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Title: The Grassroots Gatherings Author: Laurence Cox Date: March 2007 Language: en Topics: gatherings, grassroots organizing, Red & Black Revolution, Ireland Source: Retrieved on 15th November 2021 from http://www.wsm.ie/c/grassroots-gatherings-ireland-history Notes: Published in Red & Black Revolution No. 12.
In practice, the Grassroots Gatherings – and groups linked to them –
have become the main (and the only continuous) networking of the
“movement of movements” in Ireland. To date 10 gatherings have been held
between 2001 and 2005. In keeping with the goal of autonomy and
decentralisation, there has been no central committee; at the end of
each gathering a group of activists has offered to host the next one in
their own area and has got on with organising it in their own way,
around an agenda set by themselves and with sometimes very different
structures and themes.
The worldwide “movement of movements”, which has brought together
individual movements fighting neo-liberal capitalism and the “New World
Order” since the late 1990s, is a strange kind of animal. Some might say
it is less of a single species and more of a symbiotic relationship
between several species, or even a mini-ecosystem making its way through
the cracks of the world the powerful created.
Metaphors aside, the “movement of movements” consists of several very
different kinds of things. It includes a multitude of local campaigns,
sometimes organised into large-scale movements around specific issues
(opposition to the “war on terror”, fighting resource extraction
companies, workplace organising, struggles over women’s rights over
their own bodies, movements of peasants and small farmers, intellectual
property campaigns, opposition to racism… the list goes on and on).
It includes the high-profile summit protests where the ritual meetings
of our rulers are disrupted by direct action, delegitimated by mass
demonstrations, critiqued in counter-summits and forced to hide in
remote rural areas, dictatorships where protests are banned, behind
massive walls or shielded by armies and surface-to-air missiles. And it
includes the long, slow process of creating continuity between summit
protests, networking between different movements and campaigns, building
trust or at least cooperation between different political (and
anti-political) traditions: learning to have confidence in ourselves
across a whole society or a whole world. The Grassroots Gatherings,
which have been running in Ireland for the last five years, fit in here:
a space to meet each other and learn to work together; a place to dance,
learn juggling, fall in love and practice for street fighting; a place
to work on the issues that divide us and identify what we have in
common; a very temporary autonomous zone where the phrase “another world
is under construction” is more than just a neat slogan.
From one point of view, part of the job of activists is to build links
between individual discontent into local campaigns, to tie together
local campaigns into movements around single issues, and to find the
common threads shared across those movements. This is where we fight
back against the isolation and particularism that capitalism, racism and
patriarchy impose on us, and where we start to create possibilities that
go beyond changing little things within a big picture that remains the
same. Although activists are always doing this, there are times when
people are on the defensive in their own lives and the big structures of
oppression and exploitation are on the advance, and in these times our
efforts to connect are houses built on sand, constantly undermined by
the tide of money and power. In other times, such as the last ten years,
our own limited efforts connect with the much broader movement of other
people’s everyday struggles to change their lives; activists learn from
these as well as helping give them shape, and the process feels as
though it may be able to change something larger, beyond our own comfort
zones.
The movement of movements in Ireland draws on long-standing
struggles:community opposition to multinationals, the women’s movement,
left and trade union battles, working-class community organising, the
counterculture and a huge range of anti-racist, solidarity and
self-organised immigrant groups. It also draws on a long history of
networking between movements. Its ability to take these processes
further depends both on shifting power relations within people’s
everyday lives and the broader successes of the movement of movements
elsewhere.
Thus Zapatista solidarity goes back to the 1990s, and several Irish
activists participated in the two Zapatista-sponsored Encuentros which
encouraged networking processes around the world. Irish activists took
part in the 2000 World Bank / IMF protests in Prague and the 2001 G8
protests in Genoa, and various events were organised in Ireland around
these. Since 2001 Irish involvement in opposing the US administration’s
“long war” has grown and shrunk in tandem with the movement elsewhere.
Specific features of the Irish situation include the “Celtic Tiger” and,
more broadly, the widespread social change from a post-colonial,
semi-peripheral situation in the 1980s to becoming “part of Europe” in
terms of salaries (and racism), consumption patterns (and
individualism), declining religious power (and the defeat of some
elements of old-style patriarchy). Many of those whose hopes for social
change did not distinguish between the liberal and radical agendas had
to discover for themselves that to become “like other countries” was not
enough to bring about equality or justice. Others had to gain the
resources and confidence to come out from under the thumb of what had
often been, particularly at local level, an intensely disempowering,
intimately personal and status-ridden power structure. New kinds of
struggles developed – opposing incinerators or bin taxes, reclaiming the
streets or opposing new roads projects – and new kinds of alliances were
forged.
In this context, a number of activists – on the suggestion of Irish
anarchists – took the initiative of calling a meeting for those involved
in the movement from bottom-up points of view. The goal was to “keep
campaigns open and decentralised, [get] a radical message across [and
avoid] the co-optation, fragmentation and professionalisation of
activism”. The invitation defined “bottom-up” as broadly as possible
(“grassroots, libertarian, anarchist, participatory,
anti-authoritarian”) so as to include community activists, feminists,
ecological activists and radical democrats. Those writing and endorsing
the letter were mainly anarchists (WSM, ASF, Alliance of Cork
anarchists), environmentalists (Gluaiseacht, Free the Old Head of
Kinsale, Sustainable Ireland), solidarity activists (Irish Mexico
group), community organisers, alternative media (Indymedia,
Cyberjournal, The Path, Blue, Rebelweb, A-Infos) and individuals
involved in abortion rights, anti-racist work and trade unions. They
were based in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Derry, Limerick, Kildare, Monaghan,
Wexford, Down, England and Rome.
At the time the goal was stated as the development of a separate
grassroots strand within the movement which would nevertheless be able
to cooperate with other strands (NGOs, authoritarian left groups etc.)
when appropriate. In practice, the Grassroots Gatherings – and groups
linked to them – have become the main (and the only continuous)
networking of the “movement of movements” in Ireland. Other attempts
have been made (the broader-based Irish Social Forum, the SWP-dominated
Global Resistance and Irish Anti-War Movement, some NGO-led conferences)
but none has had a continuous and active presence, unlike other
countries where these strands are often the dominant ones within the
movement.
To date 10 gatherings have been held between 2001 and 2005. In keeping
with the goal of autonomy and decentralisation, there has been no
central committee; at the end of each gathering a group of activists has
offered to host the next one in their own area (the Gatherings are
currently stalled because no offer was made at the end of the 10^(th)),
and has got on with organising it in their own way, around an agenda set
by themselves and with sometimes very different structures and themes.
This means that — rather than the same people being involved in
organising every Gathering, or being frowned on if they were unable to
do so – the organising teams have been constantly shifting, as has
participation at the Gatherings. Not only has this not been a practical
problem (indicating the power of bottom-up organising strategies and the
growing capacities of activists around the country), but the usual
guilt-tripping over participation, and the identification of projects
with individuals, seems not to have happened (which means that we are
starting to get out of the emotional space of old-style Irish
organising). It’s a small example, but against the backdrop of
traditional activism in Ireland a telling one.
The general framework of Gatherings has been as a series of discussions;
sometimes organised along the style familiar from international
anti-capitalist events (opening plenary and introductions, multiple
parallel workshops, closing plenary), sometimes in other ways
(discussion sessions where speakers were limited to 5-minute
introductions; “Open Space” methodology; practical planning sessions).
Around the edges literature has been distributed, mailing lists set up,
contacts made, actions organised and new events planned. Much of the
“real work”, though, has taken place outside of this structure, in the
practicalities of setting up, cooking and cleaning together; childcare
and events for children; evening socials; sleeping on other people’s
floors; sharing buses or lifts; and coming to recognise each other —
beyond theoretical principles and the details of our campaigns – as
intelligent, competent, independent activists not too different from
ourselves. Participation has varied from about 50 people to about 300,
depending on location more than anything else. Of these, at least three
quarters at any Gathering I have attended have been activists, people
already significantly involved in different campaigns or organisations;
while there have been a scattering of people who enjoy gatherings for
their own sake, people trying to find a way into activism and overseas
visitors, the Gatherings have always been mainly about networking
between activists, and numbers need to be assessed in these terms.
This has fed directly in to one of the main goals of the Gatherings,
which has been to build alliances by meeting each other outside the
pressured situations of organising committees, public meetings and
street actions. At the start of the Gatherings, Irish anarchists were
already working well together despite theoretical and organisational
differences, and links were growing with radical environmentalists
around campaigns such as the Glen of the Downs and Reclaim the Streets.
Almost from the foundation, strong connections were made with
alternative media (particularly Indymedia), international solidarity
(particularly with Latin America), the anti-war movement (particularly
its direct action wing). In other areas (the women’s movement,
anti-racist and immigrant groups, trade union activism, working-class
community organising), while the links are real, they are also
relatively small, and the bulk of these movements remains separate from
the kinds of alliance represented by the Gatherings. This situation is
familiar from the movement of movements in other parts of the
English-speaking world in particular and sets it off from that in other
parts of Europe (such as France or Italy, where trade unions and
immigrant groups have been central parts of the movement), as well as
from the rest of the world (such as Latin America or India, where
women’s groups and community organising are far more central to the
movement).
A second goal, represented by the principles of the Gatherings, has been
to develop a specifically bottom-up wing within the movement of
movements, defined in ways which can include anarchists, ecologists,
feminists, libertarian Marxists, community activists and radical
democrats. Probably the details are not too important (to the best of my
knowledge the only debate around these has been during the formation of
Grassroots Dissent in 2005), but to the extent that they represent a way
of working which enables cooperation across our different organisational
styles and traditions, they seem mostly to work.
The main criticisms have been around informal realities: domination by
older, more articulate activists and masculine operating styles which
disempower women. We should not ignore, though, the “voting with your
feet” represented by the fact that people from trade union, community,
women’s and immigrant / ethnic minority groups (as well as activists in
their forties and beyond) rarely come to the Gatherings except as
invited speakers or as members of other movements which are present.
This may reflect a criticism of organising styles, a sense that the
Gatherings are not relevant to their movements, practical issues such as
time, travel etc. or a mixture of all three.
The call for the first Grassroots Gathering in 2001 set out a list of
principles which have become accepted as a basis for the Gatherings. The
basic points are these:
People should control their own lives and work together as equals, as
part of how we work as well as what we are working towards. Within the
network this means rejecting top-down and state-centred forms of
organisation (hierarchical, authoritarian, expert-based, Leninist etc.)
The network should be open, decentralised and really democratic.
We call for solutions that involve ordinary people controlling their own
lives and having the resources to do so:
WTO, and a challenge to underlying structures of power and inequality;
sustainable environmental, economic and social system, agreed by the
people of the planet. We aim to work together in ways which are
accessible to everyone, particularly women and working-class people,
rather than reproducing feelings of disempowerment and alienation within
our own network.
The third, and most important, goal has been to contribute to the
development of the movement of movements in Ireland by feeding into the
development of local campaigns and movements as well as direct
confrontations with the state. Other than direct organisational links
(see next section), it’s obviously hard to name which developments can
be specifically traced to the Gatherings and which have to do with
events in the wider society, the impact of the global movement or the
work of other activists and organisations.
What can confidently be said is that the Gatherings have been a
significant part of the rise of the movement of movements in Ireland,
from a situation where the most that happened locally was events in
solidarity with protests and movements elsewhere to the point where the
big power structures have been confronted massively – around the
cancelled WEF meeting in 2003, the EU summit and Bush visit in 2004;
radical, direct action-oriented campaigns with a democratic orientation
have grown — around the military use of Shannon airport, the
Shell/Statoil project at Rossport, other big projects at Tara,
Ringaskiddy and elsewhere; and a host of local campaigns and projects
have developed, so that (at least in my own town of Dublin) it has at
times taken a monthly meeting just to update each other on everything
that is going on in terms of bottom-up organising (from StreetSeen to
community gardening, from the anarcha-feminist RAG to anti-racist
actions).
Some specific offshoots of “Grassroots” can be identified, where
activists have used the Gatherings to develop new campaigns and networks
that have taken on a life of their own. Briefly, these include the
Grassroots Network Against War, that organised mass direct actions at
Shannon airport; a variety of local Grassroots groups (in Dublin, Cork,
Belfast and Galway at least); and (in Dublin) the development of
Grassroots Dissent and the monthly “Anti-Authoritarian Assemblies”
mentioned above from the merger of Dublin Grassroots Network, which
organised the Mayday 2004 summit protests, and the Dissent! Group, which
organised participation in the Gleneagles 2005 G8 protest.
Beyond this, “Grassroots” has come to stand – sometimes positively,
sometimes negatively – for a new style of organising in Irish activism:
committed to direct action for radical goals, oriented to bottom-up
democracy, and connecting activists across all our diversity rather than
trying to force everyone to follow a single “line”. Gatherings have been
important organising sites for people trying to develop direct action in
particular campaigns, building support networks (eg prisoner support,
legal action, alternative media), and creating new projects (eg
community gardening, squats / social centres).
Although the purpose of the Grassroots Gatherings have been explicitly
focussed on discussion, naturally the prospect of imminent action
enlivens things wonderfully, and is one area where specific
contributions can be named. The June 2003 Dublin Gathering set out to
make a bridge between the energy then flying around anti-war activism
and the planned WEF regional meeting in Dublin that autumn. That meeting
was subsequently cancelled; initially the government cited security
reasons but then (perhaps realising that it was not a good idea to tell
people that activism could have effects) came up with various other
explanations (a report for the meeting was said not to be ready). Given
the political capital invested by individuals such as Peter Sutherland
and Mary Harney to bring the WEF to Dublin, it seems unlikely that a
consultant’s missed deadline would cancel such an expensive meeting. Far
more likely is that the 2003 Gathering (said at the time to be the
largest libertarian gathering ever held in Ireland) and the more or less
simultaneous Irish Social Forum showed sufficient opposition to the WEF
that holding it in Dublin Castle as planned would have been a very risky
strategy.
The energy developed around planning opposition to the WEF was still
available the following year for the formation of Dublin Grassroots
Network, which organised a “weekend for an alternative Europe” in
opposition to the May EU summit and its politics of Fortress Europe,
neo-liberal economics and global warfare. This has been covered
extensively by Dec McCarthy in a recent RBR.
In the aftermath of the Mayday protests, DGN and the Gatherings were
shaken when one activist was accused of raping another. This brought up
issues of personal safety and gender dynamics within the movement,
questions of how to deal with internal violence from a grassroots point
of view, and a range of power issues as various processes were
improvised to tackle the case. Partly as a response to this, the 8^(th)
Grassroots Gathering in Belfast was dedicated to issues of gender and
race, and at this and the 9^(th) Gathering in Dublin feminists organised
their own, massively-attended workshops around issues such as safe space
policies.
Most recently, the 10^(th) Grassroots Gathering was held at Rossport
Solidarity Camp last year as a way of building support for the campaign
and linking rural community-based struggles. In many ways this is
exactly what bottom-up gatherings should be for: a tool that local
activists can use for their own purposes, rather than a travelling
circus or an organisation parachuting into a local area.
The rape case threw up in a very vivid form some of the informal
problems which activists in the Gatherings had been aware of without
being able to tackle. These can be summarised firstly in terms of
participation (relatively few participants from traditional
working-class backgrounds or from ethnic minorities, few participants
over forty or under twenty, significantly more men than women).
Secondly, in terms of internal culture and operating style, there are
definite conflicts between the different ways of being that people bring
from their own life experience and political practice (more macho
cultures of direct action versus softer, less confrontational
approaches; more wordy and competitive orientations versus more hands-on
and cooperative orientations; a tendency to assume that everyone shares
a common history and points of reference versus attempts to be clearer
about one’s own background and starting point). Thirdly, in terms of
political movements, some of Ireland’s largest progressive movements
(community organising, the women’s movement, trade unionism and the
self-organisation of ethnic minorities) have relatively little presence
at the Gatherings.
Obviously this can be interpreted in different ways, leading to
different political conclusions. One is to look at our own internal
practice and try to challenge conventional ways of working, to hold “a
revolution within the revolution” as the 8^(th) and 9^(th) Gatherings to
some extent attempted to do. Another is to see the problem as lying
within the broader society and the constraints to political
participation faced by women, working-class people and ethnic
minorities, leading to underrepresentation and a focus on the most
immediately pressing issues; while there is no doubt some truth in this,
it says little about what can be done to change things. Alternatively,
we can ask questions about the different political focus of these
movements (the emphasis placed on working with the state and elites, the
role of professional organisers and academics, the fear of disruptive
action) and ask in a more focussed way what elements within these
movements may be interested in working with bottom-up, direct
action-oriented groups trying to build a “movement of movements” –
something which has been pursued to some extent in the selection of
topics and speakers. This has been attempted particularly in relation to
community-based movements, in the preparation of the 5^(th), 9^(th) and
10^(th) Gatherings.
Here generational questions seem particularly important, as the
political experience of dominant groups within each movement (eg
feminist academics schooled in the campaigns of the 1980s; community
activists who have been through the professionalisation of the 1990s;
ethnic minority organisers who are still constructing their own
organisations and finding their feet within Irish politics) mean that we
are often looking to speak to minority wings within these movements, who
are (still) willing to break the law, who are (still) willing to step
outside their own organisational comfort zones, who are willing to
explore what for most Irish activists are relatively new ways of
organising, and who are interested in being part of the “movement of
movements” in ways that go beyond attending conferences or passing
motions of support.
For the moment, however, the internal changes of political culture seem
easier to affect than broadening the network to include relatively
self-confident movements, which in turn seem easier to affect than the
broad inequalities of power and resources in Irish society. However, the
current pause in Gatherings, and the reorganising of the broader
“movement of movements” that is underway in Ireland, should give us the
chance to think about how we can tackle all three constructively.
By comparison with these political issues, the (other) practical issues
faced by the Gatherings are relatively minor. Probably the biggest one
is whether the Gatherings should continue to be a network of existing
campaigns or whether, as the movement develops, they should increasingly
take on a role as point of first contact, with a focus on education and
information – something which would probably reduce the degree of
democratic organisation in favour of top-down presentations. However,
new activists have to start somewhere, and as the movement of movements
grows internationally, it can be easier for people to see the whole
picture and then try to find somewhere they can make a difference rather
than start from a local campaign and then find their way forward to
broader and broader networks.
A second question is geographical. Realistically, only a handful of
towns (without naming names!) have continuous libertarian scenes which
are able to organise Gatherings – at present, no-one seems to feel able
to do so (in some cases because of the pressure of other issues, in some
cases because of organisational crisis). At times Grassroots activists
have discussed deliberately using Gatherings as a way to help local
scenes develop, but so far no such Gatherings – which would logically
happen in small towns or extended suburban areas – have happened. Does
this mean that libertarian organising will remain a matter of
well-connected urban scenes and small networks of individuals elsewhere?
Or do Gatherings have a responsibility to help capacity-building and
skill-sharing? In Dublin, it seems that the recent anti-authoritarian
assemblies and the associated GrassrootsDissent mailing list have to
some extent filled the networking place that Gatherings used to fulfil.
Something like this might happen elsewhere (Cork? Belfast?) in the
future, but will hardly be able to happen even in other cities let alone
elsewhere. The geographical issue needs to be taken seriously, however
it is answered. A third issue, which to date has been largely fudged,
has been that of how decisions are made. This includes the opposition
between consensus and voting systems; the extent to which Gatherings are
planned in advance by a local team around a theme, left completely open
(as with “Open Space” technology) or cobbled together out of whatever
workshops people happen to offer. To date, the Gatherings’ focus on
discussion rather than decision-making has saved us from total disaster
in this area, but these issues have brought up very strong emotions on
all sides.
Despite these weaknesses, the Grassroots Gatherings can claim
significant achievements, many of which have already been indicated. The
Gatherings, and other associated “Grassroots” organisations, are the
only network within the movement of movements in Ireland which has had
anything like a continuous life, and have contributed significantly to
the broader movement (in large-scale protests against the WEF, EU, Bush
and G8 as well as in specific struggles at Shannon, Rossport and
elsewhere). This contribution has come from sharing skills across
movements, identifying common issues which enable cooperation, and
glimpsing broader possibilities for social change; it has also come from
developing trust among ourselves and supporting the development of local
activist capacities (not least through the organisation of a Gathering:
it is no small undertaking to host two or three hundred people for an
event with several dozen workshops and organise food, accommodation and
socials).
Perhaps most importantly, they make visible the “other world” that has
been so much talked about in recent years: in the everyday struggles
that ordinary people like us engage in to change their situation, in
critiques of the official wisdom provided by experts, in our own
capacity to organise ourselves and have an effect on the world, in our
ability to work together with people who we are supposed to be cut off
from by different interests, styles of consumption, ways of being in the
world and political traditions. That other world is colourful,
problematic, creative, emotional, intelligent, conflict-ridden,
interactive and vividly alive in our Gatherings.
This article is of course in part a call to local groups to host another
Gathering, and an argument for their continued value. There is a fair
amount of work involved in this, but the benefits for a local group,
particularly one which is not currently involved in a massive campaign,
are significant in terms of revitalising activism, bringing in new
people, making links and developing capacity. Another call that needs to
be made is for a revival of the Gatherings’ internet presence, which has
largely lapsed. A handful of people made an effort last year to gather
all the different Gathering websites; the site they built suffered from
technical problems and has since disappeared, so that our shared
experiences over the last five years are now only recoverable through
Google and often overlaid by dating ads.
Similarly, the grassroots-network mailing list has largely lapsed, and
these days mostly consists of cross-postings from the GrassrootsDissent
list. The general pause in holding Gatherings does almost certainly
reflect the broader questions about their purpose, achievements and
limitations, and what role they should have in the future. My own
feeling is that they should act as a point of contact between all the
different bottom-up struggles happening nationally (which perhaps means
meeting less frequently than before, given how much is happening), that
they should consciously aim to extend the network beyond its current
limitations (and approach activists in the women’s movement, trade
unions, minority groups and community organising not simply as speakers
but to ask how we could do this or to organise joint events), and that
they should remain primarily an activist-to-activist event, which is
ultimately a better way of introducing people to bottom-up activism than
organising specifically “educational” events targeted at people who
supposedly know nothing.
The greatest strength of the Gatherings is in the diversity of the
movements they bring together; this is always a fragile alliance,
dependent on better-organised groups refraining from pushing through
their own ways of doing things and pushing others out, and on less
well-organised groups pushing to have their voices heard, to make
alliances and to create their own space within the broader network
rather than retreating to somewhere safer. What was initially an
uncertain experiment has become “just how things are”, and we are at
risk of taking this achievement for granted and ignoring it or getting
on with other things. But if we do this, we also accept that this is as
much as we can hope to do together, and abandon the bigger space – of
who shapes the world – to the forces of capitalist globalisation,
patriarchy, “the long war” and racism to define. The real question is to
think beyond what has seemed possible up to now, and to ask what more
the movement of movements in Ireland can become.
---
Grassroots Gatherings to date
“Global and local: a grassroots gathering”.
“Taking back control of our lives”.
“Community, environmental and global justice activism”.
“Building safe communities, addressing gender bias and racism”.
“The death of partnership / what now for grassroots activism?”
“Local community campaigns”