As Europe’s ruling class responds to the post-Pax Americana world with anguish and armaments, here are the opportunities and threats facing British anarchists

~ Rob Ray ~

Part one of this article, covering strengths and weaknesses, is here.

Opportunities

Putting a cynical hat on, in many ways there has never been a more opportune time to be an anarchist. We are watching the collapse of the liberal capitalist dream happen in real time as Starmerism discards any semblance of velvet glove for the working class. The cobweb left is in utter disarray and even the new wave left of Corbynism has zero ideas. Re-capture Labour? Dead. New/radical party? Don’t make me laugh. Capture the Greens? You’ll kill them by trying—the project is already an uncomfortable balance of red-greens and liberal shire Tories talking round their very different reasons for being there.

The need for a confident, radical base building its own resources towards the goal of acquiring leverage that can actually threaten government policy once in a while, could not be clearer to see. We have an ample example both from our own recent history and from across the pond of what happens to a progressive movement that puts all its eggs in the basket of electoralism and then loses.

It’s also important to consider that both the current Labour squeeze on working class life and the oncoming wave of nationalistic, military first, sod-the-environment politics set to dominate the 2020s sits in both the Threats and Opportunities column. Watching this happen will be a focussing, radicalising factor for a great many people. We have not had a serious military drive in this country for quite some time, and it will be a culture shock. On top of all the other economic beefs the working class have right now, many leaning leftwards but with nowhere to express it, we do have some open doors to push at, if we’re canny about doing so and avoid alienating potential allies.

Reform’s dangerous position too will have elements of both threat and opportunity. The former will see the usual There Is No Alternative merchants telling us the only way to stop fascism is to get out and vote, keep things nice and calm and disciplined, the usual twaddle that’s manifestly provided not protection against but breathing room for fascism to develop Europe-wide. The latter is our ability to say this. That the post-Thatcher consensus, with its flood-upwards economics and retreat of State support is the problem. That the solution is not tying ourselves to that disintegrating status quo, giving up our agency and confidence to suited corporate goons, but taking personal responsibility and action.

One of our strengths being mutual aid fits perfectly into this grim scenario. Our politics encourage self-starting, do it yourself solidarity which is often undercut by State assumption of welfare mediation, the smothering apolitical liberal kindnesses of Big Charity and economic alienation. But the State is in retreat from these zones, charity is not going to pick up all that slack and the days of cheap goods are coming to an end. Community solidarity is what’s left, structured as solidarity rather than the often-mistaken process of a half-dozen worthies providing a service with radical trappings  to people who still think and act like consumers.

Threats

There’s almost too many to list, but to pluck from the more obvious …

I was having a drink with Phil Ruff once, talking about direct action campaigns of the 1970s—the Angry Brigade, bank robberies to raise funds and such. He, as with several people from the time, was in forgiving mood about the modern movement’s lack of similarly forceful street-level activism, in part because the situation then was so different. As he noted, CCTV was not a thing. And it’s not just CCTV. Vast, automated, easily-searched databasing and biometrics were not a thing. Social media and sousveillance were not a thing.

And increasingly we don’t just have ever-present eyes watching us. It’s AI-fed, and can steal wholesale from every corner of the internet. If you walk through the centre of London on a rally today you will be filed away and in the event that you forget to mask up for an action, years later, it’ll be used. For the careful—those who know to mask up early and often, and stay out of reach of cops looking to expose faces, this may be manageable. For those less experienced it will be a potent means for the State to identify, categorise, and heavily repress those it deems troublemakers, present or future. A pre-crime punishment system arresting people simply for having public meetings, bolstered by an experienced (and now, shamefully, legally-immune) undercover policing operation and an extraordinarily powerful media machine gives the ruling class more powers than ever before to disrupt and destroy putative movements.

Our preferred methods thus become more dangerous and difficult in a situation of rising military culture, allied with such potent tools of police and State repression. With laws now tightened around even basic protest to the point where we need police permission just to have one in the first place, our options can look limited. The city centres are increasingly zones where we cannot be effective in the absence of massive crowds and operational security that’s considerably more serious than that of the US military. Which is not to say activities can’t take place, but our strategies will have to change to reflect this reality. One great saving grace of the Tories’ fall last year was the collapse of a bill banning masks, but we can’t rely on that even under Starmer, let alone whatever comes next. Another is that it seems unlikely Labour will have much better luck with fixing prison overcrowding than the Tories did, meaning they are unlikely to deepen the use of imprisonment against protesters (though it seems equally unlikely, short of a major crisis, that they’ll dial it back to previous norms).

Culturally, Britain seems to be headed at full speed into a dark place. On the one hand we have, similarly to elsewhere, the rejuvenation of old misogynistic ideals as part of the marrying of hustle culture to alienation in young men. On another, we will have the next great military recruitment drive promoting the nationalistic impulse. While the rampant individualism of the former does not necessarily gel all that well with the die-for-your-country ethos of the latter, machismo and guns certainly do, leading to the dangerous likelihood of a new generation of far-right young men entering the services en masse. What that might mean for the future of fascist street thuggery is anyone’s guess.

What had seemed the far-removed possibility of a Reform-led government meanwhile, stymied for many years by first past the post, is increasingly looming. Their prospects seem much improved in recent months (largely through Labour’s efforts) but the conversion of this into real power is perhaps a way off yet. It’s pretty certain their direction of travel will focus more on courting the “anyone but” vote alongside anti-migrant sentiment but from an anarchist perspective their positioning and message is at its most potent in changing the tenor of the national conversation. With the likes of GB News, social media, and increasingly the right-wing broadsheets behind them they are performing in like fashion to other groups of their type on the continent such as National Rally in France and AfD in Germany. 

In the nationalist sense it’s hard to see whether Reform’s isolationism with Atlanticist aspects or Labour and Conservative tendencies of European rapprochement in the cause of solidifying the EU-Russian borderline will be more influential, but neither of them herald much good for the anarchist cause. In either direction expanded defence spending is certain (either to appease the US or fall in with European norms) and nothing in Reform’s policy slate suggests any interest in rolling back the neoliberalism that Labour and the Tories are so hopelessly addicted to. As noted above, this ties into both opportunity and threat, with an economy already in hoc to more powerful blocs leading to impoverishment but not necessarily the mobilisation of counter-power.

In sum

Anarchism has for some time acted as a fringe of the broader left, albeit one which regularly denounces and rejects that role, thanks to our lack of size and in-house resources. Suffering from both our lack of a solid class base and a public view of our activities as poorly-organised teenage rebellion at best, mindless destroyers at worst, we’ve struggled to grow beyond the role for many reasons. Some factors I’ve already mentioned, another might be the perennial problem that we’ve been poor at converting rapid growth into an improved long-term position. We have repeatedly failed to deal with the “crisis of success” where an influx of people leads to challenges to the status quo, arguments, burnout and splits. 

These are things we will need to consider how to work past (in the former case) or through (in the latter) if we are to take best advantage of the opportunities to come and, perhaps more importantly, work out ways to counter the threats. We know we absolutely cannot count on politicians be they centrist or “radical”, and the left seems barely aware of what’s coming let alone preparing to aggressively fight it. The response to far-right mass demonstrations has been to call out the same doughty anoraks as ever, increasingly outnumbered outside a few heartland zones, while few ideas have been forthcoming to counter Reform or even Andrew Tate. Changes to the law are met with the same trade union and NGO faces writing columns as ever with precisely the same minimal impact on government policy.

Small as we are, if the anarchist movement can build something of that energy and creativity we’ve seen rise to the surface repeatedly over the last couple of decades we have every opportunity, like Reform with the Tories, to grab the flag of resistance that a large section of the population still hopes to see raised. But we then have to hold it, knowing the State will be rather more interested in us than it would ever be in the amblings of loyal oppositions. Which requires discipline, forward thinking and structures that are rather more robust than we have at the moment.

We’ve relied for a long time on a churn of young people coming in, burning themselves out, then heading off to have families and make homes which has left us with precious little of what State and corporations love to call “institutional memory”. We need to find a way to break that cycle, to not just encourage youth action but give it tangible links and knowledge and a sense of continuity, rather than having 20-somethings, a bunch of people in their 50s-plus, and a gap between. And that requires a struggle to reverse the alienation we’ve fallen prey to. An expansion of physical interaction within communities and in our own spaces. A break with social media and a re-engagement with anarchist led, anarchist-controlled media which doesn’t simply get siloed within directly-engaged circles and then disappear when the campaign is done. A re-establishing of the principle of human engagement at workshops, festivals and co-ops. 

The field is, in fact, wide open for those anarchist seeds beneath the snow to start growing. And there is no more important a time to get gardening.