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Where now? Actions for solidarity and dissent

Now is not a time for despair – it’s a time to get organised, says SAM HOLDEN

THE general election showed us just how low the media is prepared to go to smear us, but we have the power to fight back. 

I remember the anger and despair I felt when the exit poll came in. It wasn’t towards the electorate or the party (not entirely anyway…) but the media. 

The constant barrage of abuse thrown at Labour activists could only be mitigated so far by our efforts on the doorstep. 

Each new slur was a personal attack on our character and beliefs, which translated into campaigners at some points feeling unsafe; at others being physically assaulted. 

So where we can go from here as activists?

In Britain the left-wing grassroots has never been stronger, yet aside from a few party meetings and venting on social media, most of us aren’t mobilised. 

There are a number of tactics that can be deployed to politicise people and persuade them that we aren’t press-ganging left-wing thugs but ordinary people who want to build solidarity among all people who are being screwed over by austerity.

Organising as a tool for class consciousness

Whether it be the sharing of reading material deemed illegal by the state or holding secretive meetings, education has been a core strategy since the inception of socialism for creating collective struggles. 

These first steps towards class consciousness lead to further actions. For example, when the McStrikers took action, questions were raised by others — “If takeaway workers should be paid £15 an hour why shouldn’t I be too?” 

It raised the idea in people’s minds that they deserved better.

There are also traces of action within other professions that are not traditionally associated with union representation. Perhaps most heartening for me (because of my training) is architecture. 

Some 50 architects have formed the section of architectural workers within the United Voices of the World (UVW-SAW) to campaign against exploitative working conditions. 

This organising is happening at multiple levels of the employment scale, uniting a diverse range of workers who collectively understand the similarities in exploitation regardless of a person’s position in life. 

We need to organise in our workplaces, even when we encounter management resistance. I recently saw an anti-union training video for Amazon employees. 

It told workers that “associates who normally aren’t connected to each other suddenly hanging out together” is a warning sign of union organisation. 

Companies are so scared of us that they are training and pitting employees against each other to look out for workers who are undertaking the treacherous activity of making friends. 

There are many great resources to get into workplace organising and union building. I would recommend listening to episode 288 of the Chapo Trap House podcast which features a conversation with Brace, a worker at Anchor Steam Brewery who successfully built a union in the face of staunch opposition. 

Another step is simply to get in contact with people who have already got organised — our movement is based on solidarity and this only works when we pool our collective knowledge together.

Solidarity economics 

We are often labelled as too oppositional, a common critique levelled at Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet was their lack of original ideas, that they were so used to opposing everything that they could not be propositional, that they would take us back in time with their old ideas. 

Whatever we may think of these claims, they held sway in the media and were points often heard on the doorstep. 

Solidarity economics is a way to combat this — it is about creating new enterprises that are not focused on profit and endless growth but instead have social wellbeing as their core tenet. In this way we can prefigure a new society from the ground up.

Now with another Tory government looming over our heads for the foreseeable future, we must find ways to protect those who are set to have their lives ruined by a new wave of neoliberal policies. 

There are already fantastic projects happening now that do just this. The Real Junk Food Project uses food waste to create a series of pay-as-you-feel interventions, including cafes and their Sharehouse market; and projects such as Community Land Trusts take speculation out of land ownership and the housing market.

This call for solidarity however is not an excuse or remedy for the contradictions of the system. We should not encourage communities, acting on benevolence, to take on services once provided by the state, which was the policy of David Cameron’s “big society.” 

Our plans must be oppositional through their proposals. In other words, to provide a future vision for how the economy could be structured we need to work simultaneously within, and against, capitalism. 

If a council decides to close a local library, we need to set up support groups to take on the management of the library as a community, and throughout all this we need to be on the front line saying why the library closed, who is responsible and why we are campaigning to change that. 

We need to create and appropriate services to fill the welfare state gap that was created by neoliberal economics, not as a method to excuse neoliberal economics but to fight back and propose new societal structures. It is only through this nuance that we can maintain a radical agenda.

Alongside the defence of social services, our solidarity economics should be expanded to attack the reliance on profit in the current system. 

As David Harvey has stated, the fundamental point of capitalism is to continue compound growth while ignoring the social conditions of those living within it. 

This compound growth is also at odds with the rapid expansion of the green movement because compound growth within a finite space (ie the Earth) is not sustainable — the maths simply don’t add up. 

The most successful example I have seen first-hand of solidarity economics working is with Argentinian social movement Ciudad Futura (Future City).

This started with the occupation of contested land to halt developers from displacing the already precarious barrio community. 

This occupation was legitimised in the eyes of the citizens by setting up a productive enterprise, Tambo La Resistencia (The Farm of the Resistance). 

Ciudad Futura has expanded from here to create a series of interventions in the city of Rosario including a cultural factory, a school, a university course, a feminist library and an anti-inflation grocery distributor that creates direct links between producers and consumers. 

They don’t stop at activism, however. Ciudad Futura’s greatest strength is to directly link these interventions with politics by fielding candidates at the local elections. 

When politicians say how they will solve a problem, we often hear empty promises. What Ciudad Futura does is demonstrate how they solved that problem through one of their concrete examples. 

This builds confidence in the movement because instead of hearing just words, citizens are shown socialist economic policies that have had a positive impact in people’s daily lives. Ciudad Futura prefigures the socialist city.

Now is not the time for despair, but nor is it the time for complacency. We need to organise, we need to prove what we are capable of, and we need to show people that another future is possible.

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