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(en) Ireland, WSM.ie: What next for Occupy Belfast? by Sean Matthews
Date
Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:48:34 +0200
The forcible eviction of Occupy Dame Street has once again shifted the spotlight on Occupy
Belfast who have moved from their original camp at Writers Square to an iconic and listed
vacant former bank building in the heart of the city centre. WSM member and Occupy Belfast
activist Sean Matthews asks what next for Occupy Belfast and whether it has reached a
critical mass. ---- Since the liberation of the former Bank of Ireland building in Belfast
city centre sections of the established media and local corrupt political class have
attempted to criminalise and discredit the occupation. This should come as no surprise as
they have a vested interest in upholding the status-quo and crushing any opposition that
moves beyond the harmless straightjacket of what the state considers as legitimate or
illegitimate protest.
The point is that action is taken, not indirectly by representatives over whom we have
little control, but directly by those who are affected without permission from those in
authority. It is action intended to succeed, not just to gain publicity or serve the ego
of a few activists, or replace the need for a mass movement of the working class for its
own interests and in its own interests. At the end of the day Action without theory is
blind and often futile, but theory without action is ultimately sterile and no use to anyone
We need to learn to set the agenda in terms of dictating the terms of struggle. The fact
is the state is the greatest practitioner of violence and terrorism and history teaches us
that the ruling class will not leave the stage of history voluntarily and give concessions
without some of struggle and mass working class resistance. From the rise of the Civil
Rights movement in 1960s both here and in the US to the ending of apartheid in South
Africa all points to the need for mass direct action and mobilisation.
Since the occupation in January, the occupation has provided focal point for a range of
issues we are campaigning along such as homelessness, workers rights, police harassment
and lack of social housing-all of which is arise not because of corporate greed but the
result of capitalism which is based on the exploitation and oppression of us the majority,
the working class. It is not just a matter making ‘demands,’ or of this injustice or that
unfairness – it is the whole way that society works that is unjust and unfair. Poverty,
war, racism, sexism and all the rest of the problems we face are not exceptions to the
rule – they are the rule. Capitalism cannot exist without the state creating poverty,
without fighting wars, without oppressing people because of their race or gender.
The taking of this building received significant media coverage, re-energising the
movement, attracting new people and pushing Occupy Belfast back into the public arena and
encouraging those who have left the camp to get back involved in some capacity. To date,
Occupy Belfast has been unable to attract a significant level of support and solidarity on
the same scale as similar movements across the world such in the US which witnessed the
largest social movement since the Vietnam War. This mass mobilisation and awakening there
has been equally matched by a rise in police violence with the US state effectively
declaring social war on the movement by using repression and torture to isolate and
disrupt it. This intense level of state violence also helped to attract more support and
involvement from more people. In Belfast the PSNI is yet to replicate that approach (apart
from surveillance and attempted forced entry) and probably won't unless we begin to really
make a difference and present a challenge to the status-quo.
Part of the problem is that Occupy has been unable to solve the divide between those who
are the core activists claiming official ownership and the wider original support base who
have drifted away. Occupations of this nature should be about accommodating as many people
to be involved on a level that suits them and their lives, not lambasting those who cannot
make every meeting. It must provide a positive environment to encourage people to get
involved who might have otherwise (due to constraints of work, family, health or other
reasons) never felt able to engage in political movements. We are now in a position of
make or break and central to this is the question of organisation and strategy.
We can define strategy from the formulation of answers to three questions:
1.) Where are we?
2.) Where do we want to go?
3.) How do we think we can leave where we are and arrive at where we want to be?
Strategy is, then, the theoretical formulation of a diagnosis of the present situation,
the conception of the situation one wants to reach and a set of actions that will aim to
transform the present situation, causing it to reach the desired situation. These are all
questions we need to ask ourselves or else we will be continuously trapped in the cycle of
activism, running about like headless chickens cut off from our fellow workers who have
been left behind. A sub class discarded in this so-called new era which has delivered
little social and economic benefits to poor working class communities.
General assembly and consensus
Central to this understanding is that occupations and creating social centres is a tactic
and cannot be divorced from organising a wider fight back linking the issue of house
evictions to cuts in pensions and housing benefit to the erosion of workers rights and
conditions.
We also need to recognise that our mode of internal organisation, based on the general
assembly is nothing new and can be located and affirmed in social revolutionary upheavals
from the early stages of the soviets in the Russian Revolution to the Spanish revolution
in 1936 and beyond to the Argentina factory occupations in 2001. It is part of a radical
libertarian working class tradition which rejects the illusions of representative
democracy and the authoritarian left in favour of collective organisation,
self-organisation and self-management.
However, referring to the radical potential of the general assembly model should not blind
us to the difference in circumstances, composition and wider balance of forces we face
today compared to the workers soviets in the early 20th century. As highlighted by WSM
member Andrew Flood ‘It is the process itself that is potentially transformative, even in
the most weak and dysfunctional assemblies. If the assembly can be the mechanism by which
we organize a camp or organize a general strike then why can it not also be the mechanism
by which we organize our workplace, our school or our neighbourhood. And when the
assemblies spread and meet up where then is the room for the politicians who instead want
to represent us.’
The effectiveness of a general assembly and consensus as a decision making process depends
on how effectively it is chaired and managed in terms of the agenda and level of comradely
discussion and debate. To date its effectiveness in Occupy Belfast is mixed, as all too
often the voices of the many are sidelined and marginalised by the egos of a few or the
views of the majority are effectively held to ransom by those who have no interest in a
consensus. At the heart of this is a lack of collective and individual responsibility.
This ethos has drifted from the camp to the building fostering an atmosphere of division
and suspicion. This maybe slowly being addressed by the agreement of rules regulating
conduct and a safe space policy but it remains to be seen whether it has a lasting
political impact.
Since the wall street occupation the rallying cry of the global occupy movement has been
the 99% vrs the 1%. While the rally of the 99% served a purpose in the beginning through
mass mobilisation and unity in the face of the greed and injustice of the 1% in the
long-term. Cracks soon began to appear in this project such as the promotion of other
conspiratoral interests over the central importance of social class and class struggle in
our understanding of the world we live in and how we are going to change it.
Class oppression is not simply a small cabal of the ultra-rich in Wall Street or
Washington or London it is reproduced in every workplace, every police station, every dole
queue, every courtroom, every prison and every territory occupied by Western militaries,
and can only be sensibly understood as such. We live in a class system based on the
dictatorship by the capitalist class despite the illusion of parliamentary democracy. The
ruling class are the people who own or control the places where we work. They make the
decisions about what kinds of products the factories make or what kinds of services are
provided, and they make the decisions about how this work is organised. All the rest of us
our forced to work in these places in order to get the money that they need to live or
rely on peanuts from the state. We, the working class, build and provide everything
society needs to function. They, the ruling class, suck profit out of our work. We are the
body of society; they are parasites sucking us dry.
Occupy Belfast needs to move beyond the limitations and contradictions of the ’99%’ and
that the crisis is simply the result of greedy bankers and evil corporations and recognise
that the root cause of our problems is capitalism and the state. This understanding is
crucial if we are move from the ’activist ghetto’ to building movement with a focus and
clear purpose reaching out to the wider public.
As noted by the WSM delegate council motion passed in November 2011 in relation to the
Occupy movement, ‘The crisis is not simply a crisis of banking or speculation or
'corruption' even if all these elements are part of the trigger for it. Rather it is a
crisis of the capitalist system, the other elements are integral parts of that system and
not deviations from it. Reformist solutions, like more regulation of banking, simply
repeat the processes that followed previous financial crashes, processes that we know now
will be eroded over time to bring us back once more to another crisis of this type.
The debt was created by that capitalist system, it is an integral part of the functioning
of that system and so if paid off it would simply be recreated by the system in a fresh
round of speculation. That in fact is exactly the 'solution' aimed for by the capitalist
class - a return to banking as normal.’
Rejecting the authoritarian left
The outright hostility and rejection of traditional left methods of organising and ready
made formulas; and the adoption of anarchist ideas based on direct democracy and
self-organisation demonstrates how out of touch the traditional left are with this new
wave of social movements in the last decade. Many left-wing activists will argue that it
is possible to combine campaigning and participation in elections. Mass direct action and
working class self-organisation which anarchists promote is the opposite of this four year
spectacle because it is about empowering others to take decision on your behalf resulting
in a pervading sense of powerlessness, betrayals and disempowerment in the long term.
The reality is that because of the way in which the electoral system works, the person who
is going to be the election candidate has to be the ‘face’ of the campaign, has to be the
main spokesperson, has to be seen to be the driving force of the campaign. Thus campaigns
can often become the opposite of encouraging mass participation and self-management,
campaigners are treated as ‘followers’ or ‘supporters’ of the election candidate not as
equal participants.
When this happens we can forget about socialism. A minority is in the driving seat and it
is only a matter of time before they develop from a grouping with their own interests into
a new fully-fledged ruling class. This is what has happened every time a minority has been
trusted to rule a country after a revolutionary upheaval. The building of socialism will
require mass understanding and mass participation. By their rigid hierarchical structure,
by their ideas and by their activities, both social- democratic and Bolshevik types of
organisations discourage this kind of understanding and prevent this kind of
participation. The idea that socialism can somehow be achieved by an elite party (however
revolutionary') acting 'on behalf of' the working class is both absurd and reactionary.
However, the rejection of the authoritarian left is misguided and compounded by a degree
of hostility and suspicion towards all political organisation and in particular the
largest social movement in the world- the trade unions. Compared to Occupy Dame Street,
Occupy Belfast has built a relationship and connections with the wider labour movement
with many activists members of trade unions. This is vital if we are to move from the
margins to the mainstream and defend this liberated space from the forces of law and order.
The Future? Class War!
We are all here at Occupy Belfast because we want to see change. What we want differs:
some want new regulations on the financial sector and so-called a return to ethical
capitalism, others want to change taxes or the minimum wage, while others like myself
believes in uprooting the root cause of all our problems. Regardless of which of these
boxes you fit in, if you fit in any of them at all, we all want change. The question we
need to ask ourselves is how do we channel this anger and disillusionment towards building
an effective mass movement that will shake the foundations of this rotten status-quo, what
tools do we use and what change do we really want? How can transform this occupy movement
to something that doesn’t just question politicians but decadence of reformism?
Despite these drawbacks, for those who feel able to participate there are many positives
to being involved in Occupy especially because of its internationalist nature. The future
lies not in making a set of demands to politicians but in creating a space for political
education and action, reclaiming and re-politicising public/private space that has
generally been taken over by capital. In the process building an alternative to our
sectarian carve up in the North connecting with the wider workers movement and
communities. In bringing new people into politics, the occupations are helping to
radicalise and politicise a wide range of people who previously may have felt disconnected
from the way society is run and political parties, and helped them to realise that by
working together in solidarity, we can create change.
By taking over this empty building, gradually building a social centre and encouraging
others to take similar action in their communities, we have made the first step in a long
political journey providing a small glimpse of our potential power, if we take direct
action where we live and work around concrete issues, linking with workplace occupations
to house evictions and beyond.
What is clear is that Occupy Belfast is not an end in itself and new movements will spring
from it which are more concrete and relevant to the day to day issues faced by our class.
Ultimately, we need to re-build and re-analysis our ‘movement’ from below upwards
combining thought with action in terms of internal organisation and the direction we want
to take which cannot be rushed over for sake of running from one action to the next.
For me this process cannot be divorced from the struggle for a better society and question
of what type of society do we want? As an anarchist, the solution is in one where we
realise our own class power, we can finally take control of our lives, our communities and
workplaces’ free from exploitation, alienation and oppression. This future, a libertarian
communist one, is truly a future worth fighting for.
Occupy Belfast will be holding a public meeting at The People's Bank at 2pm this Saturday
March 24th 2012 discuss how we intend to take Occupy Belfast forward and to establish The
People’s Bank General Assembly.
‘Since our symbolic public repossession of the former Bank of Ireland building on January
16th 2012, we have set about repurposing the derelict building for community use.
Currently we have housed a number of homeless people and are working toward establishing
educational, cultural and food programs. Our aim is for The People’s Bank to be a hub of
grassroots community-orientated activism; social and political.
We invite all members of the public, our supporters, community and activist organizers and
particularly skilled workers to join us for our first public meeting where we will explain
why we publicly repossessed the former Bank of Ireland before opening the floor for a
democratic discussion on how best to make use of the building."
_________________________________________
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