D'Ya Wanna Be In My Gang? Erm, No Thanks!

It’s been suggested elsewhere on the blog that the ‘organisers of discontent’ are no longer charismatic militants - maybe so. Perhaps there’s also a grain of truth in the comment that the ‘deeply conservative and reactionary’ responses to the recent riots are ‘rooted in the culture, history and politics of this country’.

However, in putting forward the case for militancy, Bammy seems to have forgotten a point he himself made a while ago when commenting on the NUM, i.e. that militancy is not necessarily radical in its intent, often seeking to protect very narrow interests. Indeed, history can offer us many examples of militancy that is itself conservative in its aims or, at least, seeks to establish a state of affairs where conservatism will inevitably prevail.

A good example would be the case of the Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel, who are widely offered up as the militant faction of the female emancipation movement and thus too readily associated with universal female liberation. Scratch even a little beneath the surface, however, and you find that their militancy in smashing windows, etc was largely undertaken to achieve a property-based vote for their comfortably middle-class sorority. In fact, after a remarkably brief time spent with working class women in Manchester, Christabel Pankhurst branded them ‘too handicapped by poverty and lacking in prestige to be of any practical use’.

But let’s not pretend that this ‘conservative militancy’ was a middle-class affliction. In the period of jingoistic hysteria around the time of WWI (when, incidentally, Mrs Pankhurst abandoned the ‘votes for women’ campaign to support the war effort), the syndicalist Wilf McCartney said of his fellow workers:

‘Realising that this war had given workers better conditions for a short while (and saved capitalism) the workers would not tolerate anybody opposing the war or asking for peace. Harmless German shopkeepers had their shops wrecked, their goods thrown into the street, their homes ruined, and endured personal injury, all in the cause of smashing Prussian militarism. For the first time in my life I was ashamed of my class.’

Of course, it could be argued here that in the wider class struggle it was not the nationality of the ‘harmless Germans’ that was relevant, rather the fact that they were shopkeepers, but that was not the reason they were targeted, nor was that the case in Britain’s cities a few weeks ago. Later, during WWII, a dachshund was stoned to death by a mob because it was German, even though there was no evidence that it held petit-bourgeois aspirations of any kind!

Today, it’s more than depressing that so many young people are so desperate to ‘belong’ that the vacuous culture of celebrity and consumerism holds so much sway over them, more so that they will fight and/or kill one another to forge an identity - whether as part of street gangs or in the better equipped military gangs that, for some reason, are deemed more socially acceptable, even admirable. When we then have to listen to Cameron et al telling us about ‘broken Britain’ whilst unleashing what is by far the country’s biggest (and most corrupt) organised gang to restore order, the situation is even more grim.

But what have working class youths supposed ‘homeboys’ in the trade union gang done to make young people, or anyone for that matter, think that there’s something more to life than being trodden under foot? Yes, they’ve sometimes been militant but rarely radical and their aims are usually specific to their own narrow world view. Ultimately, they’ve achieved the right to work all their lives but feel good about doing it because they might have secured a few extra crumbs from the master’s table. The Daily Mail reader is certainly ripe for contempt with their whining about the ‘nanny state’ whilst expecting the government to defend everything that their spurious middle class morality holds dear but perhaps they are also too easy a target here. Personally, I’m equally worried by those who see cradle-to-grave wage slaving as a badge of honour and look on those who reject this with contempt. These people might have the ability to be militant when their own situation is threatened but most don’t actually want to change things in any truly radical way.

Mainstream historians certainly have a penchant for airbrushing out genuine radicals but let’s not be too quick to convince ourselves that the left’s pantheon is therefore populated by those excluded elsewhere. Charismatic militants may make the headlines and, in the wake of the rise of ‘social history’, university textbooks, but they don’t necessarily represent a radical world view, in fact, they generally seek to uphold authoritarian and hierarchical social structures but with themselves in charge. If you want a strategy and agenda that offers real alternatives, it has to be one that acknowledges this, as well as also offering something more contemporary and familiar by way of example than the Lord of Misrule, or, dare I say it, the Spanish Civil War.

Given the current circumstances, this will undoubtedly be a ‘hard sell’ but it’s not like the ‘charismatic militant’ line is being eagerly consumed (or even looted) either.