A-Infos (en) Aotearoa (New Zealand), Auckland Anarchist #2 - I do my bit to create Anarchy one phone call at a time

I do my bit to create Anarchy one phone call at a time
Tue, 12/11/2007 - 05:03 — admin

The task for revolutionary communists is to address the real world, and to point 
in the direction of workers power. To reveal the hidden class struggles that 
occur, to educate, agitate and organize for workers to seize control of their 
own lives, to pose workers power in the face of capitalist and state power.

I work three nights a week for a large environmental NGO. --- My task is to ring 
our members who, by and large, are working-class people and talk to them about 
some of the campaigns we are doing and to see if they would like to give the NGO 
more money each month in return for receiving a t-shirt. --- The real world. 
Apathy. Disinterest. Thousands of workers whose only nod to environmentalism is 
by giving a small amount of their income each month to a large NGO that works to 
protect the environment. ---- The real world. Privileged wages and conditions in 
the call-center that I work in. Most of my co-workers seem satisfied with their 
lot and feel, with no small amount of justification, that the work they do is 
progressive.

The campaign I talk to workers about is one that my NGO has developed to address 
climate change. It aims to involve large numbers of people in an effort to cut 
drastically New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is built on the 
presumption and an analysis that the state and corporations will not solve our 
problems. Only through community organising, mounting pressure on state policy 
from below, direct action campaigning that aims to empower, organise and connect 
communities and individuals can climate chaos be averted.

There are significant problems in the campaign however.

A tendency to orient itself primarily to policy changes is one. The separation 
(of skills, knowledge and involvement) between the elite vanguard of campaigners 
and the masses of members is another.

The challenge of subversion is to point members through my telephone 
conversations towards an analysis of corporate-state interests, of capitalism 
itself and an understanding of, and a hope in, worker and community power. I 
must always seek to illuminate to members that ending capitalism and the 
ecological problems it is creating won’t happen cause they give the NGO I work 
for a few bucks more each week.

I must struggle collectively with others, who share my beliefs, in my workplace 
through using our power as workers, which is the potential withdrawal of my 
labour for a NGO that orients itself against capital and state power and for 
worker power. Although I can educate and agitate amongst members I must also 
seek to focus my NGO into organising this discontent and to promote grassroots 
self-organisation.
Every time I call someone at work I have the potential to address the real world.

I can discuss how only direct action and not reliance on officials or 
politicians will end climate change and advocate for community action and 
organisation. I can talk about how the corporations make profit from pollution 
and how the state is nothing but a tool for capitalist interests. I can expound 
on the successes of struggle and education. I can help people demystify the 
causes of the current ecological crisis and peoples ability to create change. In 
short I can, at work, do my bit to create anarchy. One phone call at a time.
‹ Genesis to decommission Huntly power plant...up
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The Auckland Anarchist (called "A Space Inside" for the first issue) is an
irregular zine of the Auckland Anarchist Collective.
http://anarchism.net.nz/node/32
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