We turn back time to 1970 for an anarchist plea not to settle for the fantasy politics of the electoral machine
~ punkacademic ~
We’re in a fevered moment of Politics here in the UK, which is to say the commentariat is Very Excited that Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham is standing in a by-election to return to Parliament.
For international readers, this might not on the face of it seem a big deal, but what it really means that Our Andy is going to challenge for the Labour leadership soon, and thus the office of Prime Minister, as long as the good people of Makerfield do as they are supposed to and send him to London.
And why shouldn’t they? But then Makerfield could have been Gorton and Denton, another Manchester seat which was freed up for Andy a few months back, only for Keir Starmer’s allies on the Labour NEC to prevent him standing for it.
That ended well; the people of Gorton and Denton decided they didn’t want a Labour politician after all, and elected Hannah Spencer, the Green Party candidate, instead. Perhaps Makerfield folk will do the same.
But despite the fact that it’s the sitting party of government that keeps engineering by-elections that it might lose to solve its own eminently predictable internal problems (Starmer being less principled than a cartoon mouse presented with cheese, and having less charisma than a can of Spam).
Labour folk have the arrogance to say the rest should get out of their way. Vote for us, they say, else its Reform – and you know what that means.
Indeed we do, and perhaps rather better than Labour Party acolytes given the role they have played in mainstreaming the ideas of Reform and its peers. And that’s the rub. This week, the Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities Bridget Phillipson laid the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations before Parliament.
Once granted Parliamentary assent, this Code’s proscriptions will continue the processes effectively driving trans and non-binary folk out of public life.
Whilst the Code is leavened with contradictions and opportunities for lawyers to make money, it enshrines a biological essentialism which less than a decade ago was far from the mainstream of British politics.
Back then, even Tory Prime Minister Theresa May was advocating for a policy of self-ID in terms of gender. Reform and today’s Conservative Party are in full support of the new proscriptions, of course.
But no more so than Labour, which claims to be ‘progressive’, but which implements Reform’s policies for them in advance to save them the bother of coming into office. For his part, Burnham’s rival for the leadership, Wes Streeting, less than a decade ago sponsored an Early Day Motion stating forthrightly that trans rights, and access to medical care, needed to be upheld.
As Health Secretary, he has instead worked assiduously to limit access to medical treatment and to condemn trans youth to pain through the continued ban on puberty blockers.
Savage attacks on the disabled, horrific attacks on migrants and refugees, and a generational war against the young – these are the hallmarks of today’s Labour Party.
The piece we’re reprinting today is a missive from the US, more than half-a-century old, recounting the ‘lesser evilism’ which pervaded elections there in the 1960s. The author noted how personalised US politics had become, how glamorous Kennedy had been, how the memory of Kennedy persisted after his death.
And how, ultimately, thousands upon thousands had died in imperialist wars that America was committed to irrespective of who sat in the Oval Office. The elections, in the end, didn’t really matter.
I haven’t chosen this piece out of a sense of despair or to encourage the resignation that ‘twas ever thus, but to try to highlight the fact that if we think elections are a busted flush now then they always have been, as Emma Goldman noted over a century ago.
The changes that were achieved in the 1960s weren’t achieved by electing Lyndon Johnson or Harold Wilson but by mass movements – from the Civil Rights movement in the US to street battles and barricades of May 1968.
When it comes to voting, anarchists have different views on abstention – David Graeber whilst an abstentionist himself intervened in electoral politics, notably in the context of Corbyn’s Labour, which generated much criticism in anarchist circles.
Freedom as a paper historically has taken a strongly abstentionist line, but as a diverse collective members have always taken their own position. But whether an abstentionist or not the message that comes through then and now is the parlour-game of voting cannot be the answer. Movements, and solidarity, are the answer.
Believing in what is projected onto an individual rather taking direct action collectively to take the power that should belong only to us is millenarianism, a lazy triumph of faith over experience which would shame the most morally bankrupt of religions.
To paraphrase a well-worn saying, if Burnham is the answer, what’s the question? A man known throughout his career as a political weathervane he has in the past week backed Shabana Mahmood’s draconian immigration policies, reversed his position on trans rights, and sold out those who seek a rapprochement with the EU.
In a choreographed moment of authenticity, Burnham appeared for the cameras jogging in an retro Everton replica jersey, to the delight of the assembled journalists. He really is a Blue; as a fellow sufferer I’ve seen him at games down the years.
But as Burnham, AirPods in, beamed and trundled his political Strava map betrayed a route full of U-turns and compromises.
As our comrade in 1970 knew, we can all do better than that.
—-
(From Freedom, vol. 31, no. 17, 30th May 1970)
LESSER EVILISM: AN AMERICAN LESSON
LESSER EVILISM returns to plague British Politics in 1970. If you don’t vote Labour, the Tories will destroy everything! All the progress we’ve made will be ruined. I know Wilson is bad, but we have no choice!’
In 1964 elections in the United States, young Americans were trudging from door to door, begging with people. ‘Look,’ we pleaded, ‘if you don’t vote for Johnson, Goldwater will be president. He is sure to bring on an incredible slaughter in South East Asia, race riots at home, and economic chaos every where! We talked with anyone who would listen. Every once-in-a-while someone would close the door in our faces saying, ‘They’re all the same’. We were shocked at the naïveté of these people.
Onward we travelled, undaunted, our eyes still wet from watching the Kennedy funeral on television. The myth of the good-looking young hero still blinded us to the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis. It was only later that we saw through the pretty face, the nice smile, and the firm handshake to the politician who lay underneath the facade. For the time being, we were on the trail to save America.
The night of the election, the entire country heaved a sigh of relief, as Johnson took the election by the largest land slide since Franklin Roosevelt. On the day of the inauguration we all smiled as Johnson drawled, ‘My fellow Americans, let us continue.’
A few months later we turned on our radios to hear a special bulletin. ‘Today, President Johnson announced that the United States has begun air attacks on North Vietnam. This action was taken as a response…’
The nation closed its eyes to see Johnson smiling as he pulled off his mask to reveal the countenance of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater then ripped off his face and there, underneath, was that good-looking all-American boy John Kennedy, still smiling and waving to the crowd. On that day, half a generation learned the fallacy of lesser evilism.
We learned that changes must come through people, not politicians. During the next election there were new faces. They went door to door, telling the people within to vote for one candidate or the other because he was the lesser of two evils. There were less this time, though. The old faces were now on the streets of Chicago, or in the Ghettoes of Miami. Their ballots were their bodies. They no longer were taking ‘one or the other’, they were making a real choice. The Yippies nominated a Pig for president, then ate it. ‘For the first time, the people will eat the candidate, and not the other way around. They called their celebration ‘a Festival of Life’, an alternative to the Democratic Festival of Death’. In Chicago, the forces of Death were too strong. They stamped out the Festival of Life, but not before the idea effected an entire culture. Next time we’ll be stronger. We may even win. Even if we don’t we will be truly able to say we made a choice.
Now the British people are faced to decide between the quick kill of the Tories or the slow death of the Labour Party. There is another alternative, one yet to be created. One to be made with the bodies and souls of people who reject ‘lesser evilism in 1970’, people who will dare to make a real choice.
MIKE BOARD.
