Ireland From Below
Grassroots Organizing
by Robert Allen
"A change is slow in coming
My eyes can scarely see
The rays of hope come streaming
Through the smoke of apathy"
Loreena McKennitt
Change in Ireland
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GRASSROOTS GATHERING # 5
Dublin, June 27-29
What this fifth Gathering is for:
Create a bridge for non-hierarchical & direct action
activism between the mobilisations against the war
mobilisations against the World Economic Forum in the
autumn;
Encourage networking between different movements, with
workshops that encourage people to mix between different
movements, rather than primarily issue based themes;
Develop diversity within the movement by inviting
participants from different movements, particularly
inviting variety of activists to give 5-minute intros to each
individual workshop.
Agenda: grassrootsgathering.freeservers.com
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When Ireland's commentators, journalists, spin doctors,
economists, politicians, bureaucrats and business people
speak of their homeland they see a reality that to them
represents economic growth, wealth and prosperity. Their
Ireland is a rich one, of economy and technology and
modernity and growth - a thing they began to call the
'Celtic Tiger' during the boom years of the 1990s. It is
epitomised by people like Michael O'Leary, chief executive
of the low-fare airline Ryanair, who received ir£17 million
for his shares after the company went public. Others who
have benefited from the success include Smurfit chief
executive Ray Curran, who was awarded $2.48 million in 1999
and public transport chief executive Michael McDonnell,
whose salary was increased 80 percent from ir£100,000 to
ir£181,952 in 2000 - even though the Partnership for
Prosperity and Fairness agreed between the state and trade
unions to control wages only allowed workers a five percent
increase.
According to Ray MacSharry, a politician who is credited
with creating the policies that led to the economic boom
when he was finance minister in the late 1980s, and Padraic
White, managing director of the Industrial Development
Authority of Ireland during the 1980s when the IDA was
fending off criticism of its methods, the Celtic Tiger
economy has transformed Ireland and benefited all its
people.
"Sustained high growth," they wrote,
"has produced
virtual full employment with low inflation, a sharply
declining debt burden and large budget surpluses, all
helping to complete this virtuous circle."
Capitalism flourished throughout the late 1990s making
landlords and speculators and developers and business
executives and politicians rich beyond their dreams. Since
the early 1990s Ireland has become a building site. A crane
towers over every church and scaffolding seems to climb
like ivy over every other building. Pubs do a roaring
trade, especially at weekends even in places where people
and money are not constant companions, cornershops are
being refitted as small supermarkets and the buses and
trains are always full. There is no shortage of jobs in
Dublin and its hinterlands. The place is truly booming, it
appears to the casual traveller. At the turn of the
millennium it was possible to look at Ireland's cities,
towns and villages and believe that the economic boom
euphemistically called the Celtic Tiger was actually
improving the quality of peoples' lives.
MacSharry and White saw Ireland's economic regeneration as
a consequence of the change from a predominately
agricultural rural economy to an industrial urban society.
"In 1922," - when partial independence was gained from
Britain - they stated in 2000,
"over half the labour force
was engaged in agriculture and two-thirds of the population
lived in rural areas. Today, just one in ten work on the
land, while two-thirds live in towns. And there are
encouraging signs that the Irish Diaspora, which had left
Ireland with perhaps the highest rate of emigration of any
European country in the past two centuries, is finally
being reversed. Labour shortages in Ireland oblige the
state agency FAS to use employment roadshows in Germany and
other European Union member states to try and recruit
workers for unfilled vacancies in financial-services and
electronics firms at home. Just over a decade ago, that
would have seemed an impossible dream, just like the Celtic
Tiger economy."
This gives a false impression. It tells only part of the
story and crucially it leaves out the stories of people who
see a different Ireland, people like Laurence Cox and those
who can see Ireland from a totally different perspective.
Despite its position in the first world Ireland is a third
world country. All of the factors inherent in third world
politics exist in Ireland. Once an agricultural economy
with the potential to self-sufficiency, Ireland is now a
politically partitioned island with an industrial economy
completely dependent on the success of globalization, on
the unimpeded flow of capital and the exploitation of its
labour and its environment. It is ruled by bureaucrats and
politicians in Dublin and Westminster, and controlled by
the CEO's of the corporate world - the people who dictate
the rules and practices of globalization.
For much of the last decade of the 20th century the process
of controlling the domestic budget by suspending wage
increases and public spending while encouraging consumerism
contributed to the success of the 'Celtic Tiger' economy.
Immigration replaced emigration with net increases to the
population bringing the total number of people to almost
six million. No one has been able to successfully identify
the specific factors that have led to this economic
success, why Ireland's economy has fared better than anyone
else's in Europe and why, in third world terms, it has
become a model for other underdeveloped countries. Perhaps
the reason is not so complicated. Those who are given the
task of explaining advanced capitalism in an economy like
Ireland's are unable to do so because they actually do not
understand how the free market really works. Ask a Marxist
and you'll get a baffling economic treatise. But ask a low
paid worker and you'll be given the answer. It won't be an
economic analysis either.
It has been said by many commentators on Ireland that Irish
society had no desire to be modern, that it delighted in
its pleasant green land image, its people trapped in
nostalgic narcissism and somnolence, clinging to antiquated
beliefs and traditions - until everyone woke up the 1980s.
Ireland, significantly the west of Ireland, has been
caricatured by anthropologists, sociologists, politicians,
churchmen, the media and other commentators as a place out
of step with the modern world in every era. Anthropologists
have been among the worst culprits, portraying Ireland and
its rustic communities, according to Adrian Peace,
"as a
dying society, a culture in demise, a social system
characterised by pathogenic tendencies." Ireland has
suffered particularly at the hands of foreign
anthropologists,
"the yank in the corner," as Michael Viney
once put it in a scathing attack on their ethics. Peace
said that the
"ambitious generalisation from the particular
case study has been a marked feature of the anthropology of
Ireland in the past." These studies, in particular Hugh
Brody's Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of
Ireland, published by Penguin in 1974, described rural
Ireland as one distinctive place peopled by saints,
scholars and schizophrenics (the title of Nancy
Scheper-Hughes' study of mental illness in rural Ireland)
rather than
"a richly diverse and heterogeneous economic
and political landscape, a multiplicity of spaces and
places in which the proliferation of cultural difference is
the order of the day." It was, they said, a society rooted
in 17th, 18th and 19th century value systems, a point made
by Senator Joe Lee when he said that the
"value system of a
society" was at stake in Irish communities.
"Experts, and
particularly economists, have no authority whatsoever to
impose their value system on anybody else."
There is also
an argument that Ireland did not become a fully paid up
member of the 20th century until some of its people agreed
to join the European Economic Community (latterly the
European Union) - a decision that delighted those who saw
capriciousness, competition and selfish desire as ideal
human characteristics, and much to the horror of those who
abhorred apathy, cynicism and ignorance. Irish society was
in transition, it appeared. Its image as an agricultural
backwater was being gradually changed. Economically,
politically and socially Ireland was being transformed into
a postmodern state. Sociologists like the Maynooth-based
Frenchman Michel Peillon observed
"not so much transition
as a profound mutation, and it is this that makes difficult
the task of describing and giving an overall picture of
Irish society." Peillon also noted, paradoxically perhaps,
that the ideological attachment we show towards rural
Ireland
"has prevented Irish society from seeing itself as
it really is."
That may have been true when Peillon expressed this opinion
in the 1980s; 20 years later, as his younger Maynooth
colleague Laurence Cox will tell him, Irish society has
grown up and it now knows what it looks like. One of the
reasons for this has been the work of Cox, who returned
home in 1991 after several years involved with activists in
Norway, France, Germany and Italy and decided to try to understand his country's social
movements. Those with ideological attachments towards
celtic Ireland might have described Cox as a "warrior-poet"
because he had set out to blend academia with activism,
even if his inspiration was the global social movements of
the 1970s and 1980s rather than the nationalistic politics
that divide Irish people.
Cox returned to an Ireland that was caught between a rock
and a hard place. The rock was the state and the hard place
was the people themselves who struggled to embrace the kind
of radical grassroots political action that was changing
continental Europe and would soon spread around the globe.
Cox, like many frustrated Irish eco-social activists, could
not understand why Ireland's radicals were unable to
develop from the street politics of 1968 into a cohesive
social movement, and more significantly why the only
opposition to state policy and globalization was coming
from communities. The fragmentation of the anarchist,
socialist and environmental factions after Carnsore - where
the state was forced to abandon its plans for nuclear power
- underlined what many believed was an entrenched Irish
attitude. People seeking to change society simply could not
work together because of their ideological differences.
Cox gradually came to an
"understanding" of this fragmentation, particularly
"why the Dublin Left didn't
look like the [European] scene", which was enough for him
"to
know that we didn't have to be all in our separate boxes -
by which I don't just mean the business of trying for
isolated reforms, but also the kind of Left sectarianism
which isn't interested in working (or working honestly)
with anyone who doesn't already agree with you."
Cox's first move was to see if it was
"possible that the Green Party could be a social movement party."
This led to the formation of a radical, green magazine involving a
"bunch of different people (not all from the party)." They
called it An Caorthann (The Rowan Tree)
and announced that it would be a quarterly magazine of
discussion and information for the green and alternative
movement. Their editorial perspective was radical for an
Irish society that was still coming to terms with
environmentalism.
"We aim to encourage debate around
relevant issues, and to develop networking within the
movement. Themes covered: waste, refugees, gender, national
identity, green economics, red-green coalitions, our
relationship to the natural world and green spirituality."
The Rowan Tree was the beginning of a realisation among
Irish people, particularly Irish greens, that social
politics could embrace anarchism and ecology and still
leave room for that ideological attachment to celtic
Ireland. The first issue came out at Lúnasa in 1994 and for
a while, particularly when another collective published
Catalyst and yet another published Pobal an Dulra, the
mid-1990s in Ireland appeared to suggest that the blacks,
reds and greens could work together, albeit as writers
rather than as activists. But that was changing.
Cox was among a number of people who could see that Ireland
was not isolated from the politics of globalization and
that the opposition to globalization was simply being
manifest in Ireland in many different forms and ways.
"It's
turned out that that was really just one strand among many,
which were moving in the same direction," he says now.
"So
it's been a bit like coming out of the wilderness over the
last few years."
But in that wilderness was the germ of an idea that is now
transforming Irish politics and showing that the different
ideologies can work as activists for social change and for
ecological stability. That idea was Ireland From Below.
Cox, by the mid-to-late 1990s, was well established in Waterford
at the Centre for Research on Environment and Community
where he was conducting and instigating research into
social movements. This led to a call on the social
movements email list for discussion in the form of
workshops. Maeve O'Grady of ACCESS 2000 and Waterford
Women's Resource Centre, Richard Moore of
Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance and Cox of CREC got
together to put out a call for people to attend the first
Ireland from Below Gathering in Cavan in May 1999. At the
time Cox said the point of the gathering "was to bring
together people from as wide a range of different social
movements within Ireland as possible to explore areas of
common ground and differences around three questions:
- What are the problems or challenges we are engaging with?
- What are the strategies or solutions we are developing
for working with those?
- What visions do we have of the kind of world we would
like to live in?
"The reason for asking those questions here and now (on my
part at least) was the perception that the nature and
situation of social movements in Ireland is changing
rapidly, that we need to reflect on that, and specifically
that the political context is now such that if there is to
be any alternative to 'business as usual' it will come from
us - social movements - or nobody."
Cox and his friends then did something unusual in Irish
politics. They excluded no one.
"To make this discussion
possible, it seemed important not to start with any
preconceived views as to which movements were or weren't
compatible with one another, but to allow that to emerge
from the process itself; to enable as wide a range as
possible of different ways of interacting with one another
- from formal talks through workshops to rituals to doing
the cooking together; and to be definite that the Ireland
From Below space was a communicative space for activists to
reflect on the nature and context of their own practice,
not an organisational event and not an event aimed at
mobilising people who weren't already active."
Only 20 people turned up but this was a very good start and
Cox was delighted.
"Perhaps the most important thing about
the event - and for me the best indication that we were
asking important questions - is that with hardly any
exceptions, all of the participants were deeply impressive
individuals, with long histories of activism and pretty
amazing life-stories."
He has since said that he came to two specific realisations
as a result of the workshops.
"One was a shared recognition
of the existence of structures of power and exploitation,
which we confront both in our activism and in our daily
lives. The other was a particular kind of grounding in and
attention to everyday life, running from discussion of the
politics of shopping and looking after kids through issues
of health to a more overtly spiritual (and perhaps also
artistic) interest in working with emotions, our relations
with others and the world. I think this is important not
only for meeting each other as whole human beings and for
inspiration and 'emotional fuel', but also as a means of
opening up the range of questions we're asking as far as
possible and bringing in areas of our lives which are not
normally seen as 'public' or 'political'. Many participants
mentioned the phrase 'the personal is political': the way
in which we do the personal has power implications, and
power relations happen in 'personal' as well as
'impersonal' areas of the world."
What was more significant was Cox's realisation that
"a
reasonably wide measure of common ground can be found
between different movements from below in Ireland around
potentially radical directions.
"To say this is obviously not to create the kind of
communication and cooperation which can make that a living
reality, but it is to say that for me at least the weekend
amply demonstrated that it is well worth putting more
energy into this kind of process and into feeding it back
as far as possible into our own activism and our own
movements." So Ireland from Below was important because it
showed
"that it was possible for people from a wide range
of different social movements to connect effectively with
each other, but the follow-up showed the limits of
communication and cooperation. It was possible to outline a
vision of where to go next, but in the end there was no
clear sense of where to go next."
Cox now jokes that the next move, the
Grassroots Gathering, worked precisely because it wasn't
his idea, the initiative coming from various anarchists.
"Which is a flip answer," he says,
"but
wisdom does have to do with spotting when you're just
getting the kind of answer you're expecting, and
recognising when the world is genuinely talking back to you
and there is a real conversation happening. So the idea was
coming out of existing discussions between anarchists and
radical ecologists around the anti-globalization movement
in the rest of the world. We were starting to feel some of
those ripples in Ireland.
"At the same time the whole social partnership thing at
home was starting to look rocky. Now this is crucial,
because it's one of the main things that separates
movements from each other. It keeps them in separate boxes,
lobbying different departments and trying to distance
themselves from each other - and within those boxes it has
a tendency to set them competing with each other if they're
not careful. So the increasing unease in the community
sector, and the rumblings in the trade unions, were major
things.
"We still haven't really got to a convergence between those
two situations of the kind you can see in a country like
Italy, but what's happening globally is pushing a lot of
local activists out of our inherited boxes, at the same
time as those boxes are becoming less sustainable places to
be for the major social movements in Ireland. And that is
very important."
The first Grassroots Gathering
took place in a small club in Dublin on November 24, 2001. About
80 people turned up and immediately agreed that an anti-war
demonstration at Shannon airport should be set up.
"The
first Gathering was a real shot in the dark - we just put
out the letter and organised the gathering on the basis of
a social forum style discussion process in the Teachers'
Club, followed by a 'what next?' session the next day in
Spacecraft. But we had maybe 100 people, and people came
from a real variety of movements. Since then they've kept
on happening - we're holding the fifth in Dublin on the
weekend of June 27-29 (http://grassrootsgathering.freeservers.com) - they've been
to Belfast, Cork and Limerick - and even when they were
held in a 'secret location' that was only announced the day
before there were still 50 people at it.
"Probably the biggest thing that came out of them was the
GNAW (Grassroots Network Against War), which organised the
mass direct action at Shannon and seemingly shocked lots of
people with the thought that it might be OK to break a law
to prevent a greater harm. In the meantime that lesson has
been learned, and some of the same people who were accusing
the protest of being violent are now happily organising
blockades of the Dail etc.
"There are still limits, particularly around the diversity
of the Gathering, and we've taken that as the theme for
this next one in Dublin. We're working really hard to reach
out to movements, which are only tangentially involved -
particularly community activism, anti-racist and solidarity
groups - as well as trying to get beyond 'the usual
suspects' in terms of individual participants.
"That's not for tokenistic reasons, but because once again
the way to achieve real change is to bring all those
different voices and struggles together. So it's about
getting beyond the natural tendency of any group of people
(including us) to define 'politics' (or whatever they call
it) as being the kind of thing they do, define 'activists'
(or whatever) as being the kind of people they know, and so
ignore and fail to communicate with other people and
struggles.
"Basically our strength, as people who want to change very
fundamental aspects of this society, lies in each other.
And so we constantly have to move beyond our own comfort
zones, at the same time as hoping that other movements and
individuals are doing the same kind of thing themselves.
Which is one definition of a revolutionary period,
incidentally."
Therefore, it is not surprising that Cox is opitimistic
about the future of radical politics in Ireland and once
again he believes it is tied to what happens in the rest of
the world.
"The huge protest on February 15, 2003 wasn't
quite the first time that ordinary Irish people got
involved in the anti-globalization and anti-war activity
that's been happening across the globe since Seattle and
911, but it was a real shift in gear. Before that these
were pretty marginal movements in Irish life, and now they
may not be.
"One of the real acid tests will be seeing what happens
when the World Economic Forum comes to Dublin in October,
which the
Irish Social Forum and ourselves are preparing
for. These set-piece events are important beyond the
specific issues, because they give 'us' - people who are
being hurt by the way things are - a chance to see each
other and get a sense 'yes, we are powerful, we don't have
to accept the official definition of what is possible and
what isn't'.
"One thing I think will be fundamental is connecting up the
large-scale social movements, which bring together large
numbers of ordinary people struggling for change (starting
with their own lives) and the smaller movements, which are
maybe prepared to ask bigger questions, to push the
boundaries of what we see as possible, and to take what
happens elsewhere seriously. And those are maybe slightly
polarised ways of putting it, but the point is to break
down those polarisations.
"So on the one hand you have let's say a range of different
groups on the non-hierarchical or non-dogmatic left who are
taking the anti-globalization and anti-war movements around
the world very seriously. There are different ecological,
development, feminist, anti-racist etc. activists and
groups who are also very much alive to the whole thing
(along with the groups which are really running for cover
because it's all getting too political for them in one way
or another).
"And you have young counter-cultural people, not all of
them from 'nice leafy suburbs' by any means, who maybe
resonate more emotionally with the idea of really shaking
up power relations between people.
"Now because of 'peripherality' it's often been the case
that these groups have more real resonance, links etc.
outside the country than they do on the ground at home,
though there are honourable exceptions who have always
tried to make that link in practice.
"On the other hand you have ... working-class community
development or development based on 'communities of
interest' - class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality etc. - and
the radical potential within trade unions and industrial
struggles more generally, basically the whole complex of
working-class institutions, which does include the rural
poor and marginalised to the extent that they are in a
position to organise themselves.
"One of the important things, which is happening here is
that the capacity of the system to offer anything
significant to these groups is waning dramatically. This
was very visible in the recent partnership negotiations,
but if you talk to people on the ground that discontent has
been building and building over the last few years.
"In effect what is happening is that as Ireland's
involvement in global neo-liberalism sharpens, there is
less and less room for the kind of corporatist partnership
which has, by and large, helped the state to 'keep the
rabble in line' over the last decade or so. And so that is
a very interesting situation indeed - it's risky for the
Berties [Bertie Ahern, prime minister of Ireland] of this
world, who depend on being able to offer a little something
to everyone.
"And there is the possibility there that those larger
movements, and the smaller more radical ones, will be able
to come together around shared issues like opposition to
neo-liberalism, seeing the way partnership sets limits
which we're not allowed to question (around the big
decisions, macro-economic policy etc.), and tackling racism
and war. But it won't happen by magic, it will happen
through a lot of difficult conversations and learning to
work together.
"But I think these are learning processes. And basically we
learn through cooperating with each other around practical
issues, like the war, or opposition to the World Economic
Forum in October, and through talking to each other in
things like the Gathering or the Irish Social Forum. And
along the way people change, organisations change, and the
whole process is reshaped."
This means that Irish society must think of itself again as
a society where the meithel [the mutual aid the Russian
anarchist Peter Kropotkin advocated in 1902] is the
defining force in politics, and the individualist and
nationalist politics that have defined Ireland since
partition in 1922 become history. Easy said than done, as
Cox admits.
"Of course there are also a lot of gobshites,
but the point is that these emotional responses are not the
private property of a small group of activists surrounded
by an uncaring mass. And that translates into the ability
of many activists - not all, but many - to remain human,
not to be traumatised by the pressures of the situation, to
look after themselves emotionally and to support each
other. And those are very important things - and the sense
that things are changing, that we don't really know where
we're going but the sense of possibility is becoming
bigger, and the future is seeming more open. Which is
absolutely wonderful, not simply to be playing a part in a
script that's already written, but to be present in making
our own history and feel that that's the case."
– Robert Allen
NOTE: At the time of writing, ir£1 = €1.25
top
Interview with Lawrence Cox, June 2003:
BLUE: What is your background and biog?
Lawrence Cox: I grew up with Amnesty, CND and
anti-apartheid as a kid, so I took things like torture,
nuclear war and racism seriously as part of the real world
that needed a response. I started becoming active in my own
right in school, including head-on conflicts with the
authorities over religion. (It was the 1980s, and it was
still a touchy subject.)
When I got out of that I was lucky enough to move around a
fair bit (along with college radicalism) and see a bit of
activism in Norway, France, Germany and Italy. I spent a
year in Hamburg at the time of the second Gulf War, trying
to be involved in everything that was going on, which was
really helpful in terms of seeing different possibilities
for radical politics.
I came back from that in 91 and settled down with a bit of
a longer-term perspective, some good comrades, and got
stuck into what was pretty much a ten-year research project
trying to understand social movements, while being very
much involved in different ways at the same time. At a
certain point the funding ran out and I got a job teaching
in Waterford.
Which was a blessing in disguise, because there I started
to make contact with working-class community activists,
which has been really important for me on all sorts of
levels. Community development is possible the single
biggest social movement in Ireland in terms of active
participants, and a lot of it is very radical. It's also
much more grounded in the lives of the people who do it
than many other movements.
Right now I'm lucky enough to be one of the handful of
people on this island who can make their living studying
social movements. Obviously I'm also involved in a range of
different activist projects - like the Grassroots Gathering
and the Irish Social Forum. I also do what I can to make
links between the two: for example I run an MA programme
[at Maynooth college] where I support activists doing
participatory action research on their own practice.
BLUE: What inspired you to become involved in this kind of
work?
Lawrence Cox: I think two contrasts. One was between periods like
1968 when so many different movements came together and the
fragmentation of the late 80s and early 90s. The other was
between what was left of the alternative scene in countries
like Germany or Italy and what I was familiar with from
Dublin. Those gave me real visions of what it could be like
to organise around the basis of working for a different
kind of society, grounded in the different movements for
change that already exist within this one.
Later I got more of an understanding of why things had
fragmented after '68 and why the Dublin left didn't look
like the Hamburg scene, but it was enough to know that we
didn't have to be all in our separate boxes - by which I
don't just mean the business of trying for isolated
reforms, but also the kind of left sectarianism which isn't
interested in working (or working honestly) with anyone who
doesn't already agree with you.
So I started out after Hamburg seeing if it was possible
that the Green Party could be a social movement party and
pulled together a bunch of different people (not all from
the party) to work on Caorthann, a green/alternative zine
that was supposed to bring together material from different
movements around the country.
Out of that I found my way into different kinds of
networking projects over about 5 years (Dublin Infoshop
project, Mustard Seed II, alternative press networks,
Ireland from Below get-togethers, etc.) And then as the
global "movement of movements" has started to make an
impact it's turned out that that was really just one strand
among many which were moving in the same direction. So it's
been a bit like coming out of the wilderness over the last
few years.
BLUE: What led you to believe the Grassroots Gathering
could work?
Lawrence Cox: Partly the fact that the initial idea didn't come from
me! Which is a flip answer, but wisdom does have to do with
spotting when you're just getting the kind of answer you're
expecting, and recognising when the world is genuinely
talking back to you and there is a real conversation
happening. So the idea was coming out of existing
discussions between anarchists and radical ecologists
around the anti-globalization movement in the rest of the
world. We were starting to feel some of those ripples in
Ireland.
At the same time the whole social partnership thing at home
was starting to look rocky. Now this is crucial, because
it's one of the main things that separates movements from
each other. It keeps them in separate boxes, lobbying
different departments and trying to distance themselves
from each other - and within those boxes it has a tendency
to set them competing with each other if they're not
careful. So the increasing unease in the community sector,
and the rumblings in the trade unions, were major things.
We still haven't really got to a convergence between those
two situations of the kind you can see in a country like
Italy, but what's happening globally is pushing a lot of
local activists out of our inherited boxes, at the same
time as those boxes are becoming less sustainable places to
be for the major social movements in Ireland. And that is
very important.
BLUE:
What has been your experience of its beginnings?
Lawrence Cox: The short answer is that it's worked. The first
Gathering was a real shot in the dark - we just put out the
letter and organised the gathering on the basis of a social
forum- style discussion process in the Teachers' Club,
followed by a "what next?" session the next day in
Spacecraft. But we had maybe 100 people, and people came
from a real variety of movements.
Since then they've kept on happening - we're holding the
fifth in Dublin on the weekend of the 27-29 - they've been
to Belfast, Cork and Limerick - and even when they were
held in a "secret location" that was only announced the day
before there were still 50 people at it.
Probably the biggest thing that came out of them was the
GNAW (Grassroots Network Against War) which organised the
mass direct action at Shannon and seemingly shocked lots of
people with the thought that it might be OK to break a law
to prevent a greater harm. In the meantime that lesson has
been learned, and some of the same people who were accusing
the protest of being violent are now happily organising
blockades of the Dail etc.
There are still limits, particularly around the diversity
of the Gathering, and we've taken that as the theme for
this next one in Dublin. We're working really hard to reach
out to movements which are only tangentially involved -
particularly community activism, anti-racist and solidarity
groups - as well as trying to get beyond "the usual
suspects" in terms of individual participants.
That's not for tokenistic reasons, but because once again
the way to achieve real change is to bring all those
different voices and struggles together. So it's about
getting beyond the natural tendency of any group of people
(including us) to define "politics" (or whatever they call
it) as being the kind of thing they do, define "activists"
(or whatever) as being the kind of people they know, and so
ignore and fail to communicate with other people and
struggles.
Basically our strength, as people who want to change very
fundamental aspects of this society, lies in each other.
And so we constantly have to move beyond our own comfort
zones, at the same time as hoping that other movements and
individuals are doing the same kind of thing themselves.
Which is one definition of a revolutionary period,
incidentally.
BLUE: Where do you see the eco-social movements going to in
Ireland?
Lawrence Cox: I think a lot depends on what happens in the rest of
the world. There has been quite a head of steam built up in
different networking processes - not just the ones I've
mentioned - and to some extent this has been putting the
framework in place, but now the question is whether that
framework is going to be filled out with ordinary people.
We can't make that happen - it will be made happen by
neo-liberalism and the Bush administration's choice for
permanent warfare as a way of keeping the rabble in line,
or it won't happen and people will accept those. It does
look as though (despite all the obituaries for the movement
after 911) we are still moving forward. The huge protest on
February 15 wasn't quite the first time that ordinary Irish
people got involved in the anti- globalization and anti-war
activity that's been happening across the globe since
Seattle and 911, but it was a real shift in gear.
Before that these were pretty marginal movements in Irish
life, and now they may not be. One of the real acid tests
will be seeing what happens when the World Economic Forum
comes to Dublin in October, which the Irish Social Forum
and ourselves are preparing for. These set-piece events are
important beyond the specific issues, because they give
"us" - people who are being hurt by the way things are - a
chance to see each other and get a sense "yes, we are
powerful, we don't have to accept the official definition
of what is possible and what isn't."
One thing I think will be fundamental is connecting up the
large-scale social movements which bring together large
numbers of ordinary people struggling for change (starting
with their own lives) and the smaller movements which are
maybe prepared to ask bigger questions, to push the
boundaries of what we see as possible, and to take what
happens elsewhere seriously. And those are maybe slightly
polarised ways of putting it, but the point is to break
down those polarisations.
So on the one hand you have let's say a range of different
groups on the non-hierarchical or non-dogmatic left who are
taking the anti-globalization and anti-war movements around
the world very seriously. There are different ecological,
development, feminist, anti-racist etc. activists and
groups who are also very much alive to the whole thing
(along with the groups which are really running for cover
because it's all getting too political for them in one way
or another). And you have young counter-cultural people,
not all of them from "nice leafy suburbs" by any means, who
maybe resonate more emotionally with the idea of really
shaking up power relations between people.
Now because of "peripherality" it's often been the case
that these groups have more real resonance, links etc.
outside the country than they do on the ground at home,
though there are honourable exceptions who have always
tried to make that link in practice.
On the other hand you have particularly working-class
community development, or development based on "communities
of interest" - class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality etc. -
and the radical potential within trade unions and
industrial struggles more generally, basically the whole
complex of working-class institutions, which does include
the rural poor and marginalised to the extent that they are
in a position to organise themselves.
And one of the important things which is happening here is
that the capacity of the system to offer anything
significant to these groups is waning dramatically. This
was very visible in the recent partnership negotiations,
but if you talk to people on the ground that discontent has
been building and building over the last few years.
In effect what is happening is that as Ireland's
involvement in global neo-liberalism sharpens, there is
less and less room for the kind of corporatist partnership
which has, by and large, helped the state to "keep the
rabble in line" over the last decade or so. And so that is
a very interesting situation indeed - it's risky for the
Berties of this world, who depend on being able to offer a
little something to everyone.
And there is the possibility there that those larger
movements, and the smaller more radical ones, will be able
to come together around shared issues like opposition to
neo-liberalism, seeing the way partnership sets limits
which we're not allowed to question (around the big
decisions, macro-economic policy etc.), and tackling racism
and war. But it won't happen by magic, it will happen
through a lot of difficult conversations and learning to
work together.
BLUE: What has the progress been like these past few years?
Lawrence Cox: Better than I'd expected, but slower than I'd hoped.
There are now a lot of experienced activists - I'm not just
talking about the Gathering, of course - who have realised
that the anti-globalization and/or anti-war movements are
significant, and have started to come together around
those.
And at the same time there have been a lot of younger
people getting involved, meaning that this kind of coming
together is now a reality in terms of Irish movements in a
way that wasn't true even a couple of years back. The
movement has had a lot of popular resonance - not just
February 15th, but also say in response to the Garda attack
on the Reclaim the Streets demo, or response to the Chavez
documentary [Chavez: Inside
the Coup]. And a lot of
people, not only in the cities, have taken at least some
practical action at one point or another, particularly of
course around the war issue.
It's slower in that as I've said there is still a gap
between this development of a kind of mini-"movement of
movements" against neo-liberalism and war and what's
happening in the community groups and trade unions. It's
not that there's no contact, and certainly not that there's
a lack of understanding of what the issues are. But there
are practical difficulties in identifying genuinely shared
struggles at an immediate level, effective ways of
cooperation, goals which would mean something to all those
different groups, etc.
And of course at some level there is still a lot of
complacency within the movements as well as outside.
Internally this manifests itself as cynicism, as reducing
everything down to what's already known, and perhaps most
of all as "organisational patriotism" - that the real goals
often remain limited to organisation-building or to very
local goals.
Externally it's this thing of on the one hand genuinely not
liking the way things are going, but not really believing
that "we" can do much about it, and also separating off one
thing from another. Particularly I guess at the moment that
means not really making the links between the difficulties
that neo-liberalism has in gaining popular support anywhere
and the deliberate choice of the US administration to move
towards a strategy of permanent warfare as a means of
control. And it also has to do with a kind of fragmenting
attitude to issues, talking about winning or losing purely
in local terms.
But I think these are learning processes. And basically we
learn through cooperating with each other around practical
issues, like the war, or opposition to the World Economic
Forum in October, and through talking to each other in
things like the Gathering or the Irish Social Forum. And
along the way people change, organisations change, and the
whole process is reshaped.
BLUE: What are the positives of the movement?
Lawrence Cox: Incredible courage I suppose is the first thing. I'm
thinking particularly of people like the International
Solidarity Movement volunteers who've been putting their
lives on the line in Palestine, or of some of the people
who've engaged in non-violent direct action at the big
summits or in opposition to the war. These are people who
don't have to do that, who could walk right away from those
situations, and yet they don't. And that compels respect.
Another thing I feel quite powerfully is the openness to
ordinary human responses. Now in Ireland we're quite lucky
that still very many people do have a healthy human
response of not accepting specious excuses for war, caring
about things like the coup in Venezuela, taking other
people's poverty seriously, seeing how difficult it is to
be a refugee or homeless, and so on.
Of course there are also a lot of gobshites, but the point
is that these emotional responses are not the private
property of a small group of activists surrounded by an
uncaring mass. And that translates into the ability of many
activists - not all, but many - to remain human, not to be
traumatised by the pressures of the situation, to look
after themselves emotionally and to support each other. And
those are very important things.
I guess lastly just the sense that things are changing,
that we don't really know where we're going but the sense
of possibility is becoming bigger, and the future is
seeming more open. Which is absolutely wonderful, not
simply to be playing a part in a script that's already
written, but to be present in making our own history and
feel that that's the case.
BLUE: Anything else you'd like to add?
Lawrence Cox: Just one academic reflection. Because capitalism has
been global for a long time (since the start of the
colonising period in fact), it builds networks between
people around the world, and every so often those people
come together in opposition to what that system is doing to
all of them. Peter Linebaugh has a great book about this
called The many-headed hydra, looking at slaves, sailors,
etc. in the early modern period.
So this manifested itself in the "Atlantic revolutions" at
the end of the 18th century - the American revolution, the
French revolution, 1798 and so on. It manifested itself in
1848, when half the cities in Europe revolted. It came out
very powerfully between 1916 and 1923, when there was one
revolution after another from Dublin to Petrograd, and
three empires collapsed. It came out in the Resistance to
fascism, and again in 1968, which happened around the world
from Mexico to Japan, as well as from Prague to Paris.
So we seem to be in one of those periods, where the latest
twist of capitalism - neo-liberal globalization - is
pushing very different groups of people together in
opposition to that system. And that makes this a time of
great potential, a time when at the very least the cards
are being seriously reshuffled. It is one of those times
when ordinary people are making history.
And so we need to take this fact on board very seriously.
Over a very short period indeed, the "leaders of the free
world" have been pushed into a kind of retreat to
Versailles. Instead of the usual show-piece get-togethers,
they have to hide behind massive fences, on cruise liners,
in absolutist monarchies or in inaccessible mountain
resorts. When Clinton came to Ireland nearly quarter of a
million people were supposed to have come out to welcome
him. When Bush came, the only civilians he met were
military families.
We have given them a bad scare - which is partly where the
new strategy of indefinite warfare comes from, as well as
being where things like the attack on Reclaim the Streets
is coming from. We've won quite a few battles - stopping
the WTO agreement in Seattle, breaking the MAI, reversing
water privatisation in Cochabamba, and so on.
So we need to take ourselves seriously, and take each other
seriously. Otherwise, if we stick with the usual cynicism -
which is basically a lifestyle pose designed to allow us
not to take action - we're going to buy into what they
would like us to think, which is that we haven't a chance
of changing things, that there really is no alternative,
and that the only serious political question for the next
ten years is going to be in fighting over who has to
tighten their belt most. Which would be the worst kind of
selling out, selling out to their definition of reality.
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BLUE is looking for short fiction, extracts of novels, poetry, lyrics,
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in any form relating to eco cultural- social- spiritual issues, events and
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