Looking back to two events that shaped the last decades’ radical history
~ Scott Harris ~
We can’t let this year pass without tributes for two big anniversaries in radical political history. One, 40 years ago, was the miners making their heroic last stand. And the other, merely 25, was the Carnival Against Capital.
1984: The Miners’ Strike
For anarchists, as for much of the left, the miners’ strike against Thatcher’s pit closures was broadly seen as an existential struggle and one which mobilised all quarters of the movement. Most infamous on a national scale was the intervention of Class War, a tabloid-style agitational paper that had begun publication just the previous year and already built a reputation for pugnacious prose It came into its own during the strike itself, becoming popular at pickets with headlines calling for ‘Victory to the Hit Squads’ or featuring a noose slung around pictures of Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher titled ‘The Miners Have the Right Idea.’
Direct actionists were active all over the country in support of the grassroots, though criticism of the miners’ leaders, especially Scargill, was common and there was often frustration in the pages of movement journals such as Black Flag that the struggle was tied too comprehensively to a narrow industrial fight rather than broadening into a more insurrectionary mode — though the need for “solidarity of the moment” was generally emphasised.
A letter in the June 1984 issue from D M (Middlesbrough) summed up some of the anarchists’ mix of enthusiasm and ambivalence:
“The dynamism behind the strike from day one has come from the grassroots of the National Union of Miners. On this welcome development, as anarchists and believers in a revolutionary unionism under the conscious control of militant, self-organised workers, we must base our propaganda and activity. We seek working class unity yes. But don’t confuse that with entertaining the mistakes and missed opportunities of reformist trade unionism.”
Less noisy, but common, was anarchist involvement in solidarity groups. Freedom, despite making something of a meal of things in its critical position of the miners as being marched down the garden path by their leaders, provided office space for fundraisers, while bucket rattling to fundraise round housing estates was common for radical groups from Edinburgh to London.
There is not enough room in a brief article to go through the archives of the time, but it’s well worth checking out the Kate Sharpley Library’s work, (especially its August KSL Bulletin) which considers the anarchist contribution in much more detail.
1999: Carnival Against Capital
From a purely anarchist perspective J18 (the carnival took place on June 18th) was more up the movement’s alley. Decentralised, irreverent and self-consciously political, it drew heavily from the previous two decades of growing ambition in youth movements worldwide, especially in Europe, the US and South America, to challenge what had by this point been more than a decade of neoliberal hegemony.
While the Battle of Seattle in November of that year is often named as a turning point in the ability of the anti-globalisation movement to confront capital on its own ground, J18 was when Britain’s (and much of Europe’s) radical youth moved from relative isolation to the high point of what became known as Party and Protest.
Nominally called as part of a global series of protests against the 25th G8 Summit in Germany, it electrified the media which ran days of front pages decrying the thousands of scruffy hooligans who reporters insisted were taking over central London.
Linking together activists from anarchist climate activism (the road protest movement, Earth First! etc.), bike-supporting Critical Mass with the free party scene and organised through Reclaim The Streets, the whole shebang also coincided with the forming of new decentralised online reporting. Indymedia, which offered open social media production long before corporate titans monestised it, began that same year as part of the drive to give activists their own voice against tabloid disinformation.
The State, panicked by partying radicals threatening to overwhelm the doors of the Stock Exchange, sent in a heavy force of riot police, confirming to activists that they were more than just a crowd of ravers. The set-tos would continue for the next two years, before 9/11 gave the state a golden opportunity to reset its position and draw on the evergreen final resort of scoundrels — wartime patriotism enabling crackdowns.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal
