As we go to press, talk is rife of Tory moves to oust Boris Johnson — in favour, alas, of someone probably even more right-wing. The Tory government is on the back foot, floundering on Covid, commanding little trust or credit, u-turning again and again.
And yet its Borders Bill (went to Lords 8 December), Police Bill (entered final Lords stage 8 December), and Health and Social Care Bill (Lords committee stage starts 11 January) are going through Parliament with little loud and active opposition. The left seems to be on the back foot, too.
There are millions who oppose the Tories from the left; many tens of thousands angry against the Police Bill, the Borders Bill, and the Health and Social Care Bill; but for now not many on the streets.
Strikes
Although Britain has not had a full-on strike wave like the USA or France in recent weeks, a number of recent strikes have won. Although the Omicron wave may make conditions more difficult for industrial battles, union action has shown itself able to recover from the setbacks consequent on mass work-from-home and on lockdowns. But the big union battalions are moving slowly.
Taking an overview of the last decade or so, strikes and political meetings have generally been smaller and sparser, but street demonstrations have often been big and frequent.
The rise of social media and smartphones makes it possible for quite small groups, catching the mood of a moment, to organise large protests at short notice. It also makes it possible for protests on an issue to be organised more frequently. Black Lives Matter demonstrations in summer 2020, and Police Bill protests in March-April 2021, ran weekly or even more often in London and some other cities. School student climate strikes ran monthly in 2019.
Cause for hope! But street protests without organisation to connect them with longer-term week-to-week activism in workplaces, in unions and Labour Parties, on campuses and in neighbourhoods, tend to fade away.
Kill the Bill
Many people come to one of the series to register their protest, and see little value in repeating the gesture. The minority who come week after week get worn down.
Thus in March and April, there were many protests against the Police Bill. At least one of them, on 3 April in London, counted many tens of thousands. They faded. Outside Parliament on 8 December, even after the Tories had added fierce new amendments in the Lords, there were hundreds of us. Noisy and spirited, but hundreds.
We’re lacking the organisational and ideological linkages to knit together the varied protests, or at least elements from them, into an ongoing, self-sustaining movement which sees itself as aiming for, and can be seen by the doubtful as aiming for, a comprehensive social and economic alternative to the Tories.
We’re lacking linkages between sporadic street protests and ongoing week-to-week activism in the form of workplace agitation, meetings, pushes in the unions and Labour Parties, street and campus stalls.
With such linkages, the week-to-week welds a core of activists; gives them the means to expand that core, slowly at times, faster on occasion; links them into the big already-existing network of opposition to the status quo, the trade unions and the labour movement, and gives them the means to transform that movement. The week-to-week work can generate ways to move from street protests to sharper forms of action such as strikes, and it can create sustained political pressure capable of pushing even feeble Labour and similar leaders to legislative change.
Without such linkages even very big leftish street protests are likely to dissipate, leaving little solid behind them. Sometimes even see their energy confiscated by the right, which does have linkages.
Anti-politics
Reporting from Chile in Solidarity 616, Kelly Rogers wrote that in the huge leftish “social explosion” there of 2019-20, an “anti-politics” feeling was “so strong that Frente Amplio activists could not turn up to protests with their flags or banners without being forcibly expelled”. The union movement remained weak and largely sidelined. Now the Trump-like José Antonio Kast has won the first round of the presidential election, and on a turnout of only 47%.
Luiza Xavier has described how the big leftish street protests in Brazil in 2013 retained an “anti-political-party” tone, and “after about three years these demonstrations changed…. The colours changed, towards green and yellow, which are the Brazilian colours. The right managed to channel quite a lot of the energy of the demonstrations”, bringing Bolsonaro to power in 2019.
Something of the same has happened in France, in a more complicated and diffuse way.
Britain does not, or not yet, have that “anti-political” mood in street protests. But energy from protests gets dissipated in milder ways. Many of the activists who stay around for the long haul look to NGO work rather than workplace organising and working-class struggle.
A fraction turn to social-media “activism”, feeling “involved” because of a constant flow of messages even without doing much in workplaces or on the streets; or sometimes to a sort of lifestyle politics. A writer in Australia recently blasted feminists there for insufficient radicalism. “In my experience, ‘intersectional’ has become a nice word for white feminists to excuse themselves from anti-racism work”.
The writer didn’t mean that those feminists had been late for picket lines in disputes of lower-paid mostly-ethnic-minority workers, like the Sheffield couriers. Or that they were slack about union-organising work among worse-off workers in their workplaces. Or that they had failed to make it to door-to-door campaigning.
The writer is a marketing executive and founder of a “beauty products” firm, and she’s writing in a online magazine, PopSugar, concerned with such things as “gifts for the person who has everything”. The “anti-racism work” she wants seems to be a cringing tone towards her and her business ambitions, not a fight for social equality.
Both that sort of dissipation of radical impulses, and the inevitable backlashes against it, set us back.
How to make the necessary linkages in a world where social media spread so wide remains to be puzzled out. They can’t be made without an agency working to make them.
That agency needs week-by-week in-person organising. It needs a developed overall programme (socialism), and systematic self-education to equip it to analyse and convince. It needs to gear itself into the already-existing mass movement of the exploited and oppressed, the labour movement, and work to transform that movement through class struggle.
And it needs to be there on all the protests against oppression, sporadic or otherwise. We ask readers to consider joining with Workers’ Liberty to build that agency.
