At the time of writing, Gordon Brown is rallying the faithful at Bournemouth with talk of ‘British jobs for British workers’. We know what this coded message really means. It means drawing a line between those who the ruling class want to keep happy (included in ‘democratic’ decision making; entitled to state support and protection; generating wealth etc.) and, by implication, those who at best don’t count for anything and at worst are a danger to the rest of ‘us’. That means outsiders, for example people on benefits, and the ‘outsiders within’; asylum seekers, prisoners, migrant workers, people asking for more benefits or fighting cuts, workers fighting for security in the face of ever more casualised jobs, Islamic youth (in fact youth in general!) and so on. Simplistically structuralist as this may sound, it nonetheless describes what must surely be the conscious social programme of this increasingly authoritarian government.
This programme is successful in many ways. Labour still strikes a chord with many ordinary people, to the extent that they might win yet another election by promising to protect ordinary people from the undeserving poor and the trouble-makers who supposedly threaten this romanticised British way of life. But anarchists still fervently believe that it is through the same ordinary people that change has to come. This has three implications for us in the very immediate term. Firstly, we have to undermine, expose and challenge the image of ‘the enemy within’ painted by the state and perpetrated in the media, so that people realise that they have been taken in. We have to prove that when it comes to those ‘other’ people that ‘we’, the hard-working British, are supposed to be afraid of, there is in fact no dangerous ‘them’, just a global ‘us’ that an alliance of capitalism and the state sets up boundaries between.
Secondly, we have to encourage people to actually fight the mechanisms of repression that allow the state to control and manipulate whilst supposedly protecting ‘us’. The most obvious example of this is the interrelated introduction of data collection for both British citizens and ‘foreigners’, as addressed previously in Organise!, through new RFID chipped passports, DNA collection, databases like the NHS one and, most insidiously, identity cards ‘for all’. They allow state officials to determine who is included, entitled and deserving versus those who are excluded, in brutal practice as well as symbolically. As an equally symbolic and also practical part of this, we have to target the new technologies involved; ubiquitous CCTV cameras, law enforcers’ helmet cameras, tagging, mobile fingerprinting etc.
Thirdly, we have to offer alternatives to the futility of trying change society by working within ‘democratic’ structures where the ruling class mak