New Alliances

Starmer’s Labour Party are the ‘hard-centre’ rather than social (ist) or even a social democratic one. They are to the right of the party under Blair. You have elected less toxic Tories. The challenge is to build new alliances/movements to defeat them.

Where are those forces and what are those alliances?

We’ll be exploring that in a series of articles and public meetings in the coming months.

If you examine what has startled or threatened the British state in recent years you can see some clues to what that might begin to look like. If you look at who and what the most recent repressive legislation was aimed at (Britain’s Niemöller Moment), you can see distinct movements that it is focused on.

Writing in LRB Rebekah Diski notes: “The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Public Order Act 2023 were trained largely on the direct action wing of the climate movement, although they made room for other targets, notably the rights of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. Policy Exchange, the think tank co-founded by Michael Gove and funded by Exxon-Mobil, inspired much of the detail in the legislative assault on protest with its report ‘Extremism Rebellion’, which described Extinction Rebellion as a ‘subversive’ group planning to precipitate ‘the breakdown of democracy and the state’.”

Cross Fertilisation

Now, new movements are cross-fertilising not out of opportunism or expediency but out of a deeper shared analysis. Diski again: “Young activists, in particular, are connecting struggles against fossil capital with those against racial injustice and colonial oppression. Youth Demand, an offshoot of Just Stop Oil, calls for an arms embargo on Israel as well as an end to new oil and gas licences in the UK. This cross-fertilisation has not gone unnoticed by the state: in May, John Woodcock, a cross-bench peer and government adviser on political violence and disruption, released a report on ‘protecting our democracy from coercion’, noting the overlap of tactics and personnel among the more radical elements of the movements for climate and Palestinian justice. He described these groups as part of a ‘far left subculture’ and recommended removing their rights to assemble and fundraise.”

Some of the same connections are being made by groups like Fossil Free Books.

While these forces have energy and momentum, and are emergent, there are several crucial elements needed to boost those movements into a genuine movement for change.

The first is to (understand) and counter the far-right, whether that be in the form of Disaster Nationalism, Diagonalism or the sort of cultural forces that unleash new forms of misogyny. The movement needs to be explicitly antifa but also needs to have a dimension which is as playful and provocative in the production of its message.

The second is to unite the anti-colonial movements, the anti-racist movements and the anti-oil activism with movements for something: for housing, for cities, for freedoms against police repression, for meaningful work, for liberatory tech, for peace, for land, for a future. We certainly need to break things down and smash things up but we also need to build infrastructures of long-term alternatives. This seems true not just as a response to the realities of social and ecological collapse but also as a way of stepping-back from constantly reactive / defensive politics.

The third is to bring together the people trying to re-make and re-imagine radical alternatives to the chaotic decrepit and corrupt British state. That might sound counter-intuitive but it could be a way of forming new alliances by bringing together the people who are genuinely imagining a transformed Britain in their own part of the world. What would it be like to bring together Irish Peace Babies, Yes campaigners, Welsh cultural activists, English republicans? Uniting in discourse the young people committed to self-determination and imagining a completely different relationship between (and within) the four nations is a key to bringing energy back to the independence movement and also to making common cause across Britain.

These are only outlines to be developed over the coming weeks and months, but the challenge seems to be to step away from the darkly pessimistic narratives, to go on the front-foot and to dispense with stagnant means of organising. This is about realising our collective power in a society designed to isolate us and amplify our individualism, weaponising it against us. This is about shrugging off learned failure, reflexive impotence and re-casting a new left which is liberatory rather than purely reactive and has a movement of movements.

It would have to have some ground rules to have a chance of working. It would have to have participatory and democratic ways of functioning, be resolutely against party-building and have a firewall against sectarianism. It would have to pre-purge the toxicity of the old left.

Organising Desire

Such a movement would be under surveillance and attack from the state and from the far-right, whose defeat would be a principle organising aim.

Considering the threat (and response) to the rise of the far-right, and the movements that have propelled Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, and Benjamin Netanyahu to power, Richard Seymour outlines the following (The rise of disaster nationalism‘):

“Against all this, official liberalism has one move, which is to supplement its growth discourse by triangulating the far-right. Just as Biden had sought to neutralise Trump by appropriating parts of his border agenda, Macron’s government has tried to outflank Le Pen by, for example, calling her soft on Islam and fulminating about “Islamo-gauchisme”.  This is a weird symbiosis, in which both the hard-centre and the far-right thrive on cultivating hopelessness and punitive desires: sado-pessimism. It legitimises the far-right, who take the win and demand more. Far-right voters aren’t placated because they’re addicted to the animating sense of threat. Meanwhile, liberal critique is neutralised, a fatalistic attitude to racism is engrained, and society is inured to the latest erosion of civilised norms. This is, after all, the pattern on which the far-right has thrived: the steady and accelerating involution of liberal civilization. There is no reason to assume this process has peaked, or that democracy will stabilise given the stresses the climate crisis will place on the system.”

He is right that the ability of the far-right to maximise advantage from general precarity and climate breakdown hasn’t bottomed out.

Seymour again: “There is an inchoate, global fascism in formation. It has expanded at an accelerating rate since the credit crunch, metabolising pervasive social misery, and its growth shows no sign of slowing. But there is a way out. As Will Davies argues in The Happiness Industry, unhappiness today often manifests “as a generalized deflation of desire and capability”. Neoliberal politics, telling us there was no alternative, left us nothing to wish for. Destroying our collective power, it left us nothing to do about it. We have been blackpilled into submission. Disaster nationalism has its remedy which, though it ultimately solves nothing, is more potent than CBT and happy pills. A radical programme, though necessary to reignite political desire, isn’t enough to cut through this. Desire has to be organised. People need to experience their collective power, and not only because it is the only way to enjoy some real victories.”

This then is an opening question for the movement: How do we experience our collective power?