Max J, Newcastle
At the end of this week, Rising Tide’s yearly blockade will start. For those who live outside of Newcastle, Rising Tide hosts a yearly blockade of the Newcastle coal port, the largest in the country. At least, that’s what they tell you. In reality, they host a yearly music festival which may as well be a launch party for each coal ship that goes past. Often, the government creates a 100m exclusion zone, effectively banning the protestors from actually blocking any ships. The sick irony of the blockade is that the entire thing rests on the government allowing them to blockade the ships. This means that entering the 100m exclusion zone is illegal – and illegal activities are usually kept to the last day or two of the “blockade”.
Rising Tide is a growing formation. It has managed to win over parts of the extant activist left, especially those around Extinction Rebellion. It is ostensibly apolitical, but mainly supports the Greens and other environmentalist groups, like Animal Justice. But don’t get it mistaken: Rising Tide is hardly a mass movement, though it’s not quite a sect either. Since Rising Tide isn’t a membership organisation, it’s hard to determine how many people are “in” it, but it can be safely estimated to only be in the hundreds.
Rising Tide adheres to the momentum model, which I’ve explained in a previous article. In summary, they primarily believe that change is made by a minority of activists who win over a passive majority of people in civil society. This is regardless of background – Rising Tide aims to build a movement of all people, and all classes. For this reason, Rising Tide is fairly loose on who it lets in. It has a vague, generalist handbook and code of conduct.
It’s taken for granted by much of the left (organised and disorganised) that what Rising Tide is doing is “right”, in some way. This may be true, but it is nonetheless wrong for the left to take Rising Tide at its word. The most important issue is not whether or not Rising Tide’s blockade is effective (by all means, it isn’t), but whether we should want to blockade the Newcastle coal port in the first place. With a blockade organised by environmentalist activists, very few people have bothered to ask the port workers what they think about any of this.
Since we’re communists (and Rising Tide isn’t), we aim to build mass organisations of working people, and militant unions. So it would make sense for us to take a position which supports working class organisation. Unfortunately, many people have fallen for Rising Tide’s activist charms and as a result been pulled into their ecosystem – this is the purpose of the momentum model. Because of this, few take a step back and ask whether anything Rising Tide stands for is even correct in this first place.
Obviously, we want to end the ecocidal system. Climate change is a real issue. But we have to ask ourselves whether green markets are going to solve the problem. The politics of the environmentalists more often than not amounts to anti-modern posturing, or the deep hypocrisy of post-politics.
Why would we want to blockade the coal port in the first place? There are a few tactical reasons to do so; mainly, coal exports to Israel. But we cannot block coal exports to Israel by camping at Foreshore Park and taking a leisurely paddle into the channel. Previous blockades, such as those in Melbourne and Sydney against ZIM shipping, have shown that the port needs to be blockaded directly. They’ve also shown that without the involvement of port workers, it won’t amount to much or last long. Much of the ‘direct action’ politics surrounding Rising Tide, which previously manifested in Blockade Australia (and now is camped in ‘Whose Future?’) is an elitist politics which more or less thinks the working class is stupid at best and reactionary at worst, and that only a militant minority can take action to strike the system directly and potentially drag the stupid workers kicking and screaming toward xyz. This is a futile effort, as shown by the slow death of Blockade Australia.
The RCO’s central committee recently released an open letter aimed at Rising Tide [Since this letter’s publication, the CC’s open letter has been edited to address the attendees of the event instead of Rising Tide -Editors]. Much of the letter is ‘fine’, but there are sections of it I think are a bit silly at best, and at worst undermine what Newcastle comrades are doing. There are sections which I take particular disagreement with:
“We support a green economy. The planet is dying. Rising Tide is right to demand an end to fossil fuels. But capitalism cannot be green-ified. Capitalism does not use fossil fuels because it is more cost-efficient than sustainable energy. Capitalism uses fossil fuels because it allows capitalism to move away when workers in one place get too demanding. Solar panels, wind farms, and batteries can’t be moved as easily. Capitalism isn’t just a system of profit; it is a system of class exploitation.”
Does the RCO support a “green economy”? It’s clear from the relevant sections of the RCO’s program that the organisation supports something resembling a planned economy, under the management of the working class. Whether this is “green” is a different question. I would take issue with adopting the language of the environmentalists in order to water our politics down and make it more palatable for them.
Rising Tide is not right to demand a total end to fossil fuels, though it is true that we should shrink them and pivot majorly toward renewables. While we can reduce, for example, coal production, until the widespread adoption of electric arc furnaces in steel production, we are going to need to mine some amount of coal anyway. Etc for mining iron, bauxite, so on. I do not believe it is industrially viable, nor possible, to rely on mass recycling steel or something to that effect. Rising Tide demands a heavy tax on the fossil fuel industry – as opposed to advocating for it to nationalised. This distinction ‘gives the game away’ as to Rising Tide’s class basis and their aspirations.
We need to stress that only a democratically planned economy under the management of the working class can make a dent on the climate. This means a socialist republic with a planning commission, big monopolies under state control (nationalisation), with small to medium firms taken under collective ownership primarily via co-operatives. This is antithetical to what Rising Tide openly advocates for.
“We are scared about the future. Every day, it feels more and more that the world is ending and that there is no hope. Bush fires, floods, and drought hurt our communities and our families and are getting even worse.”
As an ostensibly revolutionary organisation, the RCO should avoid the sort of alarmism which is common in the activist left: the idea that climate change will bring about the end of the world. While it will only destroy human civilisation (probably), our public statements should de-emphasise appeals to people’s fears. We should not want people to panic and be scared all day every day, these sorts of people become demoralised and demobilised. Fear is counterproductive in politics.
Broadly, I fail to see the point in trying to appeal to Rising Tide to support communism. Newcastle comrades have engaged critically with Rising Tide for the last few years, whether that was while in Socialist Alliance, or later on. We don’t want Rising Tide to become a communist organisation, and neither does Rising Tide. We engage with Rising Tide in a similar way that we would engage with any other non-socialist activist group or civil society organisation. Would we want the Uniting Church to become communist? I should hope not.
It’s all well and good to tell Rising Tide, well we’re this and we support that. But what good is it going to do if Rising Tide doesn’t care? It’s empty proselytising, and no one likes a proselytiser. We’re becoming a caricature of ourselves if our answer to every problem is “we need a mass communist party”. Of course we do, but we can’t just repeat that over and over and over again hoping people spontaneously decide to become Partyists (or whatever we call it now). We need to actually present a strategy and real, programmatic demands that can win over working people, union militants, and disorganised socialists.
I will repeat the point I made in my letter last year concerning the blockade:
“While we can turn our noses at groups like Extinction Rebellion and Rising Tide, we can’t deny that adventurist left-liberalism is attracting people to it. When people feel as if they can’t intervene politically through the usual left-reformist means, they will turn to adventurism and in extreme cases, insurrectionism/terrorism (see: Blockade Australia et al). The Greens were also in attendance to fish for voters, as they are prone to do. I myself saw Mehreen Fahruqi at the Greens stall (which, on the second day, was across from ours). We need to be there to present an alternative to left-reformism and left-opportunism/adventurism: a communist program for the working class to take power.”
I think we should go to the blockade, have our stall, try to win over people who go there (especially workers of all ages), but we shouldn’t have any misconceptions about what our aims are. We don’t aim to make Rising Tide communist, we aim to present an alternative to Rising Tide’s apolitical reformism.
The main problem with the central committee’s statement is that it reads as desperate. The RCO should not come off as desperate for Rising Tide’s attention – this puts Rising Tide in a position of power over not just us, but the communist movement in general, even superficially. It’s hardly a statement we could, should, or would, distribute openly at the blockade. It makes the RCO look meek and feeblish. This is not to say that we should try to present ourselves as “strong”, but we should also not aim to present ourselves as being self-hating or self-deprecating, as many in the RCO already do (intentionally or otherwise).
Rising Tide and environmentalist activists will not respect us if we are constantly cowed by them. We gain their respect when we show initiative, show leadership, and demonstrate ourselves as being a viable political alternative to reformism. We aim to be a revolutionary organisation – we should start acting like one.
PARTISAN! 