ROSSPORT SOLIDARITY CAMP
Grassroots anti-capitalism in the west of Ireland
Rossport is a very small village on Ireland’s western Atlantic coast. It is a part of Erris, a sub-region of county Mayo, and is a very remote area characterised by small holdings on poor land, small scale fishing, low population, and, Celtic Tiger or not, high rates of outward migration.
Over the last year its name has become synonymous with the struggle against the plans of Shell, Statoil, Marathon, and the state, to construct a gas refinery and a raw gas pipeline of a kind hitherto never built on land. The development, a 9 km long pipeline and a 400 acre refinery site, plus an off-shore pipeline to the gas field itself, actually takes in a much larger area than just Rossport. It has been halted thus far by a variety of means including mass picketing, a protest camp on the pipeline route, and the planned blockade of a pipe-laying ship by fishing boats.
In this article I’ll not be looking at the health and safety concerns, or environmental and economic issues concerning this development, or at the actions to date, but specifically at elements of the libertarian left’s involvement, which is Rossport Solidarity Camp, participation in the national Shell to Sea campaign group, and the organisation of two gatherings in Erris. I’m going to attempt to draw out what lessons can be learned from this experience.
Community Based Environmental Struggles
Perhaps the first lesson of the Rossport experience is that just because it is not on the activist radar screen doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. In February 2005 it would have been quite easy to have been unaware of what was happening in Erris, as it got next to no coverage in the mainstream media. This is in no respect different from many campaigns of a similar nature against unnecessary developments, both in an urban and rural context.
There is a long history of this in Ireland and elsewhere. For instance in the United States in the 80s the ‘environmental justice movement’, born of opposition to strip-mining, toxic waste dumps, and other assaults on communities and ecologies, consisted of between 2,000 and 5,000 autonomous local groups, mostly displaying a far more radical political agenda than mainstream environmental lobby groups or their deep ecology offspring (1). This due to both the racial and class bias of the location of hazardous industry making class and race an obvious part of the ‘issue’, and the class position of the resisting communities making for an interest in raising a wider agenda.
Likewise in mainland Europe, “Mass direct action by communities (occupations, sabotage, pitched battles with police) prevented nuclear power stations and reprocessing facilities being built at Plogoff in France, and at Wackersdorff in Germany in the 1980s.” (2). This is not new to Ireland. For example, Ringaskiddy, Co. Cork, where a struggle against a proposed incinerator has been underway for the last few years became, in 1979, in the words of one local campaigner, “a police state” as the police battered their way through pickets to allow the construction of an asbestos dump (3). While it would be naïve to see radical potentials as being in all opposition to any development (which can sometimes emanate from the ranks of privileged, who will not bite the hand that feeds them), this would be a lesser evil than ignoring this arena of struggle altogether.
Rossport Solidarity Camp
The camp came out of the Solidarity Gathering which was held in Rossport in early June 2005.
It was possible because of networking in previous years, particularly around anti-war activism, and to a lesser extent around summit protests. An important hub of such networking in Ireland is the Grassroots Gatherings, get-togethers which happen 2 or 3 times a year, moving location and organising team each time, and embracing a wide spread of tendencies orientated towards bottom-up participatory forms of organising.
However, the camp soon demonstrated the limitations of the loose network as a form of organisation.
Building a camp is very much a resource heavy operation, it needs large tents, kitchen equipment, communication tools, some form of electricity supply – we have had the loan of a wind turbine. Most of this individuals do not own, or if they do, not in sufficient quantities. Indeed it is only relatively recently that we have acquired a van for our use. The acquisition and long term management of resources requires formal organisation. Apart from a lot of this stuff being expensive, how else would it be managed accountably and collectively, as opposed to being a source of personal power as it would be if it were someone’s personal property?
The political make up of the camp is also instructive, with participation, in so far as it was coming from already existing political networks, more ‘activist’ than ‘workerist’. Partly this reveals the limitation of the class struggle critique of activism, in that it ignores the absence of permanent communities and the absence of permanent workplaces, for much of what makes up the activist milieu. The model employed here, both in terms of the camp itself and solidarity actions elsewhere, allows a rootless scene to engage in a community based struggle.
The Perception of the Camp
The only mention of the Solidarity Gathering in the national press, was a ‘positive’ article in the Sunday Times, which read in part: “The landowners received training in protest tactics a month ago from the veteran demonstrators…Protesters, some of them veterans of other environmental protests at Carrickmines Castle and the Hill of Tara, briefed members of the local community on effective ways to halt construction and gain media exposure for their campaign.”
In reality all of the workshops and talks at the Gathering, had, deliberately, been given by local residents, apart from one about Nigeria given by someone who used to live in the Delta. There was no ‘training’ and if there had been it would have been of little use value given that the subsequent campaign of direct action over the summer, predominantly coming from residents, was above and beyond anything in the experience of anyone who had travelled to the Gathering, or participated in the camp. Moreover, rather than being ‘veterans’ of anything, much of the mainstay of the camp has been people hitherto uninvolved in campaigning.
It is not just a matter of superficial perceptions and portrayals. We live in a society of hierarchy and specialisation, which has as its ideological corollary the notion of social change being brought about by specialists ranging from clientist politicians to guerrilla armies, to charismatic leaders, to political parties, to eco-warriors. But direct action does not have to mean militancy. It means the maximum number of people taking self-determined practical steps to resist captalism’s impositions. It follows that the role of the camp has been something along the lines of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the Southern U.S. in the early 60s; that is, to support a community based struggle. Anything else was a practical impossibility anyways, because of limited numbers and resources. But the strength of the notion of professional activism is so great that it is always necessary to critique it. Professional activism only makes sense from a reformist single issue point of view, if you want to being doing something other than putting out fires, then how you achieve victory in a particular struggle is of as much importance as victory itself.
Activism
Much criticism of activism revolves around spectacular summit protests, which generate more heat than light (as opposed to ‘more light than heat’). Hence I’m going to outline what I mean by activism aside from summit protests. The following is a generalisation, but it represents a distinct observable tendency. Firstly the determinant of what action is taken is moral outrage over a particular issue as opposed to a strategy aimed at contributing to a process of social change, which must by necessity involve massive numbers of folk. Following from this, priority is given to defending some wilderness or agitating around some issue in a far away place rather than an issue of generalised immediate concern. If the issue in question has popularity this is incidental. The main orientation is towards maximising militancy as opposed to maximising participation; that is, a radicalisation of technique rather than seeking to mobilise more people. The result of this often is a very inward looking perspective.
We need to
orientate ourselves to where we can have mass participation, to where we can
have a reasonable prospect of success, and to where possible, ongoing struggles
with radical potentials. The set of principles adopted by the first Grassroots
Gathering reads in part: “Organise for the control of the workplace by those
who work there. Call for the control of communities by the people who live
there”.
This can only be realised through conscious mass participation. A political party (electoral or insurrectionary) or guerrilla sect can not produce this by its nature, and seeing social change as coming about solely through activists is the logic of the party or the army. Should the present order of things simply collapse, or be brought down by such an organisation, no alternative society would result, all the old shit would reassert itself – notions about the rationality of hierarchy, traditional gender relations, and so forth, as this would be peoples’ understanding of normality, of the way things must be. Furthermore not only would we not have the idea that things could be different, we wouldn’t have the confidence or organisational capacity to make them different. Hence any positive transformation of society requires conscious mass participation and it requires mass numbers of people capable of making the change.
So how do we get there? The necessary ideas, confidence and organisational capacity are developed in the here and now through struggle. As was outlined by Subversion: “the seeds of the future struggle for communism are contained within the working class's struggles of today. The types of working class resistance to the attacks of capitalism we support, like strikes, riots, organising against the Poll Tax, and so on, all interrupt the routine of capitalist ‘normality’. In overcoming the practical problems which crop up in the course of these actions, those working class people actively involved find themselves having to develop their own collective solidarity, imagination, initiative and organisation. The development of these powers - all stifled by capitalism - is essential for the working class if it is to transform society”.(4)
Winning a struggle contributes to people’s belief in their capacity to make change. Moreover, we can see how in the course of a struggle radical ideas are developed, for instance the changing perception of the nature of the state experienced during the 84/85 Miners Strike, or the changing role of women produced in the same struggle.
At particular high points of popular struggle we can see organisational capacities develop to the point where bodies are developed – workplace and community councils - which have the potential to be embryos of a new society, for instance the sections of the Great French Revolution, the shoras of the uprisings in Iraq in 1991, and the barrio assemblies of contemporary Argentina.
Consequently we need to orientate our campaigning to where it has the greatest relevance to people’s day to day lives to produce the optimum amount of mass participation from the point of view of contributing to the potential for social change. It follows from the above argument – which essentially is about empowerment – that in such contexts we must favour direct action rather than representative politics, that is that our goal must be to support and encourage people to sort it out for themselves, as opposed to looking to politicians, lawyers, or professional activists.
Because of the sparse population in Erris, and the major nature of the development, the camp is an appropriate action, but it does not follow that in every campaign such a tactic is useful. It also follows that how the camp is promoted is of great importance, e.g. on activist e-mail lists, or with mass leafleting. That is to say, who are we trying to attract? The relative inaccessibility of this form of action, together with the associated media ‘eco-warrior’ spectacularisation, intensifies these issues.
The Camp and Anarchism
The camp has been a working model of anarchism in action, in that it involves a group not only organising campaigning as a collective of equals, but organising day to day living and activity in such a way.
As it is a living space this necessitates dealing with issues such as sexual violence. This is not something which has happened on the camp, but we felt we would give it attention to inhibit the possibility or, failing that, so as to address it rather than ignore it.
The camp has been predominantly male, but is very much not male dominated, or so I’m told. It is also organised in an ecological manner, with recycling, and energy from wind power. A criticism of the camp could be that it hasn’t put forward an explicitly anarchist case against Shell’s development. However, while being organised in a libertarian form, the camp is an open, broad-based campaigning tactic, not an anarchist organisation. Nonetheless, there is a need for its formal organisation, not only to manage resources but to build links between struggles, and also to make explicit the role of capital and the state in unnecessary developments like the one at Rossport and the need to undermine both of them.
(1) Szasz, Andrew, ‘Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice’, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1994, page 158.
(2) Anarchist Federation, ‘Ecology and Class: Where there’s Brass there’s Muck’, 2004, page 34.
(3) Allen, Robert, and Jones, Tara, ‘Guests of the Nation: The people of Ireland versus the Multinationals’, Earthscan Publications, 1990, page 109.
(4) The Best of Subversion, http://www.geocities.com/knightrose.geo/bestof10.html
For more information see:
Rossport Solidarity Camp welcomes more volunteers. People can come and stay for as long or as short as they like. The camp can be contacted at: rossportsolidaritycamp@gmail.com or 00353 9720944.