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Strike wave in Indonesia

Published on March 6, 2012 by in General News, Labor, Worker Struggles
Jakarta, Indonesia
Bekasi%20Jan%2027 Strike wave in Indonesia

Jakarta

In November 2011 a planned strike in Jakarta by 85,000 unionised workers was called off after the city governor agreed to raise the minimum wage by about 20 per cent.[1]

Freeport
More than 8000 workers and 1600 contractors struck at the Freeport copper mine in Papua. The three month strike, from September to December, was the longest in Indonesian history and slashed production at the lucrative mine by half. The strike ended when workers won a 37 percent pay rise. Employers across Indonesia were said to be worried that the pay deal could spur workers elsewhere to press for higher wages.

Though the strike was said to be over, there were also reports that as of December 22 workers were still not returning to work because the company had failed to guarantee that thousands of workers laid off by subcontractors would be rehired.

In December Papua Police said that they planned to summon a number of strike organisers as part of ongoing criminal investigations. Freeport Worker Union (SPSI) board members were reportedly banned from leaving Timika and dozens of members had been summoned for questioning.

Papua has seen a long-running independence movement over resource revenues, and striking workers were joined by spear-wielding Papuans in blockades of Freeport’s supply routes for food and fuel. The company’s main pipeline carrying metal concentrate to its port was sabotaged during the dispute and repairs were hampered due to the ongoing war between independence fighters and the Indonesian military.

On January 27 Freeport appointed a new chief executive at its Indonesian unit in what was widely acknowledged as a public-relations move.[2]

Bekasi, West Java
Bekasi is the fourth-largest city in Indonesia, on the eastern border of Jakarta.

On January 19 and again on January 27 tens of thousands of workers blockaded the toll gates along the Jakarta–Cikarang motorway with motorcycles, creating traffic jams of up to 20km and causing some shops in the area to shut. The workers, from at least 300 companies and four different unions, demanded a rise in the minimum wage. The West Java governor had ruled that the minimum monthly wage be raised from Rp 1. 29 million (A$135/£91) to Rp 1.49 million (A$156/£110), but the Indonesian Employers Association (Apindo) refused to recognise the agreement and had gained a court ruling that would overturn it.

Following these demonstrations, an emergency meeting was held on January 27 between the government and the Employers Association, at which they agreed to recognise the original ruling and pay the higher wage.

However, the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry spokesman said it was agreed that if an employer claimed that they could not meet the minimum monthly wage, they would be able to appeal to the governor for exemption.[3]

Batam
Batam island, 20 km south of Singapore, was declared a Free Trade Zone in 2006. The Batamindo Industrial Park, built as part of an economic cooperation agreement between the Indonesia and Singapore governments, contains more than seventy multinational manufacturers employing more than 60,000 workers.

In September 2011, five people were injured when rioting broke out at the PT Nexus Engineering Indonesia dockyard.

In November 2011 thousands of striking workers took to the streets for a number of days as demonstrations calling for a higher minimum wage became riots against police brutality.

Ten thousand people demonstrated calling for the mayor to raise the monthly municipal minimum-wage from to Rp 1.2 million (A$124/£85) to Rp 1.76 million (A$183/£124). Two strikers were shot and 21 were beaten by riot police. The military was called in to guard industrial estates after traffic police posts and cars were burnt and a government office was attacked. There were reports that workers and police officers hurled rocks at each other outside the mayor’s office.

Two days later, more than five thousand striking workers demonstrated and damaged several police posts. Most businesses suspended their operations as they did wish to become targets of the protesters’ anger.[4]

On January 18 nine hundred workers at the Batam factory of Varta Microbattery Indonesia, a German company, held a one-day strike demanding a more equitable housing allowance. Eleven unmarried workers receive a housing allowance equivalent to Rp 300,000 per month (A$30/£21): the strikers demanded that this allowance be extended to all workers. Read more…

 
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Police Profiling and Harassment: Seattle Police Officer Caught On Video

Published on March 5, 2012 by in People of Color, Police Harassment, video
I'm gonna kick your ass and get away with it.

Seattle Police Officer Caught On Video Talking About Making Up Evidence

 
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Occupy May 1st General Strike

Published on March 4, 2012 by in Articles/Essays, Features, Plutocracy, Worker Struggles
121211-Black-Generalstrike01

Which way forward for the 99%?

Build Power & Show Power through Mass Participatory Bold Action

by Occupy May 1st

There have been a wave of repressive attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and repression escalated to the current levels, questions were being asked: what’s the way forward for the movement? Already there have been glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way and shining a light for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike, Occupy Foreclosures, and other actions. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%

Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor (paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we do not frequently exercise this collective power in our own interests. Too often we fight amongst and scapegoat each other as the source of the problem through: racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice. This is necessary for the 1% to maintain control because their power is only exercised by different segments of the 99% actively oppressing and working against other segments of the 99%, in addition to us neither being fully aware of, nor organizing to utilize, the collective power we have. The result is that many segments of the the 99%- people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and others- deal with overlapping forms of oppression and societal prejudice; all of us remain divided amongst each other; and the 1% continues to increase their power and wealth because of this.

Currently, the state of the economy has hit all of us (some facing overlapping prejudice and oppression, harder than others). There are too many people out of work; our pay has barely or hasn’t kept up with rising costs; our social services have continued to be cut; our influence on government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been attacked. This has been going on while the elites of this country have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had the highest decreases in the amount of taxes they pay; have attacked our social services and organizations of popular defense (such as our unions and community organizations); and have consolidated to an even greater degree their power over politics. The Business Insider- ironically- provides one of the more useful series of charts that root the Occupy movement’s concerns in the sobering historical fact that we experience.[1]

The way forward must involve building and showing our popular power against that of the elite. But the form of our power must be different from theirs: we must fight fire with water. Where they exercise hierarchical power over us to dominate, control, exploit and oppress; we must build and exercise horizontal, bottom-up power with each other to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves autonomously from all forms of hierarchical power relations in our communities, schools and workplaces to fight collectively for our interests. This must include a rejection of attempts to divide and rule us; a rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression; a rejection of attempts by electoral parties, powerful special interest groups and others to co-opt and control our movement.

The camp occupations built the movement and brought global attention to the variety of concerns of the 99%. They inspired many; provided a sense of hope and solidarity; brought economic justice and the problems of power inequality back into spotlight of national conversation; highlighted the need for cultures, societies and institutions of direct democracy based on “power with”- not “power over” – each other; served as a spaces of convergence for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home and a community where folks could face less harassment than they normally faced. The camp occupations have served a fundamental role in the movement; but it’s time to move beyond them.

We need to develop the movement beyond the camp because the majority of the 99% can’t camp out in a city center. The majority of the 99% have obligations and vulnerabilities that prevent them from such time-consuming, geographically-specific action including: work, school, responsibilities in caring for children or other dependents, particular health needs, etc. So in order for us to truly exercise our power as the 99% and to truly be participatory, we need to find ways where all of us can participate, and be valued, in whatever capacity and with whatever time we have to contribute. We need our action to be as participatory, diverse and widespread as possible. We must boldly show and build our collective power.

Show Power

To show our power, on May 1st, 2012, we will be organizing for such a mass participatory and bold collective action: a national general strike, mass boycott, student strike/ walk-out and mass day of action. We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there’s no union or the union isn’t supportive- to hold a one-day general strike. Where a strike is not possible, we will be organizing people to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”. Those who are students will be walking-out of their schools (or not showing up in the first place). In the community, we will be holding a mass boycott and refusing to make any purchase on that day.

This action will necessarily be a symbolic show of power because any decrease in economic activity that day will likely be compensated for by purchases and extra work activity the days before and after May 1st. But it will be symbolic in the way a cannon shot across the bow of a ship is symbolic: it doesn’t do any damage; but it warns our opponent that we are willing and able to damage their boat if necessary. And perhaps just as important as the day itself, the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues of the 99%, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another (some of especially so) and all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other to fight for our collective interests, which is structurally, and therefore inherently, against the interests of the 1%. We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.

Build Power

In addition to showing our power on May 1st, we need to build bases of popular, bottom-up, collective, anti-oppressive and anti-hierarchical power in our workplaces, communities, and schools. So we will be doing a variety of workshops, building a variety of organizing campaigns, and engaging a variety of actions on the local level to contribute to the building of such collective power. Some of the workshops, campaigns and actions that we will develop and engage in include: organizing new unions, becoming more active in participatory unions; making our hierarchical unions more participatory; occupying foreclosures; building tenant unions; blocking evictions; preventing foreclosures; and creating solidarity networks, to name a few. We will not be co-opted by electoral parties, or hierarchical organizations looking to use the movement to serve their interest while diffusing our power. Instead we will organize, educate, and agitate where we are at to build power with each other and to fight directly for our interests: the interests of popular power against the interests of elite power. All of us must contribute for this effort to be effective; but, to the greatest degree possible, those contributions must be collective in nature because our true power is in our solidarity with each other.

Through this effort we are looking to offer real solutions to addressing issues of immediate concern where each of us is at, through direct collective action from the bottom-up. The goal is to continue the ongoing shift currently happening within the movement from just mobilizing, to organizing (or to move from mobilization, to massification[2]). Mobilizing is necessary, but it is not enough. We can’t just call people out to engage in action. We need to build the networks, organizations and campaigns that provide the opportunities for an ever greater number of people to participate in the decision-making process and functioning of the autonomous popular organizations we are creating. Our movement is leaderless, which also means that we all must be leaders. But the leadership we build is again, with, not over, others. We need to all truly listen to and support each other in developing our consciousness, capacities and confidence. We need to see the fights against the various oppressions which keep folks down and divide the 99% against itself, as central to, not distractions from, the effectiveness of our struggle. We must discourage and isolate egotistical, self-serving and movement-killing tendencies we encounter while encouraging and developing collective, liberatory and movement-building tendencies. Our participatory, bottom-up networks, organizations and campaigns will be the way through which we build our power and make small gains in the medium term. But they will also serve as the basis for a new world that we are building toward. This new world in our hearts that we are building and showing, within the shell of the old one that we are confronting, is one in which people share power with, not over, each other. It’s where workers themselves democratically control their workplaces; where everyone can find meaningful, socially-useful and balanced work that is carried out in comfortable conditions. It’s where those who aren’t able to work (or who have put in their share of their lifetime) are taken care of by society; where we abolish rulers over us and instead societies directly decide for themselves how to live, develop and grow. It’s where our environments are healthy, beautiful and sustainable; where we all have the educational and social opportunities to develop and contribute our full capacities to our families and societies. It’s where people can live in nice homes and safe communities, get their health needs fully taken care of, eat healthy and well, and not have to worry about meeting their needs or the needs of their families; where we can all have time and resources to enjoy life; and where the global human society is driven not by competition, oppression, exploitation, domination and war; but by love, freedom and solidarity. We, the 99%, will build our power and show our power until we’ve occupied our workplaces, our communities, our schools, our lives, our world… until we’ve occupied everything!

PROMOTE THIS FACEBOOK EVENT:
Let’s build the power of the 99% so we can show the power of the 99%!
Cities/Occupy GAs Who’ve Endorsed the Call for an International General Strike on May 1st 2012. Email occupymayfirst at gmail dot com or occupym1 at riseup dot net if your GA or organization endores the call!
Miami…, Los Angeles, Boston, Riverside, CA, Long Beach, CA, Venice, CA, Melbourne, Australia
LINK UP WITH OCCUPY MAY FIRST #occupym1
Friend: Occupy May 1st Like: Occupy May 1st Follow: Occupy May 1st

Occupy May 1st

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
[2] http://libcom.org/library/mobilisation-massification

 

460 0 30 0 0 0 0 0 om12 Occupy May 1st General Strike

 
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Egypt: Army and Police Attack Striking Court Workers

Published on March 2, 2012 by in Egypt, Worker Struggles

 

Thousands of court and prosecution service workers were reported to have organised sit-ins and protests across Egypt as part of a national strike which began on 28 February. The strikers are calling for improved salaries and improved conditions at work.

Court workers protested outside the courts in Isma’iliyya, chanting the iconic slogan of the 25 January Revolution: Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.

 
Hundreds of court workers chanting during their occupation of the court buildings in Giza.

The courts in Suez were completely closed by the strike. Hundreds of court workers gathered outside and held the doors shut to enforce the shutdown. Police and army forces stormed the court buildings, using electric batons to beat aside the strikers, injuring dozens in the process.

Send messages of support for the court workers’ strike to menasolidarity@gmail.com


 

 
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CALL FOR ENTRIES: Autonomy, Consensus, and the Self-Determination of Freedom in Theory and Practice

Published on February 29, 2012 by in Anarchism, Call For Entries, Egypt, Features, Libertairan Socialism, Native American, Theory, Women's Struggles, Worker Struggles
Call_For_Entries

What is the relationship of the autonomy of the oppressed to the collective of the commune? In Occupy, which groups should be autonomous, and which should not? What is the relationship of race, class, gender, age, etc., before and after the revolution? After the overthrow of the state and seizing the means of production, how do we overcome institutionalized racism that has been organized into the fabric of the means of production and the means of life? What is the relationship of organizations and groups like CNT, Libcom, News & Letters, IWW, and Solfed – born from theory – to spontaneous uprisings, organizations and groups like Occupy Wall Street? What would a Feminist “transition period” from Patriarchy to total freedom look like? These are the kinds of questions we ask you to ponder for the first issue of People Not Profit. This is an open call, and we welcome everything from art, news, music., film, theory, debate, etc.

Call for Entries
G8/NATO, Chicago, May 2012

After so many counter-revolutions have arisen from within the revolution, it is clear that additional, multi-linear revolutions must also emerge within the revolution, as new passions and  new forces rise up to smash all forms of oppression created by the division of mental and manual labor in society (one class who makes decisions, and another who must follow them). It is also clear that we cannot leave to chance the question of “What Happens After the Revolution?” We also cannot avoid fighting against all forms of oppression, as we can only get beyond capitalism if we overthrow it in its totality. We need a theory of revolution that unites these struggles before and after “the revolution.”

We ask you to imagine a libertarian socialist transition period, which mediates social relations between capitalism and a truly anarchist society. What would it be like? It must be grounded in a democratic revolution of the workers at the point of production – in the workspace, and using ever-changing and evolving forms of consensus and participatory democracy, but this alone is not enough to prevent state-capitalism from re-emerging as it did in the Russian Revolution. How do we create such a total revolution against capitalism, that the counter-revolution that emerges from within the revolution does not take hold, leading us back to the dictatorship of the law of Profit?

This spontaneously emerging worker democracy at the point of production, whose form changes in every historical moment and place, creates the basic form through which all other forms of oppression can be worked out. Only the spontaneous uprising of the people, in their fight for self-determination, both before and after the revolution, can prevent the revolution from degenerating into another form of state-capitalist repression, or some kind of pre-capitalist feudalism.

What is the role of the party, organization and philosophy/ers, who reject the “vanguard party to lead” and how can continue to play a role in exploring the new possibilities in thought and action these uprising create and how they show the path to a classless society?  What is the role of revolutionaries who are willing to give up their class privilege and submit to the consensus of the communes? What is the relationship of the theory and the party to the self-determination of the masses and these spontaneous organizations and uprisings?

We also ask you to imagine the struggle ahead, “the day after the revolution,” and how far society will still have to go before it can truly be called a spontaneously self-organized society, re-organized through consensual and autonomous revolution, where the means of oppression have been destroyed and the means of society have internalized the method of revolutionary change so that the self-determination of each individual adds to the self-determination of all, and society encourages the individual potentialities of every individual.

Cairo Liberation Square Tahir 25 CALL FOR ENTRIES: Autonomy, Consensus, and the Self Determination of Freedom in Theory and Practice

Autonomy and the Global 99%

A new uprising around the word, from Egypt to Spain to South Africa to Wall Street, is experimenting in new forms of democratic organization, and attempting to put theory into practice. The Movement spreading across the world questioning the validity of capitalism also questions our own theory and practice. People Not Profit sees this as a challenge to revolutionaries as well – to work within the new forms of resistance – consensus decision-making – to achieve a new theoretical consensus that can move us forward. We trust in the process of the collective mind to create something greater than any individual.article 2082385 0F5717F500000578 990 468x560 CALL FOR ENTRIES: Autonomy, Consensus, and the Self Determination of Freedom in Theory and Practice

 

 

But in the process of consensus, the voices of the oppressed can be stifled, as well as those of the Third Worlds. In this movement against the corporations and for radical political democracy, we cannot overlook economic and social democracy as well. We must represent the needs of the Third World and fight for the rights and autonomy of Women, Workers, Blacks/People of Color, Youth, and LGBT.  Who are the global 99%? How can we here in the US represent the needs and self-determination of the 99%, when 80% live outside the US and still work for $1/day? How do we create organizations and a theory of revolution that protects the Autonomy of the Oppressed?

 

 

Send us your Essays, News, Scene Reports, Poetry, Plays, Dreams, Theories, Comments, Debate, etc.

Send submissions to: submit2012@peoplenotprofit.net

Deadline April 10th, 2012

We encourage all Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Vanguardists – including Anarcho-Socialists, libertarian Marxists, and Libertarian Socialists – to work together with those Workers, Women, Black/POC, Youth, Indigenous Peoples, and all oppressed around the world who continue fighting globalization in non-sectarian ways – to reach a new theoretical consensus that can help guide radical activity. People Not Profit hopes to be a space for the self-determination of the idea of freedom, radical praxis, and debate that arise from a libertarian socialist vision of the transition period and the role of revolutionaries who reject vanguardism.

 
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The Role of Revolutionary Organization – afed.org.uk

Published on February 23, 2012 by in Anarchism, Articles/Essays, Libertairan Socialism, Theory
roro-afed

Anarchist communists reject the Leninist model of a ‘vanguard’ party as counter-revolutionary. This new edition explains the concept of revolutionary organisation and its structure. All libertarian revolutionaries should read this fundamental text – £2.00 +p&p. Translations of RORO available in French: Le rôle de l’organisation révolutionnaire and Serbo-Croat (print-only).

Anarchist Communist Editions series ♣ ACE#6

THE ROLE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION

Anarchist Communists have a vision of a revolutionary organisation very different from State-orientated parties and groups. But there is also something wrong with the idea of informal groupings as advocated by some Anarchists. To understand why a revolutionary individual needs to be part of a revolutionary organisation it is necessary to first describe the thing itself: its structure, its relationship with the working class and the theoretical basis of that relationship coupled with a precise understanding of class spontaneity.

The first fifty years of the 20th Century saw a sea change in the nature of capitalism. Traditionally capitalism was governed by the iron laws of supply and demand. Now what is produced matters less and less so long as marginal increases in profit are achieved. Economic necessity and technological inevitability mean increased investment and production no longer mean more jobs – they increasingly mean fewer jobs.

With the end of the age of antagonistic nation states and blocs that existed between from 1875 to 1995, the capitalist powers can now manipulate the global economy, shifting finance and production as opportunity dictates. Statist parties and groups have long proclaimed the solution nationalisation. But since investment does not increase jobs there is no argument for seizing the ‘commanding heights of the economy’, only abolishing them and finding new ways to organize work. Growth as a means of full employment is self-defeating since growth under capitalism is only achieved through increased competitiveness, competitiveness through productivity and productivity by shedding labour. Unemployment cannot be solved by increasing the amount of non-working since it depends on lower incomes and inevitable inequalities. Capitalism may have created wealth but it was stolen from the past (the ideas, knowledge and technics accumulated by pre-capitalist societies) and filched from the future (irreplaceable future commodities, gene pools, environmental degradations and so on).

Work and employment are not neutral. Work reproduces work’s social relationships. A person’s activity is productive only if it can be sold. If it can’t be sold it has no ‘worth’, nor do we. It is sometimes argued that employment would be okay if work was pleasurable but it isn’t. Why? Industrialists discovered it was easier to control a machine than a person and easiest of all to control people by subjugating them to a machine. The technology of production has been systematically applied to de-skill and make workers docile. This is being repeated in the process of consumption where we compulsively consume, but only what we are fed and for a clever reason: to balance production and consumption. The area of freedom within work is narrowing, matched by a narrowing of freedom out of employment. Attacks on the welfare state, dole scroungers and stay-at-home mums mirrors increased coercion at work and for the same reasons; we are being compelled to work in order to have the means to consume (however little we can afford to buy). Employment is seen as a socialising force, which no one should escape, and places where there is no work are feared as commodity-free deserts populated by junkies, criminals and deviants. Dehumanised and alienated, we face a future in which technology and the operation of society will be used to produce what the founders of modern industry wanted all along – weak people, easily controlled. Alongside this degradation, rationalisation and intensification of work causes massive amounts of illness, mental aberration and stress. These will inevitability increase as modern technologies compel greater productivity from workers. The fetishisation of work and consumption has a crushing effect on our minds and bodies when we become unemployed and cannot buy things. Forced to work, forced to consume, we are trapped in a system in which inequality and social division persist because the hierarchy of labour creates a socially destructive hierarchy.

From workplace to revolution

The historical argument that the factory would provide the means to create a revolutionary proletariat or source of social mobilization was false from the start and proved a disaster for humanity. How could industrial workers alone, in tightly managed workplaces and offered only the choice of alienated labour or enforced leisure, ever be capable of carrying through a libertarian revolution? Without freedom, industrial development has simply led to managerialism, technological control of the workplace – managing the unmanageable – and to social compulsion or catastrophe.

However not all is lost. Urbanization continues to create a vast, displaced, hungry, dispossessed and desperate working class across the globe. The way capitalism works, life is a red-in-tooth-and-claw struggle for survival where the “least successful” are swept to the margins of society where they can be ignored (if they work), despised (if they don’t) and punished for being different or in anyway resisting. ‘Progress’ constantly replenishes the margins with newly obsolescent humans – an ever-present strata of alienated and isolated people, less and less likely to escape economic and social exclusion. The State constantly raises the spectre of invasion by the marginalized who are demonised by the media. These ghettoised communities are always described as ‘threatening’ while actually being subject to vicious divide and rule and law-and-order experiments. Prime targets are those who can be made out to be different, for instance refugees and asylum seekers. Other bogeys are those who deny ‘modern’ moralities. Visible, different, recognisable: you’re likely to be a victim of hatred and violence whipped up by the bosses to keep the masses occupied, a class apart, separate from the rest of society, to be feared but also a convenient scapegoat.
Read more…

 
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Trotskyism and the Vanguard Party By Ulli Diemer

Published on February 18, 2012 by in Articles/Essays, Marx, Trotsky
Leon Trotsky

By Ulli Diemer

Trotskyists, for those uninitiated into the sometimes confusing and special world of left-wing politics, are followers of Leon Trotsky, the man who was with Lenin a principal leader of the Russian Revolution, and who opposed the policies of Joseph Stalin. Stalin was able to gain control of the Soviet state after Lenin’s death, while Trotsky was driven out of the country and eventually murdered.

 

Trotskyists’ ideas have often been misunderstood or distorted. The Moscow-oriented Communist Parties and the Peking-oriented Maoists insist on calling them ‘Trotskyites’, the label being a term of abuse that is supposed to signify that Trotsky’s ideas don’t qualify as a coherent system of thought, as an – ism.

It is only relatively recently that the writings of Trotsky and other Trotskyists have become widely and inexpensively available in English, and particularly in Canada. The widespread availability of Trotskyist materials and history in Canada now is due primarily to the establishment of Pathfinder Press in Toronto, which is dedicated to their dissemination and is pursuing an ambitious publication schedule to achieve it.

Still, the activities of “the Trots” are fairly familiar to students on many Canadian university campuses. At the University of Toronto, they have been an institution for a number of years, with their candidacies for student council elections, their literature tables, their Vietnam demonstrations, and their call to “Repeal the Abortion Laws”, to name only a few.

Their story begins with the founding of the “Fourth International” by Leon Trotsky after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Trotsky’s Fourth International saw itself as the legitimate successor to the Third International (the Comintern), founded by Lenin, and destroyed by Stalin. This Fourth, or Trotskyist, International, was to be the world-wide organization to which local Trotskyist parties would adhere.

However, the Trotskyist organizations, tiny to begin with, almost immediately began to display a tendency to disagree among themselves, and to split into even tinier rival factions and groups, each claiming to be the only true interpreter of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. As a result, in addition to the official Fourth International, there grew up (and continue to exist) a swarm of other Trotskyist groups, each claiming to be the nucleus of the vanguard party. Read more…

 
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Re-Building Infrastructures of Resistance

Published on February 16, 2012 by in Articles/Essays, Labor, Occupy Wall Street, People of Color, Women's Struggles, Worker Struggles
Reclaim

It is sometimes said that while anti-capitalist and alternative globalization movements are clear on what we do not want, we are less clear on what we do want (socialism, anarchism, specifics). Certainly, recent movements have not been as effective as their predecessors (labor in the 1910s and ‘30s; the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s) in sustaining the sorts of practices – intellectual and material – that put into effect aspects of the alternative world we seek. My colleague Alan Sears attributes this current inability to a decline in what he calls “infrastructures of dissent” or what I prefer to call “infrastructures of resistance.” As anti-capitalist movements face possibilities of growth, as happened after Seattle in 1999, questions of organization and the relation of various activities to each other and to broader movements for social change can only become more urgent. Yet, the absence of durable organizations or institutions, formal or informal, rooted in working-class organizations and communities, makes for demoralization or a retreat into subculturalism, as has happened to many of the alternative globalization groups. We now face a pressing need to rebuild “infrastructures of resistance” that might sustain not only activists and organizers, but especially the poor and working-class people who are being disastrously impacted by the current crisis.

Re-Building Infrastructures of Resistance  by Jeff Shantz

It is sometimes said that while anti-capitalist and alternative globalization movements are clear on what we do not want, we are less clear on what we do want (socialism, anarchism, specifics). Certainly, recent movements have not been as effective as their predecessors (labor in the 1910s and ‘30s; the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s) in sustaining the sorts of practices – intellectual and material – that put into effect aspects of the alternative world we seek. My colleague Alan Sears attributes this current inability to a decline in what he calls “infrastructures of dissent” or what I prefer to call “infrastructures of resistance.” As anti-capitalist movements face possibilities of growth, as happened after Seattle in 1999, questions of organization and the relation of various activities to each other and to broader movements for social change can only become more urgent. Yet, the absence of durable organizations or institutions, formal or informal, rooted in working-class organizations and communities, makes for demoralization or a retreat into subculturalism, as has happened to many of the alternative globalization groups. We now face a pressing need to rebuild “infrastructures of resistance” that might sustain not only activists and organizers, but especially the poor and working-class people who are being disastrously impacted by the current crisis.

The notion of “infrastructures of dissent” is drawn from the literature on social movements as developed by resource mobilization theorists such as Mayer Zald and John McCarthy (1990); it refers to the accumulated resources available to social movements in going beyond spontaneous expressions of protest to build sustained mobilization and dissent. Infrastructures of dissent often include the resources of mainstream or reformist groups, like NGOs or unions, which can be used by more radical groups for their own purposes. Writers coming from anarchist and socialist movements, such as Howard Ehrlich and Alan Sears, have developed this notion in a more accessible fashion. Sears (2007) adapts it to refer to a variety of practices by which movements develop their capacities to sustain common memories, build collective visions, voice alternatives, and engage in debate and analysis. As examples, he mentions left caucuses within unions and socialist party organizations. As he notes: “The projects of rebuilding the infrastructure of dissent and revitalizing socialism are integrally connected.” These are clearly limited and problematic.

While such an approach emphasizes formal political organizations, I would argue that more priority should be given to social institutions, informal as well as formal, based on addressing the needs of poor and working-class communities. These contemporary infrastructures of resistance might include community centers, housing and shelter, food shares, transportation, community media, free schools, bookstores, cafes, taverns and clubs.

Large-scale civil non-cooperation and/or militant confrontation with the State and Capital obviously require previous successes in organization and experience. Thus, as Ehrlich (1996b) notes, these are necessarily the outward, and dramatic, manifestations of ongoing experiments in overcoming authoritarian societies. Directing his discussion at anarchists, he encourages them to first develop alternative institutions. These are the building blocks of what he refers to as the transfer culture, an approximation of the new society within the context of the old (Ehrlich 1996a). Within them organizers might try to meet the basic demands of building sustainable communities. At the present time, as Sears notes, this infrastructure of dissent is quite weak, its development having been cut short by the political counter-offensive following September 11, 2001.

Infrastructures of resistance, operating in the shadows of the dominant institutions, provide frameworks for the radical re-organization of social relations in a miniature, pre-insurrectionary form. It is the rudimentary infrastructure of alternative ways of being, an alternative future in the present. It is decidedly not a millenarian project in which hopes for liberation or freedom are deferred or projected into some imagined future. Rather than utopian longings, these infrastructures of resistance, or transfer cultures, express real world practices in which utopian desires – the hopes and dreams of the grassroots mobilizations behind Obama – are given life in the here and now.

Libertarian socialists and anarchists have always emphasized people’s capacities for spontaneous organization, but they also recognize that what appears to be “spontaneous” develops from an often extensive groundwork of pre-existing radical practices. Without such pre-existing practices and relationships, people are left to patch things together in the heat of social upheaval or to defer to previously organized and disciplined vanguards. Pre-existing infrastructures, or transfer cultures, are necessary components of popular, participatory and liberatory social re-organization. A liberatory social transformation requires experiences of active involvement in radical change, prior to any insurrection, and the development of prior structures for constructing a new society within the shell of the old society.

Various alternative institutions, whether free schools or squats or counter-media, form networks as means for developing alternative social infrastructures. Where free schools join up with worker co-operatives and collective social centres, alternative social infrastructures become visible at least at the community level. Contemporary projects are still quite new. None have approached the scale that would suggest they pose practical alternatives, except perhaps in the case of new media activities and Internet networks. Yet all are putting together the building blocks that might promote practical alternatives extending well beyond the projects from which they originated. Read more…

 
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Arizona Set to Abolish Public Unions

Published on February 15, 2012 by in Community Submitted News, Labor, Worker Struggles

By John Jacobsen of  Trial by Fire

Arizona sate employees’ unions were caught off guard this week with news that the state’s republican controlled senate was passing a series of bills which, amongst other provisions, would completely ban unions from engaging in any negotiation which effects the terms of a persons employment with state, county or city government.

The move, according to Nick Dranius of the Goldwater Institute – one of the bills shapers – is intended to “cause people to leave the unions as they recognized that unions no longer have an unfair bargaining advantage given to them by collective bargaining laws.”

Once unions are no longer legally allowed to negotiate with the state, he concludes, workers will “realize that unions don’t do much for them.”

The unions, however, may have already beat them to it.

Provisions of the bills:

Much of the inspiration for the assault on organizing rights in Arizona has come, unsurprisingly, from the State of Wisconcsin’s own successful fight to deny collective bargaining rights to state employees. One of the crafters of the bills, the Goldwater Institute, even flew Governor Scott Walker out to Arizona in November to offer counsel on how to pass similar legislation in their state.

Like the Wisconsin laws, the new legislation would prohibit unions from bargaining with the government over the terms of their employment. It would also prohibit state and local government workers from deducting money union dues from their paychecks.

The legislators in Arizona, however, have gone much further than their predecessors in Wisconsin, largely because Arizona conservatives believe – with justification – that they face far less opposition in their fight than Republican’s in Wisconsin. Because of this, they have been able to spread their attack further than Walker, who needed to at least feign support for local police and firefighters’ unions. In Arizona, no public employees union has been spared.

Further, the bills would ban government employees from deducting union dues directly from their paychecks – a feature of many modern unions rely on in order to fund their activities. Read more…

 
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A New Declaration by Derrick Jensen on Occupy Wall Street Journal

Published on February 6, 2012 by in Anarchism, Articles/Essays, Environment, Features, Occupy Wall Street, Plutocracy, Theory
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by Derrick Jensen on Feb 1, 2012 • 5:43 pm

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That the real, physical world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise.

Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet.

It is self-evident that to value a social system that harms the planet’s capacity to support life over life itself is to be out of touch with physical reality.

That any way of life based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition not sustainable.

That any way of life based on the hyper-exploitation of renewable resources is by definition not sustainable: if, for example, fewer salmon return every year, eventually there will be none. This means that for a way of life to be sustainable, it must not harm native communities: native prairies, native forests, native fisheries, and so on.

That the real world is interdependent, such that harm done to rivers harms those humans and nonhumans whose lives depend on these rivers, harms forests and prairies and wetlands surrounding these rivers, harms the oceans into which these rivers flow. Harm done to mountains harms the rivers flowing through them. Harm done to oceans harms everyone directly or indirectly connected to them.

That you cannot argue with physics. If you burn carbon-based fuels, this carbon will go into the air, and have effects in the real world.

That creating and releasing poisons into the world will poison humans and nonhumans.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create poisons for which there is no antidote.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create messes that cannot be cleaned up. Read more…

 
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