This is the text of a leaflet I handed out at the Anarchist Bookfair and talked about at the May Day meeting there. It’s basically a suggestion for something we could do to communicate the ideas of the anti-capitalist movement to the general population, and to improve our understanding of other people’s lives and views at the same time. I’m posting it here to see what people think. I’m also going to put it forward as a suggestion for part of a week of May Day activities at the May Day organising meeting, which is on Sunday (2pm Fieldgate Resource Centre, corner of Fieldgate St/Parfett St, London E2).

In the last few years we’ve seen the anti-capitalist movement in Europe and North America grow at an incredible rate. (Huge movements with similar aims have been around for much longer in other parts of the world, but that’s another story.) It seems to me that it’s taken existing activists by surprise. Suddenly there are tens of thousands of us running around the streets, amazed by the power our numbers have given us, yet at the same time hardly knowing what to do with it. Personally, as the time comes around to invent another May Day’s misrule, I feel a sense of frustration. Yes, these things are fun and empowering and can make good political points, but we could be doing so much more.

Clearly this is a movement whose time has come. We haven’t done anything particularly clever to draw this number of people towards us, though the Reclaim The Streets parties were certainly a fine idea and took hold accordingly. This is getting so big because the effects of neo-liberalism are so dramatic. Globalisation, privatisation, the breathtaking power of multinationals: at every turn, things we assumed to belong to us, the people, are being taken away, be it public transport, secure jobs or the genetic make-up of the world around us. That ever hungry monster, capitalism, is trying to feed in places we never imagined possible. It is a political shift which has surely not been matched since the Acts of Enclosure threw the populace off land which until then had always been common property.

These changes have the potential to be seen as deeply wrong by the majority of the population. They offend our ideas of ‘natural justice’ and they are having terrible effects on people’s lives, through lost and casualised jobs, environmental destruction, the ruin of public services and education, you name it. But as a movement we aren’t responding to this potential. Compared to movements in Latin America, for instance, we are still running around like children. We have an incredibly strong message: we need to communicate it. We need to tell people why we’re dressing up in padded white suits and breaking windows every May Day, because the mainstream media sure as hell aren’t going to.

I read recently that the Zapatistas once conducted what they called a ‘consulta’, in which thousands of them travelled all over Mexico in small groups explaining what the Zapatistas were fighting for and asking ordinary people what they thought of it. What I want to suggest is that we could do something similar: a kind of Discussion Day. Three times a year, for instance, we (i.e. anyone who sees themselves as part of the anti-capitalist movement, by which I mean genuine anti-authoritarians, not Trotskyists trying to build their party) could set up in little groups on street corners or outside supermarkets or anywhere we feel appropriate and tell people what it is we’re on about, discussing whatever is appropriate for the time and place. It would be about spreading information, not a party line. It would be a two-way process, learning what’s going on with other people as we talk to them. It would need organisation, but it needn’t be hierarchical or stifling. And we would need to inform ourselves, possibly meeting up at something like the excellent conference a couple of years ago, but that’s what any mature political movement does: it educates itself.

Given the information, I believe more and more people could share our ideas. Over time we could create a movement with the strength to achieve changes we can scarcely imagine now. We could forget the pointless debates the media try to impose on us about ‘violence’. (Violent protest has always existed, often for good reason, and probably always will.) This will be far more threatening to the powers that be: the spreading of illicit information, people communicating without state permission, a powerful anti-capitalist movement taking root among all those who have something to gain from it.

Part of the problem is that at the moment there is no real forum for such discussions. I’m going to suggest it as part of a range of pre-May Day activities at the May Day organising meetings. Meanwhile if anyone has any comments, positive or critical (or both), maybe they could write to Year Zero. Ultimately, I think that if this idea is right and if we have the movement to do it, it will happen. And if it spreads, like the RTS street parties did, maybe these Discussion Days could start to happen all over the world. Where will it end? We can only dream.