Call for a G8 summit worldwide general strike in 2005

I put the following text on this website to publicise my call for a worldwide general strike at the time of the G8 summit in July 2005 in Gleneagles, Scotland. I produced a leaflet containing similar text, and handed it out at the G8 Alternatives Summit on the 3rd of July.

I, Steve Wallis, am calling for a worldwide general strike (and strike of school, college and university students) during the G8 summit – which takes place between Wednesday the 6th and Friday the 8th of July in Gleneagles, Scotland. You can read the initial double-sided colour leaflet I produced to publicise and give reasons for my call by clicking here.

I am particularly calling for strike action on the first day of the summit (Wednesday the 6th of July), because a European conference of People’s Global Action called for a “global day of action” on that day, and due to “Live 8” concert organiser Bob Geldof’s call for school students and teachers to take two days off school to go to Edinburgh for the start of the summit.

What is the real agenda of the G8 leaders – privatisation or genetically modified food/drink?

The leaders of the eight most powerful countries in the world (the seven richest plus Russia) are getting together at the G8 summit, with “making poverty history” supposedly on the agenda. Campaigners are calling for more aid, cancellation of debt and trade justice, and New Labour in Britain (in particular Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown) are supposedly in favour of all three of these demands. Indeed, Brown will be a speaker at the Make Poverty History demonstration (in Edinburgh on Saturday the 2nd of July).

However, different people have different conceptions of what these demands mean, and the G8 leaders will try to impose strings. The G8 leaders will not help the so-called Third World without getting something in return. Aid and debt relief can be tied to cooperation with the agenda of the large capitalist governments, particularly enforced privatisation of essential services such as water or buying goods from the same countries (most US aid is tied in this way). Only 18 African countries are currently being considered for debt relief, and these are countries that have complied with the demands of Western institutions (the G8, World Bank and International Monetary Fund). They have had to agree to “poverty reduction strategies” (in World Bank terminology, that should really be called “poverty intensification strategies”) involving privatisation, deregulation and flexible labour markets. Even then, New Labour is not calling for debt cancellation but merely eliminating the need for interest payments over the next ten years. The tiny amount of money they are asking capitalist governments to fork out for this (the figure of £1.7 billion has been mooted) suggests that something fishy is going on. Backhanders from some corporations, perhaps, that would benefit from such debt relief. In particular, I suspect that the genetically modified (GM) food company Monsanto is involved, and that “feeding the world” (as Band Aid called for) would be done with GM food, not merely for profit motives but as a way of preventing ordinary people from fighting back. Trials which supposedly prove that GM food is safe are scientifically ridiculous; there are an infinite number of ways in which food or drink can be genetically tampered with and even though some ways will not have any undesirable consequences, many others would. Indeed, computer modelling could be used to predict how it would affect people’s minds.

Privatisation has been the main tool of the West in controlling African and Latin American countries in the past, but recent revolutionary movements in Bolivia (general strikes, occupations, demonstrations and blockades, which called for renationalisation of the gas industry and forced the resignation of the President and new elections to be called) have shown the limits to which privatisation can be applied. Sooner or later, ordinary people are going to fight back.

Real trade justice will not arise out of concessions from capitalist governments. Even if they remove subsidies on Western produce (such as via the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy) that make it impossible for underdeveloped countries to compete, the fact that Western goods are comparatively expensive puts these countries at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to competition in this globalised world, and companies will employ workers in countries with low wages and low protection for workers such as trade union rights. Only a democratic socialist world can achieve trade justice, and this can only happen through a socialist revolution. The G8 summit is the best opportunity to launch such a revolution!

How can my call for a worldwide general strike reach a massive worldwide audience?

I am going to set up a new revolutionary socialist band, called Galaxia after the very left-wing future of the galaxy at the end of science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, in the run-up to the G8 summit. I have written the start of a song called The Revolution Starts Now! (which is appropriate since the world socialist revolution will truly start at the time of the G8 summit if there is serious strike action then) and modified the lyrics of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? to yield a song called Do They Know It’s G8 Time?

All Galaxia’s tracks will be downloadable for free from the downloads page of the Galaxia website (www.galaxiamusic.org). We will put them elsewhere on the internet, including at file-sharing sites and as files at discussion groups (including the one dedicated to Galaxia: galaxiamusic). We will not have time to produce many CDs in time for the G8 summit so we will rely on internet distribution on this occasion. In the future, we will produce CDs for distribution amongst left-wing organisations and in shops. Proceeds from Galaxia will be distributed to campaigns, socialist and autonomous organisations, and charities (especially those which campaign as well as alleviate some of the problems of capitalism) by a non-profit making organisation called the Galaxia Foundation for the World Socialist Revolution.

Of course, the best songs in the world have no impact at all unless they are publicised. We cannot of course rely on record companies or chain stores to push revolutionary socialist music; therefore we will utilise internet discussion groups (at groups.yahoo.com and groups.google.co.uk) and websites, leaflets and word of mouth to publicise Galaxia.

My leaflet with the lyrics of Do They Know It’s G8 Time? on (accessible by clicking here) can be downloaded, printed out and distributed around the world. It specifically suggests that readers photocopy it and distribute it at G8 events and at airports. This could play a large role in publicising Galaxia, and the issues involved at the G8 summit including GM food/drink and privatisation, around the world.

I am a member of over 230 discussion groups at groups.yahoo.com, about 60 of which I created myself, and a further 20 or so at lists.riseup.net. They are mostly devoted to politics or music, but I send my important political messages to all of them (sending some relevant messages to each, especially at first). Therefore, if you search for interesting keywords at one of those addresses, you will stand a good chance of coming across one of my groups or one that I send my messages to. I have no way of knowing how many people are reading my messages, because all my groups have archives that are readable by everybody, without needing to join. This is vitally important, because astute readers of my messages will realise their significance and that therefore joining the groups would entail allowing their email address to be known by many conspiratorial organisations. However, joining one of my groups (and receiving messages in individual emails) does yield the advantage of finding out about others, since I send messages to many groups at once. By duplicating windows and with a bit of copying and pasting, I can send an important message to many groups and important individuals in a few minutes (however, I am constrained by a limit on the number of emails that I am allowed to send out per hour by Yahoo!)

The search facility at groups.yahoo.com is very good, and it is possible to take advantage of it by setting up groups appropriately. When I set up a Manchester United group, I called it manchester-united-fans, gave it the title “Manchester United Football Club fans”, put it in the Manchester United section of the hierarchical structure called the Directory and mentioned “Manchester United” once in the description of the group. This meant that anybody searching for “Manchester United” found my group above all others. Since this must have been one of the most common searches used by anybody in the world at the time when Glazer was attempting to take over the club in particular, it obviously brought my views on a wide range of issues (including the G8) to a large worldwide audience.

In my opinion, the prospects of large numbers of students, especially those at school, striking on the first day of the G8 summit (Wednesday the 6th of July) are very good, whereas significant strike action is unlikely. This is partly because of Bob Geldof’s call mentioned above, and partly because the consequences of students striking are much less severe than those that could be faced by workers. With anti-union laws in this country that make industrial action deemed “political” illegal, and without left-wing political parties, specifically the Scottish Socialist Party which unites virtually the entire left in Scotland or the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) which is by far the biggest in England (or Respect in which the SWP plays a leading role), supporting the call for a general strike, it is clearly unrealistic to expect it to take off in this country during this G8 summit. Nevertheless, if we are ever to achieve socialism, such action will probably need to take place some time, since the big business parties are not going to introduce a fair enough electoral system to give us a chance to take power that way – without a big struggle at least. Part of my role in calling for a worldwide general strike is indicating how the working class can take power; I will keep this website going and perhaps it will become feasible at a later G8 summit. However, we should not rule out general strikes elsewhere in the world, where it is more apparent to the general population that capitalism needs to be overthrown, during this summit.

A big factor holding political parties back from supporting a general strike call in this country is that many of the best activists will be travelling to Gleneagles – or will try to get there (police roadblocks or limited space on trains could be a problem). This means that they are concentrating their efforts in that direction, and indeed that some could be worried about possible transport problems arising from a general strike situation. This argument a general strike is false because:

I have concluded because of the above factors that calling for a school students strike, and organising demonstrations in towns and cities starting at lunchtime so that those not on strike can attend, would be the most effective strategy in Britain during this G8 summit. I am trying to persuade anti-capitalist activists to support this call in Manchester specifically, since I would be able to achieve more in this city if they do take it up than travelling to Gleneagles.