A massive thank you to everyone who turned out today in solidarity with Drag Queen Story Hour and against the collection of homophobic, transphobic conspiracists who were trying to disrupt people reading books to children in the local library. Literally the day before Pride, they thought it would be a good idea to come to Brighton to stage a homophobic protest. Luckily well over a hundred people turned up outside Brighton’s main library in a loud, colourful, joyous response to show them what a bad idea this was. The conspiracists managed to muster a mere 30 at maximum, composed of a mish-mash of anti-vaxxers, Sovereign Citizens, Alpha Men, Satan-obsessed right-wing Christians and other scrapings of the bottom of the conspiracy barrel. This was the largest, most vibrant opposition they have faced since they started trying to bully and intimidate people at these events 10 days ago.
Patriotic Alternative, the fascist group that has been heavily promoting opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour, did not publicly show in Brighton as they have done in other towns on the DQSH tour. I guess they didn’t fancy the odds and are only really happy showing up in Crewe in a deserted plaza full of tumbleweed. However, in an unwelcome surprise appearance the opposition were joined by conspiracist-in-chief Piers Corbyn, who was soon being amusingly drowned out by chants of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’.
The wrong Corbyn
We successfully managed to push the bigots over the other side of the road, away from the library, and made a colourful corridor of flags and banners to keep the parents and children attending the event separate from the lunatics abusing them. As the day progressed, we followed the grab-bag of idiots as they made their way to the second and then third events in Hove and then Woodingdean. By the last event of the day, their numbers had fallen to a mere handful. Throughout the day, we outnumbered them three or four times over, and at each location we also managed to mostly keep them across the road, away from the libraries. We got lots of support from passing members of the public, bemused at what the conspiracists’ protest was even about. During the protests, people on the opposing side were grabbing people, spitting at them and being generally unpleasant. One of their side got nicked at Hove Library for spitting at us and there was one arrest on our side over accusations that someone’s phone got smashed.
Obviously, the rightward slide of the conspiracists, who started off as anti-vaxxers and are now standing shoulder to shoulder with fascists, is deeply worrying and shows no signs of going away. The American influence on them is clear as far-right QAnon themes targeting gay and trans people start to predominate over relatively harmless conspiracies around chemtrails or 5G. Patriotic Alternative certainly think this is fertile ground for them to recruit and mobilise. This dangerous convergence is something we will all have to keep a close eye on in the months to come. We also cannot ignore the totally mainstream transphobic moral panic in the UK media, which has now reached the stage of becoming another form of weaponised bigotry in the Tory leadership election. The messages from the top of society have a huge impact in setting the agenda for the far-right and the conspiracists on the streets and it is no surprise that we see these things happening at the same time.
The Drag Queen Story Hour tour continues and the cavalcade of cunts opposing it will now head to Wales and the north. Patriotic Alternative feel stronger in the north and are likely to try for a sizeable showing in Leeds and possibly other northern locations. Leeds Anti-Fascist Network, Manchester Anti-Fascist Collective and Manchester Trans Rise Up are helping organise opposition to the fascists and conspiracists at some key locations in the north. Get there if you can.
A crowd of red flags had already mostly blocked the road by the time I got to the St James Tavern in Kemptown. At 4pm on a sunny Saturday, which would normally be prime drinking time, the bar staff were walking out and a large crowd was there to cheer them on. The workers had signed up with the UVW (United Voices of the World), a relatively new grassroots union which specialises in organising precarious, low paid and migrant labour, which had organised supporters from Brighton and also brought union members down from London for the day to show support.
The St James Tavern strike is demanding an end to zero-hours contracts, a raise in pay to £11.50 an hour and full sick pay. The landlords of the pub have responded by refusing to negotiate with the union but instead issuing all the striking staff members with notice of disciplinary proceedings and by suspending Jake Marvin, one of the strike leaders, the day before the walk-out. Union organisation and strikes are really rare in the hospitality sector, which is plagued by low-paid precarious exploitative jobs. This sort of labour forms the backbone of a large chunk of Brighton’s economy – all the pubs and bars and clubs and cafes that crowd the centre of town and make sure all the hen parties stay drunk enough. The St James Tavern is just one average sized pub but is leased from the Stonegate Group, the largest pub company in the UK. A victory here could inspire others to organise and raise conditions for everyone in the hospitality sector.
It’s interesting that sometimes a huge demonstration can leave you feeling very flat and uninspired and a small little action or protest can feel like the most hopeful thing you’ve been to for ages. The St James Tavern demo was only relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but it was one of the more inspirational things I’ve been on for a while. A hundred people spilled out into the street outside the closed pub which was now redecorated with UVW flags and became the impromptu backdrop for a series of speakers from the UVW, the striking workers themselves and supporters from other unions. The energy and atmosphere were infectious and after the speeches the picket line turned into a dance party in the street. Often demos can feel like going through the motions. You know there’s precious little point shouting at the outside of Downing St, but we go and do it anyway. By contrast this felt purposeful and powerful. This mood was summed up by my favourite demo chant: “We’re going to win, we’re going to win”. I think there’s a lot to be said for getting 100 people to shout this all together. It’s like a bit of cognitive programming: if everyone chants it all together, maybe we start to believe it and start acting like it’s true and maybe the opposition do too. As it was ‘the opposition’ did briefly show their faces one of the pub landlords appeared briefly before scuttling away to chants of “shame on you!”
I suspect a bigger more established union might not have pulled out all the stops for 5 people in one pub going on strike. UVW brought a bus full of people from London and put on a full demo on their behalf. I think they understand the value of examples and of victories. And the UVW have an impressive track record of victories – getting outsourced workers taken back in-house, and winning pay rises and secure contracts for precarious migrant workers. They have done this by being more militant and more inventive than larger unions that often seem more constrained and hidebound in their approach. But despite these differences of approach, another refreshing aspect of the rally was the presence of people from these bigger established unions like GMB and Unison alongside newer unions like UVW and the Acorn community union, as well as various socialist and Trot groups and anarchist groups or unions like IWW and SolFed, with apparently no bitching or antagonism.
The new wave of unions
In recent years we have seen the emergence of a new wave of union organising. Some contemporary developments in the USA, especially the organising of Amazon, Apple and Starbucks employees through new upstart unions have gained a lot of publicity, but we have seen the same thing happening in the UK. Newer, more campaigning-oriented unions organising previously unorganised workers have appeared. This is a massively positive political development. The IWGB (founded 2013), UVW (2014), App Drivers Union (2015), CAIWU (2016) and others are doing what the traditional union movement didn’t seem capable of doing.
As we have seen with the RMT strike, the existing established unions can sometimes hold a lot of power, but they are concentrated in particular corners of the economy – especially in the public sector or in privatised public services where it is not possible to send production overseas or just close down entire industries. But whole new sectors of the economy have sprung up around them which didn’t exist back in the heyday of union power in the ‘70s. Entire new industries are thus unencumbered by any worker organisation and are hot-beds of low paid, flexibilised hyper-exploitation. Which was of course the entire point of smashing the unions, privatising everything in sight, and de-regulating and de-industrialising the economy in the first place.
This class war waged by the rich has resulted today in the unprecedented situation where theoretically the economic situation favours workers – there is full employment and many businesses are wanting and failing to find staff – and yet we find this combined with stagnant or falling wages and rising inflation. But after many years, an answer has emerged to the neo-liberal onslaught of precarity, outsourcing and flexibilisation. The new unions are addressing several related trends that have resulted from years of austerity and Thatcherite economics:
Firstly, highly exploited migrant labour doing low paid work – especially in sectors like cleaning, hospitality, catering and delivery. This is partly a racialised division of labour that is relying on migrants’ lack of leverage and alternative options in society to extensively exploit them. Secondly, the collapse of many traditional employment routes and career paths. For university graduates the expectation that university was a gateway to a middle class career has dried up and there has been a partial proletarianisation of a whole swathe of graduates who are saddled with thousands of pounds of student debt and end up working in jobs they could have got without going to university. This has often been interpreted as one of the main drivers behind the Bernie Sanders and Corbyn phenomena. Thirdly, there has been a drying up of any idea of a meritocratic ladder for working class youth. Class mobility has declined since the 1960s and 1970s. People’s status in society is more than ever determined by birth. Relatively high-wage, high-status working class jobs, which were often unionised and had a possibility of progression, have been replaced with a lot of low-wage, low-status jobs with no possibility of progression.
These factors have combined with the generational inequity of the housing market to ensure that many working class and middle class young people see themselves locked into a situation of precarious jobs with static low wages plus ever-increasing rents effectively indefinitely. The converging fortunes of these different groups have led to them finding common cause. As the Occupy movement pointed out, although there are many differences amongst the 99%, as the wealth of the 1% accelerates off into the distance, these differences come to seem less significant by comparison.
I had heard of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain for many years and made multiple trips to the Cairngorms before actually reading this hymn to the mountain. But in all my trips, I have only ever visited in winter for mountaineering and climbing in the ice and snow, so her descriptions of the plateau in summer, full of buzzing insects and swallows swooping, waterfalls and running water, are somewhat alien to me. My experience resonates a lot more with her writing about the mountains in the winter months: a place much more bleak, stark and cold, but still with its own strange beauty.
Written in the late ‘40s and unpublished for many years, the status of The Living Mountain continues to grow and it is now being promoted as almost the classic of British nature and landscape writing, and you can see the influence on, for example, Robert Macfarlane, who provides an introduction to this edition. But despite this recognition, it is an unusual mountain book. It is not the story of a journey. There is no destination. There is no hook of a challenge or a quest. It circles round and around the same ground. Shepherd describes herself like a dog circling around to find the right place to lay her head. If there is a journey at all, it is to know and understand Britain’s little piece of the Arctic – in all weathers, all seasons, in all its multi-sidedeness. The book is certainly an antidote to perhaps more masculine accounts of ‘conquering’ the mountains – it’s hardly at all about climbing and summits. Indeed, the book takes some unusual turns, as Shepherd advocates cultivating unfamiliarity with the landscape by looking upside down through your legs, lying looking over the edge of a cliff or falling asleep on the plateau, waking up uncertain where you are. This slim book distills a lifetime of such experiments in knowing a place. She describes it as an attempt to grasp the “essential nature” of the mountain. There’s something of Thoreau in here somewhere – the idea of trying to penetrate to the root and grasp the fundamentals, and that imaginative and sensitive engagement with a place is the route to that special wisdom.
This knowing and understanding of a place is always represented as a two-way traffic. The major theme of the book is about the interaction of the human consciousness with the mountain environment. The mountain is not really ‘out there’ at all; it is just as much ‘in here’. This is demonstrated when she asks the question – “why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive?”. Robert Macfarlane talks about this at length in Mountains of the Mind – our modern attraction to summits and impressive bold dramatic terrain all stems from the Romantic movement that essentially taught us all how to see and feel differently about the world around us. There is nothing ‘natural’ about what we find beautiful in nature. We could imagine it changing again in the future and subsequent generations being uncomprehending why so many trekked to the most isolated and inhospitable places seemingly for no reason.
So the mountain experience is as much about us that are having the experience as about the implacable geology we are experiencing: “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered”. But the mind that Shepherd is interested in delineating is always embodied – its edges stretch to the fingertips and the taste buds. She devotes chapters to all aspects of the experiencing sensing body – sight, taste, touch, sound… Likewise she follows these sensitive interactions through all aspects of the mountain environment. She addresses the water, the air, the light and the animals. Shepherd also manages to deftly switch scale – she combines attention to the huge vistas and panoramas of mountain, sky and lochs with close observation of the micro features of this world – ice crystals forming, the scratchy feel of lichen, the tiny prancing movements of birds. And the same also applies to mental states – she is good at observing and catching fleeting or minute mental states – the sudden vertiginous terror of peering over a cliff edge, the disorientation of walking in cloud, the unconscious speed with which her feet dodge an adder.
You become aware how much time she has spent in these mountains to see all she has seen. She compares different summers, different autumns. She recounts the typical happenings of every season but also rare events and chance occurances. Reading this made me feel I have only half experienced the Cairngorms. I have missed them in summer, autumn and spring. And there is not much time for Shepherd’s dawdling and reverie in the winter mountains. So it inspires me to revisit and see the place anew or differently. And indeed, the book inspires the reader to look at and feel nature differently in general. Perhaps I could head out to my local hills, as Shepherd was merely heading out to hers, and learn to see them as she saw the Cairngorms, sometimes upside down, for effect, but also trying to learn them, to know them, to imbibe and absorb them, and thus to better know myself?
A short quick post on the London anti-lockdown conspiracist protest yesterday.
The whole thing was deeply disturbing. First off, it was definitely big – there were thousands of people. Secondly, the spectacle of people shouting about their lack of freedom when all the shops and pubs are open was somewhat bizarre; people having a demonstration when the government is desperate to do exactly what they want, even if it kills a few thousand people.
The massive sense of entitlement was interesting – apparently the minor inconvenience of being asked to wear a mask in order to save other people’s lives is literally worse than the Nazis. Never mind the policing bill, the immigration bill, detention centres, war, rising nationalism and racism… The most important thing is apparently that a global public health emergency shouldn’t interfere with their right to go down the pub.
And for all its anti-authoritarian posturing, all this conspiracist movement is doing is boosting the lockdown-sceptic right-wing of the Tories, who are basically turbo-Thatcherites, happy to sacrifice some work-shy disabled people in order to kick-start their vision of a regulation-light ‘Global Britain’.
There was definitely a presence of some dodgy far-right characters who others have documented. I personally saw adrenochrome and ‘save the children’ QAnon stuff, anti-semitic ZOG conspiracist stuff, a ‘Don’t tread on me’ Gadsden flag, and a bunch of Union Jack waving types. But… also people of colour, Sikhs, hippies, some anarchists, Anonymous types, young and old. All united by conspiracism. This almost made it more disturbing than if it had just been a far-right demo.
Conspiracism is not inherently tied to left or right, which makes it a space of cross-over and convergence. This makes it dangerous but also unpredictable and changeable. This big new movement that has coalesced over anti-lockdownism feels very amorphous like lots of people have been newly politicised and might move in all sorts of directions. So it is probably very open to the far-right trying to pull it more into their orbit. But, in this respect, the conspiracism here seems very different to the USA. In the States, all the anti-lockdown stuff seems quite associated with the (far) right. Trump no doubt helped by massively signal-boosting it to all his credulous supporters. Here the far-right has not massively gone for anti-lockdown conspiracism. There is some far-right presence but far more David Icke types, hippies etc etc. You aren’t getting Tommy Robinson, the DFLA, Britain First etc falling in behind it. Although if they did, TBH I can see them being welcomed with open arms.
So, as well as some far-right, there are a load of people in this conspiracist movement who are effectively ‘our’ sort of people. Unfortunately, conspiracism seems to have this logic of increasing credulousness as believers ‘join the dots’ and ‘follow the breadcrumbs’ – people who start off with one conspiracist belief become introduced to others and add them together. So there is a danger of people who start out more or less on the left being sucked into this increasingly dodgy greyzone, moving from one thing to another, until they pop up in a couple of years’ time as fully fledged loons thinking George Soros is paying Antifa to bring the New World Order or something.
It all feels quite a lot like Occupy back in 2011. That was a political moment that drew in a lot of new people very quickly. And there were a lot of crazies and conspiraloons, which sometimes made it hard to know how to engage with it. The difference is that Occupy was inherently our territory so we had some basis to be there and to argue with people. By contrast it does not feel possible to get involved with this anti-lockdown conspiracist movement in order to try and influence it in a good direction, given that the fundamental premises of the whole thing are dangerous and wrong. On what basis would it be possible for the left / anarchists to turn up and get involved?
This then leaves a problem of how we relate to this. Should be opposing them and having counter-demos? Ignoring it and hoping it will go away? It feels problematic that this is not something that the left has got a handle on yet. And this task is made more urgent in that this anti-lockdown movement does not seem to be going away with the ending of lockdown. The question is – where will this movement go after covid? Will it fizzle out or will it transmute into something new and worse?
As American antifascists process the storming of the Capitol and look ahead at years of a far-right ‘resistance’ insurgency against Biden, are we going to see the far-right storming Parliament here? No – they have no need to. They already have the government they wanted. Here we have the dual threat of a continuing Trumpist populist government and the ever-present risk of a renewed far-right upsurge on the streets should that government’s agenda be challenged or if the racist passions it has stirred up are not perceived to be being gratified quick enough.
Tragedy or farce? – Initial reactions
It has now been a week since the storming of the US Capitol and new details and new information are still emerging, but the picture is a little clearer. Initially, it was a confusing and bewildering spectacle. It was clearly A Big Deal, but also had an air of the absurd. Initial coverage in the media and online focussed a lot on people in stupid costumes taking selfies and fucking about, which then made it hard to take it seriously when the media also described it as an “attempted coup”. Surely an attempted coup is when the army seizes the airports and generals go on TV to announce martial law? It didn’t seem to be that, so what the fuck was it? Was it just a demo that got lucky and managed to shove its way inside a building? Or was it a serious attempt to overthrow democracy? If so, how were they planning to do it? By stealing the sign off Nancy Pelosi’s door? Also the photos from inside the Capitol didn’t show the true scale of the crowd – they showed handfuls of people wandering around the corridors and sitting in the speaker’s office. It looked like an office occupation where a bunch of hippies manage to get inside Shell HQ and then don’t know what to do when they get there.
What we know now
However, more information has emerged and it’s now easier to get a perspective on what happened:
1) This was not just a handful of idiots in costumes. It was a really large crowd – certainly thousands of people, possibly tens of thousands. Several hundred appear to have got inside the building. It was a heterogenous crowd – containing some fools and lunatics, but also every faction of the far-right in the US was well represented – Nazis, Proud Boys, alt-right edgelords, Q Anon weirdos, militia types… as well as more ‘normal’ Trump supporters – if that’s even a thing. It was similar to Charlottesville in managing to more or less ‘unite the right’. Very extreme iconography and symbolism were conspicuous (Camp Auschwitz, 6 Million Was Not Enough). It should also be noted that those thousands on the demo represent an even larger number out there in the country: 77% of Republican voters believe Trump’s lie about the stolen election and 45% of them support the storming of the Capitol – which suggests 33 million people back a far-right insurrection to overthrow the government.
Trump: “We love you, you’re very special. Particularly the ones with the cable ties for hostages and the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ and ‘6 Million Wasn’t Enough’ T-shirts and the racist flag”#terroristsnotprotestorspic.twitter.com/9B5uUqSxcI
2) The cops effectively let them in. Exactly who authorised what when is still to be determined, but it is clear the crowd didn’t shoot their way in – they slightly shoved their way in, if that. Cops even appeared to open gates and barriers for them at various points, as well as taking selfies and holding doors for the rioters. However, whether the cops there on the ground were sympathetic to the rioters – many certainly appeared to be, though others (especially the black cops) probably less so – is a bit irrelevant. Despite it being completely public what was being planned, decisions had already been made ahead of time by the DC police to be almost entirely absent and by the Capitol police to only very lightly contain the demo. In addition, assistance from the National Guard had been repeatedly refused in the days leading up to the demonstration and was also refused on the day by Trump himself and the Department of Defence.
Many people have pointed out that the cops don’t see white people as a threat and that therefore the policing of the demonstration is an example of white privilege made visible. This is all true of course, but largely white left-wing demonstrations (the J20 demonstrations against Trump’s inauguration for example, or antifascist protests in Portland) have still been policed very differently to this. So there is more going on than simply the normal highly racialised policing of the USA. Firstly, there has also been a long-term institutional downplaying of the threat of white supremacist violence. Secondly, the police as an organisation are unsurprisingly sympathetic to Trump and to the (far) right. The Democrats have to an extent been influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement against the police and calls to defund police forces across the country, whereas Trump has offered law enforcement carte blanche to do whatever they want. Thirdly, on an individual level it is not difficult to find cops spouting far-right or racist stuff online and there are multiple reports of off-duty cops among those storming the Capitol.
However, even taking all this police sympathy for the rioters into account, it’s hard not to see the prior decisions made about the minimal policing of the Capitol and the repeated refusals of backup as evidence of a (real) conspiracy from the top to give the rioters the best chance to gain access to the building.
3) It’s all about race. Underneath all the noise about stolen elections, conspiracies etc, really all you need to know is that. The coincidence of Georgia electing its first ever black Senator on the same day as the storming of the Capitol could not have made it any plainer. What was Trumpism ever about? ‘Taking the country back’ and turning back the clock to ‘make America great again’ is all coded racial language about resisting demographic change, or at least resisting the democratic representation of that change. As Timothy Snyder pointed out, when they talk about voter fraud, what they mean is black voting, which in their mind can only be fraudulent. They are dreaming of an America without black voting. If a lot of old white people are terrified of losing control of ‘their’ country to black and brown people, then the police are the means by which they seek to prevent that.
Couldn’t be more symbolic: Rev. Raphael Warnock who leads Martin Luther King’s old congregation, and the woman he defeated – best friend of neo-Nazis Kelly Loeffler
4) It was a serious attempt to seize or retain power. As more has emerged about the attack on the Capitol, it begins to look more serious and less like right-wing cosplay. Particularly disturbing is evidence of some level of plotting, planning, collusion or direction from people in authority. The President organised the rally, spoke at it, encouraged and directed it. He appeared to have organised the lack of security to ensure that the demo had a good chance of getting inside the Capitol and that when inside they would not be stopped or removed in a hurry. Trump had ‘swapped out military personnel’ in the Pentagon back in November while he continued to deny the election result. These loyalists then loyally refused to send in troops against the President’s mob. Trump, his family and supporters then organised a watch party to cheer on the crowd they had summoned in the process of trying to capture, injure or kill members of Congress and possibly the also the Vice-President. Afterwards Trump celebrated the day’s events, telling his supporters “remember this day forever!”
As well as a degree of collusion from the police, the demonstration appears to have been co-ordinated to some degree with sympathetic lawmakers inside the Congress: 139 Representatives and 8 Senators voted against verifying Biden even after the mob had invaded their place of work. Also there are reports and concerns that some Republican legislators might have directly assisted the insurgents or been passing information to them. Some Republicans had been taking Trump supporters on guided tours of the building in the days leading up to the attack, which may explain some of the more focussed insurgents knowing where to go within the building. Especially black members of the legislature believe that they were deliberately targeted. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn says rioters knew where to find him in the building – information that would not be widely known – and all the panic buttons in black Democrat Ayanna Pressley’s office had been somehow ripped out prior to the attack.
It appears that Trump had initially pressured Pence to engineer a coup and then turned on him when he refused. Thus the main aim of the rioters seems to have been to pressure or terrify wavering Republicans and Mike Pence in particular to refuse to certify Joe Biden as President. There is a real possibility that they could have managed that. Lots of Republicans are apparently genuinely terrified of the Trumpist mob that now constitutes their constituency. Lots of people inside the Capitol were reported saying they wanted to lynch Pence.
Some of the more serious aspects of the day got lost in reporting. Pipe bombs were placed at Democrat and Republican headquarters. More pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails and weaponry were recovered by police. There were clearly some more serious people there on the day using the crowd as cover:
“They walked through the Senate chamber with a sense of purpose. They were not dressed in silly costumes but kitted out in full paramilitary regalia: helmets, armor, camo, holsters with sidearms. At least one had a semi-automatic rifle and 11 Molotov cocktails”
The presence of the widely remarked upon ‘zip-tie guys’ could indicate that something similar was planned to the October militia plot to kidnap or kill the governor of Michigan:
“if any number of things had happened differently, the three people next in the line of succession for the presidency might have been face to face with those zip-tie guys. And then: Who knows.”
So however cack-handed it may have been in some respects, nevertheless it was an attempt by the serving President to use a mob of violent fascists to keep him in power by annulling or reversing normal democracy. So technically it wasn’t a coup – it was an autogolpe – a power grab by an elected leader who refuses to stand down and tries to suspend the law to stay in power. This was a desperate last attempt to stop what dozens of legal manoeuvres had already failed to do. But despite it being desperate and unlikely to succeed that doesn’t take away from it being a genuine attempt to violently overthrow the result of an election.
Of course, it was also absurd in some respects, because many of the people and what they believe are so ludicrous. But as has been pointed out by many – people laughed at Hitler too, and Mussolini. All these people have something absurd about them. But this doesn’t stop them also being dangerous. Looked at in that way the Klan were also pretty ludicrous LARPers dressing up in bedsheets and awarding themselves titles like the Grand Wizard, but that didn’t stop them from killing people.
So even if it was an unsuccessful coup – this shows how fascism happens. The fascists don’t storm in and take over from an entirely unwilling population. When fascism happens the people involved don’t think it’s fascism. It blurs into the mainstream – shifting the definition of what is the centre ground. When fascism happens it channels anger and aggrieved victimhood, narratives of betrayal. When it happens, the people involved think they are patriots, saving the nation from enemies within and without.
What now in the USA?
1) This is a beginning as well as an end. This is the end of Trump as President, but also the opening salvo in a new phase of the struggle. The far-right movement isn’t going away and the massive polarisation of the country isn’t going change quickly either. This was an empowering and galvanising event for the far-right. They showed their power and they had all the Senators and Representatives on the run. They had the police on the run. They’re not going to forget that in a hurry.
But the aftermath will see them take some knocks. Those who stormed the Capitol are going to suffer some repercussions from last week’s events – jail time, trials, lost jobs etc. Amusingly, many of them seem genuinely shocked that this can happen. The fallout from this will see some realignment and restructuring in the far-right and also in its relationship to the Republican Party. Trump has brought to birth a huge far-right movement where the minority politics of the extreme far-right have now infected a vast constituency of ‘normal’ Republicans. That genie is not going back in the bottle. There is now a struggle over what will happen to all the disappointed Q-believers and Trumpists who were trusting ‘The Plan’. How will they cope as their belief system falls apart? Rather than admit that you were mistaken, one answer is to go even further to the right. The more extreme neo-Nazi groups are hoping to hoover them up to swell their ranks. It is a HUGE constituency of Trumpists, even if only a small fraction of them go even further to the right that will be a very large influx of people into armed militant fascist groups.
Although it’s right to be aware of the risk from an angry defeated far-right, and although they will use their status as the ‘resistance’ to the Woke Tyranny of Joe Biden to recruit and to build, it is still important to remember that they will be recruiting and building a whole lot less than if they had won. And for sure an angry and defeated far-right is dangerous, but a whole lot less so than an angry and victorious far-right. Trump LOST and their coup FAILED. And that is much better and less scary than if either of them had succeeded.
2) Will Republicans disavow and somehow try and pivot away from Trumpism? They have all properly drunk the Kool-Aid over the last 4 years – there’s now almost no Republicans untainted by Trump. Significant numbers of Republicans voted for Trump’s lie even though they know he won’t be President anymore – they are looking at who can lead or take advantage of this constituency of angry deluded people in the future. But there are signs since the election and then increasingly since last week that more are willing to step away from him. They are trapped between wanting the votes of a support base that LOVES Trump and the out of control destabilising Frankenstein’s monster that that voting base represents. They are cowards and will go with whatever seems to best suit their self-interest. If they are to go against Trump, they have to try and do it without getting killed by their own constituents for being traitors. Whichever way the Republican Party jumps, the far right force will not go away. It will live on either with Trump himself or with someone else trying ineffectively to fill his shoes.
3) Why didn’t it succeed? Trump just didn’t have enough forces on his side. The corporations, the military, the rich and powerful were not all backing him. In other coups, attempted coups and fascist takeovers throughout history we see that if the important, powerful people feel under threat then they will gamble on a fascist of some form to save them from that threat. There isn’t a giant crisis of American capital on that scale that would necessitate that. The military and the capitalists and the ruling class are not seeing Trump as the saviour of American capitalism. Probably more likely they are seeing him as a destabilising threat to American capitalism. Rupert Murdoch switched sides, the National Association of Manufacturers called for him to be deposed by Pence and a growing list of major corporations have pulled their donations to the Republican Party and cut their ties with Trump’s businesses.
What does this mean for us in the UK?
We have a strange divided relationship to things in the USA. On one level it often feels like we live in the USA – especially thanks to social media we can follow things in real time as they happen and American news generally features as prominently in our media as British news. It’s sometimes an effort to remember we don’t live there too. But clearly the context is very different here.
In a way we pioneered all this shit. Brexit paved the way for Trump’s right wing populism. We all remember Farage going and promoting Trump before the election, playing Mr Brexit to stadiums of hooting Trumpists. Then the Tories hitched themselves progressively to their own version of Brexit Trumpism, styling themselves as populists against the ‘liberal elite’ – the ‘activist lawyers’, ‘experts’, ‘enemy of people’ judges and wishy washy Remoaners who stand up for such things as international law, human rights and civil liberties. Proroguing parliament was a classic Trump move, similarly blithely breaking international law, attacking lawyers and judges who get in the way of ‘the will of the people’ and threatening to send in gunboats against refugees in dinghies.
It’s often said that we get the same things as America but on a time delay – what happens there will happen here 6 months later. Obviously it’s not quite as simple as that. The same process has happened here over the last 4 years as in America though not as extreme – the merging of elements of the far-right and the mainstream right. However, we’re not just going to get a repetition of Trumpist insurrection. Here there is no need. We already have the government the far-right wanted, albeit not quite as nod-and-wink racist as Trump. In some ways we are in the reverse situation to the USA. Post-Trump, the main far-right threat over there is now going to be from the extra-parliamentary mob who think the election was stolen from them and may well switch to more murderous insurrectionary tactics. Here we still have 4 more years at least of Boris Brexit Priti Patel migrant-bashing shit. We need to be able to stand up against the government’s populist agenda and be prepared to resist the far-right when they emerge in support of it or try and push it to live up to the nationalist re-birth they were hoping for.
The street far-right
We don’t have militias with semi-automatic weapons here – we have ‘football lads’ with pint glasses. But we are also just as capable of generating murderous far-right terror attacks, which we’ve seen in connection with Brexit more than once, including recently in September whether was an attempt to murder the ‘lefty lawyers’ targeted by Priti Patel for stopping the government deporting people at will.
The street mobilising far-right have been a bit quiet of late, since they won Brexit in the 2019 election and then the COVID lockdown put a lot of things on hold. The British far-right haven’t hitched themselves to COVID denialist conspiracies as much as in the US. In general the far-right here seem less keen on the full-on batshit conspiracy stuff than in the USA – QAnon has also only had a minority impact over here. So both these potential growth areas have not been working for them.
Another reason they have been a bit quiet is that de-platforming from social media companies has affected their ability to organise. Especially the de-platforming of key figures like Tommy Robinson. Mr Yaxley-Lennon has lost almost all of his social media outlets. He was the one figure who had the ability to mobilise large numbers almost at the drop of a hat, but that’s a lot harder without Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Personally also he has also been keeping his head down due to troubles of his own – the impending court case being brought against him, could see him (hopefully) financially ruined. He bailed on the statue-defending mob he summoned up back in June and the launch of attempted new organisation Hearts of Oak in August. He tried running off to Spain in July and was claiming at one point that he would be seeking asylum in Spain as some sort of political refugee until it all unravelled.
Our own home grown Nazis in Dover in September opposing refugees crossing the channel
The last sizeable showings of far-right people on the streets were the protests in Dover in September in response to the media panic over channel-crossing migrants and the ‘statue defenders’ taking to the streets at the height of the BLM protests in the summer. There was also some successful racist ‘community’ organising against migrants in Penally and elsewhere, including the Britain First hotel invasions. The attempted new force on the far-right, Patriotic Alternative, got off to a rocky start as it was infiltrated by antifascists from the beginning who then ruined its promotional banner stunt in August and an attempted launch event in October.
The general political climate to date has been favourable to the far-right – it has seemed like xenophobic nationalism was flavour of the month across the world. A really large amount of this feeling was due to the existence of Donald Trump as President. So a really big question is to what extent the changes in America will filter out into the world – will it feel like the tide has turned and the far-right are on the back foot? The blowback and reaction against the Capitol attack is already achieving some of this – Parler and 8kun now appear to be gone. Twitter and Facebook have purged tens of thousands of far-right and conspiracist accounts.
Lest we forget… The far-right defending monuments in the only way they know how.
But there is still large latent support for the far-right if they can tap into it – the “Free Tommy” mobs and the Brexit mobs haven’t gone anywhere – they’re all still out there. But the far-right is demobilised and unorganised. So, although the ‘statue defenders’ all feels like a million years ago in some ways, it’s worth remembering that the far-right more or less spontaneously organised large demonstrations in towns and cities across the country at very short notice, where the they managed to drag in sizeable numbers of ‘soft support’ around an emotive issue. In London the protests drew up to 5000 people and were very violent, managing to deter both BLM and antifascists from countering them (although they were later chased off the streets by anti-racists). So despite the seeming quietness from the DFLA et al, all it needs is the right excuse, reason or target to gather an unmanageably large number of them seemingly ‘out of the blue’ that we will then have no idea how to confront.
What we need to do
Antifascists were right. Liberals ignored their warnings and accused them of being “just as bad” as the fascists – another face of the same violent ‘extremism’. They said fascists had a free speech right to propagandise, recruit and organise. They said if we all just ignored the Nazis they would go away. They said confrontation was what they wanted, so don’t give it to them. Well, it turns out the antifascists were right. As if it wasn’t already obvious, it now becomes rather hard to deny. When Trump is organising a fascist mob to overthrow an election result to keep himself in power, even liberals are now coming round to the idea that it might be legitimate to describe him as a fascist and that the far-right might be some form of threat.
So what are the key lessons if we listen to what the antifascists were saying?
1) You need to stop the fascists before they can’t be stopped. It’s no good waiting until they are storming Parliament. Stop the far-right while it is still small and can be crushed.
2) You can’t rely on the state and the cops to defend you from the far-right. Contra Paul Mason, the most important thing in anti-fascism is not to “maintain the state’s monopoly of coercive force”. Firstly, there’s every chance the state and the cops will turn out to support the far-right. Secondly, the cops and all the state agencies of counter-terrorism are part of the problem – they are all part of maintaining racialised capitalism, infiltrating and destroying the left and racial justice movements. Any extra powers you grant them will most likely be used against antiracists and the left first.
3) You need mass community self-defence against the fascists. It is the only effective thing at stopping them on the streets. But, more than that, it also addresses the wider causes of the rise of fascism. Mass community organisation is effective at changing opinion, showing the majority do not support the far-right and at building movements for racial and economic justice, solidarity and empowerment to tackle the root causes of the far-right. Mass community organisation does not just disempower the far-right, just as importantly it empowers us and builds long term community resilience.
4) We need to police the line keeping the far-right out of mainstream. Trumpism and what happened at the Capitol is a warning to beware of the complete collapse between the mainstream and the far-right. It’s very hard to roll it back once it has occurred. Antifascism sometime fulfils a role of policing the boundaries, watching the edges, maintaining a line of what is ‘normal’ in society and what crosses that line and therefore must be treated and regarded differently. This role is not without problems, but nevertheless we must be very aware of the danger of this sort of mainstreaming. It appears that conspiracism is one of the key mechanisms by which this bypassing of the boundaries has occurred. Conspiracies often escape normal left-right categorisation and therefore become a ‘greyzone’ where people’s politics can swiftly transition, becoming a sort of pipeline to the far-right. We have yet to develop any really good answer to this threat.
And finally… We need to learn that antifascist small group tactics are only good when you are fighting small groups. For a long time antifascism was a job of small minorities confronting small minorities. Tactics were developed for keeping small radicalised groupuscules in check. Once the far-right has grown beyond that stage, you need to be able to adopt new tactics and make new alliances, without necessarily dropping the old tactics. And if they manage to infiltrate the mainstream, you need to be able to adopt new tactics again. We need to be able to oppose Brexit Tory nationalism, try and police the lines keeping the far-right out of mainstream, develop tactics to combat conspiracism and keep a lid on the street-based far-right all at the same time.
Saturday saw the public debut of a new attempt to “unite the right”. A new organisation called “Hearts of Oak” held its inaugural demo in Parliament Square. The backers of this new organisation makes it look like an attempt to reboot the coalition that emerged around the “Day for Freedom” in May 2018, which saw a coming together of the Tommy Robinson/EDL/DFLA crowd, less thuggish but no less racist UKIP supporters and a newer force of alt-right fans of YouTube provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Sargon of Akkad. At the time this demo drew around 5000 people and looked like a really dangerous new coming together of the far-right.
Saturday’s demo, on the contrary, had the big screen and some of the same ‘big name’ speakers, but drew a mere 100-150 people. This is certainly a relief, as anti-fascists had been expecting worse. Tommy Robinson had backed the demo and spoke via video link having “fled” to Spain to escape a made-up arson attack on his house. Normally he can get at least 1000 of his supporters on the streets just on his word, so it had been expected that there would be at least 1000 potentially violent Tommy-fans out in central London today.
On June 13th an extremely violent crowd of 2000-5000 “statue defenders” gathered in central London to take on Black Lives Matter partially on Robinson’s urging. Deprived of any opposition to attack, they attacked police and journalists and abused members of the public, until what remained of their demo was chased off the streets by BLM protesters. Off the back of this, there was certainly a worry that today could have seen a large and menacing far-right crowd and perhaps the birth of worrying new far-right movement. So what went wrong for them?
Cult of personality
It would appear this is all tied up with the cult of personality around Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to his mum). He has a personal following which is able to galvanise large groups of people – hence the worry when he lends his support to anything. The protests to “Free Tommy” when he was sent to prison demonstrate this – they were the largest far-right events of any form since the Second World War. However, Yaxley has recently been disappointing his fans. He posted absolutely splenetic video rants about the modifying of Churchill’s statue, ordering his supporters to turn out in London against BLM, and then failed to show himself. He was eventually tracked down on holiday in Spain. He then was due to appear at this Hearts of Oak launch, but bailed on that too, claiming the reason he had been in Spain for several weeks was because of a previously unmentioned arson attack on “my property … my wife’s property” which had caused him to permanently flee the country with his family and seek asylum in Spain. The suggestion was that “it wasn’t Muslims who done this, it was after all the BLM stuff” quickly unravelled as there are no records of any such arson attacks.
In the past, as with the “Free Tommy” phenomenon, his attempts to paint himself as a martyr have proven very successful and lucrative for him, boosting his fame and his bank balance. This attempted martyrdom does not appear to have been so convincing or successful. It would appear rather that Robinson’s actions might be more motivated by worries over his upcoming defamation trial against Jamal Hijazi and the possibility that he could (like Katie Hopkins, lest we forget) lose his house if a big payout is required.
The problem with a cult of personality is that you are totally dependent on that person’s actual personality. Given the Robinson is largely concerned with number one and a little too fond of the high life and the cocaines, this creates a problem for the cultists, especially when, as in this case, he appears to have abandoned his supporters and fucked off the Spain. I would suggest it is largely this which is responsible for the lower than expected turn out today.
Feminism not racism is the answer to sexual violence
The hook they were hanging this demo on was a call to deport the “Rochdale 3” – men jailed for child sexual exploitation offences in 2012 who are now out of prison. This sees the resurrection of the highly racialised far-right narratives of Muslim “grooming gangs” targeting “our” girls which have proven so successful for the far-right in the last few years. The patriarchal and racist assumptions underlying all of this have been picked apart by a number of commentators and also directly challenged by the Feminist Anti-Fascist mobilisations that occurred at the end of 2018. These mobilisations made it clear that feminism not racism is the answer to sexual violence and abuse and that the far-right’s exclusive focus on white victims and Muslim perpetrators excuses and enables any abuse that doesn’t fit this model.
The other thing the far-right love to avoid talking about is the large numbers of paedophiles, sexual abusers and rapists within their own ranks. Famously, Richard Price, a co-founder of the EDL along with Tommy Robinson, was defended by Robinson when jailed for making images of child abuse. But this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Various sites have attempted to collate the long list of far-right abusers. Here are the main ones:
The Tommy fanboys also of course ignore the fact that their hero, while busy making a name for himself as a “journalist”, nearly caused the collapse of a one of these child sexual exploitation trials, thus clearly demonstrating his primary concern is notoriety, publicity and money for himself, rather than any concern for the survivors.
Hearts of Oak – threat or a joke?
Tommy Robinson has been through a series of new vehicles, attempted launches and abandoned organisations. He was a member of the BNP, then founded the EDL and also tried the British Freedom Party briefly. He left the EDL for Quilliam in 2013, decided to be a professional de-radicaliser, gave up that when it stopped paying, tried to found a British PEGIDA in 2015, and then abandoned that when it didn’t go anywhere. He reinvented himself as a journalist with Rebel News, left Rebel News, and tried to join UKIP but could only be an advisor, then tried to become an independent MEP and failed at that. So now its launch has been a damp squib, is Hearts of Oak set to be merely the latest in a whole series of cast-off projects? Or does it still have the potential to be a dangerous new far-right force? I guess the jury is still out on that, but the initial evidence of a boring and poorly attended demo is encouraging.
Their failure but ours too
However, before we give ourselves a big pat on back, anti-fascists and anti-racists also need to look at themselves a little. The failure of their demo was nothing to do with us, as their demo was unopposed. It is definitely a failure that there was no mobilisation against the launch of a new Tommy Robinson vehicle in central London. There was an idea to colonise their hashtags for the day and fill them up with content pointing out their hypocrisy and complicity in covering up sexual abuse from their own side. This was successful as far as it goes but is clearly a weak and limited strategy. Even if you are completely successful you risk just making their talking points more prominent.
If the far-right are not opposed on the streets, sometimes the embarrass themselves and implode to everyone’s great amusement, but far more often they get to feel confident and strong, and come back next time stronger in greater numbers. This can lead to a situation where they quickly seem to become too powerful to oppose. This was what happened back in 2018 after the “Day for Freedom” and then the “Free Tommy” demos, when suddenly we had far-right demos of 10,000 people in central London and no infrastructure or capacity to oppose them. It was only with huge amounts of work that the situation was pulled back by the end of the year to rough parity where we were able to mobilise roughly the same numbers as them.
Anti-racism and anti-fascism ought to be the same struggle
The far-right have been forced on to the back foot somewhat by the huge explosion of anti-racist mobilising around Black Lives Matter. They haven’t known how to respond to it and nothing has really worked for them. BLM is hard for them to oppose without coming out as overt racists. Tommy Robinson called on his supporters to turn out against BLM but then today Hearts of Oak tried to use the slogan “Black and White Unite”. June 13th was a show of force but also an embarrassment for them. Today has probably not improved matters. However, we must not forget the overall political climate is far more in their favour than ours – Brexit is happening, with no deal still a possibility and we have an extremely right-wing government of hardcore Brexiters, who have borrowed pages out of the Trump playbook and tried to out-Farage Farage to get where they are. When the sunlit uplands of Boris promised do not appear and a new wave of austerity hits where will the angry Leavers look for answers?
It would be a shame if the lessons of two years ago were forgotten. We need mass mobilisation, coalition building and to not let the far-right have any space, be that central London or anywhere else. It is absurd that in the year of BLM a racist demo in a city as diverse as London goes unopposed. The Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism and anti-fascism ought to be the same struggle.
Yesterday was a really good BLM demo in Brighton. Not 10,000 people like last time but several thousand – so still a very big demo for Brighton. The crowd was very young – the average age appeared to be about 18. It was all very inspiring and hopeful. There was also some powerful anger possibly due to Brighton police being filmed just days before the demo pinning a young black man to the floor and leaning on his neck while he was saying ‘I can’t breathe’.
At the last BLM demo in Brighton on 13th June about 30 ‘statue defenders’ turned up to oppose it and ‘defend’ the war memorial. It was hard to know exactly who these people were – they didn’t appear to be an organised far-right group and most of the known Brighton far-right faces were absent. They seemed to be a mix of DFLA sympathising football fans and some veterans. There definitely seemed to be a spectrum of hard and soft right. Some of them were saying they weren’t against BLM but were just defending the war memorial. However also later in the day on the 13th some people who had been attending the BLM protest got beaten up by some of these statue defenders.
This time round in an inspired move, Extinction Rebellion and BLM worked together to take the area at the war memorial early in the day and to turn it into a space commemorating the black and Asian soldiers who have been left out of history and forgotten by official memorialisation. The area also worked as information and refreshment hub with water, food and first aid.
This action stopped any potential right-wing statue defending mob forming and also neatly flipped the narrative on the far right – how would they be able to object to BLM commemorating forgotten black soldiers? This form of action also works to drive a wedge between the hard and soft right. Instead of them being being able to paint themselves as just ordinary patriots and us as the crazed mob intent on destroying all heritage and attempting to gather people to their cause on that basis, this re-defines the argument and flushes the racists from cover, forcing them to be overt about their racism if they are to oppose us, which then loses them their soft support. As if to demonstrate this point, a couple of veterans did show up who had been present at the anti-BLM demo last time but were persuaded to swap sides and to clap and support the BLM demo as it passed the war memorial.
Hopefully this action also did some work to building bridges between XR and BLM where there has in the past been some friction over some of the overly pacifist members of XR loving the police a little too much in a way that perhaps didn’t quite acknowledge the numbers of black people they have a habit of killing. XR to their credit have done some work to address this. Hopefully today is something that can be built on in that respect.
As was pointed out in one of speeches – the ecological crisis is a crisis of race and white supremacy. The system of extractive capitalism that is eating the earth was built on the bones of black and brown people and it is people of colour all over the world who suffer the consequences of ecological devastation while the rich in Western countries profit at their expense. From MOVE to the MST to the Green Belt Movement and the ecological revolution in Kurdistan today – the most inspiring and radical ecological movements have been those led by indigenous people and people of colour. This is some thing we need to learn from to build radical anti-racist ecological justice movements today.
In a bonus little extra fillip to the day – less than 10 Britain First goons turned up with führer Paul Golding in Crawley with their ‘White Lives Matter’ shit and were told where to go by the people of Crawley out doing their Saturday shopping. Hurrah!
Yesterday and today, online adverts calling for “mass gatherings” against the lockdown received a fair bit of coverage in the mainstream media. They called on people to join the “UK Freedom Movement”, saying “no to the coronavirus bill, no to mandatory vaccines, no to the new normal and no to the unlawful lockdown”. Supposedly there are going to be demos in multiple towns and cities up and down the country this Saturday.
So this name “UK Freedom Movement” sounded familiar to some people. Or perhaps it just sounded suspicious. Also we have had our suspicions primed by the far-right Trumpist anti-lockdown protests in the USA which have had significant coverage over here. So people on twitter got busy, did some digging and discovered that Jayda Fransen, famous as co-leader of fascist outfit Britain First had registered a company in April 2020 called “Freedom Movement Ltd.” Seems like a bit too much of a coincidence right?
From that point, it went all over twitter that Britain First were behind these anti-lockdown protests. It looked like we were in for what some of us had been dreading – the spread of the far-right anti-lockdown movement from the USA to here.
I saw this, liked it and retweeted it, glad that someone had exposed this nefarious fascist ploy.
However, there was something about it that didn’t appear to quite add up.
The evidence being circulated was a screenshot of the ad for the demo saying “UK Freedom Movement” on it and then another screenshot of a company registered to Jayda Fransen as “Freedom Movement Ltd”. But there didn’t appear to be anything further to link the two apart from the similarity of the name.
Some people from an outfit called scramnews.com did a bit more research and realised Jayda Fransen does have a ‘group’/YouTube channel called British Freedom Movement but no longer has anything to do with Britain First and there is also no real link between her and the demos on Saturday.
They pointed out that there is a far-right group called “UK Freedom Movement” [Broken link: ukfreedommovement.org. uk] which has been around for a while and appears mostly to consist of a guy called Richard Inman. It’s pro-Brexit, anti-Islam, Tommy Robinson-esque stuff.
So – mystery solved, right? Its not far-right Jayda Fransen but far-right Richard Inman who is behind the protests.
However… Inman’s UK Freedom Movement didn’t appear to mention these anti-lockdown protests on their website or social media, which was a bit odd for a group supposedly organising nationwide protests in two days time.
Now to a lot of this stuff, people might say – so what? It’s all splitting hairs which exact fascist group Jayda Fransen is in this week. Fair enough, yes, for the purposes of opposing them, it doesn’t much matter whether it’s Britain First, British Freedom Movement or whatever – all their politics are more or less interchangable. However, it’s still important to get the facts right. Good research and knowledge is important for anti-fascism, otherwise eventually no one believes anything you say.
Richard Inman himself eventually found out that the internet was saying he was organising demos up and down the country on Saturday and he took to YouTube to say that it was nothing to do with him. He said the police had been in touch with him to warn him off the illegal gatherings.
So, there are going to be demos on Saturday and they are organised by something called the UK Freedom Movement. But it’s not Jayda Fransen or even Richard Inman’s UK Freedom Movement, but a different unrelated UK Freedom Movement which is mostly made up of anti-vaxxers and conspiracists.
According to Hope not Hate researcher Patrik Hermansson it contained plenty of anti-semitic conspiracy type stuff, but it wasn’t promoting either Fransen or Inman’s groups and didn’t appear to share many members with either of these groups.
It would appear that two separate groups of people just happened to seize on the same very generic name.
SOME CONCLUSIONS
One moral of the story here is the unwillingness of people online to back down or consider their own position. People get very quickly entrenched and assume if you are asking for evidence however gently, that you must be hostile. I got blocked by people on my own side because I was asking questions. I guess they thought I was some sort of fascist apologist.
Another notable thing is the quick spread of some not-very-sound information. All this flurry of tweeting got picked up by some large and supposedly authoritative anti-fascist organisations with considerable reach. UAF tweeted about it promoting the supposed link to Richard Inman and to Jayda Fransen, and Stand Up to Racism have put out a press release mixing up all the various bits of the story, saying UKFM were an anti-vaxx group, whose director was Jayda Fransen.
So obviously there’s the danger of crying wolf and declaring people fascists when then aren’t, which then means no one believes you when the threat is real. There is also a danger of people potentially utilising tactics appropriate for fascist groups against more ambiguous targets.
AGAINST CONSPIRACY
This not to dismiss the mass gatherings planned for this weekend, although they appear if anything to be closer to the left than to the right, they are extremely worrying in a number of ways.
Britain has the second worst death toll from coronavirus in the entire world because of our irresponsible far-right Tory government. And now that same government is following Trump’s lead and wants to end the lockdown and send us all back to work to save the economy. At least working class people in manual occupations are to be sent back to work, while middle class people sitting in front of laptops can continue to work from home. This will result in an even greater death toll, which will fall disproportionately on the poor, the working class and BAME communities.
These anti-lockdown protests play right into the hands of the Tories who want us all to die for the economy. Also they are promoting dangerous conspiratorial thinking and opposition to either any potential vaccine against the virus or indeed the notion of a virus at all. This again risks adding to the death toll of people like bus drivers, care home stuff and construction workers – all of whom are dying from coronavirus at a greater than average rate.
Also conspiracist thinking is inherently fuzzy with no defined edges or basis on which to accept or reject any information. It functions in many instances as a gateway drug to the far-right. You start off being skeptical about fluoride and wake up one day tweeting anti-semitic Rothschild conspiracies with no idea how you got from one to the other.
For mutual aid and co-operation against the virus and social solidarity and struggle against the state and against capitalism.
I never voted for anything until 2016. I’ve spent my whole adult life being an anarchist involved in extra-parliamentary politics and not voting kind of went with the territory. The rise of the far-right and the Brexit referendum changed that. The referendum was the first thing I ever voted in and now (in for a penny, in for a pound…) I appear to have become a voter.
I am not alone in experiencing this sort of transition. The radical left has substantially been pulled into the orbit of Corbynism and many comrades (including even anarchists) have got involved in the Labour Party and in campaigning for Labour. Or to frame it another way, the radical left has partially taken over the Labour party and many comrades have followed. Lots of my anarchist comrades from years back are currently out knocking on doors for a Corbyn government and I spent the last week trying to persuade people to register to vote.
TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE?
On the question of voting versus not voting, I don’t feel I have gone through any huge transformation. I never felt that not voting was a moral principle. You sometimes get the feeling from some anarchists that Thou Shalt Not Vote is one of the moral commandments of anarchism. That seems completely against my understanding of libertarian communism. There is a strange contradiction in some traditional anarchist arguments against voting – it is simultaneously useless and changes nothing and yet also you must not do it. Yet if it is so trivial then why the great injunction against it? Not voting is another electoral choice, the same as Labour, Tory or spoiling your ballot paper. To turn any of these into a moral absolute seems a mistake.
Another anarchist argument against voting is that mass universal suffrage was a sop to buy off the working class and prevent revolution. This is no doubt to an extent true, but if you stop seeing things as black/white moral issues and see mass universal suffrage as both an incorporation of the working class within capitalism and also a positive gain of the class struggle, then you can see that there is no problem with engaging with the compromised legacy of past struggles while always pushing for more and better.
It is not plausible to argue that voting or engagement with electoral politics never makes any difference to anything. Obviously there are many things it is not capable of affecting, but it is certainly possible to imagine ‘thought experiment’ situations when voting really can make a significant difference to things (would you advocate abstaining from voting in Germany in 1932?).
Therefore, sometimes it can be useful, it can serve a purpose, but to make a giant moral principle out of voting or not voting is to fetishise it. The non-moralistic argument would surely be to recognise it for what it is at any given moment (at some points in time it may be especially pointless and at others may have more use) and not to limit your options in advance merely to electoral politics. Voting has some capacity to change some things but the class struggle will carry on regardless.
VOTING NOW IS A STARK CHOICE
So that had always been my position – I had no massive opposition to voting but in the past there seemed little reason to actually bother to vote. It’s easy to be an anarchist when the two main parties are essentially interchangeable as they were for most of my adult life. For anyone under the age of about 50, for most of their lives the argument that real change required a step beyond the revolving door of Labour/Tory was easy to make. The two parties were competing over the ‘centre ground’ and politics was essentially about electing the best managerial team for UK Plc.
In contrast we are now facing the most stark electoral choice for decades. It feels hard to be indifferent or neutral or disinterested. It feels rather like a luxury or a position of privilege to stand aloof. Suddenly the two main parties seem really quite radically different. The Tories have essentially become the Brexit party – an English nationalist force that is willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to the idol of Brexit. If they win the election a cabal of ultra-Thaterchites will use flag-waving jingo to bamboozle people as they – as Nigel Lawson put it – “finish the job which Margaret Thatcher started”. The Labour Party has its most left-wing leader ever, a life-long anti-imperialist and is proposing a quite startling end to the era of neo-liberalism – renationalisation, rolling back anti-union laws, workers on the boards of companies, rebuilding council housing – some major shifts in power.
So the newly ‘left’ Labour Party seems more of a project worth engaging with and the increasing growth and influence of the far-right seems more urgent to combat. Making the traditional anarchist argument has gone from being easy to being slightly more challenging. Especially as these events are combined with a general torpor and lack of combative class struggle or powerful autonomous movements.
THE HEYDAY OF ANARCHISM
The 1990s, it turns out in retrospect, were the recent heyday of anarchism – I didn’t realise that at the time. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc the whole of the traditional left was thrown into crisis. Even for groups that were critical of the Soviet Union, nevertheless the Eastern Bloc was the centre of gravity around which the whole left oriented itself. Anarchists and anarchistic movements seemed to be the only game in town from the 1990s through to maybe the 2008 financial crisis – they were the main fuel and inspiration behind the anti-globalisation movement for example.
But anarchists failed to capitalise on this – we didn’t have a plan, we failed to build anything, we failed to be able to move beyond protest politics into anything else. Since 2008, and especially more recently, we have seen a resurgence of the socialist left (including unfortunately, the lowest of the low – internet Stalinists). But given the general torpor and failure of extra-parliamentary politics into which this new post-crash left was born, for the generation radicalised by the financial crisis and by the student protests of 2010, it’s easy to see the attractions of the Corbyn project. Also for some older comrades, for those frustrated and tired of waiting for things to get better, this new direction held out the hope of seeing some results, and perhaps that most elusive feeling of winning.
ANARCHIST DOGMATISM
Being an anarchist you don’t want come over all Russell Brand and talk a good fight about rejecting electoral politics until you then fall at the first hurdle and immediately cave as soon as there is any shred of difference between the two main parties – then your anarchist principles turn out to be not much more than the lack of a decent third party. However, at least Russell Brand wasn’t afraid to change his mind and wasn’t afraid to be inconsistent – he wasn’t ideological.
The attitude of some anarchists of hostility to or disengagement from the Corbyn phenomenon seems ideological and dogmatic. Just sticking to your guns and trotting out your anarchist line that never changes or develops seems to be missing something:
It’s failing to acknowledge that something new or different is happening here.
It’s failing to acknowledge that this situation is a challenge for anarchists.
It’s failing to acknowledge what is behind the real attraction of Corbynism.
It’s failing to have some humility and acknowledge the failure of anarchist and radical left politics to achieve anything much even in the face of global capitalist crisis and the exhaustion of any ideology justifying their rule – it’s understandable that some comrades are turning to Corbynism – it holds out the possibility of engaging with really large numbers of people and affecting quite significant changes on a really large scale. It’s exciting. It’s got the wind in its sails. And some people might want to see something change for the better before they die.
Also in the context of the growth of the far-right across the world and here in Britain, engagement with electoral politics seems more of a necessity.
CORBYNISM AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT
The most interesting thing about the Corbyn movement is that it is a movement. After the financial collapse, after years of austerity, after the hollowing out of the neoliberal dream that both parties had been selling for years as the only possible future, out of the blue in 2015, thousands and thousands of people emerged seemingly out of nowhere to create a movement behind Corbyn’s leadership bid. Suddenly it seemed there was a mass popular anti-neoliberal movement that no one on the left had predicted or foreseen.
The problem of course was that this was a movement of disconnected atomised individuals only linked by their participation in an electoral project. This is a severe limitation. As Bernie Sanders has acknowledged and perhaps the Labour Party have been less ready to acknowledge, even getting a Corbyn government elected would be the beginning not the end of any radical project. Bernie has emphasised that he’d need a movement behind him to be able to do achieve much and the same is true of a Corbyn government.
The state is more than the government, and any radical Corbyn government would find itself in government but not necessarily in power, its radical programme opposed by a large number of its own MPs and by all the other organs of the state from the military, to the civil service and the secret state. There would be huge pressure, especially from international institutions and the financial sector, for the new Corbyn government to compromise, to roll back on a lot of its promises. The only thing that could keep them on track and stop them drifting to the right, that could create the space for them to be able to do what they want to do and maybe even push them to do some things they don’t want to do, is a strong extra-parliamentary radical left. The Corbyn/McDonnell leadership is particularly susceptible to pressure from left activists and campaigners because they see themselves as part of the same movement; also a threat from the (further) left will persuade business and the establishment to go with what a Labour government is proposing for fear of something worse.
There is a basic political principle that you get what you fight for – we don’t have the weekend, the welfare state and the NHS by accident. They were not the benevolent gifts of a patrician ruling class. They were either extracted under duress or given through fear of revolution. As Aditya Chakrabortty pointed out, it was the threat of the Soviet Union that allowed the social democratic left in a lot of the world to win concessions from capital. The logic was – give them reform to stop them asking for revolution. The existential threat to western liberal capitalism, in the sense of an alternative system that actually existed as a rival global power, is gone. So how will it be possible for a Corbyn government or a Bernie Sanders presidency to make meaningful changes when faced with the ‘common-sense’ logic of the marketplace without an equivalent threat to back them up?
The value of any potential Corbyn government is completely dependent on extra-parliamentary power. It will make a crucial difference whether there are unions mobilising, social movements organising – a general increase in uppityness – both to pressure Labour to stick to what it promised and to serve as a threat, making the radicalism of Corbyn seem more moderate by comparison. A Labour government could also open up space for moving the Overton window and allowing more things to be thinkable and possible. It should increase capacity and morale across the entire left spectrum, as long as we take it as a starting point and not an end point – as a challenge to organise and mobilise more, not to hang up our hats and think ‘job done’.
BACKFILLING THE REVOLUTION
The weirdness of Corbyn (and Sanders) is a left project of repudiating neoliberalism emerging out of a devastated social landscape where most of the organs of collective solidarity have been decimated. And so instead of a radical leadership of the Labour Party emerging out of strong grassroots labour, left, union and radical movements and then building up until these movement finally found expression at the highest level (perhaps a little bit more like what happened to Labour in the early ‘80s), instead – it’s all back to front. A really left-wing leader has been parachuted in at the top with no infrastructure or organised radical left movements behind him. Now primarily Momentum and also other left groups are desperately trying to backfill and magic into existence a radical left movement to support Corbyn. But it’s all building from the top down rather than the bottom up.
So Corbynism represents a large and impressive amount of people looking for something new and different, coming together behind Corbyn’s leadership bid. And then subsequent to that, new social movement(s) in the process of being composed out of this crowd of individuals. The social movement around Corbynism is something that has begun to be formed after the election of Corbyn as leader rather than before. It is this movement and what becomes of it, that is of key importance in determining what happens next.
An obvious question will emerge if there is a Corbyn government – are we building a movement to challenge Corbyn from the left or to shore him up? There will be pressure to not rock the boat if there is a Labour government, as they will already be under attack from the right; to rally behind ‘our’ government and not to protest. This is the wrong approach – it is important to keep up pressure from the left on any potential Corbyn government.
If (as unfortunately seems more likely) Labour fails to win, the important thing will be to maintain the gains of the Corbyn project in terms of a shift to the left and not allow the Labour Party to revert back to being like another version of the Liberal Democrats. The space that has been created must be defended. Especially, the main area of contestation is over Brexit / immigration / migrants rights / nationalism. A Labour loss to the Tories in this Brexit election, could spark a wave of people saying Labour lost because it wasn’t tough enough on immigration, wasn’t giving enough ground to the ’legitimate concerns’.
Even out of power, much of the same stuff applies to Labour in opposition – they are very open to influence from the left, the existence of Corbynism opens up extra space for the left, the presence of other people further left than them allows them to present themselves as more moderate and also to point to a potential threat necessitating concessions.
The far-right had no qualms about getting out on the streets to campaign for Brexit, even though it was far from all that many of them would have wanted. But they recognised that it moved things significantly in their direction. Similarly you’d have to be blind not to recognise the massive shift that Corbynism has created in what it is possible to popularly say and think – a whole terrain has opened up around being able to talk about class politics, around being able to discuss socialism without people thinking you’re a loony, around challenging neoliberalism and capitalist business as usual.
So we should not be afraid to get our hands dirty, we should not worry about ideological purity more than getting stuff done, we should engage with what is going on. We should critically engage with the Corbyn phenomenon but most importantly we must also build class power and the autonomous power of extra-parliamentary radical movements.
Because, the big question, in the case of a Labour victory but even more so in the case of a Labour defeat is – what will become of the Corbyn movement? Will it collapse into disillusionment due to defeat or the disillusionment of disappointed hopes when Labour in power does not live up to expectations? Will it be redirected by electoral defeat and shift energies into extra-parliamentary politics? Or will more energy be thrown into continuing to transform the Labour Party? To what extent is the Corbyn movement capable of escaping being a purely electoral mechanism and becoming an actual social movement?
The answers to these things will shape the next decade of our lives.
This article neatly sums up why most of the Left has got it so wrong on Brexit.
Andrew Murray expresses the opinion that Brexit is part of a ‘culture war’. You are given to understand that this means something essentially unimportant, non-political. Culture wars, we are led to believe, are a distraction – an irrelevance, something that can be easily left aside. It is as if the whole of society were being riven by a giant split over who should have won the Bake Off – this is an argument that we don’t want to get dragged into, that has essentially no political meaning or implications and that therefore we can safely dodge.
This is of course entirely wrong about Brexit. The livelihoods of millions of working class people, their immigration status, their family life, their right to work, their right to live and move are all on the line. This is quite apart from the inevitable rise of nationalism, racism and racist attacks and the Thatcherite austerity-plus that will inevitably follow Brexit. It could not be more of a political issue.
But maybe he’s got a point in there somewhere. It does seem like we are increasingly finding ourselves immured in the ‘culture war’ politics of the United States, where cultural divides between liberal and conservatives which cut across class lines partially replace more traditional class divides. I can empathise to some extent with people in the Labour Party wanting to get back to talking about the many and the few. However, the answer to this shift to ‘culture war’ terrain is not to try and pretend it isn’t happening.
Although the term itself is a dismissive, trivialising term, we need to consider what are ‘culture wars’ about? In the United States what that means is – do the police have the right to kill black people with impunity? Do you have the ability to have an abortion if needed? Is there access to contraception? Are the lives of gay or trans people going to be valued as having any worth? Are refugee children going to be imprisoned in camps in the desert? These are literal matters of life and death. The culture wars couldn’t be more serious.
Ultimately, why is this ‘culture wars’ thing happening? It’s happening because of the rise of the far-right and a return to nationalism, nativism, racism, xenophobia. That is the big picture of what is going on in the world and if you cant see that then there really is no hope.
Andrew Murray apparently can see this. He acknowledges that Brexit has become about many other things apart from just the EU – essentially about nationalism, nativism and xenophobia. Remarkably, he concludes that it would be very bad to take a position on this. His argument is based on electoral calculation – that the Labour Party can’t take a position against “xenophobic nationalists and Thatcherite utopians” because it needs the votes. Really?
while rome burns 