On Michael Schmidt

Serious allegations against Michael Schmidt, a prominent activist in the Anarchist movement in South Africa, were published on 25 September:

http://www.anarchistnews.org/content/michael-schmidt-author-black-flame-white-nationalist-trying-infiltrate-anarchist-movement-ak

During October, documents were published in support of these allegations:

(https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-1-1a6fa255b528)
(https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943)
(https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-3-7d288d84b170)
(https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchist-movements-throughout-the-world-chapter-4-8ff357d222e3)
(https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-5-a6ae0f471e9e)

On 26 November, Michael Schmidt published a defence:

http://drinkingwithghosts.blogspot.co.za/2015/11/michael-schmidt-african-anarchist.html

The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group is studying these documents and has not yet reached any conclusions. If the allegations against Michael Schmidt are true, he should be expelled from the movement and treated as both a serious danger and a thorough scoundrel. If they are false, he has been appallingly libelled and he deserves public exoneration – and his accusers are guilty of, at best, reckless behaviour.

We believe that a tribunal, composed so as to hold moral authority in the Anarchist movement, should be established to investigate the allegations thoroughly and impartially according to the principles of natural justice and to publish a report of its findings. The Anarkismo Network, to which the MACG belongs, is pursuing an initiative along these lines. The MACG therefore appeals to the Anarchist movement to withhold judgement until such a time as either the tribunal reports, or it becomes clear that the attempt to form a credible tribunal has failed.

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MACG Statement of Shared Positions

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Adopted 6 Dec 2015

Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group

Statement of Shared Positions

This document is to be read as a supplement to the Aims & Principles of the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group. Agreement with the positions in this document is a condition of membership.

1. The social revolution will be the act of the working class, organised in the workplace. Other classes (e.g. the peasantry) and social strata (e.g. students) in society may support the workers in this struggle, but cannot substitute for them. The workers have a unique role because of their numbers, their role in production which means that they are able to remove the economic power of the capitalists by organising under their own initiative, and the fact that the experience of social co-operation in production tends to produce the values that promote solidarity in the struggle against the employer. One corollary of the fact that the struggle will be decided in the workplace is that it will not be decided by street brawls with the cops. While it is certainly necessary to defend ourselves against police attack, capitalism’s achilles’ heel is in the workplace and our strategic orientation must be there.

2. We stand for the complete equality of the sexes and oppose all forms of oppression of women. The liberation of women from patriarchy will not be achieved without the overthrow of capitalism and the destruction of class society. The overthrow of capitalism will not be achieved without the full participation of working class women in the struggle. It is therefore in the interests of male workers to support all struggles for equality and freedom for women, even if these are at the expense of male privileges. The solidarity of the male and female halves of the working class can only be built on the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. We support the right of women to organise autonomously within the wider working class movement and also within Anarchist organisations.

3. We oppose the oppression and dispossession of indigenous people in Australia. This means that indigenous people have the right to equal treatment within Australia (i.e. no racial discrimination, whether from the State or in society) and have the right to remain indigenous (i.e. retain their lands and culture, without pressure for assimilation into the dominant culture). Indigenous people in Australia have never ceded sovereignty and have never sold their land. We acknowledge the desire of indigenous people in Australia for a treaty to recognise their prior occupation and continued rights, but believe that no such treaty can be negotiated on just terms for indigenous people while capitalism and its State endure in Australia. We believe a just settlement for indigenous people can only be achieved after a revolutionary transformation of society, including crucially the abolition of capitalist real estate.

4. We are internationalists, opposing the division of humanity into conflicting nation States and supporting working class solidarity as the one force which is capable of being an axis of effective counter-mobilisation against nationalism and racism. We therefore support open borders as a principle that will be implemented under Libertarian Communism and in the meantime will support struggles which provide opportunities to move in that direction. In particular, we support the struggle of refugees for asylum in Australia and oppose both immigration detention and deportation.

5. We oppose both pacifism and terrorism. Instead, we support the right to use reasonable force in self defence.

Pacifism is the principled refusal to meet physical force with physical force. Terrorism is the strategy of using violence, or the credible threat of it, in order to create a climate of fear for personal safety in the civilian population of a society, or a definable sub-group of it, to achieve a political end.

The problem with pacifism is that it assumes that there is a degree of humanity at work amongst the capitalist class and its State and that there are limits to their ruthlessness. The history of the last hundred years, however, provides plentiful evidence to the contrary. In the face of totally non-violent resistance, a sufficiently ruthless force, even if a tiny minority, could impose its will on the rest of society.

The problem with terrorism is that it is a strategy which marginalises the mass of the working class politically and drives it into the arms of the State for protection. Even if used in the pursuit of supportable goals, therefore, its political effects are inevitably reactionary. The callous and instrumental attitude to humanity necessary to use terrorism is completely antithetical to the principles of Anarchism and thus to resort to this would be to betray our philosophy.

Our position is that we recognise the right to use reasonable force in self defence. We are consistent on this point and thus we repudiate the State’s proclamation of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Rather, we insist that we do not lose the right to self defence when we enter the field of political struggle. Workers thus have the right to use reasonable force to defend themselves against police or thug attack on the picket line or on demonstrations.

We oppose the use of force beyond what is reasonably necessary for self defence. This would contradict the humanitarian values of the society we wish to create. The working class, being the immense majority in industrialised societies, has the advantage of the weight of numbers and the ability to use economic force to press its cause. We therefore have no need of violence, beyond what is necessary to defend ourselves against those who themselves would use violence to prevent us achieving our goals non-violently. We also believe that the use of unnecessary violence would alienate sections of the working class and make it harder to break them from authoritarian ideologies. In particular, it would strengthen the position of authoritarian groups active within the working class.

We believe that Fascism provides an example, unique in advanced capitalist democracies at present, of a specialised application of the principle of reasonable force in self defence. A Fascist group is not a debating society, but a permanent conspiracy to murder. It is an open threat of violence against women, immigrants, indigenous people, all other minorities and ultimately, to the working class and its organisations. Defence against Fascism is therefore necessarily, in many cases, pre-emptive. Fascist groups should be defeated and broken up, if possible, whenever they show their faces. We emphasise that this position is unique to the issue of Fascism and does not apply to Right wing populists, where the ordinary use of the principle of self defence would apply when fighting them.

We recognise the possibility that, in revolutionary situations, self defence may require pre-emptive action against forces of the State. This is not a pretext, however, for abandoning a principled opposition to offensive violence. The situation must still be assessed using the criteria of whether the use of force is both necessary for defensive purposes and of a reasonable degree given the threat.

We reject any attempt to equate property damage with violence. Property has no rights and damage to it must be assessed in the light of its impact on people. Damage to nuclear weapons, therefore, is the complete opposite of damage to a worker’s home.

6. “Free thought, necessarily involving freedom of speech & press, I may tersely define thus: no opinion a law — no opinion a crime.” — Alexander Berkman

We therefore oppose State bans on any opinion, even ones with which we passionately disagree. Any such bans would end up being used, in the end, against the working class and its organisations.

We also, therefore, recognise complete freedom of conscience. We support the right to believe in any religion or none, to practice any religion or none and to preach any religion or none. In the Australian context today, this includes a special responsibility to defend the right of people to be Muslims without discrimination or harassment.

In addition, freedom of conscience is a right of every individual person and is not restricted to religious leaders. Adherence to religious precepts must therefore be entirely voluntary. Attempts by religious leaders or denominations to compel adherents to conform to their teachings or discipline must be resisted and we resolutely reject any attempt to give them State backing.

7. A libertarian communist society will be one that is ecologically sustainable. Even if capitalism were just and supportable on other grounds, it would fail the test of sustainability. We need to reject the instrumental thinking inherent to capitalism and realise that we are part of nature – a conscious and creative part, but a part. As such, nature is not something to be dominated, but to be protected – and particularly to be protected against human damage.

In building a sustainable society, it is essential to end the use of non-renewable resources – or develops ways of making them renewable. In the short term, this means a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. In the medium term, we need to restructure our existing cities for a preponderance of medium density living and decentralise into a considerably larger number of smaller cities. And in the long term, we need to phase out mining before the exhaustion of accessible mineral deposits at practical grades forces us to abandon it involuntarily.

A commitment to ecological sustainability does not, however, mean enforced poverty in living standards and even less so does it require a return to a hunter-gatherer society. We therefore reject Malthusians of all varieties and especially in their primitivist manifestation. Production of a wide variety of goods and services needs to be increased, not decreased, in order to abolish poverty and want from the face of the Earth. We hold that it is capitalism, not human nature, that is responsible for the wanton environmental destruction which has occurred in the last two centuries and is threatening the very liveability of the planet which we inhabit.

Further, the fact that technology has been developed under capitalism does not irretrievably contaminate it. Different technologies have capitalist relations embedded into them to different degrees and in some cases development of a particular technology has been slowed because it doesn’t fit well with contemporary capitalism. Nuclear power is an example of a technology which will have to be abandoned as anti-social, while solar power is an example of a technology which, on the whole, undermines the power of the great capitalist corporations.

A libertarian communist society will resolve the current conflict between the need to increase production and the need to limit the environmental damage that capitalist production imposes by:

(a) Producing for rationally determined needs, rather than for wants generated by advertising;

(b) Producing quality goods which last, rather than shoddy ones which break down quickly;

(c) Using only renewable energy;

(d) Using closed loop manufacturing processes, with 100% material recycling and zero waste;

(e) Rationally planning the satisfaction of social needs in the most energy and resource efficient manner;

(f) Using the most modern technology to institute efficient small-run production of a wide variety of goods, thus eliminating a large part of the need for long distance transport; and

(g) Planning cities, and the means of transport within and between them, on ecologically sustainable and energy efficient lines.

Finally, we believe that the current so-called “population crisis” is an illusion caused by the inefficient, unjust and unsustainable practices of capitalism. While there is a natural limit to the carrying capacity of the planet, we believe that this limit is impossible to determine until after capitalism has been abolished and its destructive practices eliminated. If population reduction is called for after the planet’s carrying capacity is established, it can be achieved gradually through social consensus.

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UPF Nazis menace Melbourne Anarchist Club

The Nazi thugs of the United Patriots Front, led by Führer Blair Cottrell, paid an uninvited visit to the Melbourne Anarchist Club today. Five of them attempted to intimidate the two Anarchists present with their swagger, making free with the small selection of literature on sale. They later posted a video on their Facebook site. The implied threat, of course, is what these thugs could have done if they’d felt like it.

The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group denounces this act of Fascist intimidation and declares that, if anything untoward happens to the MAC or its members, we will hold Blair Cottrell personally responsible.

Other solidarity messages are available here:

https://www.facebook.com/AnarchistAffinity/
https://www.facebook.com/melantifainfo

TOUCH ONE, TOUCH ALL

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Stop the Fascists in Bendigo! Rally Against the UPF!

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The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group supports this initiative of the Bendigo Action Coalition. The MACG participates in the Campaign Against Racism & Fascism, a united front which has been providing assistance to BAC in its initial organising efforts. Meet:

12:00 p.m.
Saturday 10 October
Bendigo Town Hall
Cnr Hargreaves & Bull Sts
Bendigo 3550

For more details:

https://www.facebook.com/events/762477407195421/
https://www.facebook.com/bendigoaction

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Give a Pro-Choice Unwelcome to Operation Rescue from Melbourne!

In the spirit of the united front, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group encourages its supporters and readers to attend the rally below. Some activists have been urging the Immigration Minister to deny the anti-abortion zealot at the centre of this controversy a visa to enter Australia. The MACG does not support this tactic, because it’s not the Immigration Minister’s call to decide this matter. Our response is, instead, to mobilise working class opposition to the movement that Troy Newman embodies. A crucial factor in our decision to endorse this demonstration is that the organisers of the rally have not participated in the campaign for the Immigration Minister to act.

Note: The Immigration Minister has banned Troy Newman from entering Australia, but the rally is going ahead anyway because Right to Life is still having its conference.

SNAP ACTION
Friday, 2 October, 12.00 pm

Give a Pro-Choice Unwelcome
to Operation Rescue from Melbourne!

Right to Life is touring Troy Newman, President of the notorious U.S. anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue (OR). OR has a violent history that includes clinics bombings and defending assassinations of doctors. Newman advocates the harassment of clinics, which includes stalking staff, as a way to shut them down. He says that abortion providers should be executed; women who choose abortion are guilty of murder and should be punished.

Newman is also connected with the Centre for Medical Progress, which is behind the smear campaign against Planned Parenthood in the United States, accusing PP of selling “body parts.” This macabre misrepresentation of the provision of donated foetal tissue for research into diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease and kidney failure has been well exposed.

Defend abortion providers! Stand up for women’s right to choose!

Rally at the Treacy Centre
126 The Avenue, Parkville

Bring placards, banners, co-workers and friends!
Tell Right to Life and Operation Rescue that we won’t tolerate their misogynist violence!

To endorse the action, email Radical Women:
radicalwomen@optusnet.com.au

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PROTEST SPIKES OPERATION FORTITUDE

BORDER FORCE GESTAPO GO TO HELL!

This afternoon, an angry demonstration of 200-300 people in Melbourne forced the cancellation of a police press conference to launch “Operation Fortitude” and then forced the cancellation of the operation itself.

In a media statement released in advance of the planned press conference, an Australian Border Force official said, “Tonight and tomorrow evening (Friday and Saturday) Metro Trains, Yarra Trams, the Sheriff’s Office, Taxi Services Commission and the ABF will join Victoria Police as part of the inter-agency operation”. He also said that, as part of what they called “Operation Fortitude”, Border Force officers would be positioned at various locations around the city and would speak “with any individual we cross paths with”.

News of the planned operation spread like wildfire across the Internet and the phone network. The MACG joined 200-300 other protestors at Flinders St Station at 2:00 p.m. and all were extremely angry at the prospect of Border Force coppers stopping people and asking them to show their papers to prove they were in the country legally. Speakers pointed out that Border Force was either going to be stopping people at random, or was going to be engaged in racial profiling. Neither of these options is acceptable. It was also agreed by the crowd that it would be a good idea for people to intervene if they see Border Force coppers stopping people and checking ID – getting them to justify what they’re doing and informing them of our objections. The MACG thinks that’s an excellent proposal.

As debate raged across the Internet, the protest moved from the steps of Flinders St Station into the middle of the Flinders and Swanston Sts intersection so that it would be impossible for the media to ignore. The disruption successfully spread the news that these Gestapo tactics from Border Force were not only arousing outrage, but would be resisted. When news came that the press conference was going to go ahead inside Flinders St Station, the protest moved into the station itself. When the border cops realised they were the centre of attention, they decided discretion was the better part of valour and retreated to the station’s police office.

At 2:35 we received the news that the press conference was called off. At 2:45 a media report was announced, stating that Operation Fortitude had been cancelled. Victoria Police said “We understand there has been a high level of community interest and concern which has been taken into consideration when making this decision.” Someone in the Victoria Police Media Unit is going to get an award for understatement over that sentence.

The demonstration broke up at 3:00 p.m. in celebration. The MACG warns, however, against complacency. A Twitter storm and a demo of a couple of hundred might be enough to take down a misconceived PR stunt for Border Force, but to defeat the Border Force itself and the racism that it enforces at the Government’s behest, we will need a movement of the whole working class, organised in the workplace. The Fascists of the United Patriots Front certainly need to be taken on and defeated, but it must be recognised that, at this stage of proceedings, they are amateurs at racist violence. The State employs an entire Border Force of professionals who are a lot better at it and who do it for a living.

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29 AUG Stop the bigots in Bendigo! No to fascism, no to Islamophobia

Fascist group the ‘United Patriots Front’ (UPF) are planning to descend on Bendigo on Saturday, 29 August outside the Town Hall in order to protest the construction of a mosque.

The mosque was the subject of an unsuccessful legal challenge a few weeks ago (see : http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/bendigo-mosque-survives-legal-challenge-gets-green-light-for-planning-permit-20150806-gisq9z.html, Rania Spooner, The Age, August 6, 2015) but may be subject to further challenge in the courts.

The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism is mobilising against the UPF and to defend the right of Muslims, in Bendigo and elsewhere, to have their own house of worship.

CARF will be assembling on Saturday 29 August at 1:00 p.m. at:

Bendigo Trades Hall
40 View St
Bendigo 3550

We will march to the Town Hall at 1:30. For more information, see the Facebook event:

https://www.facebook.com/events/740339059424914/

For those travelling from Melbourne, the MACG advises taking reasonable care when travelling to and from Bendigo. If you travel by train, don’t be conspicuous. If you travel by car, park it in a side street and not at the railway station. And take a map or two so you don’t get lost.

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