In this new occasional series, we’ll be speaking to comrades about what being in the ACN means to them. In this first interview, we speak to Steve in Glasgow.
Steve, we describe ourselves as a class struggle organisation. What does class mean to you?
Class is our relationship to the means of production. Do you own the factory, or do you work in it? A class analysis of power in society comes down to one word: ownership. Class is a relationship. Do I need to work in order to live, or can I live off my capital, my investments? For most of us, the answer is we need to work. If we can. Or we draw benefits, which aren’t enough to live on.
The media keep using the phrase “white working class”. Do you think the working class is white?
Well, the working class is most of us. So that means it’s black people, white people, Asians, trans people, cis people, gay, straight, men, women, people with disabilities. People you see all around you. People who need to work to live. And we all have that in common. The same relationship to ownership.
What does direct action mean to you?
It’s kind of there in the question. It means acting directly. Not acting indirectly. Getting directly stuck into what matters to you and your community. It’s the people affected by a problem acting together for the solution of that problem and doing it without external mediation. The structures that are part of the problem, part of the system, love to mediate us. Stick their oar in. That’s how they co-opt and neuter activism.
Direct action means people getting together as equals and deciding our common interests and needs, then going for them. Not believing that politics means going to others to act on our behalf. Like signing petitions, voting for “representatives” once every four years, and so on.
Another term we hear is “solidarity”. What is solidarity?
It’s a process. It’s the way that the powerless discover the power to carry out our own liberation. By acting together, we learn our own power. Solidarity brings about this self-confidence, which comes from within the working class. And this self-confidence is nurtured through solidarity and direct action.
But isn’t the working class reactionary?
That’s the story we’re told to hold us back. But if you’re afraid of the working class, you’re afraid of yourself, to mangle a Fred Hampton quote. A friend of mine said something the other day, we were talking about this, and it made me laugh: “they can come and call me homophobic if they want. I’m queer as fuck. They can fuck right off”. That’s what people forget. Who is the working class? It’s us.
It’s Uber delivery riders, shop workers, care workers, bar tenders, cleaners, flight attendants, call centre workers. That’s what makes us working class. But we’re also gay, straight, trans, cis, black, white and all those other things too.
What is missing is direct, participatory democratic control in the hands of all those people, which means cooperation and solidarity. Listening to each other’s needs. It means direct democracy. It means needs being met rather than wealth being unequally hoarded. It means fighting for common ownership and control of the means of production. We need to overturn ownership as the basis for power and control and replace it with humanity as the basis for control.
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