Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why We Need an Ecosocialist Organisation
0 Plays2 seconds ago
Explaining the need for organising on an ecosocialist basis, Simon Hannah urges socialists to take the crises that confront us seriously.
Text originally published here, 22/01/25
Read by Jack Graham
Music: Debunking by Yuzzy
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Eco-Socialism
00:00:00
Speaker
are why we need an eco-socialist organisation, explaining the need for organising on an eco-socialist basis.
00:00:20
Speaker
Simon Hanna urges socialists to take the crises that confront us seriously.
Critique of Capitalism
00:00:35
Speaker
We need to get rid of capitalism. This is the central point. It is a deeply destructive economic model based on alienation, exploitation, and enriching a tiny minority at the expense of the majority.
00:00:50
Speaker
This is not to mention its devastation of the environment, which looks terminal, and prioritising shareholder value at the expense of future survival. Some say capitalism is broken because it doesn't provide for everyone.
00:01:05
Speaker
This is wrong. Capitalism is functioning exactly as intended. Even the small joys we have in our own lives only exist because someone, somewhere, is making a profit out of it.
00:01:18
Speaker
Getting rid of this system isn't easy, though. It won't collapse of its own accord, not into something better, anyway. It has a massive army of people who help make the system function every day, from bureaucrats to journalists to judges to literal armies.
00:01:34
Speaker
The system is entrenched and fights for its survival, even as it is destroying the basis of life on the planet. This means we must take action to fight for a world worth living in for us and future generations.
The Importance of Political Activism
00:01:48
Speaker
One of the biggest decisions a human being can make about their lives is to become politically active. To move from being just a private individual who has opinions and sometimes votes to being someone who wants to actively try to make the world a better place is extraordinary.
00:02:06
Speaker
It is a decision to not just care about yourself, but to work to change the way our society works, for millions, even billions of people. To want to do that is a very powerful thing.
00:02:20
Speaker
The task that then falls to political activists, of overcoming capitalism and replacing it with an eco-socialist society, is enormous.
The Need for Collective Organization
00:02:31
Speaker
This is why we need organisation. As the black US revolutionary Malcolm X said, we are not outnumbered, we are out-organised.
00:02:43
Speaker
We must build a collective organisation, not just around particular campaign issues, but as a basis to overthrow capitalism as an entire global system.
00:02:55
Speaker
Naomi Klein powerfully makes this case in her 2014 book This Changes Everything. Quote, I have, in the past, strongly defended the right of young movements to their amorphous structures, which means rejecting identifiable leadership or eschewing programmatic demands.
00:03:13
Speaker
And there is no question that old political habits and structures must be reinvented to reflect the new realities, as well as past failures. But, as many are coming to realise, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalisation, is not a luxury today's transformative movements can afford.
00:03:35
Speaker
In practice, that means that, despite endless griping, tweeting, flash mobbing and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained transformative movements of the past.
00:03:48
Speaker
Unquote. Building an organisation is one of the tools that can build and sustain transformative movements. Anti-capitalist resistance is a revolutionary socialist organisation.
00:04:01
Speaker
What does that mean? We want to build a mass movement that can overthrow capitalism by removing the capitalist class from power by seizing their corporations and wealth.
00:04:12
Speaker
The goal is to establish a new kind of society based on democratic social ownership of the economy. This is a political act. It cannot just be left to social movements or spontaneous action.
00:04:26
Speaker
It requires strategy and relentless work to make big things happen.
Revolutionary Approaches to Change
00:04:32
Speaker
We are revolutionary because we do not believe that the capitalist class will simply give up power because they lost a vote.
00:04:41
Speaker
Whenever their power is threatened, the capitalist class and their politicians deploy the police and use the judiciary and the courts to imprison people. We cannot undo this entire economic, social and political system just through a general election to Parliament.
00:05:00
Speaker
We are also revolutionary because the scale of the climate crisis over the next few years is going to see massive transformations in the environment, which will have a direct impact on human and animal life around the globe.
00:05:13
Speaker
If we want to avert the worst of the crisis, we need to revolutionise the very fabric of our society.
00:05:24
Speaker
Why being in an organisation is helpful These are the basic arguments for why we need a socialist organisation and why you should join us. Organisational strength.
00:05:36
Speaker
Being in a socialist group means building a collective where our individual talents and energies can be focused and amplified. Learning from our movement's history. A socialist group is also an important way of ensuring that the lessons of past struggles are not lost, so that we can build on successes and avoid defeats.
00:05:57
Speaker
Anti-capitalist resistance has comrades who were involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1970s and younger members involved in the trans rights politics of the last few years. A socialist organisation allows us to come together and connect social movement campaigns with the wider working class movement.
00:06:16
Speaker
The Battle of Ideas The capitalists and their politicians aggressively promote their ideology, even having the audacity to claim that capitalism is common sense, through political parties, the media, etc.
00:06:31
Speaker
Only through serious organisation can we challenge these ideas on a sustained basis. Capitalism does not just exist because of lies or propaganda by the capitalist class.
00:06:42
Speaker
It appears real precisely because we are all humans embedded in market economics. It structures our lives and therefore outlooks. Socialism requires explaining why this is not the best way for us to live as humans and to outline how society could be better.
00:07:02
Speaker
Educate and train activists We are better fighters for human freedom if we develop our skills, whether that is in writing articles, giving speeches, running campaigns, organising protests or whatever else needs doing.
Building a Healthy Socialist Movement
00:07:16
Speaker
We also need to be able to win arguments with people, challenge reactionary ideas and give hope to people who have fallen into pessimism or cynicism.
00:07:30
Speaker
Building a healthy organization The history of the struggle for socialism is almost as long as the history of capitalism itself. During this time, the working class and socialist left have built many organizations including trade unions, cooperatives, educational societies and socialist parties of different sizes and strengths.
00:07:51
Speaker
There is a lot we can learn from history, but certain things we clearly want to avoid to build a healthy organisation as part of a wider movement. The first is that we want to avoid building a political sect.
00:08:05
Speaker
A sect isn't just a small group, it is an approach to organising that privileges the group above all else. it means focusing only on building your organisation and not the wider movement.
00:08:18
Speaker
While we want to recruit and grow anti-capitalist resistance, this can only happen in relation to the wider workers and social movements. We also don't want leadership cults, where one guru dominates everything based on their whims.
00:08:33
Speaker
One problem with the Russian Revolution was how people turned Lenin, after he was dead, into an infallible expert who never made a mistake, which allowed Stalin to emerge as the unrivalled leader.
00:08:45
Speaker
This was part of how things broke down after the genuinely revolutionary early years following 1917.
00:08:52
Speaker
We want collective leadership based on democratic participation, where our individual strengths come together, and we know no one person is a perfect leader beyond reproach.
00:09:03
Speaker
This is why we have a democratic organisation. We value people being active, taking an interest, having opinions, attending internal meetings and airing views.
00:09:14
Speaker
People can challenge leadership if they think mistakes are being made. No one is expelled simply for having a different political view, unless it is dangerous to others, like serious misogyny or racism.
00:09:26
Speaker
We think socialists are at their best when they are part of a lively internal culture and debates within the group. This approach is crucial because sometimes socialist groups get it wrong.
00:09:38
Speaker
New things are happening constantly and new events can be responded to incorrectly. There were big debates in the 1960s, for instance, over the New Left, which was less focused on trade unionism and more on opposing the Vietnam War, promoting women's rights or opposing racism.
00:09:56
Speaker
Some groups were sceptical of these movements, judging them as middle class and not properly socialist. Others joined them with both feet, sometimes collapsing into the movements and losing their identities.
00:10:09
Speaker
A healthy political organisation, with principles, but that can relate to new situations, is what we need. The way we approach political disagreements is very important.
00:10:21
Speaker
There have been too many damaging divisions on the left. It's a common joke about how often socialist groups have splits, like the People's Liberation Front of Judea from Monty Python. So we want to focus on collaborative working, where we can agree on general points.
00:10:36
Speaker
This means we have agreed positions as an organisation, adopted at conferences or members' meetings, aggregates, and the elected leadership has a mandate to adopt political positions when needed.
00:10:48
Speaker
But the leadership's position can be challenged and overturned at a wider membership meeting, and, crucially, just because anti-capitalist resistance has a particular line on certain events doesn't mean every member has to repeat them in public.
00:11:03
Speaker
We don't want to elevate tactical questions to matters of principle. Whether you vote for a mainstream trade union-backed party like Labour is tactical. There's no point splitting over it.
00:11:15
Speaker
However, supporting working-class struggles and resistance to social oppression are matters of principle for us. We certainly encourage members to act collectively and to have a degree of loyalty to the organisation's principles.
00:11:28
Speaker
Otherwise, why be a member? But disagreements over tactical issues or slogans should not lead to heresy hunting or relentless internal debates.
Critiques of Established Political Parties
00:11:42
Speaker
Why not just join Labour or the Greens? There are anti-capitalist resistance members and supporters active in trade unions and larger political parties like Labour and the Greens.
00:11:53
Speaker
But as an eco-socialist organisation, we do not believe that a primary focus on Parliament is the way to get the kind of change we want. Labour is a mass party with many trade unions affiliated, but it is not a socialist party.
00:12:08
Speaker
It is integrated into the management of capitalism and maintaining the status quo. That doesn't mean Labour won't occasionally implement good reforms like the welfare state and NHS, but you cannot reform capitalism into something else.
00:12:23
Speaker
The capitalist class would never allow it. And we saw how Labour treated Corbyn and the left between 2015 and 2019.
00:12:32
Speaker
The Green Party can appear as a credible left alternative, and they usually have a more radical manifesto than Labour. But because the Greens share the same political strategy as Labour to win parliamentary elections, they are subject to similar pressures to conform and ultimately facilitate the needs of capital.
00:12:52
Speaker
When the Greens were in power, in Ireland and Germany, they quickly implemented policies they had previously campaigned against. In Germany in the early 2000s, their government, with the Social Democrats, called the police on environmental activists trying to blockade nuclear power stations.
00:13:08
Speaker
On a smaller scale, when the Green Party ran Brighton Council after 2010, they implemented austerity measures just like any other council. As eco-socialists, we are critical of so-called democracy under capitalism for several reasons.
00:13:23
Speaker
First, it isn't real democracy. The economy is in private hands, and there is no democratic say in workplaces, even though work takes up most of our lives and is central to our society.
00:13:37
Speaker
Capitalism is built on the exploitation of labour and nature, and parliamentary reforms can ameliorate that, but won't end it. Important parts of the state are also not subject to election or democratic oversight.
00:13:51
Speaker
The police, army, secret service, civil service, and judiciary, for instance. These parts of the state defend the status quo. There is also an issue with electoralism.
00:14:04
Speaker
Electoral democracy replicates passive political relations of experts or politicians doing things for you. But it is also based on the divisions under capitalism, between the exploitation of labour, both paid and unpaid, and concentration of power by the ruling class into a police-military bureaucracy that sustains their rule.
00:14:25
Speaker
At the same time, it allows reforms to maintain capitalist hegemony and sustain it as a system. Capital plus electoral parliamentary democracy creates capitalism as a system.
00:14:38
Speaker
The tyranny of capital with the veneer of democratic oversight. This reality creates a culture of depoliticisation and dissatisfaction.
Grassroots and Democratic Transformation
00:14:49
Speaker
Nothing changes. They're all the same. Our understanding of radical transformation comes from people building struggles, empowering themselves collectively, and challenging power directly, using new, genuinely democratic, accountable and responsive institutions.
00:15:11
Speaker
Taking action collectively in your own interests leads to radical challenges to existing power structures. People who were quiet become loud. The oppressed fight back.
00:15:24
Speaker
The exploited band together. When faced with this, politicians try to channel discontent into votes for themselves. for example the Democrats in the USA, or Labour in Britain.
00:15:38
Speaker
But this is about giving themselves more power at the expense of the radical fight from below.
00:15:48
Speaker
Working in broader movements bread and butter activity for socialists is working in social movements and community campaigns. It is important to enthusiastically throw yourself into movements where growing numbers of people are fighting for their liberation.
00:16:05
Speaker
Whether it is workers fighting for higher wages to offset inflation, or black people protesting police violence, or trans people demanding adequate healthcare, or people opposing genocide in Palestine.
00:16:17
Speaker
These kinds of initiatives are sometimes called united fronts, as in we present a united front to the bosses and the reactionaries. Movements are made up of separate organisations and tendencies, but they are united towards a common goal.
00:16:34
Speaker
In movements like these, it is important not to fall into two traps. The first is coming across as sectarian, because you have a my way or the highway approach, where others already need to have a fully developed out socialist strategy for it to be principled to engage with them.
00:16:52
Speaker
This is a recipe for isolation and constantly counterposing socialism to whatever is actually going on. You end up being out of touch. The other danger is simply politically collapsing into movements and struggles and offering nothing much to them.
00:17:09
Speaker
This usually involves following along behind the existing leaderships or most active people and refusing to critically engage or offer ideas for how to win.
Socialists in Movements: Strategy and Engagement
00:17:20
Speaker
If movements spontaneously came up with their own winning policies and tactics every time, then it would make us wonder what the point was in being a socialist organisation in the first place.
00:17:32
Speaker
This is sometimes called liquidationism. You end up liquidating your own voice and perspective. We must be able to work across the left on the things that matter without dissolving ourselves into a broad movement where we lose sight of what we are trying to specifically contribute.
00:17:50
Speaker
Navigating between these two one-sided approaches is not always easy. For most people, it is something that they learn over time. As eco-socialists, we believe we have important things to contribute and useful historical lessons of victories and defeats for existing struggles.
00:18:08
Speaker
But these have to be part of a dialogue with the movement. We should be one step ahead of the movement. But perhaps only one step. A practical example.
00:18:20
Speaker
Let's take an example of the mass pay strikes in 2022-3 over inflation. We start from the simple question, why are working people being made to pay the cost of bosses putting up prices?
00:18:34
Speaker
So turn this crisis into a chance to argue for positive changes. This is translated into demands and slogans. For instance, wages should be linked to inflation.
00:18:46
Speaker
This is an important demand. What about price caps on essential goods? Introducing rent controls. All of these are examples where we counterpose a socialist response to inflation with what the government is doing.
00:19:01
Speaker
Politics only exists within the context of people fighting for them. So we also have to consider the movement that is being built. Lots of unions organised strike days.
00:19:12
Speaker
Some unions won some concessions. Some didn't win anything much. Very few of the unions actually won inflation-busting pay increases. What is a good intervention into such a movement?
00:19:26
Speaker
There are the basics, such as attending picket lines to show solidarity and trying to get your own workplace or union to strike over pay. But we can also argue for the unions to coordinate their strike days to make them more powerful.
00:19:40
Speaker
Also, one-day strikes are limited. Why not try and escalate to two- or three-day strikes? What about calling mass assemblies with the local community to build a broad movement?
00:19:51
Speaker
This could include not just workers impacted by inflation, but students, the unemployed, people on disability payments, pensioners, and so on. Can we turn a trade union issue into a class issue that builds the broadest possible movement?
00:20:08
Speaker
This example is just one of many, but you can apply the approach to any issue – racism, climate change, housing, women's rights, and trans liberation, and so on.
Anti-Capitalist Resistance: Unique Perspectives
00:20:24
Speaker
What is unique about anti-capitalist resistance? There are so many different socialist groups out there. So what is different about ACR?
00:20:35
Speaker
It might be worth saying here that in some ways we don't want to focus on the differences because in some ways we do what any other left group worth their salt is doing. Supporting workers' strikes over wages, building solidarity with Palestine, writing political analysis, and so on.
00:20:53
Speaker
For us, basic things need to be done because they are tried and tested ways of mobilising people in a fight for a better world. And despite any political differences that might exist, we are adamant that unity and struggle is crucial.
00:21:09
Speaker
Working people and the oppressed hate petty sectarian divisions when they are faced with a serious attack by those in power. Having said that, there is a reason why we are building ACR and not in another group, though we are very much in favour of broader left realignment and unity wherever possible.
00:21:27
Speaker
We emerged as a fusion of two organisations, Socialist Resistance and Mutiny, in 2021, which also involved other activists across the socialist left.
00:21:39
Speaker
The basis of this unity was on three key issues. Eco-socialism to fight environmental collapse. A concern about the creeping fascism of mainstream politics in the form of people like Trump in the USA, Bolsonaro in Brazil and others.
00:21:56
Speaker
and a view that Brexit had not been a working-class triumph against EU neoliberalism, but was a movement rooted in reactionary nationalist concerns about immigration and border control, led by anti-working-class figures like Nigel Farage.
00:22:12
Speaker
What was needed was internationalism, not a left nationalism. On these three issues, our views have not changed, though we would be clear that your position on Brexit in 2016 is of far less importance than whether you want to oppose the racist attacks on immigrants and refugees happening in the wake of Brexit.
00:22:32
Speaker
Again, this is because we must build the broadest possible unity in struggle. This is why we attend stand-up-to-racism protests, even though they are organised by the SWP, who were pro-Brexit.
00:22:45
Speaker
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a very divisive event on the British left. Some welcomed it as a blow to Western imperialism, which, from our perspective, is entirely wrong.
00:22:58
Speaker
We oppose Western imperialism and its institutions like NATO, but we also oppose Russian imperialism. The invasion of Ukraine was, even in Putin's own words, to recolonise Ukraine as part of a vision to create a greater Russia before Ukraine split off in the early 1990s.
00:23:19
Speaker
The colonisation of one country by another is wrong, and no one on the left should support it, even if it is resolving borders created by colonialism.
00:23:30
Speaker
We have to advocate for revolutionary eco-socialist politics which break out of the logic of nationalism and colonialism and forge a new kind of radical project.
00:23:42
Speaker
Within our own ranks there were debates about which was the best slogan to raise, but we have always been clear that Ukraine has a right to exist and therefore defend itself from invasion, just as Iraq and Afghanistan had a right to protect themselves from invasion by the US and the UK in the early 2000s.
00:24:03
Speaker
We have built connections with Ukrainian socialists and trade unions which have been very important because we are fighting to defend their country from invasion by a foreign power that has historically oppressed them.
Efforts in Eco-Socialism and Global Crises
00:24:16
Speaker
We have also been proud of our work around eco-socialism, taking the lead in organising a 150-strong conference in December 2023 and another in December 2024, and building a network with others to forge an eco-socialist movement in this country and beyond.
00:24:36
Speaker
We are putting effort into developing our politics, arguments and strategy around this issue because for us, the environment is not just another issue among many. It is the basis of life on the planet.
00:24:48
Speaker
So overthrowing capitalism to prevent runaway global warming or unstoppable climate degradation is central. This is an example of where we are, even with our limited resources, focusing on movement building alongside others.
00:25:04
Speaker
Building a fight back against the attacks on trans people in the UK in the wake of the Cass Review is also something that we have put our focus on. Trans people are some of the most oppressed in our society, with blatant bigotry against them from mainstream politicians and the mass media.
00:25:23
Speaker
The fight over the right to exist as a trans person goes to the very core of being free to be who you want to be in the world. And it is central to any socialist idea of liberation that people be allowed to live the lives they want to live.
00:25:40
Speaker
This is true of sexuality or gender or anything else. However, some groups, like the Communist Party of Britain, have a shockingly bad, transphobic view on this issue.
00:25:53
Speaker
And we reject it entirely.
00:26:00
Speaker
Self-organisation for socially oppressed people.
00:26:05
Speaker
A core part of our organising philosophy is that people from socially oppressed groups should be able to meet separately, to discuss and organise as they see fit.
00:26:16
Speaker
This includes women, non-binary, queer, black people meaning anyone who isn't white and disabled people. This isn't about separatism. We are all members of anti-capitalist resistance and act collectively.
00:26:31
Speaker
but it is about ensuring that voices from oppressed groups can be heard and their particular concerns can be listened to. This is because, in our society, rooted as it is in sexism, nationalism and racism as well as ableist ideology, certain people can benefit from relative advantages in terms of confidence to speak and to be taken seriously.
00:26:58
Speaker
but also the default assumption or perspective is often around white, straight men. This is still the case, even after decades of social movements and struggles to shift it, though there have been significant victories as well to make sure that specific concerns for socially oppressed groups are heard.
00:27:18
Speaker
We have to make sure that our own organisation as much as possible reflects the wider working class, which is very diverse, and increasingly so. Self-organisation is a way to address that.
00:27:32
Speaker
We also advocate for self-organisations in the trade unions and Labour Party, because it is vital that people who are marginalised by capitalism get to be heard and can advocate for their own interests.
Building a Mass Revolutionary Organization
00:27:49
Speaker
Building a Mass Revolutionary Organization To change the world, we need as many active, organized revolutionaries as we can get. We have to build a mass organization that can play a central role in replacing capitalism with eco-socialism.
00:28:07
Speaker
This cannot be done by scattered individuals, by a focus on lifestyle choices, or going on the occasional demonstration. While we are actively growing our organisation, we cannot become a mass revolutionary force by recruiting a few people here and there.
00:28:25
Speaker
Our What We Stand For explains that, quote, anti-capitalist resistance will encourage convergence with other revolutionary Marxist activists and organisations, unquote.
00:28:37
Speaker
We favour a broader realignment of the left. But this cannot be done on an unprincipled basis, where you ignore genuine political differences.
00:28:48
Speaker
There has to be a large degree of political unity over your programme for action and how you approach political questions. Nevertheless, the reality is that any organisation that gets larger inevitably moves towards a more heterogeneous multi-tendency organisation.
00:29:06
Speaker
At the moment, the socialist left is scattered with groups of various sizes here and there. Some are in the tens, some are a few thousand. There are real differences about why some of these groups have emerged from splits and divisions.
00:29:22
Speaker
But we have to be serious that we need a very significant revolutionary organisation to have any hope of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with eco-socialism. Any mass revolutionary organisation will be made from splits in larger organisations and fusions, as well as new people joining who might never have been involved in politics before.
00:29:45
Speaker
But we are clear we cannot simply unite the left where there are very real political differences on important issues. Many of these disagreements cannot be resolved by simply talking it out or debating.
00:29:59
Speaker
They are based on quite radically different assumptions about politics. It requires working together in mass movements, building trust, and seeing the benefit of more unified action in practice.
00:30:11
Speaker
We are clear, however, that globally all the contradictions of capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism and austerity are culminating, most clearly, in the climate crisis.
00:30:23
Speaker
The growth of the far right is not an accident. It is a symptom of the wider problem of a society based on division, exploitation, competition and hierarchy.
00:30:37
Speaker
We have to work urgently to build movements and organisations that can make a difference. This is not a hobby or something that we can just do because it is interesting.
00:30:49
Speaker
It is a pressing concern for billions of people. Time is against us, which is why these ideas matter and they need to be taken seriously.
Joining Anti-Capitalist Resistance
00:31:16
Speaker
If you would like to join Anti-Capitalist Resistance, then you can at the link in the description. If you want to contact us to discuss these ideas more, then email us at info at anticapitalistresistance.org.
00:31:41
Speaker
Simon Hanna is a socialist, a union activist, and the author of A Party With Socialists In It, A History of the Labour Left, Can't Pay, Won't Pay, The Fight to Stop the Poll Tax, and System Crash, An Activist Guide to Making Revolution.