What do you do, after over a decade (at least) of staking your political project on expanding the role of the state in the life of its citizens, when you are faced with a confrontation when the primary demand is against the power of the state?
I am going to assume the reader has a working sense of events surrounding the ‘Kill the Bill Movement’. My intention here is to offer a handful of critical remarks based on my experience of how this ‘movement’ has played out in national discourse, and in Manchester specifically, where I live. I am sure experiences from other places would cast a different light or even contradict my reflections.
The de facto leaders of the Kill the Bill Movement are Sisters Uncut, a group that formed as a feminist response to the wider anti-austerity movement of the early 2010s, and specifically UK Uncut. Following the financial crash of 2009, successive Labour, Tory, and Coalition governments argued it was necessary to cut public spending to restore economic prosperity; once the state balanced its books, economic stability would be restored, and this stability would facilitate a return to economic prosperity. This logic, usually explained through a misleading comparison to household budgets, is nonsense, but was widely accepted in some form across parliamentary divides, but provoked significant mass demonstrations and direct action against the state and financial institutions that were deemed responsible for the crash. Within this movement, Sisters Uncut appeared as a push both for better feminist practice within the movement, and better representation of feminist concerns in the movement’s demands - primarily focused on cuts to domestic violence services.
The relatively brutal state response to these actions indicated some of the contradictions embedded in the movement. To be assaulted and/or arrested by the arms of the state for demanding better funding for the arms of the state reveals the limits of the demand. These arms are not identical but they can clearly find common cause, and a mobilisation ‘against austerity’ does not address this relationship. At best, better state provision may act as a demand to mobilise a movement and direct it towards the form of power that might provide such services for itself. In practice, however, decades of reformism and opportunism on the british left gave the anti-austerity movement few tools with which to approach the state. For Sisters Uncut specifically, there remained a tension between better service provision and an understanding of the relationship between state violence, domestic abuse, and gendered violence more broadly.
A factor worth mentioning here is the role of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a Trotskyite sect with strong connections on the Labour Left. These connections combined with tactical ruthlessness and significant economic resources for placards, sound systems, and other common protest equipment have given them an outsized role in so-called grassroots mobilising for decades. The other side of their ruthlessness in dealing with external threats or competitors for influence (real or perceived) is their near total absence of internal democracy and a culture of abuse and apologism (google Comrade Delta for the full story). Unsurprisingly, their preferred action is the A to B march, with full police cooperation - calling the police on their opponents is another favored tactic. Whilst the SWP’s combination of sexual violence and state collaboration, and intense colonisation of any and all independent organising by Black people and other people of colour, has made them one of the most dangerous groups on the british left, it would be misleading to think of them as uniquely bad. I have already mentioned their deep roots in the Labour Party, including the circles around Corbyn, as well as what little exists of a Left media, and this didn’t come from nowhere. Part of how they are able to exercise such disproportionate influence is because of how they crystallise a wider range of violent and opportunist currents.
Returning to Sisters Uncut; in the years that have followed the heyday of the anti-austerity movement, SU in London have been able to navigate the opposition between state services and state violence in a way that other groups have not. At their best, SU have been able to make of it a productive tension between radical critique and mass appeal, rather than an antagonism between radical aspirations and state collaboration. But if they have been able to do this, it is because in London, many of the organisers at the core of SU have long experience with organising against prisons, against the hostile environment, and other such issues, and the group has been actively campaigning whether publicly or at a low level for years. This also means that they have built trust in Black communities and other communities of colour in the city, such that their mobilisations have a significant local social base.
The Sarah Everard case (rightly) provoked widespread outrage, but the political articulations of this outrage varied drastically, from individualised outpourings of trauma about men to revolutionary critiques of the function of the state in gendered violence to not-so-subtle attempts at transphobic mobilising. By the time this occurred, SU in London had already learnt the skills and put in the work such that they were well positioned not only to take action, but to draw wider currents of outrage, with better or worse politics on gender and the state, into a form of genuinely radical confrontation.
SU is a highly decentralised organisation. There is communication between SU groups in various cities, but not to the extent that one could speak of it as a cohesive organisation across the country. There are of course both strengths and limits to this. From both experience and various reports, the factors that made SU so effective in London are not present for some SU groups in other cities - but those groups are still able to use the reputation made nationally in London, to launch local mobilisations.
I opened this piece asking a question; What do you do, after over a decade (at least) of staking your political project on expanding the role of the state in the life of its citizens, when you are faced with a confrontation when the primary demand is against the power of the state? Sisters Uncut poses one answer to this question - but the answer did not fall from the sky, but was created by social practice. Another answer might be seen in Bristol, where the militant street response to the state, both on the street and at a legislative level, could take the form that it did because of organising ongoing since last summer to defend the Colston Four, charged with a mass action that tore down the statue of slave trader, Edward Colston, during Black Lives Matter demonstrations in June. This itself builds on longer histories of Black uprising and community defense in Bristol going back decades. But it materialised in Bristol, and in London, because organisers have put in the work to maintain these legacies of part of ongoing political consciousness, not simply a spontaneous insurrectionism or recognition of need.
What is clear is that the conventional logic and political formations of the Left do not have an answer to this question. All that is left is to salvage the tools and resources these political formations have hoarded for decades, and redirect them to other purposes. This lesson needs to be learnt fast because the Left is more than prepared to turn such practices of salvage against more revolutionary alternatives. The SWP’s long history of collaboration with the police and sexual violence has not prevented it from swarming all over Kill the Bill protests in many cities, Manchester included - I know the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), sharing similar issues to the SWP, this time with a Marxist-Leninist slant, has taken a similar role in other cities. Part of how such groups are able to absorb these movements is because they crystallise certain tendencies within them, tendencies towards state collaboration and compromise. It is our responsibility to mobilise other tendencies.
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As ever, my perspective here is firmly shaped by the work of George Padmore. This article is a good place to start understanding his perspective.
The phrase, “the answer did not fall from the sky, but was created by social practice” is adapted from Mao Tse-Tung’s talk, ‘Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?’ Some of the ideas around productive tensions vs antagonism are adapted from ‘On Contradiction’ and ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’.