How well did “Exiting the Vampire Castle” age?

Exiting the Vampire Castle is a 2013 essay by the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher. In recent times, the essay is largely remembered for its opposition to the mode of public excoriation known as “callout culture” or “online shaming”, and in part for the responses that it received as a result of its publication. Fisher viewed the left as it was in the 2010s as gripped by a puritanical moralism revolving around identity – specifically atomised identities, which confused priggish chastisement for empowering and unimpeding the agency of marginalised social groups. The piece proved highly controversial and was subject to considerable discussion, and received a number of prominent responses. Its influence is felt on the so-called ‘dirtbag left’ represented by Chapo Trap House, and other sections of the Left hostile to the expressions of the so-called ‘social justice warrior left’ – this concentration is mostly seen among the core writers of Jacobin, the former editor-in-chief of Zer0 Books – Douglas Lain, and the late Michael Brooks as examples. It is interesting to note that so far, the list of names who had claimed influence from the book were from the United States – and that Fisher is, again, British – that said, Fisher’s frustration with callout culture and his belief that it was an impediment to class solidarity, much less the liberatory politics affected by those given to callouts had likely resonated with them precisely because of historic difficulties in mobilising working-class organisations in the United States, in contrast to the perceived (and sometimes real) instances of identity politics used by various social climbers within the media ecosystem, as well as political careerists playing into clientelist politics (usually by the Democratic Party). But did Exiting the Vampire Castle address more than just callout culture? What else did Fisher discuss within it? And how well does it hold up as critique of the left as it exists today?

Background

As mentioned before, Exiting the Vampire Castle was written in 2013. By then, austerity measures implemented by the Conservative government had set in. The Health and Social Care Act had passed the year before – which was a restructuring of the NHS to include further marketisation, which was met with resistance from direct action groups such as UK Uncut and Disabled People Against the Cuts. Students were confronted with the fact that the tuition fees for attendance had tripled, and protested against the rise in costs to their studies. And it was within the umbrage of the Occupy Wall Street protests which had spread internationally. Early discussions around the potential to mobilise mass protests through social media were highly optimistic, and specifically the functionality of Twitter ‘flattened’ and ‘squashed’ the space between influential users of the medium and everyone else in the dynamic of exchanges – the consequence was in some cases, a disruption of the prestige in the public space that these prominent figures acquired ‘offline’ or the support base of these figures en masse targetting a user deemed to have offended or written something offensive about the figure. These interactions both fell under the rubric of ‘dogpiling’ and became but one example of how conversations on Twitter were quickly becoming toxic.

Furthermore, activists on the online space – – particularly from the ‘new social movements’ lionized as alternatives to an ossified Leninism from the 1990s onwards, had a framework which synthesized the various gender, racial and queer struggles into a practice referred to as intersectionality – informing contemporary identity politics, which itself sat alongside the various poststructuralist theories which had become prominent in academia the generation prior. The framework provided a lexicon of terms, as well as interrogated its contemporary culture – and at times, this had led to confrontations with prominent people on Twitter – the accessible packaging of this lexicon led to it being used widespread, representing an early expression of what would become identified with contemporary social justice activism, or alternatively these activists were derisively referred to as “social justice warriors”.

In the climate of austerity, various left-wing writers, broadcasters and activists came into prominence – among them were: Laurie Penny, Dawn Foster, Fransesca Martinez and Owen Jones, in addition to the emergence of the Everyday Sexism Project headed by Laura Bates, and Novara Media. Of particular importance to the social context was the profound epiphany that was to occur to the comedian and broadcaster Russell Brand, who was still affected from the death of his friend, the singer Amy Winehouse from a drug overdose. Initially, Brand wanted to make the case on how to address addiction in British society – particularly from the a public health perspective, which from there became a call for a revolution – one based on love and care as the basis for society, rather than the individualistic atomised existence that characterises it. Brand was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for the BBC current affairs programme Newsnight, which aired on 23 October 2013, in which he expressed his disinterest in voting and articulated that as person that emerged from a working-class background experiencing severe deprivation, there’s no reason to legitimise the callous and indifferent political system in the ballot box, and denounced the whole thing as a charade. Brand also called for a redistribution of wealth from the most powerful corporations in the country, and praised the Occupy movement for putting in the public lexicon “the 99 percent” contesting the greed of “the 1 percent”. For many observers, even though Russell Brand had not entirely specified the details of the revolution he called for, or alternatively, declared was coming, he did not only hold his own against a presenter infamous for grilling politicians like a George Foreman BBQ, he articulated the frustrations of the underclass seldom recognised and did so with panache.

In online discussions after the interview, including on legacy media, Russell Brand received praise for boldly expressing that a flawed system doesn’t warrant support, as well as scorn for launching into a juvenile tirade with no clear outline on the society that he wants to see and declaring that the most disadvantaged should disenfranchise themselves for some millionaire’s vague, barely detailed revolution. A particular form of criticism from another angle came in questioning why Russell Brand should be the centre of this revolution for social and ethical transformation – when taking into account his history of misogyny: Of particular note was the infamous Andrew Sachs prank phone calls made on his radio show, where he prank called the actor claiming that he had sex with his granddaughter. It was also pointed out that his revolution even as he called for it, did not address the role of feminism in his outlook.

So what does Russell Brand’s political ventures have to do with Exiting the Vampire Castle and its author: Mark Fisher? Quite a lot, actually. Despite his pessimistic analysis of the health of the radical left in Capitalist Realism, Fisher saw “Brandmania” as a cultural and political breakthrough, but more so, he very strongly identified with Brand – to Fisher, Russell Brand was a distorted carnival mirror reflection of himself: someone who came from the same working-class background he did, experienced the same deprivation, maybe even did some of the same drugs – yet Brand became this famous entertainer who in the eve of 2013, is bringing people to the idea of revolution – while the cultural disruption he sought to acheive had up until that point, had only led him to a frustrating job as a Further Education lecturer. More so, Fisher was irritated with the interrogation of Brand’s attitudes towards women – viewing it as myopic, moralistic and irrelevant to the problems faced by people in Austerity Britain – for men and women. All of these issues, from Twitter, austerity, Russell Brand, to third-, well fourth-wave feminism were all things that Fisher felt strongly about and they were the soil that his essay was produced from.

So….what does he say?

I’ll link towards a essay for anyone to read, but the basic summary of the points are as follows:

• There is a very hostile culture in ‘Left Twitter’
• This culture is full of snarky, moralistic jerks delivering regular put downs that he couldn’t refer to any specific examples for fear of being mobbed*
• Solidarity with Owen Jones, who somehow became a target of “everyone’s a lib, but me”-types
• No seriously, why would you fuck with Owen Jones? He’s done the most for class consciousness!
• Such is the self-righteousness of Left Twitter slacktivists that they slag off the Ipswich People’s Assembly rally, while they do nothing**
• Solidarity is beautiful to see, as with was in the People’s Assembly rally. Also, they’re a fine example of the horizontalism we like to see on the left grabbing attention, not by Leninist burn-outs
• Russell Brand is a working-class hero (unlike that ultra-posh nincompoop Michael McIntryre. Yes, Fisher literally says this), and from attending his show, Brand is different from what the ‘poststructualist left’ moralisers paint him as. In fact, Brand’s show is the model for ‘acid communism’ should be***
• Brand pwned the infamous rottweiler presenter Jeremy Paxman, doing what Johnny Rotten couldn’t with Bill Grundy
• Focusing on Brand’s sexism is not important to what he was saying, or calling for, and the “petit-bourgeois narcissistic left” were for some reason under the impression that Brand was himself going to lead the revolution, even though he hasn’t told anyone to do anything****. In fact, bringing to attention sexism from Brand is a thought-terminating cliche
• Class consciousness is weak, and the academic Left is dominated by a petit-bourgeois culture which narrows any discussion of class politics. Indeed, the fragmentation of class has led to the moralism we see in interpersonal exchanges within the Left
• The toxic, moralistic, tribal and self-congratulatory culture on the (Twitter) Left has produced the ‘Vampire’s Castle’, turning the nominally liberatory demands in identity politics into identitarian silos. The Vampire’s Castle reproduces liberal identity politics to take the conversation away from class
• Nietzsche’s portentions of something worse than the slave-morality of Christianity – ‘the priesthood of bad conscience’…is perfectly expressed in Left Twitter
• The Vampire’s Castle produces individualistic actions over the structural critiques that they claim to engage in; has an aura of humorlessness and guilthood, and produces essentialist liberal attitudes.
• The immature, cynical ‘neo-anarchists’ of Left Twitter are subjects produced by the capitalist realism of the New Labour era, have a shallow undertanding of what creates change in society, and misidentify the problems in parliamentary politics without understanding the context – and are just pretentious hipsters giving a pseudo-radical affect
• Faced with this current dilemma, it is imperative that identitarianism is rejected, and that the Left returns to class politics
• Social media is under capitalist control, and that the Left musn’t lose sight of this, despite its faux-egalitarian presentation, the Left needs to recognise that class struggle is the motto, and solidarity the core value. Capitalist social media is enemy territory, and we need to fight to win. The goal is not to be an activist, but for the working class to activate and to acheive victory

It is perhaps a surprise to a small constituency of people that people had stuff to say in response to Exiting the Vampire’s Castle – in particular the tone that permeated throughout the essay. It is, and still remains – a very controversial work, engendering praise for capturing the zeitgeist of the period and making a defiant call for class solidarity, and by (perhaps more than) equal measure derided as a ridiculous tirade from a middle-class white academic upset that his nonproblematic ‘problematic fave’ was getting stick, and trying – as many embarassing socialist groupings and figures have done in the past to dismiss the problems faced on the basis of identity – and apparently those that women face. Before I get into what to make of Exiting The Vampire Castle, I think that it’s worth that we go over more context from the some of the people that knew Fisher personally what they thought of him and his work.

The Passion of Mark Fisher

“Reading Vampire Castle against the grain a bit, how Mark describes [Russell] Brand is how he is describing himself — slightly effeminate and glam, working class, eloquent (although Mark was rather more stocky and wasn’t wearing make-up quite so often by this point) — and yet he’d probably have flunked the interview by telling [Jeremy] Paxman he was being ‘delibidinising’ or insufficiently Spinozist or something. Mark never really did go overground, but he wrote constantly about how important it was that people did. I’ll admit that one of my many reactions to Vampire Castle was wondering why he was wasting his time with this rubbish, wasn’t he meant to be becoming our public intellectual or something by making TV programmes or writing think tank reports rather than arguing with prats on Twitter (although — credit where it’s due — he did do the think tank report for Compass).”

Owen Hatherley

The Sydney Review of Books did a three-part series on Mark Fisher’s influence on the blogosphere, and his body of work ranging from cultural criticism (or to be more specific, his music reviews) to cultural and social theory. It took the form of an interaction between some of his contemporaries (among them were personal friends or at least acquaintances), and those who were influenced by his work. The cultural and social context where Fisher as ‘k-punk‘ posted, the ideological trajectory of Fisher’s outlook, and the kind of personality Mark Fisher had. There was indeed praise for how appropriate k-punk was for the time it existed, and even where it was felt Fisher took overly strident positions was accompanied by attempts to contextualise these actions. When discussing Fisher’s impact in the blogosphere and his work as a music reviewer, the cultural backdrops of both those environments in the late 1990s & early 2000s are presented for the former as a rather subterranean and for the latter as a particularly male-dominated subculture with all the flaws that come with it.

They also discussed Fisher’s own ideological journey from the technolibertarian accelerationism reflective of the thought-mode of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit collective he was a member of, to a somewhat sentimental social-democratic position; and how this shift was mirrored by his own experiences as a philosophy grad student, his time in precarious work, to his eventual literary career. Of additional importance is his formative experiences in northern England as the industrial backdrop was reshaped by the neoliberal turn.

For the interviewees, Fisher’s work during his more overtly leftist positioning was very welcome, even if it didn’t have the flair or aestheticized appeal of his blogosphere years. Though among them, those that recalled the release of Exiting the Vampire’s Castle mostly remember the bemusement that they felt. Owen Hatherley specifically recalls instances in which Fisher during what he calls his most intellectually productive period, dismissed people as a result of various intellectual debates that took place, or at least engaged in practices very similar to the ‘cancelling’ which is now of some cultural concern. For recent fans on Mark Fisher (say post-2017, the year of his death) – the so-called ‘acid communists’ who are unaware of this context, or those who intentionally demphasize focus on this period, it stands as a rather conspicious tenure not to explore – especially considering Fisher’s post-mortem acclaim to apotheotic levels among the New New Left, and the discussions around cancel culture.

Not a lot of focus is made of it because for them it is part of a broader context of where he was moving at the time, as well as the reccuring themes of alienation, depression, and the class-defined social scripts given to people that had been features of his work. Rhian E. Jones, who also grew up in working-class area in Britain where the process of deindustrialisation led to a communal fracturing, rightly pointed out that Fisher’s exhaltation of Brand as the archetypical ‘class warrior’ for our age, did not need to come at the expense of feminism, especially feminists within the working class – or that somehow that objection to sexism was a middle-class malaise, and the intervention in the way that he did undermined the importance of an articulation of class politics. For her, the issues that came about from it were had a tiresome and predictable quality to it (in the sense that they were “points addressed a thousand times”) and had foregrounded the so-called “dirtbag left”, an ostensibly left-wing positioning defined by its hostility to identity politics. She also mused on the irony of Fisher’s arrival at a politics that for her, seemed almost natural and commonsense in her youth – even antiquated by the 1990s, now resdiscovered and championed by a left blogosphere – chalking it up to a deemphasis of praxis and overemphasis on theory the the age demanded; and possibly a lack of engagement with the organised left, and even the parliamentary left. Considering that Nick Land and Nina Power are now fascists, I’m inclined to agree.

Conclusion

So what are my thoughts on Exiting the Vampire Castle? Do I agree with the writers above on their reactions to it, is my position different? And how is it different? Well, unlike the interviewees in that article, I’ve never spoken to him, worked with him, nor was I exposed to his work in the 2000s where his cultural insights apparently looked like the Holy Grail to a certain kind of disaffected grad student a few years away from taking part in those aforementioned tuition-free protests – and even then, I wouldn’t really fuck with post-punk back then, so I wouldn’t have the same emotional connection to Mark Fisher’s works. That it was also a group of professional writers, if only for different genres, could possibly add to the grounded response to it, and in my mind, a necessary contextualisation of this piece among his general body of work.

However, I’m not a professional writer. Or a journalist for that matter. I’m a blogger, and one who had only so much as heard of Mark Fisher a year after his death. Which is why I fully expect readers to not be surprised that given my flippant reaction to various parts of Exiting the Vampire Castle, that I consider this to be probably the funniest piece that Mark Fisher had ever written, and the fact that he was apparently so self-serious about this makes it even better. And by better, I mean by incredulity of the status of the work, not the quality of the work itself. Seriously read it, it’s super-funny. I don’t know if he was intending to call to attention the gradual erasure of working-class culture from television, but going on about how Brand’s so amazing and Michael McIntyre and the army of ‘bland graduate chancers’ doesn’t do much for bringing the issue to attention. In fact, at several points, Fisher undermines the concerns that he is trying to raise with melodramatic diagnoses. I mean, should I really take seriously that Left Twitter is the personification of Nietzsche’s “preisthood of bad conscience”? Should you take that seriously? I know Doug Lain might take that seriously, maybe Ben Burgis and the Jacobin people take it seriously. I sure as fuck don’t.

The decent points that he raises are either underdeveloped, or replaced by an attack on a particular target. And there are even some targets that he won’t get specific about in details (i.e. who did what online?, etc.), for the fear that he himself will be a target! That’s the irony: the essay itself expresses the same kind of moralism that he accuses ‘identitarians’ of doing. This is probably why Owen Hatherley dismissed it as Twitter BS that was a waste of his talents. And more so: it as a consequence barely attempts to get to the structural issues at play here: Twitter as part of an overall process of the commodification of intellectual labour in the backdrop of post-industrialism, the highly addictive qualities built into it (“the scrolling function” being an obvious feature) as context is being churned out, the way that it covertly encourages conflicts between users to generate more content, etc. But instead of daring people to imagine what a communistic approach to online communication might look like (aspects that intitially, were identifiable in the early history of the Internet, as is often the case with these things), we get this individualistic castigation. In fact, he claims the inhabitants of the ‘vampire’s castle’ existed before the Internet – even though social media is such a heavy feature of the piece.

He rightfully identifies a fragmented class consciousness of his era (though I personally believe that in spite of my occassional whinging, class consciousness has slowly consolidated since the time Fisher wrote this) and I agree that identity politics shorn of class struggle is cack – that the problem really is capitalism – not some amorphous, transhistorical power structures (though a lot of the so-called ‘identitarians’ I’ve come across would not really disagree on that point either, but it does need saying), he’s correct in saying that personal virtue and castigation does not lead to the construction of liberatory possibilities and undermines solidarity; Hell, I might even agree on his point on the ‘neo-anarchists’ campaining to protect the NHS.***** But I can’t help but feel that this was an essay written where instead of taking a friend’s advice to sleep on what frustrates him to see whether it still gives him the urge to write on, that he just churned out immediately after a particularly bad exchange – which might be why his points around the preponderance of identity politics over class politics, and personal virtue passed off as “awareness” seem so malformed. I don’t oppose criticism of the prevalence of identity politics at all. I certainly don’t oppose critique of the relegation of class to “another relation” by which those on the lower rung can be oppressed as primarly experiential. I just have read better criticisms. Even from the same author, and where they weren’t even the main focus of the essay. It’s actually strange to me that it this essay, even from critics – which even I’m participating in giving this sort of cultural significance, was granted this kind of importance to his legacy, because it feels so unfinished.

In my attempt to answer the question whether Exiting the Vampire Castle aged well – I can only suggest, that it was likely, well definitely considered ridiculous at the time – at least among some sections of the left, and it time has made it even more absurd. At the same time, I think that it’s OK that it feels absurd. I’m actually glad that it was written, published, and engendered a discussion around it – because many of the concerns that it rose are still very relevant nearly a decade on. I think that as a work, it is probably more optimistic than Capitalist Realism for example, in that Fisher now saw a possibility of an effective working-class mobilisation. Though the idea that two men – particularly two white men – occupied as cultural commentators and producers, could not only articulate the multifaceted social realities of the working-class in Britain in all of its diverse and reproductive adjuncts, but focus them into a coherent aim appropriate for austerity Britain – was always preposterous, whether the year was 2013 or 2022. Since we’re up for another round of austerity, if we’re going to revisit this work and situate it in its context, we have to remember this particular implication in Exiting the Vampire Castle, just doesn’t work.

I think that the Jacobin and 2016-2021 era Zer0 Books guys/ Doug Lain adjacents, who are themselves inhabitants of Left Twitter identify with the critique of identitarian-based moralism, to the point of treating it like some major revelation – primarily and ironically because it’s actually an easy and not especially significant point to make, especially in the context of online behaviour, and questions around the sustainability of online-generated activism (which in the era of Occupy had a much more optimistic outlook towards) and the building of social movements was if not something to avoid, certainly harder to resolve. After all, if you’re already inclined to hate or distrust identity politics, then blaming it for the fracturing of organised labour as a force and an active impediment to rebuilding of socialism as a global force is pretty convenient******. But always, I digress.

So my ultimate conclusion is that it is a rather odd essay that felt unfocused and emotional (which is fine, by the way), that does admittedly have a continued resonance in various cultural concerns. As with all essays, there are going to be parts that aged poorly, especially with the passage of time – and some things will be outright wrong. The thing with Exiting the Vampire Castle is that it has an unusual level of infamy mostly owing to the significance given to the issues raised in it, specifically those around “cancel culture”, movement-building on the left, and the implications of social media. I might think that it’s half-assed, but a number of people smarter than me (all of them dorks, obviously) have praised it, in part because some of the responses to it (admittedly) were of poor quality. I think that a critical, rather than this strange hagiographic engagement with Mark Fisher’s legacy will open the door to a more grounded assessment of this essay.

In short, it ain’t Blood In My Eye, but it sure as hell ain’t “Why I’ve Given Up on the Left” either (Nick Cohen, June Lapine, whoever – all these ‘I left the left’ pieces have always been dribbling dogshit).

Notes

*- This of course doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist, just that he didn’t want to cite anything in relation to this point, apparently.

**- This is perhaps a clear sign as any, that there are times we netizens should find the time to – as the kids now say – touch grass.

***- If that’s the case, then perhaps it’s just as well that “Acid Communism” was never really fleshed out.

****- Brand did tell people to not vote, though. So it’s easy to see why some people mistakenly treated him like he had some kind of alternative program.

*****- Lifestyle anarchists to many will be annoying, no matter what new neologism you give them, especially when they fall back on existing positions, though I strongly suspect that Mark Fisher was telling on himself, with his previous “cyber-Stalinist” edgelord posturing.

******- I do find it curious that none of these folks ever addressed the weird ‘Britishisms’ in the essay, since they’re fairly integral to his championing of Brand and Owen Jones for building up class consciousness. It seems that only the cancel culture and anti-identity politics stuff will do for them. Sad.

Links:

– A video that illustrates the strange acclaim of Exiting the Vampire Castle (done in part, by portraying Fisher’s critics as a formless, hostile mob who only responded to it with aggressive moralism) created none other than the then-editor in chief to Zer0 Books, Douglas Lain. As mentioned before, he as with other fans of the essay, exclusively emphasizes the parts of its content that is hostile to identity politics, and deemphasizes the parts of its content where it appears that Mark Fisher had never been to a demo before.

See also

• Mark Fisher
• Cancel culture
  • TV presenters who wrote or did a documentary on cancel culture
• ‘SJW’
• Brahmin left
• ‘Brocialist’
• ‘Dirtbag left’
• ‘pomo left’
• Class reductionism
• Social media and the online left

The 2019 Election Anniversary – A(n Emotional) Retrospective

For a large segment of the British left, today is a sombre commemoration – it is the 3rd anniversary of the 2019 general election which saw a Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson comprehensively defeat the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, and consolidate a 80-seat majority – owing largely to the collapse of traditionally held Labour seats, the so-called ‘red wall’, as the Conservatives seized them. There are many reasons as to why this election went the way it did – and some of them are down to the Labour Party and even Jeremy Corbyn, and others within his inner circle. I don’t think that I’ll talk so much about how it was that Labour came to lose than go over what the entire experience was like for myself, and how I’ve come to terms with what had come afterwards.

In pretty much most of my life, I didn’t have very much – or rather, what I had didn’t feel as much as what my peers had. And once I had to take responsibility for own finances – it always felt precarious and fleeting. 2019 was no different. I’d left the second and so far – last job with a contract with the company on my 28th birthday – health issues, various engagements, and ironically enough – finances, made continued employment unworkable, and I partially suspect that there were attempts to get rid of me at the workplace anyway. While I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Corbyn project, the reality of the precarity was keenly felt, and it affected my involvement in the local Labour Party’s various activities – and even ones that weren’t local. This wasn’t entirely new for me – after all there were various points during the nine years that I was a party member – when I did canvassing without a penny to my name. There were even runs that I attempted to join that most would probably try to reach by bus, but I decided to walk there to see if I could find them. Was it all to see a left-winger actually win? To see a different social arrangement than the one I was used to? The emotional need to feel like a part of something amazing? I don’t know – it could be any one of those things, none, or all of them. But by late November, with my favourite uncle passed away, my therapy sessions long over, and the benefits and personal earnings from my job drying up, I got sick of it all.

There were a lot of left-wing commentators online or otherwise around the UK who talk about how excited and energised young people were to see themselves represented in Corbyn and trying to fight for it. By November 2019, I wasn’t one of them. And it had nothing specifically to do with Corbyn, McDonnell, or any of them. What it had more to do with, is seeing people around you who you called ‘comrade’ in two-hour long canvassing sessions get to go home to their cozy middle-class lives – and plan their holidays, while I every day received headaches either from not eating enough, or trying to figure out how I’m going to manage using the 20 quid in my wallet over the week for food and transport. It was this maudlin, saccharine tripe – the sloganeering, of ‘getting tough’, that I once parrotted – that began to weigh on me. I was getting blamed for my own financial hardship by people who are supposed to help me. It was shit. Even as I signalled solidarity for the social media to see. When I discovered that yet again, I had no money in my account near the end of the month – I had reached my limit. I had decided that days weren’t going to get any better so I might as well try to act normal and have it as good as possible, because it was going to be my last. I don’t know how it happened, but on my way to Croydon – I received messages from an old friend. I think that my nerves were pretty fried, so didn’t feel joy – but told him of my intent to end my life. I think that he phoned me to distract me and at the time, I wish that he didn’t because I got scared of the passing cars again. When he hung up, I got upset – because I realised that I wanted to live, even with everything as painful as it was. It was then that I called my other friend and told him about what had happened, sobbing as I did. I said that I’ll wait at the nearby McDonald’s and that he was coming over.

Somehow, I was still able to engage in ‘political mode’ in my head, even as it was coloured by my depression. I expressed scepticism that so much of what was promised could really change – more so, that I could feel it change – and he agreed. I think at that moment, I felt recognised in a way that I didn’t from my other fellow members. There was another fallout from Croydon Council that we were still reeling from that was also personal – but that might be for another story for another – likely distant, time. In any case, I am grateful, that he came when he did.

I think that it was about a week until in a lot of respects I was back to activism mode. I even went to a Stop the War rally the week before the election, even getting a People’s Assembly T-shirt. Throughout that week, I leafleted – even in the rain, and canvassed the doors of Central Croydon. One memorable evening canvassing session had me forgo the advice I was given (not by a campain organiser – who in Croydon, was likely to feel strongly about it) to not talk about Brexit, and discuss housing and public services – only to learn that this was what all anyone on that street would go on about – one have out with its line about how he wouldn’t vote Corbyn because “[he didn’t look] strong” like he used to in his birth country. Eventually, it became simply about getting the party’s supporters out to vote – the televised backdrop is Labour MPs such as Jonathan Ashworth causing stirs with openly antagonistic statements towards the Corbyn leadership for the voyeuristic press to chew on. Another one with Rebecca Long-Bailey explaining the free broadband scheme with a vast fiberoptic infrastructure concentrated in the deindustrialised north, was given the caption: “Broadband communism?” by the BBC, demonstrating that infamous impartial reporting of Auntie Beeb. I was very much burnt out at this point, and commented on feeling like a cog in a machine, and I was consoled by mostly fellow activists – many of whom have since left.

The final day was spent doing one last canvass run, and completing a proxy vote for another friend and his wife, and getting soaked in the process. With the final evening run, by the time everything was finished, it had taken me more than an hour to walk back to Ruskin House in South Croydon. I went there with the belief that we probably lost, but at least gave a good showing. When I walked into the building, it was so much worse than I imagined. A large fella, who I number met before clasped his hands onto my shoulders something indeterminable – but I sensed it was bad. As I walked into the bar room, I mused that whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be that horri-holy fuck! Is that the results on the screen!? I saw that the Tories had roughly a hundred more seats than Labour. I was baffled, how could our failure be so complete? Weren’t we going to take Boris Johnson’s Toxteth seat from him? Wasn’t he a blatantly dishonest and cowardly politician? So why did this happen? Another room – titled the Nelson Mandela room in which I enter, full of Labour activists with wistful and sour expressions, even though Croydon North and Central were secure – MP Sarah Jones had even increased her share (though MP Steve Reed’s clear majority fell by a third from the prior election).

Apparently, the country never believed in the change that Corbyn represented, for varying reasons – but I suspect that what it broadly comes down to, is that he challenged so many comfortable certainties. Certainties like “will my property value raise?”, “will I get paid by that private firm that wants a stake in the NHS?”, “Will my shares I have in this company raise in value?”, “Will I finally get the peerage or title I’ve been aching for years under this?”, that sort of thing. The kind of worries poor little boys who roll in worn-out jackets can’t imagine. The irony is that a lot of those things would still would happen, and as for stock – well – it’s actually hilarious how emotions like fear and anxiety from capitalists, can so easily affect the markets, which tells me all I need to care about financialisation as a good. The other problem comes with nostalgia – used and abused alike by both sides of the insipid Brexit screaming match which allowed people to take leave of their senses. I concluded that Britain is governed by a deep, self-indulgent pessimism emanating from segments of the propertied class, and the embourgeoised – this malaise is highly infectious and difficult to control, but it robs any emergent possibilities, which is the tragedy experienced by those living and working precariously.

Aftermath

Some time later in the following year, during the election post-mortem in the Momentum meeting, I got given an officer position. Not sure if I deserved it, or did a lot with it – certainly not as much as I wanted to. But I did canvass like a motherfucker, so I took it. Some time later, the mission was to save Corbynism by supporting Rebecca Long-Bailey and Richard Burgon, which I threw myself into, to the point of getting heckled outside the Indian YMCA. Even as I went further into it, I wondered if it really was the final days that I got engaged with social democracy. All the Croydon nominations were stage-managed farces, but beyond my frustration around them, I came to realise that from hearing Starmer’s supporters, that Labourites use the term “socialism” in a very weird way. Both those on the Left and Right seem to believe that it’s – to reference Richard Wolff, “when the government does stuff”. Starmer did win, and I ignored social media for three days – lest I bitch out all of Croydon Labour, especially the councillors I was convinced voted for him. The reality was I’d be painted as a divisive, marginal asshole, so I stayed largely silent – if somewhat snarky. It was the pandemic, and lockdown nearly everywhere, so it’s not like I was going to do anything else.

I did attend nearly every meeting Momentum had that year, and I think co-hosted one, though by the end of 2020, any enthusiasm that I had for Labour snapped like a twig after Jeremy Corbyn was suspended. Mentally, the only thing that I wanted to give left to Momentum was my prescence, a few stuff that I planned to either finish or put forth to them (like stuff involving political education and presentations), and would pop my head up for stuff that piqued my interest, like housing, or democratisation of the party. By 2021, I was done with all of it, and left. I was going to hop off the boat anyway, but the straw that broke the camel’s back, was hearing how malicious locally the Labour right bureaucrats and jobsworths could be.

So that’s that. I think that I will accept a marker of my politics as “disgruntled post-Corbynite” or something, even though it did admittedly take a while to get into it and came in later than most. What else can you call me after writing so much on Labour? I don’t think that had Corbyn won, it would be all sunshine and rainbows. In fact, I was expecting to for him to compromise on many things in his program, and for our role to change to push for a commitment to it. I’m now unsure that given the revelations around the 2017 campaign of the dirty tricks from the Labour apparatus, not even from the Tories – that such a government would not be allowed to last very long. Whether it’s backbench rebellions, recalcitrant civil servants, a rabidly hostile media, even foreign intervention (not in the Latin America-kind, just the kind where ‘Atlanticism’ is revealed to be a one-sided relationship), or Civil Assistance-style plots, these were the possibilities of a Corbyn government.

Other Corbynites, ‘post’ or otherwise, seem to suggest that it would lead to the beginnings of the creation of ‘New Jerusalem’ or something, but I kinda think that this is the kind of melodramatic mush the Labour left have been prone to. I don’t believe that anything close to the story of how Corbyn’s Labour came to lose the 2019 election has been told, and what has been given is this shallow narrative for media pundits, and Social Review-style wonks to tell: that he was incompetent, or some kind of Assadist maniac who will run Jewish people out of the country, or the most personally irritating – that just as Blair went too far to the right, Corbyn went too far to the left, conspicuously leaving out any discussion around the Party apparatus, its functionality, and even whether it worked towards the same agenda as the LOTO office. I think that there are questions to had around whether Corbyn’s personal demeanour was suitable for the pressures of leadership (and it appeared that he mostly led a pack of fucking jackals), or around whether there was a serious commitment to the deepening of party democracy, or a serious attempt to incorporate dying Labour strongholds, instead of what appeared to be a purely electoral strategy which focused heavily on comms, centralised management, and backroom dealing.

For myself, I’m not really emotionally attached to those questions anymore. I don’t think ‘exposing betrayal’ would be as emotionally satisfying as it was two years ago. As I like to tell myself, I’ve bypassed the Labour Party, and don’t imagine joining back in the forseeable future. Out of all the quotes the laconic Tony Benn gave, the “toughen up” one is one of my least favourite ones. Toughen up for what? So I can get fucked by petit-boug bully boys for some dream of a fleeting settlement? Nah, that doesn’t enthuse me at all. Given the narrowing of horizons, we should in etching out new possibilities not measure ourselves by our tolerance of abuse and suffering – especially from those that are, ostensibly, ‘on the same side’; we should instead measure our capacity to embrace other, to show understanding, to feel love, and to have solidarity – for those would be the foundations upon what the new society will be built on. If anything else, although it was funneled into a parliamentary program, it was indeed many of those features that did emerge in the Corbyn project – it’s a reason to be wistful, but also an inspiration to build in another, more expansive form.

See also

• Jeremy Corbyn
  • Corbynism
    • The end of Corbynism
• The 2019 general election
• Rethinking the Labour Party as a vehicle for change
• What is my current political position?

Just why should there be a general election? (The search for an independent left and struggle against Black Hole Electoralism)

On October 25th 2022, Rishi Sunak became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Despite losing the first Conservative leadership election in September to Liz Truss, in little more than a month, another one took place sealed off to the party membership to crown him leader. The Labour Party is demanding that a general election take place on the basis that the Conservatives have lost credibility and needs to be put to the test on their legitimacy to govern. Outside of parliament, the national demonstration to address the cost-of-living crisis and a decade of privatisation has now adapted itself into a general demand for a general election – some of the biggest advocates for a GE are the critics of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – many of whom occupy the far left, who believe Sunak came in without a mandate, and is tantamount to an undemocratic appointment. In this essay, I will attempt to explore why it is, that sections of the British left have pinned their hopes on the possibility of a Labour Government that they know – and aren’t shy of telling anyone – will push anti-immigration policies, will severly punish protestors, will almost certainly encourage stop-and-searches, will be hostile to trade unions, will securitise further an already highly securitised state apparatus, will cater to the whims of the ruling class, will issue in austerity measures and call it “everyone doing their part to spend a little less”, will commit to a neoliberal sensibility long past it’s expiry date, and will not do anything for the working class beyond a few scraps; and why I think that calling this ‘plan’ utterly absurd doesn’t even cover the folly of it.

"We must do something!"
"What should we do?"
"I already told you! We must do something!"

In recent times, it’s not been very easy for the left in the UK: Left-wingers committed to the Labour Party have, and continue to experience repression by the party bureaucracy – if suspensions and expulsions, including retroactive expulsions by association is not the order of the day, then the ‘mild’ withdrawal from a candidacy is also a common enough measure. The anti-war movement had failed to even so much build a presence for its case on the war in Ukraine, easily outflanked by the pro-West chauvinism of the likes of Paul Mason, and slandered in the press, notably by ‘progressive’ commentator George Monbiot characterising critics of Western imperialist involvement in Ukraine as “Putinists”, “tankies”* and “Assadists” and aided in the slander by none other than the leader of the Labour Party itself: Keir Starmer, who after penning an article slamming the anti-war position, made clear of his intent to sanction MPs in the party who took an anti-war stance by threatening to remove the whip. Far more serious, and damning was the failure of the “Kill the Bill” protests which concerned the interests of environmental and racial justice activists, and trade unionists, as well as for migrants and people from GRT communities – as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill passed, and worse, some good and passionate activists were arrested and jailed for participating. It’s not all been bad, but it does present a very sobering situation.

On November 5th 2022 – an auspicious day for resistance to parliament, a demonstration planned and organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity took place. The People’s Assembly had a list of demands: an end to the wage restraint imposed on workers and the profiteering from their employers; a wealth tax to fund social care, social security and fuel poverty; a nationalisation of energy, water, rail and mail; a demand to meet the housing crisis by building council homes; an end to the outsourcing of public services and the privatisation of the NHS; and a general election to overturn an undemocratic government imposed by the Tories. The demonstration itself was planned for months, and hoped to synthesize the energy built from the already existing industrial strike actions that had taken place. Indeed, it was discussed in Parliament as an early-day motion and signed by the Labour MPs comprising the Socialist Campaign Group, in addition to a few progressive Scottish MPs on July 5th 2022. The recent addition is the demand for a general election following the collapse of the Johnson and Truss premierships within a 110-day period.

The People’s Assembly, allied with eight trade unions, and over a dozen left-wing organisations, exists as an adjunct for the parliamentary left. And the trade unions themselves which support it, themselves also believe that the best chance that it has for securing a fair pay for its workers exists in a Labour government. With such an ecosystem, it is forgivable or at least understandable that they would commit to a electoral demand and specifically a Labourite demand as the government that exists, a Conservative government, has shown itself to be deeply hostile to worker’s rights. The question, however, is that does it say about the left’s current ability to etch out new political bases, much less push for higher horizons?

‘Nowhere else to go’

In the late 1990s, as the New Labour project went underway, the parliamentary left found it had become a weak and very marginal bloc. This was not due to any active attempt on the part of those New Labour project to suppress their influence, indeed it never needed to – as much of their atrophied state was the result of internal disputes during the so-called modernising process overseen by former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Thatcherism had already set the terms of how British ‘common sensibility’ were to regard public services – from housing, to transportation, to even healthcare – the public sphere was colonised by marketisation. The Labour Party then, either for electoral calculations or that they were themselves committed to a more marketised society, decided not to challenge this sensibility, because they viewed earlier collectivist expressions of Labourism as outmoded. Whatever the views of the critics of New Labour prior to its electoral breakthrough, they were able to get the unions on side with the promise of reversing the curbs to their rights which Thatcher introduced – only to completely and gleefully renege on that promise once in power. They were also able to convince the activists and supporters of the Labour Party to support it over John Major’s Conservative Party as despite the character of New Labour, “A Labour Party in power is always better than a Conservative one”, and they were desperate to put an end to nearly two decades of Tory domination. Even as it did admittedly commit to social welfare policies, they came tied with the expansion of private finance initiatives (PFIs) to fund them, much to the anger of the unions affiliated to Labour, such as Unison and the GMB.

The unions were antagonised by an incarnation of the Labour Party which seemed willing to break with its connection to the former – the “parliamentary expression of trade unionism” was now considered to be a historical baggage unfit for the modern problems New Labour believed required technocratic solutions. It is to the surprise of both sides, that in spite of the mutual hostility between the unions and New Labour, they both had coinciding interests (the unions sought to have some influence within the increasingly centralised party bureaucracy, and Labour still needed their donations as even the courting the wealthy was not enough to finance the party’s operations), and so that final break did not happen. The parliamentary left, in the form of the Socialist Campaign Group offered its resistance by voting against the party whip in terms of war, social welfare, and for better treatment of asylum seekers. But this resistance only served to demonstrate its overall impotence, for rather than serve as a moral conscience in the body of New Labour, they were regarded as overall irritations.

Strangers in familiar land

As for the revolutionary left, it had also entered a sombering period defined by its decomposition; the last great industrial action – popularly known as the Miners’ Strike had been defeated – and the mobilisation on the basis of class politics seemed to be increasingly untenable following the end of the Cold War, as a result of the fracture of the power of organised labour and the decline of the industrial regions that came with it. The solution they turned was the broad campaigns formed with the wider extraparliamentary left on issues of racial justice, anti-fascism, environmental justice, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ and so on, embedding itself into the milleu of activist groups. Within the revolutionary left in Britain, there had been no greater commitment to this practice than in Trotskyism.

The Trotskyist narrative has it that in vying for inflence in working class organising, they were suppressed by labourism and Stalinism – parallel bureaucratic tendencies respectively each undertaking class collaborationist projects, and stifling working class militancy. Even accounting for the pressures from the Labour and Communist Parties domestically, and anti-communist subversion by the British state, the Trotskyist movement in Britain had been on several fronts of industrial action but as with the wider revolutionary left, they lacked the capacity to turn these struggles to build into a wider revolutionary situation – not least because it was common for Trotskyist organisations to suffer various internal and theoretical disputes, which often precipated their splintering. As with much of the revolutionary left, Trotskyists were faced with the question of how to deal with the Labour Party: Grouplets within the Tortskyist milleu tried various strategies from entryism into the Party and established pressure groups to an active opposition to Labour and its parliamentarianism. The first is most well-known, and a common source of intrigue for observers.

It is through the entryist strategy the Trotskyist movement, or at least organisations committed to Trotskyism had its successes in social movements that it had become involved in: the International Socialists – later the Socialist Workers Party, for example, was influential in the early days of CND, Vietnam Solidarity Movement, the Anti-Poll Tax demonstrations, and anti-fascist organisations such as the Anti-Nazi League. Entering the Labour Party itself had proven to be a riskier gambit, as it had already cultivated a history in its sharp opposition to communism. In spite of the Labour Party’s willingness to expel the organisations, Trotskyist groupings came involved with Labour’s left-wing. While some like Socialist Action preferred discretion in their activities, those like the infamous Militant Tendency were overt in their declarations as a revolutionary socialist party – albeit one embedded in a parliamentarian institution. At least in this respect, they had better headway in incorporating itself in the Labour Party than for example, the Communist Party – which was admittedly a more obvious target, was already a useful scapegoat for the Labour leadership’s frustrations with worker militancy.

All the same, even as these groups told themselves that they would be able to convert members of the Labour Party receptive to revolutionary politics and organise a militant proletarian movement within the Labour Party – a scenario that is by now – the subject of much media hysteria about the Labour Party and its affiliated trade unions succumbing to the influence of revolutionaries, the sobering reality reveals the stupidity and vacuousness of this chavinistic moral panic and common Trotskyist self-deception alike. For it is not the Labour Party – whether under Lansbury, Wilson, Foot or even Corbyn that had seen instances of Trotskyist permeation into Labour’s thought and practice. Rather, it is the Trotskyist groups – believing that they are building a class for itself through the unions, issue groups, and the Labour Party – that had internalised the very labourism they often criticize by incorporating themselves to its various organisational structures, and committing to these organisations – their political programs broadly echoed that of the parliamentary left in its calls for nationalisation of public infrastructure and opposition to wage cuts to the workforce. It could not transcend a social democratic framework, and constructing a route to revolutionary politics was out of reach, even if their sloganeering suggested otherwise.

Entryism in perpetua

The global reccession, which saw a resurgence in enthusiasm for socialist politics, and 2010s-era austerity, which opened the space for left-winger Jeremy Corbyn to become leader of the Labour Party, when various parties on the far left turned to support the Labour Party as it was led by a figure who was a mainstay of various demonstrations and political campaigns. The Trotskyist groups were cautious yet were supportive of the Corbyn project (some even incorporated themselves into it), while amongst themselves having differing set of responses to Brexit, and even opposing stances based on what was prioritised – for example, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) stood in opposition to Brexit – considering it a right-wing project – and demanded that Corbyn’s Labour Party oppose it, while the Socialist Workers’ Party – which stood outside of the Labour Party calling for it to make the final brake with the EU on the basis that it is a neoliberal institution that would oppose a socialist program. The parliamentary left itself was divided on the issue – which led to Labour’s electoral defeat in 2019. Whatever the conclusions around what the correct stance was, and how the fatal error was committed – the result was another failed project around a Labour left leader, just as it was with Tony Benn before. At least for the Labour left, they are – as they will always be, committed to not just a Labour victory even if the party apparatus is adversarial to them, but to one day control the levers of the party, so that the work towards a New Jerusalem can be realised. In other words, it is a setback – but a setback that for them can and must be overcome. For the revolutionary left outside, and especially inside the Labour Party, it represents at best a blocked route to social transformation, and perhaps a feeling even more pronounced than even among those on the Labour left, that invites a reassessment of their strategy – if not their overall politics – and certainly their relations to a Labour Party quickly reorienting itself towards the right (of course, that question has already been answered for some of the parties in question). But if the line about Labour “no longer being a worker’s party” is active again and more so a rallying cry, then it begs the question as to what they stand to gain from hovering close to Labour-adjacent demonstrations.

‘The movement everything, the final goal nothing’

When we take into account the fact that broad left organisations like the People’s Assembly push for a general election, and specifically for a Labour victory – they do so with the belief, to paraphase the American Left, that they can somehow “push Starmer left” or the even less ambitious conclusion, is that the crumbs from the table that you’ll get from Labour will be bigger and more plentiful than with the Tories. The Trotskyist grouplets which occupy these campaign groups generally do not share this illusion, but cynically insist in using demos like the one that took place last week to push for a GE anyway, with some preposterous verbiage about the ‘sancticy of democracy’ or whatnot, knowing full well that British parliamentarianism is a particularly opaque form of government, and therefore lacks any fundamental accessibility to the working class. And when it is pointed out that they are committing to a Labour with an outright anemic social democratic program, the defence is something to the effect of that the contradictions of labourism will expose it for what it really is, and a class-conscious British working class will arise. A suggestion to readers unconvinced by this line would be to press on this point to anyone committed to uttering it, and ask them – how exactly did this work out in 1979 – when Callaghan was resolute on bringing the unions to heel, large sections of its members rather than commit to a revolutionary program, put Margaret Thatcher in power? Or in 2007, when Blair was finished and New Labour had almost completely ran out of steam, on the eve of the Great Reccession – the ‘new workers’ party’ somehow failed to materialise? And if the responses to these questions are less then edifying, suggest that maybe waiting on the failure of Labour governments for class consciousness to spontaneously emerge out of disaffected labourism is really fucking stupid?

That said, it would be remiss to leave out that the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), while not inclined to utter this spiel, also broadly agreed that a GE should be held on the basis of democracy and to support the some of the ‘progressive’ policies Labour still has, such as they are. Any suggestion that stalking labourism and the organisations that it has significant sway in has dulled their radical politics does not invite reflection. This is particularly problematic among Trotskyist groups which, having presented itself possessing a revolutionary edge that the Communists no longer had, replicated many of its flaws in addition to its exhausted strategies in entryism in perpetua to Labour.

What if we said, ‘I’m sick of this shit, here’s what we’re going to do’?

Just Stop Oil, an environmentalist group now known internationally for their public disruptions, may to some engage in a form of protest that seems Dadaist in style. But their brand of direct action makes a clear point: in a world hostage to runaway climate change – there is no time to stop and appreciate public art. Just Stop Oil had since then escalated their protests to defacing car dealerships, and blocking the M25. The British state has responded in kind by arresting several of their activists, and intensifying this process in preparation of the COP27 meetings. At the very least, Just Stop Oil have been clear – they lay the blame on governments unwilling to commit to a transistion away from fossil fuels, and are not swayed by hollow promises from leaders of so-called progressive parties. Likewise, said leaders by dint of electoral calculation and the desire to purify any iteration of Corbynism also are more than happy to denigrate and dismiss Just Stop Oil, and utter a commitment to ecomodernist responses to climate change.

The Sunak government has also retained the anti-immigration policies characteristic of the previous two governments, and is indeed likely to see an intensification from that period. The Home Secretary Suella Braverman pushes the boundaries of parliamentary respectability by using dog-whistle rhetoric describing Britain as victim to a hostile invasion of immigrants, particularly those originating from Albania – using the moral panic of Albanian gangsters. The nationwide Anti-Raids Network is a mobilised couter-power to brutal state racism towards migrants unfettered by labourism and its consistutionalist instincts. The same is also true of renters’ unions which have also been clear that that they will not subordinate their task of defending and organising renters, and taking a militant stance against landlords – private or corporate (local councils), and also likewise recognise that however supportive of their goals that individual councillors may be, the agenda of the councils that they represent are fickle, and willing to enforce evictions in the properties that it has ownership over, or even support the claims of landlords – the most vulnerable of these renters will be immgrants with ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF) exculding them from access to various forms of benefits.

The General Election if and when it comes may be won by the Labour Party, but whatever the form of government, we are looking at another decade of austerity at the very least. The sites of resistance demand a space that will not simply be curtailed into a parliamentary agenda, and certainly does not need (grumpy) sheepdogs with a radical veneer doing aiding in parliamentary dilution based on some attachment to a ‘norm’ (really a Thatcherite innovation) of bourgeois democracy. It is not a ‘class war government’ that is creating immersation of the working class, it is class war, period. At the end of the day, when a Labour government engages in the same repressive policies, the same ‘culture war’ obsessions, and a similar acquiescence to business elites, it will be the parliamentary left that apologises on behalf of the Labour Party for not living up to whatever expectations that it believes that its supporters have, will of course engage in resistance to the worst of said government’s measures, but will be constrained by the demand of loyalty to the party. We need not wait for this to happen. What we need is a strong left current independent of parliamentary limitations, and perhaps one that synthesises the aforementioned organisations committed to direct action against an increasingly repressive state, and the complicity of the major parties in Parliament. How this will happen, I have no idea. But it there’s one thing that is clear, that stalking the parliamentary left to build class struggle is not a viable option.

Notes

* The term ‘tankie’, initially used to mock members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who were too uncritical of the Soviet Union – particularly its aggressive enforcing of the Warsaw Pact (Hungary, Czechoslovakia) and came to describe a faction or tendency within the CPGB, is now deployed by Monbiot to mock those who are opposed to the war in Ukraine. If anything can be said about the term – it’s that it lost the power of its original connotation.

See also

• Enough Is Enough
• Parliamentary cretinism
• Extra-parliamentary left
• Politics is not just what happens in Parliament
• Labour left
• Labour Party and the trade unions
• The People’s Assembly Against Austerity
• British Trotskyism
• Entryism
• United front (What Trotskyists who supported this believe that is what they are doing)
• Beyond The Fragments
• “In and against the state”
• Rethinking the Labour Party as a vehicle for change

Olive Morris

Olive Morris (1952-1979) was a Jamaican-British activist. Born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, she came to the UK in the early 1960s living in South London. By the 1970s, she became involved in the various campaigns around black power, women’s liberation, and squatter’s rights. Her activism took her from the streets of Brixton engaging in anti-racist struggles and community organising to China as part of anti-imperialist solidarity.

Morris left Dick Sheppard School school without qualifications, but went back to education to complete O-Levels and A-Levels.

On 15th November 1969, she witnessed Metropolitan Police stop-and-search Nigerian diplomat Clement Gomwalk under the sus law, and wouldn’t believe his account that he was a diplomat. Morris attempted to stop the police harassing Gomwalk, and was beaten along with several others, and was arrested. She was further beaten while in custody and forcibly stripped, received racist and sexist verbal abuse, and threatened with rape. She was later fined £10, and received a suspended sentence of 3 years – later reduced to one year – in prison for assaulting a police officer. This incident was a formative one for her political consciousness, and soon after became a communist and a radical feminist.

She joined the British Black Panthers meeting Altheia Jones-LeConte, Farrukh Dhondy, and Linton Kwesi Jackson. She was arrested and charged with assault of an officer, along with Darcus Howe in 1972, yet was acquitted based on conflicting accounts from the police officers who gave evidence. After the collapse of the Panthers, she formed the Brixton Black Women’s Group with Liz Obi and Beverly Bryan in 1973; They were critical of the contemporary (second-wave) feminist movement, which focused heavily on the experiences of middle-class white women and projected a universality from that. For the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the experiences of black women were not so much focused on abortion and wages for housework labour, but childcare and the poorly-waged domestic work they performed for other people. They produced a newsletter called Speak Out! and created the work The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. As they were a non-hierachical collective, none of the women took credit for it specific to the organisation until it was made into a book in 1985.

Morris began squatting to support her housing needs, and to establish a base for political projects. She squatted in 121 Railton Road in Brixton – the place became a hub of black community groups and women’s centres. There were several attempts to evict Morris and Obi – with the police successful in dragging Obi from the house and sent to a police station, when Morris was at work. When Morris returned, she climbed on top of the house, and argued with the police from the roof. The iconic photo of Olive Morris climbing the roof became the cover of the Squatters Handbook 1979 edition. 121 Railton Road even after Morris and Obi left for 64 Railton Road, was frequently squatted by various anarchist and feminist groups, and was the home of Sabaar Bookshop for a time, until the final eviction in 1999. Morris was also part of the Race Today collective, and helped set up their office in 165-167 Railton Road – Today it now serves as the office of the Brixton Advice Centre.

After heading to Manchester to complete her university studies, she helped set up the Black Women’s Mutual Aid Group and joined the Manchester Black Women’s Co-operative based in Moss Side, and had also helped set up a community school for local black parents, and a bookstore. In 1977, as part of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, she travelled to China and wrote about her experience for the British Black Women’s Group, and how it informed anti-imperialist praxis. Upon finishing her studies in 1978, she same back to Brixton and the activist groups she was involved in. With her latest partner, Mike McColgan – they both wrote a pamplet which critiqued the strategy of the Anti-Nazi League for focusing on fascism and the expense of racism in British society. Around this time, she also with Beverley Bryan and Stella Dadzie, set up the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) – its inaugural meeting brought around 300 women from across the country to discuss and find solutions for issues they faced, including: housing, employment, healthcare, education and financial support. It was one of the first organisations for black women in Britain.

In September 1978, Morris following bouts of illness, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She eventually died on July 12, 1979 in St. Thomas’ Hospital. She was 27 years old.

OWAAD continued for a while after her death, and Brixton Black Women’s Group lasted until 1985. Their campaign upon Lambeth Council’s announcement of a new building in 18 Brixton Hill was named Olive Morris House in 1986. The council had a housing benefit office there. The Remembering Olive Collective (ROC) was set up in 2008, by long-time friend Liz Obi and scholar Tanisha C. Ford, to commemorate Morris’ life, creating educational pamplets for schools in Brixton informing children of the life Morris led. A Remembering Olive Morris Rally was held on 26th June 2015 on what would have been her 63rd birthday to keep her memory alive. The ROC reconvened in 2019 following the announcement of the demolition of Olive Morris House, which occurred in 2020. A new building titled New Olive Morris House is planned to house the archival material assembled related to her life. Olive Morris is depicted on the £B1 note for the Brixton pound – the unoffical local currency of Brixton.

You can also read: https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/we-continue-to-remember-olive-morris-a-roc-2-0-reboot/

See also:

• British Black Panthers
• Brixton
• Brixton Black Women’s Group
• The Heart of The Race: Black Women’s Lives In Britain
• “Housing is a human right”
• Mutual aid
• Squatters’ rights

Rainbow flag

The rainbow flag is typically associated with LGBTQ+ identity, and specifically pride in asserting their identity as a person or people that identify as any of the identities within the LBGTQ+ umbrella.

The flag was designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a US Vietnam War veteran, and a drag performer; along with artist Faerie Rainbow (Lynn Segerblom), Lee Mentley, James McNamara, and other activists. Baker wanted to find a symbol distinct from the pink triangle which represented the oppression of homosexuals, and to find one that celebrates “the dawn of a new gay consciousness and freedom”.

There are multiple accounts on how account the rainbow flag came to be, many of which were generated by Gilbert Baker.

As Baker tells it, he brainstormed the idea of the flag with his friend, filmmaker Artie Bressan, Jr. At first, Baker sought to lampoon the notion of flags, and the conformist attitudes in American society that perpetuated gay oppression. However, the idea gradually became serious when he thought of the celebrations and spectactle generated by the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States two years prior:

As Artie implored, I looked at the flags flying on the various government buildings around the Civic Center. I thought of the American flag with its thirteen stripes and thirteen stars, the colonies breaking away from England to form the United States. I thought of the vertical red, white, and blue tricolor from the French Revolution and how both flags owed their beginnings to a riot, a rebellion, or revolution. I thought a gay nation should have a flag too, to proclaim its own idea of power.

As a community, both local and international, gay people were in the midst of an upheaval, a battle for equal rights, a shift in status where we were now demanding power, taking it. This was our new revolution: a tribal, individualistic, and collective vision. It deserved a new symbol.

In the past, when I had thought of a flag, I saw it as just another icon to lampoon. I had considered all flag-waving and patriotism in general to be a dangerous joke. But that changed in 1976. The American Bicentennial celebration put the focus on the American flag. It was everywhere, from pop art to fine art, from tacky souvenirs to trashy advertising. On every level, it functioned as a message. After the orgy of bunting and hoopla surrounding the Bicentennial, I thought of flags in a new light. I discovered the depth of their power, their transcendent, transformational quality. I thought of the emotional connection they hold. I thought how most flags represented a place. They were primarily nationalistic, territorial, iconic propaganda — all things we questioned in the ‘70s. Gay people were tribal, individualistic, a global collective that was expressing itself in art and politics. We needed a flag to fly everywhere.

Gilbert Baker

In deciding on a rainbow, Baker was drawing from the 60s protest movements and hippie subculture, particularly the “Flag of the Races” (red, black, brown, yellow, and white), though Baker had also stated it was a reference to the Rolling Stones single, “She’s a Rainbow”.

This account is contradicted by the ones given by Lynn Segerblom, Lee Mently, August Bernadicou and Chris Coates who claim that they came at the decision of a rainbow flag came on the Pride Planning Committee meetings in San Francisco City Hall. They claim Baker was a very effective promoter, yet credit him instead with spreading its international ubiquity.

The committee approved the rainbow imagery and made the decision to make two massive 40’ x 60’ foot rainbow flags to be flown at the Civic Center along with 18 smaller rainbow flags designed by different, local artists, to line the reflecting pool putting rainbows into the grey sky.

For the two large flags, one would be an eight-color rainbow starting with pink and including turquoise and indigo in place of blue, and the other a re-envisioning of the American flag with rainbow stripes which became known as Faerie’s flag.

August Bernadicou & Chris Coates

 The story is that a white gay man did all of this by himself, but, in fact, that is not true at all. He just promoted it. For that, though, he should be given great love.

Lynn Segerblom

The original rainbow flag had eight colors: pink, symbolising sexuality; red, representing life; orange symbolising healing; yellow for sunlight; green represnting nature; turquoise symbolising magic; indigo for serenity; and finally violet symbolising spirit.

Demand for the flag increased after Harvey Milk, mayor of San Fransisco, and first openly gay major was assassinated on November 27, 1978. Pink was dropped due to it then being difficult to get enough of the colour fabric, and turquoise and indigo ‘merged’ into royal blue. This became the standard for the LGBT+ movement.

The flag has since gone through further iterations and deriviatives. To mark the 40th anniversary of his design, Gilbert Baker introduced a nine-striped flag, brining back pink and turquiose – but also adding lavender, which represents diversity. The Philadephia flag design was more upfront by introducing black and brown to the flag, symbolising the issues that affect people of colour, and in 2018, designer Daniel Quasar introduced the Progress Pride flag, incorporating a chevron on the left side of the flag with the common rainbow design, incorporating black and brown to symbolise marginalised people of colour, and the colours of trans pride (sky blue, pink and white). This flag has also gone through iterations by incorporating black, brown, sky blue, pink and white diagonally; representing intersectionality.

In 2021, Valentino Vecchietti incorporated a yellow triangle with a purple circle within it inside the chevron, to make it intersex-inclusive.

The efforts around the recent additions do call into question in presenting symbols that fully synthesize the wide breath of LBGTQ+ experiences, and what aspects of queer history is presented to the forefront, and what others get erased. While the process around creating the original rainbow flag was intended to reflect and embolden the experiences of queer people as a whole, the critique that it “flattened” multiple variations of queer experiences in different cultures and subcultures had been laid, and the recent additions highlight contemporary issues that are prounounced among specific marginalised communities such as people of colour, trans & intersex people.

On the other hand, a Social Justice Pride flag introduced in India highlighted a chevron with black representing the self-respect of the lower castes in India, blue to represent the movement of BR Ambedkar, and red to represent the Left.

The rainbow flag may continue to go through many iterations, or be replaced entirely depending on the causes facing the LGBTQ+ community, or indeed, the different identities that intersect with the LGBTQ+ community.

References

Gilbert Baker – Rainbow Flag: The Origin Story

Rainbow Flag – The LGBTQ History Project

See also:

• Pink triangle
• Bisexual flag
• Trans flag
• Gay liberation movement
• “Rainbow-washing”
• Harvey Milk
• Pride event
• San Francisco scene

Colston Four

Taken from theguardian.co.uk

The “Colston Four” is a collective nickname for the four anti-racist activists who were arrested and charged with criminal damage for the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, which they faced ten years in prison. The activists, Rhian Jones, Jake Skuse, Sage Willoughby, and Milo Ponsford – did not dispute that they removed the statue, only that it was an act of vandalism to do so. On 6th January 2022, all four were found not guilty and cleared of their charges.

Late May and June 2020 saw Black Lives Matter and racial justice protests explode throughout the world in response to the filmed murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. The United Kingdom had protests organised by Black Lives Matter UK in dozens of locations including London, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford, Swansea, and of course, Bristol. Other than the U.S. itself, the protests that took place in the UK had the largest George Floyd protests.

On 7 June 2020, 10,000 people turned up to the Black Lives Matter protests in Bristol marching across Collage Green to its town centre where the Statue of Edward Colston stood. The protestors threw red paint at the statue to represent the blood on his hands, put ropes around the bronzed Colston; and Jones, Willoughby, Skuse and Ponsford were among those who told the others to clear the are as they pulled it from its hinges, removed it from its podium and as it fell from its elevated platform – was stomped on, had its neck kneeled on, and dozens of the city’s anti-racists rolled it into the Bristol Harbour amidst a chorus of ten thousand cheers. The rest of the demonstration was held on the very same podium that the Colston statue was once held on. But the choice of Edward Colston had a wider context than the events of that day, and had more to do with the legacy of Bristol itself.

Taken from independent.co.uk

Why Edward Colston?

cw: rape, murder, slavery, imprisonment

Taken from walesonline.co.uk

For well over 300 years, a concerted hagiographic portrayal of Edward Colston presided over the city of Bristol, presenting him as its finest son. He was remembered as a merchant, Member of Parliament, shipping magnate, and a philanthropist whose benevolence inspired the christening of roads and schools in his name, a society created in his honour and a statue in the centre of Bristol. Recent decades saw the challenging of that legacy to present the reality that his wealth was largely built upon the kidnapping and enslavement of African people, and used his influence to lobby the city of Bristol until it was eventually remade in his image. Edward Colston was a slave trader. He was a shareholder, and later the head of the Royal African Company, which during Colston’s time, oversaw the enslavement and transport of 84,000 people, of which 12,000 of them were children. They were branded with the company’s initials “RAC” in West Africa, some were brutalised and raped as had happened notably in a port which housed slaves in Sierra Leone; and when they succumbed to illness, fatigue, starvation or were simply killed during the journey, their bodies were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean, like ruined cargo property – as many as 19,000 people met this fate.

They were sold for labour on tobacco and sugar plantations across the Caribbean and the Americas, for those involved in the slave trade, it was more profitable as the labour they provided was fre, in contrast to the indentured servants and wage labourers in Britain. In 1692, he stood down from his positions in the Royal African Company, but never stopped profiting from slavery until a decade later. He became an MP for Bristol and stood between 1710 and 1713, and died in 1721. He had no children, yet the land he owned was inherited by his nephew, also named Edward Colston – who became an MP of Bridgewater (now Wells) between 1708 and 1713.

In 1725, the Colston Society was created to honour his contributions to the City of Bristol, embedding itself into historical outings by the schools which held his name, and actively involved in preserving his sanitised image until its disbandment in 2020. In 1895, a statue designed by John Cassidy was erected in the centre of Bristol in commemoration of his philanthropic work. In 1920, the historian H.J. Wilkins wrote a biography of Edward Colston, bringing to light his involvement in the slave trade. The 1990s gave rise to demands to remove the venerations of Edward Colston from public display; to rename the roads, charities or schools carrying his name, and for the statue in the town centre to be removed or at least a plaque but in place that he was a slave trader. Bristol City Council tried to mediate between the demands of the campaigners calling for Edward Colston’s name to be removed from Bristol’s public spaces, and those from conservative factions, including the interests of the still influential Society of Merchant Venturers, which Colston was a member of in life, and continued to fund charities and educational institutions. The statue was tagged in 1998 with the words, “SLAVE TRADER”, with a councillor commenting that what becomes of the statue reflects how Bristol feels about a slave trader in the city’s centre.

Debates ensued over the change or introduction of another plaque after an independent artist installed one highlighting the victims of the slave trade that Colston participated in. It led to a two-year back and forth between the city’s politicians and local academics and art curators, and the demands of the Society of Merchant Venturers, and saw three different plaques alternating in emphasis over his philanthrophy and MP and his role as a slave trader. The conflict between the power nodes of Bristol over the statue was rendered moot once it was brought down by activists bringing to attention the pervading influence of systemic racism. Various parties, from the Mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees, the Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer, Member of Parliament for Bristol Thangam Debbonaire, and even the Society of Merchant Venturers itself, at least gave public statements agreeing with the sentiment that the Colston statue should have been removed a long time ago after the fact.

Asha (surname not given), 25, from Bristol places her dedication on the empty plinth where the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol once stood after it was taken down during a Black Lives Matter protest on Sunday. The protests were sparked by the death of George Floyd, who was killed on May 25 while in police custody in the US city of Minneapolis. PA Photo. Picture date: Monday June 8, 2020. See PA story POLICE Floyd. Photo credit should read: Ben Birchall/PA Wire

The trial

The trial of the four defendants began on 2 March 2021 and they entered the plea of not guilty. The public gallery was filled by many local onlookers and supporters, with clips presented of the collapse of the statue of Edward Colston generating cheers. Banksy produced a T-shirt to be sold to raise money for their defence. The historian David Olusoga was called as a special witness to explain in detail the organisation Edward Colston was involved in, and the industrial evil it produced. The prosecution relied on insisting that the jury accept the facts of the matter of what happened on that day by bringing to attention that their action was unauthorised and therefore an illegal act of vandalism. The prosecution also tried to highlight not only the statue’s damage but damage to the pavement.

The defence in contrast noted that Colston’s legacy over Bristol has been debated for decades and even led to calls accepted by the city council to change the names of various public venues, and for the statue’s removal largely subject to a glacial efforts by the council to acknowledge them; pointed out that the activists’ removal cannot be divorced from its political and social context; made references to Martin Luther King and Edumnd Burke; incredulously asking whether quibbling over vandalism occurred over the Berlin Wall, and whether such objections would occur over the removal of a statue dedicated to Jimmy Saville (itself a reference to the mannequin dressed as the paedophile that stood on the plaque the statue of Edward Colston stood for an hour before its removal).

The defence made a final implore to the jury “to make history” by choosing not to convict the four.

Result, aftermath and commentary

“…I leaped, I couldn’t believe it…It was just….’Wow!’, It was that moment where it was like ‘Look at what the people have done, that the city couldn’t do.'”

Lawrance Hoo – Co-founder of Cargo Movement, reflecting on the tearing down of the statue of Edward Colston

Rhian Jones said on the day before the trial’s conclusion that it didn’t matter what happened to them, as they’ve already won. The statue of Edward Colston brought down had also brought with it international attention to the legacy of slavery and colonialism that the United Kingdom was built upon, and the continued sanctification of the figures participating in it. Rev. Al Sharpton referenced the event during the George Floyd Memorial, commenting: “I’ve seen grandchildren of slave masters tearing down slave masters’ statues; over in England, they put it in the river.”

Had the four been found guilty, it would have escalated into a protracted conflict that the city’s establishment was already losing in Bristol, and would have been felt even in Parliament, continuing to build embarrassment towards the office of its parliamentary representative, and the party she represents. The four were acquitted because what they did wasn’t something as crude as vandalism, which implies thoughtless damage: what they did reflected solidarity with Bristol’s black residents, and was the final defiant act of a cumulative struggle against the romanticism of oppressors in the public space of Bristol.

Commentators like the Sun’s former editor Kelvin Mackenzie, claimed that the verdict “…was a shocking signal to every lefty protester in the country that they can damage with impunity as long as they chant the phrase ‘hate crime’.”

What they ignore, willifully it appears, is that the damaging statues still gives a penalty for up ten years, and lack the understanding to tie the act of Colston’s removal to wider struggles over Bristol’s cultural memory. In Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King argued that direct action can take place if a sufficient number of people are informed and educated about the issue, negotiate with your opponents to try to resolve the problem, and then engage in direct action if no response is forthcoming. He insisted that direct action often creates the space for serious negotiation. Colston’s overlooming prescence in the social fabric of Bristol has been discussed for decades, and the city’s feelings on the matter reflected a desire for something more than whitewashed portrayals of literal misery merchants such as Edward Colston. Brought into an international struggle against racism, and the activism advocating the removal of monuments to colonizers and enslavers, Colston’s collapse and dumping into the River Avon became an action that few in Bristol dared deny the spirit of.

The Tories may think of ways to introduce secret trials for protesters under the anti-demonstration bill in response to the verdict, but for the “Colston Four”, in the war against racism, and the struggle of presenting Britain’s colonial and imperial legacy, in this battle, they were victorious.

See also:

• The George Floyd protests
• Black Lives Matter
• Anti-racism
• Being a good ally
• The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill
• Direct action
• “Decolonize this space”
• Rhodes Must Fall

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, is a piece of legislation introduced by Home Secretary Priti Patel which seeks to increase police powers to curb protests, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. It seeks to slap 10-year prison sentences for people who vandalise statues, and increase stop-and-search powers to the police. On the 5th July 2021, it passed its third reading at 354 Aye votes to 273 No in the House of Commons, meaning that it is on track to become law.

Many on the Right, particularly those within the Conservative Party were given a fright from the widespread Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter protests last year. The former saw the disruption of public transport in many cities, especially London, and the latter saw the tagging of government buildings and the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, and the removal of Edward Colston in Bristol. As the BLM protests took place close to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, some have reasoned that the protestors were only able to get that far because of a lack of police presence and more importantly, a lack of police powers. This piece of legislation was concocted to meet civil disobedience with the increased weight of the state by increasing police powers, and as part of its ongoing “culture war” – as seen with denying the existence of systemic racism within the United Kingdom, and its attacks on anti-racist education. The bill makes it a criminal offence to create a “public nuisance” through protests – saying they should not be loud enough to cause “serious unease, alarm or distress” to people “in the vicinity”, and police officers can decide if a protestor is being too noisy. Its prohibition on “unauthorised encampents” also has discriminatory implications for the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities.

#KillTheBill protests mobilised across the country in response to the proposals set out in the bill, unifying many different activist organisations, trade unionists and a few charity groups. A few MPs turned up supportive of opposition to the bill. Both outside and inside parliament, the Police, Courts and Sentencing Bill has been criticised for being draconian, repressive, and in conflict with the recognition of people’s human rights. Its heavier sentences of muggings, stabbings and murders, and the increased stop-and-search powers given to police suggest a “tough on crime” approach by the government.

It remains to be seen, but it is possible that this bill can still be overturned. If people feel strong enough against something, there’s very little that can stop them, not even the state. It was the reaction to the “poll tax” that ultimately brought down Margaret Thatcher. The fights for climate justice, racial justice and gender justice requires disruption. We don’t need permission to stand up for them.

See also:

• The global George Floyd protests
• Black Lives Matter
• Extinction Rebellion
• Diversity of tactics
• The “poll tax”
• GRT

George Floyd, Racial Injustice and Making The World Anew

It has been a month since the protests over the murder of George Floyd began. And as mentioned in my previous article, it comes at a serious moment of global crisis – with the coronavirus pandemic – and this is more so the case in the United States – with over 2 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and well over 100,000 dead; and 40 million people filing for unemployment – leaving the rate at 14.7% – the rate for blacks reaching 16.7%. George Floyd was one such person who after working as a security guard, found himself out of work as a result of the coronavirus crisis. He lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota – having moved from Houston, Texas in 2014.  While he had five children – three of them were of adult age, and he had to take care of his youngest daughter with his most recent partner – having faced the coronavirus itself and now having to deal with unemployment.

On May 25th, Minneapolis Police were called to its Powderhorn Park neighbourhood after he purchased cigarettes and one of the store clerks claimed that he paid with a fake $20 bill. Four officers – James Keung, Tom Lane, Tou Thao, and Derek Chauvin responded to the call. At 8pm, two of the officers Keung and Lane intercepted the SUV Floyd drove in, he was pulled out, handcuffed and made to sit on the sidewalk. As they walked him towards the police car – Floyd fell to the ground. Then they picked him up and placed him towards the car’s door when officers Chauvin and Thao arrived and they forced him into the car even as he announced that he was claustrophobic. After a minute of trying to put him in, Chauvin pulls him out as Floyd fell to the pavement – then decided to kneel on his neck, with Lane and Keung pressing his legs and torso respectively, and Thao watching – ignoring the pleas of Floyd as cried for his mother and announced “I can’t breathe”, and that of bystanders’ outrage of the incident. For 8 minutes this went on, even after the ambulance arrived. Floyd was eventually taken to the Hennepin County Memorial Center where he died.

The location where he was killed became a makeshift memorial, and indeed there was a massive demonstration against the killing of Floyd. It would quickly become apparent that the manner in which was killed, the broadcasting of it on social media, and other prolific murders of black people by police – such as Ahmaud Arbery, and Breanna Taylor. The death of George Floyd eventually became for America the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For White America, the moving filtering lens which removes black suffering with the goodwill offered by the apparatus that maintains their standing, finally focused on the right time in which it could be shown that was done to protect this arrangement. For Black America, it was a gratuitous killing too many. Both were the result of the social gridlock created by the pandemic. Shared in the horror of the moment, a chain reaction spread across the country, now with no signs of ending and nothing to stop it.

Statues glorifying racial oppression were either torn down, or remade anew – with the rallying cry of justice and thoughts of the heroes that came before them. Roads repainted with the slogan Black Lives Matter, police districts destroyed – effectively abolishing them in multiple cities, and spaces carved out for the protesters to provide services for the themselves and the downtrodden within its vicinity.

Reacting to this moment, the corporations of this world – fearing that the mood would take away from their profits showed “solidarity” with nonsense such as the #BlackTuesday event – turning your profile pic black to protest racial injustice, Google and therefore YouTube had little statements (in YouTube’s case, a playlist on the main page) which ostensibly showed themselves to be on the side of the protesters, while all the while – they, and the reporters who covered the events were either arrested, or shot at. When the protests reached the gates of the White House, Donald Trump and the First Lady reportedly hid in a bunker. Cornel West’s assessment of the situation was to declare America a “failed social experiment”.

But the protests didn’t stop in America – they spread internationally. Every nation where the police was employed to brutalise and suppress black people, working people, immigrants ethnic minorities and people whose existence is resistance – took to the streets, protesting against their repression, along with those who would reject repression as a necessary to maintain what we would call – a decent life. Here in Great Britain, I bore witness on June 6th to a Parliament Square remade to reflect the anger animating those who rallied under “Black Lives Matter”.

The totemic statue of Sir Winston Churchill – subsumed into cultural narrative of Great Britain as its finest champion, a King Arthur for the 20th century – was literally repainted with the narrative suppressed to British sensibilities. His plaque was covered by a placard covering the details the monument wanted people to read about Churchill, to reflect a narrative that is not told to the British people because it makes for uncomfortable reading even if its merely three words – “was a racist” under the name Winston Churchill – because it demanded – by force, for British people: the ones who weren’t immigrants or the children of them, to face who this man represented as a the face of British Empire. An empire so often told in grandeur, and progess – rather than the grotesque show of industrialised brutality, and enforced stagnation that it actually was.

Gandhi similarly was given the BLM dose of reality – an attempt to bring to attention that while free Indians were of Gandhi’s high priorities, blacks were not – at least that was the case during his time in South Africa. “Kaffirs” were lesser people than Indians after all, and not equal victims of colonialism in South Africa, or other colonized nations. The Mandela statue didn’t come off empty-handed – quite the opposite actually. Mandela was to told up a sign declaring that “the UK is not innocent” – now transformed into the petrified judge on Britain’s race relations. The chant “Black Lives Matter” echoed to the drums played across the streets. At this point, the police presence hadn’t descended given the lack of numbers – as activists were on poles, statues and tagged the walls either with “BLM”, or the names of black people who were martyred. The walls were made to say their names – for as much as black lives, Black Narratives Matter as well.

When the following day, in Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston – the merchant known to the town as a philantropist, who made the bulk of his wealth as a slave trader – was thrown into the canal – the commentariat became absorbed in the spectacle – generating or at least (re)animating discussions around statues of people that advanced notions of racial superiority. The reactionaries angry at this challenges sought to defend Churchill and other ‘heroes’ just like he defended them – or so the narrative they’ve been told said. The organisation Black Lives Matter pulled back but the slogan was carried by other groups and has carried since.

Even so, the pertinent question remains amidst a global standstill – were the most pernicious aspects of a capitalism in crisis – an intensification of the exploitation and the disposibility of bodies of the racialised underclasses – the question remains: we know what racial injustice looks like. But what is the world that we will create if the pursuit of racial justice is the instrument that we use? There were so many different approaches that I encountered during the protests – reformist politics, cultural nationalism, a support of what is effectively black capitalism – and I had confirmed before me that social imagination even within the pandemic still remains held together on a conscious level through capitalist realism even as states struggle to maintain the existing social relations. Perhaps the pandemic beyond our online calls has otherwise rendered us utterly isolated from one another – outside of the organised days of action. We meet each other in shared feelings of outrage, frustration and righteous fury. We march in joy of a possible new world, but we’ve never taken the time to discuss to each other what one really looks like.

George Floyd has imbued the world a level of social consciousness that is far more receptive and interconnected than prior. The tragedy that befell him has led citizens to question their assessment of what it means to be “safe” and “secure”, and why is it that those things are only expressed in terms of one another. The police exist to maintain law and order – which really means to maintain the existing social and economic relations that the state maintains. Since that has mainfested in brutality towards a particular group of people to maintain another group of people’s power – the slogan and initiative “defund the police” both imagines a society where communities do not have to scared of its own people, where security is equated with social health and where resources are diverted towards public services other than a seige force to protect people from themselves. However, we have been socialised and been subject to relentless propaganda and allowed enforcers to resolve the tensions of our society rather then ourselves – so while it has been acheivable in some form in a nation that exloded into riots – it remains on the level of academic discussion in Great Britain – where unrest is the toppling of a statue.

Make no mistake – defunding the police, is reform. Police reform at that too. It’s an idea that redefines the idea of security, and at best – rolls back the militarisation of the police and related expressions of brutality to secure safety. The police to protect its institution will be forced to reimagine its role in the public sphere, or the state will do it for them. This is why they – and their spokespeople in political parties see no interest in pursuing such a change in social relations.

It remains to be seen what will emerge or what has emerged, will remain once the protests die down. But a scream heard around the world demands more than a response – but a resolution. One not born of fear, but of care.

 

See also

• Black Lives Matter
• Defund the police
• Abolish the police
• What are the police?
• “No justice, no peace!”
• “Another world is possible”
• Reform vs. revolution

Quick Updates: George Floyd, Lockdown, And Other Stuff

To be honest, a lot has went on. Pretty much every day I get involved in some form of activism is every three weeks that I do not write. Technically, I ‘write’ all the time – as does everyone in the digital age – but I imagine that you know what I mean by this. I’ve been musing a bit about whether to instead set up a Medium page instead, but I guess that would have to mean abandoning this website in favour of another one – and approaching a whole new outlook on this – particularly with respect to the anonymity that I have previously maintained. It’s a bit annoying since this announcement has come when I’ve written in total less than forty posts so far. Most of the ones that I do follow somehow are able to squeeze out dozens in a month. I can scarcely imagine the level of free time that these people actually have. Nevertheless, these are the topics that I have in mind:

Racial injustice

It’s on everyone’s lips after the dying scream heard around the world. It’s been exactly a month since the murder of George Floyd on the hands of police, particularly one Officer Derek Chauvin, who after pinning him to the ground, forced his knee into Floyd’s neck as he begged for his life. This came at a pivotal moment in human history – particularly the coronavirus pandemic and video-sharing across social media – millions across the world saw the final moments of a 46-year old black man in America whose life ended because he was alleged to have forged a $20 bill. The protests that took place across America has overshadowed almost completely the presidential race and has – at least for the moment reshaped the politics and society as never before. While the Civil Rights Era remains on the public consciousness as comparative event, even that was never in comparison to what has occured over the past month. More so, the reaction triggered an international show of solidarity in support of the Black Lives Matter movement – and included their contemporary instances of racial injustice. Media (both traditional and online) and the public space in those countries have either responded affording it the space with sensitivity towards the situation or having the conservation thrust upon them with the removal of statues and works represnting racial oppression. This article is coming very soon.

The lockdown of lockdown

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced an end of the regular daily Downing Street press conferences of the coronavirus situation in the United Kingdom and has all but indicated that lockdown measures are slowly being lifted – people can meet up to “two households” and up to six people from different households. Public places such as the library, community centres, places of worship, playgrounds and gyms would be able to open provided that measures are taken to limit the transmissions. The same with cinemas, bars, hotels and campsites. The recommended social distancing has now reduced to 1 metre between other people. All of these are to take place from 4th July. It is worth noting that there have been many false starts thanks to the inconsistent and in some cases, overly optimistic assessment of the containment measures that had taken place – leading to a confused message and several instances of people flouting the government advice. It being summertime also plays some part of it. Officially, there has been an estimated 300,000 cases of coronavius, with 43,000 deaths – though the real number could well be as high as 70,000. Perception of Boris Johnson’s has plummeted over the weeks – and he has resisted so far all attempts of an inquiry into his government’s response to the crisis. This too, will receive an article in due course.

Other stuff

Topics like my ever mosaic daily routine, and current thoughts on party politics – and the scope of possibility of a different system are playing in my mind. The problem is the range of stuff that I’m up to occupying my time – not all of them are urgent, but must are educational. I would say everything in some form is “educational”, but there you go. There’s also the edts to old articles that I’ve not come around to doing, but that will happen very soon. Beyond that, this space is gonna be open for a while.

The Meaning of Trevor Philips

On the 8th March 2020, Trevor Philips was suspended from the Labour Party.  Trevor Phillips has – for a very long time now – used his platform as the former EHRC head to voice his dismay at the current generation of activists from multiple marginalised communities, and indeed those in support of those activists – on the basis that they’re trying to undermine freedom of speech. Indeed, in his last documentary Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?, Philips attempts to make the case that social justice activists are now more concerned with condemnation of regular people and policing behaviours than making British society more equal. At one point, he likens them to Stalinists and Maoists. What powers these activists and groups have to “silence” or “police” people beyond a reaction from the intransigent prone to complain about political correctness he hadn’t clarified. But as a consistent appeaser to reactionaries, aggreived Little Englanders, “Very Serious People” and the wider “freeze peach” crowd, it was as much as anything he’s done recently.

Naturally, you will not find an ally in Trevor Philips in me. That the first president of the National Union of Students had reduced himself to the proverbial man ranting at cloud is regrettable but not entirely unexpected. He was always a simpering liberal. For him, the road to racial equality at the end is engaging in respectability politics and victim-blaming as its means – viewing material gains through his elitist lens. I recall in the documentary Things We Can’t Say About Race That Are True his framing of the interview he conducted with Les Ferdinand on racism in football to make a point about the “real taboo”: black bosses. Not Ferdinand’s brother Anton being called a “black cunt” by John Terry. Apparently the lack of black coaches in English football is the real problem and not the underlying culture that allows for this problem. He did this again fairly recently, regarding the the lack of representation of BAME people in executive positions in business. This is the fight that Philips was really interested in: Whether our corporate overlords are black or brown, than whether or not they can feel comfortable in the streets or a workplace without having dehumanizing jibes thrown at them. Black faces in high places.

It is from this respectability politics that Philips is motivated to oppose multiculturalism – and went to head with Ken Livingstone during his tenure as Mayor during the early years of the Greater London Authority, and invoked the ire of Operation Black Vote. It is also where his apparent issue with Muslims – which is the basis for his expulsion from Labour – seems to come from. For him, Muslims seem to represent a faction within British society that is impervious to ‘integration’. Consistent with the patrician faction of liberals such as Anthony Flew, Richard Dawkins and Anthony Giddens – Philips identifies multiculturalism as a threat to Britain, following a curiously crude interpretation of it existing as British state being the manager of different identity groups – all apparently monolithic, steadily encroahing on the British core in exchange for their culutral values remaining untouched.

His anti-Muslim animus motivated him in writing and on TV, to continuously refer to the Rochdale sex trafficking scandal, arguing that authorities ‘not wanting to look racist’ addressing the problem of Pakistani men grooming young girls – who were white. No mention of the lack of trust the authorities had within Asian communities, or indeed that ‘white’ (non-Muslim) grooming gangs are greater in number. No, just blame the victim – the Pakistani and Muslim community as a whole. It’s ‘cultural relavitism’ that have them a chance to exploit those girls, and the Left making excuses for them. They are a ‘nation within a nation’. Giving the amount of times he blames the Left for teachers not supporting black students, for protecting the feelings of Muslims who were “segregating”, and other grievances – I can’t help but womder whether his issue is really with the Left, or whether it is a convenient all-encompassing shorthand for identity politics and marginalised groups as a whole, but he feels he can’t outright say every individual group he charges with victimhood. If anything, other than Simon Danusck, I’ve never seen a more right-wing Labour Party member, or a former equalities campainer and leader work so hard to undermine the gains in British society.

Philips now charges the Labour Party of having become a “totalitarian cult”. Perhaps he should have spent more time musing and speaking on whatever draconian policies the party has, instead of suggesting that the Labour Party has a uniquely anti-Semitic culture that needed to be addressed.

See also:

• “Freeze peach” (coming soon)
• A list of Labour Party suspensions/expulsions on racism allegations (coming soon)
• Black liberals (coming soon)
• Red-baiting (and why reactionaries do it) (coming soon)
• Respectability politics (coming soon)
• Multiculturalism (coming soon)
• Can black people be racist? (coming soon)