BY PETER BOYLE
Activists in every capital city in Australia have begun organising around calls for a worker-student strike and blockade of the stock exchanges on May 1. The M1 coalitions have brought together veterans of the S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne last year and other activists inspired by the new global movement against corporate globalisation.
Militant mass actions are now planned in many countries on May 1, especially in the Third World. The call for a global strike, initiated by the Democratic Socialist Party and Workers Power, has also been supported by groups and individuals in South Africa, Nepal, Pakistan and Indonesia.
A lively discussion has also begun on a number of internet discussion lists. While there are a variety of local discussion lists, the main global list is <m1-2k01@egroups.com>. While started by activists in Britain, it has so far mainly been used by Australian activists, as the M1 anti-corporate mobilisation is most advanced in this country.
The discussion on the m1-2k01 list so far has revolved around the familiar debate about movement organisation, with some anarchists making a fundamentalist argument for a affiity group/council of spokes structure, which they claim is the most democratic. Others, including the DSP and most socialist groups, support open, democratic activist coalitions.
'Global strike'
Another discussion has focussed on the call for a global strike. Leon Parissi of the Workers Liberty group, for instance, has argued that it is a mistake for M1 activist coalitions to issue the strike call unless union offiials agree.Without such official backing, such a strike would fail, he argues, and those workers who did strike for a day would be demoralised and conclude that left groups are not to be taken seriously. This conclusion, he says, would only serve to leave otherwise militant workers even more firmly in the grip of current leaderships, with no credible alternative pole of attraction.
At the heart of this discussion are differing political estimates of the significance of the new global movement which has come together in Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Prague, Seoul, Nice and other cities.
For its part, at its recent Congress held from January 3-7, the DSP made a four-part assessment of this new movement.
First, the party assessed, the present character of the movement as a sustained, militant, mass movement against neo-liberal globalisation and corporate tyranny will be strengthened by a new round of major actions which will take place around the world during 2001, just as occurred in 2000. The next World Trade Organisation meeting, scheduled for November, could be a turning point, especially if the governments of the rich countries succeed in forcing a restart to the trade round scuttled at Seattle in November 1999.
Second, the party sees this new global movement's power as lying not only in the disruption caused to a few global summits but in the huge latent support the movement has in the working class of the imperialist countries and the oppressed masses of the Third World. The threat of a more direct link with either of these mighty class forces poses a much deeper disruption than the corporate rulers want to risk.
Third, this potential for the movement to link up with major class forces, in a leap, is based on the pent-up discontent with two decades of global capitalist neo-liberal offensive.
The traditional misleaderships of these classes, primarily the social democratic and Stalinist parties, were massively discredited by their decades of accomodation to the capitalist neo-liberal offensive. In Australia, for instance, very few workers seriously doubt that Labor in government serves anyone other than the corporate rich, even if they don't see an immediate political alternative and still give their vote to the ALP as the lesser evil.
Fourth, working against this is the weakness of the organised forces for radical change. However, at very least, these forces ought to recognise that this is a moment to be audacious and help build mobilisations that can draw in the advanced detachments of the working class and other oppressed classes.
On the basis of this general assessment of the movement and its context and its specific manifestation in Australia around S11 the DSP concluded that it was right to support M1 mobilisations which include blockades of the stock exchange (and possibly some nearby corporate HQs), combined with a call for a workers and students strike against corporate tyranny.
Don't hold back
Anti-corporate activists should try their best to get formal union support for M1, including for the strike, but should not hold back from making the strike call and wait for the trade union leaderships to take the initiative. Because they won't.The point of the M1 strike is not primarily to expose the trade union leaders but rather to practically build on the fact that the trade union leaders are already considerably exposed. Unfortunately, some left activists underestimate the growing political alienation of workers from their conservative union leaders, at the exact moment we should be taking political advantage of that alienation.
Another misconception is that workers and unionists will sacrifice a day's pay on May 1 only if the strike is about immediate issues. But that certainly wasn't true for the many workers who participated in S11.
Many workers can see the link between the movement against neo-liberal globalisation and their immediate interests (not just industrial but social and ecological). It is not hard to understand that global resistance to the corporations' demands for more freedom to exploit us helps workers all around their world in their more immediate struggles against the same forces.
We should support any attempts to make this connection more explicit by supplementing the main global demands of the movement such as abolition of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, the cancellation of the Third World debt, opposition to trade rules stacked in favour of the corporate exploiters and opposition to the corporate monopoly and abuse of technology with more immediate demands such as opposition to privatisation, individual contracts, the Workplace Relations Act.
Deciding on such issues will be a big part of the task of the M1 coalitions over the next few months.
If we're to link with militant workers, M1 activists will also have to be involved in the major union struggles taking place now such as the Yallourn power struggle in Victoria and the CFMEU's fight against BHP's individual contract offensive and we should take the M1 call to arms with us into the union movement.
But the other key to getting workers out on M1 will be to make sure it really is a mass anti-corporate civil disobedience action. People are sick of going through the normal channels of protest. If a blockade of the stock exchanges on M1 can capture the imagination by going outside those channels, then workers will back, regardless of whether their union officials support it or not.
Of course, the call to strike on May 1 might be more or less successful. But even if we get only the degree of worker and unionist support won at S11, M1 will take the working class movement forward. And given how inspired those unionists who participated in S11 were after the event, it should be possible to surpass S11 and bring many more workers along.
Of course there are no guarantees about M1's success. But the decision by militant sector of the movement to take the initiative and call a global strike on M1 will not make it more marginalised.
Conservative union officials and ALP hacks in the student movement are already acting to try to block the gathering M1 momentum precisely because they are worried of the opposite: that, like S11, M1 will strengthen the radical forces against the conservatives in the labour, student and other social movements.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.]