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| <nettime> Endorsing the Call for a Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc |
... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 00:45:35 -0500 From: Edmond Caldwell <[email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: [spanet] (Fwd: Anarchist Unity) This development in the USA is interesting in itself, but I think also has some practical relevence to the discussion on the nature of class taking place here. ****** Forwarded Message Follows ******* ________________________________________________ A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E http://www.ainfos.ca/ ________________________________________________ Endorsing the Call for a Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc Recently a number of anarchist groups issued a call for a Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc for the upcoming "A16" demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund in Washington D..C. Not restricting themselves to organizing an anarchist black bloc, these activists extended a hand to autonomists, "anti-state libertarian marxists," anarcho-syndicalists, and council communists to form a common front, organized separately but acting in concert as a revolutionary and anti-capitalist pole of attraction within the larger movement against "globalization." As adherents of council communist political perspectives, the publications Collective Action Notes, Red & Black Notes, and The Bad Days Will End endorse this call issued by our anarchist friends. We do so not as representatives of membership organizations, and still less as "leaders" of any kind, but rather as individuals who represent publications with modest circulations. The "A16" actions are intended to build on the momentum from last years anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. In the growing resistance to "globalization" and global financial institutions such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank, some are now heralding the emergence of a "new movement" and even a "new anti-capitalism." These protests certainly demonstrate that globalization is not the inevitable juggernaut that the capitalist bosses and bureaucrats say it is. But the "new anti-capitalism" that was on display in Seattle was a mixed bag, containing, it turned out, a lot of the old reformism, in the form of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, the Sierra Club, the National Lawyers Guild, Ralph Nader and his ilk, and assorted "NGOs." These elements see the movement against globalization simply as a way of putting pressure on the capitalist state to curtail or revamp international financial institutions or to replace "free trade" with "fair trade." This reformist perspective brings with it an ugly nationalist protectionism, where what is needed is thoroughgoing international solidarity. Tensions between some among the reformists and radicals surfaced in Seattle, where "peacekeepers" willingly acted as adjuncts for the state and its brutal cops in trying to keep radicals "in line." As the movement builds for A16 in Washington, so does the need for political clarification. On a whole host of questions, the call for a Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc takes the road of class struggle rather than reform. The call declares that the reformist message of "fair trade, not free trade" and of "pruning" and "fixing" global capitalist financial institutions is unacceptable. The call rejects the narrowness of "single-issue" organizing and opts instead for a total revolutionary critique of capitalism. The call repudiates the protectionism and nationalism that infect much of the anti-globalization movement, agitating instead for the abolition of nations. The call rejects the participation in the movement of so-called "peacekeepers" and insists on the right of groups and individuals to organize and act autonomously within the larger movement against globalization. All of these things are not only supportable, but are necessary. The anarchists call for a Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc is not a call to split the movement. It is a call to strengthen and concentrate a political pole of attraction within the anti-globalization movement which advances the understanding that, to be against globalization, you must be against capitalism, the state, and the nation. This opposition necessitates a proletarian perspective: To be for the working class and for the working class revolutionary self-organization through workers councils. This idea is not the stale "old left" or Leninist dogma in which only the factory proletariat, organized in the trade unions, is allowed to be the "real" subject of history. Globalization itself has meant the de-industrialization of large segments of the U.S. workforce. At the same time, modern capitalism has made of society as a whole a "social factory" in which we are all workers. As the British journal Aufheben wrote in a recent editorial on the J18 demonstrations in London, "if we are fighting capital then we must constitute ourselves as the proletariat." Through this union of the working class and its essence, we forge the basis of a genuine international unity, which will one day lay the basis for the abolition of capitalism, wage slavery, and work itself. Its with this perspective in mind that we support the call for a Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Bloc. Signed, Curtis Price / Collective Action Notes Neil Fettes / Red & Black Notes Ed Caldwell / The Bad Days Will End March 2000 Contact addresses: Collective Action Notes POB 22962 Baltimore, MD 21203 USA <[email protected] Red & Black Notes PO Box 47643 - 939 Lawrence Ave E Don Mills, ON M3C 3S7 Canada <[email protected] The Bad Days Will End c/o Merrymount Publications PO Box 441597 Somerville, MA 02144 USA <[email protected] <..> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]