In 1985 a wave of
rebellion swept through the jails of France, with prisoners rioting
in response to abuse by wardens, climbing onto the roofs 'to get a
breath of fresh air' and 'shout out their their revolt against
imprisonment, the daily terror exercised against them'. In solidarity
with this struggle a group of individuals under the name Os
Cangaceiros conducted a number
of supporting actions: forcibly stopping trains to
distribute a text among passengers in
order to get maximum publicity the rebellion, stealing architects’
plans for new prisons and distributing
them in the area to help prisoners escape, attacking
the architects of prisons and
sabotaging construction-sites of new jails.
They also provided rebels, mainly those in the French squatting
scene, with some good ideas on how to expropriate the expropriators –
ie how to rip off banks through “fraud” – and provided a
network that enabled such activity. While
the distribution of prison blueprints seems to have directly assisted
in a number of jail-breaks, and the advice must have proven
invaluable to a number of individuals with a distaste for
wage-slavery, the strategic value of the sabotage actions was
admittedly questionable: the participants themselves saw them more as
an attempt 'to partially fulfil
a completely natural rage and break with the decadence of our epoch
that allows anything to be done as long as there are economic or
state reasons.'
There was also an element of
retributive justice involved – ironic considering the ideology of
vengeance & punishment is precisely what supports the cops,
courts and prisons of this world in the first place: 'It
had become urgent to put a bit of ethics into public affairs and to
do so in such a way that none of the enterprises stirred up against
us would go completely unpunished.'
Although the rage expressed
by such actions are entirely understandable in a South African
context where proletarians are simultaneously criminalised and placed
beyond the pail of justice, where blacks are subjected to all the
violence of the black boers without any of the supposed protection,
where the landless and homeless are brutally dispossessed in the name
of property laws while their legal 'rights' to due procedure are
ignored, where those
unfortunates to have fallen into the clutches of the bastards in blue
are subjected to routine degradation on a scale that makes the
Marquis de Sade's tales look like children's stories (the latest
example addressed in the press being the St
Albans prison); the
tactical value of Os Cangaceiros
for our own struggles lies
elsewhere. As the critical
introduction to their text Freedom
is the crime that contains all crimes
incisively puts
it:
'What was exemplary in the support for the prison riots of ’85 was the combination of practical sabotage, a subversive text and a movement to which both related. It is this general positive “lesson” that is worth applying as part of a more general social movement – not specifically prisoners alone. However, to produce a text and an action which could contribute to subverting more general contradictions necessarily involves subverting the marginality imposed on us rather than pumping it up as something positive...'
Possible applications of
the above 'lesson' as they regard the platinum strike are outlined
directly below. Possible methods of subverting 'subverting the
marginality imposed on us' are addressed later in this text, in the
section on the Anti-Anti Land Invasions Unit.
The source of many of
these actions can be found in the first-hand account of the year-long
British coal miner's strike of 1984-85 presented by the producer of
dialectical-delinquents.com
(So
near So far:
A
History of The British Miners). This was inspired by certain
similarities between the current situation in South Africa and the
one described therein*, such as the outbreak of a prolonged mass
strike within the context of widespread social contestation, but many
of these tactics can be adapted to extend various different
struggles. As the text itself states:
'One could sense this volatile rumblings-under-the-surface type atmosphere at the time. And me and a group of friends and contacts wanted to contribute to this atmosphere. We had a project of occupying a disused church off Holloway Road, North London. The building needed a lot of cleaning it was partly squatted by pigeons, and hadn't been used for over 30 years, but was an unusual place, being round with a round corridor around it and a few rooms, plus a stage. We aimed to use this as a base for support for the miners and to somehow agitate to spread the struggle, as well as having free concerts which might have been used for collections for the miners. With this in mind, we hoped to go along to schools to distribute leaflets attacking education, to workplaces attacking work, to discos attacking the disco scene etc.etc. Plus we thought we might cover the area with interesting graffiti and maybe do a bit of appropriately-targeted vandalism. Plus use the place for mass meetings and discussions.'Other than opening dedicated spaces where those interested in extension of the struggle can congregate at all times of the day and night, I suggest collective steps towards the following interventions:
- Extensive research on global platinum supply chains in order
to identify targets for solidarity action
- Picket harbors that load/offload SA platinum
- Picket companies (manufacturers of catalytic converters and
the automobile corporations these supply) that use SA platinum
- Agitate among sailors, dock-workers, auto-workers, truck and train drivers, warehouse workers and others about the strike, encouraging them to refuse compulsion by their employers to work as scab-labour (which in fact they all are doing at the moment, given the global nature of production-chains) through conversations, pickets, pamphlets, invasion of workplaces, and any other possible means
- Prepare well to support workers who participate; intimidation and victimisation are sure to follow.
- Preparations can include: legal intervention (in some areas, especially those with democratic pretences, it is illegal to compel a worker to break an officially srecognised strike through scab labour)
- Agitation among fellow workers encouraging them to refuse to let their employers intimidate and victimise their colleagues
- Agitation among the general public to refuse to allow corporations to intimidate and victimise workers who act in favour of their own class interests (in other words who 'stand up for their rights' in the interests of 'solidarity'), encouraging them to boycott companies that force their workers to work with SA platinum whether it be through manufacture, transport, storage, or any other way
- Extension of the struggle in other directions, for example:
Similar practical solidarity with the miners of Soma in Turkey, who's struggle in May 2014 erupted into major social upheaval involving a general-strike of hundreds of thousands, riots across the country, invasion of the mineworkers union by miners, and an occupation by 1000 people of the mining department at the Technical University of Istanbul. The department has blossomed into a lively community, with sleep rooms, unisex restrooms and makeshift movie theatres where students screen documentaries about problems in the mining industry. Students hold heated debates one after another in jam-packed hall. Just a few steps away, the names of each of the 301 miners who died at Soma have been written on the wall. We wont be engineers of the murderers. We will be the engineers of the people, reads one piece of graffiti. According to a participant The faculty is complicit in the deaths of the miners. The mining company delivered a seminar here two weeks before the disaster. We will not leave this building until those responsible are brought to account
- It is not difficult to discover a practical basis for such solidarity. Every year hundreds of workers are swallowed whole by the mines of South Africa; the bosses and their stooges call these accidents but it is clear that under conditions where profits are adversely affected by the safety of proletarians, to the persistent detriment of the latter, there is nothing accidental at all in the equation. The same can be said for the hundreds of thousands killed by silicosis and other lung diseases, some of whom are fighting Anglo American in the courts as I write. The more proletarians are exposed to work, the more they are recklessly exposed to injury and death, with little if any compensation afterwards (how could a few coins possibly replace permanently ruined lungs?). In response to this deliberately disastrous set-up, the chemical workers of Porto Maghera in Italy embarked on a campaign of imaginative industrial action during the 1970s including checkerboard strikes (systematic deployment of short, unpredictable strikes by different sections of the workplace to apply the maximum disruption with the minimum hardship for strikers within a factory or industrial complex) and wildcat demonstrations within the workplace (an initial group forming a snake and working their way through the shop-floor picking up those from different areas as they go and forming a general assembly at the end -- a tactic that was applied to great effect at the level of entire industrial areas during the Durban strikes of 1973) under the slogan 'less work, more pay'. The relevance of this to the current miner's strike will be readily apparent.
- Similar practical solidarity with the Marikana land occupations in Cape Town and Durban, such as the formation of Anti-Anti Land Invasion Units
- Encouragement of those around the world to extend the Marikana struggle however they can, adopting the boycott methods above, inventing new ones of their own and communicating their actions internationally. The best way to encourage the international extension of the strike is to practically demonstrate what local contributions can be made to struggles from around the world.
- Extensive discussion and practical investigation into of all the above and much more, for example:
- Co-ordination and communication of information about how many are on strike and where, whether production continues in any of the affected mines and why (what is the proportion of strikers to scabs in these places, what are the strikers doing to shut down production, if anything, and how have such attempts fared over the duration of the strike) what is the state of the reserves for those mines that have shut down and how do the reserves get transported (is any picketing happening here)? A recent newspaper article on the situation states 'Although 60% of South Africa's platinum group metal supply has been sluggish, the mining giants have been well placed to withstand the strike as many of their operations in the eastern limb of the platinum belt, which stretches into Zimbabwe, remain unaffected. Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) is producing at 60% capacity with the continued operation of its more profitable mines. Impala Platinum is producing at 40%. Even Lonmin, which is considered the most vulnerable of the worlds three largest platinum producers because it has no operations outside of Rustenburg, is not as close to falling over as media reports may suggest it is sitting on $351-million in unprocessed inventory and at least half of this could be monetised.' ('How long could the mines hold out?', Mail & Guardian, 13 Jun 2014) The billions worth of stockpiled inventory which currently 'mean the mineworker strike is almost convenient for the mining companies' cannot be 'monetised' magically. It takes the form of material goods sitting in Rustenberg alongside thousands of idle, highly disgruntled strikers and the surrounding townships full of equally disaffected proletarians. The warehouses in which it is stored are staffed by fellow workers. There are entrances and exits, roads and railways through which it must pass in order to generate profit for the bosses, all of which are staffed by transport workers. The unprocessed material must be refined at centralised facilities, operated by other workers. These are strategic facts which could be of great value in the struggle if incisively & boldly used. The mining operations in Limpopo & Zimbabwe are likewise staffed by fellow proletarians working under similar conditions, their products must be transported through specific, limited, possibly vulnerable lines of supply which are themselves staffed by yet more workers. Just as the ability of the mines to extract cheap labour from black proletarians who are in the process destroyed generation after generation is not a god-given certainty, so too the ability of the mines to 'hold out' -- the continued availability of their other sources of profit -- is by no means guaranteed by divine providence. Tactical positions could be targeted by 'flying pickets' (convoys of vehicles deployed to locations as and when the occasion demanded), transport workers could refuse to cross picket lines like the bus driver who stopped his vehicle in the middle of the street during a demonstration in London during the British miner's strike. If the income from these reserves & operations are shut down the bosses will straightaway find the worker's demands much more compelling. A comprehensive grasp of the situation of the strikers could also be gathered for various possible uses. How many strikers have their own reserves in the rural areas and how many don't, what's the situation of those who do (how long can their reserves hold out for) and those who don't (how do they survive?) in what state is the network of support (like the looting of the entire shopping centre in Rustenburg, the occupation of state houses & illegal electricity connections in Sondela township) that help those feeling close to scabbing survive a little easier, and so on.
- Research into previous solidarity actions such as those by the supermarket workers of Ireland and the dockworkers of Holland, the UK, Sweden and the USA who refused to handle apartheid goods: What were they thinking? How did their colleagues, their employers and their neighbors respond? Did their actions help them advance their own interests, how or how not, what were their interests and what were the contrary interests of their employers? How can we make use of this history, what practical conclusion can be drawn, today?
- Similar studies of, among others, the creative anti-apartheid solidarity actions of BZ in Denmark (whose struggle to defend the occupation of Rysegade in the 1986 was probably most tactically brilliant anti-eviction action in modern history) the British miner's strike of 1984-85, the Asturias coal miners strikes of 1963 and 1934, the Harlan County coal miner's strike of 1972 & the Grant County zinc miner's strike of 1951 in the USA, the Alexandria bus boycott of 1957 and the incredibly rich hidden history of the revolutionary movement in South Africa, especially during the period 1976 - 1986 for the purpose of appropriating & improving ideas for possible actions, drawing conclusions for the conduct of current action, and so on
* There is also a more direct link, as pointed out to me by one of the producers of revoltagainstplenty.com: 'Just after the hell in Marikana I was with my bro on Woolley Colliery spoil heap where Arthur Scargill once worked. We picked up a copy of the local Barnsley paper and fell out laughing on reading that Cyril Ramaphosa had come (or was coming) to see Arthur Scargill, no doubt because the South African NUM was somewhat modelled on Scargill's moment at the helm of the British NUM [during the British miner's strike]. Whatever happened to that proposed meeting I simply do not know though I now read that Ramaphosa wants to take over from Zuma...'
3.
An example of the sort of strategic supply-chain research necessary for such actions, together with a demonstration of the possibilities for extending them in the direction of disruptions with significant , nearly immediate impact in the everyday life of everyone (those in Cape Town, or even Johannesburg, for example, only experienced the miner's strike as an external event taking place somewhere far away, mediated by mass communications media), can be seen in the text Choke Points, which mapped the high-traffic nodes and lines through which the majority of commodities circulate in the eastern United States. Noting the existence of only seven such lines passing from the ports to the rest of the country, and recent blockades of one such line in Canada by a handful of Native American activists, the authors asked:
'If an action conducted by a relatively small group of people (infinitesimal compared to the thousands present for the November 2nd shutdown of the Port of Oakland [following the repression of the 2011 Occupy movement]) could halt a major Class I route operated by CN [The Canadian National Railway Company] for a few hours, what could possibly emerge if intermodal railway line blockades became a tactic diffused and implemented in the same way plaza occupations were globally diffused in 2011-2012?' (Choke Points: Mapping an Anticapitalist Counter-Logistics in California; Degenerate Communism)
Such questions are well worth posing considering the fact that road blockades have become widely diffused on at least a national scale during the in South Africa during the struggles of the 1970s/80s as well as those of today; similar steps were taken in the 1997 - 2001 Argentinian piquetero movement; and both road and rail blockades were tactics deployed nation-wide in the 2006 anti-CPE movement in France as well as the recent revolt in Langa, Cape Town, in which all road and rail routes in and out of the township were blocked for the day.
This latter is a local demonstration of how the general strike today increasingly takes the form not of a voluntary withrdrawal of labour at the point of production, 'but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow... In such a situation,' say participants of the Oakland Commune in the very stimulating text Blockading the Port is Only the First of Many Last Resorts, 'the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple. In November 2010, during the French general strike, we saw how a couple dozen flying pickets could effectively bring a city of millions to a halt. Such mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration and sale of goods produced elsewhere.' The stay-away produced by the revolt, which was effectively a local general-strike as the vast majority of Langa residents worked elsewhere, was imposed by those unemployed, part-time and precarious young workers who blockaded the roads and railway lines of the township.
Choke Points also details the possibilities for blockades of intermodal rail yards and air cargo warehouses, concluding that the former would be rendered obsolete by successful blockade of rail lines and the latter insignificant by dint of the relatively low number of commodities involved -- not to mention the difficulty presented by far tighter security surrounding all air transport! Another possibility not mentioned in that text was demonstrated by the 2000 UK fuel protests in which the week-long blockade of major oil refineries and depots led to only 5% of normal fuel deliveries being made, with all the inevitable consequences.
Simultaneous blockades of ports, major railways, highways, freight truck chokepoints, rail yards, air cargo warehouses and oil-refineries would not only significantly disrupt the circulation of all commodity-capital but also severely strain the capacities of the forces of law and order to crush such actions by forcing them to stretch their troops over widely dispersed locales thus depriving them of the ability to concentrate their offensive power at a single point.
When networks of commodity-capital circulation are disrupted, they open up space for new forms of action and relation. Streets are transformed from murderous conveyor-belts into marvelous living-rooms for dialogue, feast, festival, self-expression, protest, organisation, recovery. Rapid climate change turns what is normally a concrete desert dominated by dead objects into a fertile proliferation of teeming possibilities and playful people taking their chances with gusto and gut-rage, handfuls at a time. Thus a participant of last year's massive mobilisations in Brazil could take to the streets normally reserved for machines and dance to the music of now comradely strangers normally reserved and silent carrying a sign that said 'Cities are for people, not cars.'
There are also tactics which divert networks towards radical ends, with disruption produced as a secondary benefit. One example is when the children of the townships comandeered buses during the uprisings of the 1970s/80s in order to transport people to neighbourhood assemblies and mass meetings, or to drive them into the sides of schools and factories. A more recent example is when members of the Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign forced their way onto trains in order to join demonstrations in the city center.
The above by no means represents some sort of ultimate strategem to be universally applied, once and for all, by masses assigned the task of implementing the directives of others. They are simply an outline meant to demonstrate a few directions for collective action not yet taken, inspired by what has already been done by those determined to change their own lives. The possibilities for subversion are limited by little more than your imagination, audacity, and organisational capacity.
