Vol 1 – Issue 4 by Catalyst

Author:Catalyst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-25T20:41:05+00:00

Collective Empowerment

Where is this counterpower to come from? How can the radical left contribute to its emergence? The former question finds a tentative answer throughout the present article. Workers’ movements from public services unions, ports, the car industry, logistics, Caterpillar, Amazon, Ryanair, Deliveroo, and so on, wield huge potential. There is no downplaying broad and diverse movements on labor market reform, climate action, health, agriculture, or trade agreements. Hope stems from these struggles. Under right-wing hegemony, they have the potential of putting the initiative back with social movements and the radical left.

Active participation in the myriad of movements at different levels is of the essence to foster the understanding that a wholly different Europe is necessary. Change comes from below. Bringing the voice of social movements and struggle to the doorstep of parliament is important, but does not suffice. “Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep. They just lie there and they die there,” Nat King Cole knew all too well. The work of radical left-wing members of parliament should serve the strengthening of the movement. Members of parliament bring the struggles of the working people to the parliamentary arena and go back to the people afterward to inform them and reinforce the counterpower.

This vision contrasts sharply with the idea of advancing moderate demands aiming at stabilizing the current European framework or offering it nicer sheen. It finds itself equally at odds with exit campaigns that identify the EU, its currency, or German capital as the main enemy, hence foregoing the systemic nature of unequal development and exploitation. With hegemony still very much held by the Right, the radical left has a responsibility to prioritize awareness raising, organization, and the mobilization of working-class forces at every level. The electoral results or polls in certain countries are a further encouragement to transform this support into a collective political force.

A European perspective will eventually both favor and require more interaction and coordination amongst radical left parties on a European or sub-European level, but does not mean abandoning national struggles. On the contrary, each political party cannot but wage and stimulate struggles in the first place in its own country. Changing the balance of forces within each country will be essential to creating locomotives of change for the whole continent. As change will most probably not come to all European countries simultaneously, some struggles are likely to serve as vanguards of change. Local and national social movements and interconnecting parties contribute to building power relations that can lead to European breakthroughs. Therefore we should articulate our struggle at the local, national, and European level with radical demands towards the (proto-)states at the respective levels. A major task lies in facilitating and actively contributing to the interconnections between struggles and movements across Europe. Top-down electoral initiatives disconnected from local realities will never be a substitute for local activism and grassroots work.

What platform this is best done on depends on concrete and local realities. Ideally, a simple but powerful bottom line would nonetheless express

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.