‘Learn from each other’s struggles’: An interview with Laurence Cox (part 2)
Brian: Could you tell us a bit more about the Grassroots Gatherings? I was aware of their existence, but as a keen young sectarian I wasn't particularly interested in them. What sort of forces did they involve and why did they peter out?
Laurence: The Grassroots Gatherings were get-togethers of social movements across Ireland that ran between 2001 and 2015, with the fundamental thought that deeper alliances between movements are best made by not trying to jump straight to the leadership agreeing a text and platform for the next demo. That in turn came out of the Zapatista call for “one no, many yeses'' and formed part of the global process of a movement of movements against neoliberal capitalism - which is basically about building popular power by starting from existing struggles as movements, not issues to be instrumentalised from above, and finding ways of working together in the face of a common systemic enemy.
I wrote a partial account of them,[1] but a simple way of putting it is to say that the idea in Ireland was to construct an opposition to neoliberalism that organised in ways that weren’t based around NGOs nor around political parties. At the time, some of both were adopting the language of anti-globalisation, and later moved onto other things, leaving the Gatherings as really the only continuous space for that ‘movement of movements’ approach in Ireland.
For context: top-down and centralised organising was a lot more popular on the left at this point - this is before things like ROSA, RISE, Solidarity, or PBP as ways of diversifying and experimenting with the traditional party form. And non-violent direct action was also quite contentious in some quarters: at Shannon in 2003, an SWP member marched up and down with a megaphone, shouting at people taking direct action against the US military that they were engaging in violence. So the kind of bottom-up, self-organised, direct action-oriented politics that has since become much more widespread was treated with deep hostility from various points of view.
One crucial thing that came out of Grassroots was two substantial summit protests in Dublin. The first came when the World Economic Forum, under pressure from the anti-capitalist movement globally, decided to have regional fora to boost its legitimacy, and Peter Sutherland got the European one to Ireland in 2003. Between Grassroots and the short-lived Irish Social Forum, the event was cancelled because the Guards decided they couldn’t defend Dublin Castle against perhaps 150 people willing to engage in direct action (and they even admitted that for a week before coming out with another story!)
Then in 2004 there was an EU summit in Dublin. NGOs and left parties held a march somewhere completely different - but the Dublin Grassroots Network, an offshoot of the Gatherings, decided to confront them directly and see if it was possible to have our protest heard (literally, with pots and pans). That was the highpoint of a weekend of direct action which included opening up a private park, an anti-car protest, a solidarity event at Mosney direct provision centre, and so on. The state went berserk, brought in half the Gardaí in the country, tried to convince shopkeepers to roll down the shutters for the weekend and spread all kinds of lunatic stories to the tabloid press (about arms dumps, chemical attacks, plans to burn down Blanchardstown shopping centre…).
In the event, their biggest mistake - after weeks of panic mongering - was announcing that they’d deploy the riot squad at the meeting point of the big march. So a lot more people came out to defend the right to protest, and we did indeed get 5,000 people within hearing distance of Farmleigh House before the Gardaí brought out the water cannon they'd got from the PSNI. Some key alliances were made around Grassroots, notably the willingness to engage in direct action at Rossport in support of the local community - something which would have been disastrous handled any other way.
Ultimately what caused it to fade away wasn’t just the crash of 2007-2008, but the way in which the crash was used to pull the discourse back to a familiar left comfort zone of national-level economic policy and endless ritual marches - most of which were firmly on the defensive right up to the point where working-class communities organised themselves for direct action against water meters and refusal of payment (with some unions and parties rightly supporting them). That was a revival of a strand of popular self-organising which went back to the anti-drugs marches of earlier decades and the origins of community activism - a form of working-class movement which is historically very large in Ireland by comparison with pretty much anywhere else in Europe.
““In some ways the language and practices of self-organising have become considerably more widespread in Ireland””
So in some ways the language and practices of self-organising have become considerably more widespread in Ireland, sometimes genuinely and sometimes as rhetoric. I’d like to think that direct action has become more widely acceptable. Maybe the biggest challenge for us now though is how to keep creating conversations between movements, or between their more serious ends. That’s partly about building long-term alliances for change of the kind that were more common in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but were squeezed out by social partnership and NGO leaderships that felt a whole movement was winning if there was a bit of ‘representation’ in elites, a bit of funding for service delivery and a bit of lobbying access.
It’s also, though, about what I call learning from each other’s struggles: realising that we can’t extract a perfect strategy for making a better world from a simplified theory or potted history that an organisational leadership presents as justifying its strategy. More than anything, we need to listen hard to the struggles of the different social groups and movements that we want to be on our side, what they think they’ve learned in their own conflicts, and what we might do together.
A classic example is resisting climate change. The Anglophone left pays a lot of attention to things like Extinction Rebellion - which until recently has basically been a series of arrestable photo-ops with a magical theory of change, but no concrete results beyond meeting with Michael Gove - and authors like Andreas Malm, with an entirely rhetorical call for violence. Yet the people who actually, regularly and consistently, put the brakes on fossil fuel extraction and transport are indigenous populations around the world, who punch massively above their own weight in doing so.
If you think of the impact of half a million Ogoni managing to make Shell persona non grata in their territory for a quarter-century - this is why Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed. Or look at the most recent Indigenous Environmental Network report,[2] showing that First Nations and Native Americans have managed to slow down or prevent altogether something like 25% of all North American carbon emissions. If we’re serious about climate justice, we need to pay close attention. That of course is also why we recently organised the Zapatista tour of Ireland (they are currently touring elsewhere in Europe): not to mechanically follow everything they do, but to start from having the honesty to admit that we might actually stand to learn something from other kinds of radical struggle, even if we’re not indigenous peasants defending communal lands.
Brian: You make an interesting comparison between the absolutely unyielding approach of the state in forcing through the Corrib gas project and the relative ease with which fracking was defeated. Looking back at big victories and defeats for the Irish environmental movement, it's not always immediately obvious why some struggles won and others were beaten. Do you think that there's a simple explanation for why the willingness of the state to capitulate in the face of opposition has varied so much? Or is it all just about the balance of forces at a given moment?
Laurence: I think it is about the balance of forces, but really that’s a question rather than an answer. The forces we’re up against are complicated, with shifting alliances - and we win sometimes, even winning large where we didn’t expect to. Fracking and fossil fuel divestment globally are, I think, terrains where the wins have come more easily than we might have expected from a left perspective. That’s potentially hopeful, not just on those specifics but because it means that dressing up despair as Serious Political Theory is actually deeply misleading.
““The people who actually, regularly and consistently, put the brakes on fossil fuel extraction and transport are indigenous populations around the world””
Part of it is that we aren’t up against Capital in the abstract - we’re up against specific fractions of capital, and their allies within the state apparatus, the media, etc. There was a historically specific moment before WWI when Great Powers came to see petroleum rather than coal as the strategic fuel of the future; we are now probably coming to the end of that, not least as renewables are becoming significantly cheaper in many cases.
As far as divestment goes, we also have to take into account not just renewables capitalism (which has its own problems), but things like the insurance industry, the extent to which financialisation has driven investment into urban property which is very often threatened by sea-level rise, etc. and set those against, for example, the airline industry and other natural allies of fossil fuel corporations. Those calculations are going to be internally contested within the industries and within individual corporations, as well as within different states. It is not just about ‘objective’ interests but equally about how different factions present ‘this is in our interest’.
So too with fracking versus Rossport. Rossport was one of those cases - like some nuclear projects, or like the UK government’s roads programme in the 1990s - where the state decided that it couldn’t be seen to back down. It’s probably also relevant that this was about showing their loyalty to a major multinational like Shell. And yet, as in those examples, it was a Pyrrhic victory in the sense that the political capital (and sheer money) it cost them meant that they couldn’t then afford another battle.
Fracking, as I understand it (and the petroleum industry is insanely complex) is often carried out by quite small, speculative firms with the hope of selling on any finds to larger corporations - the opposite of most offshore drilling which is very expensive because the industry is basically moving with the cutting edge of what is technologically possible and just-about-profitable, into the Arctic or 2 kilometres underwater and so on. So the individual fracking firms themselves don’t have so much political power and it is only in the most visibly crooked states (Trump’s US, until recently Johnson’s England) that they have very cosy relationships to power. Conversely the sites are physically vulnerable, easily blockaded, etc. and a real threat to local farmers, tourist interests, etc.
Part of any serious movement, not only ecological, has to be about trying to understand who its potential allies are, but also who can be detached from the coalition that its opponents need to win. So we need to think about ‘balance of forces’ as a practical question, not as Gramsci would say a contemplative one, in which we observe from a distance and either cheer or get depressed. A corollary of that of course is that some battles can be won without major challenges to the existing order - a nice middle-class area may be able to fight off a polluting development relatively easily, for example - while others cannot be won within neoliberalism or perhaps even within capitalism.
We do need to be honest with ourselves and each other about these things and really tease out that analysis if we want to win specific battles or make effective alliances; it may be true in the abstract that capitalism and ecological survival are incompatible, and that is a useful educational proposition - but in movement organising and strategy it is only part of the story. Just as we can say that social inequality can’t be overcome within capitalism, but that doesn’t really tell us how specific labour struggles can win.
Brian: You mention above something we discussed a little when setting up the interview: ecosocialism is a big idea on the radical left at the moment. Given the already unfolding climate disaster, that's maybe not surprising. But it's not the first time that there's been a political encounter between the ‘red’ and the ‘green’ and it's not even the first time that the term ecosocialism was prominent. Could you tell us a bit about that history?
Laurence: So the language of ‘new social movements’ comes from Marxists across western Europe who recognised that alongside the ‘old social movements’ (the workers’ movement in particular), 1968 and the following years had seen the rise not so much of new issues as of new social actors - second-wave feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, new kinds of anti-war and anti-nuclear actors, migrant-based anti-racist struggles, and ecological movements. That includes things like the struggle against nuclear power stations, which was massive and very radical in countries like West Germany, but also for example the working-class struggle against chemical pollution in northern Italy (the Seveso disaster was in 1976). So Irish struggles happened in a wider context, where the European left after 1968 was trying to understand the changing face of social struggles, and to make the connections across them. New Left parties of many kinds (not only Green parties) were part of that attempt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just as the Zapatista-inspired ‘movement of movements’ did in the early 2000s.
““The European left after 1968 was trying to understand the changing face of social struggles, and to make the connections across them””
On a global scale this fed into the contemporary arguments about sustainable development, which were about how to marry the fact that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet (itself of course a powerful argument against capitalism) with the visible need for development (however understood) in the majority world, what was then called the Third World in the sense of the 1789 Third Estate. Like everything, these languages - new social movements, new left, red-green, sustainable development - and later ones (environmental justice, climate justice, just transition, green new deal, whatever) get quickly co-opted, fundamentally because the service class is trained to new words and apply them to do the same old things, so that we have to come up with something new to mean the same thing.[3] So the west German left, for example, had already done a lot of thinking around this - by the time I arrived in Hamburg in 1990 I could buy second-hand lefty books about ecosocialism going back to the ‘70s. And the arguments were familiar enough in English that three decades back you could read Green Left Weekly, Capitalism Nature Socialism or Red Pepper - all still going and founded in 1991, 1990, and 1995 respectively.
Brian: And why do you think we "keep inventing that political wheel without necessarily getting anywhere"? Is there a way to move past arguing anew every decade that we need to bring the environmental and workers’ movements together?
Laurence: What that history tells us is that there are several good reasons why the red-green encounter happens again and again. The ecological and social crises keep getting worse and worse, and hence the urgency of action. Any honest thinker who pays attention over time is likely to realise that these and other issues are fundamentally driven by capitalism, which is why just “raising awareness” about them gets us nowhere, like liberal and NGO solutions - and therefore multiple movements have a strategic reason to connect up. Our movements visibly need each other more than ever - and it is again a liberal, particularist approach that seeks to firewall them from each other, as though we could somehow, for example, win socialism without overthrowing patriarchy, transforming the economic system and not just who runs it, defeating racism, etc.
What is more interesting maybe is why people keep on discovering ecosocialism (or whatever) as if it was something amazingly new. And what I think that highlights is how little our movements own our own “means of intellectual production” as Marx puts it. We have far less by way of our own periodicals, spaces for debate, education and training programmes, theoretical production, or whatever, than we did even twenty years back in the days of Indymedia, let alone fifty years back in 1968, or a hundred years ago. Fundamentally our movements are now dependent on what they can do as a money-making concern (including radical but commercial magazines, podcasts, books); on what can drive celebrity and clicks on social media; and on what works in academia.
Those spaces allow a certain amount of agitation - convincing a passive audience that something is unjust and they should take action. They reward certain kinds of education - helping people think about the structural reasons why problems persist. What they offer very little space for is organising, and learning in any serious way about organising. The fact that we keep on reinventing this particular wheel, like toddlers pointing at a train with a big smile on their faces, is really scary for what it says about our own understanding of movements. Basically we haven’t a clue about movement history, or movements in other countries, except for a handful of symbolic things that we can ’sell’ on circuits we don’t own.
““Basically we haven’t a clue about movement history””
It is deeply symptomatic that the argument for ecosocialism is typically made starting from technical and policy concerns, with the question of actually-existing popular agency way down the line. In a sense it is a constant form of preaching about what should be the case, with very little attention to where effective alliances are being made, what their limits are, how these alliances have been broken in the past or whatever. It is a completely idealist way of thinking, which abstracts from actual human beings and their collective agency to construct a sort of fantasy alliance around ideology in pursuit of a theoretically-derived policy necessity. But socialists - actually anyone who is serious about a survivable planet and a liveable society - need to start from the other end, from what Gramsci called the elements of ‘good sense’ that are articulated in actual popular agency, in social movements including the workers’ movement, and to think what we can do to help take those further.
Much of the substance of what I’ve just said draws on the arguments of the great Welsh socialist Raymond Williams in Beyond 2000, from … 1983. Honestly most greens or reds over the age of 25 who are only starting to think about this now should be asking themselves serious questions about what that says about their own traditions that this isn’t treated as a basic part of what we know. The Goodwillie pamphlet is from 1988.
Brian: Just how incomplete is the written history of the Irish environmental movement? What published works would you recommend? And how can we pull together and archive the more ephemeral material that documents movement history?
Laurence: There are two obvious points of reference for the history of ecological struggles in Ireland. One is Guests of the Nation: People of Ireland vs the Multinationals, by Robert Allen and Tara Jones - the second edition (No Global by Allen alone) updates it but loses some of the earlier material. A second is Hilary Tovey’s work, not least her book Environmentalism in Ireland but also some of her articles and chapters scattered around the place. Simon Dalby’s pamphlet The Nuclear Syndrome about Carnsore, free online,[4] is well worth a read. Liam Leonard, Mark Garavan, and John Barry have also written about it.
But part of the challenge is also to refuse the provincialism of imagining Ireland as the only place - and the separatism of thinking about environmental struggles as completely separate from other ones. That actually reproduces the logic whereby there are all these separate policy issues for the state to deal with in different departments, rather than seeing it from the point of view of movements. Eamonn Slater has done fantastic work on how Marx wrote about nature and society with particular reference to Ireland, now available online.[5]
I’ve pulled together some of my own attempts at ‘making sense of Irish movements’, not as completely separate things but as interconnected forms of popular struggle.[6] For red-green engagements internationally there is so much to look at in the wider world right now: environmental justice struggles in the global South and among indigenous populations, for example. The Ogoni struggle against Shell, which connected directly to Rossport, is covered in our free book of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s letters[7] before his execution by the military regime. You could look at indigenous struggles in North America, which have slowed or stopped something like 25% of carbon emissions in the last decade. You could look at the anti-airport ZAD in France, the ecological dimension of the Rojava revolution,[8] or the Norwegian climate jobs alliance [9]- as well of course as everything going on in the US and UK around those engagements. Not seeing any of these as models, but rather as moments when some kind of bridge between those issues was made grounded in popular organisations - and thinking what we might learn from those, including from their mistakes. My book with Alf Gunvald Nilsen, We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism, tries to do that.
““It is so costly in so many ways to try to make everything up from scratch in our own lives ...””
Archiving movement history is a major challenge - there are lots of movement archives, in Ireland and around the world, but they are almost all under-resourced and inevitably focussed on different things. When the wealthy, powerful, and famous die their papers are lovingly archived - when the poor and powerless die someone often comes along with a roll of black plastic bags. So it’s really important to try and preserve and recover the flyers, newsletters, posters, badges, booklets, and whatever. There is a lot more digitisation than there used to be though - a couple of years back three of us did a book with original texts from the movements of 1968 in 12 different countries (Voices of 1968) and we could find almost all of them online.
One project I work with is the global Interface journal,[10] which is more specifically about what activists can learn from each other’s movements - around different issues, in different places, and using different political or academic languages. Our last issue has a lovely interview with the people who run the Cyprus Movements Archive - it’s very interesting for thinking about our own movements here.
The Irish Left Archive,[11] and the anarchist Struggle site,[12] are easily accessible examples of what is possible, and north of the border the CAIN site,[13] documenting the conflict in the North, is a huge resource. In a very different format Terry Fagan’s walking tours of the NE inner city, which take in the docks and the red light district, the Lockout, 1916, resistance to the industrial schools, and the drugs crisis are extraordinarily powerful and show how work, community, and struggle were intertwined. And next door the People’s History Museum in Manchester is a fantastic example of how to remember movements, going back to a volunteer constable’s baton from Peterloo that was handed down in a protester’s family and forwards to a badge-making machine from the 1980s.
At the end of the day though - and this brings us back to Rupture - it’s really important for today’s struggles that our movements develop a culture of remembering past struggles, not simply as Heroic Martyrs or Great Victories, but as people like us, in groups like our own, that weren’t always sure what to do, made mistakes, had arguments, got things done and sometimes changed the world. It is so costly in so many ways to try to make everything up from scratch in our own lives and movements - the more we can actually ‘learn from each other’s struggles’ the better.
Notes
Indigenous Environmental Network, “Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon” available at https://www.ienearth.org/indigenous-resistance-against-carbon/
Cox, Laurence, “Why Ken Saro-Wiwa matters for climate justice”, available at https://www.academia.edu/44503837/Why_Ken_Saro_Wiwa_matters_for_climate_justice
https://www.innatenonviolence.org/pamphlets/nuclearsyndrome.pdf
https://laurencecox.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/making-sense-of-irish-movements/
“Silence would be Treason” available at https://www.academia.edu/37691372/Silence_Would_be_Treason_second_edition
Internationalist Commune of Rojava, “Make Rojava Green Again” available at https://makerojavagreenagain.org/book/