Myths.

 De-deifying Mary Barbour.

 Image courtesy of Internationalist.

          Mention the Glasgow-Clydeside rent strike and people will say Mary Barbour. It is as though nobody else played any major role in that class struggle form 1915. The rent strike didn’t even start in the district where Mary Barbour lived, Govan, it started in Linthouse and spread to Glasgow and down as far as Clydebank. There were thousands of ordinary women threw threw themselves into the struggle many took a major role in this event. Communities across this area of Scotland organised groups to stop sheriff officers entering buildings to serve eviction notices. This was a vast community event with ordinary people playing the major role. Mary Barbour was just one of them. There is never any mention of Jean Ferguson, an activist who played a major part in the Glasgow struggle. Jean’s husband was an anarchist, a shipwright at Fairfield’s Shipyard, who was fined for organising strike, which was illegal during this period, refused to pay the fine and went to prison, Jean shared his anarchist principles. There were thousands of “Jeans” who played a major part in this tremendous struggle, who after the strike went back to being housewives, factory workers, shop assistant etc..Mary Barbour owes her fame to the fact that she went on to be a Glasgow councillor, and became well known as Mary Barbour of the rent strike. When the rent restriction act was passed freezing rents, the Glasgow part of the strike called it off. However a little part of history that seems to get over looked is that Clydebank didn’t. They carried on the strike for a further 6 months, claiming that the rent increases that had been passed on to the tenants were in fact illegal. Eventually it went to court and it was stated that in Scotland a landlord can’t just increase the rent. They first must draw up a new tenancy agreement with the tenant who has to sign the agreement, the tenant failing to do so the landlord can then apply for an eviction notice. Since none of this was done, the court ruled that the increases were therefore illegal and those who had paid the increases should be refunded. This again was the ordinary people of Clydebank who came together as one force and beat the system, six months after the Glasgow strike had had been called off, and Mary Barbour was well on her way to becoming a City councillor.

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A Desired Normal.

      It must now be obvious to most people that the system we have been living under has failed us, the people. As we scramble to save lives with a decimated health service and keep hearing the same phony platitudes from our political ballerinas, that the government is doing all it can, doing it right, and everything is falling into place. While 4 weeks into this lockdown, front-line workers are still struggling to get the right equipment. 

     An economic system that was wholly focused on profit for the millionaires and billionaires at the expense of social spending, a system that completely failed to build and maintain the structures necessary for a civilised society. A system that failed to prepare for such emergencies and allowed so many citizens to fall by the wayside, must be seen for what it is, a system that is pure and simple there to enrich those few who are already rich at the expense of the many.

     Knowing this raises the obvious question, what are we going to do about this injustice and abject failure? Mutual aid groups are spring up all over the world, as ordinary people step in to fill the void left by this failed system. People with compassion and a desire to help each other and those more vulnerable than themselves. This surely must be the blueprint for any future shaping of our society. Communities coming together and doing it themselves in co-operation with other groups and communities, with no thought of profit, just seeing to the needs of all our people. I see no reason why we should abandon this method of caring for each other, rather than meekly sitting waiting for our lords and master to get the old greed drive, failed system back up and running. 

    We can and must create that new "normal", based on mutual aid, co-operation, sustainability and seeing to the needs of all our people. 

       The following short article on mutual aid, how to build on it, where it can take us, its possibilities, its possible problems, and its possible wrong directions. There are plenty of links in the article giving a much wider discourse on the subject that will save us, mutual aid.

The following extract from Acorn:

       Mutual aid features prominently in the anarchist response to the current situation. Here is, after all, a perfect opportunity to put theory into practice and to show that acting together, by and for ourselves, is more effective and empowering than waiting passively for the state to save us.
       There is also the possibility that the self-help community networks built up now could evolve into the bases of future revolutionary activity.
      “Longstanding anarchist forms of organization and security have a lot to offer when it comes to surviving the pandemic and the panic it is causing”.
      “Within communities, mutual aid has been proven as the only way to get through the privations of lockdown and the fear of serious or fatal illness. Communities have acted quickly to share basic supplies and resources”.
       “We are seeing Mutual Aid groups spring up in local communities across the UK as crisis sparks compassion in many who want to help out and reach our most vulnerable, our isolated, the many left behind by successions of uncaring governments”.
     “Social solidarity and mutual aid pandemic care is blossoming in communities large and small”.
See also here, here and here.
     There has been occasional reflection on the limits of such an approach, asking how we can ensure that mutual aid networks do not simply turn into temporary means of helping people adapt to a situation they maybe ought not to be adapting to…
        “If our capacity to care for one another fails to be instantiated in qualitatively different forms, they may very well simply be reintegrated into novel expressions of privation, dispossession, and precaritization in whatever new legal and economic systems that may attempt to establish themselves”.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk