31.10.1996

Nothing less

The recent summary eviction of the Land Is Ours group from the Guinness land in Wandsworth has proven once again the strengths and weaknesses of single issue campaigns.

Like the M11, Newbury and Fairmile, the Land Is Ours participants and organisers proved how effective sustained ‘guerrilla’ protests can be against the ecological destruction wrought by capitalism’s relentless drive for profit. The attempt to challenge such a huge multinational like Guinness with small-scale, low-tech and eco-friendly tactics and resources is heroic and necessary. Like those before them, the campaigners were able to trigger debate and renew consciousness around the everyday ecological destruction happening around us.

Yet with every defeat the movement’s ability to renew itself becomes more problematical. George Monbiot, one of the organisers of the occupation and its principal theorist and publicist, wrote an article in The Guardian (October 16), revealing the problems involved with politics and protest conducted in isolation against the indomitable forces of repressive social control.

At first glance there would seem to be no similarity between George Monbiot, eco-friendly campaigner, and Bob ‘We’ll nationalise the fish’n chip shops’n all’ Crow, member of the Socialist Labour Party national executive. Yet look closer and the same narrow, partial answers to the problems before us appear. Monbiot wrote:

“Next time we - people who seek to alter the way the world sees itself - must define the limits of exploitation our social commons can support. We must learn to recognise and punish overuse and persuade other communities of interest to clear off and find their own spatial and political commons.” (my emphasis)

Similarly, ‘Frying tonight’ Bob has become a legend in his own lunchtime, with his use of the ‘you can’t play for two football teams’ metaphor, to explain why you cannot be a member of another political party if you want to join the SLP. And if you are, or even if the leadership think you are, you are out.

A letter from Ben Tulley in the Weekly Worker (October 10) started like this:

“The anarchist and environmentalist circus which joined forces with the Liverpool dockers dispute to ‘take action against the system of injustice’ sums up all that is best and worst about spontaneous struggle.”

The letter went on to argue that the only way forward was by “building an authoritative party of revolutionary leadership”. And the only way of doing that was to answer “the vexed questions of living working class history still unresolved”. This abstract, gnarled ‘revolutionary’ approach is equally unhelpful, delivered like a pious sermon, moaning pretentiously that it could have been very different if it had been very different. It ends up being universal when one should be particular and vice-versa.

The problem is that under capitalism’s global hegemony, partial socialist or environmental solutions cannot work. In fact they are doomed to turn into their opposite and become part of the problem. Thus Monbiot and Crow, in wanting to tunnel into the future like moles, looking neither left nor right, contribute to certain failure. Their answers can only reflect the answers capitalism has to the necessity of social control.

István Mészáros, in his book Beyond Capital, talks about how “repressive tolerance” and the “tolerance of repression” mark the limits of social systems which are incapable of meeting the need for social change in a determinate historical period. He argues that partial measures directed against capital’s globally interlocking system

“are capable of functioning as ‘Archimedian points’ ... strategic levers for a radical restructuring ... This is why Marx spoke of the vital necessity of changing ‘from top to bottom’, the conditions of existence as a whole, short of which all efforts directed at a socialist emancipation of mankind are doomed to failure. Such a programme, it goes without saying, embraces the micro-structures just as much as the most comprehensive institutions (the macro-structures) of political and economic life. Indeed, as Marx had suggested, nothing less than a radical restructuring of our ‘whole manner of being’ can produce an adequate system of social control” (p 894).

The dockers’ strike, the SLP and the various environmental campaigns are at present our ‘strategic levers’ - but weak, repressed and atomised working class dissent is fraught with danger and the concomitant pull towards reaction and integration into capitalism. If leaders like George Monbiot or Bob Crow are unable or unwilling to combine critical awareness with a commitment to socialist humanity, then they should be challenged and replaced. If they are not, our ‘Archimedian points’ will sink and drown.

Paul Hart