A Note on Post-March Militancy in Copenhagen

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen on the struggles of 2007 in Denmark, the attempt to split the movement, the abyss between the streets and the shop floor, and the (false) problem of violence

The question of militancy and violence is becoming one of the most pressing problems facing us. Furthermore, it is a problem that is characterised by much confusion in a time where the left is unable to relate itself to the resistance movements in Iraq, where some G8 demonstrators are distancing themselves from other, more militant G8 demonstrators, where the police arrests more than 800 people in the weeks following the raiding of the youth house, where people from Christiania are collecting money to a high school that was burned down during the riots and where large parts of the left are busy condemning the use of violence as a tool in the battle for the creation of another world while more and more young people are out in the streets squatting and demonstrating for a new youth house. 

The question of violence and, in a wider sense, political violence has raised itself in a Danish context following the events related to the youth house conflict. After the brutal and spectacular raiding of the youth house March 1st this year [2007] where special police forces stormed the house using helicopters and firing very large amounts of teargas into the building, a group of young people much larger than expected was mobilised. In the days and weeks after the raiding, the streets of Copenhagen were the scene of continuous fighting between police and demonstrators. Throughout the entire process the police did not hold back in their use of force: they broke up demonstrations by firing large amounts of illegal deadly teargas into them, they arrested hundreds of people with or without relation to the events, they searched a number of addresses without search warrant and they repeatedly beat up protesters. This however did not prevent thousands of youngsters from showing their discontent in the streets. Barricades were built from burning dumpsters and the streets were temporarily conquered by the demonstrators. Politicians and so-called experts on social affairs were busy, of course, distancing themselves from what was going on, dismissing the protests as the work of juvenile troublemakers thus refusing to consider the question as a political problem. In retrospect, it is evident that these explanations were completely wrong. People are still protesting and there are demonstrations at least once a week. If somebody thought that the battle for a new youth house would quickly die out or that the youth house only mattered to a few hundred of activists, they were wrong. Meetings are taking place all the time and on several occasions the streets of Copenhagen have been filled with protesters fighting the police or looting shops. The protest movement is so confident it announced in advance that it would squat a specific house October 13th. And although the police tried hard to prevent it, several hundred protesters out of a demonstration comprising more than 8,000 people actually managed to get past the police and into the house. This incident and others like it all testify to the fact that there has occurred a kind of democraticization of militancy in Copenhagen: More and more people support the fight for a new youth house and for the right to live another life, different from the one supplied by the ruling order with work, family and ever new commodities.  

The widespread support for the fight for a new youth house has to do with the normalisation campaign that has been sweeping across the country for the last seven years. Ever since the elections in 2001 where the liberal candidate Anders Fogh Rasmussen formed a government backed by the extreme right wing party The People’s Party, the political system in Denmark has developed a peculiar mixture of democracy, racism and chauvinism, a kind of national democratic authenticity totalitarianism primarily expressed as a cultivation of authenticity and hatred towards foreigners. Having won the election in 2001, Fogh Rasmussen launched the so-called ‘battle of culture’ aimed at the left and Muslims alike. Therefore we have seen a steadily growing repression of various groups that somehow do not fit the dominant vision of Danish identity. The eviction at the youth house and the following events have, along with the Mohammed drawings, been the most visible signs of this campaign against alternative life forms. Excessive use of violence and criminalization of formerly accepted expressions and actions have been the order of the day. This local development is of course linked to a global process which, although currently termed ‘the war on terror’, actually constitutes an extensive neo-liberal counterrevolution expanding the power of a closely defined capitalist power.     In a way it might seem strange that it took so long before a reaction manifested itself in Denmark. But even though the Fogh Rasmussen government since 2001 has promoted a particular kind of Danish national democracy expressed as racism, complete support for the US-led ‘war on terror’ and hatred towards the intelligentsia, the left, political correctness and of course Islam, it took the raiding of the youth house to prompt action in the streets. The big demonstrations in May 2006, at which more than 100,000 people protested against the government’s welfare cuts, were easily channelled into the existing political system’s traditional logic of exchange and thereby neutralized. At that time it proved impossible to introduce something new and it was easy for the Social Democratic party to falsely stage the protests as merely a wish for a new government rather than a wish for a break with the current political establishment right or left. But the demonstrations in 2006 do testify to a growing discontent among large sections of the Danish population who had until then remained passive. So far it has remained difficult to connect the different protests, protesting welfare cuts and the fight for a new youth house, and so far no one has really got involved in each other's battles, added anti-racism and resistance to the war with critique of the government’s neo-liberal policy.    That is one of the problems right now: There is no coherent resistance. The protests in favour of the youth house are thus completely disconnected from what is going on in the workshops around the country. There is thus a deep abyss between the street and the shop floor, the militancy of the street has not been able to expand itself into militancy other places. The fight for a new youth house is not yet connected to a wider resistance encompassing rejection of the process of normalization and the racist national democracy, which the neo-liberal forces are trying to create in Denmark. This is without a doubt one of the tasks that lie in front of us: to formulate a coherent critique in which the individual objects of critique are not separate but joined together in a radical critique of the capitalist system and its money and state form. Confronted with the repressive movements of the Danish state that seeks to represent all critique as terrorism, is it necessary to politicize the protests even further and give them a powerful voice in a consensual space where there is almost no distinction between right and left. In this situation it would be inopportune to rule out the use of violence. Indeed violence in this situation is to be understood as a premonition of the far greater conflict that will inevitably occur if we do not succeed in blocking militarized neo-liberal capitalism and its attempt to hold on to wealth and power by means of control, market expansions, a provocatory public sphere, ‘white health’ and extreme tourism.      The situation demands careful consideration. Becoming militant necessitates a discussion of goals and means and requires the development of a new language and new strategies combining critique, creativity and illegal actions transcending the anti-globalisation protests of the 1990’s. Many insist that non-violent actions are the only right ones. After the protests this summer in Germany in connection with the G-8 summit we witnessed the movement being divided into two fractions: a violent and a non-violent one. We must reject this division. The street battles in Copenhagen in March show that for the state there is really no difference between violent and non-violent protestors – the passers-by were arrested along with the more unruly elements, indiscriminately. In that way the state tries to destroy not only the effectiveness of the protests on the street but also their credibility in the media. The state knows very well that another world is possible and that the threat is real. Therefore the state tries to isolate the mere rebellious elements by using official institutions like unions and parties or different left wing groups connected to the political system. At the same time the state tries to reduce resistance to illegitimate non-political babble: “this is just the actions of irresponsible youngsters who have not been properly raised by their parents.” If this is not enough, the state creates a state of emergency setting up so-called visitation zones where people can be stopped and searched at random by the police without being suspected of any criminal activity making everyday life difficult for ordinary people. If it is not possible to identify and control the unruly elements, whole neighbourhoods are closed down. This took place in Nørrebro and Christianshavn in March and it is happening again right now in other neighbourhoods in Copenhagen. If it is not possible to catch the fish, the water is polluted. That is why it makes perfect sense to launch the slogan: We are all militants! The attempt to demonize the protests must be rejected; it is not possible to divide us into a black and a blue block. The protests are an expression of a general will to resistance and a common wish to do things that run counter to the interests of the state and are subversive with regard to capitalist valorisation. It is necessary to move beyond the usual and recurrent attempts to distance oneself from militant resistance. That the established working class organisations and left wing parties participate in such a move is not a big surprise and really it just illustrates that they are closely linked to the neo-liberal restructuring that has been taking place since Chile 1973. It is not from them that we should expect any solution. They have no interest in seeking alternatives to the present order of things. The automatic rejection of violence and militant resistance in favour of a non-violent critique risks consolidating the status quo and effectuates a falsification in so far as it is not possible to envisage a revolutionary movement that refrains from the use of violence in the battle against capitalism and the state. Denunciation of violence is opportunistic. It is either an attempt to gain acceptance in a consensual political public sphere where all radical expressions are derailed or recuperated or it is a sign of a wrong and misguided understanding of the necessity of critiquing the ruling representations about violence and terror.      Naturally, every effort must be made to ensure that militancy does not reduce itself to what we might term the individualism of rebellion. It is never the individual that is militant, it is the collective that uses militant measures in a political battle. Even if individual revolt, in certain situations, may present itself as morally effective, it is always politically inexpedient and necessarily results in various mental short circuits where the fighting isolated individual sees himself as ‘chosen’ and regards others as objects of mobilization. As if the mission was to force people into doing something. The task is never to organize others but to organize oneself with others. When individual militancy strives to rouse others by the use of violence through exemplary actions, it risks being caught up in a suicidal mirror trap in which power becomes nothing more than a homology to power. Thus, the point is not to glorify violence – it is not certain that violence is a key ingredient in the foundation of a new society. But it is clearly stupid to imagine politics without violence. There is always a need to strike back in defence of the new.