PARTISAN!

RCO comrades Max, Ross, Jamie & Mila report on their experiences with Rising Tide’s 2023 “People’s Blockade” in Newcastle.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a collection of articles written in November 2023, appearing in Direct Action #8.

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Rising Tide is an up-and-coming (but had existed in some form in the past) environmental protest group, from a similar milieu as Extinction Rebellion (XR). They describe themselves as a civil resistance direct action activist group that aims to be a grassroots movement through which people will demand the ending of the fossil fuel industry in Australia.

Politically, Rising Tide mostly draws from the Greens, XR, and other similar environmentalist activist groups, including the now seemingly defunct Blockade Australia. They host an eclectic mix of eco-anarchists, left-wing Greens, ‘eco-socialists’ (of the Socialist Alliance variety), as well as more right-leaning environmentalists who promote rightist fearmongering about overpopulation.

Rising Tide has successfully marketed itself as a grassroots, down-to-Earth, committed activist group. But behind the PR speak, the marketing, and the brainfog of activism, Rising Tide shows itself to be another flash in the pan, of the same variety as its predecessors in XR and Greenpeace.

On the 24th of November, Rising Tide launched its “People’s Blockade”, in which they blockade the Newcastle coal port by blocking the Hunter channel, combined with a large activist camp-out, speaking events, and a general activist gathering. It’s a who’s-who of environmental activists in Newcastle, and also brings in hundreds from Victoria, Melbourne, the ACT, and other parts of Australia.

Four RCO members (Max, Ross, Maxine, and Jamie) were in attendance, and give their perspectives. We try to determine whether Rising Tide can really be trusted to direct the movement (insofar as one exists) in the right direction, and whether communists (in particular, the RCO) should try to enter Rising Tide as communists to push for a communist perspective within that group.

Groups in Attendance:

• Rising Tide
• The Greens
• The NSW Police Force
• Extinction Rebellion
• Socialist Alliance
• Food Not Bombs Newcastle
• Knitting Nannas
• Hunter Workers
• Members of the CFMEU and NTEU (informally)

The Insider’s Perspective

Jamie is a member of RCO Melbourne and was the lead coordinator of the children’s tent at the “blockade” event.

Rising Tide early on at the event showed a fundamental lack of organisation and planning, communication leading up to the event was similarly lacking in clarity. Many were told that tents would be provided for those that couldn’t bring their own – there were no tents. People had to scramble on the first day to get tents from nearby stores massively limiting stock. Water similarly was incredibly scarce to come by and was not provided on the first day. The weather here was close to thirty degrees and many people were performing intense physical labor setting up the marquees and campgrounds. I did not observe anyone fainting from heatstroke but that may have been sheer luck.

Water was eventually provided and made readily available but the issues of simple organisation of basic necessities continued; showers were not present at all, only the nearby surf coast open air showers, hardly the environment to clean oneself without exposing themselves to large crowds of people. This is not to mention that the toilets frequently overflowed and were inoperable. Coordination of kindergarten facilities was equally shit before one of the RCOs comrades had to take over coordinator role to fix a building crisis in a lack of volunteers.

Electricity was only kept to ‘essentials’ which included organisation tent lighting and charging coordinator phones – yet this did not extend to the dishwashers who during the late hours of the night had to scrub filthy pots and pans in near complete darkness of it were not for volunteers using precious phone battery life (which was nearly impossible to source) to see. The organisers and heads of the event of course did not pitch their own weight in to help when things got tough, no they gouded and rounded up volunteers, many of which paid large sums of money to be there. Then had to pay more when the organisers failed to meet their basic needs.

The port blockade itself had no shortage of people wanting to get on the water and kayak, who can blame them though? They paid to be here and it was a series of hot days in the sun and in stormy weather. But from the brilliant organisers who brought you shit pouring out of portaloos and pitch black scrubbing duties came upon another ‘banger’; intentionally getting arrested.

Early on the organisers intentions for PR and media coverage was abundantly clear, the blockade itself proved to make no real change, though this was clear even before attending. The people who wanted to, got arrested and were detained an hour later a short walk from the camp, incredibly performative and incredibly lame. Yet bang on drums and chant “power to the people” some four odd people did as the police released activists being a little nuisance.

Why did the RCO attend this event, even going so far as to have some travel interstate for the event? Connecting with Newcastle and the entire country’s left wing like Socialist Alliance in the hopes more radical action can be planned out away from the likes of Rising Tide. We’ll have to see how organised this up and coming united front can be, and how Rising Tide can be firmly pushed aside from planning major events like this ever again in Australia, they have proved they care little for the real movement, and that they are elitist, self serving and incapable of managing something of such scale.

Malthusian Rebellion?

Ross is a member of RCO Newcastle and attended the blockade as an ‘outsider’.

It was pointed out to me that Extinction Rebellion was displaying Neo-Malthusian literature in their stalls. Looking for myself, I saw a reading list with some basic ecological texts along with “The Population Bomb” (1968), “Limits To Growth”(1972), and “Overshoot”(1980). These outdated texts are major proponents of Neo-Malthusian thought, a philosophy that very easily leads into Eco-Fascism, due to its false conclusion that depopulation is critical to humanity’s survival.

I decided to confront them directly, my source being an older man in a Rising Tide shirt, with some environmental degrees under his belt. He took some time getting to the actual subject, going on a tangent about how Scott Morrison got his science from the “Sunburnt Country” poem, before further prefacing that “Neo Malthusianism is a dirty word” among members of the Extinction Rebellion, and that he would prefer to speak in a lower tone so his colleagues could not hear. Playing with an open hand, I shared that I was a Marxist, that population control would disproportionately effect the periphery and marginalised communities. Ineffectual at best, Eco-Fascism at worst. He received this positively stating that he was a socialist himself, but that he was “More interested in analysis than conclusions” which was his primary misgiving with Marxist ideology. He replied that overpopulation is a problem that the wider left ignores, and started to elaborate before the storm knocked down the tent.

Out of it all, “Neo-Malthusianism is a dirty word” really stuck out to me, especially when my source started to justify the “dirty word” before foul weather interrupted our conversation. I think it speaks of a larger undercurrent of Neo-Malthusian and Eco-Fascist thought that Rising Tide and Extinction Rebellion are refusing to address. As a bourgeois activist group I hardly expected ideological rigour. I wasn’t surprised when most members I talked to revealed themselves to be utopian socialists and reformists, but this undercurrent was unexpected given the otherwise progressive nature of the organisations involved. I would be willing to chalk this up as a “bad egg” and single incident, but I’d like to reiterate that this conversation started because I saw an official reading list filled with Neo-Malthusian literature. Perhaps my source’s philosophy of being “More interested in analysis than conclusions” reflects a wider culture within Extinction Rebellion and Rising Tide, and they were simply reading these books as critique. This is somewhat supported by the presence of the books further down the reading list that dismiss the over population myth, focusing on more modern theories concerning the waste of resources and disproportionate emissions in developed countries. But my source made no such claims, and neither did the reading list. In fact, said list was titled “Classic Readings”.

I do believe this dark undercurrent is in the minority. In my conversations with other members of Extinction Rebellion and Rising Tide, they seemed more focused on pollution and environmental destruction produced by the Core, primarily Australia’s use of fossil fuels.

Blockade, or Activist Circus?

Max is a member of RCO Newcastle who attended the blockade alongside other RCO members.

The 25th of November saw the opening day of Rising Tide’s two-day long “people’s blockade”, a yearly gathering of environmentalists at Horseshoe beach in Newcastle. The stated purpose of this gathering is to “block the coal port”, that being the port of Newcastle, which is the largest coal port in Australia. I arrived relatively late on the day (most arrived at 8am to set up, I arrived closer to 12pm) but I nonetheless got a decent feel of Rising Tide, how they organize, and what can really be expected for them in the future.

Organizationally speaking, the “blockade” seemed to be set up relatively well. Most attendants came to Newcastle from interstate, usually Canberra, Victoria, or Queensland, and thus were camped in a little tent-village just outside of the beach. No doubt Rising Tide had to ask for permission to camp there as well as to “blockade” the coal port. In attendance were various Greens groups, Food not Bombs, Extinction Rebellion groupings (many of whom still use Malthusian rhetoric in the form of promoting the long-debunked eugenicist text “The Population Bomb”, an idea thoroughly critiqued and debunked by Ian Angus for Links in “Too Many People?“), Socialist Alliance, and a whole score of NSW police, mainly from the Riot Squad.

To say that the “blockade” was fairly toothless wouldn’t be groundbreaking, however in activist circles it is considered a severe crime to question, however mildly, the effectiveness of any action undertaken. Severe doubt should be laid against the dubious claims from the NSW Minerals Council that this 30-hour blockade could have a “major impact on the NSW economy”. Minerals council brow-beating is more of a joke than the “blockade” itself. To these people, weeding your garden is “extremism”.

I would contrast this “people’s blockade” with the ZIM blockades taking place in Sydney. While the first ZIM blockade was dubious (for example, the ship they claimed to have been blocking never arrived in the first place), this second blockade has seen horrendous police violence, with many being incarcerated for what was overwhelmingly a peaceful demonstration. In comparison, the “people’s blockade” looks like a farce.

Rising Tide is a large force in the new environmental movement, and so Communists can’t simply ignore them completely and turn their noses to them. However, we should also acknowledge that Rising Tide is, whether they understand it or not, misdirecting the movement. While we should be advocating for green bans, green unions, and large-scale communalized ecological care work, Rising Tide advocates for circuses and adventurism (they have in the past used the long failed method of purposefully getting yourself arrested to “clog up” the judicial system – this has never worked in the last 20 years).

Communists should be weary of Rising Tide and their organizers, and should not shy away from critiquing their methods. What is important is to provide a viable alternative, which Communists do have: organizing the workers. We can point to the Green Bans as being the most effective form of environmental action, and we can point to the failure of adventurist projects such as Blockade Australia to really do anything. We should criticize strongly “awareness raising”, and we should do our best to direct the environmental movement away from facile reformism and toward a “green revolution”, the ousting of the ecocidal Capitalist system and the creation of an ecological, Communist system. The presence of trade unionists within Rising Tide has at this moment done little to steer them away from the same kind of failed activism that Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace exhausted years ago.

In fact, the event ended with such a stunt by Rising Tide, XR, and other attending groups. This stunt, no doubt done to get the attention of the media, involved roughly 100 activists remaining in the channel past the 4pm ‘curfew’ (for lack of a better word) on the 26th. Myself and others watched from the beach as, at the stroke of 4pm, the crowd of activists cheered on their friends and associates from the shoreline. It took roughly two hours for the police to arrest the activists in the water, many of whom were released quickly after.

From an outside perspective, it seems strange that this event, which was nothing more than a glorified music festival (it was, in fact, marketed by many, including Green Left, as a “protestival”) is held up as being a fatal blow struck against the extractivist regime. How can we expect a mass movement to make any real change if none of the organisers take it seriously?

Criticisms aside, it was nonetheless an impressive mobilisation, although it is disappointing that the workers movement, least of all the communist movement, can’t pull of anything even half as big as this. It’s an indication that the Communists still have a long road ahead of them, and a lot of work is still necessary to build the capacity of the Communist movement to such an extent that we can mobilize this many people. As Communists, we have to ensure that the mass movement is not overtaken by career activists, or potential bureaucrats.

In contrast with groups such as Rising Tide and Extinction Rebellion, Communists believe that the solution to the climate crisis is not to empower bureaucrats or to vote better, but to instead empower the working class, in order to build ecologically conscious unions, to stage green bans, to engage in mass ecological care labor, and to reconstruct society at the foundations by doing away with the ecocidal, extractivist Capitalist system.

The main disappointing aspect of the People’s Blockade was that it didn’t feel like we were at a protest, it felt like we were at a festival with politics loosely attached.

Thoughts on the Newcastle Blockade

Mila is a member of the RCO in Canberra and a volunteer at the Blockade.

“Meet them where they are at.” were some of the first words spoken to me by a comrade and friend when I arrived at the blockade, because I had already started complaining. Other RCO comrades have already expressed complaints that I echo, but one in particular that I want to express is the lack of accessibility and the martyrdom attitude that it stems from. Soon after arriving at the event I found out that I was the only transgender woman participating in the entire blockade. The Rising Tide organisers implemented no rules or norms about the space whatsoever, which would have guaranteed our safety on the beach and at the camp. Particularly concerning was the attitude of one volunteer who, when I asked if there were any private spaces for showering or getting changed (which are especially necessary for trans people to safely participate in public beach spaces in general, let alone at a protest), responded snootily, put off by the fact that I even asked!

This represents a wider attitude amongst many at the blockade. At the blockade, there is zero realistic discussion of strategy or tactics for halting climate change, and any criticism of Rising Tide’s civil disobedience strategies are treated as if they are personal insults of the, especially renowned, activists involved. “Don’t you know who I am?!” or “Do you know how long I’ve been in this fight, what have you done?!”

There are no serious long-term strategic considerations of how actions in which 100s of activists are deliberately arrested will ensure a halt to global warming. Instead, there are generic hopes that media attention and dramatism will win over enough people that then… something or other will change. Indeed, even at the Worker Solidarity: A Just Transition event, attended by Socialist Alliance and militant trade unionists, there was no call for revolutionary action except my own.

The fact that a few people came up to me throughout the rest of the blockade to congratulate me on my speech demonstrates that there is plenty of appetite for a revolutionary strategy within the climate movement, but that the catharsis of martyrdom that many Rising Tide organisers and other key activists have become nearly obsessed with has created an organising space that is hostile to revolutionary strategising, or long-term strategising of any kind. This is made more difficult by the implicit, and sometimes explicit, anti-worker attitudes of Rising Tide organisers. They are often either actual “ethical” small business owners opposed to trade union organising on principle, or nihilistic middle-class workers who are sceptical of the usefulness of any kind of serious long-term opposition to climate change. These are the sorts of folks who, at the blockade, brushed me off whenever I spoke of the need for workers within the port to actually down tools and strike.

I return to the words of my comrade, “meet them where they are at.” Despite all of these frustrations, and those of my comrades that I echo, we must not turn our nose up at Rising Tide. Our task, as revolutionaries and communists, must be to enter climate activist spaces and lead by example. We must not relax into our armchairs and arrogantly critique those who are at least doing work, even if we believe that it is the wrong sort!

Even with all my complaints, I still found the sight of hundreds blocking the coal port and celebrating on the beach inspiring. Comrades must let themselves be inspired! There were so many unionists and workers at the blockade who quietly supported my call for a revolutionary mindset that says “I won’t let those bastards hurt anyone else!”. We can only be successful revolutionaries by bringing people on side. Only by meeting people where they are at and working alongside them can we win friends, otherwise all we will win is enemies.