(The following speech was given by ARA Toronto member Mike Donovan at "From
protest to resistance", a hugely successful public forum on the Free Trade
Area of The Americas and the radical anti-capitalist, anti-racist and
anti-authoritarian elements organizing against it. Members of The Ontario
Coalition Against Poverty, Food For Chiapas, Colours of Resistance, The
Anti-Capitalist Convergence, The Summit of The Americas Welcoming Committee
as well as revolutionary anarchist and community organizer Lorenzo Komboa
Ervin also spoke at the forum which drew over 300 people. Electronic
reproduction is encouraged, print publications please contact ARA Toronto.)

Stick 'em up motherfucker!
An anti-fascist perspective on the movements against global capitalism.

(The following speech was given by ARA Toronto member Mike Donovan at "From
protest to resistance", a hugely successful public forum on the Free Trade
Area of The Americas and the radical anti-capitalist, anti-racist and
anti-authoritarian elements organizing against it. Members of The Ontario
Coalition Against Poverty, Food For Chiapas, Colours of Resistance, The
Anti-Capitalist Convergence, The Summit of The Americas Welcoming Committee
as well as revolutionary anarchist and community organizer Lorenzo Komboa
Ervin also spoke at the forum which drew over 300 people. Electronic
reproduction is encouraged, print publications please contact ARA Toronto.)

On April 20-22, 2001, thousands of people will converge on Quebec City to
oppose the Summit of the Americas, the so-called Free Trade Agreement of
the Americas (FTAA) and capitalism in general. Among them will be a strong
contingent from Anti-Racist Action (ARA), an international network of
direct action, anti-fascist groups in North America. Some will ask what
the FTAA, and capitalism have to do with the fight against racism and
fascism. Why is ARA organizing against the FTAA?

We are organizing against the FTAA because we are part of the international
working class resistance to capitalism (which is the system of the rich
stealing the wealth that we create!).We see ourselves as part of the same
resistance that has farmers in India setting fire to fields containing
Monsanto's genetically modified seeds, the Zapatistas resisting the Mexican
army in Chiapas, and demonstrators storming the annual meeting of the
Asian development bank in Thailand. Anti-racists are part of the
demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle, The International Monetary Fund
/ World Bank in Washington and Prague, the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue
in Cincinnati, the European Union In Nice, and the current fight back
against the Conservative Ontario government initiated by the Ontario
Coalition Against Poverty.

We are organizing against the FTAA in solidarity with indigenous people of
the Americas, both north and South. No one has been as screwed over,
exploited, and generally scammed as the indigenous people of the Americas.
They've had their land stolen, the treaties they signed were broken before
the ink was dry, and they've been pushed onto ever smaller "reservations."
(Let's not forget that Canada's reservation system was the blueprint for
apartheid in South Africa.) Their land has been raped for commodities,
their children were sent to government run residential schools in a effort
to destroy their culture, and they have had outright war and genocide
inflicted upon them.

The history of indigenous people is also one of incredible and inspiring
resistance, however. Indigenous people have fought back, from the Red River
rebellion to Pine Ridge, from Kanesatake to Gustafson Lake, from Stoney
Point to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, who kick-started the fight-back against
the neo-liberal agenda in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement
first came into effect. The movements against global capitalism have a lot
to learn from indigenous resistance movements, and we damn well better be
in solidarity with them and their struggles, too.

We have learned in anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing to ask nothing
from the state. The state will not stop nazis; it uses and protects them.
The state cannot be depended on to write "social contracts" on labor or the
environment into international "agreements" on trade, let alone to enforce
such protections. The state's primary purpose in the capitalist system is
to subsidize and protect large corporations interests while attacking the
working class and indigenous resistance movements opposing those interests.
This is exemplified by the massive mobilization of the state's police
forces for The Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, which has been called
the "largest security operation ever undertaken in Canada". The same thing
was seen last June in Windsor for the demonstrations against the
Organization of American States which initiated the FTAA process. To put
any faith in the state would be putting faith in one of the most powerful
forces directly opposing our calls for labour rights, environmental
protection, indigenous self-determination, open immigration and an end to
capitalism itself.

As anti-racists, we are against economic nationalism. We are not fighting
the FTAA in favor of isolationism or tariffs against foreign made goods,
which can quickly take on a racist and nationalist politic. Despite the
ruling class's claims, we are not "anti-globalists" wanting to return our
countries to isolationist, nationalist economies. We want a system of
international trade that is based in the local physical, economic and
cultural needs of the world's people. We believe the world's working people
should be free to immigrate to wherever the bosses are paying the best wage
or indeed producing at all. In fact, we are working towards a world where
not only are people not economically displaced but one where all workers
receive all the wealth that they produce. In short, a world without bosses
where we democratically make the decisions that affect our lives.

We are organizing against the FTAA as part of (and for white folks like
myself, in solidarity with) people of colour in North America, who because
of the system of white supremacy in Canada and the U.S. have the worst jobs
at the worst pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Now, the way I see it as a working class male, with some limited access to
middle class privilege, whose family has been categorized as "white" for
the past couple of generations (before that we were just a bunch of dirty
micks), this primarily benefits the rich. Even white workers see their pay,
benefits, and working conditions worsen under white supremacy. After all,
why should the boss hire a white worker, or increase pay and benefits and
implement better working conditions to white workers, when the boss can
just hire people of colour or women that he can pay less and treat worse
because they are more oppressed by our white supremacist system?

Think of capitalism as a fancy restaurant. There are the super-rich
investors, money speculators and the born rich who just laze about gorging
themselves with the food that we make and sipping cocktails that we mix.
Then there's the owner of the restaurant who directly profits off of the
workers' labour, followed by management, levels of skilled workers and then
unskilled workers, and let's not forget the unemployed handing in resumes
and hanging out just outside, ready to take the job of anyone who gets out
of line.

Because of the system of white supremacy, let's think of white workers
falling roughly into the position of skilled workers, say cooks. Now, cooks
are better paid and have more status than say dishwashers, who can
represent people of colour or women. But when it comes right down to it,
cooks are only given a thin slice of the cake that they help make. The vast
majority goes to the ultra-rich, then the next big hunk goes to the owner,
then management, then the skilled workers, and on down. The dishwashers get
the half-eaten scraps and the unemployed outside get nothing. The reason
that skilled (white) workers get more, or indeed any, slice of the cake is
partly because they have skills that the boss needs in order to make a
profit, but it's also a pay-off to keep their own boots on the throats of
the less skilled (non-white & women) workers and the unemployed on behalf
of the bosses.

Now does this system really benefit skilled (white, male) workers? Yes and
no; skilled workers are getting a better deal, a slightly bigger slice of
the cake, than unskilled (again, read non-white or women) workers. However,
what white workers gain by keeping the system of white supremacy in place
is peanuts in comparison to what they could gain if they were part of
autonomous, industrial organizing with ALL levels of workers in the
restaurant AND the unemployed. Then all workers and poor people could go to
the boss, or the rich bastards dining in the front, and in the words of
Black Panther Bobby Seale, shout out, "Stick 'em up, motherfucker!"

The class struggle cannot be separated from struggle against racism and the
struggle against racism cannot be pushed to the side while taking on global
capitalism. We have to be simultaneously fighting capitalism and the
racist, sexist, homophobic shit system that helps maintain it.

As anti-fascists we see our role as unique in the anti-corporate
globalization movement. While the movement against global capitalism is
largely one made up of various progressive and left wing organizations, it
also has strong participation by the protectionist right wing, including
such people as Pat Buchanan, sections of the radical right, such as the US
militia movement, and increasingly, even outright white supremacists, such
as Matt Hale, of the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), several of whose
members have been convicted of racist murders and shootings.

Let's take the telephone "hate line" message Matt Hale recorded on December
6, 1999. On that message, the first news item was the massive
demonstrations that shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle
just a few days earlier.

Hale says,

"... the riots were incredibly successful from the point of view of the
rioters as well as our Church. They helped shut down the talks of the Jew
World Order WTO and helped make a mockery of the Jewish Occupational
Government around the world. Bravo!"

Hale, who was in the Seattle area to network with local white supremacists
and speak at a memorial rally for racist terrorist Robert J. Mathews, goes
on to state,

" I witnessed some of the marches, and while there was certainly a fair
amount of non-white trash involved in them, the vast majority were white
people of good blood who can be mobilized in the future for something
besides their economic livelihood or environment:their continued biological
existence. It is from the likes of white people who protested the WTO (and
in some cases went to jail for illegal actions) that our World Church of The Creator must look to
for converts -- not the stale "right wing" which has failed miserably to
put even one dent in the armor of the Jewish monster."

This sort of rhetoric is not without historical precedent. In fact, the
original Nazi party, the NSDAP, was called the National Socialist German
Workers Party for a reason.

Listen to this quote and tell me if it sounds like something you might hear
at a forum against globalization today:

"We are Socialists, are enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist
economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its
injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to
wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are
determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!"

That quote is from the essay "Thoughts about the tasks of the future"
written in 1926 by Gregor Strasser, who was a leading Nazi party official
during the 1920's and whose thoughts are widely held in the socialist
current within National Socialism to this day.

In fact, one of the left's biggest failures has been refusing to recognize
that Fascism isn't simply a marionette of capitalists scrambling to save
themselves, but a popular mass movement that has a self-contradicting mix
of socialist, capitalist and nationalist politics. This "Third way beyond
Capitalism and Communism" as third positionists or Strasserite fascists put
it, is rapidly gaining prominence in the fascist right again and presents a
real threat politically to the growing movements against global capitalism.
It is a threat that we have to take on head first and physically and
politically kick out of our movements. Failure to do so has grave
consequences for all of us, but especially for oppressed communities.

For example, on September 23, Czech fascists rallied in opposition to the
IMF and World Bank in Prague. Fortunately they were met with an
anti-fascist demonstration of over 1000 that ended with anti-fascists
intercepting the fascists at a train station, bloodying those who didn't
run away fast enough. Three days later, on September 26, those same
anti-fascists were on the front lines opposing the World Bank and the IMF
meeting. No Fascists dared to try and show up to be part of the broader
mobilization.

We see our role as anti-fascists in exposing and routing the radical right
and any collaborators out of the anti-capitalist movement. But fighting a
defensive fight against fascists and white supremacists within the movement
against global capitalism is not enough. We are also part of the radical
anti-authoritarian tendency within that movement, and it is our role to
continue to push the movement away from reformist strategies and symbolic
protest to a movement of real resistance.

-----------------------------
Anti-Racist Action (Toronto)
P.O. Box 291, Station B
Toronto ON M5T 2T2
a...@web.net
416.631.8835
http://www.web.net/~ara

Fighting tha fash since '92.

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