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Workers Power: Where next after the G8?
Workers Power 297 - Summer 2005
The July G8 demonstrations in Scotland will see hundreds of thousands converge on Edinburgh to protest against global poverty and the big business agenda of the G8 leaders.
Make Poverty History rapidly filled 10 trains and put on hundreds of coaches. Its message to cancel debt and increase aid has inspired hundreds of thousands in schools, colleges and workplaces across the country. Trades unions have mobilised such as Amicus, which has laid on 18 coaches for its members.
The SWP’s Globalise Resistance and the anarchist Dissent network will mobilise thousands of anticapitalists. Local G8 mobilising committees have sprung up in several cities such as Manchester and Leeds, alongside local social forums such as Cardiff and Leicester. They are all organising to get as many people as possible to Scotland for the protests. It is certain that this will be the biggest antipoverty and anticapitalist mobilisation the UK has ever seen. Add to this local demonstrations and Live8 concerts and it could rival in size the February and March 2003 antiwar mobilisations.
Bob Geldof’s call for a million people to converge on the opening of the G8 on 6 July was greeted with howls of rage from police chiefs and Labour politicians. He called on young people to walk out of schools and take three days off to do so. Suddenly “Saint Bob” became irresponsible Bob, dangerous Bob - a Pied Piper of Hamelin threatening to empty the classrooms and lead swarms of youngsters against the G8. Geldof is certainly an unreliable maverick. He may be pressured to divert his followers into a concert in Murrayfield, but his call was absolutely right and many young people will have taken him at his word and decided to join the G8 protest.
The militant anticapitalist wing of this vast movement will mobilise thousands of protestors to confront the 12-mile “exclusion zone” around the G8 summit, attempting to shut it down. On the Sunday 3 July there will be an anti-G8 counter-summit with organisations from all sides of the anti-G8 movement debating alternatives to capitalist globalisation.
The counter-summit must discuss how to continue the movement after the G8, especially with so many young people present, both existing anticapitalist and antiwar activists and first-time protestors. By then it will have become plain to many that the result of lobbying the G8 leaders is just another set of empty promises on debt relief and aid linked to further demands for privatisations in the poor countries.
A movement, even of a million people, that comes and goes away again, runs the risk of achieving nothing, except perhaps to make many people cynical about mass mobilisations in future. The failure to take sustained mass action after the great antiwar marches in 2003 led to a withering of the antiwar movement. This must not happen again.
Here in Britain we must seize the opportunity to turn these G8 mobilisations into a lasting and co-ordinated movement. Mass movements cannot last forever if they are based solely on spontaneous anger and hope for change. They need to get organised. Tens of thousands would willingly become organised activists against the war drives, privatisations, poverty and racism they see growing in Britain and around the world.
If the leaders of the July protests put out the call to go back to every town and city in Britain and across Europe and build local bodies pledged to continue the fight, scores of thousands would take it up. In this way we could build strong local co-ordinating bodies across Europe: against the occupation of Iraq, against the rise of the BNP, against the environmental crisis, against the attacks on pensions and cuts to the civil service, against global poverty.
Counter summit must co-ordinate action
All the major figures and organisations in the anticapitalist and antiglobalisation movement will be present in Edinburgh and at the counter-summit.
Socialists and ecologists, trade unionists and students, groups from Britain, Europe and around the world will attend. This is the raw material from which to build a powerful, democratically organised mass movement against global capitalism.
But will such a movement be launched in Edinburgh? Unfortunately, the prospects of the “leaders” of the big organisations doing so are not good. After all most of them, the union leaders, the NGO chief executives, the CND leaders and even the Socialist Workers Party, are the same people who let the 2003 mass movement slip through their fingers.
The G8 Alternatives counter-summit is a broad event involving the left, some NGOs and organisations that have a history of being involved in anticapitalist summit sieges at Prague in 2000 and Genoa in 2001, plus successive meetings of the European Social Forum. Sadly, there is a real danger that G8 Alternatives will remain little more than a set of interesting discussions and could fail to take the initiatives to establish an organised UK-wide movement.
For example, seminars of trade unionists will discuss privatisation in Europe and the EU constitution, a workshop of youth organisations will debate how to mobilise their generation for action, groups from across the world will discuss the oppressive impact of globalisation on women and the environment, others how to push down the racist immigration barriers being thrown up around Europe.
The aim of these sessions should be to go beyond general discussion and try to take practical steps - create networks, draw up campaigning plans and debate and vote on proposals for action.
Worst of all, there will be no Assembly of all the participants to tie the counter-summit together at the end, in the way that the Assembly of Social Movements meets at the end of the European Social Forum and agrees a calendar of common mobilisations.
Such an Assembly could come up with an action plan and establish a permanent co-ordination of organisations to implement it – a network of social forums right across the UK, tied in to the annual European and World Social Forum assemblies.
We need a UK social forum
Social Forums need to be democratic bodies connecting different groups, youth and trade unionists for discussion and action.
The Italian Social Forum movement grew up after the protests against the G8 in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001. When one protester, Carlo Giuliani, was murdered in cold blood by the police and Premier Silvio Berlusconi threatened a state of emergency and the arrest of anticapitalist activists, social forums sprouted all over Italy, organising mass strikes and demonstrations for over a week that forced Berlusconi to back down. They formed the basis of successive days of mass action against Berlusconi’s attacks on social services. And the first European Social Forum conference (ESF), which the Italian movement convened in Florence in 2002, saw a radical Assembly of the Social Movements raise the call which led to the 15 February 2003 international antiwar demonstration, the largest global demonstration ever seen.
The Italian movement showed the potential of such local co-ordinating bodies to develop into real councils of action, with delegates representing the anticapitalist youth and the working class movement and a wide spectrum of militant community organisations and campaigns. They were democratic, took decisions and focused on action. They provided an antidote to the bureaucratism and routinism of the trade union movement, NGO’s and much of the left in Italy.
A UK Social Forum could unite currently fragmented local groups - anti-G8 campaigns, local Make Poverty History supporters, groups of school students campaigning against debt, trade unions, and political organisations. It could provide a national organisation that could co-ordinate the activism, give it a profile and impact, and organise on a greater scale for key international events such as the EU summit in Britain this autumn.
Such local bodies, whether they were called social forums, action councils, people’s assemblies, could draw in the thousands of potential activists and attract the tens of thousands beyond them with regular, systematic campaigning on these issues in our local communities, unions, workplaces and campuses. We could organise an annual UK Social Forum which had at its head an Assembly of the delegates from the local social forums, the unions the anticapitalist parties and so on.
Activists should raise the issue of how to continue the movement and the need for a UK social forum in every session at the counter-summits, even holding a spontaneous assembly or meeting on the question if the response is positive. But even if we don’t succeed and the summits wind up with nothing lasting left in place, the story isn’t over. Protests at the EU summit in Britain later this year will give us a chance to hold a similar event in conjunction with the ESF movement, and call for a UK Social Forum next year. And in January 2006 the World Social Forum will gather in Venezuela, and at Easter the European Social Forum in Athens will be held. Both will hear calls to deepen and organise a worldwide movement.
But for that to happen it’s up to every activist in the movement to start arguing this now and building the movement that can deliver it. Those that attend the G8 protests should hold local report back meetings and propose the creation of local social forums to keep the movement in motion. Existing G8 committees should keep going, and work to draw in all the organisation and local bodies which mobilised for Edinburgh and Gleneagles to build a social forum in every city and town.
• Build a network of Social Forums across Britain
• Build a UK Social Forum