On March 1, a police “anti-terror” squad landed by helicopter on the roof of the “Ungdomshuset” (Youth House) to storm the building in the Nørrebro area  of Copenhagen which has been occupied by squatters for almost a quarter of a century. This final eviction move – the debut of the police unit – provoked six days of street-fighting, which made headlines around the world. The bourgeois press played up the burning cars and barricades, but rarely mentioned the fact that protesters were beaten, tear-gassed and in some cases run over as the cops moved to break up or seal off what began as peaceful demonstrations. Extra police vehicles were brought in from Sweden and the Netherlands for the military-style assault.

In all, nearly 700 persons were arrested and arraigned in court. The police round-up – the largest in Danish history since the German occupation in World War II – included nighttime raids on individual apartments and the offices of left-wing groups, with or without court order. Among those swept up in the dragnet were members of legal aid groups, paramedics trying to attend to the injured on the street, members of American rock bands touring Denmark, and a host of innocent bystanders. In the aftermath, about 250 of those arrested have been remanded by judges, who rubber-stamped police requests for holding them without bail in isolation custody for two to four weeks awaiting trial.

Police wrecking crews equipped for civil war.
(Photos: Above, Arne Lind. Below, Politiken)

What set off this wanton display of police power in “peaceful” Denmark? The municipality of Copenhagen had officially handed over the abandoned building to the squatters back in 1982, and it became a cultural center at which such well-known musicians as Nick Cave and Björk had performed. But seven years ago the city administration went back on its word, and sold the building for a pittance to a fundamentalist sect, Faderhuset (“Father’s House”). Led by one Ruth Eversen, the homophobic Faderhuset was politely described by the New York Times (4 March) as a “Christian congregation.” In a Sunday sermon delivered as the fighting raged, Eversen exulted that the eviction was a victory over “Satan” – i.e. abortionists, homosexuals and others who are objects of hatred of these reactionaries (also including Muslims, punk rockers and anarchists).

This is why Faderhuset refused offers by concerned parties to buy back the building for considerably more than it had originally paid, and had the building torn down. This is also an act of vicious historical/cultural vandalism. The building at Jagtvey 69 was once a “People’s House” belonging to the Danish trade unions, and had been the scene of various international workers gatherings. It hosted the socialist women’s conference in 1910 which launched International Women’s Day, and had been visited by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg – no doubt an added incentive for Eversen & Co. to destroy it.

Copenhagen’s social-democratic mayor, Ritt Bjerregaard, disappeared on a ski trip during the police assault, but she returned to denounce the protesters and explain that private property rights were sacrosanct. (For social democrats, anyway!) While the bourgeois media tried to whip up hysteria about “foreign agitators,” the cops struck swaggering poses for ”trophy photos” on the site. They have since been deployed to conduct arbitrary body searches at checkpoints around the city.

In our article, “Racist Anti-Muslim Provocations Trigger Storm of Islamic Reaction” (The Internationalist No. 23, April-May 2006), we noted that behind the uproar last year over the Danish anti-Muslim cartoon affair was a drive against immigrants by the Danish bourgeoisie and its state. While this drive is currently being carried out by the national government in the hands of a right-wing coalition including the ultra-rightist Danish People’s Party, the Danish Social Democracy paved the way. Now we have the cops being unleashed at the behest of a right-wing Christian sect (which some of them openly sympathize with) while the Social Democrats play Pontius Pilate.

As we noted in that article, the uproar whipped up over the Danish cartoon affair in the West European bourgeois media countries about “intolerant Islam” was utterly phony. While the bourgeois media waxed indignant over calls by Muslim clerics (and fake leftists) for censorship of offensive images, a climate of hostility to Near Eastern and North African immigrants was being whipped up to justify the use of untrammeled police power. And while the foreign-born may be the first targets of this “anti-terrorist” repression, ultimately the working class and the left are targeted. The recent gunpoint eviction of squatters in Copenhagen proves the point.

Some in the punk/anarchist youth milieu around Ungdoms­huset may be hostile to the workers movement, but the opportunist antics of the social-democratic pseudo-left only reinforce such tendencies.

Socialistisk Standpunkt (SS – Socialist Standpoint), the Danish affiliate of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) founded by the late Ted Grant and now led by Alan Woods, lectures autonomist activists that “their strategy is completely counter-productive.” SS complains that a December 16 demonstration “was converted into violence with individual fighting with the police and the smashing of shops” (Socialistisk Standpunkt, 22 January 2007). While allowing that “the police carry their part of the responsibility for these acts of violence,” these cheerleaders for Venezuelan bourgeois populist Hugo Chávez call to “take the demand for more youth houses up in the three workers’ parties, in the Social Democratic Party, in the Socialist Peoples’ Party, in the Unity-list.” So for to these “Marxists,” the correct strategy is to beg from crumbs from the Social Democrats who are co-responsible for capitalist state violence against autonomist youth!

The same slavish loyalty to Social Democracy and denunciation of “violence” is displayed by Socialistisk Modstand (SM – Socialist Resistance), affiliated to the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) led by Peter Taaffe. In a March 6 Internet statement, SM complained: “In addition, unfortunately, there is a group of ‘autonomists’ with no interest in cooperating with any politicians, the police or even other movements on the left, if they disagree on the smallest thing. This group has a lot of power, which is very bad as they have a negative influence on the rest of the peaceful movement of young people.” The CWI, like the Grantites, with whom they were formerly aligned in the British Militant tendency, holds that the cops are “workers in uniform” rather than guard dogs of capital, no matter how rabid they get.

Socialistisk Arbejderparti (SA – Socialist Workers Party), Danish affiliate of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec), similarly avers that “the police hold part of the responsibility” for escalating the conflict. SA adds: “That the police have let themselves be used as a tool in a political conflict cannot (alas) come as a surprise” (International Viewpoint, March 2007). So the cops, the armed fist of the bourgeois state, “let themselves be used”?! It certainly comes as no surprise that these pseudo-Trotskyists pretend that the police could somehow be neutral. After all, their Brazilian comrades are part of the bourgeois government and have sent police against landless peasants. Like SS and SM, SA tells autonomist youth to orient to social-democratic parliamentarism, through the “Red-Green Alliance,” which for its part “condemned the use of political violence” (SA statement, December 2006). It’s also no surprise when radical-minded youth say “no thanks” to this dead-end.

All these groups, with their even-handed condemnation of “violence”, are pining for the “good old days” of the capitalist “welfare state”, but the bourgeoisie, in Denmark, as elsewhere, has repeatedly demonstrated in past few decades that this form of capitalist rule is history. The events in Denmark are a serious warning to the workers and oppressed. This is nothing less than a rehearsal for a police state. In Europe, as in North America, “anti-terrorism” masks a desire to regiment the entire population, starting with immigrants, rebellious youth and others considered by the capitalist rulers to be a “threat to the state.”

The junior imperialists of the Danish bourgeoisie want to police København like they police Kabul and Kosovo. To defeat them it is necessary to mobilize a superior force: that of the working class.
(Photo: AP)

The problem with the anarchist-autonomist tactics and “strategy” is not that they are too “radical” or “violent,” that they alienate “ordinary people” and the “broad masses” who would otherwise sympathize with them, but rather that street skirmishes and acts of frustration are wholly inadequate to take on the organized violence of the capitalist state power. They seek “autonomy” from capital so they can do their own thing, but they can’t escape the class struggle. And some of today’s petty-bourgeois street fighters may well become tomorrow’s bourgeois ministers and imperialist warmongers: look at the example of Joschka Fischer in Germany

The junior league imperialists of the Danish bourgeoisie yearn to police København like they police Kabul and Kosovo on behalf of NATO. To go up against and defeat the class violence of these helpmates of U.S. imperialism, who acted as deputy sheriffs to the world gendarmes laying waste to Iraq, requires a superior power: that of the working class. What was necessary was to mobilize the workers movement on a massive scale, for the same ruling class that tore down Ungdomshuset has been slashing social programs left and right. But bringing to bear workers’ power does not mean parades like the 100,000 who demonstrated against welfare cuts last October. It requires militant class action.

In this context, the refusal by the Danish building trades unions to have anything to do with tearing down the Ungdoms­huset was, if laudable, woefully inadequate (the reactionaries simply resorted to a non-union firm from a Baltic country). Leaders of the 3F (Fælles Fagligt Forbund) labor center even spoke of strikes, but didn’t do anything. What’s needed is a thorough-going mobilization of the power of the working class to stop this reactionary drive in its tracks and ultimately sweep away the capitalist system which spawned it. And that requires revolutionary leadership of genuine Trotskyists, as opposed to the social-democrats of the second mobilization who abuse the name of the Bolshevik leader while begging for crumbs from the bourgeoisie. n