Without History

Introduction – There sure is a lot to be angry about

Fifteen years ago I wrote a pamphlet for the Anarchist Federation UK – An Introduction to Anarchist Communism. It did pretty well. Was translated into a few languages and people liked it. The organisation still uses a version of it today and every now and again it gets mentioned to me. And every now and again I reread it and realise quite how far my politics have moved on from “class struggle Anarchist Communism” and into the anarcha transfeminism I tend to define my politics as today.

Yet fifteen years ago, I found writing this clarifying. It showed me where my principles were, where the areas of ignorance were, where what I believed was solid and well backed and where it was muddy and misty as my long covid addled brain is today. In many ways, it was researching those muddy areas that led me away from these politics. In many other ways, it was bitter bitter experience but we can talk about that as we go.

This is going to be an odd piece of writing. It’s possible I’m just writing for myself and the handful of people who were there alongside me, but I suspect there might be something useful, or at least amusing, in reading about this for people who weren’t there. This will be as much a personal account of my years in the UK Anarchist Federation as it will be an attack on the idea of “class struggle anarchism” I defended during that time. The two things are separable, but not for me. Maybe that will undermine the “credibility” of this piece, who knows? I’m a mentally ill tranny who makes weird music and even weirder religious materials. No fucker’s listening to me anyway.

The Introduction to Anarchist Communism was a pamphlet written anonymously for a collective and it was fudged in many places to satisfy political differences that were never really allowed to properly surface in what was, for an anarchist org, quite an authoritarian setup. A gerontocratic founder-ocracy that eventually fell apart over the key question in all modern politics – should we treat trans people like human beings?

The split in the Anarchist Federation in 2017 over the founding members’ transphobia was part of a decisive moment in UK anarchism. A moment when a significant part of the movement decided to support reactionaries backed by fascist money – creating an opening for them which has led to the situation now where trans rights are being reversed and children denied medical care and dying as a result. Most of this was due to prejudice and preferring friendships over solidarity, but some of it was because of the politics in this pamphlet. So fuck these politics and fuck this pamphlet. Past me had a lot to learn.

The rot in these ideas appears almost immediately in the introduction. Capitalism, I claimed, is

a system designed from the ground up to set us at each others’ throats. It exploits and exaggerates every tiny little difference between us, making us compete for scraps and hate each other as we fight while a tiny minority enjoy all the benefits.

(IAC, p5)

Right here are the two major fault lines in any “class struggle politics” and especially in the anarchist varieties. Firstly, an agency is assigned to capital, which is often an agency assigned to the ruling class, which sees the system as intentional in important ways. The situation of the working class has been designed in a way such that some kind of pre-existing unity is shattered as we are set at each other’s throats. “Tiny” differences are exaggerated and exploited to divide working class people and make it easier for the ruling class to dominate us.

The logic runs like this. The working class united is powerful, we see this in moments of elevated struggle and revolutions. Therefore, to preserve its power the ruling class must keep the working class divided. Therefore the existing divisions in the working class must be the work of the ruling class, which it is the job of revolutionaries to undo. We are already in the world of primary and secondary contradictions – of hierarchies of oppression – before we’re even out of the gate. We’re already working with a circular and oppressive logic.

Secondly, “a tiny minority” enjoy the benefits of this system while the rest of us “compete for scraps”. The flow of material benefits and power in capitalist societies is clear. The minority ruling class reaps the benefits of whatever the majority working class does. Any redistribution of that power amongst the working class are “scraps”, unimportant and illusory benefits compared to the power of the ruling class. This is the second underlying and unstated assumption. Other working class people, however much they might be hurting you, are never the “real” enemy. Power differences, exploitation and differences in access to resources within the class are never as important as the division between the ruling and the working class.

This is a set of assumptions that is deeply questionable simply on the facts, but it also demonstrates a logic and a standpoint that underlies all class struggle politics and constantly turns any attempts to incorporate feminist or anti colonial politics into it against themselves. The working class is the primary antagonist of this revolutionary story. The point of view of the working class, united, is what any revolutionary must articulate. Whatever undermines this unity is a ruling class perspective. The class in itself has been corrupted, the class for itself will be purified. Clear as glass, hard as steel. Ultimately, patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism and whatever else can be purged from the working class as corruptions imposed by the ruling class. They are never fundamental conflicts between people with different interests and needs.

Combine this with the rhetoric of minorities and majorities – probably overused in this pamphlet but to be found everywhere in class struggle politics – and the, frankly sinister, logic of this becomes clear. Whilst class struggle anarchists might decry the authoritarian Marxist view of feminism or queerness as “bourgeois decadence” or whatever the in phrase is this season, they still endorse the idea that the salience of these ideas within the working class – the persecution of queer people, POC and women by other working class people – is the responsibility of the ruling class. And the eliminationist logic of that is never far behind.

The transphobia that split the UK movement in 2017 was no anachronism. It follows from some of the fundamental ideas held by a movement steeped in the logic of traditional class struggle politics no matter how far removed from that it might like to see itself as. There’s a reason anarchism, Marxism, Leninism and other revolutionary strains within the traditional workers movement that grew through the 19^th century in Europe consistently fuck over “minorities” within their ranks. And that reason is the misogynist, white supremacist idea of the working class they’re working with.

When I was writing in 2010, these fault lines were visible to anyone who paid even passing attention to our movements and how they worked. But as will become clear, much effort was put into hiding those lines, into refusing to see power struggles as power struggles, but to instead characterise them as the result of bad ideas or ruling class connivance. However, in that very effort the fault lines were made so much clearer and the blind spots of so many comrades outlined. The consequences of this would be obvious to trans anarchists soon enough, as they had become obvious to so many other minoritised comrades over the years.

What We’re Fighting: Longing for Unity and Expelling the Divisive

Class Struggle – A Sacred Cow and the Necessary Sacrifices

It’s in the first of the three main sections of the pamphlet that I really get down to the main business of defending class struggle anarchism – defending the idea of false consciousness without admitting that’s what I’m doing. After a brief and fairly orthodox description of what capitalism is – one which leaves unsaid as much as it says – we get into “class struggle” itself and the anxiety at the heart of the writing starts to become clear.

The Anarchist Federation in 2010 was a sclerotic organisation. The aims and principles laid down in the 80s were basically unquestionable as the founder members had rigged the internal democracy in order to give themselves a veto in the guise of consensus. This was the main reason there were so many short lived orgs formed from AF splits in the years leading up to 2017. However, younger members were often heavily engaged with refugee solidarity, feminist and environmental work and brought in ideas from those movements that did not sit easily with the poor compromises over the “autonomous organisations” of multiply oppressed working class people found in the A&Ps.

The origins of these poor compromises in the ultra-left milieu of the 1960s and its tattered 1980s rump will be discussed later when they’re more relevant, but in the context of the writing of this pamphlet what’s important is that I was trying to write for an ideologically diverse organisation pretending to be a theoretically tight and unified group of militant workers in a workers’ movement that no longer existed. That I stayed as long as I did and put in as much work as I did is testament to the terrible effects of stubbornness mixed with low self esteem. My comrades who quit and got on with more effective work were much much smarter than me.

One task of writing an introduction pamphlet was to paper over these cracks, as much as it was to clarify them. Members tended to leave in one of two directions, either into more specific work with wider perspectives or into “harder” class struggle positions that aimed to be more interventionist and often ended up in some kind of Leninism (a current editor of the Morning Star, and well known abuser, left the AF for just such a project). Unspoken in all AF theoretical projects – and I was involved in *a lot* of them over the years – was keeping these two forces from spinning outwards. This is not to say that an organisation which rarely breached 100 members and never kept them for long was obsessed with recruitment. Rather it is to say that these ideological fractures, usually in various barely veiled forms, often dominated the internal life of the organisation.

With 20/20 hindsight gained through years of severe mental illness and pissing off cis people it’s obvious now these fractures came from fundamental flaws within the underlying ideas of class struggle anarchism. At the time, I largely managed to convince myself, and convincingly argue, that these problems came from contradictions in the struggle that it was the responsibility of the movement to overcome through our organising. Ideas like “site of struggle” and “culture of resistance” became thought terminating cliches rather than tools to more closely analyse and understand a situation. Anything to avoid analysing the lines of power within the working class.

In the “Class Struggle” section of the pamphlet we find an almost perfect demonstration of this:

This confusion about the idea of class is part of a wider set of tactics that the ruling class use to disguise the reality of class from the people that it exploits. Capitalism needs workers in a way workers simply do not need capitalism. If the working class unites around its common interests then it can do away with the ruling class and run society itself. We don’t need them, but they need us. Because of this, the ruling class works hard to divide us against each other. It does this in two ways – partly through trying to control ideas and the way we think about ourselves, and partly through creating small differences in power and wealth that set working class people against each other.

(IAC, p9)

“This confusion” is of course the idea that “middle class” teachers are not workers when they have “no real control over their lives” and “have to struggle against their employers”. There is a very specific sleight of hand at work here. The question is subtly changed from “what power do teachers have over other working class people?” – a question very much alive in the wider anarchist milieu and which has intruded into class struggle anarchist groups, packed to the gills as they are with teachers, many many times – to “what makes teachers working class?”. The question of power within the class is replaced with a question about the unity of the class. A very specific turning aside from a specific political problem to a general question of definition.

Indeed, this question of definition becomes a question of the “reality” of class. This reality is disguised by the ruling class as part of its work to divide us. The reality is a unified class. The illusion is division through the control of “ideas” – ideology in other words, unnamed here for the sake of accessibility and avoidance of jargon – and “small differences in power”. A united class is divided from above. Just as teachers and students are “equals” before capitalism – wage workers all – so the “countless women subjected to emotional, physical and sexual violence as a result of their gender” mentioned in the introduction are simply subject to “small differences in power”. Their rapists were presumably helpless in the face of ruling class indoctrination as they exercised the inconsequential scrap of power capitalism granted them over working class women.

I’m talking about false consciousness. Even in 2010, I would have denied that’s what I was doing, claiming this idea was patronising and elitist, looking down on working class people as simple dupes of the ruling class rather than autonomous agents with complex and contradictory needs. I was perfectly capable of talking about white supremacy and patriarchy – indeed this pamphlet will do exactly that – but always in the context of capitalism. Always as divisions in the working class which need to be overcome so the class can unite and overthrow our oppressors. Working class white people, working class men, are never the enemy. They are never oppressive groups with power of their own which they exercise over subordinates because they directly benefit. They are always proxies of the ruling class when they do this. “Small differences in power”. “Ruling class ideas”. The class in itself – divided and weak – vs the class for itself – united and strong. The atrocities committed by working class people reduced to “divisions” fostered and encouraged by the ruling class. Their victims encouraged to look to the “real” enemy – capitalism.

The conclusion of the section is explicit about this:

To fight the class struggle, then, is to try and overcome the false differences that the ruling class creates and unite as one class against the people that exploit us.

(IAC, p10)

We are exploited by the ruling class, never each other. The divisions are false, imposed from above and never a real difference in material interests. Our goal in class struggle is unity and that overrides all other considerations.

This introductory pamphlet was deliberately written to be simple, even simplistic, and jargon free. Accessibility was prioritised over detail and complexity. But in this section we find a whole cluster of denial mechanisms condensed into a few phrases. This pattern will repeat over and over throughout the rest of the piece with the same purpose – to displace the power exercised over subordinated and minoritised working class people by other working class people onto the ruling class so an idealised potential for working class unity can be preserved. The fundamental conflict in society is between capital and labour. All other power struggles can be reduced somehow to this. There are no divisions within the class which are irreconcilable. There is no alliance between sections of the working class and the ruling class which is not a fundamental betrayal of the working class’s long term interests for the short term gain of a “corrupt” minority. Whether divisions in the working class are called “sites of struggle” or “contradictions” or “fractures” they remain opportunities for organisation and the creation of unity, never a struggle over irreconcilable differences in power in the way the struggle between the ruling and working class is.

The State – Anarchism as the Embarrassing Aunt of Class Struggle Anarchism

The following section on the State is simplified to the point of incoherence and really does not get into the real problem that the State poses for anarchists, but this is a predictable lapse. Anarchists are at our most deranged sounding when we say things like “[the] state is a machine for controlling people and can never be anything else.” It’s when we’re at our most correct as well. Generally anarchism is most correct when it is least reasonable, least willing to compromise. But this can be a hard sell to anyone not already steeped in anarchist ideas and assumptions. That the AF clearly sees this as something of a weakness (a pamphlet on the State was never forthcoming or even proposed as I remember) is interesting, even telling about the vague sense of embarrassment class struggle anarchism generally has about the anarchism part. Not Marxists, but not “lifestylists” either. Clear eyed revolutionaries defining themselves as much against the excesses of the hippies as the betrayals of the Trots.

This sense of embarrassment is a common feature of any politics that aspires to be mass. Indeed, it’s pretty much central to Platformism, Especifismo and most forms of the ultra leftism class struggle anarchism usually finds itself part of. Revolutionaries outside of periods of mass struggle, outside of revolutionary upheavals, are a tiny minority. Generally speaking, a deeply unusual minority made up of pretty unusual people. We spend huge amounts of time and effort on activities that, at best, will not benefit us personally and, at worst, will land us in prison or ruin our lives one way or another. Inevitably, people willing to do difficult and dangerous things out of a sense of principle will likely be pretty independent minded in many other ways.

But the class is where revolution will come from! How can this tiny backroom full of misfits and weirdos relate to the mass of “ordinary” people? Especially if, as anarchists, we look to the authoritarian left and see the manipulation behind the pretence to leadership, the corruption and exploitation behind the creation of cadre. If revolutionaries are not special, not essential, not a moving force in the process of revolution as the Leninists would see themselves, then what are we for? This is obviously a widely debated question to which the AF devotes a whole (terrible) pamphlet. However, the answer to it is often more felt than reasoned.

Revolutionaries are “ordinary” people who have useful knowledge. We exist to spread that knowledge and we do that by organising where we are, in the circumstances we find ourselves in. At work, in our communities, whatever. This is pretty much what the next two large sections of the pamphlet are about. Underlying this, however, is a sense that to be ordinary people we must be somehow relatable. You have to be able to sit in the residents meeting, or the union conference, or the work canteen and just be “one of the boys”.

One of the boys doesn’t say crazy things like “abolish prisons” or “kill your local rapist”. One of the boys doesn’t live in a squat and get their food from skips. One of the boys isn’t a tranny or a faggot or a crip or a mental. We might want the boys to be sympathetic to those people, we might see ourselves as bringing enlightened ideas about minorities to the masses, but we are about the masses not those minorities and it is with them that we must fit in.

This is more often felt than argued, but it is a huge part of the structure of feeling that underlies class struggle anarchism. Indeed, one of the major splits from the AF in my time in the organisation was a now defunct org called Liberty and Solidarity, in part founded by someone who had infamously argued that anarchists should dress however the average working class person in their area dressed. It is also often this felt source that is underneath the enmity towards “IDPol” frequently found in class struggle anarchism and which the pamphlet I wrote was desperately trying to navigate whilst also being a subcultural faggot (and repressed and closeted trans woman). It didn’t navigate it very well.

The transphobic split in 2017 in which founder members of the Anarchist Federation left to form the Anarchist Communist Group was in part rooted in this. The angry faggots who had confronted Helen Steel and Grottie Locket at the London bookfair that year had gotten way above their station. As a member of the ACG would say in leaked internal communications a few years later

I am another member of the ACG who supports Helen Steel.
I have said that consistently and I will stick with it.

In the period running up to the 2017 Bookfair, there was a political climate within the AF with the ascendency of privilege theory and intersectionality where it was impossible to have differences of opinion that didn’t end in accusations of intolerance or phobias. The attack on Helen Steel at the Bookfair lead to a row within the AF and for a group of us, there were two options; be expelled or leave.

(Leaked ACG forum post, not actually sure if it’s online atm)

As it happens, we didn’t think we could expel them because of how thoroughly the founders had rigged the internal processes of the AF. We planned to leave en masse and found a new org, leaving them with a ruined transphobic rump. Sadly, we were gazumped. But that’s besides the point. Helen Steel is a founder member of A Woman’s Place, the single most important transphobic organisation operating in left spaces. It’s mostly dormant now, the Gender Critical space having been taken over by much more explicit fascists. Her transphobia is completely indisputable. Its equation here with “privilege theory” and “intersectionality”, presented as alien ideologies (and clearly not fully understood) splitting the AF and leading to “accusations of intolerance” is… interesting to say the least.

In the period leading up to the 2017 bookfair, the AF, through several local groups, recruited a large number of trans and queer members. We were the source of the “ascendency of privilege theory”. The refusal to see this, the refusal to listen to trans comrades when we explained exactly what Steel was doing at the time, was presented as ideology. It wasn’t. It was transphobia. They claimed it couldn’t be, because some of them wore makeup in the 80s, but it was.

The association of the AF with the freaks was too much for these people. An org with a large number of queer members couldn’t be a vehicle for “social insertion” into residents groups. It was too marked, too weird, too different to the “ordinary working class”. And so perfectly ordinary bigotries got presented as political differences.

This structure of feeling has a huge impact on the direction and theory of class struggle anarchism. It has deep intellectual roots in ideas of the Mass which profoundly influence the vision of “the class” that hovers in the revolutionary imagination. But ultimately, it is a kind of embarrassment. Why can’t the rest of us just be normal? Jim in the canteen would listen to them if the rest of us weren’t a bunch of freaks ruining the reputation of anarchism.

Just one more split, lads, and you’ll be pure. Just one more.

Hierarchy – Bam! Pocket Sand!

Our opposition to hierarchy is what distinguishes anarchists from the other ideological products of the European workers movement. No Gods, No Masters. In the matter of boots. Against the Red Guards and the White. That story about Durruti wearing an apron and telling his comrades off for not doing the washing up.

The opposition to hierarchy in class struggle anarchism, however, is always attenuated, always redirected against “real” targets. It refuses the straight up dismissal of the struggles of working class women or POC as “bourgeois” or whatever whilst at the same time practising the same sleight of hand reframing of questions we saw above in the discussion of teachers. Suddenly we are not talking about power, we are talking about division. False division at that, dividing an always already united class.

Hierarchy is one of the key tools that the state and capitalism use to control people. It is implicated in both the repressive and the manipulative arms of the state, but it is most destructive when it is used to manipulate people. A hierarchy is any system where power over others is concentrated in the hands of a minority.

[…]

This is one important way that capitalism creates and uses hierarchy to divide working class people. We are given a small amount of power over each other so that we end up fighting each other rather than fighting the bosses.

(IAC, p13)

This short section is an accomplished magic trick. Misdirection, sleight of hand, specialist equipment. It has everything except the scantily dressed floozy (I suppose the author might count as that but I was still a few years off my floozy period when I wrote this). Hierarchy is a tool. It intrudes into the always already united working class, wielded expertly by the capitalist state, to smash us apart, to weaken us. Working class people are manipulated with “small amount[s] of power” which tear us apart and set us at each other’s throats instead of tearing at the flesh of the bosses.

Here, hierarchy is denied its own logic and its own existence. It may or may not preexist capitalism but it is so thoroughly imbricated (yes, I’ve read the communisation people, I’m coming for you later!) in capitalism that separating it out is impossible now. Having forced this card on us, the magician shuffles it to the bottom of the deck and leads us into the next step of the illusion. This is minimisation and misdirection. Hierarchy is about minorities here. It is trivially easy to think of forms of oppression where a minority is persecuted by the majority – say… trans people for example – but that doesn’t mean this is a mistake. It is misdirection. The persecution of trans folk comes from the minority ruling class here. Daily experiences of bigotry are disappeared away as “small amounts of power”, irrelevant to the real power of the ruling class. By directing our attention to a minority ruling class and away from oppression by other working class people through minimisation of daily oppression experienced by actual minorities within the class hierarchies separate to capitalism are simultaneously invoked and disappeared.

Once again, the argument is a structure of feeling masquerading as a basic outline of an idea. The assumptions and preferences and unconsidered emotional anchors here reach up and shape the argument like a white gloved man behind the curtain. The consequences of this in terms of the actions taken by groups like the AF cannot be understated. One of the greatest political failures of movement anarchism of my time as an activist in the UK was the response to the wave of riots in the summer of 2011, beginning in London and spreading over the whole country. We failed to set up defence committees for those charged, we failed to stop people pleading guilty and receiving prison sentences, we failed to challenge not just the police response, but the escalation we saw in the courts. This was not a defeat as say the widespread police infiltration of the environmental movement, or the expansion of the border regime and persecution of migrants was. It was an enormous error in judgement and failure to act in exactly the circumstances where a small but determined minority could have made huge difference.

There were a lot of reasons for this, some good faith (Green and Black Cross saying early on they didn’t have the capacity to handle this as they had the student riots the previous year and needed others to step up), some much less so. There are two sets of ideas presented in this pamphlet that contributed heavily to this failure. The first is the class first hierarchy of oppression established covertly as we’ve seen in this section and above. A class first hierarchy of oppression that becomes pretty openly racist in its expression. The second is the principle of separate organisation that it establishes in the few paragraphs following the quotation above. A principle which, at first glance at least, seems to take the reality of oppression and exploitation other than capitalism seriously, but which upon closer inspection merely cements in theory a principle long evident in practice: Solidarity does not flow downhill.

The hierarchy of oppression manifests itself in the frequently asked question “is this a class issue?” In 2011 there was widespread doubt in the anarchist scene that the riots were something we should even support. What was the class character of these riots? Were they actually revolutionary or was this “just criminal”? These questions were pushed back on hard. The racial character of the riots, of youth of colour pushing back against systematic police violence and the very racialised notion of “criminality” was pointed out. But the questions remained. There were anarchists across the movement questioning whether we should support a group of people in open revolt against the police because it wasn’t immediately obvious how this was “working class”. Even those of us supporting the riots found ourselves pushing back in “class” terms – pointing out how poisonous the petite bourgeois local businesses set ablaze could be as a locus of debt and policing within racialised communities. Cops are racist and deserve to get their fucking lumps was not a good enough argument. It had to be understood through the class lens.

Rioting black youth had to be established as “like us” – nerdy fucking white boys – to receive unconditional solidarity. In its cruder forms this was simple racism, but even those of us arguing for solidarity were forced onto the ground of “working class unity”. Only if racism was “a class issue” would it be worthy of notice by the hallowed halls of revolutionary organisations. A clear hierarchy of oppression is operating here and solidarity does not flow down it. If it is not “class” it does not deserve or receive action and the response of POC to the racial violence of the police has to be “interpreted” to be worthy of attention.

The other important hesitation is, at first glance at least, part of an acknowledgement of non class oppressions and the importance of fighting them:

Just as only the working class can fight capitalism because we are the ones being directly exploited, so only women, LGBTQ people and those attacked by racism (which can change from place to place and period to period) can destroy patriarchy, heterosexism and white supremacy. We can all support each other in these different fights, but it is vital that those directly attacked chose the form and structure of their own response. Organisations of women, gay people and of black and ethic minority people (who are often, in reality, majorities) are absolutely vital in resisting and destroying various systems of hierarchy.

(IAC, p15)

On one level this is accepting the leadership of those directly effected by particular oppressions. The role of white people is to support people of colour in struggle, supporting their organisations rather than paternalisticly assuming the right to lead and structure such struggles. This is unobjectionable, on the face of it, until it is joined to the covert hierarchy of oppression established above.

These two things placed together create a justification for inaction. Black people here aren’t simply the bootmakers we must defer to in matters of their expertise, but they become to whom we have no responsibility. We are white and therefore must not interfere. They, however, are working class and owe us their support. This is the consequence of refusing to see oppression and hierarchy within the class as “real”. Of seeing it as a ruling class intervention. The struggles of minoritised people become subject to debate, the question of solidarity an open one and nerdy white boys in revolutionary organisations relieved of all responsibility to act, unless it is to turn up at something organised by other people for the credibility points (provided they never touch a national flag of course!).

The sclerotic inaction of the anarchist scene during the 2011 riots had many causes, some forgivable, some far less so, but ultimately it was the result of a racial order class struggle anarchism refuses to see as structural and structuring. Like the worst “I don’t see colour” liberals we saw no responsibility beyond disavowing our own bigotry and as a result class struggle anarchists failed to support the most significant outburst of that struggle on the streets in the austerity era.

No fucking wonder Corbyn ate our fucking lunch. We deserved it.

Next time on Past Me: Coward, Fool and Traitor…

I mean, who knows if there’ll be a next time. I write sclerotically and have more important writing priorities than this, but there are three more sections of this damn pamphlet to demolish and goddamn did taking down the first part feel good.