From a little utopia to a bigger struggle?

Submitted by cathy n on 25 August, 2008 - 6:44 Author: Stuart Jordan

The mixed bag of the anti-capitalist movement is a bewildering place for your average Trotskyist — but beyond all the political arguments it was an incredibly impressive, inclusive and participative exercise in collective living, self-organisation and fighting the state.

The organisation of the camp is based around consensus decision making and self-organisation, operating on a formal and informal level and at every level of the camp. The camp is split into geographical areas for ease of pre-camp organisation, and each neighbourhood or barrio is based around a communal kitchen and living space. Each barrio starts the day with a meeting which is fed back to a site-wide meeting by spokespeople.

Anyone who wants to get involved in any area of work can go to the jobs tent and get the job of their choice. There is an emphasis on skills-sharing.

The camp is a hive of leisurely activity, people joining in, offering their help and taking over jobs. This not only brings the camp together and allows people to mix through their work but also smashes up the work-leisure/worker-consumer dichotomy that defines capitalist society. It is perhaps a little taste of how we might organise work in a future communist society.

Also, there is an incredibly effective rumour mill. At one point we thought the water had been turned off by the police and everyone was running around trying to collect water and telling each other to preserve the water they had. This rumour spread to all corners of the camp before another one started that the water was up and running again (and it turned out to be a kink in the pipe and nothing to do with the police!) It is incredible to be in a situation where people are constantly communicating all the time and there is an unending list of dramas that are told.

The first wave of activists who set the camp up in the week before it started are very experienced in direct action and managed to maintain crucial infrastructure of the camp. It was these activists who were also at the front line when police started a dawn raid on Monday morning. The stand-off got incredibly heated, with hundreds of activists linking arms and holding ground against successive lines of heavily armed riot cops. Several were dragged out behind police lines and beaten up. One activist was held to the ground whilst pepper spray was squirted into his eyes, leaving him blind until the following day.

However, the experienced activists within our blockade not only allowed us to de-escalate the situation when police were losing it, but also ensured that necessary direct action was taken to recover cars and arrestees and strengthen our position. Inch by inch people managed to climb on top of cars and underneath vans to ensure that the police could not drive them away. At one point a riot cop grabbed an activist by the throat and only let go after we started to shout out his number “Three-eight-four! Three-eight-four!” This kind of experience and expertise in fighting the state is vital for our movement as it grows.

Whilst we often talk on a theoretical level about collective living, social control of the economy and smashing the capitalist state, the Climate Camp offered a brief insight into what all this might look like. It was a little utopia besieged by the violent troops of capitalist hostility. The only problem was that there was no consensus amongst the campers of how to make this utopia a reality.

This difficulty has long been recognised within the anti-capitalist movement. In the analysis that followed the Carnival Against Capitalism, Andrew X in Give Up Activism argued that the evolution of the movement from single-issue campaigns to protest against capitalism-in-general had meant their was a rupture between theory and practice. The theory said we need a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order but the practice remained a reformist tactic of direct action. This tactic was very successful in winning concessions for single-issue campaigns but did not fundamentally change society.

Supporters of Workers’ Liberty went to the camp as Marxists with a class analysis of climate change. Some of us also went as a part of the broad network Workers Climate Action which seeks to inject class politics into the environmentalist movement and environmentalist politics into the labour movement. It is our belief that the only way forward is to direct the energy of the anti-capitalist movement towards the revolutionary potential of the labour movement.

We will all come away with criticisms of the camp and especially of some of the ideas and beliefs that we came across. We will feed these criticisms back into the movement and continue to argue for class politics. Whilst there were degrees of sectarianism towards our Trotskyist “intervention”, the Camp was overwhelmingly marked by a genuine openness to discuss ideas about how to make the small utopia a living reality.

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