A week after leading the 20,000-strong demonstration and street battle against the IMF, World Bank and OECD in Naples, Ya Basta! hosted the first European conference of the Peoples Global Alliance in Milan during the weekend of 24/25 March.

Over 300 delegates from across Europe spent last weekend locked in discussions in the Leoncavallo social centre. Activists from Slovenia and Greece in the east to Spain in the west, from Finland in the North to Italy in the south gathered to discuss areas of work, collaborate and prepare for the PGA’s third world conference in Cochabamba in Bolivia. Individuals from further afield – Russia, Israel, Bolivia, Colombia and the USA – also participated.

The main forces included a sub-group from Reclaim the Streets in London and groups inspired in their wake – such as Global Resistance Movement (MRG) from Spain – and Ya Basta! and its supporters across Europe.

Alongside these major forces, there were a smattering of autonomous groups that were very localist in their outlook, often based on squats, and sometimes completely opposed to any structure whatsoever as being inherently oppressive. Most interestingly a few left Stalinist, Trotskyist and anarcho-communist groups with a serious orientation to the working class were also present.

Ya Basta! – despite their post-modernist dismissal of the working class – have, uniquely among the European PGA groups, significant roots in the working class and urban poor.

Unfortunately, this is not true of almost all the other organisations at the Leoncavallo last weekend; a fact that was reflected in a deeply sectarian attitude towards the working class and its so-called ‘authoritarian’ and ‘hierarchical’ organisations.

The PGA sub-group of Reclaim the Streets (London) in particular wasted two hours of the opening session by leading a witch-hunt against Workers Power, Socialist Workers Party and Globalise Resistance.

Offering no evidence whatsoever of our disruptive, undemocratic or uncomradely behaviour – despite being challenged by Workers Power to do so – the RTS sub-group threatened to leave the conference if we were not excluded.

Their reasons? – we organised on a hierarchical structure internally; we favoured revolution; and we had turned up despite the sub-group of the RTS saying they did not want us to attend.

Workers Power exposed each of these allegations to be a smokescreen for political exclusion. Although we organise in a hierarchical way – as do the Zapatistas with their 22 sub-commandantes and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers with their full-time officials paid out of the subs of worker members – we do not impose that on the PGA.

Will the RTS sub-group and their allies seek to exclude the CUPW and denounce the EZLN at Cochabamba? No.

Secondly, the fact that the witch-finders explicitly turn their back on revolution says more about their trajectory than anything else. And finally, we explained that since no other participant in the PGA had a veto over the inclusion of other groups (in fact Ya Basta! explicitly said they wanted no exclusion orders), it was authoritarian in the extreme for the RTS sub-group to seek one. On the strength of these arguments the RTS sub-group relented and we agreed to participate but not intervene on internal PGA matters.

With this out of the way, the PGA conference set about its business, in particular preparing for the global days of action in Quebec, Saltzburg, Gothenberg, Barcelona and Genoa, and for the conference in Cochabamba.

Due to language problems, the nature of consensus decision-making (i.e. a tiny minority can prevent a conclusion being reached) and the political diversity of the participants, the conference did not decide much. Nevertheless it provided an interesting exchange of ideas and information, and an insight into the workings of one of the most influential of the anti-capitalist wings.

The Global Days of Action (GDAs) are not being abandoned – though there was a serious discussion on how to link them more effectively to ongoing struggles – they are proliferating. But they differ enormously in their purpose and direction.

The Catalonians and Spanish in the MRG want Barcelona’s mobilisation to last two months, culminating in a blockade of the World Bank conference on 25-27 June. But they do not want anyone else to come to Barcelona! Similarly, the Austrians – fearing repression – are planning a very limited protest action on 1st July against the WEF.

On the other hand the socialist, syndicalist and anarchist Swedes in Globalise from Below and Ya Basta! are clearly trying to involve wider forces – immigrants and trade unions – to recreate and even surpass the mass and international mobilisations in Prague and Nice. For this reason, Gothenburg’s EU counter-summit in June and Genoa’s G8 blockade in July will be the main focal points for the European anti-capitalist movement this summer.

Ya Basta! continue to lead the way forward in developing imaginative tactics. On 19th July they plan to co-ordinate an illegal immigrants’ demonstration, protected by the Red Cross and NGOs to highlight the plight of those who usually are too repressed to protest. And on the opening day of the summit itself,

Ya Basta! has called a ‘citizenship strike’ where the unemployed, students, immigrants and workers organised in unions can all take strike action against capital and its agents. As a way of putting pressure on mass trade unions to get stuck into the anti-capitalist movement, the citizenship strike could become as widely used as the ‘tute bianchi’ white overalls movement is already.

But despite these specific advances, the Milan conference exposed the fact that the PGA itself is facing serious questions about the way forward. These were revealed when the activists reported on discussions concerning the world convention in Cochabamba.

The PGA organisations from the south include mass movements like the 1.5 million-strong Bangladesh National Garment Workers Confederation and the landless peasants’ movement Sem Terra in Brazil.

They do not fetishise the non-hierarchical strutures of the anarchist and petit-bourgeois activists in the north. Indeed, they know these structures are impossible to maintain once the masses are engaged in direct action.

By imposing a 70-30 split in favour of delegations from the Third World countries they hope to limit the influence of tiny groups from the major capitalist heartlands who represent no one. After all, if your delegation has been funded by the subs of teenage girls in sweatshops, you won’t want to return reporting a beautiful discussion process but no concrete results.

Secondly, the PGA organisations from the semi-colonial world almost certainly do not share the same post-modernist vision of anti-capitalism of RTS, MRG and Ya Basta! – let alone the individual egoists of some squatters’ collective in Baveria!

While Sem Terra, the Bangladeshi Garment Workers and Korean trade unionists have signed up to the ‘anti-capitalist’ tag in the PGA, but – like the Zapatistas themselves – their anti-capitalism is closer to reform than abolition. The KRRS, for example, the Indian indigenous peoples’ movement which hosted the 2nd PGA conference in Bangalore in 1999, is quite clearly heavily influenced by Stalinism.

In fact, the PGA is in danger of developing an international network which is broadly left Stalinist in Asia, left nationalist in Latin America and anarchist in Europe. Not only is this quite deceitful – to claim political solidarity from tendencies that do not share your vision in order to boost your own kudos – it is also very dangerous.

In the coming six to 18 months, the anti-capitalist movement will face a severe test – a recession in the largest economy in the world, the USA. The reformist NGOs will undoubtedly run a mile from any militant defence of workers’ and democratic rights when push and shoves turns into baton and bullet.

The socialist far left and anti-capitalist anarchists will, on the basis of the previous 18 months’ battles, stand firm. The fate of the movement will depend on winning the large mass of people and organisations who fit into neither of these two categories.

By building an international tendency where the distinction between reform and revolution is blurred and fudged by a populism masquerading as anarchism or anti-capitalism ducks the responsibility of preparing the ground for the coming battles. The LRCI sees in the current situation both the urgent need and the possibility of building a new revolutionary international, democratic in its internal proceedings but centralised around agreed of action.

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