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    pt 2 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on July 6, 2019, 3:20 pm, in reply to " Betting on infinite loss Alex Callinicos pt 1"

    The historical experience, moreover, of past civil disobedience movements doesn’t support the mechanical law affirmed by the American academic Erica Chenoweth and repeated by XR that “it takes 3.5 percent of the population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple brutal dictatorships”.26 Where peaceful resistance has succeeded, it has been crucially thanks to other factors. Gandhi’s Quit India movement in 1942-4 rapidly spilled over into popular violence, and was contained by intense repression. It was the Indian Navy mutiny of February 1946 that demonstrated that the colonial power could no longer count on the loyalty of the vast military machine it had built up on the subcontinent, at a time when Britain could also no longer milk India financially because of the huge debts it had built up there during the Second World War.27

    The Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and the 1960s succeeded in forcing the dismantling of the segregationist regime in the South by putting pressure on a Federal government that represented a ruling class with little interest in maintaining Jim Crow. At much the same time, the National Party government in South Africa ruthlessly crushed the Defiance Campaign of civil disobedience mounted by the African National Congress and its allies. This defeat prompted moves to guerrilla campaigns that were also brutally broken; it took a new cycle of struggle beginning with the Soweto rising of June 1976 involving violent township insurrections, mass strikes, and the rise of a militant black workers’ movement to force the apartheid regime to the negotiating table.28

    The fact remains though that XR is committed to organising mass mobilisations that create sufficient disruption to begin to force change. More than that—it has delivered. Its week of mass protests in London in April was probably the biggest direct action in British history, exceeding the campaign against nuclear weapons organised by the Committee of 100 in 1961. This should encourage a bit of ­humility on the part of the traditional left. When did we last shut London down?

    Hallam repeats familiar criticisms of “A to B marches” that were directed against the Stop the War Campaign after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But usually the direct action advocated by these critics as an alternative involved an elitist reliance on small groups of specially trained people. While XR does offer direct action training, the emphasis in April was on inclusive mass action, with open attractive events and appeals for more people to get involved during the week of protest in London. Moreover, while contemporary climate protests originate from very different contexts than that of the labour movement, they involve forms of action with affinities to those traditionally taken by organised workers. Thus Hallam compares the impact of mass civil disobedience to that of a strike on the Underground, while Thunberg has endorsed the call for a global climate strike, now scheduled for 20 September.

    The response of the revolutionary left to the new climate militancy should be quite simple. We must throw ourselves wholeheartedly into this movement—­helping to build local XR groups, supporting the school strikes, taking part in future actions and working to make the climate strike something real. Socialists within XR should build links between the new climate movements and the trade unions. In Britain, the University and College Union (UCU) and the bakers’ union BFAWU have already backed calls for strikes over climate change, and other unions, notably the new National Education Union, have supported the school strikers. Of course, all sorts of strategic and tactical problems will arise as the movement develops. But what matters is that the politics of climate change is no longer the monopoly of intergovernmental negotiations and NGO lobbying. Despair is becoming action. We have to become part of it.

    This is all the more so because mainstream politics in Britain continues to be dominated by the Brexit death spiral. May hoped to buy time for her withdrawal treaty by persuading the European Council to postpone Britain’s departure from the EU till 31 October. Instead, she helped to make a no-deal Brexit almost ­inevitable. Staying in the EU for another six months meant that Britain participated in the European parliamentary elections. The postponement of Brexit infuriated Leavers and gave Remainers renewed hope; hence the elections favoured the hard-line elements in both camps—the new Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage, on the one hand, and the Liberal Democrats, on the other. This has made achieving the compromise desperately sought by big business even harder to reach, and it has given Farage a second chance to place the far right in the front rank of mainstream British politics, as it is in many other European countries.29

    May had already fallen on her sword before the Tories’ disastrous performance in the Euro-elections. The contest to succeed her is inevitably being dominated by the issue of no-deal Brexit—both because of the nature of the Tory mass membership who will have the ultimate say and because of the pressure to capture the voters lost to Farage and the Brexit Party. Already the completely undemocratic idea of proroguing Parliament to stop the House of Commons blocking a no-deal Brexit has been seriously canvassed by the likes of former Tory leadership candidate Dominic Raab.

    The probable winner, Boris Johnson, is perfectly capable of blundering out of the EU without the help of such devices. An ill-prepared Britain could find its bluff called by the EU-27 and crash out on Halloween. The scale of the economic damage, long-term and short-term, on both sides of the Channel is hard to estimate, but there certainly will be some, as well as an embittering of relations between Britain and its former partners. Johnson’s alternative of hitching Britain onto Trump’s wildly careening chariot seems like a dangerous gamble. The evidence that persisting Brexit uncertainty is affecting investment decisions is impossible to ignore. In the three years to the first quarter of 2019, foreign direct investment rose by 43 percent in the EU-27, and fell by 30 percent in the UK.30

    Worse still, Johnson has an ugly history of racism—sometimes casual, often calculated. While Farage was careful not to stoke up racism during the Euro-elections, he was quick to blame “Pakistani” voters for Labour’s success in the Peterborough by-election, and has plenty of form when it comes to anti-migrant agitation. While the electoral humiliation of Tommy Robinson and his allies in UKIP was a real success for the anti-racist movement, the overall effect of the Euro-elections will be to heighten the already sultry climate of racism in Britain, as the new Tory leader struggles to claw back ground lost to Farage. And the Euro-elections also hurt Labour, forcing Jeremy Corbyn further onto the defensive from the assaults mounted by his right wing—though Peterborough suggests Labour has been less damaged than the Tories (in England at any rate).

    Brexit thus continues to destabilise British politics in a context where it is the far right that is making the running. This means it is vital to continue as broad and strong a movement against racism as possible. Stand Up to Racism has established itself as the essential framework for such a movement, but it will face many tests to come.

    In this context, the climate protests, in their different forms, represent a ray of light shining through the clouds. This new movement can renew a left badly damaged by the divisions of the past few years on a more robust anti-capitalist basis. More importantly, it can start to rally the forces needed to wage the battle of the century. In this way, collective, ultimately revolutionary action can ­transform despair into hope.31

    Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College London and editor of International Socialism.

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