?What if we build it and they don?t come? That was the experience of the left during the
crisis - decades had been spent building organisations and a model of how crisis would
create revolution, but when the crisis arrived the left discovered that the masses weren?t
convinced. The expected pattern of crisis leading to small strikes and protests, then to
mass strikes and riots and then perhaps to general strike and revolution didn?t flow as
expected. Under that theory the radical left would at first be marginal but then as
conditions drove class militancy to new heights, the workers disappointed by reformist
politicians and union leaders, would move quickly to swell its ranks. ---- In 2008 and
2009 that was the expectation of the revolutionary left organisations across Europe and
North America, but that cycle of growth never materialised. In 2011 revolts did break out,
but not in the manner expected and so the left could only spectate and criticise. Beyond
that the period of struggle from 2008-2014 suggests that there is less strength in
building struggles around broad ?bread & butter? issues than we imagined and a suggestion
that diversity proved more useful in sustaining progressive struggle.
Failure & demoralisation along the old route in 2009
This idea that economic crisis produces revolution has been at the heart of the radical
movement since 1848 when Marx & Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. Written in the heat
of the revolutionary wave that spread across Europe that year it?s an extraordinarily
poetical and polemical work filled with sound bites that defined the socialist movement
for 150 years. The downside of such fine prose though is that it encourages attachment to
ideas that are wrong or perhaps outdated. In 1848 and perhaps as late as 1978 the core
concepts of the Communist Manifesto looked reasonable. Particularly attractive was the
idea that capitalism was creating ?its own gravediggers? by forcing larger and larger
sections of the population into repetitive work in mass factories. And this gravedigger
once created made ?its fall and the victory of the proletariat.. equally inevitable?
Roll out of a crisis
In mid September 2007 I was on board a Greyhound from Toronto to Ottawa, Ontario. This was
near the start of a speaking tour that was to run across North America until the following
May and to make use of the long journeys I had subscribed to a number of podcasts. One of
these was ?Behind the News? and I remember as we stopped for a break in some town on the
shore of Lake Ontario that Doug Henwood opened by saying that the emerging sub prime
mortgage scandal was starting to look like it might be the start of a genuine crisis.
I was used to left parties seeing and even hoping for crisis of capitalism at every turn
but Doug tended to be quite level headed in his economic analysis. Over the next seven
months as I travelled North America that crisis became more and more visible. When I
arrived in Miami in April the construction cranes on the horizon were still and the
skyline dominated by the stumps of half constructed condos.
A year to the day after I heard that podcast, Lehman Brothers filed for Bankruptcy. The
dominoes of global finance began to topple and the stock market crashed with them. The
left started to get excited; believing that after years of waiting its time had come. In
London the newly formed Liberty & Solidarity group went so far as to call for protest on
October 10th under the ill considered slogan ?Collapse Faster?. In Ireland the government
citing fear that the banking system would collapse guaranteed all the liabilities of the
banks. Over the following two years the full scope of the enormous costs to be imposed on
people in Ireland as a result of that decision unrolled. On November 2010 we saw the
EU-IMF ?bailout? as it became impossible for the Irish state to borrow on the
international bond markets.
At the time of writing in 2014 we might be seeing the beginning of the end of the crisis,
or we may just be at the peak before another crash. But no one could deny that the years
2007-14 comprised a deep and thorough global economic crisis of the type Orthodox Marxists
dreamed of.
These first three years were years when the left imagined its moment was approaching. The
long boom had heightened expectations of workers. Easy credit had improved living
standards and now not only was this hope for the future taken away, but those gains were
destroyed. Workers who appeared to have considerable wealth due to the value of their
property saw this wealth vanish exposing large debts that they were not going to be able
to pay back. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. Public sector workers pay was cut,
pensions attacked. They were forced to work extra-unpaid hours and with no pay increases
for at least six years. Young people who had spent their teenage years expecting to be
able to easily get a well-paid job were forced to emigrate in huge numbers.
Resistance and its limits
There was resistance. The media myth that ?Irish people don?t protest? does not measure up
to reality. The Nov 24th 2009 public sector strike saw a quarter of a million workers
strike. The three Irish Congress of Trade Union (ICTU) marches saw 100,000 or so
demonstrate each time. Hundreds of thousands refused to pay the household tax. And apart
from these large demonstrations hundreds if not thousands of smaller protests took place.
My memory of much of that period is that every week there was some sort of significant
demonstration, which attracted hundreds or even thousands.
There was resistance across Europe. From Ireland this perhaps looked militant, in
particular the general strikes that took place in Spain and Greece. But these so called
general strikes, which were in reality very limited one-day strikes and just represented a
somewhat different tradition of protest. It can be argued that in Spain the character of
the general strikes changed somewhat after the emergence of the movement of the squares
but before 2010 they were not the openings of a revolutionary wave as imagined. Before
2010 particularly in Ireland but also from Portugal to Spain to Greece these protests did
not instill a sense of hope, a sense that another world was possible. Instead people
participated and then went home, convinced that although they had made their ?voices
heard? that nothing would change. Back in Ireland the ICTU marches although huge were
amongst the most demoralising protests I?d ever taken part in, the spirit of defeat walked
down the quays with us.
This meant the strikes and marches remained under the control of the same trade union
leaderships who had avoided meaningful struggle for years. The left spent those years
arguing as to whether a ?rank and file? or ?broad left? strategy to overcome or bypass
that leadership was better but despite the depth of the crisis and the clearly tokenistic
nature of the resistance promoted by the union leaderships they stayed in control.
Before 2010 this happened everywhere, or at least everywhere in Europe and North America.
It?s important to recognise this because in Ireland (and elsewhere) the revolutionary left
has failed to recognise that they had come up against more than local conditions. What
happened, or rather what didn?t happen was not down to bad organisation or poor
communication skills, still less the wrong slogans. The left has failed to recognise that
something fundamental failed to happen. That is that the masses had not become radicalised
in the way that they expected for reasons other than bad practice.
Rather than understanding that lessons the left went on the hunt for scapegoats. And in
each local context there will always be plenty of examples of bad implementation. Whether
this is at the organisational level of things promised not being delivered or at the level
of poisonous sectarianism visibly putting people off. But when failure happens everywhere
the cause of failure is unlikely to be in local problems.
This refusal to recognise that there is a general problem in our model for revolution was
not helped when the left made small breakthroughs in the one area where it mattered least.
That is to say they managed to get some more people elected to official office at the
local and national level. The contradiction here was a deep one, on the one hand it
appeared the left had convinced many people that their ideas were the best and thus
deserved their precious vote. On the other when the same left parties called a
demonstration the numbers they mobilised were tiny - in the Dublin context around 1,500
(on a good day) against the 100,000 ICTU pulled out. Electoral success only demonstrated
the powerlessness of those left radicals elected. Court jesters that proved the wisdom of
the king and his willingness to hear all complaints - most often in Ireland via the
Vincent Brown TV panel show.
Taking public spaces and not workplaces
Then in 2010 something happened. Europe is bordered by the semi-Europe zone of cheap
labour, one where the much vaunted ?rule of law? and procedures of parliamentary democracy
rhetorically loved by EU politicians are openly secondary considerations to maintaining
stability for the rule of capital. Adventurous tourists from the EU have long taken cheap
package holidays in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey & Egypt. But fences, walls & border guards
make it hard for the populations of those countries to travel to Europe - over 16,000 have
died trying to do so. Dictatorship & border controls are what maintained these countries
as cheap labour zones for the EU. Domestically through wages that were a fraction of those
in Europe and externally through providing insecure and often undocumented low wage labour
in Europe.
In 2010, after the revolt of the PIIGS failed to materialise, it was this zone that
started to light up with resistance. Low wages and lack of food security meant that the
equivalent drops in income and employment faced by European workers translated into
something life threatening. So although the costs of rebellions were much higher,
thousands were killed, the need to rebel was stronger still. Look at a map, look at the
edge of Europe, and follow the revolts as you move from West to East starting with Morocco
in North Africa, passing through Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Turkey & the current
complexity of Ukraine.
The traditional sites of revolt the left looks to - the workplace, the unions - had it is
true a significance in some of these revolts but what characterised them was something
else. Something that seems quite new and is still not understood.
What they have in common is that the people seized not the workplaces but the city. Or
more specifically the squares that lay at the heart of the cities. And while the marches
and token strikes in Europe had felt like defeats, even at the moment of action, these
seizures of the squares felt like victories. In several cases they turned into victories
of a limited kind as what looked like entrenched forms of dictatorial rule crumbled in
front of a population that had lost its fear and was in the streets. Successful enough
that quickly these methods were adopted in the very countries back in the EU where the
strikes and protests were felt to have failed and as interestingly began to interact with
the more traditional forms of protest. A particular example of this being the September
2012 protests in the Spanish state when tens of thousands mobilised around the demand for
a referendum on austerity.
In the autumn of 2011 this went global when the square occupation returned to the place
the crisis had sprung from, Wall St. Five years after the crisis, five years when the
revolutionary left had failed to inspire, there was that sudden moment when it felt like
every city in the world had at its core a determined group implementing a shared program
of resistance. Almost three years afterwards it?s easy to be cynical about Occupy, to
focus in on its many problems, but at that moment, at the start of November 2011 it felt
euphoric.
Is ?Bread & Butter? the secret sauce?
One reaction of much of the left to its own failure to be relevant has been a sharp turn
towards lowest common denominator economism. That is a retreat to seeking to only organise
around lowest common denominator economic demands that in theory almost all workers should
support. Often this is accompanied by hostility towards any suggestion that complexity
should be looked at. Witness the amount of articles and blog posts by mainstream radical
left & feminist figures attacking what they see as ?intersectionality? over the last six
months.
Elsewhere I?ve characterised this tendency under the label of the Nostalgic Left. What I
want to emphasize in this piece though is that when you look at the events of 2007-2014 it
was the focus on economism that failed to inspire people. Economism is the idea that
working class movements are best built by focusing on the sort of broad economic issues
that all workers can identify with. These are sometimes called ?bread & butter? issues,
underlining the point that they are those issues that put food on the table.
The other side of economism is downplaying, ignoring or attacking any issue that might be
seen as dividing the working class. Perhaps the clearest illustration is found in the
1970s when some economistic left groups faced with the growing demand for LGBTQ rights
instead choose to define homosexuality as a bourgeois deviation that would be swept away,
come the revolution. That is an extreme example but the common traditional approach of the
left rubbishes any interest in talking about oppression within movements as coming from
middle class academics.
A crisis is a great time to test out economism. Pretty much every aspect of workers wages
and living conditions are attacked providing plenty of ?bread & butter? issues to try and
build class unity around. The left tried to do that and failed, while indeed workers were
mobilised the mobilisation although broad also proved to be shallow and easley limited by
social democratic parties . The strikes and demonstrations about ?bread & butter? issues
around pay cuts and tax hikes failed to build, never mind sustain a movement of
resistance. In Ireland this proved true of the public sector strike and the ICTU marches.
The height of success of the left was in the voting down of the Croke Park II deal by
public sector workers yet this was only to accept the almost as noxious Haddington road
agreement. Despite displaying an initial if nervous willingness to fight on the 24th
November strike we ended up swallowing a massive erosion of our pay and conditions,
including a huge pay cut followed by a pay freeze that has now lasted 7 years. The added
acceptability of Haddington road was largely because it sacrificed future public sector
workers to preserve some conditions for existing workers.
With the left quietly accepting that resistance in the unions was not going to be
significant it switched to the other traditional bread & butter battleground of community
struggle around local taxation. We?d won a fight around this in the 1990?s but lost
another in 2003. The government was introducing a tax on home ownership. As with the union
struggle the initial period of the Household Tax appeared promising with mass meetings of
hundreds of people in some communities and a massive 50% of households not registering for
the tax. But that broad resistance again proved shallow and the government defeated the
movement by stepping up the costs of defiance and the mass movement spluttered out without
a significant fight.
Globally in the 1% v 99% language of Occupy there is an implicit economism but Occupy as
it was expressed was more about a sense of unfairness & corruption with the way things
are. What did pull people out were demands that were not simply economic but at one or
more remove. Rising food prices and youth unemployment were the backdrop to the North
African revolts. But the actual expressions were demands for dignity, real democracy, and
an end to corruption & cronyism. What kept people out once those movements had started was
discovering each other?s comradeship through a common resistance on the barricades to
state repression.
It?s a discussion for another day but as we have just seen with the protests in Ukraine
that unity through resistance to the state need not result in a turn to the left, in
particular if the left was too weak or abstained from the struggle. At this moment in time
it appears that the far right made the gains through its willingness to engaged in
militaristic confrontation with state forces. In Libya, Syria and to some significant
extent Egypt Islamists made gains on a similar basis. In Gezi on the other hand the
movement was defined around being open to LGBTQ, Feminist, and other movements of
marginalised peoples and this gave the overall movement a character much more resistant to
the influence of the right, in this case in the form of Turkish nationalists. In Gezi it
appears that the strength came not from having some broad unifying bread & butter issue
but rather from the diversity of the movement in the park.
Where is power?
It?s easy to bemoan this impulse to occupy the Square rather than occupy the workplace.
I?ve written about what some of the problems are in An Anarchist Critique of Horizontalism
(In IAR #9). The chief problem is that there is no power in the Square to build a new
society, only to demand a change in those running the existing one. In Egypt three changes
were won in two years, Mubarak to the Military, the military to the Brotherhood and then
the Brotherhood to the Military. It looks quite possible that this cycle may lead back to
a ?Mubarak? of a modified form although those at the heart of the revolution hope they
have at least constructed a culture of resistance. This is the pattern of many of the
revolts; the occupation of the Square could manufacture a crisis that would bring a
faction of the ruling class, often the army, to introduce chance. But it could not create
a society ran from the Squares.
There is no power to transform society in the Square in the way that there was in the
workplace. A radical movement that seized factories and farms was a movement that could
easily imagine itself building the new society from that base. Workplace occupations
required that the workers meet and plan how to source raw material, how to reorganise
production and where to send finished products. Such occupations spreading across a city
and the surrounding countryside spontaneously created a parallel system of administration
in competition with the claims of the official government, whether it was of the left or
right. The Bolsheviks fought as vicious an internal civil war against the factory
committees in the period from 1918 to 21 as they did against the external white armies.
Left unchecked workplace occupations can literally create the new society simply by having
to deal with the problems of production and distribution
Until recently it was also the case that taking over your workplace was an obvious act of
rebellion for workers. Even in 1919 in Ireland, which lacked an ideological left of any
size, the national struggle saw dozens of workplaces taken over by their workers and some
80 soviets declared. Workplace occupations push movements to the left in a way Square
occupations don?t because repression will come not just from the state but also from the
owner. They create a strong class unity but one which may also be a unity against a left
party in power which is why power seeking leftists tend to distrust them.
It?s not that there were no workplace occupations in the crisis. In Ireland there were
many but all of them on the basis not of continuing production but of demanding fair
redundancy payments. Continuing production could be part of building the new world in the
shell of the old, demanding redundancy is just demanding that capital behave in a fair
manner. That is a legitimate demand but one entirely contained within the system.
There were workplace seizures that were about continuing production in the Argentine
crisis of 2001. These were in cases where the owner had abandoned factories they could no
longer extract sufficient profits from. Such workplaces are even referred to as ??bricas
recuperadas translation - reclaimed/recovered factories?.
Turnips for Lattes
What changed between the workplace occupations of 1910?s Ireland or Russia and the 2010?s?
Why did it appear to make more sense to radicals to set up tents on cold, hard city
streets & squares as winter approached? It wasn?t because the left had forgotten to
advocate such occupations; all the radical left organisations did so and enthusiastically
reported on and participated in the limited ?pay our redundancy? one that did happen. Yet
even WSM failed to consider street occupations seriously as they spread from North Africa
to Europe. The summer before Occupy a visiting Israeli anarchist came to one of our
regular Dublin meetings to advocate that we should camp in the streets as was happening in
Tel Aviv. We pretty much just looked at him and moved on to our serious business - quite
possibly discussing the need to propagandise more for workplace occupations.
Why despite the left advocating workplace occupations did they not materialise? The reason
is perhaps in what and how we, as workers, produce. When many workers produced goods that
had an obvious direct use then not only was continuing to produce those goods for our own
use obvious there were also other workplaces and farms nearby with which we could imagine
exchanging goods or being in mutual aid relations with. Production and economies were very
much more local. In Europe of that period even raw materials like iron or coal frequently
came from somewhere close enough to imagine that they could still be sourced. If you were
producing hammers it was easy to imagine a relationship with the furniture factory down
the road and the farmers on the edge of town as well as the woodcutters and miners over
the mountains.
The sort of workplaces seized in Argentina in 2001 also illustrates this. They were
involved in the production of simple goods with obvious exchange potential like textiles
(Brukman), ceramics (Zanon/FaSinPat) or hotel services (Bauen). Some exchange between
these was possible, the tile floor of the new cafe at Hotel Bauen came from FaSinPat.
There is a tradition of factory occupations in Argentina and there were workers in these
places that had an ideological attachment to such action. But the reason the occupations
happened was because they were what made the most sense to the mass of the workforce that
were otherwise facing unemployment.
Globalisation means that it?s now common for the various components of production to
travel enormous distances - even something as basic as wood is seldom locally sourced but
instead shipped over great distances. Workers in distant lands with whom we have no
connection and often no common language produce the raw materials and components of what
we produce. A computer involves hundreds of components assembled from across the globe in
thousands of widely scattered workplaces with no direct connection to each other. And
these individual components often have no use outside of that complex production chain.
The same is true of a passenger jet. Even interchangeable components in this process like
RAM chips are of little use on their own, even for exchange purposes.
The technological revolution also means very much fewer of us are involved in the
production of goods with a recognisable use value or even in the production of physical
goods at all. If you work in a call center what exactly are you producing, in particular
if you are selling or supporting some software product produced by programmers on the
other side of the planet?
The material conditions of much of the world?s working class are now much more complex
than they were even in Western Europe in the 1930s. A working class family in Barcelona at
that time did not have a large range of material goods and what they did have were mostly
locally sourced. Today workers expect to have phones, TV?s cars, washing machines etc. as
basic essential goods. But we know that many of these are not produced in the factory down
the road or over the mountain.
In a period of upheaval today the benefit of seizing one?s workplace is nothing like as
obvious as it was in the 1930?s. A barista looking at the computer programmers down the
street and the till operators in the electronics shop across the road can?t see much
potential for keeping food on the table through linking up with them. This isn?t to say
mutual aid is now impossible; the global possibility is stronger than ever. The problem is
that now it is much harder to see and understand that possibility before an ideological
conversion to the idea. Local implementation is in almost all cases not possible without a
radical restructuring of industry and agriculture in that region. Something that is
impossible in the short term.
This is not an argument for abandoning either workplace organising or the idea of a
society of self managed workplaces under a communist system of exchange. Rather it?s
intended, as the start of a discussion as to why the form we see rebellion in has shifted,
despite the attempts of the left to encourage the previous form. And how with these new
movements of rebellion we can inject the still essential idea of seizing workplaces as
being a literal requirement of building the new society.
That question is complicated by the changing nature of work. Today as we are herded into
telesales centers, fast food outlets, PR & HR sections it seems that a lot of work is of
very limited value when it comes to sustaining life. Who would choose to self manage work
that produces no value? The positive side to that being that this means very much less
work for all without a reduction in living standards in a free society.
The bottom line is to recognise that a lot of traditional left methodology was based
around the idea that the working class would self-radicalise as a result of reaction to
crisis by seizing workplaces. That was once a logical first step because it enabled those
workers to continue to produce to live. Today it remains a logical goal but that is a very
different thing, for many of us it only has a use in order to ?produce to live? at the
level of continental and global economies. This demands a different approach to that taken
by the left in the past; increasingly workplace occupations are what we need to argue for
in ?the square? rather than something we expect to unfold due to their own inherent logic.
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» (en) WSM.ie: Irish Anarchist Review #10 - Turnips, hammers & the square - why workplace occupations have faded.