Activism

Better not laugh at nazis – they might sue

Activism, Fascists
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What do you do if your clothing brand, ever so slightly tweaked to appeal to neonazis though you swear that’s not your intent, is parodied? You appeal to the decadent weakling courts of course to stop it:

Storch Heinar has been around since the winter of 2008, and is the brainchild of a left-leaning youth group called Endstation Rechts — which translates as “last stop for the right wing” — set up to combat right-wing extremism in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony. As members of the groups discussed the opening of a “Nazi shop” selling, among other things, Thor Steinar in the middle of Rostock over a bottle or two of wine one night, they decided to respond by starting their own clothing label. And so the tale of the unhappy stork was born. “We were not drunk though,” Mathias Brodkorb, a Social Democrat and member of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state parliament, one of the people behind Storch Heinar, told the daily Die Tageszeitung.

Storch Heinar’s popularity has increased over time, no doubt due partially to increased local media coverage of the brand — the range of goods available via their website is now large enough to include baby bibs and Frisbees and the brand has around 4,000 fans on Facebook. The label has sold “more than we thought it would,” Brodkorb told news weekly Focus. The profits fund the work of Endstation Rechts. Storch Heinar is only a small, and relatively uncomplicated, part of their work, Brodkorb, 33, who studied philosophy and classics, explained to Die Tageszeitung: “We are all fixated on neo-Nazis and often we overlook more subtle opportunities for people to be inhumane and right wing extremist.”

[…]

Unsurprisingly, Mediatex GmbH, do not like any of this. The owners of Thor Steinar are known for their litigiousness and, as one local commentator put it: “Right wing extremism and humor go together like combat boots and Birkenstock sandals.”

Brodkorb told local media that the day after Storch Heinar was founded, the company that owns Thor Steinar tried to copyright the avian name. They were rejected. Mediatex then filed a complaint against Brodkorb, saying that Storch Heinar was injuring and “disparaging Thor Steinar.” The case went to court on Wednesday in Nuremberg. The small group behind Storch Heinar has been raising funds to fight the case — they even have a new T-shirt for sale that boasts the garment’s owner is part of the rescue team for the beleaguered bird.

Germans do have a sense of humour, but those who hanker back to the good old days of the Third Reich? Not so much.

SWP stunt causes failure of world revolution forever!!1!

Activism, British left, Unions
Published on 2 Comments on SWP stunt causes failure of world revolution forever!!1!

Protesters surround BA boss Willy Wash

So, to recap: last Saturday, at the end of the Right to Work Conference, coincidently held close to where British Airways was “negotiating” with the unions, several hundred or so people went from the conference to the negotiations to show their support for the airline workers and ended up shouting at BA boss Willy Walsh, with the union leaders looking on in annoyance, while . Cue much pearl clutching from Andy Newman and co, convienced that this would finally be the end of the SWP (joy!) but also mean the ultimate failure of the negotiations, union militacy in general, the socialist project and world revolution (oh noes!).

The whole controversy is remarkably silly, but to be expected from people for whom that bit from Life of Brian about the Judean People Front isn’t satire, but an instruction manual..

Back in the real world it’s clear this stunt didn’t matter much one way or another. It didn’t “disrupt” the negotiations as overblown rhetoeric had it immediately afterwards, but neither did it achieve anything else, other than provide a show of moral support that might have been better expressed differently. I do worry about the attitude of people who think a stunt like this is inherently wrong and counterproductive, or who worry too much about how “the rightwing media” or “the bosses” will spin this, or who get outraged at the “disrespect” shown to union bosses. It reminds me of those liberals who back in 2002/2003 were too good to join antiwar protests organised by giant puppet making hippies.

Civil servant union moves leftwards

Activism, Unions
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AbvaKabo is the largest Dutch civil servants union, one of the bigger union within the FNV federation of unions. As such it was the driving force behind the recent garbage strikes, in which new, radical methods of organisation imported from the US led the unions to victory. And this success, together with the earlier success in the cleaners’ strike has led to a new feeling of militancy within the union, which was noticeable during the leadership elections.

Because despite this recent militacy the union is still somewhat alienated from its members; even more so from non-members of course, who they do represent in negotiations but who see no reason to become members. Membership had dropped over the years and the incumbent leadership of the union has tried to reverse this trend by making the union more of a customer care organisation, including tax advice and such. Some of the more activist cadre members have taken a dim view of this and other modernisation measures, prefering, especially now, to focus on action rather than reorganisation.

There was a real choice than at the elections, but the result was a typical Dutch compromise. The incumbent chair remained in her post, but several leftwing members were elected as well. It will therefore be interesting to see what the union’s strategy will be in the next great struggle, in the negotiations over pay and conditions for health care workers.

Amsterdam garbage strike: a new workers offensive

Activism, class war, Unions
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garbage piling up in Amsterdam

As I warned last month, the municipal garbage collectors in Amsterdam went on strike following Queensday, though waiting until after Memorial and Liberation Day. A week later and the garbage has started to pile up everywhere, both in the streets and at every collection point. This isn’t helped by those assholes who decide to profit from the strike by dumping commercial waste as well. Luckily the weather has been cold enough that stench hasn’t been a problem yet, though with the promise of warmer weather next week and the strike continuing all that rotting garbage may become a health hazard…

The garbage strike is just one tool the unions are using to try and get the joint municipal employers back to the negotiation table; earlier the parking ticket collectors had a one day strike (very popular) and there have been a few big demos as well. It’s a sign of the growing militancy and changing role of the unions how quickly they’ve used such an aggressive tactic however.

It didn’t used to be this way. For years, if not decades, the unions had become little more than negotiating partners for business and government, operating on a policy of compromise in what has become known as the “poldermodel“, with strikes becoming rare and ritualised pressure tools. It meant a certain amount of social stability, but the price was a growing irrelevancy of the unions to the average worker who did not see the need for union membership anymore, or at best saw it as equivalent to membership in a fitness club. As socialists like Anton Pannekoek warned about more than eighty years ago, unions had become just another tool to manage and control workers.

But in the past decade this has slowly changed. Partially this has been forced upon the unions, as the political climate in the Netherlands changed and became more openly rightwing, but not entirely so. There’s also been an internal radicalisation, a growing willingness to fight rather than compromise, as well as the realisation that the unions needed to change to become relevant again, could not longer permit themselves the luxury of only defending rights already won. One result has been a growing internationalisation of union struggles, for example in the fight to stop the EU-wide liberalisation of sea ports. The other has been a revamp of tactics and methology, heavily influenced by the experiences US unions have had in organising workers in traditionally weak and vulnerable trades, like the hotel cleaners as immortalised in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses. A lot of these lessons were on display in the earlier cleaners strike I’ve reported on before, were the struggle was organised together with the (non-unionised) cleaners themselves, and instead of impossible mass strikes various companies were surgically targeted.

The current civil servant strike is done in the same spirit, with a series of short, smart actions rather than one long strike. So you had a public rally first, to get people’s blood up, followed by a one day strike by parking ticket collectors to hurt the city councils in their wallets, followed by the garbage strike to make it both public and impossible to ignore. Behind that and less visible in both strikes, as well as elsewhere are less visible and actually quite oldfashioned methods to get workers organised, by union activist actually going to a workplace and talk with workers there, persuade people to become unionised, get a nucleus of such workers to organise the rest of the workforce and if necessary use the same sort of smart, targeted strikes to force concessions from the bosses. And the best thing about this is that finally the unions have stopped doing purely defensive strikes, defending rights already fought for and won decades earlier, but have gone on the offensive, winning rights for those groups of people not having them yet.

Police violence at Rotterdam May Day demo

Activism, Policing
Published on 1 Comment on Police violence at Rotterdam May Day demo

From a posting on Marxmail, an eyewitness account of police violence against this year’s May Day celebrations in Rotterdam:

Here’s some video I shot of the police attacking the Mayday demo in Rotterdam. I realize that police attack demos somewhere in the world every day, but this was rather significant because this demo has been held traditionally (for 30 years I understand) on mayday starting at the city hall in Rotterdam, but this time the police announced that we wouldn’t be allowed to march (supposedly because the sticks our flags were on could be “weapons”) and then told us we had to clear out of the area completely. After moving in and causing people to retreat and forcing us into smaller groups, they attacked the group still in front of the building with clubs, horses, and a dog, arresting 14. I only realized how close I got to being trampled by a horse after watching my own video!

http://www.xs4all.nl/~meisner/1meiRotterdam2010/CLIP0165.AVI
http://www.xs4all.nl/~meisner/1meiRotterdam2010/CLIP0175.AVI

Why the police attacked this time (again, for a traditional demo with a permit) isn’t clear, but might reflect a strategic shift against protest in context of the economic crisis. Or it might just be that they thought they could get away with it, partly since the demo was a lot smaller (about 500) than the usual 1-2000 (due to poorer organizing this year, I think). But this is held every year more or less without incident, so no one expected it. And I understand that the police also arrested people at the Mayday demo in Nijmegen, so this might signal a crackdown on the left and protesting in NL.

I’ve seen the excuse about sticks/flagpoles as “dangerous weapons” used before when police needed some reason to harass a demo, both here and in the UK. It’s absurd, but can be sold to the newspapers. The original poster overthinks the reasons for this police aggression; I doubt that the police has explicitely gotten orders to crack down on political protests. If I had to guess I’d think that it’s a side effect to the Rotterdam police overreacting to what happened at the Hoek van Holland beach party of August last year — where inept policing and rioting football hooligans led to the police accidently shooting and killing an innocent man. Since then the Rotterdam police has become a lot harsher in dealing with potentially dangerous situations and since leftist demonstrations of this kind have always been seen as worrisome by them, it’s no surprise that this happened. Wrong, but not surprising.