Trade union strike wave, Part II: The Historic TU Sellout and Chris Kaba Campaign Collapse

 Trade union strike wave, Part II 

- Another wave of strikes after the historic sellout

- Chris Kaba campaign collapse demoralises potential of Black resistance

After the unilateral undemocratic decision of the RMT, ASLEF, CWU leadership to call off strikes in respect to the monarchy and its handover, the trade union strikes have started-up again. The sellout of the strikes for the British monarchy is one of the most glaring sellouts of the left ever in history up there with the support of the 1stWW by Brit 'socialists' and the sellout of the nine-day 1926 General Strike and the year-long 1984 Miners Strike by the Labour Party and TUC (there's a hint as to which forces hold back the workers in collaboration with the ruling classes).

Knowing what happened with the sellout to the monarchy and then the strikes re-starting by the same sellout leadership leaves us in a strange position, we have no actual left in this country who has the capacity or ideological ability to take stock of what happened, popularise it and then act on it to improve the class struggle. Nevertheless, despite all these massive limitations it's a good thing not a bad thing that workers in trade unions are back mobilised in the streets and on picket lines. The problem is that people should clearly now know that they have a very corrupt sellout leadership who don't want a real fight against the tory state but want to protect their big salaries. The RMT sold-out the P&O dispute in front of everyone's faces and hardly anyone has said a thing. 

Why do Brit workers accept and cover-up the sellout culture of the TU leadership? Partially it's because they share the racism and brit nationalism and careerist grift of the TU leaders and union structures. Mick Lynch openly argued in favour of prioritising former brit soldiers as RMT members above anyone else in a recent interview (see here). Another reason so many are so accepting is because people are increasingly desperate for hope that something will work for them. So they suspend critical faculties and become a little religiously delusional to some extent. We had the same dynamic played-out so graphically and tragically in the Corbyn years. 

Due to the deep internalisation of Brit state racism and colonialism on the left the strike wave brings out the entire white left onto the protests and picket lines. Black and brown people are generally squeezed out of left culture, trade unions and organisations so you have a massive disproportionate presence of white people and an equally disproportionate absence of black and brown people in the strike wave movement. 

The black radical grassroots were and still are to a lesser extent ready to mobilise around the police shoot-to-kill of Chris Kaba. However, the state and counter-revolutionary forces mobilised and the campaign for Chris Kaba has basically ground to a halt with no process and strategy of street protests and mobilising the community. To add to that the Chris Kaba spokesperson Jefferson Bosela stated on a 'twitch' session hosted by Michael Morgan on Weds 28 Sept that he had a meeting with London Met Police chief Mark Rowley and that Rowley had asked Bosela to keep that meeting secret, Bosela said on the twitch event that he would respect Rowley's request for secrecy. To meet the chief of racist and misogynistic torturers, rapists and killers which is the London Met Police chief and have the meeting in secret and keep the details from the community is indicative of the current low-point in the campaign. 

Black and brown communities have no leadership, organisations and very little voices that can build towards the kind of movements we need to develop the entire working class struggle as only the most oppressed and militant workers can lead and fight and they are the Black and brown working classes. We have the most radical class struggle traditions in this country from William Cuffay and his leadership of the Chartists, through to oppressed Irish people radicalising the working class movement in Britain through to Black and Brown working class youth leading the resistance against the state especially in the uprisings from 1979 to 1981 and of course the Aug 2011 uprising across the country. 

Then there is the sorry and pathetic sight of small number of farright forces who use and abuse Hinduism and their mirror-opposites using and abusing Islam mobilised a few youths respectively against each other in Tommy Robinson and the Brit state's dream in Leicester with a similar stupid incident in Birmingham. South Asian communities are largely hostile to this nonsense and a small group of idiots supported by a few leftists especially the reactionary role of Amrit Wilson backing the far-right using and abusing Islam should not be seen to represent anyone but their own sectarian and opportunistic agendas. 

The collapse of the Chris Kaba campaign and the sectarian antics which play neatly into the agenda of Tommy Robinson /Brit state in Leicester and the inability of Black and Brown communities to mobilise against and way beyond this into a struggle for Black Power socialist struggle remains a challenge that we cannot yet fulfil. For our part we in the MXM are mobilising public in-person events after a hiatus of two years to discuss exactly these issues on Fri 28th Oct 630pm at the London Irish Centre in Camden with leading grassroots trade unionists and anti-colonial socialist fighters and organisers on the platform. 

MXM Public event: STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

Eventbrite event page

Facebook event page

*Fri 28th Oct 2022

630-830pm (Starting sharp at 630pm)

London Irish Centre, 

50-52 Camden Square, 

London NW1 9XB

£5 suggested entry

This event brings some of the most experienced speakers directly involved at the forefront of the class struggle exploring challenges of defending working class people under increasing attacks by the Tory state in the contexts of a growing far-right state, racism in the colonial capitalist global crises in general.

Speakers: 

Steve Hedley (former Assistant Gen Sec RMT Union)

Suresh Grover (The Monitoring Group, former Stephen Lawrence family campaign coordinator)

Glenroy Watson (Chair of RMT's 2023 Black & Ethnic Conference)

Arnie Hill (London Black Revs)

Chair: Malcolm X Movement

*This event will be audio-visually recorded for upload onto social media, please let the chair know if you do not wish to be recorded  

*We apologise that there are steps leading into the room

MXM public event: Black Bolsheviks, with Hakim Adi, 630pm Fri 10 Dec Housmans Bookshop, N1 9DX

BLACK BOLSHEVIKS
Special guest speaker: Hakim Adi
630pm Fri 10 Dec, Housmans Bookshop
Housmans Bookshops, Kings Cross, N1 9DX
£5 Suggested entry

FB event page

Dear friends,

MXM are proud to announce that leading Black scholar Hakim Adi will be giving a talk and taking questions and comments at our Black Bolsheviks event this Friday, It is the centenary of the Bolshevik October Revolution which was a massive surge against colonialism and racism as the new revolutionary state in by many means directly supported the global revolutionary movements against colonialism. Arguably Africa and Asia would not have seen liberation from colonialism without the 1917 Revolution and then the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Be prepared to learn so much about a primarily important part of our revolutionary history.

Please see attached some memes related to the event, feel free to share.

In solidarity
MXM Coordinators Team

MXM public event: Marcus Garvey: Origins of 'Race First' - 630pm Sat 23rd Sept, Housmans N1 9DX

Marcus Garvey & the Origin of 'Race First'
630pm, Sat 23 Sept 2017
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road, N1 9DX
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

Guest speaker: Brother Omowale (Pan-African Community Society Forum)

We are proud to announce that we are hosting Brother Omowale, a leading Pan-Africanist organiser and researcher in London on the subject of Marcus Garvey and the the origins of 'race first' in Garvey and Garvey's historic movement of the United Negro Improvement Asoociation (UNIA).

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism - Fri 28 July Housmans, 630pm N1 9DY

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism
630pm Fri 28 July
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

Libyan people from different parts of Libya will be speaking about terrorism in Libya and its roots and nature and how it reaches other parts of the world including Manchester. They will be speaking about the on-going persecution of darker skinned Libyan and non-Libyan African people, exposing the realities of the people smuggling and who is behind them. There will also be a person from Tawergha (pictured are internally displaced children from Tawergha), which was the ONLY Black African town in North Africa which has been totally wiped out by Nato proxy armed gangs.

public event: Elections, Islamophobia & Terrorism - This Fri 630pm Housmans Bookshop, N1 9DY

Elections, Islamophobia and terrorism
630pm Fri 09 June 2017
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

The political situation in Britain continues to worsen as the British Tory government and state continues to ramp-up racism particularly focused around the fallout of Brexit, in addition to that the three terrorist attacks in the three months that has raised the spectre of British state collusion with terrorism has enabled the Tory government to now signal to the country that they can be nearly racist as possible with calls for mass deportations and arrests of Muslims becoming louder and louder. This is event is an invnitation to a conversation led by some of the leading grassroots activists and advocates for the Muslim community, ant-racism, anti-imperialism and for socialism to discuss the results of the general election.

Speakers:

Arzu Merali - Co-founder and Head of Research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, IHRC is the leading organisation fighting Islamophobia in this country for decades

Glenroy Watson - President of the RMT trade union's London Region the Secretary of Global Afrikan Congress uk a Pan Afrikan Reparatory campaigning group

Nargess Moballeghi - Independent journalist and documentary film maker. Formally head of news at Press TV UK, and has been working as a journalist for 12 years

more speakers TBC shortly.



Please note: this is an event oriented towards migrant and Black and Brown communities, not to be dominated in any way by the white left. This event will be filmed for public viewing online and attending this event means you give permission to be filmed, however please let the organisers know if you don't want your face on camera.

IFTAR: We will be going to the local Turkish/Kurdish restaurant Best Mangal where comrades can have their Iftar with us (some of whom are fasting) if you so wish, you have to buy your own food and drinks, apologies we can not provide that.

event: Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism
630pm Fri 28 July
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY

Facebook event page

Libyan people from different parts of Libya will be speaking about terrorism in Libya and its roots and nature and how it reaches other parts of the world including Manchester. They will be speaking about the on-going persecution of darker skinned Libyan and non-Libyan African people, exposing the realities of the people smuggling and who is behind them. There will also be a person from Tawergha (pictured are internally displaced children from Tawergha), which was the ONLY Black African town in North Africa which has been totally wiped out by Nato proxy armed gangs.

MXM event: Somalia Resists Famine, relief worker's report back

Somalia Resists Famine: relief worker's report back
630pm Fri 23 June
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

Somalia is a proud people with a leading anti-colonial past and recent history. A once stable and prosperous liberated country it has in recent decades been ravaged by imperialist-instigated destabilisation. Today in part as consequence to all this the Somali people have been facing a drought and famine. Mohammed Ibrahim Shire (pictured) has been doing excellent work by returning to the Homeland from England to assist directly with the relief work and will be educating us about what is happening there and putting it into wider political contexts. 

Mohammed Shire is also the author of one of the only political biographies of Somali anti-imperialist socialist leader Siad Barre, he will be bringing some copies with him to sign and sell.

Black Panther Research Project launched!

Facebook event page

The Malcolm X Movement, in partnership with Brixton Library and the Black Panther Alumni (http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/ ) and supported by Black HistoryStudies proudly present:
BLACK PANTHER RESEARCH PROJECT

A free and exclusive opportunity to learn from veteran leading Black Panthers themselves (speaking via live video link) in a 5-part series of events! Participating in this full course will give you an in-depth understanding as to the many different aspects of the Black Panthers, a process of learning led by the actual local and national leaders of the Black Panther Party.

Please contact 2015mxm@gmail.com (places are limited, first come first serve)

1. Fri Jan 13, 615pm - Roots of the Black Panthers - Billy Jennings

2. Fri Jan 27, 615pm - Black Panthers & Serve the People programs - Billy X Jennings

3. Fri Feb 10, 615pm - Black Panthers & Culture - Emory Douglas

4. Fri Feb 24, 615pm - Black Panthers & Global Solidarity - Aaron Dixon

5. Fri March 10, 615pm - Women' Liberation & Black Panthers - Charlotte O'Neal

Venue: Brixton Library, Windrush Square, Brixton Hill, Brixton, London SW2 1JQ

Free warm food and drink will be provided
£5 entry fee per research session

Twitter: @mxmovement | Facebook: /malcolmxmovement | http://mxmovement.blogspot.co.uk/ | Instagram: malcolm_x_movement

Leading Black radical advocate Prof Gus John gives a MXM talk on Brexit

Leading Black radical advocate Prof Gus John gives a MXM talk on Brexit 

The Malcolm X Movement are delighted to announce that we will be having a public event whereby this country's leading Black radical advocate against racism in general and in the police and education system - Prof Gus John - will be delivering an important talk on Brexit. Brexit is the concentration of all our growing colonial oppressions in this historical moment and needs serious analysis and grassroots organising to oppose it. Prof Gus John gives a wealth of wisdom, knowledge, analysis and experience that can well equip us for these challenges.

Facebook event page

6pm Thurs 17th November
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
Kings Cross, N1 9DY
Suggested entry - £5

Launching new historic DVD and book on Libyan Popular Anti-Imperialist Resistance

Launching new historic DVD and book on Libyan Popular Anti-Imperialist Resistance

The Malcolm X Movement proudly hosts the premier of a hard-hitting, informative and inspiring look at African and Libyan popular anti-imperialist resistance entitled Nato War on Libya (53mins). We are also hosting at the same event a book launch of a collection of writings about the martyrdom of Muammar Gaddafi entitled On the Martyrdom of Muammar Gaddafi: 21st Century Fascism and Resistance. One of our MXM coordinators - Sukant Chandan is the editor of the book and the filmmaker of the doc.

The event takes place this Sat 29th Oct at 6pm at Marx Memorial Library,  EC1R 0DU (£5 suggested entry). The Libyan community are kindly and generously providing free Libyan snacks and refreshments at this event.

Please find the Facebook event page HERE.

In solidarity
MXM Coordinators Team

'Europe' Formed through A Colonial Genocide Against Africa, Asia and Islam

The Malcolm X Movement will be holding an event (details HERE) for Cedric Robinson and his amazing work - Black Marxism. Below is an extract from that work, this is an extract from Robinson explaining the genesis of modern Europe and European-ness, and how from the feudal times that feudal and the colonial conceptual nature of 'race' and 'racism' was at the heart of the developing concept of what Europe is and has become. This process took place in counter-opposition to the civilisations of Africa and Asia which were inspired and organised by the faith of Islam. This process of genocidal colonialism that developed a racialised white supremacist character, is fundamental in understanding how re-build a Black (non white) but also African and Asian revolutionary analysis and practice towards liberation. These and other connected themes will be explored and discussed at our event.

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Islam and Eurocentrism 
Extract from Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, p97-100, 1983

The history of Europe for the millennium following the fifth century of the Christian era had not been markedly uni-linear. That immense span of time had contained little if any basis for teleological certainty. Indeed, there had been eras such as the eighth century when the very presence of Western high culture had been faint, preserved in scattered outposts whose own fate was made doubly uncertain by barbarian invasion and the pathetic social and material conditions of the pagan societies that surrounded them.

By the year 700, European learning had fled to the bogs of Ireland or the wild coast of Northumbria. It was in the monasteries of Ireland that fugitive scholars pre- served a knowledge of the Latin and even of the Greek classics. It was in a monastery in Northumbria that the greatest scholar of his time, the greatest historian of the whole Middle Ages, the venerable Bede, lived and wrote. And it was from the monasteries of Ireland and England, in the eighth and ninth centuries, that English and Irish fugitives would return to a devastated Europe.

Christendom slowly recovered. During what would be called the Dark Age, allied with barbarian chiefs and kings, converted or otherwise, the church gradually grew into the most mature base for the feudal organization that characterized the early Middle Ages. It acquired land, and the peasants and slaves who made that land productive and valuable. Without the slightest sense of its moral bankruptcy, moreover, the leaders of the Christian Church unmercifully exploited its human base, legitimating the brutality of the nobility, their secular kin, and sharing the profits from the labor of bound workers and a foreign trade more than eight centuries long that delivered European slaves (among other goods) to Muslim merchants. Feudal Europe, for a time, however, proved to be capable of expansion while rotting from within-but it was only for a time.

By the thirteenth century, that phase of European development was at a close; the system collapsed. The ruling classes of feudal Europe were succeeded by their Mediterranean factors: merchants, traders, and bankers. They in turn spawned or defined the roles for those actors who supplied capital, technical, and scientific expertise, and administrative skills to the states that would lead the emergence of capitalist Europe. By then, however, European culture and consciousness had been profoundly affected. Legend, as we have seen, acquired the authority of history. Moral authority continued to dissipate. The mystifying veil, which the feudal ruling classes had created to hide, or at least soften the crushing oppression that they had put in place, was in tatters. Prester John's [1] first appearance in the European imagination of the twelfth century was consequently understandable.

The legend, if it indeed originated from within the ruling class, accomplished two very disparate ends: for one it presented Europe's intelligentsia with a powerful and splendor, Roman counterpoint, inspired by Christian idealism, biblical imagery and splendor, Roman law, and Greco-Egyptian civil craftsmanship. Here was the ideal Christian society, measure by which the failures secure in its political body and spiritual soul, It was the and insidious corruptions of actual Christendom could be calibrated in detail. A model Christian Empire, which, when compared to Europe, displayed those faults that had contributed to the inability to defeat Islam either spiritually or militarily. This was the legend's internal function.

Its other significance, however, was even more critical. The legend transmuted the world beyond Europe, "the Indies," into Eurocentric terms. Whatever was the reality of those lands and their peoples, came to be less and less important. For the next 300 years, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, the legend of Prester John provided Europe's scholars and their l learned coreligionists with a structured a obfuse prism through which the authenticity of every datum, every traveler's report, every intelligence of its foreign trade, every fable of its poets, and every phatic foible of its soldiery could be screened and strained. Even direct evidence was not immune, for in the next century, G. K. Hunter tells us, this "frame of reference" was sustained:

"The new information which the English voyages of the sixteenth century brought to the national culture had to be fitted, as best it could, into a received image of what was important. This means that the facts were not received in quite the same way as they would have been in the nineteenth century. Historians of the last century were much taken with the idea of the Elizabethan imagination liberated b the voyagers. But there is little evidence of this outside the unhistorical supposition, "that's how I would have reacted." The voyages certainly did expand of physical horizon, but it is not clear that they expanded the cultural horizon at the same time. The image of man in his theological, political and social aspects could not be much affected by the discovery of empty or primitive lands." (G.K. Hunter in Shakespeare in His Own Age, 1964, p40)

The architects of European consciousness had begun the construction of that world-view that presumed the basic structure of other than European societies was at its foundation a European structure, that the moral, ideological, and spiritual scaffold of these societies was the same bottom structure discernible in European culture, that the measure of mankind was indeed the European. The legend of Prester John and his wondrous realm, the formidability of this purely Christian king who waited in patience for his Christian allies at the other end of the world, all this was the form impulse in its appropriate medieval costume. Thus, when the miraculous kingdom could not be located in the deserts and steppes of central Asia or even Cathay, it did not cease its fascination but was transferred to the south beyond the upper Nile The of other people fantasy and its attendant resolve to bend the very existence and being into convenient shapes were important beginnings for the destruction past. While the vitality Islam had seemed to mock the pathetic feebleness of of Christ's chosen, humiliating them in defeat and with the persistent threat of further occupations and invasions, the legend was compelling. And a basic lesson of propaganda learned: Europe's destiny was incompatible with the autochthonous non-European worlds. An increasingly prominent concomitant of the European millennium (roughly from the tenth to the present century) would be the refutation of those terms.

In freeing itself from Muslim colonization, Europe once again had a vigorous bourgeoisie and the state institutions to begin the construction of its own extra- European colonialism. From the fifteenth century on, that colonialism would encom pass the lands of Asian, African, and New World peoples and engulf a substantial fraction of those peoples into the European traditions of slave labor and exploitation. Capitalists were, from this point on, no longer dependent upon the material restraints Europe presented for the primitive accumulation of capital. What Genoese, Pisantine, and Jewish capitalists accomplished for Portugal and Spain in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, on their expulsions from Iberia they transferred to north western Europe. Soon after, an English bourgeoisie succeeded those of Belgium and the Netherlands in the domination of the now-extensive world system. We have, however, gone far beyond our immediate interests in the Muslim part in Europe development. Here we must conclude, still somewhat arbitrarily and abruptly, the survey of the significance of Islam in European history. For the moment it will have to be sufficient to remind ourselves that Islam once represented a more powerful civilization, and, again, one closely identified in the European mind with African and Black peoples.

In retrospect the Western potential for creating the Negro had moved closer in a way to its realization. The cultural and ideological inventory was at hand. A native racialism had already displayed its usefulness for rationalizing social order, and with the advent of the Islamic intrusion into European history it had further proved its value by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance and a negation of an unacceptable past. For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object.

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[1] 'Prester John' was a myth, whereby European colonialists imagined a perfect Christian utopia ruled by Prester John that existed somewhere in the 'pagan' lands of the 'East'. ie., it was a legend that justified and motivated the colonialists to colonise and conduct genocide - MXM

Raw livestream video from MXM's Muhammad Ali Memorial Event

PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK

Public event: Anti-Imperialist Prisoners - Palestine, Syria, Libya & Turkey, Fri 06 May

Anti-Imperialist Prisoners - Palestine, Syria, Libya & Turkey

Fri 06 May, Marx Memorial Library
37A Clerkenwell Green, Farringdon, EC1R 0DU
Doors open 6pm for a 630pm sharp start
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

THIS event seeks to bring together the situations and struggles of detainees and prisoners in the jails of Daesh and other death squads in Libya and Syria, in Turkey, and the colonial occupation force in Palestine.

Moussa Ibrahim - Libyan Peoples National Movement (Libyan Resistance). This will be the only speaker adressing the event via live internet link

Ashjan Ashour - On anti-colonial resistance amongst Palestinian prisoners

Steve Kaczynski - Former political prisoner held in Turkey

Issa Chaer - On the plight of detainees held by Daesh in Syria

Elif Sarican - Kurdish Students Union, speaking on Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey


Organised by the Malcolm X Movement:
FB: Malcolm X Movement
YouTube: Malcolm X Movement
Twitter: @mxmovement
W: mxmovement.blogspot.co.uk
E: 2015mxm@gmail.com

By attending this event you are giving permission that you might appear in the filming of the event which will be uploaded publicly onto social media