Anarchist Thugs Respond: A Word About Saturday’s Events at Downing Street
A response to Saturday’s events at downing street, and the Daily Mail’s article: Anarchist mob plotting a summer of thuggery
The gauntlet has been lain down.
In last week’s election, a small proportion of this country’s population, 24% of eligible voters, declared war on everybody else. We can argue all we like about what combination of lies, confusion, racist fears, or cold-blooded self-interest made them do it; but at the moment, that doesn’t matter very much. What matters right now is that war has been declared, and millions of Londoners are facing a regime of daily terror.
The Threat
This is not some sort of rhetorical exaggeration. It’s literally true. We have to think about what a newly emboldened Tory government actually means to a pensioner in social housing who might now at any moment be yanked from everything that’s made their life meaningful, to a mother working two jobs so that someday her daughter might be able to go to college, an African refugee fleeing torture, a cleaner facing the prospect of being sacked and rehired, at zero hours, or placed back in the exact same job as a welfare slave; to someone in a wheelchair who will now face being removed from their home to an institution in which their life expectancy will plummet; to a teenage girl now facing the choice between physical abuse from a violent guardian, and living on the streets – where she can now expect to blasted with fire hoses and see her sleeping bag appropriated by heartless police. Millions will now lie in bed every night wondering how long it will be before the new government comes for their homes, their hospitals, their schools, jobs, libraries, parks, fire stations, buses, markets, gardens, to have even the most elementary guarantees of a decent and dignified life stripped away from them, to be cast on the tender mercies of the food banks.
Like all terror, it is made possible by the threat of violence. Again, this is literally true. When bailiffs come to roust you from their home, when police come to remove you from an estate the council has turned over to a private developer, they will use what force they have to. If they come to shut down your library, your surgery, or your school, and you refuse to comply, they will physically attack whoever remains in those spaces. It doesn’t matter if your resistance is entirely non-violent. The power of the state is ultimately backed by batons, tasers, and automatic weapons; when standing your ground, those things will be produced eventually. The same racist violence that the police deploy every day against Black Londoners, will, ultimately, be directed at anyone who is determined to defy them.
Self Defence is Love
In the language of the state, which is also the language of its loyal servants in the media, all of this is distorted in a crazy circus mirror: violence is not harm to other human beings, it’s not terror, it’s not the destruction of lives; it’s not even outright physical assault, since, if a protestor simply tries to calmly walk out of a police kettle and is tackled or kicked in the face, somehow, that’s never considered violent. Kicking a family from their homes using the threat of weapons isn’t violence either. In the language of authority, “violence” means answering back.
Sometimes, that, too, is literal (what protester does not, eventually, hear the familiar words, ‘one more word out of you and you’re getting locked up’?) Daubing slogans is treated as violent disorder, and god forbid you should do anything that might damage a pane of glass.
If the only way to save a child about to fall off a ledge was to break a pane of glass that did not belong to you, would anyone in their right mind describe breaking that pane of glass as an act of violence? So why is it different if we are talking about hundreds, even thousands, or children?
We are under attack. Everything we have, everything we have built, is being threatened. And as we well know: none of these things we defend, were ever handed to us by politicians. We created them. They are the legacy of generations of work, love, solidarity, imagination, sacrifice, and gruelling political determination. True, the government runs them because the state does not allow them to be administered in any other way. And now the state proposes to take them away.
There is no point in writing letters and petitions, in waving signs or begging our masters for mercy; they have none. When you are facing a stick to the head, there’s only one question: Are you going to just sit there and take it? Or are you going to act in self-defence?
There’s not one of us who have not agonized over the question. But in the end there’s only one possible conclusion:
It’s one thing if the stick is just aimed at your head. It’s quite another when it’s aimed at people that you love. Faced with an assault on our friends, families, communities, on the very principle that every human life carries in it an inherent value and dignity (that cannot simply be trampled under foot by the powerful), a principled defence becomes an act of love.
Honouring our Ancestors
The masters of London have to be made to understand that they are surrounded by enemies. We outnumber them. Their entire strategy has been based on the assumption that we are better people than they are. They’re right of course. We are. We would never dream of kicking anyone out of their homes – even them. We’d never resort to guns and bombs like they do. But that very sense of decency that makes us refrain from doing so compels us to take action.
That’s what we did on Saturday.
The Tories need to know that their every move will face determined—and if need be, militant—opposition. When police attacked a peaceful protest, this time, protesters fought back. History must now record the very first day of the new regime was marked by battles in the streets. It will not be the last. And history is very much what’s at stake here. The new government had expected that day to be marked by a parade—down that very street—supposedly, in honour of Victory in Europe day 70 years before: a cynical slap in the face to the memories of that generation of ordinary Britons who, fresh from their victory over fascism, came home to oust the Tories from power and create the very welfare state the Tories are now intending to dismantle. Instead, what better way to honour our ancestors than to show that there are still young people willing to fight to defend the things they risked their lives to build?
History also teaches us that there a thousand ways to strike back against an arrogant and overweening ruling class. We know their weaknesses. We’ve been studying them for years.
Servility as an Export Product
The greatest weakness of the current regime is that the economy they seek to build is entirely dependent on our passivity. Why is it that other nations send their wealth, their manufactures, food, energy, and raw materials, to us? We are told that we are now providing the world with “financial services”; this is double-talk; people are not sending us their cars because they’re dazzled by our paperwork. To some degree, true, Britain is simply reaping the benefits of its position as loyal lieutenant of the American empire, whose “financial system” is largely a shake-down system, extracting tribute from the rest of the world. But here in England, “finance” is based above all in real estate, and the real estate bubble is sustained by the fact that every billionaire in the world seeks to buy a piece of London. Why? Because Britain’s rulers and the City have, effectively, turned the defeat and humiliation of the British working classes into the island’s primary export product, offering our servility (“service economy”) and political defeat (“security”) as marketable products to the global rich. A Russian oligarch or Saudi prince knows they can get anything they want in England, from a cheerful, creative, and subservient population, and—unlike at home—never have to even think about the danger of political upheavals or social unrest. (No revolutions here! We haven’t had one of those since 1688.) The process is incomplete. New Labour even tried to retool it slightly, trying to market not our class system but our “creative industries” – but failed as they didn’t understand where popular creativity actually comes from, and snuffed out the real working class sources of cultural creativity when they got rid of the Dole. But increasingly this is what is being proposed for us: the class system will become England’s major export product, as cynical right wing populists manipulate the resulting indignation by fomenting rage against Polish construction workers instead of Russian oligarchs, Bangladeshi drivers instead of Saudi princes, West Indian porters instead of Brazilian steel tycoons.
But here, precisely, lies their weakness. Because it means without our servility, they are nothing. It means every act of resistance, every act of communal self defence and collective organization, is a direct blow against their economic model.
A Summer of Resistance
A summer of resistance is about to begin. Housing estates are already in occupation – Aylesbury, Sweets Way, the E15 mothers– and there will be many more to come. Fire-fighters, transportation workers, and others will soon be striking. There will be battles over the fate of hospitals and schools. All this affords an opportunity. Because in resistance lies democratization. It provides the potential to overcome the racist divisions that have hobbled us in the past, to develop genuine, human, democratic ways to manage the services by which we keep each other alive instead of the current paternalistic and soul-destroying bureaucracy. There are a thousand ways to throw spanners in their works: to refuse collaboration, a thousand acts of sabotage; to film, obstruct, confuse police, to block the courts, refuse to pay unjust debts, steal, squat, expropriate, undermine, expose, slow down, short-circuit, but above all, to defend what makes our lives together meaningful and possible.
Above all, make those who have declared war on our communities aware, that we know who and what they are, we know where they live, we know what they intend to do with us.hey are living amongst a sea of enemies.
We didn’t choose this war. But if war has been declared against us and everything we love, there is nothing more legitimate than the defence of our communities.
A. Thug
#FucktheTories