A few thoughts on where we are as we teeter on the cusp of a decade-defining shift into armed nationalism
~ Rob Ray ~
In the deluge of capital-N News we’ve had over the last month, by far the most consequential for our war-distanced isles has been the announcement, Europe-wide, of massive rearmament.
In the wake of dizzying spending plans from Germany and the EU, as well as a belated realisation from local powers that maybe outsourcing production to rivals wasn’t good strategy, Labour’s pledge to cough up 2.5–3% of GDP on defence isn’t even looking like the most aggressive commitment around.
But it seems likely that the next decade will be one of transformation on a number of levels, with the further ascension of far-right political groups dovetailing with military revivalism, permanent realignment of the Great Game and, most likely, abandonment of environmental commitments even as the consequences of climate crisis quite literally come storming into our daily lives.
As we march towards this catastrophe for the world’s working classes (who will be forced to suffer the costs and consequences even while being told it is all their fault), Britain’s anarchists can and should work on ways to stop it. But we must also consider that, as for most of the last four decades, we won’t have the wherewithal to do so, or even to slow it down. As a movement with limited means, what are our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats?
Strengths
Let’s be honest, physically we don’t have many at the moment. There’s a lot of unconnected local groupings, a small (albeit feisty) squatting scene, a smattering of places like Freedom or the Star and Shadow, a few co-ops like Radical Routes, publishers like Active, some legal support, a fringe social network, that sort of thing. That’s not to say the potential is absent—we’ve made serious strides from lower points before now. The last three waves of anarchist-influenced activity, 1999-2003, 2010–2013 and the mutual aid movement of 2020-2021, have not faded from memory just yet and have many lessons to teach, plus there’s a large groundswell of alumni who could potentially be re-enthused by an offering which has learned some lessons about not just inspiring movements but sustaining them.
Unlike our frenemies in the social democratic and trade union scenes, we’re not flailing at the wrong end of a challenge-fail cycle and in fact many of our predictions about the shortcomings of Corbynism were fully vindicated. We have an excellent recent example of spontaneous mass mutual aid (Covid) to point at when arguing our case for (re)building decentralised networks of solidarity across the working class. For all that we lack large federal organisations able to reach across the country, we do have spaces which could act as nexus points for rapid growth, as well as at least some friendly contacts with centres run by fellow travellers (Friends Meeting Houses, workingmens’ clubs, worker co-ops and the like).
And for all the many terrors ahead, our politics are likely to be thrown into sharper relief by the increasingly repressive behaviour of governments both foreign and domestic. The British public has, on the whole, been astonishingly lackadaisical about protecting its own freedoms in the last decade. It looked the other way as protests were reduced to police-approved walkabouts, while direct action was criminalised and prison sentences imposed, as town and city centres across the country were placed under the permanent watch of Big Brother’s glass eyes. We can point to years of warnings and propose action when one event or another, triggered by the new order of things, shocks the public into paying attention.
Standard left-wing respectability politics has had little of note to say about these assaults beyond “that’s bad mkay” while the Free Englishman Ruuule Britannnia, so-called pro-liberties mob (Spiked!, right-wing broadsheets, etc.) either ignore it or actively cheer for more. Anarchists are one of the few groupings that have consistently not just warned there’s a problem, or whinged vaguely at a Westminster that absolutely does not care, but advocated for and sometimes taken action to fight it. With the pandemic anti-mask phase some of our more conspiratorial comrades went through out of the way, there’s lots of scope for pushing back if we’re smart. We have know-how both active and historic on the true state of the law and our vaunted “freedoms” that gives us an outsized influence at street level when shocks like a wave of military nationalism rolls through.
Weaknesses
Hoo-boy, do we have a few of those. Within the scene there’s a back-biting, rumour mongering, cut-em-off-for-a-slight culture that has hamstrung us for the best part of a decade now, worsened by the tiredness of groups which (understandably) often find it easier to automatically cold shoulder rather than get sucked into yet more interminable arguments and insoluble investigations. We’ve split repeatedly over trans rights, relative positions on international conflict and good old fashioned burnout-fallouts. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly ‘guy points at factory shouting organise’ type, other than thrashing things out over trans rights (directly relevant to our ability to organise where we are) we should not have been self-destructing over these issues.
My personal views, for example, on Ukraine and Palestine are largely consistent—I have been in favour of supporting the people in both countries. In Ukraine the people (and the anarchists) do not wish to be an imperial outcrop of a bloody-handed autocratic Russia known for killing dissenters. In Palestine they don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. I find these both to be pretty reasonable, while understanding and appreciating the broader importance of the No War But The Class War position.
But realistically what I think is unimportant, outside a tiny section of a British left that has historically been really quite rubbish at stopping even its own government’s wars, let alone anyone else’s. And arguments we have on the subject should not be making us worse at tasks where we actually can make a significant difference. I don’t have to agree with people about Ukraine to work with them on other issues, and our movement, lest we forget, is supposed to be heterodox. As it stands however it is often alien and unwelcoming to outsiders (sometimes to insiders) held back by constant internecine bickering, often hiding personal beefs behind hyperbolic Political Disagreements.
More broadly, we suffer both poor integration with the left base that does exist in this country and from the long malaise that base has been experiencing. Anarchism has a history of plucking many of its best organisers from the ranks of trade unions, student movements, minority activism and the disillusioned far left, all of which are struggling.
Those unions and left groups are politically moribund and for the most part have been in managed decline for some time bar a few groupings in strategic industries, such as RMT on the tracks or healthcare workers in the chronically understaffed NHS. NGOs, where they aren’t just flat-out liberal in ways useless to us, have been in large part neutered by the government simply making “being political” a black mark for their funding, or even illegal. The co-op movement has long since lost most of its radical edge, bar a fringe of smaller entities active in fields like housing, book selling, bikes and wholefoods (those last being a small one to potentially put in the strength category, though they often struggle to compete effectively enough to provide a financial backbone).
The institutions’ slumber and our haphazard connectivity with them undermines or ability to successfully approach and mobilise extra-parliamentary action in communities – and the greatest weakness of all is that we lack a clear, approachable base in most places outside certain areas of big cities and particular small-town enclaves. It will take significant effort to rebuild the base that has historically sustained much of the left more generally as political class consciousness is so fractured, demobilised and alienated.
I acknowledge this ends the article on something of a bum note but never fear! It’s opportunities next week and there’s quite a few of those.
Part 2 of this article will appear next Sunday.
Pic: Number 10/CC
