WEA & the International Workers’ Education Movement Conference
Congress House, London, May 22, 2003
The WEA & the Future of International Workers’ Education
Rebuilding the Movement
by Dan Gallin, IFWEA President
Brothers and Sisters,
Friends and Comrades,
It is a great pleasure and honour to convey to you, on behalf of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations, our warmest greetings and best wishes on the occasion of the Centenary of the Workers’ Education Association of England and Scotland.
Your organization has a long history, much longer than that of our International Federation, of which it was one of the founders, but your history is also part of ours, together with that of many other organisations that have joined forces to build the International Federation.
On occasions such as this, history is remembered and honoured. But what is history? It is the sum-total of the struggles, controversies, sacrifices and the hard work involving thousands of people who shaped our movement, who created its identity and its values.
This is why history, contrary to common belief, is not about the past. Because it creates identity and values, it is about the future. Organisations need roots to grow, and they cannot understand what they are and where they are going unless they understand where they have been and where they came from, because only then the ultimate purpose becomes clear.
What does history tell us? It tells us that our movement originated in not one but in a diversity of social and political traditions, including trade unionists, ministers of religion, academics, activists of the women’s movement and of the co-operative movement, liberals and socialists, later on activists from the liberation movements. What brought them together in a common endeavour was their commitment to social justice, to a vision of society based on justice and freedom.
What they meant was not only economic justice, but also justice in the relations between men and women, and justice in the relations between individuals, that is to say individual rights, human rights, democratic rights, the exercise of democratic power under the rule of law, freedom of expression, freedom for individuals to assert their dignity and to develop their full potential as a human beings, through co-operative and mutually supportive relationships among equals.
The institutions of the labour movement, such as trade unions, and the mechanisms of social protection and social welfare the labour movement sought to establish by political means, ultimately exist to protect the ability of the individual to develop his or her potential, to protect the time and space each individual needs to grow, and in this context workers’ education is part of a liberating and empowering process.
All of this defines our concept of democracy, which, for us, has never been an abstract goal but above all a method, since we all know how closely ends and means are intertwined, and how each end determines its own means. This is why our movement has always believed that workers’ education has to be participatory and driven by the workers themselves because, as Marx put it when he wrote the Rules of the First International, “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” – and no one else will do it for us.
These are our values and this is our identity. They have not been easy to defend at the best of times and we have always been in a struggle, although at times it appeared that this struggle was muted, and we could even entertain the illusion that we were advancing through the natural progress of society.
Today, my friends, the situation is very different. These are not the best of times. Our values and our goals are under challenge. We are facing an onslaught on our movement, world wide, of a kind that we have not experienced since the 1930s.
In the last twenty years or so, the globalisation of the world economy has meant an enormous increase in the power of transnational corporations at the expense of the nation State, that is, the geographical space in which the labour movement has been accustomed to function and where democratic control, such as it is, is exercised. The geographical space in which the transnational corporations operate is the whole world: they are global, we are not. What we have so far is international networks of national organizations, each of which think and react in national terms. That is not good enough.
A huge shift in power relationships has taken place. The mobility of capital has given transnational corporations unprecedented economic power. They also exercise political power through the international institutions, which they control through their government proxies: the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. Most importantly, they are in control of world’s hegemonic superpower: the United States. There has not been an American administration in recent history that has been so directly and so blatantly connected to corporate interests as the present Bush administration.
This is an administration that pursues its goals with the utmost ruthlessness, the ruthlessness that we know well from the industrial practices of its sponsors. The Iraq war is a good illustration: none of the reasons for which it was ostensibly declared hold water, the real reason, negligently and barely concealed, is to entrench a right-wing Republican administration in the United States for a generation, and the domination of that administration over the world, for a generation.
In 1952, two American science fiction authors wrote a book called the Space Merchants, also known in its serialised form as Gravy Planet. It pictures a dystopia where corporations are literally ruling the world – it is the syndicalist dream turned upside down, where it becomes a nightmare. Fifty years later, that fictional dystopia looks dangerously close to our reality.
We are facing this onslaught at every level: in the industrial democracies, social welfare and social protection are being dismantled, democratic rights and union rights are being eroded; the rest of the world is caught in a poverty trap, often maintained by repression, from which there seems no escape. Through a cynical distortion of language, individualism becomes a rationale for the loss of individual rights, democracy becomes a justification for repression, the freedom of some translates into the servitude of the majority.
If this was the whole picture, it would be a bleak picture indeed. But this is not the whole picture. We are also witnessing an unprecedented movement of popular resistance.
Last February, over ten million people where demonstrating in the whole world against the war in Iraq. This has never happened before in history. And it did not come out of nowhere. It would be inconceivable without the worldwide demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation, which preceded it. It would be inconceivable without the meetings of the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre, now in its third year. This is the Global Justice Movement, growing with each of its actions as it emerges from the depth of popular revolt with the battle cry: “another world is possible”.
That is what we believe: another world is possible. That is the world we have been fighting for for the last hundred years, the world we carry in our hearts and in our minds.
How do we bring it about, this other world? We need to build alliances. We want to be part of the Global Justice Movement – many of the members of our International Federation already are – but we also want to make sure that our values and our identity, our specific goals and methods, prevail. We do not want just another world, we want a better world and to achieve this we need, first of all, to build a coalition with those who share our values.
The way forward is clear when we look back at our history. The emergent workers’ education movement was carried by the two strongest institutions of the labour movement of the time: the trade unions and the co-operatives, and it is not an accident if its representatives share a platform before you today.
Let us work together to rebuild the labour movement in its broad, historical sense. Let us work together purposefully, including wherever possible the many other organisations that grew out of the historical labour movement, for example those providing welfare and solidarity, those organising women and youth, those working for a sustainable environment and, yes, also the labour parties, at least where they are not fighting us.
The division of labour between the different branches of the labour movement, which emerged over the years no longer meets the needs of our time. It is now time to bring together what has grown apart through neglect, complacency and the territorial instincts of self-perpetuating bureaucracies. We must pool our resources and we cannot go on working as if we were each of us alone in our world. We are now facing a global threat to our future and if we do not work together we may lose our future.
If we succeed in rebuilding our movement, we can become a formidable force in the Global Justice Movement, giving it a hard core and a sense of direction and then, yes, we have a chance of making a better world possible.
I thank you for your attention.