Every day, perhaps hundreds of workshops, seminars, public meetings and lectures are held in pubs, backrooms, private flats in London. Many of these meetings are organisational meetings of solidarity or campaign groups, others are informative, or discuss matters of ideology and world views. Many of these meetings approach one theme and organise information and militant action around it. There is a meeting on anti-motorway protest (opposing the car society and the destruction of commons), another on the Liverpool's dockers on strike (opposing casualized labour, low wages and job insecurity), another on Mexican or Indonesian human rights (opposing the brutal arrogance of power and denouncing business collusion with it), etc. These efforts show many people's desire to resist and attack power from different fronts. However, given the time constraint that most of us face while attempting to do political work on the top of our daily need to reproduce ourselves as workers in the market economy, most of us cannot be involved in more than one of these groups. Thus, this fragmentation also results in a) fragmented understanding of power; b) fragmented understanding of people's needs; c) fragmented and atomised action against different aspects of the same power.
fHUMAN London Committee wants to promote a series of workshops the aim of which is threefold:
1. not to replace other single issue meetings and organisational work, but to encourage and help catalyse the connection, the link between different people in different groups, both at the theoretical and practical/organisational level. We can find common ground by asking: What is the connection between the real or potential struggles against homelessness, against debt and house repossession and against high intensity of work and moonlighting? What is the connection between the real or potential struggles against motorways, fare-dodging, and campaign against BP collusion with Colombian army's repression of campesinos? etc.
2. Our workshops aim to clarify what kind of alternative we wish to build, to replace the realities we are fighting against. What kinds of needs are we fighting for, and how to cut across the differences in society to meet these needs. For example, the struggles against motorways are questioning many central issues of the current profit driven society, e.g. pollution; car as status symbol, cars as expression of fast, wasteful, irrational life (from a human point of view); cars as requiring the destruction of commons. However, these struggles seldom link up with the struggles and concerns of many who are forced to get a car in order to reproduce their labour power in the given social organisation - e.g. working mothers in "need" to pick up children from school, in "need" to drive to the megastore 5 miles away for the weekly shopping, etc. To organise for a new way of doing things requires the active participation of all those who can help develop alternatives.
3. Aim of these workshops is also to break the insularity of Britain and its political scene, by approaching the struggles against power in its different forms and the reformulating of needs at three simultaneous levels: local, national and global. We think that in the current circumstances in which increasingly mobile capital crosses the world by subjecting people in the five continents to different forms of discipline and interdependence, we must find forms to turn this interdependence into strength for our resistance and enriching constitutive moment for reformulating our needs.
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