideration of where S11 fits into the political situation, just some catchy slogans for those who might believe that revolution is made by phrases rather than mass action.
The protests have become an important focus for challenging the neo-liberal offensive in Australia and raising the ,Opolitical perspective of a class-struggle internationalist solution — possibly the best opportunity to do so in many years. S11 will not overthrow the government — but it could begin the process of forging a new alliance of social, environmental and labour movements to struggle against neo-liberal capitalism, at home and globally.
What the radical edge of the social and environmental movements has here is an opportunity to provide the sort of leadership that the Labor Party-oriented trade union and peak community organisations will not provide. We can win hundreds of union, environmental and community activists to ongoing struggle against the neo-liberal agenda, not compromised by the racist, nationalist and parliamentarist illusions sown by Labor.
This, not tomato throwing, is the serious revolutionary alternative and should be the real mark of S11's success.
[Jorge Jorquera is a member of the S11 Alliance and Melbourne district secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party. Visit Green Left Weekly's new S11 web page at <http://www.greenleft.org.au/globalaction/s11>.]