On Saturday 19th December Dundee Revolutionary Communist Group held an open mic street rally in the Murraygate, Dundee. The event urged all organisations and individuals to stand together in active, democratic opposition on the streets.
Comrades from Edinburgh and Glasgow RCG, Dundee Against Austerity, Class War and the Scottish Unemployed Workers Network united and the mic was open for anyone to speak out against racism, war and austerity. We set up at the monument commemorating the extraordinary life of Mary Brooksbanks, a Scottish jute mill worker and communist who was centrally involved in organising workers and the unemployed in Dundee during the 1920s and 1930s. She had famously publicly repeated the words of Scottish revolutionary John MacLean in 1921 when he urged the workless not to allow themselves or their children to starve. MacLean served a year in jail for this sound advice. Brooksbanks had boldly dared the authorities to also arrest her, refusing to abandon the demands of the hungry poor in the face of repression.
Taking up the call of ‘The banks got bailed out! We got sold out!’, speakers agitated against the disgraceful benefit sanctions and workfare schemes imposed by the Job Centres, forcing claimants to choose between heating or eating this winter. Dundee held the record for the highest rate of sanctions in Scotland in 2014, a grim situation which massively contributed to the record working class vote there to ditch the imperialist United Kingdom at the independence referendum of that year.
We called for ‘Imperialist hands off Syria’, detailing the hypocrisy of Britain’s military interventions in Syria and Iraq, highlighting the booming arms and oil trade Britain enjoys with Saudi Arabia, key funders of ISIS. Speakers detailed the racist media manipulation against migrants and refugees, demanding that we stand together and oppose all immigration controls. In imperialist Britain, all attempts to control immigration are thoroughly racist and based on the needs of profit; from the first immigration controls imposed in 1905 against Jews fleeing pogroms to the new immigration bill currently in parliament which seeks to turn whole sections of society into immigration police.
We spoke out for Sheku Bayoh a young man from Sierra Leone who violently died at the hands of Police Scotland in Kirkcaldy this year. We openly challenged the road of racism, austerity and imperialist war which is all the ruling classes can offer the working class and oppressed of the world. We pointed out another road of struggle, solidarity and socialism. We stood in solidarity with Socialist Cuba and the fight for socialism in Venezuela, beacons of hope and progressive struggle that show a better world is possible! We are committed to creating a democratic political space on the streets, to provide a powerful and popular response to the racist, capitalist, warmongering media of the millionaires- join us at our next speak out event:
23 January 2016, Argyll Street, Glasgow 12-2pm
