21 days later: some thoughts on the situation after Woolwich

Posted on June 12, 2013 by

So, it’s been a few weeks since the murder of Lee Rigby stirred up a huge revival in far-right activity, and it seems like enough time’s passed to be able to try and make some initial judgements on what the new situation we’re facing looks like. Any and all of these points may end up being proved entirely wrong by events to come, but at least attempting to assess what’s going on is better than doing nothing.

 

  1. Tommy Robinson is not a tactical genius.

The tendency among many liberal and leftist anti-racists to write the EDL off as a bunch of drunken, uneducated idiots is definitely a negative thing. It’s completely understandable to be annoyed by it, and Joseph Kay’s recent blog did an excellent job of showing how harmful it is. But that doesn’t mean we should exaggerate things in the other direction either. As I see it, Tommy Robinson is a bit like a far-right version of John Rees or Lindsey German: basically a chancer with one big idea. If you carry on doing the same thing again and again for long enough, then, as long as the thing you’re doing is not too utterly stupid and you don’t have terrible luck, you’ll eventually find you end up in a situation that’s favourable to the thing you’re doing, at least for a while. But that’s not the same as being a tactical genius. He didn’t look like he was in the middle of an unstoppable rise to power a few months ago, and there’s no guarantee he’ll look like it a few months from now.

Besides, even if he does make sound tactical choices, the EDL is a loose network, not the kind of tightly disciplined centralist organisation that would allow him to micro-manage his supporters’ behaviour on the ground – as can be seen by his insistence that the memorial marches for Rigby should be sober and silent, an instruction that was not always followed to the letter by the local mobilisations, to put it mildly.

 

  1. The EDL are not ruling the streets.

After Newcastle, and the first London mobilisation on the bank holiday, things were looking really bad. But I don’t think it’s possible to generalise from that weekend. The local events at the start of this month, on the whole, were not overpowering shows of strength, and their last big day out in Sheffield was nowhere near the size of London or Newcastle. Besides which, Newcastle was a pre-planned demo that they’d been publicising for a while, and London is London. It’s hard to directly compare the scale of events in the capital to events anywhere else, and there certainly wasn’t a huge racist turnout to support the BNP’s attempts to grab the spotlight the week after. There may well be some areas where the far-right are outperforming us  - in particular, I suspect the pattern might be that while it’s relatively easy to pull out big numbers of anti-racists in large, mixed cities, the right have more of a free run in the kind of small former industrial towns that have been continually run down since Thatcherism – but in general, their two days of success immediately following the murder are looking more like a pair of one-offs than the new rule.

 

  1. Just because the EDL aren’t controlling the streets doesn’t mean that we’re not in a scary, dangerous situation.

The most worrying racist force in the country isn’t the EDL, it’s UKIP. That was true a month ago and it’s still true now. They seem to have pulled off the trick that Griffin could never manage of becoming the respectable populist nationalist party, and anti-fascists still don’t have an adequate strategy for dealing with a hard-line nationalist force with little or no connection to the old fascist traditions. The collapse of the BNP was due to their own internal problems more than the effectiveness of the opposition, and the EDL, even if they’re not ideologically fascist, do at least have a set of tactics quite similar to the old NF et al, which makes it a bit easier for our side to rely on the old lessons of militant anti-fascism. But, overall, we’re still faced with the challenge of working out how to deal with racist groups when they don’t attempt to rule the streets, and I’m not sure we have an adequate strategy yet, despite occasional interesting experiments.

Secondly, the EDL marches are only one side of the racist revival after Woolwich. The other, more worrying, side is the rise in racist attacks, and if, as seems plausible, the EDL continue to find themselves outperformed in big set-piece demonstrations*, targeted clandestine attacks could come to seem like a more and more tempting option for their supporters. I can’t think of anything we can do to actually prevent late-night arson attacks, although we should lend our support any attempts to repair the physical and psychological damage, but it’s worth bearing in mind that, between the realm of big public demonstrations and secretive lone-wolf attacks, there’s also the possibility of small “flash-mob” attacks on specific targets, along the lines of the very unruly EDL event in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich murder. If my analysis is correct – and it’s always worth bearing in mind that there’s every chance it isn’t – and the EDL’s street resurgence isn’t going to last long, then these kind of short-notice mob attacks could increase as an alternative outlet. I don’t think that this’d be an easy development to counter, but I think it would be possible for militant anti-fascists to play some role in resisting this kind of attacks. It’s not possible to make contact with every single potential target in the country, but I think it makes sense for anti-fascists to try and think about likely targets in our areas, open up some kind of communication with them about their contingency plans, and let them know that there’s people ready to offer extra support if needed. Mobile phones and social media have made the task of spreading information to huge numbers of people almost immediately much easier, so the next challenge is to make sure that we’re in a position to hear relevant information in the first place.

*there’s no guarantee of this, it’s equally possible that the twin problems of police repression and liberal/UAF fuckwittery will manage to derail most attempts at effective anti-fascist mobilisation for the foreseeable future.

Posted in racism, the right | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Emergency! Woolwich and the politics of urgency

Posted on May 30, 2013 by

Perhaps this is a terrible thing to admit, but when I first heard about what had happened in Woolwich – and, more to the point, when I began to realise the effect it would have on the wider political climate – the first thing I felt wasn’t really shock, or outrage, or horror or fear or any of the other things you’re meant to feel in these situations. It was exasperation – that kind of tired grumpiness best summed up by the phrase “oh, for fuck’s sake.”

While the overall political situation beforehand was already a bit grim, there were quite a few things I’d been feeling cheerful about. For one thing, although the level of electoral support for the hard right is worrying, the far-right’s ability to mobilise people in the streets seemed to be collapsing. And, on our side, the determined campaign against workfare’s led to the government getting increasingly nervous and secretive, some of the local campaigns against the bedroom tax sound really impressive, the campaign against blacklisting seems to have a good level of rank-and-file initiative, and the emergence of the Pop-Up Union as a body capable of taking real industrial action is one of the most exciting developments in workplace organising for a long time. None of these things are going to turn the world upside down tomorrow, but they’re all worthwhile and, given time and enough patient commitment, they could have some real effects. But, in the days and weeks to come, no-one’s going to be talking about those things, because racists are setting the agenda. Again. And yes, it’s scary and it’s horrible, but for anyone who lived through the last decade, it’s also starting to get a bit boring. We’ve been here before, so many times.

It’s definitely the case that we need to be mobilising in response to the high levels of racist street militancy that we’re seeing. When faced with racist attacks, pretending they’re not happening and carrying on as usual is not an option. But I think that, in situations where it’s tempting to drop everything else and make responding to the latest news our number one priority, it’s more vital than ever to keep a clear head. Lee Rigby’s death was a tragedy, and the fact that innocent people have been hurt as a result of the racist backlash that’s followed is another tragedy, and if we can do anything to stop more racist attacks from happening then that’s vital. But I can’t help worrying that, however many weeks or months later, when everything’s more or less died down and returned to normal, we’re going to emerge from this period of emergency mobilisation to find that the fragile fledgling community-based revolt against the bedroom tax has utterly died from neglect while everyone’s had their attention taken up by the EDL, and that evictions which could have been preventable are taking place with no opposition.

It’s no secret that many activists, from both the traditional Marxist groups and the more libertarian end of the spectrum, share a tendency to be a bit excitable, to put it mildly. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, and the kind of intense energy that comes with that excitability can be really useful for getting new initiatives off the ground. But, for almost exactly the same reasons, that activist urge towards urgency and excitability is no help at all when it comes to trying to sustain anything for an extended period of time, as the urge is always to drop whatever you were doing before in favour of this week’s hot issue. As I’ve said, the racist backlash is having a real impact on people’s lives, and so can’t be written off as just another bullshit distraction like the Royal Wedding or the Olympics. But if we focus all our energies on it, we’re still letting the racists set the agenda. In a debate about Islam, where all the options are defined by various anti-working-class political ideologies (“do you support Islamic extremism? how about British nationalism? Or do you oppose both of them and support the respectable moderate center ground? How about moderate Islam? What about moderate British nationalism?”), it’s very hard to articulate anything beyond a purely negative anti-racism, or a state-friendly liberal approval of “multiculturalism” and the moderate center. There’s not much space to articulate a broader vision of solidarity and taking back power over our lives.

In the days to come, we need to be acting as anti-fascists and anti-racists. But we shouldn’t let our activity be reduced to just that and nothing else. Difficult though it is, we should also try and keep up whatever we were doing before last week. The ongoing project of trying to rebuild a culture of solidarity and direct action is still as vital as ever, and having a clear, long-term strategy that we stick to is the only way we’ll ever be able to break out of this cycle of permanently running around trying to deal with the fallout from this week’s disaster.

Posted in activism, racism, the right | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

From Staffordshire to Stockholm: notes from the class struggle

Posted on May 22, 2013 by

For a while now, I’ve not really written anything substantial, just used this blog as a place to share links to things that I think are interesting. This is another of those posts, but at least it should be short.

First off, a story about an impressively intense workplace conflict. Sometimes mass class struggle flares up in a dramatic fashion; most of the time it doesn’t, but it’s always there behind the scenes, in the attempts of the DWP to make life on benefits as unbearable as possible and in the ways claimants try to make things a little easier for each other, in the new initiatives from management designed to squeeze as much work out of us as possible and in the quiet refusals and evasions that workers come up with to escape this kind of discipline. And also when bosses accuse workers of skiving and those workers react by kicking their heads in, as in the case of Robert Morris and his boss Colin Amos. This story makes me wish Class War were still around, I can only imagine the amount of fun they could have had with a Page 3 Battered Boss.

Secondly, Stockholm has now been rocked by three nights of riots, sparked off by the police shooting a 69-year-old man. I’m not an expert on Sweden, and I’ve not seen any detailed analysis yet, so I don’t feel qualified to say too much on the subject, but The Local seems to be a decent English-language source for mainstream Swedish news coverage, so you might want to have a look around there if you want a more in-depth take.

And finally, state repression against anarchists in the US is something I’ve covered quite a bit in the past, particularly the Grand Jury in the Pacific North-West that saw a number of people jailed for refusing to give information. At the moment, everyone who was jailed for refusing to co-operate with that investigation is now free, but over on the East Coast, Gerald Koch has now been imprisoned for staying silent in the face of another Grand Jury targeting anarchists. You can write to him at

Gerald Koch

# 68631-054

M.D.C.

P.O. Box 329002

Brooklyn, NY 11232

USA

You can also submit a statement of solidarity using the form here, buy solidarity fundraiser stuff or just make a donation here, and download a nicely-designed poster from here to spread the word about his case. By staying silent in the face of imprisonment, Jerry is helping to protect the anarchist movement as a whole; we owe it to him to return the solidarity.

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Beating bosses in Birmingham, bothering blacklisters: mid-May round-up

Posted on May 19, 2013 by

Another quick round-up of a few interesting stories and upcoming events: on the benefits front, the big news of late is the legal victory won by workfare campaigners over the DWP, in a case which the government had previously warned could lead to the collapse of the Mandatory Work Activity scheme. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the government will actually comply with the court’s rulings, as previous legal cases have shown how easy it is for them to rewrite the law to suit themselves. Also in welfare news, the Merseyside Anti-Bedroom Tax Federation sounds impressively organised, and Johnny Void highlights the upcoming lobby of PCS conference over benefit sanctions as an important date for militant claimants in and around Brighton.

It’s been a busy week in the ongoing fight against the blacklisting of unionists: I’ve not been able to find a definite update on the case of sacked IWW bus driver Oscar Alvarez, but the case is definitely worth keeping an eye on and supporting if possible, and retired electrician George Tapp was knocked down by a car at a protest against blacklisting in Manchester a few days ago. He’ll require reconstructive surgery on his legs, but is reported to be in good spirits. If you want to help keep up the fight and you live in London, then you might want to show up to support Frank Morris, a blacklisted electrician who’s going to an employment tribunal on Tuesday morning, or if you live in Glasgow the Blacklist Support Group have called a protest there next Saturday.

Finally, what sounds like a victory: management at Birmingham University, who’d been threatening 361 support staff with redundancy or pay cuts, have backed down after campaigners at the university responded with a call for a national demonstration similar to the one that rocked Sussex recently. While these kinds of victories are rarely complete or clear-cut, they do demonstrate the power of direct action to change a situation for the better, and challenge the idea that there’s nothing we can do. The last word should go to Birmingham Defend Education themselves: “Calling off this action is not the end of the campaign. Both staff and students will resume organisation in the next academic year when we are stronger, and we can continue to build a sustained campaign rather than just one big action… When we become involved in organising, we are constantly told that protests don’t change anything, but the actions of this group and the national student movement have shown management that we’re capable of defending ourselves if they try attack the conditions of staff and students.”

Posted in birmingham, protests, stuff that I think is pretty awesome, the unemployed | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Bins, buses and bossnappings: post-May Day round-up

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

So, it’s been a while since May Day, and the excitement of having a holiday born out of the class struggle has faded a bit. May Day was born out of the struggle for an eight-hour-day, which was an attempt to assert our needs and desires against a world that ignores them, and the fact that we get a day’s holiday out of the effects of that movement is a sign that we’ve not been totally unsuccessful; but the fact that, the day after, we have to return to normal life at work or on benefits is a sign of how far we still have to go.

I was going to try and do a round-up of interesting May Day events, but there’s not much to add to Bristol AF’s excellent summary. The only thing I’d add is that, if you have the time, this report from the May Day clashes in Istanbul is worth a read. On an international note, this Bangladeshi anarchist page doesn’t have much original content on it yet, but it might be worth keeping an eye on for ongoing developments in the region. The ongoing bitter dispute on the docks on the USA’s west coast has heated up again with a lock-out in Portland, and, while the Pacific North-West Grand Jury resisters are currently all free, Jerry Koch, a New York anarchist, is currently facing another Grand Jury trying to coerce him into giving information on his comrades. The Black Scare is far from over.

Back in the UK, the big story of late has been the Brighton bin wildcat, but there’s a few other stories worth taking note of: the IWW are currently fighting for the reinstatement of sacked bus driver Oscar Alvarez (see here for some information on how you can support him), and two new worthwhile-sounding initiatives are being launched in London, South London Welfare Action and Angry Workers of the World. Finally, the case of the four dancers accused of kidnapping their boss over unpaid wages is an interesting one: just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, one alleged bossnapping doesn’t necessarily mean the coming summer’s going to be a hot one, but it does bear noticeable similarities to a number of incidents that happened in France in the early years of this crisis. When talking about the alleged bossnapping in Cheltenham, it’s worth remembering that it’s a product of a “grey market” workplace, and so the conditions it came from don’t necessarily generalise to the rest of the economy; but on the other hand, to say that it came out of a semi-legal workplace isn’t necessarily to say that it’s irrelevant. In the coming months and years, as the formal economy continues to slump, jobs at the hyper-exploitative edges of the legal labour market are likely to expand, and so we might well see an increase in these kinds of uncontrollable conflicts taking place in areas where the old mechanisms for containing class conflict have no presence. Only time will tell.

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May Day round-up

Posted on April 30, 2013 by

I’ve not had time to write anything substantial on here in a while, and to be honest I don’t have enough time to do so right now, but I wanted to share a few links of interest. One story that I missed when it came out a few weeks back is that Grand Jury resister Maddy Pfeiffer is now free. I only found out about it now as a result of reading about the increased FBI harassment of anarchists in Olympia and Seattle in the run-up to May Day. I suppose in the next 24 hours we’ll have a clearer picture of how the last year of state repression has affected the Pacific North-West’s ability to throw lively May Day events. Closer to home, one form the fight against state repression has taken is in the solidarity shown to Steve Topley, a Nottinghamshire claimant who was imprisoned for comments made during an Atos interview, but has now been released on bail.

Finally, and this really is a brief round-up because I’m tired, the inspiring grassroots campaign against the bedroom tax on Merseyside continues, and this week they occupied the offices of a bailiff company that’d been looking to make money out of welfare reform.

That’s all for now, I hope to find the time to write more soon. Happy May Day, anyway.

Posted in America, anarchists, disability, police, repression, the unemployed | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The only good tory party is a dead tory party.

Posted on April 9, 2013 by

The death of Margaret Thatcher is something I’d spent a while thinking about before it happened. In advance, I really didn’t know how I’d react, but thinking about it as an abstract idea, I tended towards taking the killjoy position: while the country is still so strongly in the grasp of Thatcherism, the passing of an individual figurehead is pretty meaningless. Then it happened, and I realised I felt no desire to play the spoilsport: right now, a lot of people who, like me, haven’t found much to celebrate in the news for a long time have found a piece of news that makes them happy, and I have no inclination to argue with that.

To tell the truth, I don’t even really properly hate Thatcher. I certainly dislike the idea of her, but that’s all it is, an idea: I was a young child when she left office, and so I can’t really summon up the kind of visceral loathing that I feel for the likes of Tony Blair or Iain Duncan Smith. But, even if I don’t take that much personal satisfaction from the news, a lot of my friends – at the risk of sounding terribly drippy, both the friends I already know and the ones I have yet to meet – are happy about it, and that does make me happy.

Of course, it’s true that a confused old woman dying of a stroke doesn’t take us any closer to the end of neoliberalism. But then it’s also true that there was never a magic man born to a virgin on the 25th December, and that doesn’t change the fact that Christmas parties can be quite fun. We spend enough of our lives feeling unhappy, stressed and anxious as it is, and not enough time celebrating. When opportunities to enjoy ourselves come our way, we shouldn’t squander them.

Posted in tories | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment