NHS London March & advocates of anonymity

'SPIKYMIKE', otherwise known as the now retired Manchester City Council housing manager Mike Ballard, on libcom on Feb 6th, 2017 commenting on the forthcoming London NHS March on the 4th, March wrote:

'This will be big I'm sure but although I've attended a few local NHS demo's and picket lines in the north west over the last couple of years I can't bring myself to get up before 5am to catch a coach with a load of lefties down to London for a tramp around the big smoke - its bad for my health. There are some useful local campaigns around but the trade unions that will be at the forefront of this have hardly shown themselves able to mount any genuine solidarity action in the workplace where it matters (during the doctors strike fore instance) and one wonders how much of this effort will be about garnering support for the Labour Party in forthcoming elections rather than anything else?  Still it would be good to get some reports and feedback from London comrades on this. The NHS really is descending into something of a crisis - round here for instance with at least two local hospitals planning big cuts in beds just as the national news is highlighting the shortage of both beds and staff!!'

Well, it was indeed a 'big' demo, and there wasn't a red and black banner to be seen on the march. 

Yet the National Shop Steward's Network, otherwise known as a front for the Socialist Party, estimated the numbers and reported it thus:

'But this march of over 100,000, although some reports say double that attended, must be the start not the end of the campaign. The health unions and the TUC must call another national demonstration that could be absolutely massive. This would give health workers the confidence to take co-ordinated strike action, which we believe last year’s junior doctors’ dispute showed, would have the full support of patients and communities.'

On an early TUC march against the cuts some years ago, I had just come out of the Gent's Urinals at John Lewis and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the red and black banners blowing in the wind on Oxford Street.  It soon sank as the anti-climax set-in, especially as I scrutinised the feeble figures with their pigeon chests who were carrying the flags.  These bands of fellows were being followed by a bunch of press photographers hoping no doubt for something untoward to happen, and trailing behind these were the Metropolitan Police.

Last Saturday, there was no sign of the BLACK BLOC  or the anarchists with their pigeon chests, just an orderly well organized demo put on by Unite and the Peoples Assembly.

Meanwhile, on the anarchist FREEDOM webpage on February 4th, the FREEDOM 'publishing House' ran a story recommending demonstrators wear mask and entitled:  'Why covering your face at a protest is the right thing to do' by someone called Kevin Blowe.

Mr. Blowe writes that:

'In June 2015 Netpol launched a campaign to try to encourage activists to start covering their faces when taking part in demonstrations and marches.

'We saw this initiative as one of the few remaining ways of resisting the growth of intrusive surveillance on the streets, which sees police monitoring social media for images and live-streamed video, chatting to protesters in the guise of ‘facilitating’ their activism and routinely filming everyone. This data-gathering is overwhelmingly overt rather than involving undercover officers — and most of the information is handed over by ourselves without objection. It is also carried out on an almost industrial scale, intended to build up a picture of different social movements, their structures and alliances.'

This is an interesting little essay and very typical of the kind of psychological state of mind of those who inhabit the metropolitan bubble of paranoid politics with its cheap thrills for the pigeon chested.  Such an approach has no insight into what was moving the participants on last Saturday's March.

The point about the March to save the NHS was that it had mass support from people who wouldn't normally consider themselves 'activists', indeed it was probably supported by many of the officers policing the demo.

For the organisers to introduce bundles of masks wouldn't have encouraged a spirit of revolutionary fervour it would have inspired fear and alienation among the crowds.

Mike Ballard above is right to ask the question 'one wonders how much of this effort will be about garnering support for the Labour Party in forthcoming elections rather than anything else? '

Last Saturday's demo had much to do with boosting support for the Labour Party, and there is a real underlying danger that inconclusive demos of the kind we were involved in actually undermines morale in the end.

Yet, covering one's face will not improve matters anymore than knocking off a few policemen's helmets.

'Populism', Imagined Communities & Nations

by Brian Bamford

ROUTINE elections in European countries in 2016 have ushered in a mercurial quality to the political landscape.  Jon Bigger in a thoughtful article on the Freedom Blog about the recent by-election in Richmond wrote:   

'The recent Richmond by-election victory for the Lib Dems shows that the Brexit split can make a very real difference to British politics.  It isn't inconceivable to see the British public split along the lines of the referendum for years to come, with the conservatives and UKIP on one side and the Lib Dems, Greens, and SNP on the other.' 

Mr. Bigger then writes: 

'Note that as things stand there isn't any real role for the Labour Party in this scenario.' 

On the 'libertarian communist' website libcom, commenting on Brexit, someone wrote in what appeared to be an editorial: 

'In the UK context it was clearly a vote against foreign “others” and anybody who can be labeled as such...  Nigel Farage (former leader of UKIP and important leader of the Leave campaign) said on more than one occasion that he would be able to sacrifice economic growth to see less immigrants.'

This seems to have been the case and François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said:

' In Britain, one of the campaign slogans for Brexit was “Vote Leave, Take Control”.' and the idea seemed to be that being in 'the EU was preventing Britain from doing that.'

The feeling is that the motivation driving many voters in Britain, the USA and now in Italy's referendum over a week ago, is to impress upon the politicians that the status quo and the establishment elites are now unacceptable. 

The Italian electorate threw out a constitutional overhaul that would have increased the power of the prime minister by cutting the number of senators and decreasing their power.  This wouldn't have mattered so much, but for the fact that it gave a political opportunity to the Five Star movement to gain political prestige by opposing it. 

What makes things worse is the lasting consequences of the global recession in 2008 in both Europe and the USA, and the underlying frustration of the pain still being suffered in many European countries. 

In France, economic growth only reached 1% last year, and youth unemployment is still close to 25%.  In Italy, Spain and Greece it's higher. 

Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, the director of the Paris office of the German Marshall Plan, said recently:  'The Rust Belt isn't just in America – there's a Rust Belt in the north of France, ... they feel they are dispossessed, dispossessed of their countries sovereignty and their economy.' 

Ms. Scheffer added:

'The way Washington is perceived by many American people is the way many French or Germans or Italians perceive Brussels... they perceive Brussels as almost an illegitimate entity.'

Jon Bigger in his Freedom essay prudently argues that the 'changing [political] landscape may be something we don't fully understand for years and I don't think anyone has got the definitive vision yet (and you shouldn't expect to see it here either).'

And, he suggests:  'Think for a moment about how this anti-Establishment feeling has manifested around the world since it started:  the Arab Spring, Occupy, Brexit, Bernie Saunders, Donald Trump, Momentum and Corbyn...  The response to a disaster within global capitalism hasn't been one of simply global revolution.  Instead people have responded in ways that reject a simple left / right ideological perspective.  When things settle at home and abroad there will be a new alignment, a new politics which which may well conform to a clearer ideological split.'

Geert Wilders, the leader of the right-wing Freedom Party in the Netherlands and regularly rated as the most popular politician, also has said:  'Right verses left doesn't exist anymore'. 

Clearly politicians who look to nationalism and promote worries about disenfranchisement are in vogue. 

The lib-communist website editorial is at pains to stress that they are against nationalism and claim they are 'indifferent towards any national question'.  They stress that 'for us, all nations (small or big) are fake communities.' *

The dogmatic thinking of the 'communists' on their website tract seem in a bit of a muddle between what is the 'state' and what is the 'nation'.  They even finish off with an exit platitude taken from the 1848 'Communist Manifesto' by by Marx and Engels: 

'The working men (sic) have no country.  We cannot take from them what they have not got...' 

Yet then it goes on 'the proletariat must ... constitute itself the nation... though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.' 

What are 'fake communities'? *  Are nations and nationalisms invented?

Or would we be better-off embracing Benedict Anderson and his now his famous study entitled 'Imagined Communities'?**

Put crudely what seems to have happen according Mr. Anderson, is that when peasant face-to-face communities declined from the 18th Century onwards people have felt a psychological need to replace the everyday communities of the village with the 'imagined community' of the nation state in which though people can't possibly know all of the members of the nation they come to feel an affinity with the other citizens through the national media and other cultural forms of identity. 

The 'libcoms' or 'communist libertarians' of small organizations like the so-called 'anarchist federation' are inclined to use a cookbook approach in such a way that their analysis almost writes itself.  Unlike Jon Bigger on the Freedom Blog who modestly admits the 'changing [political] landscape may be something we don't fully understand for years...', while the libcom gang for their part have the dreary dogma of a party-line don't even try to get to grips with the anthropological emergence of nationalism.***  It is so much easier to simply dismiss the whole phenomena of 'popularism' and resurgent nationalism with a grim guffaw and a quote from the 19th century Communist Manifesto to give their statement gravitas. 

 

*    Ernest Gellner has written:  'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist'

**  An imagined community is different from an actual community in that it is not—and, for practical reasons, cannot be—based on everyday face-to-face interaction among its members. It is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson to analyze nationalism. Anderson depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.

Anderson's book, Imagined Communities, in which he explains the concept in depth, was first published in 1983, and reissued with additional chapters in 1991 and a further revised version in 2006.

***  Benedict Anderson has explained his now influential concept thus:

'In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation:  it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. 

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.'

THE Statement from the Freedom Collective, which because we believe

in transparency we publish below in full, was posted on the Freedom web-site

on Thursday the 23rd, June 2016.  We have reason to disagree with much of the

contents as expressed by the author(s), and will in due course give a full account of

what happened on the premises of 84B, Whitechapel High Street, and later in Angel

Alley on the 22nd, June 2016.  But for now we just say that several persons within

the building behaved badly in so far as their actions were ultra vires: 

that is they breached their powers under the law.  The Collective Statement is
seriously flawed and may confuse the uninitiated reader, and for this reason I
(Brian Bamford) offer my own response to this 'Statement' at the end of the text.

Freedom Collective Statement

on Brian Bamford

Published June 23, 2016

We’re sad to report an incident which occurred today(June 22) at the Freedom building, in which a member of the Freedom Press collective and one of the nominees for the Friends of Freedom were attacked by Brian Bamford, a former contributor to Freedom newspaper who has been excluded from involvement for the last four years due to his unreasonable behaviour. Bamford and his three pals had previously been engaged in a lengthy campaign of online harassment against both the collective and its individual members, following a dispute at the 2012 London Anarchist Bookfair in which he felt we had failed to back his grievance against another organisation. From 230 miles away he took it upon himself to punish a collective he had mostly never met for not pushing what he wanted. He and his chum Chris Draper called this smear job an “expose.” This campaign culminated at the Friends AGM at which he appeared, unannounced, despite having been told he was not welcome in the building, in order to criticise the collective and attempt to have Freedom, sold to fund a website more in line with his own philosophy. After he refused to leave, the Friends allowed him to speak then asked him to wait outside. Having walked down the stairs he then refused to leave the building, attempting to push over the woman who was in his way. Two collective members subsequently took him by the arms and dragged him out. He followed this by charging at a collective member who was blocking the front door, bouncing off and falling over. He got up, and failing to push past, put them in a headlock and stamped on their feet until restrained from doing so.  This was a 72-year-old man repeatedly attacking a 35-year-old who refused to be drawn into a fight. Bamford’s conduct has repeatedly been disgraceful for most of the last four years. He has sneered at, defamed, doxxed and impugned anyone who disagreed with him, and dragged respected comrades and organisations’ names through the mud in his quest to pull down Freedom Press.  As a collective we have, until now, not commented publicly on his appalling behaviour as we felt that it served no purpose to give him the oxygen of publicity.  However following his bizarre physical attacks on members of Freedom Press and the Friends, we feel we should make it clear that Brian, and his three pals who have enabled him throughout, have no place in the anarchist movement.  Their brand of disruptive, bullying, self-aggrandising tantrum-throwing is unacceptable and should not be given any support by anarchist or progressive organisations.  In our view they should not be welcome in anarchist spaces nor published in the anarchist outlets – they are persona non grata in our eyes. We hope other organisations will support us in rejecting their toxic approach.

Andy Meinke upholds the honour of Freedom!

Curious comment from Andy Meinke on the Freedom Collective, Friends of Freedom & the OFIN program:

'THE Freedom Collective does not rent out any of the property. We're a Collective of Anarchists who work in the building and on various Freedom projects such as publishing, website, news sheet. Everyone involved pays what they can to keep the project going. Freedom is run by a Collective that has meetings every month open to anyone in the movement. You get to join the Collective by turning up and doing stuff. The 'Friends of Freedom Press' are a company who owns the building in trust. As you might guess from their name they are 'friends' (editorial emphasis in bold) of the Collective. Mostly former Collective members and generally good eggs. If we need a group called 'Annoying Dicks who want to fuck up Freedom Press' (editorial italics and bold print) we'll leave (sic - let?) you know on 'Who is David?' post below.'

NV Editorial Reply to Andy Meinke:

ANDY Meinke above writes:  'If we need a group called "Annoying Dicks who want to fuck up Freedom Press we'll let you know".'

CAN this be the same Andy Meinke, who in 2014, wrote in the Freedom free-sheet words to this effect:  'Kropotkin started it (Freedom newspaper) but we fucking finished it (Freedom)' ?

CAN this be the same Andy Meinke, who in November 2012, banned a northern regional anarchist publication from the Freedom Bookshop?

CAN this be same Andy Meinke, who in the Summer of 2012, verbally abused the photo-journalist, David Hoffman, over a claim he had raised with Freedom about the theft of intellectual property?  Resulting in Mr. Hoffman having to pursue a formal complaint the consequence of which was that Freedom Press had to pay him a large sum of money?

CAN this be the same Andy Meinke, who in late 2012, allegedly failed to pay the insurance on the property belonging to Freedom Press?  The consequence being that the insurance cover on the building ran out and some two weeks later a fire occurred resulting in extensive damage and further cost to Freedom Press?


Need we go on further?  What is the position pray regarding the insurance of the property now?  Will the building pass fire regulations?  Will anyone insure the property owing to the earlier mismanagement?  What happens if there is another fire at Freedom and it takes the Whitechapel Art Gallery together with the current Barjeel Art collection*, with it? 

HOW many tens of thousands of pounds will it take to bring the Freedom building at 84B, Whitechapel High Street up to standard, so that it meets all the regulations required of it?  Who will take responsibility?  The Friends of Freedom Press, or will it be Andy Meinke and his mates who turn up for a drink and enter the revolving door of the Freedom Collective?  As Andy apparently lives with his parents and is seemingly an employee who manages the Freedom bookshop, perhaps in event of a crisis he will escape legal liability.

*  The Barjeel Art Foundation holds an extensive collection of art from the Arab world.