“Direct Action is a method by which we ordinary people achieve specific political and economic goals, without having to rely on so-called experts – be they pol
Archives: Blog entry
A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
I visited the site of Occupy London when I was in London at the end of October for the London anarchist bookfair and took the photos that in the flickr slideshow below. These are a selection of over 100 shots, in particular I took photos of all the signs and leaflets that were stuck up to archive, most of them aren’t interesting enough to include here though.
The last 3 General Assemblies at Occupy Dame Street have seen greatly reduced numbers in comparison with those leading up to the controversial vetoing of common work with DCTU. I’ve been at all three and it seems quite a number of people have walked away, at least for a while, including at least a couple of the blochers. On the other hand the camp is solidifying, in particular with the construction of a large wooden hut last night to be used as a kitchen. It sends the clear message to those watching that whatever the differences we have been debating out under their CCTV cameras the camp is not going away.
Monday night saw the final in a series of Occupy Dame Street’s GA’s that focused on the proposal that ODS link up with the Dublin Council of Trade Unions. Unfortunately both proposals for some form of collective participation in the DCTU protest march of November 26th were vetoed by a small informal group who objected to working with the unions on what amounted to a range of ideological concerns.
What do you do when the people making the right arguments are manipulative idiots who have so alienated people that opening their mouths amounts to emptying a full magazine into their feet? I started this blog having just come from an Occupy Dame Street assembly. There I witnessed a car crash in glorious slow motion. I felt that deep sort of frustration, where you can see just what is coming, but remain unable to tear your eyes off the disaster as it wrecks all around.
The issue on the face of it is simple. The Dublin Council of Trade Unions has called a pre-budget demonstration and would like Occupy Dame Street to co-organise it. Straightforward enough you’d imagine. Well it’s a bit more complex. Occupy Dame Street is a little prone to an anti-union line that is about the 8/10’s Sunday Independent’s ‘The unions are running the country’ and 2/10’s the left communist’s ‘The unions are running the country.’ [Ian, please note that the 2/10’s comprises both people who might be called ‘autonomists’ with some degree of accuracy: Everyone else, there are two in-jokes there, only one of which most of you have a hope of working out].
Like I suspect many other Anarchist Writers readers I’ve been playing a part in the Occupy X movement. I’ve visited the camps in Cork & London (and published photos of both, see end of this post for images from Dublin) and I’ve been active from time to time in the General Assembly of the Dublin Camp at Occupy Dame Street. I also did a workshop on activist journalism at Occupy Dame Street about 10 days back.
The left is undeniably weak. Compared to our capitalist adversaries we have little in the way of finance and none of our organisations are as powerful or organised as the state. We need to be able to punch above our weight, and to increase our capacity so that eventually our resources enable us to force lasting social change.
So how can we ensure we get maximum bang for our activist buck? An obvious response is to concentrate our meagre forces so that our combined focus and strategy allows us to win things we would not usually be able to. The opposite of this, a scatter-shot approach, frequently results in resources being spread too thinly and consequently failing to make an impact.
Well, last Saturday was the London Anarchist Bookfair. I spent most of it behind the Black Flag stall and I’m happy to say we sold out of the new issue (no. 234)! Rest assured, we still have copies and they will be appearing in good bookshops soon. An announcement will be made on the Black Flag blog shortly, I assume.
Meanwhile, stateside
Whilst never explicitly syndicalist the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905 in Chicago, clearly had a lot in common with their syndicalist comrades elsewhere around the globe. The primary instigator in this new union was the Western Federation of Miners, a highly militant industrial union. The WFM sought an alliance with various socialist organisations and smaller unions to create a national union body outside of the craft-focussed American Federation of Labour. The AFL represented craft-unionism par excellence, its member bodies being forcibly split along craft lines on pain of expulsion.
In contrast to this divisive stance the IWW not only advocated industrial unionism but that there should be one union for the whole of the working class. After all, they all ultimately had the same interests. Somewhat optimistically the IWW saw itself as the basis for this One Big Union and this positioning often lead to an antagonistic relationship with the far larger AFL.
It started in France
The Confédération générale du travail, formed in 1895 in France, is widely regarded as the grandfather of the syndicalist movement. Within its ranks socialists alienated by party politics, radical republicans and anarchists joined forces to forge a new movement; revolutionary syndicalism. In a short space of time syndicalist ideas came to dominate the CGT, at the time the only sizeable union in France.