vestas occupied!

Workers at the Vestas wind turbine blade plant on the Isle of Wight have occupied their factory in Newport in an attempt to prevent its closure, which was scheduled for the end of this month. Their brave fight in is an example of what workers can do when they get together and take militant action to save jobs and sustainable industries.

We call upon everyone around the country to send whatever support they can to the workers at Vestas. We all have an interest in a sustainable future, and we all have a responsibility to show solidarity to workers in struggle.

We have already reported on the significance of this struggle, both in terms of its concrete objectives, and in terms of how it came about.  The occupation has occured against a background of non-unionised workers, and activists from Workers’ Climate Action appear to have made a significant contribution to the organisation so far, including introducing the idea of an occupation.

More news will follow when we have it.  A list of resources, events, and things you can to do help follows.

vestas – the struggle on the horizon

By Joe Thorne

An important struggle is brewing on the Isle of Wight: we all need to take note, both of what has happened so far (and the lessons we can learn from it); and the possibilities in the coming weeks.

A factory, the only remaining manufacturer of wind-farm turbines in the UK, is due to be closed by its owners, Vestas, who are making all 500 workers redundant.   The company, like so many of those making redundancies at the moment, is using the recession as cover for cuts which are motivated by nothing other than ordinary cost cutting.  Jobs are being moved to the USA.

But this is not only about jobs.   News of the planned closure has also ignited outrage in the movement against climate change.  When we should be converting to an economy based on renewable, low-carbon energy, the closure of the Vestas factory is just what doesn’t need to happen.  So Vestas is not just a class fight – though it is that.  It is a class fight which raises issues of climate change, and the tension between capitalist production, and social production.

Workers are now discussing occupying one of the two sites on the Isle of Wight, and need the support of workers and climate change campaigners everywhere.

nuclear waste transport protests in germany: ‘we shall be in the way’

by Ella Seebacher

‘Castor kommt. Du auch?’ (Castor is coming. You too?) has been the uniting chant since April 1995, when the first cross country transport of radioactive waste from France has brought the rural farming village Gorleben in the region of Wendland in Lower Saxony in the north-east of Germany to controversial fame. It triggered an overwhelming movement of protest, such as Germany has not seen since the student revolution around Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s. Typically, the corporate newspapers had a field day with pointing out the millions of Deutschmarks the immense police operation to stop the ‘Atomchaoten’ (nuclear rioters) would cost the taxpayer and were quick to blame ‘den schwarzen Block’, the anarchists. But no, far from it, the anti-nuclear protesters taking part were coming from all ways of life: the guy who runs a gardening service, the carpenter, the supermarket cashier, farmers, grandmothers, small town politicians sitting in the constituency of Lüchow-Dannenberg, teachers and pupils. Doctors and punks and indeed, a complete army of vicars from every village and small town around expressed their opposition loudly.

man dies as police clamp down on london g20 protest: photo-report

by David Broder

Today the capital saw a mass march on the City of London, with contingents from four stations around the Square Mile – representing the four horsemen of the apocalypse threatening the system (war; climate change; job losses and the capitalist crisis; lack of housing) – converging at the Bank of England. The numbers at this demonstration, held to coincide with this week’s G20 summit hosted by Gordon Brown, were far greater than those at the SWP-organised “March on the City” and Chris Knight’s “Dancing on the grave of capitalism” event held last October at the peak of the financial meltdown.

Even the Tory Evening Standard reported that there were 4,000 people at the Bank of England, and certainly the protest’s numbers were large for a weekday. However, the demo, as well as the Climate Camp, were tightly contained by the police via a system of ‘kettles’ with 5,000 police, horses and police vehicles on hand to encircle groups of protestors. All in all there were 63 arrests: and late in the evening we heard that a man had died as the police besieged the demonstrators from all sides.

Much unlike Saturday’s turgid march organised by the otherwise lethargic Trades Union Congress and some liberal NGOs, the protests in the City of London were of an anti-capitalist character, mostly animated by anarchists. However, in the recent furore about today’s “G20 Meltdown” the media has greatly puffed up the importance of Chris Knight, the radical anthropologist suspended from his University of East London post for saying that people were so angry that bankers might be hanged from lamp-posts

Photos and a few comments on the events appear below. Besides the events described and depicted in this article, the day also saw a Stop the War rally from the US embassy to the Excel Centre.

over fifteen years of collective production and self-management at mst co-operative

The Vitória Agricultural Production Co-operative, belonging to Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) has since 1993 practiced a model of production based on collectivism and diversification. From Passa Palavra.

The Vitória Agricultural Production Co-operative (COPAVI), in Paraná City in the north-east of Brazil’s Paraná state, was founded on 10th June 1993, but its story began in January of that year when several families occupied around 256 hectares and transformed a rugged area of sugar-cane-monoculture land, belonging to one sole owner, into an agro-industrial area with diverse production, securing an alternative – and decent conditions – for more than seventy people.

COPAVI, according to the National Institute of Farming and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), is among the ten most successful holdings in the state. Its collective forms of ownership, production, and management, under the leadership of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement; MST), are considered a model [1]. It remains symbolic of the landless workers’ struggle in Brazil.

report of campaign against climate change trade union conference

by Steve Ryan

Held on 7th March this Campaign against Climate Change (CCC) trade union event was the second such conference of its kind.

The conference was structured in a similar way to the first one with an opening plenary, workshops, forums and a closing plenary. The turnout was however far lower than at the first conference: showing how easily such a subject falls away in recession, when it should, properly argued, be at the forefront.

self-management and the environment

Tomorrow sees the second Trade Union Conference on Climate Change – held at King’s College in London.  Ahead of the conference, Steve Ryan looks at the relationship between the recession, workers’ self-management, and climate change.

The recession is an important topic and is certainly preoccupying the minds of all from bosses through government to the Left.  This has very much put the debate about climate change and peak oil out of the limelight.

No doubt bosses and governments will be pleased with this. Buried in the news recently have been a number of disturbing items as regards the speed at which the poles are warming and the fact that Labour have watered down their commitment to carbon reduction under pressure from big business. Worse that the average temperature is now looking to rise by 4 degrees in the next 20/30 years… oh, and oil runs out in 2020!

the commune issue 3 – out now!

The March 2009 issue of The Commune is now on sale. £1 a copy, email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to order. Click here for pdf.

The new paper features the following articles:

Don’t moan, organise! – editorial on the recession

Factory occupation in Ukraine – by a comrade in Kyiv

Unions and left parties let down Greek youth uprising – by Valia Kaimaki

Lessons of the oil refinery wildcat strikes – by Gregor Gall

The impossibility of class struggle in the mind of the BBC – by Joe Thorne

Occupations for Gaza: activism goes back to university – by Taimour Lay

More arrests in Iran – by Sam Parsa

School students get organised – interview with Tali Janner-Klausner

Lassalle’s state socialism – from Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution

Self-management and the environment – by Steve Ryan

formula 1 millionaires seek state bailout

by David Broder

The Honda Formula 1 team may be set to receive a bailout from Lord Mandelson’s £2.3 billion fund for the car industry in a further example of state intervention to shore up the super-rich.

The team is currently owned by Honda, the world’s sixth-largest car manufacturer. Although the marque’s sales have suffered much less from the recession than its rival Toyota, in November it announced plans to sell off its Formula 1 team, which finished 9th out of 10  in the 2008 constructors’ championship on a budget of £180 million.  A 63% fall in Honda’s quarterly profits has also prompted the shutting-down of its Swindon road car factory.

Honda claim that closing the team entirely would cost it more than keeping it going, but wants to wash its hands of the operation. Therefore any state bailout would essentially amount to using taxpayers’ money to save an unprofitable part of Honda’s business which it wants to junk.

new pamphlet: the meaning of communism today

We are pleased to announce the publication of our sixth pamphlet, “The meaning of communism today”.

The pamphlet, excerpted in the latest issue of The Commune, features a discussion document produced by supporters of A l’Encontre, l’Emancipation sociale, Carré rouge and A contre-courant looking at what alternative we can pose to the crisis-ridden capitalist system, including a focus on gender oppression, the coming ecological disaster and modern imperialism.

Arguing against the tried-and-failed statist and vanguardist conceptions of Stalinism and social-democracy, the piece puts forward the case for a self-managed society based on participatory democracy and collective decision making.

You can order the pamphlet for £1 + postage by writing to uncaptiveminds@gmail.com or The Commune, 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London EC1V 4PY.

the commune issue 2 published

february 2009 – £1 + postage and packing, email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to order

click here for pdf or see individual articles below

barack obama is lipstick on a pig – by Ernie Haberkern

civil service pay dispute: defeat or victory? – by Steve Ryan, Wrexham PCS

class struggle on the london underground – interview with Vaughan Thomas, RMT London region chair (LUL)

occupations: the way to win? – guest editorial by Gregor Gall

the people’s charter: a charter for change? – by Chris Kane (online only)

militancy and mobilisation in the anti-war movement

the mindset of israelis in the gaza conflict – by Solomon Anker

anti-semitism and the war – by Aled Thomas

unemployment: a view from the front line – by Christine Hulme, PCS DWP

welfare ‘reform’, the brown premiership and the recession – by Chris Grover, Lancaster University

what does ‘socialism or barbarism’ mean today? – by François Chesnais

call centres: the workers’ enquiry – review by Jack Staunton

ukraine’s ‘new left’ and the russian ‘gas war’ – by Milan Lelich

the socialist movement in iran – by Sam Parsa

political platform of the commune

local energy and workers’ control

by Brian Rylance

Bio-diesel has presented an unusual opportunity over recent years as various local workers coops have taken a relatively simple technology to make a mostly carbon neutral diesel from local used cooking oil. Food and energy are the most important goods to any community and they are subject both to fluctuations in the global economy and fickle state control. The opportunity to take local worker control of any portion of the energy they consume, however little and however briefly, is important on a scale beyond the actual goods they produce as it trains co-operators in the knowledge of fuel making and fuel makers in the practicalities of cooperating.  Such local control has allowed genuinely ethical decisions to be taken for the community benefit rather than for purely economic reasons; all the coops associated with the Goodfuels Coop have freely chosen to use only waste cooking oil for feedstock rather than any unused food oils including dubious soy or environmentally damaging palm. Driven by profit alone it would have been far better for the balance sheets to import large amounts of palm oil from plantations that have been grown on slashed and burned rainforests.

photo-report of campaign against climate change demo

Around 10,000 people turned out in London today for the Campaign Against Climate Change demonstration held on the same weekend as the United Nations Climate Change Convention being held in Poznan, Poland.

Starting near the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the march snaked its way through central London before a rally in Parliament Square in front of the Houses of Parliament.

Most far-left groups were present and there was a large contingent of radical and socialist-minded people. Most prominent however were the placards of the Green Party, calling for a “Green New Deal” of environmentally-friendly state economic intervention akin to that proposed by US President-elect Barack Obama. In the bottom-right photo below the statue of Nelson Mandela can be seen holding a placard to this effect. Speakers included the Green European Parliament member Caroline Lucas and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, continuing the apparent vogue for the Liberal Democrats to be given a platform and allowed to portray a “left face” at anti-war and environmental protests.

We did not produce a special leaflet for the event, but sales of our new paper were brisk. We only have a few copies left, so do write to us – uncaptiveminds@gmail.com – if you would like one.