By some point midway through last month, i had entered the stage of my work cycle, that plays itself out week by week, from resignation to depression to anger to resignation again, where i could resign myself no more. Barista’ing is by turns boring and gruelling, a combination of repetitive drink preparation with endless cleaning and the (sorry) emotional labour of selling every customer the experience of being serviced. did i mention it’s boring? after so many days at work i begin to feel my skin peeling away; i feel this deep muddy pit opening up somewhere between my heart and my gut. i needed a way out, even if just for a day or so. a few twitter dms later and £30 poorer, i had made a plan. a night in london, unplanned, to just catch up with friends, and hopefully find some decent bookshops.
even not considering the pandemic, i hadn’t been to london in several years. meeting my friend at the station and walking through the streets to find some dinner, i found myself gawping like a tourist. in truth, i wasn’t - i wasn’t there for the sights or attractions. but where does tourism end and social observation begin in a city built on spectacle? i had to remind myself, sometimes out loud, not to be shocked by much of london’s street-face, the immaculately sculpted image of its landscape, 19th century town houses accommodating boutique shop fronts and tourist kiosks, with new city skyscrapers rising in the distance. Me and my friend both commented, as we passed en route, on how sad even buckingham palace looked by comparison; a mausoleum commemorating aristocratic decay surrounded by the open spectacle of neo-colonial new money, as if openly displaying that a royal residence constructed from the sedimentation of five centuries of imperial loot is essentially a house built on bloody sand.
i had to remind myself not to be shocked because manchester is exactly the same. In many ways, the powers that be in manchester see london as a model for success. Quite aside from the stark inequality and mass death created by london’s development projects, not to mention the huge difference in mere size (by some measures, london has sixteen times the population of manchester) what this attempted emulation misses is that you simply can’t recreate a global financial capital by decree. But that doesn’t stop manchester’s administration from trying.
In london, it is not simply the mere fact of wealth or its display that struck me, accidental tourist. It is less a superficial display, gilt on the rot, so much as a structuring of the city around its wealth. In other words, the capitalist organisation of the modern city. Especially in its most tourist-driven forms, the city has crafted itself as a commodity and sells itself back to you. As we (both, trans women) sat outside a restaurant in Soho, eating and smoking, a woman asked if she could photograph us. My friend replied;
“No, thank you.”
“You must get this all the time.”
”Yes, I do.”
When the stranger had moved on, my friend turned to me and said, “You’ve now had the full Soho experience.” You could say, the Gay Village experience in manchester.
The city attempts to structure itself through its wealth, because otherwise it could not hold onto it. There is more to the city than this imagistic structural display. Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos speaks of “the Mexico from above” and “the Mexico from below.” This is his attempt to articulate the continuity and difference between the Zapatista uprising and older historic forms of revolutionary nationalism in Mexico. On the one hand, they recognise the continued necessity of the project of national liberation, of anti-imperialism, of rejecting western dominance over Mexican affairs. On the other hand, in the age of neo-colonialism, it is the Mexican elite that administer this dominance over the rest of the population - the workers, the peasants, the indigenous, women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, transsexuals, sex workers, and others - on behalf of international capital. This Mexico from below feeds the Nation and gives it its significance and meaning; on this basis the Mexico from above rules and dominates them. It would probably be too far to begin to speak of a london or a manchester from below versus a london or a manchester from above - it is not so territorially neat as that - but there is an analogy.
Before we were interrupted, me and my friend had been discussing the small wave of very public anti-raids actions that had recently received a lot of attention. We both expressed reservations about this attention. People are resisting border imperialism every day, sometimes in small ways, sometimes bigger. Anti-raids work at its best can build up this everyday resistance, strengthen it, link up isolated struggle into a collective movement. But increased attention more often means increased surveillance, and an increasing awareness of our tactics on the part of the state.
i apologised, but i couldn’t help citing a point made about Trotskyism in Latin America in Régis Debray’s book on the strategy of the Cuban Revolution; in that period, the practice of Trotskyite groups was to turn up in a peasant village, call a meeting to ‘agitate’ for an uprising against capitalism, and hand out literature among the villagers, hoping to unlock their spontaneous revolutionary power. The next day, the revolutionaries would move on to the next village - and the army, following them, would sweep into the village, imprisoning or killing its inhabitants as enemies of the state.
Increased interest in anti-raids work from the Left does not seem to have been followed by an increased awareness or critical thinking about the demands of that work in contrast to more mainstream institutions like electoral parties or NGOs. For electoralism or an NGO, increased awareness can only be a good thing! But as Tariq Mehmood puts it, in this wide ranging interview on 70s anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and NGOisation, “every report that they produce is a report for the intelligence services who mine it.” At times, it can seem as if after the defeat of Corbynism three years ago, many people are still floundering for an alternative set of practices or institutions on which they can hang an essentially unreconstructed politics. Debray describes another debate in Latin American Communism, at the time of the Sino-Soviet split, during which many militants recognised the critiques of the USSR made by the Communist Party of China in their own local parties. These critiques became the basis of an attempt to rejuvenate their own practice; the militants formed a breakaway group, attempting to return to the struggle. However, as they were importing an ideological critique from elsewhere, these groups invariably recreated all the old institutional structures and practices from the party they had left, now promoting a rival ‘political line’. Both group hardened in its sectarianism, both became more moribund, prompting ever more splits. Castro’s group, by contrast, did not emerge from the old Cuban Communist Party to begin with; they assembled, went into the mountains, and commenced a new form of practice. I don’t want to reject the legacy or lessons of the Corbyn period outright, but I would like to move on from it - especially since our enemies are moving on from it without us. Without structures or strategies of our own, we will find ourselves falling into those of our enemies.
If citing old ideological critiques from elsewhere in my insistence on new strategies and tactics seems ironic, it is also a useful way of not commenting too directly on what strategies and tactics are being innovated on the ground. My friend pointed out to me that ‘anti raids work’ has never been one thing; in its most common forms, it has been an orientation, with raids acting as a point of contact between state repression and the self-activity of the migrant proletariat. Some anti-raids groups mostly spent their time turning up to local union or tenant organiser meetings with literature saying, “Do you know what to do if one of your members gets raided? Cos it is happening and is going to happen”. She told me another story about a friend who used to cycle around on days off following immigration vans, waiting for them to stop, and going into the shops in advance to warn them and advice them to not let them in the front door. In manchester, and in many other places, we run a stall. A stall is bread and butter work, a way of refocusing attention away from spectacular resistances, awareness raising, and other heroics, and towards the day to day struggles of britain’s subaltern-ised classes.
There’s a story jean genet tells in his incredibly messy book about his time in Palestine, Prisoner of Love, that i’ve found myself quoting a lot atm.
In the evening the fedayeen usually rested from the day’s work: fetching and carrying supplies and guarding the base, the gun emplacements, the radio and telephone network, and everything else to do with security; not to mention the permanent alert against the ever-dangerous Jordanian villages. One evening Khaled Abu Khaled asked me about the fighting methods of the Black Panthers.
My answer was slowed down by the meagreness of my Arabic vocabulary. He was surprised to hear about the activities of the urban guerrillas.
“Why do they do that? Haven’t they got any mountains in America?”