A-Infos (en) Sweden, Malmo, The buletin of the The libertarian alternative to the ESF - Class, climate change and commons by Planka.Nu*

During this time many activists became increasingly aware of the struggles in their everyday life, 
instead of focusing merely on mobilization to protest on international meetings. So when 
politicians announced that SL ­ the Stockholm public transportation company ­ was to raise ticket 
prices from 450 to 500 SEK (52) it trigge-red a reaction. Members of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Youth 
Federation, SUF, in Stockholm started the protests which gave birth to the organisation Planka.nu. 
Since 2003 we are also established in the city Gothenburg and the region Östergötland.
Planka.nu soon became famous because of "P-kassan": a fund that pays the fines of its members if 
they get caught fare-dodging. ---- It costs 100 SEK (11 ) a month and since the fine is 1200 SEK 
(128 ) something around 300-500 people in Stockholm find it a good deal every month.
The fund has also generated some extra money,
so Planka.nu can afford decent propaganda
and bolder campaigns. The existence of
the fund has also guaranteed the conti-
nuity of our organisation, both because of
the administrative work that has to be put
in every week (but it's not much!) and the
firm economy.

An army of fare dodgers

Before we started"P-kassan" fare-dodging
had been an individual option when your
economy looked weak. But we wanted
to make it a collective form of struggle
and force politicians and media to regard
it as a political question instead of just
a matter of security. Commuters have
always been poorly organized, especially
if you compare with motorists and the car
manufacturing lobby. That's why it's been
easy for politicians to raise ticket prices
when the finances are looking weak. But
now the tide is turning and we are put-
ting the problems with ticket-financed
public transportation in focus. Planka.
nu practises also include following ticket
controllers, thus sabotaging the controls
by warning commuters.

During the last few years, increasing awa-
reness of the human impact on the earth's
climate has escalated the discussions about
our infrastructure solutions and the way
we plan and build our cities. These dis-
cussions haven't gone by unnoticed in the
Planka-campaign. In the wake of plans
to build a new multimillion-dollar urban
highway in Stockholm, we have connected
well with the climate action group Klimax.
To, once and for all, crush private car
traffic in our cities and replace it with
public transports and a climate smart
city planning is essential if human effect
on the environment is to be reduced.
Together with Klimax we have organized
protests outside the meetings of the car
lobby and highway loving politicians.
We have also released a report on the
Stockholm highway entitled "Highway to
Hell?" (only available in Swedish).
For us in Planka.nu it's impossible to
think about solutions to the climate cri-
sis without a class perspective, and the
main question for us today is what kind
of society we want to build. For we have
no belief that business-as-usual with a
green twist can save the planet, and for
the first time - maybe ever - we have a
united academia standing behind us and
screaming: commons, commons, com-
mons! And as we see it, they're totally
right, the only solution for the climate
crisis we can think of is to expand what
we see as common goods: first we'll take
the subway and then we'll take the streets.
And even though the climate crisis is on
a global scale we have to start in our own
cities, trying to reclaim the streets from
the car industry, organize ourselves and
create networks for commuters, activists
and all those worried citizens. While doing
this we do not only create politics from a
common practice, just by saying "here's
the barrier, jump here" we create a political
subject from disparate people who had no
affinity before. A fare-dodger is no longer
a poor commuter, she's now an activist!

---------------------------------------------
Planka.nu is a Swedish network of groups promoting free tax-financed
public transport and organizing fare-dodgers (people who don't pay for
themselves in the public transport system). Since our aim here at this
social forum is to establish a European network to promote free tax-
financed public transports we want to share our experiences with the
Swedish campaign. We will start off with a short historic overview and
then present different methods and strategies that's been utilized by
Planka.nu. We hope that our mistakes and, especially, successes will be
able to inspire other activists.
---------------------------------------------

Cause and solution

Looking back at the last seven years of
struggle we can identify two key reasons
why the Planka-campaign has been such a
success. The first one is that we didn't have
to force people into the practice of fare-
dodging, it has never been a problem for
us that there are too few activists. When
we started there already existed an army
of fare-dodgers in the Stockholm public
transport system, somewhere between five
and ten percent of all commuters don't
have a valid ticket according to SL. The
only thing we really did was to drape this
already existing movement in a red flag. By
organizing fare-dodgers in the "P-kassa"
we got the opportunity to define fare-dod-
ging as a political practice - comparable
to civil disobedience - and explain that
practice in political terms. From being vie-
wed as something along the lines of shop-
lifting or graffiti painting, we have pushed
the public discussion about fare-dodging
into a context of class, climate change and
commons. It's all really simple, we present
two problems: people who fare-dodge and
the climate change. Then we define the
reason causing these problems: economic
inequalities and cities built for the fos-
sil industry. Then, last but not least, we
come up with a solution: free, tax-financed
public transports.
The second reason, which we believe is the
key to our relatively successful campaign,
is our durability. Not many one-question
campaigns manage to live on and evolve
for seven years. The main cause of that is
of course, as we mentioned above, that the
administration of the "P-kassa" has forced
us to continue working with the campaign.
But "P-kassan" doesn't comprise the big-
gest part of our campaign; these seven
years have seen lots of other actions from
Planka.nu, which serves as a testimony of
the persistence of the most active members
of the campaign. And also as a proof of the
old saying that "if you tell a lie a hundred
times it becomes the truth", with the excep-
tion that we never told a lie. We just inter-
preted and explained a social phenomenon
in economic terms, something that can be
quite hard to get people to understand and
accept.

======================================
* Planka.nu was founded in the autumn of 2001 after the hot spring by Planka.Nu
and summer of the Swedish EU-presidency, which culminated in
the big demonstrations and riots in Gothenburg.
_________________________________________
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