BY STUART MUNCKTON
The Earth is becoming a nastier planet on which to live. The growing hole in the ozone layer, increased global warming and the wholesale destruction of the world's forests are evidence of this. Moreover, according to the World Health Organisation, 40,000 children are dying every day from starvation. Millions are dying each year from preventable diseases.
What causes this? More and more people are laying the blame for this dire situation on the capitalist private profit system. The people who are coming to this conclusion are coming up with many different solutions. This is to be expected. Some people who have rejected capitalism call themselves socialists. Some call themselves anarchists. Both these terms encompass a broad spectrum of views.
Anarchists, in general, recognise the horrors of the capitalist system and recognise that this system must be abolished. It is more than a little disappointing then, given their understanding of both the horrors of capitalism and the urgency of the need to defeat it, that a number of people who consider themselves anarchists seem to be spending a significant amount of time, not running campaigns against capitalism, but rather against the rest of the anti-capitalists.
In Melbourne, a large number of posters have appeared attacking the socialist youth organisation Resistance. They parody the style of a particular Resistance poster and say "When you assume what other people are doing isn't worthwhile, give them leaflets! Insist! Join Insistence!".
The question that has to be asked about these posters is, why? What is the point of the time and energy that has gone into thinking this poster up, designing it, getting it photocopied and then put up? What has been achieved when only people familiar with Resistance would understand the "joke"?
The people responsible, who identify as anarchists, clearly have a different political perspective for fighting capitalism than Resistance (you would assume they wouldn't do smug send ups if they didn't). But exactly what that different perspective is, is not clarified by the poster.
What the growing anti-capitalist movement needs is open, constructive debate between different tendencies within it in order to find the best way forward to defeating the capitalist system.
Those behind the "insistence" poster would have made a far more constructive contribution to the anti-capitalist movement if they had spent the same time and energy exposing the crimes of capitalism, or actually formulating and putting out their ideas on the best way to defeat capitalism and how they differ from Resistance's.
The only political position that can be drawn from the "insistence" poster is that its creators are opposed to leaflets, or, perhaps, not opposed to leaflets, but opposed to attempts to distribute them. Are these anarchists attacking the right of people with views different from theirs to express those views by means of leaflets?
The "insistence" poster is, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. There seem to be a number of people considering themselves anti-capitalist who find it more important to attack other anti-capitalists than capitalism itself. These people often focus their attacks on those in the anti-capitalist movement who identify themselves as revolutionary socialists, or Marxists, although they are routinely and dismissively tagged as "Trots" (i.e., Trotskyists).
At the protest against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne from September 11-13, for example, it was disheartening to see, amongst a lot of brilliant political graffiti, signs declaring "Down with Trots".
On one pavement there was sprayed "Trots are cunts". That is actually quite an achievement: whoever was responsible for it had managed, using just three words, to be both sectarian and sexist. Meanwhile, these "Trots" were on the picket lines resisting the police along with everyone else.
A number of left-wing email lists have also been used as a forum for "anti-Trot" attacks. While there has been a lot of useful discussion between anarchists and socialists on these lists about the way the S11 blockade was organised and on the way forward for the movement, far too many of the contributions have consisted in little more than inventive mud-slinging.
One posting on an email list for discussion around proposed actions for May 1 next year advertises an "anti-Trot" web page. This is a professional-looking page prepared by people calling themselves anarchists into which a fair bit of time and energy has clearly gone.
The main target of the page is the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), although it takes swipes at other socialists as well. The web page features a number of articles, most of which, rather than criticising the politics of the ISO or other socialists, denounce the ISO for producing an anti-capitalist newspaper which reflects the ISO's views. Would these anarchists prefer that people only had the option of reading the Murdoch and Fairfax families' newspapers?
It is one thing to have political disagreement with someone. Resistance has a range of disagreements with the ISO. However, we have more important things to do than spend our time designing a whole web page to sling mud against other anti- capitalist tendencies with whom we have some political disagreements.
We will work with anyone in any campaign where we have common ground. Where there are political disagreements we believe in open debate to clarify the issues.
If we are to defeat capitalism, then all anti-capitalists need to take the following words of Che Guevara seriously: "If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine". Or as another great revolutionary, Malcolm X, put it: "I for one will join in with anyone ... so long as you want a change to the wretched conditions that exist on this earth". Anti-capitalists need to fight capitalism, not each other.
[Stuart Munckton is a leading member of the socialist youth organisation Resistance.]