Secret police defend the status quo

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is a state-sponsored, privately-owned organisation accountable to no one which has been running its own operations, both high profile and undercover, since the 1980s.

Moving forward from its role as a national police force developed during the 1984-5 miners’ strike, ACPO put itself even further outside of state control when in April 1997 It was incorporated as a limited company, one month before the election of the Blair government.

Its dramatic expansion, which saw the infiltration of the climate change movement, took place during the rule of New Labour. ACPO’s operations are funded by the Home Office and tributes levied from the 44 police forces and the income from an annual exhibition.

ACPO describes itself as “an independent, professionally led strategic body” and “in times of national need ACPO - on behalf of all chief officers - coordinates the strategic policing response.” Planting agents inside the environmental movement comes under that heading and is “proportionate to the risk”, according to Liverpool chief constable Jon Murphy. Defending the use of agents, he says:

"There are many people who have got perfectly legitimate concerns about any numbers of issues about which they may wish to protest …Unfortunately, in the midst of some of these groups – recent history would evidence this to be true – there are a small number of people who are intent on causing harm, committing crime and on occasions disabling parts of the national critical infrastructure. That has the potential to deny utilities to hospitals, schools, businesses and your granny."

This is nonsense of course. The state protects infrastructure because it is corporate property. If any part of the state were truly concerned about grannies being without energy, they would do something about energy prices. In the winter months, around nine older people die every day as a result of cold.

Two more undercover cops have been outed. Lynn Watson, real name unknown, claimed to be a care worker from Bournemouth when she appeared in 2003 at a protest at Aldermaston nuclear weapons research unit. She moved to Leeds to become active in groups who used the Common Place social centre.

Jim Boyling, a serving officer in the Metropolitan police, used the identity Jim Sutton to infiltrate Reclaim the Streets and during his five years undercover started a relationship with a fellow activist.

Murphy claims this was a breach of discipline, and that agents are specifically banned from sleeping with the enemy – but presumably acting as an agent provocateur, as Mark Kennedy/Stone is said to have done, is OK.

He was a high profile activist, who trained others to take part in the proposed action at the Ratcliffe-on Soar power station, gathering over 100 people at a nearby school where they were arrested in a dawn raid after he tipped off police.

Of course, the presence of agents is not the reason climate activists have not succeeded in changing Britain’s energy policies. Actions and protests in and of themselves cannot change the basic capitalist power relationships in society. All policing is designed to protect these relationships as part of the work of the state. It is the state itself that we need to transform.

As those who threw down the Berlin wall showed, when a moment of real political transformation arrives, agents can’t prevent it – even in a country where the Stasi was woven into the fabric of society. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary of the activities of agents, and expose them when we can.

We can fight for the idea of a sustainable economy and alternative energy strategies most effectively by building People’s Assemblies. Linking the struggle to defend the eco-system with actions to defend livelihoods, jobs and communities is the way forward. The only way we can shift to a green economy is by transcending the profit-driven capitalist economy and that will require mass political action.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Wanted: a leap in imagination

US born Muslim Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist who turned his guns on his fellow soldiers at an army camp in Texas yesterday, was apparently unhappy about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. So the horror of Kabul, Baghdad and other cities where terrorist attacks kill scores of people on a daily basis has hit back, in a Texas military stronghold, of all places.

But how is it, that 20 years after the dramatic end of the Cold War, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, such ferocious acts, and the conflicts that give rise to them, continue? Wars and military confrontations in today’s world are not simply the creation of “the West” as some would have us believe. Russia, China, Sri Lanka and Burma to name but a few are carrying out wars against subject peoples on a scale that equals the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan.

One can only conclude that it is the violent nature of the dominant system of capitalism, based on gross inequality and exploitation, enforced by political repression, that is the source.

Rewind the camera to the world of 1989. The collapse of Stalinist dictatorships former eastern Europe was soon followed by other dramatic changes, this time in Africa. In 1990, the apartheid rulers of South Africa released ANC leader Nelson Mandela from prison. Mengistu Haile Mariam, until then supported by Moscow, was overthrown as dictator in Ethiopia.

Peace and democracy, it seemed back then, was breaking out. Yet, only a year later, the first Gulf War broke out after Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. And as the new millennium opened up, the continued occupation of Palestine led to a new intifada by an oppressed people.

The New World Disorder became swiftly identified not with democracy but with the take-over of the planet by giant corporations who drove globalisation forward at any cost, political and environmental. This led to the clear and present reality of the planet overheating due to the wanton over-consumption of oil and other resources, driven by capitalism’s need to extract profit from the production and sale of commodities.

Many have noted that euphoria of the 1989 period described by US philosopher Francis Fukuyama as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was never realised. The “end of communism” – more accurately, the collapse of Stalinist dictatorships – actually ushered in a long decline in the capitalist world which has matured into a full-scale global crisis.

The more astute commentators and analysts of post-1989 capitalist society are now taking time out to examine what went wrong after the supposed triumph of capitalist democracy, even talking about a “failure of imagination” in the political classes.

But the underlying issue is the nature of the economic system itself. The post-1989 unification of Germany and the other newly capitalist countries of eastern Europe demonstrate this vividly. One of the richest capitalist countries, West Germany has been unable to resolve the problem posed by absorbing and reconstructing its other half, the former German Democratic Republic.

Unemployment in the east still outstrips the West and incomes are at least one third lower. Behind all the shiny new buildings is a country that – just like the US, Britain and the rest of the world – remains deeply divided, not only between former east and west but between rich and poor – who include unemployed immigrants, now often subject to racist attacks.

There is no point blaming the ruling classes and their spokespeople in the media for failing to resolve the crisis created by the system that they preside over. That truly would be a failure of imagination.

Today’s crisis requires a revolutionary political and economic vision which grasps that replacing capitalism with societies determined and controlled by people themselves, based on co-operation and diverse cultures, religions and outlooks, is a sustainable solution. A roundtable discussion we are hosting at the Whitechapel Art Gallery on December 2 on the meaning of 1989 for today is intended as a contribution to that challenge.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Taking inspiration from 1989

The amazing sequence of events that marked the year 1989 which culminated in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on November 8 continues to stimulate debate in its 20th anniversary year.

From the moment in March when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the Hungarian leader, Karoly Grosz, that the Brezhnev doctrine of military intervention was now dead, to the rapid and violent downfall of Romanian dictator Ceausescu in December, the speed of events was breathtaking.

Much less well-known is how that historic moment was only made possible by a decision of the Hungarian Communist Party. Early in October it razed down the barbed wire fence that separated Hungary from Austria and refugees from the German Democratic Republic poured through. On October 20, the now renamed Hungarian Socialist Party also agreed to amend its constitution to end its own domination and introduce a multiparty political system.

The meaning and outcome of that year still provokes debate, but what stands out above all is that for the first time since the revolutionary period around 1917, millions of people actually made history. One documentary film maker, has described the mass movements of twenty years ago as a “miracle”.

And indeed, there still is a truly triumphant, awe-inspiring quality to the huge demonstrations and flows of ordinary people in so many countries. Not only were the numbers involved unprecedented, but so was the way momentum built up from country to country. The disenfranchised were suddenly transformed into the empowered, it’s been said of the movement that within a few months led to the tearing down of the Wall. This was truly people’s power in action.

Since that time, the people who experienced the downfall of decades-old Stalinist regimes have seen monumental changes, for better and for worse. Entire countries like the Soviet Union have been broken up and new ones formed. Old hierarchies have vanished. And, last but not least, a new and mostly brutal capitalist economic order has replaced the state-dominated bureaucratic systems which fossilised leaders and their opposite numbers in the West liked to describe as “socialist”.

Gorbachev, the man who gave the greatest impulse to the break-up of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and east Europe, did not set out to destroy the “socialised” aspects of his country – nor indeed its East European satellites. He simply believed that “we [the Soviet leadership] had no right to interfere in the affairs of our ‘satellites’, to defend and preserve some and punish and ‘excommunicate’ others without reckoning with the people’s will... Those who still blame Gorbachev,” he has written in his memoirs, “are in effect, lacking in respect for their own people, who have gained freedom and made use of it as best they could”.

As one writer has noted in relation to the courage of those who gathered in Leipzig 20 years ago, under the searchlights and cameras of the brutal Stasi secret police, tearing down the curtain was not just the work of movements and ideas; it happened because “courageous men and women resisted apathy and fear”.

The world is undoubtedly deeply changed today. It appears to many that the revolutionary movements of that kind are truly “last century” and could never happen again. But what characterised every single one of these people’s uprisings was that they were largely unforeseen and no one could anticipate either their speed or their outcome.

We live in a world transformed, not only by the political revolutions of 1989, but also by an ongoing communications revolution combined with unemployment and homelessness as economic meltdown continues. The ravages of global warming are present and imminent.

The year 1989 was a year of political, rather than social, revolution. It freed people from the rule of repressive Stalinist bureaucracies. The fact that the outcome – capitalism – did not fulfil the aspirations of those who made the change possible is no one’s fault. It leaves the challenge of making a new step forward to today’s generations.

The need for ending capitalism is greater than ever. What is needed, then as now, is the creation of organisations, networks and movements with the vision and courage to go where no one has gone before in making the revolution of the 21st century.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
20 October 2009

Marking the revolt against Stalinism

Twenty years ago today, the Hungarian government, under pressure from anti-Stalinist demonstrators, announced that it was opening its borders with Austria. Tens of thousands of East Germans flooded into Budapest, on their way to Western Europe. This human tidal wave led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall later that year and the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, a crack appeared in the seemingly impenetrable rule of another Stalinist regime. In China, hundreds of thousands of students and workers were marching through Beijing, Shanghai, Chonquing and other big cities. They were inspired by the fearless sit-in begun by students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing two weeks earlier.

The students began a sit-in to mourn party secretary-general Hu Yaobang, who had recently died, at the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the centre of the square. Within days, the demonstrations spread to more than 400 cities. Martial law was declared on May 20 by a split Politburo. By June 3, the 27th Army was firing on demonstrators in the square. This was the extraordinary moment when a man in a white shirt confronted a tank column on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

Even as you read this, the Chinese government is clamping down on bloggers and journalists, petrified at unrest on the anniversary of the brutal crackdown in which around 3,000 people lost their lives as troops fired on demonstrators. Café Sentido reports : “As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres approaches, the event itself remains taboo in China, forbidden from discussion on state-run television and even banned from results pages on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, operating inside China.”

The Chinese government was one of the very few Stalinist regimes to survive the global revolutionary events of 1989. Elsewhere bureaucracies were breaking up. Mikhail Gorbachev’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Eastern Europe at the beginning of 1989 had marked the dawn of a new era for the Soviet Union and the countries it dominated politically and militarily. In Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia dictatorships toppled like ninepins.

A new generation has sprung to life since that year that shook the world. Then the media crowed about the “end of communism”. But now capitalist triumphalism is a thing of the past. The global economy is in its deepest crisis and the arrogance that followed the end of the Soviet Union has given way to a patent loss of confidence amongst the ruling classes.

The hope that the masses who made 1989 happen would turn their energies against the capitalist system was premature. Many were dazzled by the consumer capitalism that they experienced, then in full swing. But the glitter of McDonald’s, BMW and game players is losing its shine as millions are thrust into unemployment, bankruptcy and repossession. In China, the Stalinist-imposed ruthless brand of capitalism is falling apart and the authorities are fighting a losing battle to stay in control over increasingly angry masses.

The regimes that fell in 1989 hid their true identity behind socialist phraseology while they carved out special privileges for themselves. Just as the students and workers of 1989 unmasked them, the challenge for today’s generation is to dismantle the political system that pretends to rule in our interests today. A recent YouGov poll revealed that in 1989, 35% thought that politicians were generally “good people”. Only 17% believe that today. And, confidence in the police has fallen from 70% down to 46%. Draw your own conclusions.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary