Shoutout to the amazing feminists who interrupted the PvdA (labour party) during the pacifist “anti-racist” demonstration yesterday in Amsterdam! Blowing whistles and shouting slogans, they pointed out the hypocricy of collaborating with this ruling party and made sure the PvdA representative was inaudible for people in the front. It made me realise we should do this more.
The response of the organising committee was as shitty as predictable. They hurried to say that “we shouldn’t be divided” because the times are so rough now. And that we should stand as a unity because we are all against racism or something.
This ridiculous response is typical for mainstream leftism. Calling for a unity with the ruling (!) labour party? The party who has actually been fucking over the working class for twenty years by privatizing health care, privatizing social housing and making education more expensive? The party who has designed, expanded and executed a deeply racist migration policy? The party that has cooperated so much with the neoliberals that by now they have become them? How the fuck do you form a unity with that kind of party? But instead of being real about this, the leftists organisers actually allowed these racist neoliberals to co-organise the event and they backed them up after PvdA had left the stage.
The interruption was good because it emphasised exactly that. But it also showed something that’s not being highlighted enough: the petty bourgeois politics and the strategical failure of mainstream leftism. The kind of “left” that sides with (or are) hypocrite racists rather than being honest and engaging in an actual politics that will liberate the people. That repeats a shallow narrative about how everyone should be equal rather than organizing people to disturb the fascist manifestation 250 meter further down the road. The kind of left that wants to create a “broad” but empty “unity” with the very people who are our class enemy rather than building genuine radical political power that can smash fascism. The organisation even explicitly called for the attendants to “not go to the Pegida demonstration” to disturb it. They literally do not want to confront fascism, let alone stop it. This pacifist idea is only one of countless efforts to please the bourgeois media; it doesn’t connect with material reality in any way. It shows that what they are concerned with most is upholding a false belief in long ago watered down ideas that represent only their own narcism and their petty bourgeois line. The result is the displaying of the highest possible form of irony when they argue that nazis should have freedom of speech, but at the same time silence the critical voices from their own so-called “broad unity”. How disconnected from anti-fascist struggle are you if you take this position?
Disturbing a bullshit theater like the one yesterday is a good example of an appropriate response to mainstream leftism. We need to engage in confrontation with them in order to sharpen the contradictions among “the left”. This will attract people who want to move forward and overthrow capitalism and it will filter out the fakes. The fakes will only hold you back and depoliticise and neutralise you under the banner of “building a broad movement”, sucking up the energy you could be using for building actual radical political power. Building a movement doesn’t start in the mainstream. It doesn’t start with (siding with) political sell-outs, racist, lying capitalists. It can only come from the margins, the most exploited and oppressed parts of society. We need to open up spaces for potential radicals to meet up, develop and organise, organise and develop. We need to shut the spaces down for mainstream leftism. We need to propagate a genuine socialist future and create radical alternatives to the existing “left” that actually have the potential to overthrow capitalism and smash fascism.
Rode Draad 