The Labour Representation Committee, rather than being a single tendency body, serves as an umbrella for a variety of groupings and individuals, primarily those in the Labour Party who consider themselves to be on the left. As such, it hosts an array of left Labourites, Marxists, Stalinites and Trotskyites, all of whom enjoy an uneasy alliance under what is essentially a ‘British socialist’ platform.

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Nominally, its function is what Andrew Fisher, the opening chair at the November 19 LRC annual conference, held in the University of London Union, vaguely described as pushing the Labour Party “in a more socialist direction”. In contrast to the staged and stitched-up ‘conferences’ of the ostensibly revolutionary sects – take, for instance, the Socialist Workers Party’s annual rallies – the LRC’s annual conference does provide some room for contending viewpoints, even if motions have to be proposed in three and a half minutes and subsequent contributions squeezed into two.

Labourite unity

And so, the first half of the day was kicked off by John McDonnell’s typically eloquent account of the technocratic euro zone coup. Comrade McDonnell demanded we support direct action and Occupy protests, while simultaneously advocating sustained, traditional trade union and political party organisation to the new blood of resistance – this was echoed later on by an Occupy guest speaker who admitted that his movement might have “the energy, but not necessarily the brains, experience and leadership”.

Beyond November 30, McDonnell argued, there should be more days of industrial action, and a dialogue about an unspecified “new model of society” should be held – a view that, for better or worse, no-one in the hall could disagree with.

Graham Bash of Labour Briefing spoke in a similarly crowd-pleasing fashion, rallying the assembled LRC members to a “fight for a Labour government ready to take on capital”. It was unclear what type of Labour government he meant and how we would get it. Even more ambiguously, comrade Bash alluded to necessary “alliances with those who will not be with us all the way”.

Despite the sometimes vagueness of their statements, most speeches from the straightforward Labourite camp were competent – although a breathless contribution from Hackney LRC offered vapid agitprop worthy of an SWP rally: capitalism is in crisis, we were thunderously informed (who would have guessed?), so it was time we “reclaimed our party”.

If the latter was an instance of intellectual underkill, the Islington North CLP’s motion was a textbook example of political sneakiness. Sound bites such as “Inequality is bad and is something that we should do something about” – a truism if there ever was one – should have rang everybody’s alarm bells. The motion itself contained a lot of fluff about setting the budget in a way that does not hit black people and women the hardest, but effectively amounted to an underhand attempt at whitewashing cuts deemed to be ‘fair’. A ‘fairness commission’ is what these slippery comrades would like to set up, and we are pretty sure they could even get George Osborne to sign up.

Labour Party Marxists delegate Stan Keable took the opportunity to alert even the most somnambulant socialist in the house to the motion’s treacherous content. But, in a surprising and highly unfortunate development, the motion was carried. That’s right – ‘Labour’s resistance’ had no trouble voting for a motion that Ed Miliband might have slipped in when he thought no-one was looking. The climate thus set, MP Katy Clark could get away unchallenged when she naively stated that now even the Blairite Progress group was “changing” and coming out “in defence of the workers” – as if the leftish posturing of career politicians in opposition was some act of great significance. The Tories, argued Clark, just don’t provide the “growth that we need” – and that’s about as militant as it got.

Following this, not even NEC candidates Gary Heather, Christine Shawcroft and Patrick Hall could shock us when they announced that they would not publicly condemn Labour councillors who implemented cuts. Further contributions, advocating good old bureaucratic voluntarism as a method to overcome the organisation’s poor gender balance (“we need to be more inclusive”), gave this part of the conference precisely the soft-left sheen that it deserved.

Marxist confusion

The only left groups to submit motions in their own name were the New Communist Party, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, and the new kids on the block, Labour Party Marxists. The good news first: the AWL’s very decent motion for Europe-wide working class unity and against EU withdrawal was carried by 72 votes to 60, with several dozen abstentions. That’s no mean feat, seeing as the hard left in and around LRC is still considerably tainted by nationalism and, in more than a few cases, nostalgia for Stalin’s failed national-socialist model.

Despite pleas to abandon this “divisive” motion, one contributor from the floor correctly pointed out that the time to raise the question of Europe is now – in fact, with the background of the euro zone crisis, there has never been a more pressing time. This, we are happy to conclude, must have dawned on more than a few LRC comrades, giving the organisation a position on Europe that is now to the left of the SWP/Alex Callinicos line. Of course, we have many points of contention with the third-campist AWL, but we do welcome the call to “organise public meetings and debates about Europe across the country”. If the LRC leadership makes this a reality, such events would provide us with plenty of opportunity to debate the AWL’s less appetising Atlanticist birthmarks.

On to the bad news: a motion by tankie survivors, the New Communist Party, which painted Gaddafi’s regime in quite agreeable colours, was carried by an impressive majority. Gaddafi provided a decent living standard for his pool of wage-slaves; he gave generous famine relief to other African countries. You’ve heard the song before, and it would not be worth further reciting, were it not for the fact that the motion also managed to call on that principled anti-imperialist body known as the United Nations to “defend the sovereignty of small nations”.

“There’s been a lot of compromisin’ on the road to my horizon,” sang Glen Campbell in his country pop classic, ‘Rhinestone cowboy’ – words that must ring particularly true if your theoretical road led from studying Marx and Lenin to endorsing Gaddafi and the UN. Is the fawning before Gaddafi’s achievements just plain, second-camp ‘idiot anti-imperialism’? Or have these people actually arrived at the conclusion that the working class will never emancipate itself and can therefore only hope to be policed by benevolent autocrats?

Whatever the case, the NCP was not alone in fostering illusions in bourgeois forces. It was when arguing against the Libya motion that the AWL came into its own, pushing its trademark ‘We don’t call for imperialist intervention, but refuse to condemn it’ line. Sometimes (most times?) Nato invasions create favourable conditions for working class struggle, we were told once again; so who are we to condemn the imperialist bloodbath in Libya? One AWL comrade gave us an allegory on the way: if the police attack fascists at a demonstration, he claimed, we don’t call upon them to stop because, after all, that’s where the repressive state apparatus hits the correct target. According to his twisted logic, it follows that we don’t oppose imperialist mass murder if a dictator is removed in the process.

Labour Party Marxists

Labour Party Marxists submitted a relatively brief motion, which rejected Labour governments that are backed by a minority of the population, loyal to the constitutional order and do not have a “realistic prospect of implementing a full socialist programme”. Such Labour administrations merely pave the way for the next Tory government and further attacks on the working class. The idea that no workers’ party should administer capitalism in the hope of handing down some reforms is, of course, socialist ABC dating back to way before the Second International. Short of being able to implement a “full socialist programme” backed by the majority of the people – which by definition involves breaking up the institutions of the capitalist state – it should continue to act as a party of extreme opposition.

In the run-up to the LRC conference Stuart King, a member of the Permanent Revolution group, referred to the LPM’s motion as a combination of “ultra-left abstentionism and parliamentary cretinism” which fails to address the question of the state and the armed people. I am in no position to tell whether the comrade’s remark was a genuine misunderstanding or a disingenuous put-down, though it is hard to imagine how a rejection of Labour governments that are “loyal to the constitutional order” could have escaped him. A political group which explicitly rejects the constitutional order, you would think, must aim to break up that order: ie, smash the state, including its extra-parliamentary institutions. How else could you interpret that formulation?

Either way, Labour Party Marxists can be grateful to the comrade for providing a test run ahead of the conference, illustrating how someone could ‘misunderstand’ what is being said in the worst possible way. Far be it for me to insist that one should, as Hitler recommended, always tailor one’s speeches to the biggest fool in the hall, but with only three and a half minutes to move a motion – let alone one coming from a new group that not many will have heard of – it is imperative to take great care about one’s choice of words.

Although the LRC has, as we have seen, more than its quota of reformists, Labour Party Marxists might have won over a good section of those present by a more comprehensive motion. A clear statement on the tasks of the working class vanguard operating in and outside the LP – rather than just a list of things that socialist should not do – may have gone a long way to clearly distance the group from Socialist Party of Great Britain-type utopians, who, with pure hearts and arms folded, have been waiting for the masses to vote for socialism for over 100 years.

LPM members appeared acutely aware that they will be judged by what they proceed to do and say in the forthcoming months. In my opinion, this should include an elaboration of their position on the state question. They are on the right track – LPM comrade Jim Moody was elected onto the LCR’s national committee – but they will need to make their positions understood to many, including in two-minute sound bites.

Pedantry aside, the reason why the motion was not carried was, in all likelihood, due to concerns from the right wing of the LRC, not from its left. For all their socialist speechifying, the overriding leitmotif of the organisation is, before everything else, to get a Labour government elected. Despite the historical experience of the 20th century and, it stands to reason, against their better knowledge, the comrades hope that bad Labour governments will be followed by less bad ones, until one day – hey presto – we get a socialist one.

In this gradualist approach, our Permanent Revolution comrade does not differ significantly from the traditionalist Labourites who extolled the virtues of the 1945 Attlee government – you know, the NHS and all that – in speaking against the LPM motion. How much more, one wonders, must the European economy deteriorate to convince these comrades that there is just no point in dreaming of another 1945?

Warning! Attention, everybody! It looks like for the first time since the 80s, London’s ethnic communities must fear for their safety when certain rock bands come to town. As the Love Music, Hate Racism website warns us in bold letters, the Slimelight club in Islington, North London has booked a “set of acts with fascist ties” for October 2011. These include Peter Sotos, who “has written tributes to Joseph Mengele (also known as the Angel of Death in Auschwitz) and whose self-produced fanzine contains references to ‘Nazi triumphs’, with frequent and lurid references to the abuse of children and women.”  Scary stuff…  Read more at Red Mist

Co-written with Claire Fisher, published in Weekly Worker
 

As readers will know, home secretary Theresa May responded to the English Defence League’s intention to hold an anti-Muslim demonstration in Tower Hamlets and the proposed counter-demonstration of the left by banning all marches in five London boroughs in the month of September, including the City of London.” />

As it turned out, the police were unable (or unwilling) to prevent fascists and anti-fascists alike marching. The two contingents marched for just under a mile – simultaneously, but separately; the EDL moving from Aldgate station to London Bridge, and the counter-protest marching from the eastern to the western end of Whitechapel Road, with a section converging at the lower end of Brick Lane, ‘blocking’ the EDL from entering the borough of Tower Hamlets and from harassing its Asian inhabitants.

Arriving at the permitted ‘static protest’ organised by Unite Against Fascism at the corner of Vallance Road and Whitechapel Road, we endured familiar scenes of popular frontist speechifying emanating from a makeshift stage. Amongst the crowd of approximately 1,000 people were comrades from the Socialist Workers Party and smaller left groups, union activists with a variety of banners and a higher than usual presence from the local community – sections of the large Muslim population of Tower Hamlets view the EDL as a real threat.

From the stage, the SWP’s Martin Smith, national coordinator of Love Music, Hate Racism and UAF ‘national officer’ (amongst his many guises), declared that the various meeting points the EDL had tried to organise had been “smashed” by community and union pressure. Attempts to use the Sainsburys car park down the road had been foiled by the UAF and local community groups lobbying the supermarket, while the RMT rail union had closed down Liverpool Street station, another proposed meeting point. Instead, he enthused, the fascists would not be shouting “E-E-EDL!”, but “N-N-NCP!” – a reference to them being holed up in an obscure car park.

The following speeches by others on the left, trade union activists, Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians and ‘community leaders’, reinforced the overall message that the EDL ought to be opposed by all right-minded people. We had already decided we had seen all there was to see when we picked up twitter feeds which located around 1,000 EDL supporters first at Kings Cross, and then, all of a sudden, at Aldgate station. This piece of news prompted us to turn on our heels.

Aldgate station was by this time almost completely closed off and swarming with police. The official figure was 3,000 police out for the event, with the majority of them clearly tailing the EDL rather than the counter-protest. And it soon became clear why – rounding a corner on Minories, next to Aldgate station, we finally saw the EDL protest.

The front of the march consisted of tanked-up football hooligans and lumpen elements violently shoving the coppers forward. It was unclear at that point whether the police were letting them march, or just couldn’t stop them from getting to where they wanted to go. In hindsight, the trajectory of their progress, which led them away from the minaret-strewn Tower Hamlets, must have been a police tactic. As the kettling of the student protests had shown us all, if the cops want you to stay put, they usually see to it you do.

Watching the people who marched behind these trail-blazers from close range, it was interesting to note that many of them appeared placid, walking calmly, with young couples holding hands, smiling and acting in a generally respectful way. Rather than being limited to the petty bourgeois-lumpen bloc of Trotskyist formulae, the EDL seems to have picked up a following of ‘ordinary’ working class people. “Come and join us,” some of them shouted as they saw us watching. According to the SWP’s internal Party Notes, the EDL managed only to attract their “hardcore following”, while “soft supporters” stayed at home (September 5). This is not what it looked like to us.

We noted among the crowd a small young Jewish contingent, an Asian face, Roberta Moore from the EDL’s Zionist ‘division’. Following her came an athletic builder type holding up the national flag of Poland. Rather than being driven by drunken hatred, it appeared to us as if some of these people were here out of a sense of community and solidarity, however distorted. Unity at the expense of an excluded scapegoat, of course, is one of fascism’s oldest tricks – however inclusive the assembly might appear otherwise.

Major scuffles were continuously breaking out at the front, and later we found out that the march resulted in 60 arrests (all from the EDL contingent) – for assault on a police officer, common assault, drunk and disorderly behaviour and affray. At one point, a hooligan contingent surged out of the police ranks, trapping us against a wall for a short time. On Whitechapel Road, we noted a number of incidents, including a line of Asian youths standing silently, being stopped and rigorously searched by police.

Returning to our original starting point in Whitechapel, we found it was now serene, with tell-tale placards strewn on the empty streets, and SWP members languishing outside pubs, congratulating each other on their ‘victory’. We spoke to an SWP organiser who was in dire need of getting some frustrations off his chest. During our absence the numbers of counter-protestors had been bolstered by Asian youths and anarchists, who had collectively defied police orders and started to march west towards Aldgate. The comrade told us he was jubilant when this happened, considering their defiance of the marching ban to be a brave and commendable act. Many rank and file SWP members enthusiastically joined the foray. However, once down the road, the UAF leadership, armed with megaphones, directed the march to turn around, stating that their objective had been achieved.

Socialist Worker Online reported: “There is jubilation on the streets of east London. The EDL have scurried off home, without setting foot in Tower Hamlets. Anti-racists are now holding a ‘victory march’ down Whitechapel Road and returning to their rally point. Together they have filled the width of the road, and are being cheered by onlookers and crowds gathered around the East London Mosque. Within a few minutes they will be back at the rally point at Vallance Road, where their day began.”

The comrade we spoke to, however, was not jubilant, unable to reconcile the “victory” the central committee had proclaimed with the feelings of the people he was marching with. “It’s not right,” he said, “that the CC should turn around a march that was started by the people, and not take their wishes into consideration. There are problems in this organisation.” Later, he wryly added: “I’m not trying to recruit you – don’t worry.” In a real Communist Party, of course, he would be able to address any “problems in the organisation” openly in its press.

Whether this was a “victory” or not is hard to tell. One rather symbolic achievement was that both sides were able to defy Theresa May’s anti-democratic ban on marching, if only for a few hundred metres. Placards were waved and slogans were chanted on both sides, despite police threats that this kind of behaviour would lead to arrest. At the time of writing, however, it is still unclear how exactly the 1,000-strong EDL contingent got from Kings Cross to Tower Hamlets. Were they, after all, able to catch tube trains to Liverpool Street once the RMT’s half-hour closure of the station was over? Or did the Met give them a guided tour from A to B at ground level?

Having seen the EDL in action and up close, it is fair to say that a pitched battle would have ensued had both sides come head to head. The reader may decide who would have emerged victorious out of this particular confrontation. One gleeful consolation we take away with us is the story reported the next day in the press: upon leaving London, one of the EDL’s hired coaches broke down. Pissed to the gills and wanting to get back home, they lost their temper and rioted until the cops arrived and arrested every single one of them. Another classic EDL coup!

We broadly agree with what comrade Jack Conrad said in the CPGB podcast of September 4: in order to counter reactionary politics in the long run, we will need a Communist Party that is capable of mobilising communities, just as the historical CPGB was able to mobilise the working class against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s – not just physically, but politically (cpgb.podbean.com/2011/09/05/edl-protests). The self-evident, practical problem is that such a party does not exist at present, and we cannot pull one out of a hat at short notice.

What would be the alternative in present circumstances? Shall we allow groups such as the EDL to march triumphantly through Asian working class neighbourhoods without any opposition? Fascist groups tend to attract losers, and they do so by projecting an image of strength, unity and power. As evidenced by the precarian working class contingent within the EDL ranks, the army of losers may be growing in these days of economic crisis. As people feel the carpet being pulled from under their feet, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the imaginary ‘Islamic threat’ is really of such importance to some of these confused protestors – or just an excuse to march alongside others.

At the most basic level, the anti-EDL counter-protest was a show of strength and solidarity: those misguided souls who march with the EDL should not be left with the impression that they are marching with the winning team. To counter the EDL politically and win the working class to socialism, however, much more is needed than UAF’s lowest common denominator politics. And what better occasion to interact with the left through our presence and literature than protests such as the one last Saturday? The existing left, we fear, will not come knocking at our doors to enquire about our vision – a CPGB stall would not have been a bad idea at all.

Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School Of Medicine live in London

As we were watching Jello Biafra advocating “non-violent direct action” from the stage of the O2 Academy in Islington, only a couple of miles up the road members of Tottenham’s impoverished community made their frustration felt by rioting and setting the local police station on fire. Two days previously, the 29-year old Mark Duggan, father of five, had been shot by the police. It was the LA riots all over again, with the rightwing papers predictably pouncing on the opportunistic looting that ensued rather than on the murder of the presumed ‘gangster’.

Back in 1982, Biafra dealt with this issue when recording the song ‘Riot‘ as part of the Dead Kennedys’ lyrical and musical peak that was their album Plastic Surgery Disaster. Perceptive as ever, the track acknowledged the great rush that a violent release of accumulated anger gives you, while at the same time warning that spontaneous rioting would only “play right into their [the state’s] hands”. Tonight, after over thirty years of politically aware punk, hardcore, and spoken word, Biafra took the stage with his new band, the Guantanamo School of Medicine, to seamlessly continue his mission: play faster and harder than most while attempting to raise the crowd’s political awareness in a sharp and engaging fashion.

Biafra himself might not have approved of the “Jello, Jello!” chants that heralded the band’s entrance, but even this author must admit to have felt somewhat starstruck. Here was a man who had cut through the more or less studied idiocy that characterised a lot of hardcore punk in the 1980s. When playing with the thuggish Exploited at the height of their popularity, he had the guts to address the assembled faithful, the ‘Exploited Barmy Army’, with the words: “The Exploited think they hate the police, but I think the Exploited are the police!”. But the great thing about him was that that he did not give a damn about the trendy left’s anti-’rockism’ either. In the 90s, he came out with lines such as “My new project Lard is meant to show the alternative rock wimps how it’s done properly”.

He is still showing them how it’s done properly, if only in terms of sheer power. Gone are the days when he brought something new to the table with every project: from his collaboration with proto-math-core legends Nomeansno through to his album with redneck renegade Mojo Nixon, Biafra was always good for a surprise, even if that willingness to experiment earned him a kicking from idiot punks on occasion ^[i]. The latter would have no ideological issues with the Guantanamo School of Medicine, which comes off like a cross between Dead Kennedys – effect-laden surf guitars and all – and a less robo-core version of Lard.

The opening tune ‘John Dillinger’ was new but sounded instantly familiar, as if it were a distinct teenagehood favourite of mine. Surprising was only the fact that Biafra chose to reprise plenty of actual Dead Kennedys classics, which would have been unfathomable some 15 years ago. No doubt he did the same at the Rebellion 2011 festival in Blackpool a couple of days later, where he was part of the kind of punk nostalgia package that he used to despise. Tonight’s audience, however, couldn’t have been more grateful and, as befits the less atavistic end of the hardcore spectrum, thanked it with enthusiastic but considerate mind-the-twiglets slam dancing.

At 15, I thought the Dead Kennedys were the height of political radicalism. Tonight, I was astonished how comparatively tame and Naomi-Kleinish Jello’s stage banter was. A Green Party activist, Jello is not only morelaissez-faire than most punks will remember, but also profoundly American in his nostalgia for a non-corporate early capitalism. The pioneer mythology that he and many of his contemporaries adhere to found expression not least in the 1980s explosion of DIY hardcore labels such as Black Flag’s SST Records and Jello’s own Alternative Tentacles. The fact the Levi’s corporation ended up using ’Holiday in Cambodia’ to advertise their sweatshop products did not dispel his beliefs in a ‘pure’ petty capitalism any more than his former bandmates dragging him to court over royalties.

“Anarchy sounds good to me, but then again who’d fix the sewers”, sang Jello as early as 1986 in the DKs song ‘Where Do Ya Draw The Line’, and tonight he drew the line at “radical activists who wear ideological blinders”, i.e. those to the left of himself and the likes of UK Uncut, whose virtues he extolled not once but twice during the gig. Biafra’s liberal finger-wagging would be pardonable if he didn’t come out with pompously presented yet wholly banal observations elsewhere. A topical number titled ‘New Feudalism’ raised awareness of the ‘novel’ phenomenon of globalisation, which readers might remember from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848. “Nations are now corporate colonies”, the hardcore veteran howled to the backdrop of his raging troupe. “This isn’t capitalism”, he offered furthermore, “it’s feudalism”. Er… not really, Jello. You ought to take off your ideological blinders and read some Lenin.^[ii]

Like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, Jello Biafra is searching for the real America – an America whose free market doesn’t make people slaves. One wants to remind him of his own song ‘Nostalgia For An Age That Never Existed‘. For although he spent the best part of the last decade recording songs against the ‘war on terror’, Biafra is still reluctant to connect the dots and consistently denounce the economic system that necessitates such policies in the first place. Instead, he tilts at mere pieces of the puzzle, with personal greed, racism, war-mongering Republicans, and evil corporations featuring prominently in his work. He may have abandoned the hope he had initially placed in ‘Mr Hopey Changey’^[iii] – hence the excellent album title The Audacity of Hype – but at times, Jello’s brand of radical liberalism still makes him look like an ass. “Try not to work for corporations”, the punk star asked us from the stage of the O2 owned venue. Tell that to the McDonald’s staff next door.

At his best, the man still possesses a sharpness that remains unsurpassed in punk rock, and – let’s be honest – we yet have to see a Marxist artist who matches his dark sense of humour. The latest Guantanamos release,Enhanced Methods Of Questoning, might suffer from largely giving us just what we would expect from Biafra, but it does hit home with ‘Metamorphosis Exploration On Deviation Street Jam’, a psychedelic Turbonegro-meets-The Doors ego trip on par with ‘Full Metal Jackoff’.

The same goes for ‘I Won’t Give Up’, the extended outro which drew  to a close a show so engaging, we hadn’t even thought about topping up our depleted pints after the first song. A subdued, personal number to wave your lighters to, it was the closest that Biafra had ever come to a Bruce Springsteen moment: all man of the people, he encouraged us to persist with whatever struggle we had chosen; to give up, as he repeated ad infinitum, was “not an option”. Biafra’s universal message seemed to go out to the people of Tottenham as much as to us commies, and our hearts thus warmed we descended into the night.

[i] as happened on 7^th May1994 at Berkeley’s famous Gilman Street punk club

Published in Weekly Worker, 11th August 2011

On Sunday afternoon, it looked as if the police had been instructed to use a new tactic to contain the public anger: grin. The area around Tottenham police station, which had been subject to severe rioting the previous night, was cordoned off by the boys and girls in blue, each of them sporting an unpersuasive, frozen smile.” /> Gathering in front of the police line were those who have not got much to smile about these days: the overwhelmingly working class denizens of the impoverished north London neighbourhood, which had seen its last major riot during Thatcher’s reign in 1985.

Emotions ran high, as people variously attempted to gather the latest news or simply express their feelings to the somewhat nervous coppers: “Mark Duggan was unarmed,” shouted one voice. “He was handcuffed when they shot him,” claimed another. A woman of around 20 forcefully walked towards the police line. Her flaming eyes would have been enough to make anyone step aside, but she drove the point home by pointing her index and middle fingers at the bobbies and imitating shooting noises. Not the most prudent gesture perhaps, but what might have earned her a truncheon blow under normal circumstances was merely met with more forced smiling.

“Murderers! You’ve shot a young father dead,” the woman shouted, following the accusation with assorted expletives. As she walked off, two officers turned to each other and chuckled. You would have thought that homicide is not exactly a laughing matter, especially when you consider that 333 people have died under British police custody since 1998 and not a single police officer has been successfully prosecuted. But then that’s just human defence mechanisms for you.

The more one listened to the crowd, the clearer it became that this was not merely about one particular incident. “All of this could have been prevented if someone had come out of that police station to talk to these people,” one bystander argued, “but they just went: ‘No, these are all gangsters and they can’t be talked to’. You get a sense of how they view people in this neighbourhood.” And, as one of many heated debates turned to the possibility of the deceased Mark Duggan being a drug-dealer, somebody argued: “But why are they dealing with drugs? Because you can make a grand a month, so why would you want to slave at McDonald’s even if you got the chance to?”

Another bystander suggested that “you can see it in The wire all the time: the guys on the top of the tree are all white, and the black dealers are just their foot-soldiers”. But apart from that there was encouragingly little black-versus-white rhetoric. Before we knew, there was enough talk of local service cuts to fill an entire issue of The Socialist, and even bankers’ bonuses entered the conversation. An elderly woman summed it all up when lamenting that “the poor get poorer and the rich get richer – it’s been going on for many years, but it’s all getting worse now”.

We spoke to locals to get an idea of the mood on the day after the initial riots and were confronted with many examples of what might be called mixed consciousness. Despite the fact that the government and police were viewed in a rather negative light and the austerity programme was identified as deepening social tensions by many, the overwhelming belief was that ‘they’ – the professional politicians – should do a better job.

Could you sum up what has been happening here over the past few days?

Faisal: On Thursday, a guy called Mark Duggan got shot about two minutes walk from here. Yesterday around 6pm there was a protest outside the police station, and it seems that it has escalated into pretty much a full-scale riot.

Derek: A man was shot in Tottenham Hale on Thursday, and yesterday people were looking for answers – they wanted to know why. Apparently there were two or three hundred who came to the police station hoping to get some answers from the police, but they didn’t get any. So then things just got out of hand.

Joy: My condolences go to the parents of who this happened to because I know what they are feeling now. We lost families in the same situation in Harlesden police station in 2007, and nothing came of it. The police cannot carry on like this. What they have done by batoning the girl outside the police station is wrong. They should have had the sense when the family turned up there to speak to them and sort out this matter in the right way. They just ignored the people and didn’t want to come out of the station.

Do you think it’s understandable that people are so angry?

Faisal: I can understand it, but I don’t think it justifies all the rioting, which in my view was opportunistic. You’ll always have an element that will look to kick things off, and then everybody else is destroying things.

Derek: I’m convinced that the people who came to the police station didn’t want any violence. But then people came from Hackney and other areas to join the gangs and start looting and destroying shops. No-one condones what they have done – I think it was very wrong. There are things that need to be investigated, and it needs time until we hear the real truth about what happened. If people jump to conclusions and take the law into their own hands, it is very wrong.

But, then again, people were angry because the police were not listening. If you simply ignore 200-300 people, I think tempers will run high.

Joy: I think what happened yesterday is understandable. It’s time that we start putting our foot down now and stand up to these police here. They’re not doing their job right. They’re in these uniforms to protect their state and their own selves, not the public. People are angry because of what happened on Thursday, but they are also angry about many things that have happened in the past and that nothing has been done about. So if the law won’t take it in hand, the public will take it in their own hands.

Some media were quick to describe the man who was shot as a ‘gangster’ before any evidence was produced. What do you think about that?

Faisal: The way I see it – if he was found with a gun … no-one carries a gun for no reason, but I don’t know the facts.

Derek: See, this is what happens when you start to put people in boxes. Most of the time, when anything happens in this neighbourhood – in the north London ghettos, if you like – then we quickly get stereotyped. It’s all of us, you know, we’re all gangsters and we’re all bad people.

Joy: I don’t think the man was a gangster. I don’t think the guy had any gun with him. I think the police just wanted something to do on that day, so they just went around terrorising people. Lots of persons are out on the street, lads are walking and not doing anything, and they come and terrorise them.

Do you think that people here have been angry for a long time – with the government or aggressive police presence?

Faisal: I don’t think it goes that far. I think the peaceful protestors were angry at the Mark Duggan situation. If you separate that from the rioters, who were basically just seizing on the opportunity – you know, ‘Nothing else to do, everybody else is doing it, so let’s join in’ – then you can understand it. There is no political motive behind the riots. It’s just young kids who’ll see other young people doing it, so they’ll get involved.

In Wood Green there was looting that started at 2 or 3 in the morning. Police didn’t turn up before 6am, so they had pretty much free reign to do whatever they wanted. In terms of police presence, they have probably adopted a stance of ‘Let’s just keep out of view in light of what happened with Mark Duggan’.

Derek: I would say that it’s mainly the cuts that have caused the people in this neighbourhood very difficult times. So many things have been taken away because of the cuts, and I think that’s what’s still causing such a difficult situation here.

And, of course, it affects young people a lot: I know for a fact that most young people here are not working because opportunities have become very low in this neighbourhood, and it’s getting worse. All these issues need to be looked at and dealt with if you want to solve this problem. So many youth clubs and youth centres have been taken away because of the cuts, and I think this contributes to this sort of unpleasantness.

One would hope that something meaningful will come out of the disaster, that they will start doing something about it. I hope that this will not become like Brixton in 1981, but I’ve been reading on Facebook and on Twitter that they are willing to take it further. I hope it will end at this, though, because it’s very unpleasant.

We know that there needs to be cuts, but the way they are cutting it, that’s the danger – and I think this is something that has to be discussed. When the riot started, people were looting shops for food! And that should take us to a different perspective.

Joy: I think this will build up and intensify. Because of what has happened, people will not back down until justice is taken. And I think justice should be taken with the police. Give the parents justice – I think they deserve that much. And, yes, there has been a more aggressive police presence here since Cameron came in. Cameron might want to do something about this because what he is doing is making matters worse.

 “Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to the local police” – that is what the good citizens of Westminster were being urged in a notice recently issued by the Metropolitan Police. After all, they are told, “anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful”. Yes, that’s right – one year into the coalition government and several months into the Con-Dem austerity programme, the cops have staged their first clumsy attempts at neo-McCarthyism.

However, the Met’s ‘counter-terrorist focus desk’ got more than it bargained for: anarchists bombarded it with, quite literally, “any information” relating to their political philosophy – including leaflets, pamphlets and printouts from Wikipedia.

Following an article in The Guardian, the humiliated thought police retracted the “unfortunate wording” – anarchism is now deemed a “legitimate political view” – but they did not go so far as to amend the basic thrust of their original notice, urging aspiring block wardens to grass on those who may have “caused criminal damage to business premises and government buildings in Westminster” on March 26 2011.

Much though the Met’s ham-fisted appeal to betray thy neighbour may have prompted ridicule among Londoners, the matter should not be taken too lightly. Calls for increased powers to supervise whoever the state considers ‘extremist’ are crescendoing all over Europe these days, with the bourgeois right predictably exploiting Anders Breivik’s massacre in Norway for its own ends.

In contrast to anarchists, we communists identify the state as an outgrowth of class society, not the other way round. That said, we cannot think of anything more “legitimate” than the desire to abolish the “undesirable” and “harmful” capitalist state – and we are prepared to defend any section of the left against its tentacles.

I spoke to Donnacha DeLong, anarchist and new president of the National Union of Journalists, who had just returned from a picket line at BBC studios.

How seriously do you take the ‘anarchist scare’ incident – is this the prelude to something more sinister or just a few clueless cops churning out a leaflet that barely anyone reads?

I think it reveals a level of ignorance in the police that’s unsurprising, but worrying. The police have been acting for years as a political force – since the miners’ strike and, in terms of the Met, the Wapping dispute. The right to freedom of assembly has been violated again and again, so it’s a short step from saying that you’re not allowed to do something to saying that you’re not even allowed to think it and freedom of opinion disappears as well. It didn’t start with anarchists: Muslims have seen the criminalisation of much of their community before this – not just Islamists, but a variety of political activity by people who happen to be Muslim: eg, the sentences following the arrests at the Gaza demo last year.

How did anarchists react to the news, and why do you think the Met’s statement was retracted so swiftly?

Social media exploded with this story as soon as it was confirmed. It started circulating on Twitter, I think, on Saturday night, and by Sunday it was all over Twitter and Facebook. Anarchist groups like the Solidarity Federation and Alarm [All-London Anarchist Revolutionary Movement] have put structures in place to deal with the media and that showed through strong and accurate quotes from the former in The Guardian and, fairly surprisingly, the latter in the Daily Mail.

As to why it was retracted so quickly, I can only guess the law of unintended consequences came into effect – they didn’t realise how quickly this would spread and what kind of reaction there would be. A front-page story in The Guardian was undoubtedly unexpected. Also, when you ask for “any information relating to anarchists”, there are people who are only too happy to cooperate. I’m guessing a lot of people had very full inboxes on Monday morning – there’s a lot of information available about anarchists.

Anarchists are often associated with the black bloc, whose spontaneous actions are regarded as merely notoriety-seeking and undemocratic by the bulk of the labour movement: mass protests are derailed and broken up because of the actions of a tiny minority. Is this a misleading stereotype?

Yes, any generalisation based on the activities of an obvious few is a stereotype. There are hundreds, if not thousands, more anarchists in the UK who are active in a variety of different ways who never mask up and never smash windows or anything else. Anarchism is a very broad movement, and includes ideas drawn from pacifist Christians, like Tolstoy, as much as insurrectionists like Bakunin.

I’d also quibble with the idea that black bloc actions derail mass protests – that didn’t happen on March 26, for example: the main march walked all the way from A to B and then went home. The actions of others had minimal impact on the march itself. Other mass protests, like the G20 protests in 2009, were largely organised by anarchist groups.

I neither support nor condemn the actions of the black bloc – it’s not my chosen form of activism, but it’s not up to me to criticise the actions of others in the movement.

The ‘circle-A’ has long become a part of pop culture and seems almost cuddly these days. How likely is it that a moral panic can be created by evoking an ‘anarchist threat’ in 2011?

I think states have long had difficulty maintaining anti-anarchist panics. They’ve tried; probably the earliest one specifically about anarchists was around the Haymarket affair in the US in 1886. There were quite a few around the wave of assassinations at the turn of the 19th century – particularly the assassination of US president William McKinley in 1901.

However, to maintain an anti-anarchist panic requires a high level of disinformation that’s difficult to keep up. The fundamental idea of anarchism – that people should be free to control their own lives without interference – is an attractive one. The more common reaction is one of pessimism – ‘It’s a nice idea, but it’s never going to happen’ – which hardly sustains a moral panic …

Also, the Met are making a fundamental mistake. This island has a long and proud tradition of freedom of speech and thought that goes back to the origins of the modern British state. People will accept controls on actions, but start trying to criminalise ideas and you’ll run into opposition – not just from anarchists, but from a broader base of opinions.

Following the massacre in Norway you tweeted: “Finally the Met’s national domestic extremism unit starts looking at real extremists”. Why do you welcome measures which are bound to be directed against us in the end?

I didn’t – these measures have been used against us for years. The unit has existed for quite a while and has, up to this point, focused far too much on animal rights, environmentalist, other leftwing protestors and journalists. The comedian Mark Thomas was on their domestic extremist spotter card, and every protestor in recent years will be aware of the Forward Intelligence Team and their cameras.

The reality is that the concern of the forces of the state is, and always has been, more focused on protecting property than on protecting people. Thus, protestors who attack commercial property or disrupt the normal functioning of the capitalist economy are seen as dangerous enemies of the state. On the other hand, groups like the English Defence League have largely slipped under the radar because they march in relatively unimportant places from an economic point of view and, when they attack property, it’s small, independently owned shops and the like that are not important in the grand scheme of things. The fact that they present a serious danger to people doesn’t seem to have mattered up to this point.

I don’t support the measures. I think the national domestic extremism unit is dangerous, but I’m just glad that, if it does exist, it focuses on an organisation that is actually posing a threat to innocent people.

Marxists and anarchists have some irreconcilable political differences. However, if the capitalist state comes for the anarchists, we will defend you unconditionally. Will you do the same for us?

Absolutely. Any attempt to criminalise ideas should be resisted. What’s needed now is greater cooperation and organisation between all groups opposed to the current government. I’m under no illusions that we’re in a pre-revolutionary situation and we’ll either get a socialist state or no state at all in the next few years, but I do think it’s conceivable that if we organise together in our local communities, cooperate to take the trade union movement back to where it was in the 70s and build a mass movement to disrupt the normal functioning of this country, we could topple this government.

I think the Met have given anarchists a great opportunity to engage the public and show people what anarchism is really about.

“Because sex workers shouldn’t be dead to be on film”, argued the promo blurb for London’s first Sex Worker Film Festival. And who aside from Henry of Portrait of a Serial Killer could disagree? Organised by the Sex Worker Open University, a “grassroots collective” of sex workers, academics and activists, the declared goal was to challenge the stereotypical representations of strippers and hookers as  vulnerable “fallen angels” or “shallow, manipulative and without ethics”… Read more at Red Mist

“Rallies are boring,” said one activist characteristically at the ‘open organising assembly for June 30 strikes’ in central London. The May 23 meeting may have been attended by more than 100 activists from various tendencies, but it was certainly decentralised direct action groups such as UK Uncut that set the tone. Particularly visible in recent months through their spectacular occupations of banks, Topshop outlets and the like, the group is a pole of attraction to the freshly radicalised, and there can be little doubt that many of them will stick around for a while.

“One of the most respectful, dynamic and inspirational meetings in a long time” is how one activist described the meeting in retrospect. This was true in that the room was buzzing with rapid-fire ideas, ‘jazz hands of agreement’, and a consensus-driven, Zabriskie point-style atmosphere very much to the taste of the largely student crowd (as well as the odd survivor from the class of 1968). It was also true that there was no sectarian squabbling between the various tendencies, the implicit notion being that anarchists, communists, socialists and the less ideologically solid might cooperate as long as we keep our politics to ourselves and stick to the lowest common denominator of opposing the cuts.^[1]

Consequently, members of groups such as the Socialist Workers Party were careful not to push their agenda too aggressively, while others urged trespassers not to make it “too political”. The most frenetic eruptions of ‘jazz hands’, meanwhile, were reserved for a small handful of Spanish students who introduced themselves as London representatives of the Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) movement, sending some of those present into what appeared like a state of rapture. Inspired by the Arab spring, the movement has been staging permanent occupations of central squares in all major Spanish cities in the months leading up to the regional and local elections. Following their calls to “bring Egypt to London” earlier this year, groups such as Counterfire and the SWP have already begun placing their bets on this new social movement: “Bring the spirit of Spain to the streets of Britain,” exhorted Socialist Worker,^[2] while ‘Real Democracy’ spin-off groups have been forming everywhere from France to Greece.

Echoing proclamations on Democracia Real Ya’s various websites and blogs, the Spanish students at the May 23 meeting made a point of declaring themselves to be a “totally non-violent” as well as “non-political” group. The latter is, to some extent, analogous to the attempts of the ‘open organising assembly’ hosts to preserve ‘unity’ by suppressing political differences. More crucially, though, it is the expression of a generation’s disenchantment with electoral politics – particularly in a country where the centre-left PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) and trade union bureaucrats have been either carrying through or in effect excusing the savage austerity programme. Translate this disenchantment into a generalised anti-political, anti-party stance, and you might just arrive at the notion that only a broad social movement operating at street level, uncontaminated by ‘ideologies’, might effect change. How exactly that will happen, nobody is sure.

‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it: I wanna protest peacefully’, then, is how a cynic might sum up the ‘spirit of Spain’ in a song – perhaps ending on the chorus, ‘… ’cause I wanna be democracy’. The neurotically contrarian Spiked magazine poured nothing but scorn on the Spanish protestors, denouncing them as essentially apolitical kids who happen to enjoy a night out on the square. Much though the article smacked of the author’s indignation at the idea that the masses might start a protest movement without asking him for permission, he certainly had a few points, however. It is true that a ‘non-political’ or ‘anti-political’ stance will, sooner or later, lead any movement down a blind alley; instead of suppressing politics for the sake of unity at any cost, they should be brought out in the open, so that an effective strategy might be formulated.

It is not the job of communists, however, to grumpily stand on the sidelines or, worse still, attempt to “subsume or subdue”^[3]spontaneous struggles, however theoretically naive they may initially appear. An elemental, vaguely anti-capitalist outbreak of anger at a bourgeois establishment that presently condemns more than 21% of the Spanish population to unemployment, the Real Democracy movement is a justified and positive development.

Moreover, one would have to be completely blinded by dogmatism not to appreciate the high level of organisation and cooperation on display at Madrid’s Plaza del Sol. From communal cooking and educational/debating groups and spontaneously established free public libraries, the scenario portrays an intuitive communism wholly at odds with what we are being told all our lives: that human nature is intrinsically selfish and territorial. Likewise, the fact that the word ‘democracy’ is put up for open-ended debate in a nominally democratic western hemisphere is a welcome step forward – particularly so in a climate in which imperialism is scrambling to import its own idea of ‘democracy’ into the rapidly changing Arab world.

What communists can offer such spontaneous movements is a coherent theoretical outlook to “give voice to their various concerns within the framework of a comprehensive theory”, as Karl Kautsky referred to Marx’s work in the First International – even if that entails facing the same difficulties that the early Marxians confronted and weeding out the same petty bourgeois ideas and non-solutions all over again. After all, our goal is to make the dream enacted in the Plaza del Sol become reality and not just an ephemeral, utopian adventure.

As the history of 20th and early 21st century anti-capitalist movements demonstrates, the same old ideas tend to reappear again and again in new guises, inevitably condemning their followers to repeat the mistakes that had rendered their predecessors politically impotent first time around.^[4]
Nowhere is this truer than with cross-class, politically diverse ‘social movements’ and tendencies that advocate political abstentionism.^[5] In my interview below, it is apparent that a political party which provides the collective memory of the class is indispensable if we do not wish to get caught up in perfectly avoidable dead ends. For the left, to uncritically herald every new movement as ‘showing the way’ or to pander to an anti-political consensus in the hope of signing up a few dozen recruits is irresponsible and short-sighted – to critically engage with these movements, on the other hand, is imperative.

On the weekend of May 28, just a week after the conservative Partido Popular’s victory in the local elections, I visited some 30 activists at the Spanish embassy in Knightsbridge, where they had been camping in solidarity with the protests in their native country. They referred me to Esther, who acts as the London-based press spokesperson for Democracia Real Ya. Together with a chap simply known as Hugo, Esther was recently touted by the Education Activist Network as one of the “main activists”^[6] in what by and large appears to be a structureless movement.

I interviewed Esther the following day:

Can you tell us what you’re doing here?

We’ve been gathering in front of the Spanish embassy since May 15. For this weekend, we have organised a lot of camp activities and various workshops on democracy. We have also held general assemblies to decide where our movement is going and what steps to take next.

Have you had any hassle from the police?

On the first day the ambassador called the police, but we’ve been demonstrating peacefully and all they did was ask us how long we would be staying. They were always helpful – one morning at six o’clock whilst we were sleeping it started to rain, so they asked us if we’d like any hot water. So, no, there have been no problems at all.

Could you briefly sum up what Democracia Real Ya is all about?

There is demonstrably a failure in the political and economic status quo, so we are demanding a complete change in the democratic system and in the financial system. We are protesting against the unjust policies of the politicians and bankers that have led to a catastrophic situation.

How did it all start – did your movement arise spontaneously or was there a lot of planning beforehand?

Originally there were two protest movements that started in several Spanish cities in mid-February. One of them was called Estado del Malestar, which means something like ‘badfare state’, the opposite of ‘welfare state’; the other one was called Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth Without Future). Together, these two movements began organising flashmobs and awareness drives in the main town squares of Spain.

They decided to call for a big demonstration on May 15, just one week before the general election. It was much larger than anticipated and people thought spontaneously: ‘There are so many of us here. We have to make the most of it while we’re still awake. We cannot just leave the square now, so let’s set up camp and talk.’ So the original plan was just to hold a protest on the 15th, but the decision to camp in the square arose spontaneously. This was the beginning of Democracia Real Ya.

How did the Spanish media react? Are you getting any sympathetic press?

There are many different reactions. There is one newspaper that portrays the movement in a realistic way, without distorting anything. The Spanish state media, equivalent to the BBC, hardly talk about us at all. And the far-right TV channels, such as Intereconomia TV, are just terrible. They simply portray us as hippies that enjoy gathering and camping in the street.

Reading through Democracy Real Ya leaflets, websites and blogs, I have noticed that you are making a point of being ‘non-political’. But how can a protest movement against the political and economic status quo be ‘non-political’?

We are political in the sense that we are making political demands, but we are non-political in the sense that some of us have very well-defined political ideologies, while others don’t have them at all. The main thing that has brought us together is the economic situation, especially rising unemployment. We are a generation that is very well educated, but is forced to emigrate because we don’t see a future in Spain. Sometimes we do focus on particular political issues and discuss them: for example, ‘What kind of state do we want?’ or ‘Do we want a republic or a monarchy?’ and so on.

One of your websites says that you have some people in your movement who would consider themselves progressive, while others would self-describe as ‘conservative’. How does that work? To be conservative means wanting to preserve the status quo that you say you oppose.

To be honest, I cannot speak in the name of the whole movement. Personally, I have a very well defined political point of view, but I can’t speak for everybody else. I can say, however, that we do work with movements who organise separately from ourselves: for example, yesterday we participated in the UK Uncut action.

Since you mention that, it seems that movements such as yours and UK Uncut are almost exclusively street-based, with a heavy emphasis on direct action and a certain level of distrust towards political organisations. But our opponents own media empires and can write whatever they want about us; they own the banks and industries; they have people in parliament and in the courts; and if it comes to the crunch they have a police force and the military at their disposal. Won’t it take a highly sophisticated political organisation, operating at all levels, to really challenge them?

Actually, right now a people’s assembly movement exists which truly is a movement of the people. We don’t want to form a political party because of the mixture of political views within it. There are other groups in countries such as France, Greece and Portugal who have the same demands as us and with whom we are coordinating our actions internationally. We have foreign affairs sections in all of our groups. As for media representation, we prefer to pass information directly to each other via web-based social networks – Facebook, Twitter and so on – because we don’t want anybody to manipulate our information. In the media, you will always have a little bit of manipulation.

Many say that the student protests, UK Uncut and Democracy Real Ya resemble the student movement of 1968. Now 1968 must have been a very exciting time and left a cultural imprint, but it posed no effective challenge to the political and economic power structures. It all just faded out.

Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I think – or I hope – that this is going to take us somewhere. We’re not just students; there are all kinds of people in Democracy Real Ya. We will organise under our own political agenda until next year’s general elections. We are going to ask solicitors for their advice on using the law to eventually change the constitution. These are only ideas and drafts, but during the summer they will all have to be decided and voted upon. We will then present all our demands to the politicians; we really hope to make changes before the next general election.

In your manifesto you say, “The political class isn’t even listening to us.” But if they started to listen to your demands and agreed to take a hard line on corruption, tackle unemployment and even think about proportional representation, would that be enough?

We don’t want promises: we want facts. We have heard many, many promises, and we are fed up with them. So until we see the facts we will continue. We want this movement with all its grassroots proposals and demands to be active in creating a new constitution. The existing constitution was approved in 1977 – two years after Franco died – in a very unstable environment. Because there was the fear of a coup by the far right at the time, it was an extremely conservative constitution that didn’t change the existing system that much.

But surely changing the constitution requires real political organisation and a political party?

It doesn’t necessarily need to be a political party. It can be a big movement that decides in assemblies, which is a totally different concept. We are not talking about trade unions or political parties here. We are talking about something completely new: people’s assemblies.

There have been a lot of big social movements that were insufficient to change things. Take the massive anti-Iraq war movement in 2003: the war went ahead anyway. There were also ‘people’s assemblies’ at the time, not to mention the ‘non-political’ European and World Social Forums, which didn’t go anywhere.

There are so many indigenous and environmentalist people’s assembly movements in Latin America. That’s the way they have been organising all the time. If it works in Latin America, why shouldn’t it work here?

As for the Iraq war, the vast majority of the Spanish population were against it. Some conservative politicians even left the Partido Popular when it decided that Spain should join the war effort. They said, you are not listening to the people; nobody wants to go to Iraq but you. Back then, the Socialist Party, which was the main opposition party at the time, was at the head of the anti-war demonstrations, but, now that they are in power, they are the ones selling weapons to Africa. They were only against the Iraq war because it was convenient for them at the time.

What about the other left parties in Spain, such as the ex-communist United Left?

Yes, there is Izquierda Unida and also the new Izquierda Anticapitalista, the ‘Anti-Capitalist Left’ party.

How many people are protesting in Spain right now?

In Barcelona and Madrid alone there have been 25,000.^[7]

If all these activists were organised in a single party, they could pose a serious political challenge.

But that’s impossible because politically we’re so diverse. Initially at the Madrid assembly many demands were made. What they were trying to do was reach an agreement on everything. So what came out of that assembly were the four demands that you’ve read. And unfortunately, they’re really nothing – they’re so vague that it’s almost impossible for anybody to disagree with them: separation of powers, fighting corruption, and so on. They don’t commit you to anything …

So, speaking for yourself, what is your end goal? Do you want to reform the system and commit the economic and political elites to more fairness and transparency? Or do you want to do away with these elites and the system altogether?

Yes, of course I want a different system. If we only repair things here and there, that’s not going to change much. We’ve seen that this system has failed, so we can’t just change a few policies: we need a real revolutionary change. And actually I want to highlight that at a Spanish level we can only change very little. We have to do it at a European level, because a lot of economic policies come from the European Union. And what’s even more important: we have to abolish and change institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

I agree with you. Many left organisations think that withdrawing from the EU is the solution. But nationalism is an illusion.

Yes, I don’t think it’s good to isolate yourself. The best thing to do is to join forces internationally and, once we have identified who the enemy is, fight him together.

Well, reading through your manifesto,  it seems you have already identified the enemy. Phrases like ‘‘the dictatorship of the major economic powers through the main political parties” and “an obsolete and unnatural economic model” surely refer to the capitalist system?

I can only answer this in personal capacity, not on behalf of the movement. You know what I’m really for? I’m for downshifting. Everybody should work less hours so there are jobs for everybody and at the same time consume less and less every day. Have you read Serge Latouche? He’s the main economist for this theory, and he wants us to return to a much more basic and easy way of life that is more in contact with nature.

This sounds like he wants us to return to a pre-capitalist or early capitalist stage rather than move beyond capitalism.

Oh no, it’s a system of sharing everything together. Capitalism promotes working as much as you can so you can own as much as you can, so these demands run contrary to capitalism.

You make a point of being a non-violent movement. Is that a moral principle or a tactical choice?

It’s a choice, because violence always generates more violence. Personally, I completely reject violence as a matter of principle because I think that we should not make the same mistakes that the governments that use violence against us are making. We have endless debates about violence in the movement, though, and there are many different views on that. Therefore, I would rather not speak on everybody else’s behalf.

It’s important to us communists that democracy has class content. Is class something that you talk about in the movement – do you want all classes to cooperate, or do you have a class agenda?

We want to work as people with no differences between us. The people – that’s everybody.

Who or what is your biggest inspiration – any historical figures or events?

When I was volunteering for a human rights organisation in Mexico, I met an environmentalist activist who I thought was amazing. She is not famous or anything, but she and some other activists I worked with have been such an inspiration to me. I don’t admire any historic figure in particular – there are just so many people that have made a great contribution to the world … maybe the Spanish republicans who had to flee the country in Franco’s time and who ended up in Nazi concentration camps in France.

Do you see any similarities between Democracy Real Ya and the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s?

Actually, I see a lot of similarities between now and the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic. Before the elections, people started making demands and there was a lot of discontent among the population – so it was quite a similar moment.

One of your demands is for “real separation of powers”. Could you clarify what you mean by that?

You have got the executive, the legislative and the judiciary power. But in Spain the executive is really mixed with the judiciary because it’s the government that appoints and employs some of the judges. The executive overlaps with the other two powers and we want them to be totally independent. We don’t want the executive to control all the powers.

Do you see any dangers in the concept of the separation of powers? Imagine, for example, a political party that enjoys majority support and wants to pass a law for shorter working hours. If I was the CEO of Vodafone, I might make a small donation to my friends in the judiciary, who would then veto the law as unconstitutional interference with free enterprise.

But it is idealistic to think this will happen. In truth, if all the powers are represented by the same political party or one assembly, that’s too dangerous. Don’t you see more danger in that, when the ruling party can do whatever it wants because there’s a conjuncture of all powers in one body?

It couldn’t necessarily do what it wanted if the political representatives were recallable by the people at any time. But your manifesto calls for an “ethical revolution” – what would that entail?

An ethical revolution is a revolution of the mind. We have to implement democratic principles in people’s minds because most of them have never been at an assembly in their lives. They have never thought about being the sovereigns of their future. It is very important that we educate ourselves about different political systems and learn about politics.

I’ve noticed that you use ‘jazz hands of agreement’ at assemblies a lot. Does that mean you favour consensus decision-making?^[8]

My group only just started calling assemblies two weeks ago and for the moment we are implementing the decisions of the majority. We only use the ‘jazz hands’ motion to imply agreement, and we will actually be having workshops on consensus and majority votes, where we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both. We haven’t yet decided which decision-making process we will use in the future.

Who wrote your manifesto?

The people at the assembly in Madrid wrote it.

Could you tell us something about the process by which a few thousand people create a document?

So far, it has always depended on the kind of decision that needed to be made. They have worked in little groups, each of which has a spokesperson. Then the speakers for the different groups meet up and put together all the decisions that the different groups had arrived at. Or, alternatively, everybody who was there makes decisions together. This will actually be the next step of our movement – to decide for which occasions we will work in little groups and for which we will take decisions as a whole.

Where is Democracia Real Ya heading?

So far, we have an agenda until the next general election. Generally speaking, our movement is only really starting now, but it has to continue until we achieve real change. I think it’s a slow process where things have to be done properly in order to be consistent. If you try to move too fast the movement might not last that long. That’s why we want to go little by little, step by step … but consistently.

We haven’t yet discussed what political direction we want to take, and I don’t think this is something that will be discussed any time soon. In the long term … maybe.

Notes

1. Though certainly more creative in their application of the direct action credo than the po-faced poseurs of the anarchist black bloc, the commendable militancy of groups such as UK Uncut is not necessarily matched in radicalism by the political content of their actions. The austerity measures are “bad for economic growth”, we are told on the UK Uncut website. UK Uncut essentially limits its demands to taxing the living daylights out of banks and cracking down on corporate tax-dodging.
   The logical political conclusion to this approach is to call for a strongman centre-left government enforcing law and order against the ‘worst’ capitalists: ie, the kind of government that is the stuff of old Labour dreams. But can we realistically hope for any government, let alone the Miliband-led Labour government that would inevitably follow on the heels of a successful general strike, to implement such measures as long as capitalism exists? Was this, in fact, even the case in the ‘golden age’ of Labour, upward mobility and the welfare state? Ralph Miliband and John Saville’s 1964 essay, Labour policy and the Labour left, makes for an interesting read vis à vis such myths.
2. ‘Spanish protests show the way … revolt against austerity’Socialist Worker May 28.
3. See the lessons drawn from the Paris Commune by Nick Rogers in his article, ‘Inspirational feats and heroic failure’ Weekly Worker May 26.
4. See M Macnair Revolutionary strategy p16.
5. Ibid pp30-33.
6. May 23 entry at educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com
7. In total, some 250,000 people came out to protest in 60 Spanish towns and cities on May 15.
8. The classic text on this subject is Jo Freeman’s The tyranny of structurelessness , though it did not take long before voices from the current generation of protestors too began to express doubtsabout the questionably non-hierarchic consensus model.

The Bermondsey Joyriders and John Sinclair live at London’s 100 Club

“Where are they now?”, asked a 1982 song by South-East London band Cock Sparrer, lamenting the faded and lapsed heroes of the British punk revolution. The answer was simple. Some of the addressees of the lyric, such as John Lydon and Joe Strummer, had moved on to create rather more interesting music (Public Image Ltd. and Sandinista! respectively). Lesser lights, such as Sham 69′s Jimmy Pursey, had simply run out of ideas that might justify yet another album of two-chord terrace chantalongs, leaving the spotlight to a new breed of dole punks operating under the ‘Oi!’ umbrella… Read more at Red Mist

When Lady Gaga announced in early 2011 that her next single would be called ‘Born this way’, anyone familiar with the singer’s club-conscious pop and gay-friendly sound bites knew what she had in store… Read more at Red Mist

I like The Clash because…

… the over-privileged Joe Strummer spent his whole life impersonating what he imagined an authentic working class person would be like: bad teeth, unintelligible speech, chain smoking.

… guitarist Mick Jones lived in a high rise estate for only four months and then wrote at least 40 songs about it.

… with their Police and Thieves cover, they made reggae sound like marching music.

… with The Magnificent Seven, they were almost the first white artists to do hip-hop. Blondie’s Rapture beat them by only a month.

… Joe Strummer referred to Billy Idol’s band Generation X as follows: “I hate bands like that. They stand for nothing, they mean nothing, they are essentially just a bunch of wimps.”

… when Joe Strummer, for once, walked the walk trying to sell the Morning Star to striking miners, he got dispirited after only one day.

… they were full of contradictions – and that’s what made them seem human.

A report from the Laurie Penny vs. AWL debate on 27th Jan 2011 in central London

“If you have come to see a bloodbath, you’re in the wrong place”, announced Alliance for Workers Liberty member Ed Maltby. No worries Ed, I didn’t expect that. After all, various far left groups have been virtually falling over themselves to appease the influential young journalist Laurie Penny, who in a notorious article likened Socialist Worker sellers to cockroaches.

Penny, whose articles and columns in the Guardian and New Statesman are read by tens of thousands, represents those who – consciously or not – resurrect the ideas of the 1968 generation and present them as new. Informal structures, informal leaders, spontaneity, the whole shebang . Everybody who poses the question of power is ‘old left’ and best avoided. In fact, the very notion of thinking before you act is virtually totalitarian, not to mention passé.

But you know what? They were probably right to seek dialogue with her. Much as Laurie Penny indecisively bounces from one position to another while essentially suffering from what a comrade tagged “primal anarchism”, the past months have seen her evolve. She might refer to herself as an anarchist without knowing a great deal about anarchism, but, at least at this meeting, she says that she has come around to recognise the “need and use for a vanguard party in Lenin’s sense.”

Understandably, she is still annoyed at the Socialist Workers Party’s being “all over everything like a bad rash, trying to brand all that moves with the SWP name and control it”. But she claims she is no longer opposed to the hard Marxist left per se, regarding “everybody in this room as comrades”. Almost touchingly, she now expresses regret about her inflammatory article.

Laurie Penny appears angsty, confused, and alienated – not at all the snooty, ‘trendy left’ poseur that I expected. When she unthinkingly castigates Marxists for being “white men quoting other white men”, she might be parroting the most vacuous clichés that identity politics have to offer. But she does not do so calculatedly. It is simply because at this point, she cannot yet imagine that those “great white men” had no interest in defending white male privilege whatsoever – quite the contrary.

There are those who are disproportionally upset about being called a “cunt” by Penny – which, as far as I’m aware, happened in good humour. But if Penny is as genuine and committed to revolutionary politics as she appears tonight, we might well witness a change of tune in her future articles – at least to the extent that her paymasters let her.

Ed Maltby’s dry-as-dust introduction to Leninism might not have set Laurie’s world on fire, but his elaborations on internal party democracy, open debate, and the duty to criticise were certainly helpful to her. At times, we heard little devil versions of ourselves whisper in our ears: “Remember when the AWL expected David Broder to engage in Maoist styled public self-humiliation?” But hey – sometimes even we are capable of biting our tongues for the greater good.

A report from the Artists Of The Resistance meeting on 26th January 2011 in central London

Apparently, SWP members are required to keep a copy of Socialist Worker on their desks whenever they attend a public meeting. This functions as an advertisement as well as territorial urination when different tendencies meet in the same room. At the Artists Of The Resistance open planning meeting – an offshoot of Counterfire’s Coalition of Resistance – overt advertising of one’s political affiliations was rather frowned upon, as were a lone SWP delegate’s efforts at linking up the group with the Right to Work front.

The room was torn between two distinct tendencies: ‘anti-hierarchical’, politically unaffiliated advocates of spontaneous, spectacular direct action on the one hand  – united under the Artists against the Cuts umbrella – and those who were slightly less averse to organisation on the other: Artists of the Resistance.

The former group is influenced by a certain type of academic Marxism: one that views Marx as one of many entries in an extensive canon of ‘interesting thinkers’ and reduces his thought to a few dialectical mindgames while bypassing the proletarian revolution bit. Infatuated though they may be with that perpetually fashionable staple of radical student culture, the 1960s Situationism of Guy Debord, their lack of a well-grounded political perspective effectively results in a left-liberal outlook best described as Naomi Kleinism.

It isn’t capitalism, then, that these artists view as the problem, but merely the big, mean-spirited corporations that they perceive as a threat to independent and DIY culture. They do not want to get involved in actions to resist cuts in arts funding because institutions such as the Tate and the ICA have “dodgy links with BP” and, more importantly to them, to avoid being co-opted and institutionalised.  At times, it got to the point where one wondered what cuts the Artists against the Cuts group were actually against.

Quite rightly, an SWP member argued that in a capitalist society there were no non-capitalist spaces. This wasn’t just about culture, she continued, but about wider society: we could not stand aloof when ICA and Tate employees were facing redundancy just as much as workers elsewhere. Her words were lost on those in the room who perceived themselves as ‘artists’ – apparently a distinct caste in society – rather than members of a class.

Though the Artists of the Resistance group attempted to make concessions to the libertarian artistic mindset, the friction in the room was symptomatic of a problem that dates back a long time. Once we had the most advanced composers, painters, graphic artists, playwrights, actors and film directors in our ranks. With the arrival of the socialist-realist aesthetic and the Stalinist denunciation of any deviation as formalism, the communist movement managed to repel and alienate the artistically talented for a long time to come.

The philistine economism of today’s socialist groups does little to fix that. If left papers talk about strikes and marches and nothing but, where is the inspiration for progressive-minded artists? In the absence of a left aesthetic and cultural critique – but, more importantly, when no vision that can inspire the minds of millions is presented – it is small wonder that artists gravitate towards the acceptable ‘radicalism’ of the New Left crowd at best.

A report from the Hackney Alliance To Defend Public Services meeting on 25th January 2011

“Over the past months I’ve been using every opportunity I can to urge the Coalition Government to not make these devastating cuts to Hackney’s budget”, promises a puppy-eyed Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, on leaflets currently distributed by Labour Party activists. Granted, the east London council “is facing some tough decisions ahead”, but the “protection of vital frontline services” will always be Pipe’s “absolute priority”. The aspiring Mayor of London, who touts himself as being “on your side”, guarantees that any cuts to spending will be “fair” and not hit lower and middle income families “so hard”.

One may well wonder how Jules can “fight the cuts” when he is simultaneously implementing them. And yet, he and his fellow ‘soft cuts’ advocates are currently enjoying unlikely support for their sly class collaboration. When Labour Representation Committee members called Islington Labour councillor Charlynne Pullen a scab, none other than the Morning Star’s John Millington rushed in to Pullen’s defence. To refuse to implement cuts, claimed the journalist, would mean to risk prison. This, of course, is a myth.

Those less swayed by slick Jules are organising in the Hackney Alliance to Defend Public Services, from which CPGB comrade Bev James has reported in more detail in the Weekly Worker. SWP dominated though it may be, the alliance produces the excellent No Cuts! bulletin, with more than a little help from The Commune members. Refreshingly, the paper’s February issue does without any sub-SPEW sectariana. Instead of warning the reader not to touch the Labour Party lest they might get their hands dirty, it goes in for the kill and outlines in a few short, sharp bullet points what actually happens when a councillor votes against government cuts and sets an illegal budget.

The Hackney Labour Party branch has affiliated to the Hackney Alliance, if only for ornamental purposes. Following an official statement of affiliation in the Hackney and Stoke Newington Gazettes, most local Labour activists chose to abstain from the monthly Alliance meeting in January. In LP branches, councillors have been warning against the “sectarians” that dominate the Alliance, especially those that raise “crazy” demands such as calling on councillors to refuse to pass any cuts budgets. Though there is a certain amount of debate in the ranks of the Labour Representation Committee, most of Hackney’s LRC members are not prepared to vote against these[i].

Given its toothless, Janus-headed stance, it comes as no surprise that many anti-cuts activists in Hackney do not regard the Labour Party as their first port of call. But our arguments and those that the No Cuts! bulletin is putting forward must be carried into the ranks of the Labour Party itself. A lone council refusing to implement cuts such as Liverpool in the 1980s is easily isolated and crushed. But if we win the argument and – to misquote Che Guevara – create two, three, many Liverpools, we might see a very interesting situation indeed.

As a 50 strong audience of Coalition of Resistance supporters and guests gathered in the building of the University of London Union, the central committee of Tunisia’s ruling party, the RCD, was no more. Under massive popular pressure and with the military withdrawing its support, the governing body of the Tunisian oligarchs’ puppet party had dissolved earlier that day. General amnesty was declared. ” />

“General amnesty? This means nothing to me”, sniffed guest speaker Mohamed Ali Harrath, before adding confidently, “to me the question is: will there be a general amnesty for them?” His Islam Channel colleague, Counterfire leader John Rees, watched on proudly as Ali alternated humour with verbal militancy. “Times online put me on the spot when I declared that I want a revolution”, the former political prisoner declared, “but to me, revolution is not a dirty word.”

Harrath is a charismatic guy. So charismatic he could talk the pants off your mom and your dad. When he tells you that there are no divisions in this world except those between exploiters and exploited, you believe that he really means it. But when the talk shifts to subjects such as religion and the state, he goes a lot quieter and more ambiguous: “People ask me whether this is the Islamic revolution. I tell them: call it whatever you will – I call it the people’s revolution”. Something that John Rees, the ‘broad popular movements’ man par excellence, can have few reservations about.

Watching footage of Harrath cross-examined by Stephen Sackur on the BBC News Channel’s Hard Talk programme , it’s hard to decide which is worse: Sackur’s perfidious attempts to insinuate that Harrath poses some grave danger to Britain or the latter’s attempts at defending himself within the paradigms set by Sackur. Not quite the revolutionary, Harrath here impersonates a law-abiding Muslim bourgeois. Though by his own account he does not habitually slam the door in the police’s face, he is, to his credit, not prepared to “act as a spy on the Muslim community” either.

Back at the COR meeting, a Palestinian comrade’s contribution from the floor sharply prompted Harrath to clarify his stance on the separation between religion and the state. But comrade Rees helpfully intervened. “You have made a lot of controversial statements”, he addressed the intruder, “I think we best leave the answers to this one for the end”. Harrath nodded affirmatively, and I’m leaving it up to the reader to guess whether he made good on his promise.

According to Harrath, all Tunisians are Muslims and Tunisian society is very open and tolerant. His account of the country’s political history benefited from being less impressionistic, beginning with the French colonial takeover in 1881 and through to the constitutional amendment of 1987 that rendered Ben-Ali a president for life – with CIA backing. Once again, Harrath warned not to allow the debate to become one about religious revolutionaries versus the secular left. Urging not to “buy into any of that”, he promised that there were “only oppressors and oppressed”, before adding unhelpfully that he was “not an Islamist extremist, communist, or any other >ist<”.

True: this is not the Islamic revolution that the Israeli government and fellow apologists for tin pot dictators such as Ben-Ali and Mubarak fantasise about. But it is far from clear what tendencies will prevail, and it is at least worth analysing the forces on the ground. A Tunisian born socialist in the audience was pessimistic: “there aren’t any Trotskyists in Tunisia and the communist and Maoist parties aren’t well rooted in society. The protests are mostly driven by moderate civil rights activists”.

This made little difference to comrade Rees, who quoted Engels as saying that “all revolutions begin as revolutions of flowers, and in the course of the revolution different programmes emerge.” [Rees uses the same turn of phrase in a recent Counterfire article, but I have been unable to find the original Engels quote. Any ideas?] Ditto young Counterfire member Joseph Daher, who concluded his talk with the somewhat vacuous words, “at the end of the day, we all want democracy”.

Following Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn’s brief and uncontroversial musings about the importance of social networks and communication technology, the assembled hopeful dispersed into the night. The historic significance of this day for the Tunisian people stood in stark contrast to our collectively not being a lot wiser than before.