Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis theory

[Rob Schaap <rws@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Published on Thursday, February 8, 2001 in the Guardian of London
Dissent is in the Air: Take to the Streets
by George Monbiot

At last it's happening. Just as the neo-liberals on both sides of the Atlantic
proclaim universal victory, a composite radical opposition movement is
beginning
to emerge. It's confused, it's contradictory and it looks like nothing we've
ever seen before. But for the first time in 14 years of campaigning, I feel
that
I've witnessed something unstoppable.
I've spent this week touring the country with a ragged coalition of greens,
anarchists and socialists. Everywhere we've been so far, I've picked up a sense
of excitement I've never felt in Britain before. In Glasgow we drew 500 people:
according to the locals I met it was the biggest political meeting in the city
for 15 years. In London, 1,300 turned up.

But the numbers, unprecedented though they may be, are less impressive than the
unity of purpose. In London, green activists stood and cheered an RMT official
as he left the stage to join the Tube strike. In Coventry, car workers demanded
an end to global warming. No one denies that there are issues which divide us,
but in contesting the neoliberalism to which almost every major political party
on earth has now subscribed, we have discovered an oppositional accord which
overrides our differences.

Neoliberalism demands the privatisation of everything. While the general
agreement on trade in services, due to be negotiated next month, would force
governments gradually to transfer their mandate to the corporations,
Britain has
anticipated it with the universal application of the private finance
initiative.

PFI serves companies better than overt privatisation, as the government
guarantees their income stream. For the same reason it serves us worse: we lose
both public control and public funds.

Neoliberalism also insists that companies be permitted to dump their costs
on to
people and the environment. As deregulation allows firms both to pollute the
planet and to sack their staff without consultation, steelworkers and global
warming campaigners have discovered, to their surprise, that they're on the
same
side.

New corporate freedoms, moreover, can be sustained only by denying freedom to
everyone else. While the companies seizing our public services are permitted to
use "commercial confidentiality" to disguise their intentions, our emails, even
our computers can now be monitored and raided by the security services
without a
warrant.

While corporations have acquired the legal status of human beings, but without
most of the accompanying criminal liability, jury trials are being denied to
those who protest against them. The government, which granted passports to the
billionaire businessmen accused of involvement in the biggest arms corruption
scandal in modern times, has just announced new restrictions on asylum seekers.
The world has been wrested from our hands.

In seeking to wrest it back, we have yet to develop a coherent political
programme to which all of us can subscribe. While the greens support small
business, trades unionists find workers within big corporations easier to
mobilise. The anarchists want to smash the state, while the socialists want to
rebuild it.

But the unprecedented solidarity between these disparate groups is beginning, I
feel, to develop into a programme in its own right: a grassroots reorganisation
of the political process, propelling democratic renewal from below.

We must, of course, be careful not to mistake the affirmation expressed at
these
meetings for wider public consent. But the public support for the strikers
contesting the privatisation of the London Underground and the West Midlands
hospitals suggests that some, at least, of our demands are beginning to
resonate
with Britain's biggest political movement: the disillusionment party. The
extraordinary numbers promising to attend the protests at Faslane, the Scottish
nuclear base, on Monday and the G8 summit in Genoa in July, suggest that
this is
the beginning of something big.

The new political movements have rediscovered in the public meeting an
effective
forum for dissent. We were promised that television and the internet would
promote participation; instead they have provided our representatives with new
screens to hide behind. As radical movements struggle to escape from an
enclosed
and virtual politics, public speaking has become the new rock and roll.

The enclosure of power will not be easily reversed. But had any New Labour
ministers attended the meetings we have held so far, they would have scurried
back to Westminster very worried indeed.

This is not the end of neoliberalism. But it is the beginning of the end.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001




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