Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere. Paul Mason
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feel like there is a lot of reaction to ‘the future’: there is a sense that the present is so bad, and conditions of austerity being imposed, pensions undermined, services undermined—that we can’t have any more of this. And if this is what the present is, what’s the future?
Social media, she believes, have been the key to turning what was once a niche, lifestyle form of protest into an accessible method for everybody else:
The anti-road movement of the late 1990s didn’t ask you to sign up to an ideology, just to put your body in the way of a JCB. The difference is that then, we didn’t have a media strategy. UK Uncut is the best example of social media carrying ideas into maximum participation on a localized, decentralized scale.
Horizontalism, she argues, provides the most useful methods for people with no power. If trade-union activists and grandmothers alike were drawn to dressing up and committing civil disobedience in the high streets of small towns, it was because they saw the old ways of trying to influence politics as closed off. Jasiewicz describes succinctly what this kind of protest is designed to achieve: ‘A lot of our resistance as unarmed and powerless people is based on creating moments where the state is forced to respond to a scenario we are putting forward that is problematic for them; that creates a crisis of legitimacy.’
UK Uncut actions were ‘fun, good-natured’, easy to join in with—but they also allowed people to ‘see the repression in their lives’, says Jasiewicz.
Once you can take the struggle out of the corridors of power and distil it—so that you can see capitalism, personified, in your high street—it becomes more tangible. It becomes easier to respond to an oppression you could not name. Now you can. And social media says to people who are alienated and disparate: you are like me; these things are everywhere.
I ask Jasiewicz the same questions I asked Riches: what she reads, and what has influenced the way she thinks and acts. It turns out that, like many fellow activists, she has a deep hostility to theory. ‘I don’t like talking about what I think; it’s bullshit. It’s this action, this protest, Iraq, Palestine, Deptford’—where she organized a post-riot cleanup and solidarity demo in August 2011. ‘And even social media is not the central thing. The things that are central are off the radar: social interaction, relationship building, trust. Talk to people. Trust is explosive.’
In the space of six months, the impact of austerity in Britain had created a mass constituency for these ideas, above all among school students and undergraduates. But the old, hierarchical forms of protest had not gone away. Slowly, the trade unions moved from lobbying to action. On 26 March 2011 they called what would become the biggest trade-union demo in post-war history.
However, just as the events in Tahrir Square had demonstrated the potential for synthesis between students, workers and urban poor, 26 March would be a case study in the lack of synthesis. It would throw the horizontalist movement in Britain into a crisis of direction that it is still struggling to recover from.
Three tribes go to war
London, 26 March 2011. It’s clear early on it’s going to be massive. The leaders of Unison—which represents local government and health workers—have massively mobilized their people, bringing in whole trains and hundreds of coachloads of workers, printing t-shirts and professional-looking banners. On the south bank of the Thames, a group called ‘Croydon Filipino Nurses’ is lining up for a photo call. Further on, under a banner saying ‘Nurses Uncut’, a group of women—longtime workmates from various hospitals—meet up, ready to march. They’ve organized it on Facebook: 450 have signed up, some not even in a union. They’ve spent the past few days reassuring each other because of the lurid tabloid headlines about anarchists and violence. ‘There won’t be any trouble,’ they tell each other.
Getting across the river is hard: some bridges are closed, others crammed with people. Shoulder to shoulder are teachers from Devon, firefighters in red t-shirts, balloon-holding binmen from Glasgow, Norwich, Gloucester; home helps from Renfrewshire. They shuffle their way across Waterloo Bridge. The demonstration is already massing along the Thames and you can hear whistles, drums and vuvuzelas.
By the time the march sets off, with a clear half million on the streets, it has turned into the biggest trade-union demo for more than thirty years.
Among the marchers, you can see what the new mood created by the student movement and UK Uncut has achieved. ‘Where’s Ed Miliband?’ representatives from a special needs school—students and teachers linked arm-in-arm—ask me. ‘We don’t trust him! He needs to get his act together. It’s the bankers, the profit system. The big companies should stop evading tax!’ There’s a festive atmosphere. The schoolkids are singing a re-scripted version of ’I Will Survive’.
But at Piccadilly Circus, the edges of the demo are swarming with youths dressed like members of the anarchist Black Bloc. Really young kids: buzzing with the newness of it all, some change from their normal clothes into black hoodies and scarves right there in front of the police. The police begin to talk urgently into their walkie-talkies.
A veteran riot photographer texts me with the time and place where it will kick off: Regent Street, a vast curve of nineteenth-century architecture and luxury retail. When I get there, it’s deserted. In the distance I can make out a tight phalanx of black-clad protesters, about 400 strong, filling the width of the street. They tramp forward, masked, some carrying the red-and-black flags of anarcho-syndicalism. This, one of them tells me later, is the biggest Black Bloc ever assembled in the UK. And though there are certainly numerous anarchists from Europe here, it is the students and school students from December who have really swelled the numbers.
They veer off into a side-street and start lobbing paint, billiard balls and smoke flares at various boutique shops: Victorinox gets it, so does an art gallery. There are only about twenty police around, none in riot gear. In a futile gesture, they try to protect the Victorinox shop, receiving the full barrage of paint, bottles and—according to the Met’s later report—an acid-filled light bulb.
It’s mayhem. And it is clear the police tactic is not to deploy fully and fight the protesters. For the next few hours the Black Bloc will roam around the West End, attacking shops, breaking into groups, running away, re-forming—with a Genoa-style, ‘fluffy’ contingent of nonviolent direct action people trailing along behind.
I stop some of the latter: the women are dressed in multicoloured wigs, faces painted, tinsel in their hair, bare midriffs; the men are longhaired, thin, and non-aggressive. Why are they doing this?
Boy: ‘Because Top Shop’s owner hasn’t paid billions of pounds of tax.’
Girl (off her head): ‘We’re just dancing with flowers. We’re protesting in favour of beauty, against all this fucking shit in the window. We don’t want to spend all our money on clothes.’
Boy: ‘… and because capitalism is a damn lie. That’s why we’re throwing stuff at these fucking shop fronts.’
I buttonhole a second group, students; two young men and a woman. One of the guys, wearing a hipster low-neck t-shirt and a plaid duffle coat:
We’re sick with the government in general. For decades nobody legitimately can tell the truth; the nature of the hierarchy means only the imbeciles, the suck-ups, only the scumbags ever get to the top. So to truly be free is for everyone to take our part and decide for our freedom.
This is weird English but that’s exactly how he says it, and he is not drunk or foreign, just furious. ‘We need to all get together and create a community. All government is just an infrastructure, when we get government out of our vision we can start from the ground up, without corruption.’
At Oxford Circus a thirty-foot Trojan Horse made of wicker is wheeled in by protesters and goes up in flames. The police do nothing, because at this point there are none in attendance.
Along Oxford Street, all the stores targeted by UK Uncut in previous weeks—Topshop, Nike, HSBC—are closed in anticipation of the protests. In front of a branch of Boots, a peaceful picket of Uncutters (everybody dressed as doctors or