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Title: Learning from May Day Author: Dec McCarthy Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: May Day, Ireland, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 9th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/rbr9/mayLearnDA.html][struggle.ws]] and [[http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/rbr9/mayLearnOrg.html Notes: This article is from Red & Black Revolution (no 9, Spring 2005)
movement
The experience of May Day brings up us back to some of the perennial
questions thrown up by counter-summits protests: how do we broaden our
movement and what role do direct action and confrontational tactics have
in that process. These are, of course, the issues that have been
mainstay of Red and Black Revolution debates over the past few years but
have been usually viewed through the prism of events outside of Ireland.
The following article is a personal account of the Dublin Grassroots
Networkâs approach to such issues in relation to May Day and goes on to
argue for increased tactical flexibility from anarchists within the
anti-capitalist movement.
The two defining, and in Irish politics novel, characteristics of the
various Grassroots groups -including DGN â has been the advocacy of
non-hierarchical organisation and an insistence on the importance of
direct action in protest. This emphasis on direct action has undoubtedly
helped libertarians carve out a political space for itself. However, it
is clear from May Day and other events that Grassroots groups have
planned over the past three years that we are primarily focused on
spreading libertarian ideas and regard direct action as only one, albeit
vital, element of libertarian struggle. This approach has meant that at
least as much time and effort has been spent on making persuasive
arguments and distributing leaflets as planning actions.
Furthermore, many of those actions could be characterised as âfluffyâ,
âmoderateâ or even simply symbolic. Some of the visiting protestors
thought that we should have been much more confrontational. I would
argue though, that our approach was principled but pragmatic and that we
had to take local sensibility and political experience into account. I
think this is why May Day was a relative success. What is important is
that we communicated our ideas to a fairly large amount of people and we
did so without compromising ourselves. This doesnât mean I think we did
everything perfectly or that the same approach would yield the same
results in the future but simply that at that particular time in Ireland
these were sensible choices.
To discuss this properly I shall first clarify what sort events DGN
envisaged when planning the protests and what level of confrontation we
imagined this would entail. The overall strategy and the main aim of the
organisers of the No Borders weekend was to plan events that could
potentially involve large numbers of people (including any acts of civil
disobedience). As street confrontations are, more often than not,
determined by the cops it was difficult to know in advance how all this
would pan out but the actions were devised to minimise the possibility
of arrests and to avoid physical confrontation without giving away our
right to protest.
So generally, over the May Day weekend DGN chose to defy rather than
confront â more akin to a pink/silver bloc approach than black bloc
tactics â and The Critical Mass, the No Borders picnic, the RTS, the Top
Oil Action and the Bring the Noise march, and the mass direct action at
Fitzwilliam Square are all examples of this. Many of these actions had
some element that could have been deemed illegal but the hands-off
policing policy employed for most of the weekend meant that this never
became an issue.
Early on in the planning process disruption tactics such as blockades
were also mooted as was the possibility of direct action at the banquet
centre itself but nobody within DGN advocated targeting property or
employing militant tactics against the police. Most activists, anarchist
and non-anarchist alike, thought that widespread property damage or
attacking the cops would be counterproductive and inappropriate in an
Irish context. At the same time DGN consistently reaffirmed our support
for a âdiversity of tacticsâ in resisting neo-liberalism both at home
and abroad. DGN organisers were conscious of how at anti-capitalist
events elsewhere divisions and splits had emerged between various
alternative globalisation factions over the issue of militant tactics
and because of this strived to avoid the terms violent or non-violent to
describe the planned protests.
So why did DGN chose this âfluffyâ approach? First of all Grassroots and
its spin-off activist groups are broad libertarian coalitions which
includes people who are convinced pacifists and this has definitely had
some influence on Grassroots initiatives. But the question then remains
why most of the anarchists within DGN, who are not pacifists, fully
supported this approach. In practical terms, DGNers knew that we were
not a small part of a general mobilisation, we were wholly responsible
for whatever mobilisation took place.
The small size of the anti-capitalist movement in Ireland and the
magnitude of the security operation meant that militant action would
probably attract very few people onto the streets and, in all
likelihood, result in beatings and arrests. In the long term it was also
thought that such forms of protest would alienate people and provide a
pretext for the criminalisation of anti-capitalist activity in the
future. However, more importantly these choices also reflect in a very
fundamental way the political orientation of most Irish anarchists,
including the WSM, who believe that mass participation and direct action
should be one of the main objectives of anti-capitalist activity. This
does not mean that we oppose other forms of protest and resistance but
that we think that this orientation to âmass politicsâ is more likely in
the medium term to build the confidence and momentum of radical social
movements.
In the run up to the May Day weekend it was impossible to know if groups
apart from DGN were intending to use more militant tactics and we were
concerned to accommodate a diversity of tactics while ensuring that
there was a clear demarcation between groups that wanted to use
different methods of struggle. The obvious logic of such a demarcation
is to give people participating in protests the choice of what sort of
actions and risks they want to take. To this end the DGN organisers of
the Bring the Noise demonstration met with most of the international
visitors before May Day. It was agreed that any group who did not want
to abide by the general guidelines drawn up by the march organisers,
including using âany form of offensive physical confrontationâ, should
do so away from the main march.
This is why the most confrontational action of the weekend, taken by the
âpushing blocâ at the Ashtown roundabout near Farmleigh, was done
separately from the main Bring the Noise march. This bloc was made up of
a mixture of foreign activists including the Wombles,[1] some DGN
activists and Irish black blocers. Their attitude was that it was
important to contest the boundaries imposed by the state on protest so
when the DGN march finished they emerged from the crowd, largely masked
up and in formation, and advanced on the police lines. With only a
hundred or so people within the bloc and another few hundred from the
Bring the Noise contingent behind them there never was any possibility
of breaking through the police lines. In fact, I donât think, even if
every single person at the protest joined in, this would have been a
possibility without the use of molotovs and other weapons. This was
never on the cards and consequently the whole incident had a stagey
quality as if we were all playing our allotted roles in a grand
spectacle of rebellion.
However, the pushing bloc did not see the action as an exercise in
futility but a visible and empowering act of resistance. It is open to
debate whether this action was a positive thing for libertarian politics
in Ireland but my own opinion is that, on balance, the pushing blocâs
symbolic confrontation was an important part of the May Day weekend and
a good, if unplanned, example of diversity of tactics in action. The
pushing bloc could certainly not have acted without the existence of
DGNâs larger protest and although their action had no chance of success
it served a purpose by showing that through solidarity resistance is
possible.
May Day shows that, as a movement we need to avoid being boxed either by
others or by ourselves by defining ourselves simply as the militant
direct action wing of the anti-capitalism. Popularising our ideas and
methods of struggle can take many forms and May Day worked because we
took this into account when planning our actions, dealing with the media
and cooperating with groups outside DGN. Unpredictability, imagination,
and a willingness to defy any limitations imposed either from within or
outside will, I believe, broaden and strengthen anarchism. Sterile
purism, dogma and formulaic thinking, on the other hand, will ensure
that anarchism remains an obscure tendency of left wing thought confined
to dusty rooms above pubs. The difficulty is, of course, to be
tactically flexible without abandoning the passion and the combativity
at the heart of the anarchist tradition. This demands that we are
scrupulous in assessing our own activities and clearly distinguish
between media stunts, symbolic protest and genuinely effective direct
action. In that spirit, the worst lesson to draw from May Day would be
that same tactics will necessarily work in the future or that we can
avoid confrontation and still achieve our aims.
Anarchism is nothing if it is stripped of its willingness to confront
power and the tactical choices made over May Day are not in any way a
blueprint for future struggles. We have quite rightly criticised the old
left for ritualistic and meaningless forms of protest and we need to
examine our own politics with the same rigour. If we are simply going
through the motions, whether repeating the same type of symbolic
protests or property damage at a summit, we will end up as bad as the
Trots.
A couple of days before May Day the police discovered and shut down the
squat that was intended to serve as a convergence/accommodation centre
during the protests. Although the 100â150 or so international activists
were all found somewhere to sleep, this loss obviously caused
difficulties. Without a proper convergence centre in which to debate and
discuss issues related to the protests many of the international
activists felt excluded and blamed and resented DGN for not providing
what they regarded as basic facilities for a protest like May Day. On
the other hand, a large number of Irish activists felt they were doing
their best in difficult and stressful conditions and that the visitors
were treating DGNers as disreputable tour operators rather than
comrades. Unsurprisingly, over the week a very discernible them and us
attitude developed between some Irish and English anarchists. (It should
be noted that the visitors were a very heterogenous group and âsomeâ
means only some).
This led to further difficulties when the Indymedia centre began to
serve as the default convergence centre with people hanging around,
eating and drinking. This was not what the Community Media Network (CMN)
had agreed to when it had made their premises available to Irish
Indymedia and it ended up creating tensions and misunderstandings
between people from CMN/Indymedia and people from DGN. CMN/Indymedia had
no problem with meetings being held in the building but understandably
felt that if the place was treated as a social centre it would undermine
its role as an alternative media hub. On the other hand, some of the
visitors believed that Indymedia, as a constituent part of the
anti-capitalist movement, should make the space available to them
because DGN hadnât provided any other options. This underlying tension
flared up in innumerable little incidents. At one point tempers were so
frayed that CMN activists were pushing to have the Indymedia centre shut
down early because of the behaviour of some international activists.
The lack of solidarity and the rudeness of small minority of visiting
activists was not the real cause of the problems though. The blame rests
with us in DGN for not thinking through the consequences of issuing an
international call out without having the capacity to provide the basic
infrastructure for visiting protestors.
Why did this happen? While many people in DGN have had a lot of
experience organising protests and campaigns of various sorts we had
not, until May Day, organised anything that included the sort of
logistical support that an international call out demands and we
underestimated the work that it would involve. The group dealing with
accommodation provision was too small and included activists who were
already burdened with an extraordinary amount of work. We should have
collectively made much more of an effort to support them or made the
decision that we were not in the position to provide accommodation much
earlier. This highlights one of the observable drawbacks of the working
groups model that we used when people are overstretched; difficult and
problematic tasks, such as accommodation provision, get doled out as a
way of taking them off the agenda rather than really dealing with them
collectively.
Wisdom in hindsight is a fairly useless luxury but it is also worth
reflecting on how we took an international model and applied it
wholesale to a local context without entirely thinking it through and
how that ended up colouring the perception of a good number of the
visiting activists. As effective network building both between various
elements of the Irish anti-capitalist movement and international
activists is one of the secondary aims of events like May Day this
stands as one of DGNâs greatest failings over the weekend.
Similarly, DGNâs legal and defendant support work was more piecemeal
than it should have been. The main reason for this is that once again we
left an important job in the hands of too few people and we failed to
understand just how much preparation and effort is needed to do such
work effectively. Because of this, going into May Day, we didnât have a
proper bail fund and ever since May Day a small number of people doing
legal support having been trying to play catch up.
In the run up to the protests the legal team distributed thousands of
bust cards with a solicitorâs phone number and legal briefings to
prepare people for the possible consequences of protesting. It appears
though that many of the people who were arrested near the Ashtown Gate
were new to politics and had never taken part in anything
confrontational and did not have this information. This meant many of
those arrested were processed without knowing what was likely to happen
to them or whether they could expect support. This was further
complicated by the fact that the Gardai refused to allow the arrestees
to make their phone call until Sunday, which slowed down the response of
the legal support group. Nonetheless, they were nearly all contacted one
way or another over the weekend. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the media
furore about the riot, the vast majority of defendants contacted opted
not get involved in a defendant support group or accept any help from
DGN. For those who did opt to accept our solidarity money was and is
continuing to be raised but there is no May Day defendants group to
speak of.
Two of the English anarchists arrested did ask DGN for solidarity but
were unhappy with the level of support they received. DGNâs lack of
organisational coherence is part of this story because, despite some
individualsâ best efforts on this score, we failed to make defendant
support a collective priority. Some of this is a question of experience
but for something as important as legal support this is not acceptable
and this aspect of the May Day experience begs political as well as
organisational questions.
These problems were not just oversights, they are serious political
problems. We need to develop sustainable legal support structures within
the libertarian movement but there are a number of obstacles to this,
not least the organisational form of DGN. One of the fundamental
strengths of the DGN network model is that it is easy to get involved,
have a say, work on a given issue and then, if you choose, take a break.
This is very attractive in certain respects but as the network is
primarily a network of individuals, rather than groups, it can lack
organisational coherence and consistency. This is compounded by the fact
that many of the people in DGN have only been working with each other
for a relatively short period and the informal patterns of cooperation
and interdependence that might compensate for such organisational
weaknesses havenât fully developed yet. This has meant that problems and
issues can present themselves at a time when DGN is not meeting very
regularly or at all and often nobody takes up the slack. This is in
contrast with more established anti-capitalist networks elsewhere, which
consist mainly of groups that have had a longer experience of working
with each other.
Potentially, this could create other problems: not least unclear
decision-making, the development of informal hierarchies, and a lack of
accountability. It also seems as if the structure of DGN makes it
impossible to plan political activity in a paced and strategic manner.
For instance, after May Day many activists felt completely burnt out
during a period which saw an anti-immigrant referendum and Bushâs visit
to Ireland and this definitely hampered the libertarian campaigns in
response to these two events. Politically, such an unstable network is
also very unlikely to build the sustained links with communities and
workplaces that could make anti-capitalism a genuinely subversive force.
It is not clear at the time of writing whether DGN has a future or not
in its current form but hopefully these very serious failings will be
addressed by the anti-authoritarian community in the future.
[1] The WOMBLES (White Overalls Movement Building Libertarian Effective
Struggles) are a loose anti-capitalist group in Britain that dresses in
white overalls with padding, helmets and breathing protection at
protests. They should not be confused with the animated childrenâs
television characters, the Wombles.