Activism

BA gets deeper in trouble with the unions

Activism, Life under Capitalism, Unions
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Unions in Denmark, Sweden and Norway are going to take action in support of the BA strike:

ITF General Secretary David Cockroft said: “BA is a world organisation and conflict within it has world repercussions. Our member unions have watched the failure of negotiations between management and union and they have been unanimous in recognising the risk of a downward spiral across the aviation sector and the potential for damage to the company, its image, passengers and workers that failure represents.”

He continued, “We and our members intend to resist what has come to look very much like an attempt to break the union, and resist the drop in standards across the industry – probably starting in Spain after any BA/Iberia tie-up – that it would usher in if allowed to happen.”

Having the strike spread outside of the UK will do a lot to make BA hurt. One of the ways BA has been able to limit damages so far is because it partners with other airlines and can depend on their crews for those flights. If union involvement from outside the UK can stop this, BA will have a lot less flights departing as planned. See the below video for a handy explanation.



It’s good to see that unions in other countries recognise the danger of letting BA win and are prepared to make sacrifises to stop them. Unions have long realised that with globalised capital, labour needs to be globalised as well, but it has been much harder to put in practise. One of the few succesful multinational union campaigns I can think off of the top of my head is that of the harbour workers fighting the deregulation of European ports — hopefully the BA campaign will be another one.

Where is the US left?

Activism, Unions, US politics
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The American left doesn’t understand political power as anything other than that held by the state:

This confused me when I first moved to the US; looking for the left in the Bay Area it seems at first like there’s no there there. The general left-wing sentiment in the area doesn’t seem to be matched by the existence of left-wing organizations. It turns out that that’s not quite right; it’s just that these organizations aren’t political organizations but are, rather, community organizations and non-profits. Some of these have radical rhetoric and a revolutionary pedigree, but they all share the weakness of the Alinskian (non-)understanding of power, where power is not conceived of as something that could be appropriated collectively and used creatively to common ends, but where power is something someone else (the state) has, and the limit of collective action is to force concessions from those who do hold power.

Richard of The Existence Machine says, went even further:

But even that’s a bit strong–we don’t force concessions, we ask, we beg, we beseech. Witness the spectacle of liberals, prominent or otherwise, writing open letters, or blog posts, addressed to Obama–please close Guantanamo, please end the occupation of Iraq, please take time to consider single payer healthcare, please keep your promises, please fulfill our hopes and dreams, please please listen to us!

Part of that –conscious or unconscious– rejection of power and its attending responsibility probably has to do with the peculiar history of the American left, the socialist part of which was always much smaller than in other countries, — and whatever you can say about socialists and communists, they always have a keen grasp of power (if not how to get it or use it). And then this weak communitarian tradition was thoroughly rejected by the sixties New Left as well, making its influence even weaker.

But there’s more going on, I think. I think part of this difficulty with the concept of power as something that can be used by people themselves, directly, as opposed through putting pressure on the state, lies in the influence libertarianism has had on political debate in the States. This after all is a philosophy that in its vulgar form — in which it had has its most influence– denies the existence of any form of power other than that wielded by the state. It may be marginal in its direct influence, but libertarian concepts have seeped through the entire political spectrum in the past three-four decades and with it this ignorance of non-state power.

Which is of course very convenient to the powers that be, as a left that voluntarily rejects its own ability to organise alternative centres of powers, is much easier to control. Interestingly, if there’s one group that still (or again) understands the need to depend on itself, rather than on the benevolence of the political classes, it might just be the teabaggers, attempting to reshape the Republican Party into their own image.

If you do your job effectively, then you draw the government’s attentions

Activism, Policing, Totalitarianism
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How the feds targeted one G-20 protestor:

An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.

In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious “evidence” from the Queens, New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.

Madison, who counsels more than 100 severely mentally ill patients in New York, seems to have first drawn attention from the authorities at September’s G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he was arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops — an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran.

Finally the penny drops

Activism, Democratic (in)action, fascists
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Lance Mannion, the voice of reasonableness, explains why liberals need to be unreasonable sometimes:

I don’t know why six religious nuts are allowed to ruin a holiday for a hundred kids. I don’t know why a relatively small pack of paranoid racists and Right Wing extremists are allowed to prevent everybody’s else’s kids from hearing the President of the United States advise them to work hard and stay in school. But I suspect that part of the reason is that sensible parents who may get mad don’t stay mad. They have other more important things to worry about and they move on to worry about them. The Right Wing nuts get mad, stay mad, and don’t let up. School officials who ignore the complaints of sensible parents know that by the end of the semester the sensible parents will have forgotten about the issue; but the nuts won’t forget, won’t drop it, and won’t let up—run into them anywhere, anytime and they’ll start screaming all over again. It’s just easier and it moves the problem off the desk more quickly to cave to the nuts, knowing you probably won’t hear a peep from the sensible parents.

As the old saying notes, it’s the squeeky wheel that gets the grease and the same goes for political change. You need people to either be afraid of you or think that it’s easier for them to give in to you than to resist you. Yes, this can backfire, but surprisingly less so than is commonly assumed. All great change happened through radicalism, civil disobedience and a refusal to be reasonable.

In a roundabout way, this is also why you don’t want to debate the BNP as much, as to make it socially unacceptable to support them. You can’t argue racist fuckwits into not being racist, you can scare them into not being openly racist.