Why I am not a member of a political party:

At the end of 2023 I wrote a few posts in which I mentioned going to meetings of a new political party, Transform. In the end I chose not to join Transform, nor any other new socialist party, for the reasons below:

For one thing, I decided quite a while ago that I would be voting Green at the next general and local elections, so I could not in good faith join a party that is going to run against the Greens. I will not join the Green party either, but in the present context in which we are facing a Labour landslide election victory under a right-wing leadership, a massive vote for the Greens is the clearest way for EVERYONE to the left of Starmer to send a clear message that we do not support him.

The only other party big enough to be a contender for this would be George Galloway’s Workers Party. I personally hope that many socially conservative but economically left wing people vote for him rather than for the Tories or Reform. His views on migration alone make it impossible for people genuinely on the Left to vote for him, however, even if we may share some of his opinions on Western Imperialism.

After the dust has settled following the next election there will inevitably be some kind of regrouping on the Left. Some of the socialist parties which have formed will merge with others or split. Some socialists who have joined the Greens or the Workers Party may leave again, or it may become clear that on or the other of them is actually the Left’s best hope, unlikely as that may be. There is also the question of those on the Left who remain in the Labour party and what they choose to do.

It would be foolish of me to nail my colours to the mast about which potential future faction I would have loyalty to, and I would prefer to remain objective until then. In any case, my children are still too young for me to have as much free time to commit to any cause as I would like.

However, I still believe that there is a need for a new mass party of the working class in Britain (not including Northern Ireland, which should be reunited with Ireland). The nucleus of such a party must be built by people within the existing Left who have experience of organisation and serious class politics. A democratic structure, common set of principles and overall strategy must be found which is capable of making such a party grow from being a small organisation of activists to a genuinely mass party in which large sections of the working class is actively involved in decision making.

I hope the conditions for such a project will be more favourable under the Starmer government than they are presently. The prospect of five more years of austerity under a Labour party in which the Left and Unions have no power will surely focus minds. There will always be sectarianism and folly but hopefully wiser heads will prevail.

A mass party must be a broad church including a range of opinion, and that range must be broad enough to include Revolutionary Socialism as its Left Wing without being broad enough to include any explicitly pro-capitalist tendency on its Right. The Right of the party must be a Social Democracy of Gradualist Reformist Socialist sort which seeks to abolish capitalism progressively over hundreds of years rather than the Revisionist Social Democracy which does not seek to abolish capitalism at all.

Of course, at present the majority of working class people do not believe capitalism needs to be abolished at all. This is why a political party needs to be able to clearly argue why it does, and to be able to link this broader analysis with every concrete material issue affecting working class people today. The party can only demonstrating that we have a correct analysis by actually winning concrete material struggles, and publicly advertising that we are doing so due to our correct analysis in ways which cut through the mainstream media propaganda levelled against us. The more we win, and the more we are proved right, the more people will join us.

Only then will the working class stand a chance of becoming conscious of its true interests and capable of fighting for them as a united bloc: to carry out the social revolution which abolishes the bourgeois state and establishes the democratic republic that is the initial form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat – the transition stage to a post-capitalist society during which the working class democratically controls society and progressively creates the conditions for a classless and stateless future society.

Why we should participate in elections even though Socialism can’t be achieved through the ballot box

On Monday we had the second meeting of people in the Bristol area who had signed the call for a new political party of the left called Transform.

I was glad that there seemed to be a broad consensus that we should be actively involved in local campaigns around issues affecting working class people. Three issues were mentioned: the closure of local bus routes; housing; and proposals to abolish Council Tax Reduction.

Being involved in such campaigns, helping them win and connecting them together, is exactly what a political organisation of the working class should be doing. This is because they are direct expressions of working class power, and ‘building power in communities’ is one of the key aims of Transform, according to it’s 10 principles.

The political organisations of the working class can play a different role in these struggles to the actual campaigning organisations themselves. An organisation such as a trades union, or a tenants union like Acorn, inevitably has to at some point negotiate with the class enemy and potentially make compromises. Also, as single issue campaigns, they are not well placed to provide a broader analysis of society, except as it relates specifically to the issues at hand.

A political organisation guided by a socialist outlook can make these intellectual arguments, linking each single issue to a comprehensive critique of capitalism. This does not need to be expressed in academic language, but still, someone needs to explain why those people affected by one particular issue in fact have the same interests as the wider working class.

Campaigning on real issues which ordinary people are involved in and linking them together both practically and intellectually helps build the strength of the class, as well as developing class consciousness.

There also seemed to be a consensus at the meeting that although we would not realistically stand a chance of winning a seat in parliament at the next general election (likely to be some time in the next year), we should still stand anyway.

The main reason for this is to spread propaganda. But it is important to make a distinction between propaganda for our organisation, and propaganda for the interests of the working class as a whole. We should only be promoting our own organisation insofar as it is one and the same as promoting the interests of the class as a whole.

What could this look like? At hustings events for elections, and in any media interviews we may be offered, our election candidates and other spokespeople should always be trying to shift the terms of the debate towards the issues affecting working class people.

We should always be arguing that the solutions to the problems they face is in growing the strength, confidence and consciousness of the whole class, rather than trying to claim that if only our party members became the government we would somehow be able to solve everything.

As I explained in my last post, there are many reasons to expect a party winning election within a representative democracy would fail to achieve ‘socialism’: it would be undermined by the financial sector, the media and possibly even be overthrown by the military.

Only with the active participation of the majority of the population could even a minimal socialist program stand a chance of success. This especially so if you believe, as I do, that socialism must involve a restructuring of the state and a move away from representative democracy to participatory democracy.

A case in point is the issue of local bus routes being shut down, which was the main issue discussed at our meeting on Monday. It was suggested at one point that we should be making the case for ‘nationalisation’ of buses as part of our socialist propagandising within this campaign. However, this can be taken to mean different things.

At one extreme, ‘Nationalisation’ could be taken as meaning the creation of a huge centralised bus company with it’s headquarters in Whitehall, managed by civil servants or other bureaucrats distantly removed from the working class populations around the UK who might actually use buses. These people would most likely be members of the upper and upper-middle classes and make their decisions about which bus routes to close or not based on financial considerations.

Would this be really that much better than having private companies run the show? In terms of the extent to which working class people in a particular area would have control over their own buses, the difference is minimal.

What we really want is the ability for citizens in a particular area who want a bus route to come into existence, or be improved, to have a mechanism by which they can raise this for discussion at their local council and have it be voted on by local people or their delegated representatives. Then, if a majority of people in a local area want resources to be spent in a particular way, they will be.

This would require a massive decentralisation of power both from central government to local councils, but also from local councils to their actual citizens.

The same principle should apply to schools, hospitals and all other public services. ‘Building power in communities’ must surely have this end goal: of communities that are in effect self-governing, but federated together at regional and national levels as and when this is necessary for practical reasons.

But even a partial step towards greater local democracy, falling short of the radical vision of total self-governance, would be a welcome shift in the balance of power between classes. If a socialist party were to come to power and create such local structures by which citizens can directly have a say over their local public services, then even if a right wing party were to come to power at the following general election, they would have a hard time rolling back these reforms.

Being involved in campaigning gives people a small taste of what having this kind of direct power would feel like. Campaigns which are democratically run give people an idea of what running all of society democratically would feel like, and gets people used to the idea that they have a right to have their voices heard, as well as a duty to respect the wishes of the collective. Most people have never experienced such things.

So we should stand in elections, but only so we have a chance to tell people that by voting for us they are actually voting to give themselves more power. Even if we do not win an election and have the chance to put into action some minimal program of reforms – if we are able to encourage more people to take action in their own lives then we will still have built the power of the working class.

Can Transform Become an Organisation of the Working Class?

Last night I attended the second meeting of an attempt to set up a branch of a new socialist party in Bristol, called Transform

There was lower attendance than the previous meeting. I believe that is because the date and time for the meeting was decided on in quite a hurry with limited input from the wider group, meaning it was scheduled for a time that many people could not make. Nevertheless there were some interesting discussions and of course the most interesting things were the disagreements.

Many, including myself, argued for the importance of ‘listening’ to working class people and involving ourselves directly in struggles going on in communities or workplaces, before writing programs or standing in elections.

Others put more of a priority on trying to stand for election, whether or not we have done this groundwork, emphasising the importance of spreading socialist ideas via hustings etc.

While there is no necessary contradion between these positions, if the latter were taken to extremes I feel it would be problematic and contradict the spirit of the 10 principles we all signed up to. The ten ‘core principles’ of transform include two separate aims (number 8 and 9). The party: proposed party:

(8) Contests elections in order to offer voters a socialist alternative and build power locally and nationally, without promoting the idea that voting alone can solve the present crises.

but also;

(9) Seeks to build power in communities, workplaces and on the streets.

As I pointed out in my last post, nothing in point 8 indicates a belief that the proposed party is capable of winning a national general election, nor that ‘socialism’ could be achieved by such a government even if it did. This is a big party of why I signed the call to create this party.

Standing in elections claiming to represent the working class and to be fighting for socialism, while staying separate from the actual struggles of the working class, would be to ignore many lessons from history.

The Folly of Reformism

Where has ‘socialism’ been achieved through the ballot box? Nowhere.

Where has it been achieved outside of and in opposition to the State? Everywhere it has ever existed even a tiny bit.

Simply put, the bourgeoisie will never allow a socialist government to rule it’s State. The way Corbynism was undermined by the political and media establishment was nothing compared to how “Democratic Socialists” have been treated in other countries. This month is the 50th anniversary of the fascist counter-revolution in Chile which saw the Socialist president Allende lying dead in his own office and hundreds of thousands of working class activists murdered.

General Pinochet was the man responsible for this with the support of the governments of Britain, the US and the corporations they represent like ITT, whose interests were threatened by Allende and so lobbied the US government to support the coup. As his title suggests, he was in the military and therefore was a part of the very state apparatus which Allende naively tried to use to create ‘socialism’ – leading to such tragic consequences for himself and all of Chile.

Some people use the word ‘deep state’ to describe these features of bourgeois ‘democracy’ by which democratically elected governments can be undermined by the forces of the military and bureaucracy representing the interests of the ruling class. The term is often used by conspiracy theorists, especially on the Right, who sometimes talk as if they believe that genuine democracy once existed but was corrupted by nefarious elements. This is because they ignore history.

The State has NEVER been democratic, and in Britain never even had a constitution pretending it was. The Glorious Revolution which created our modern political system in 1689 was a revolution of the protestant aristocracy and mercantile capitalist class, who created the system to suit themselves.

Working class people took hundreds of years to get the vote and create a political party to supposedly represent their interests. When the first Labour prime minister, Ramsey MacDonald, came to power he betrayed the working class by forming a coalition government with the Tories and Liberals to impose what we would today call Austerity.

There are so many other examples but one which springs to mind is Syriza in Greece, who even went against the results of a nationwide referendum to impose austerity despite claiming to be socialist.

Things like this happen because States usually operate by being constantly in debt to financial capitalists who are then able to force governments to do their bidding, no matter if it is to the detriment of the working class or even other capitalists.

The bourgeoisie will first seek to discredit socialist leaders, as they did to Corbyn. If they are elected despite this they will use the financial system to force them to discredit themselves, as happened to Syriza, Ramsey MacDonald and others. And failing this they will just kill us all, as in Chile, Indonesia and so many other places.

The Revolutionary History of the Working Class

Marx and Engels made clear in the Civil War in France (1871) that they believed socialism could only be achieved through destroying the old state and creating a new one, meaning they had changed their minds since writing the Communist Manifesto (1848). The period between 1848 and 1871 is one of the most interesting in European history and this shift in perspective was due to many factors, but one of the most important was the example of the Paris Commune.

The manifesto was written at a time when both the bourgeoisie and the working class were fighting for basic democratic rights. Although the manifesto poetically described how the interests of these two classes were opposed, they still had hopes that if free elections were held in bourgeois states then a working class party might be able to win and impose policies that would lead to socialism.

By 1871 they had not only lost faith that the bourgeoisie would play fair and allow this, but also been inspired by how the working class of Paris had created their own democratic system government in order to pass policies in their interests, rather than trying to reform the existing State.

In 1905 in St Petersburg the working class did a similar thing, using the word Soviet, usually translated as “council”. (The French word Commune is also usually used to describe what we would call local councils). The memory of this experience led to them repeating the experiment in 1917.

In Spain in the Civil War, similar things happened in Catalonia. So many workers were members of the revolutionary CNT Union that the union itself became effectively the local government in many areas, organised on similar radically democratic principles to the Commune or the Soviets.

More recently in 1994 many villages in the south of Mexico declared their autonomy and created their own self governing structures in the Zapatista rebellion. In the North of Syria the Kurdish YPG/YPJ set up a system of government based on similar principles in the region they call Rojava (West Kurdistan).

The Role of the Revolutionary Organisation

In all these examples there were socialist political organisations who played a big role in creating these new forms of government, usually after having embedded themselves within working class communities for years or even decades. This is the kind of organisation I want to be a part of – one which is embedded in working class communities and patiently explains the need for a revolution to overthrow capitalism and create an egalitarian democracy, while winning trust and respect from the wider class by always demonstrably fighting in the interests of the whole class.

Standing in elections may or may not be part of this process, but when it is it is not with the aim of forming a government over the existing state and having to negotiate with financial capitalists, but merely to use the public platform it gives in order to spread our critiques of the existing system as well as our hopeful vision of the future, in order to further build the revolutionary movement of the working class.

Genuine socialist parties or organisations act in order to facilitate the self-emancipation of the working class. They do not substitute themselves for the class and take power over hierarchical organised, bureaucratic states and claim to be acting in the interests of the working class whilst exploiting them. This is the tragedy of Marxist-Leninism: the Bolshevik party which played such an important role in creating the Soviets and destroying the old state, then set up a new state and took power away from the Soviets.

The most inspiring part of the Transform meeting last night was hearing from an older comrade with decades of experience in organising workers who emphasised the long term nature of this kind of organising. He spoke of how organisations may have very few people coming to their meetings at first but that when the organisation is doing something which working class people clearly see is in their interest, they may suddenly explode.

If we do not listen to the working class and simply write a program full of policies we assume the working class will support, then we are falling into the same trap of substituting ourselves for the class. If we are not embedded within working class communities in struggle, we will not know what the wider class actually wants and will therefore not be able to create a successful program.

Conclusion

Transform still has not written a program nor a constitution, so there is still everything to play for. I still believe it has the potential to be an organisation genuinely rooted in the working class, but only if it admits to itself that this is not currently the case and forms a realistic strategy to remedy this.

If we do field candidates at elections I hope we are wise enough not to choose people who are just attention seeking opportunists with delusions of finding themselves rubbing shoulders with the Westminster elite whistle posing as radicals, but rather choose people committed to the self-emancipation of the working class.

Non-Left Wing Communism: A Paternalistic Delusion

NB – this is not an attempt at an academic essay, but merely a stream-of-consciousness exposition of my current thinking based on some recent limited reading.

It all started with me deciding to start using Twitter. I hadn’t used facebook for years and was missing the chance to get into stupid arguments about political differences with strangers. The dopamine hits and all that.

So I just searched for the term “Marxist” and followed a whole load of people who had that word in their self-description. For a while I just followed anyone it recommended me, and this took me to some very weird places – places I never knew existed.

Firstly, the MAGA Communists: American Stalinists who want to try and recruit working class Trump supporters by claiming that Stalinism is actually what they really want, and indulging in all kinds of racist, homophobic, ablest and sexist crap to do so.

Then there were the ‘normal’ Stalinists – much the same, except not necessarily American (but still probably American). Turns out some of them disagree about whether Brezhnev or Stalin was better. It’s like reading some bizarre alternative history from a parallel universe.

Then there are the ‘Dengists’ – people who actually think modern day China is socialist. Lots of these kinds of people like to argue that we need to support various awful regimes around the world, on the basis they are supposedly ‘Anti-Imperialist’.

Disagreeing with all these guys were Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, Council Communists and ‘Italian Left Communists’. Among all of these types I found things I could agree with and disagree with.

Maoists, Trotskyists and ‘Italian Left Communists’ all believe in some kind of ‘Vanguard party’, which anarchists and council communists do not, but the difficulty is that some of what they say requires a much more detailed critique than those of Stalinists.

Among ‘Italian Left Communists’ there are different internal splits about their exact view on the vanguard party. Those influenced by Onorato Damen, such as the ‘Internationalist Communist Tendency’, have a view on the vanguard party which is not that different from what Libertarian Communists have advocated in terms of what a revolutionary organisation should do.

Damen-inspired Left Communists, Platformist Anarchists and some Council Communists, all believe that there is a need for revolutionaries to organise and spread revolutionary consciousness, in order to influence the wider working class to fight to overthrow the capitalist classes in all countries around the world and build a new system based on some kind of participatory democratic socialism.

They make clear that it is the whole class itself that makes the revolution, and that conscious revolutionaries have no right to exert power over the rest of the class, or to substitute themselves for the wider class. Damen advocated for revolutionaries to organise according to democratic centralist principles, which libertarian communists would generally disagree with, but ‘Left’ and ‘Libertarian’ Communists at least agree on not substituting themselves for the working class

When it comes to other ‘Italian Left Communists’, such as those inspired by Bordiga, they do think that the vanguard party has the right to take power over and above the participatory democratic structures of the working class itself. Maoists and Trotskyists agree, although they propose various ways to supposedly ensure that the vanguard party stays connected to the wider working class.

Maoists talk about the ‘Mass line’ by which the party takes ideas from the masses, then tries to synthesise them into something coherent, before taking it back to the masses to tell them what to do and gain more feedback, starting the process once again.

The Vanguard party with the ‘Mass Line’ is the Dad driving the car, asking the kids in the backseat where they want to go. Of course he isn’t going to actually drive them wherever they want. He is going to drive them where he see’s fit, and just wants to hear their opinion to help him make this decision, a decision which remains his alone. It is up to him whether he even asks them at all.

Trotskyists are divided into so many different groups each with their own perspective that it is hard to pin them down on what exactly they think is the nature of the relationship between the party and the masses. Some emphasise that they reject the ‘bureaucratisation’ of Stalinism and want to make sure that the Socialist system is very democratic, even with room for multiple parties to exist.

But Trotskyists tend to defend the history of what the Bolsheviks actually did in the Soviet Union, which was set themselves up as an independent power over and above the system of workers’ councils. If Trotskyists claim they want a system of self governing workers councils and that they don’t set themselves up above the rest of the class, then why do they call themselves Trotskyists and not Left Communists?

Why I am no longer an ‘Anarchist’ (but still a Libertarian Communist)

My last post was in October 2017 which was mainly about events in my life from 2011 to 2013, and the one before that in December 2016, just after Trump won the election.

At the time of these two posts I was still identifying as some kind of Anarchist, although in fact my opinions had changed considerably and I was basically already some kind of Marxist.

I was supportive of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party and went through a phase of calling myself a “Democratic Socialist” as if there were no contradiction between anarchism, Marxism and reformist socialism. After the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx was convinced that the Capitalist State needed to be destroyed and replaced with a Worker’s State. Marxists who do not believe in this are therefore revisionists.

I no longer call myself a Democratic Socialist as this tends to mean Marxists who are not Revolutionaries and therefore not really Marxists. The experience of many Democratic Socialist experiments over the years, including that of Corbynism, has shown it’s inadequacy, but this is a subject for another time.

I also began to become much more critical of anarchism, due to educating myself more on Marxism. I read many of the classic texts of Marx and Engels and gained a Masters degree in Global Political Economy at a University department influenced by Marxist economics.

This led me to eventually fully break with anarchists on the theoretical concept of the ‘transition stage’ or what Marx called the ‘Lower Stage of Socialism’ in his work ‘The Critique of the Gotha Programme’.

Like Anarchists, Marx believed the existing state would have to be dismantled. But unlike Anarchists, Marx believed the “Worker’s State” was a necessary period that society would have to go through in order to reorganise the economy in the many ways necessary before something like the anarchist-communist vision of a totally decentralised federation of self-governing communes could work.

When I called myself an anarchist, I basically had no answer to this question of how to get from A to B, and so far I have not seen an anarchist give a convincing explanation of how the material prerequisites for an anarchist economy could be established without some form of political centralisation and authority.

Becoming convinced of the necessity of the Worker’s State forced me to re-examine my position on Lenin. I tried for a long time to avoid doing so, calling myself a ‘Marxist Humanist’ as a way of focusing exclusively on Marx and Engels without having to think about what came after. But this was untenable.

Lenin’s ideas of the need for revolutionaries to be well organised and on the same page in terms of their analysis, BEFORE the revolution, are not so different from the ideas of some Anarchists, such as Platformists, or those of the Anarchist Federation of which I was once a member.

The Anarchist Federation was also influenced by some ideas of the Council Communists, so I was already aware of the idea that ‘Workers Councils’ could be considered ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. The only difference between Workers Councils and Anarchist Communes are in the degree of internal hierarchy, and perhaps centralisation.

A vision of revolution based on the state being dismantled and replaced by a system of workers councils which are self governing but which send delegates to centralised organs to deal with bigger issues, being the ‘Transition Stage’ or ‘Lower Stage of Socialism’ with the task to lay the groundwork for a future, completely communist (and essentially anarchist) system, was not a big jump from my previous Anarchist Federation opinions.

So where did Lenin go wrong? Only to the extent he went beyond this. He thought a well organised revolutionary socialist party should not only help in the process of dismantling the old state and building the new one, but that the party should actually become the State itself.

This is justified by circular reasoning by which the Leninist party self -defines as ‘the most class conscious revolutionaries’ and therefore has the right to seize power over and above the workers’ councils themselves, simply because they believe in the theory that they have the right to do so. Of course, Karl Marx would have made short work of ridiculing such a theory.

There are some who agree with a view of how revolutionary organisations should work similar to the Leninist concept of the party but who disagree that the party has a right to take power over the Worker’s Councils. These people, in my eyes, are the real Marxists. Some may call themselves Anarchists or Council Communists but secretly believe in some kind of transition stage being necessary, and others may be Trotskyists or Maoists who secretly don’t agree with the authoritarian baggage of those traditions. Others would not use any of these labels at all.

Whatever you call yourself, you are my comrade if you want to build the power of the working class, with the ultimate aim of a revolution to build a system of worker’s councils that then federate together into a democratic, centralised system capable of reorganising economic production to meet the needs of the people, and eventually abolish private property and wage labour altogether.

Building the power of the working class means helping people become conscious of their own position within the political-economic system, and helping build democratic organisations of working class people in struggle for different causes, working together to unite a critical mass of the whole class. A supposedly ‘revolutionary’ philosophy not rooted in the recognition of this necessity, is absurd to me now.

Insurrectionist Anarchism in particular, especially it’s more nihilistic elements, which emphasise only the destruction of the state, with no thought to how to working class will build it’s own form’s of self government, is now in my thinking extremely dangerous.

I now attribute most of my thinking and actions during my insurrectionist period to my PTSD and want to formally distance myself from what I wrote on these pages, especially between 2010 and 2015.

Capitalism and the Racist Violence at Morocco’s Borders – A Personal Reflection by a Former Insurrectionist

Deep in my heart I want to help find a solution to the problem of the suffering of Black African migrants in Morocco: the violence in the forests, the deaths at sea, the systematic racial discrimination. I do not believe that a typical ‘Anarchist-type’ migrant solidarity strategy of a small affinity group or network of activists starting a ‘direct action campaign’ combined with support for migrants’ own self-managed solutions to their humanitarian problems will ever be enough to change the situation.

It is clear that a much larger and more politically significant solidarity movement would be needed to achieve structural change in the right direction, which must involve lots of publicity of the situation. But I do not believe that simply pointing out that these human rights abuses are going on is enough to build such a movement because ultimately not enough people in Europe are ever going to care about the struggles of African migrants to become politically mobilised, simply out of altruistic sentiment.

I have believed from the beginning of my involvement with this cause that we need to be able to show how the border regime in Morocco is part of a global structure of oppression. The struggle of the African migrants in Morocco must be linked to the struggle of the European and transnational working classes generally, so that European and other workers see the liberation of African migrants as bound up with their own.

To understand how to make these links clear we need to stare the horrific reality of the mechanics of this global system directly in the face, without being too blinded by moral outrage to actually learn how to help the situation. This is the trap I fell into when I studied my undergraduate degree, and ended up dropping out of bourgeois society altogether for a few years as I was so disgusted with what I had found out about it’s basis in the exploitation of Labour and the deliberate underdevelopment of the poorest countries in the world.

Before my degree I had wanted to be a Development Aid worker of some kind, which is why I studied an undergraduate degree in International Relations and Development Studies at the University of Sussex. However, I was strongly converted to Marxist and Anarchist ways of thinking during my time at University and participated actively in anti-capitalist grassroots activist groups for several years.

I began to realise – thanks to my professors at Sussex University and the many knowledgeable activists I met through my political activities – that poverty in the world, oppression and environmental problems were extremely unlikely to be adequately dealt with by NGOs and government agencies promoting development under the current paradigm of thinking about development in official circles.

The neoliberal paradigm fails to recognise the inherent contradictions of capitalism and blindly assumes that free trade policies will lead to development more than actual organised state intervention to deal with the root causes of poverty. This must involve the ruling classes of Western Imperialist countries, along with their allies in ‘comprador’ bourgeoisies of ‘peripheral’ countries, paying formal compensation for the historical brutality of primitive accumulation through dispossession, forced labour and extreme repressive violence to enforced racial barriers.

Free trade policies actually stop underdeveloped countries from developing: all successful development strategies by governments, even the ‘Core’ European and American ones, occurred under protectionist and state interventionist regimes. The countries that are already developed, and which depend on sucking wealth out of poorer countries, force those poorer countries not to follow successful development strategies, through World Bank loans, IMF structural adjustment programs and World Trade organisation rules against tariffs.

Then richer countries form protectionist blocs like the EU anyway, getting around the WTO rules, and keeping the poorer countries from developing that way as well. The only chance many working class families in peripheral countries have of improving their material standards of living is to send some of their children to risk their lives, health and liberty crossing deserts, seas and border fences in the hope of reaching a core or semi peripheral country where the wage rate, even for undocumented workers, is higher than in the formal economy of their home countries.

Even this last ditch attempt and wealth redistribution is rejected by the ruling classes of core countries, with the active complicity of those in the semi-peripheral, in the form of police violence against undocumented migrants and people who just look like they might be undocumented migrants due to racial stereotyping and profiling on the part of police officers and border guards, who are free to commit murder and excessive violence with impunity.

I formed the opinion that I did not want to work for any government development agency, the World Bank, or any large NGO that had ties to transnational corporations. This was not to say that I believed all on-the-ground projects run by these organisations were not genuinely saving lives and providing much needed services for the global poor. But I became convinced early in my studies of Development issues of the validity of Amartya Sen’s theory outlined in his book “Development as Freedom” and so only considered those projects valid which had a focus on empowering the poor, not merely giving them handouts.

I knew that there were many grassroots and small scale NGOs, some of which would occasionally receive grants from governments, corporate sponsorship or the World Bank, and which were doing things to genuinely empower poor people, but I did not know how to go about getting a job at such an organisation. For me to want to work for any kind of development agency it would have to essentially be prepared to have an occasionally conflictual relationship with the powers that be and not be beholden to them by financial ties. I knew that to find such a job would take a long time and a lot of effort, and I had become so disillusioned that I no longer felt able to even try.

What I learnt about the capitalist world system made me simply want to run away from it, by travelling, living in squats, busking on the streets, shoplifting, eating food from bins, and getting into debt with no plan of paying it back. I spent so much time avoiding work that it was more effort and hardship than actually just getting a job, but I felt somehow I was making a moral stand by refusing to participate in the system I hated.

This moral stand was in contradiction to another moral principle I wanted to follow which was to spend my life actually doing something to make the world a better place, and I increasingly found that having no money did not help me with this. I started to feel that really I was just sponging off the labour of other people, even just by living off their waste and small change, and when I tried to involve myself in progressive causes I often found that the chaos of my personal life prevented my from really being much use.

I could try and be nice and share things with my fellow squatters and random people I met, but could not do anything to help those less fortunate than myself, even though I tried, for example by living in Calais, France for a month trying to be part of an extreme migrant solidarity group while also having hardly any money, and it was too intense to be sustainable. Other people I knew who tried to combine the money-free lifestyle with extreme direct action and solidarity activism ruined their mental health considerably, as did I to some extent. We learned the hard way that we could not fight to change the system from the outside.

This was a horrible and existentially challenging realisation to me as it had been a desire to pursue a life based on working for global justice that had lead me to learn the awful truths about capitalism that led me to want to drop out from it in the first place. In my wilder nihilistic moments, I fantasied that we could perhaps square the circle of not being able to change the system from the outside if we could simply destroy the system from the outside, and indeed many books and magazines I read in my early twenties advocated this.  It is clear to me now that this was nothing more than a dark fantasy that only lead to tragedy or farce when people did act on these instincts, in the case of the Anarchist Insurrectionists, whom I once sympathised with.

It was in the darkest depths of this period in my life when I first went to Morocco. When I arrived there I had been living outdoors for over seven months. I left the long term squat I had been living in in Brighton on the 22^nd of December 2011, having lived there for four months which had been longer than I had lived in any squat before. Most of the squats in Brighton I lived in during the 2 years before that had only lasted a few weeks at the most, some only a matter of hours before police or other hired thugs kicked us out.

Finally having a few months of stability perhaps made me realised I had been living that crazy life of constant evictions for too long, all in the hope of finding a long term rent free house in Brighton, and just at the moment I finally had it, I decided to throw it away and leap into even more chaos.

I left the UK altogether and went to live in a treehouse in a protest site in France called La Zad in Notre Dame des Landes outside of Nantes. I lived there through the depths of winter, collecting and chopping firewood every day, living off food from local supermarket bins which were bountiful, and some money that my family had given me for Christmas.

I should stress during all these stories that may sound like I was going through hardship that it was entirely my own choice to live that way. I am the eldest son of an upper-middle class family from North London with parents that have always been prepared to bail me out of trouble I have gotten myself into by giving me money from time to time. I always felt guilty about accepting this money as it reminded me that no matter how much I could try to avoid being part of the system, I was always going to me in a privileged position within it. So I tried to pretend my parents help wasn’t always there for me and that I could just survive on my own without them, or a job, or anything except my guitar and my wits, and every time my stupid choices and failure to plan ahead meant that I found myself in need of help, I would call them.

But I did not ask them for any money in between Christmas 2011 and when I went to Morocco in June 2012, simply out of this arrogant refusal to accept reality. When my Christmas money ran out in the Zad, I hit the road to attempt to hitchhike to Portugal with nothing by my guitar, accompanied by another crazy hippy I barely knew who only had a couple of root vegetables with him and a typewriter which he would use to write stream-of-consciousness poetry at any opportunity.

We were both going to Portugal mainly because of girls we were sleeping with, who I don’t think particularly cared at the time if we followed them there or not. We optimistically thought we would be able to hitchhike through most of France and all of Spain in just 2 days, and make it to a protest camp against a hydroelectric dam somewhere in Portugal. After that the plan was to go to Porto to meet the sort-of girlfriend of the guy with the typewriter, before going on to Freekuency Festival, where I was to meet the girl I was sleeping with at the time, who is now my Fiancé but at the time showed no signs of being interested in a serious or even monogamous relationship with me.

We had a terrible time the first few days trying to get through France – failing to find good hitching spots, then trying to jump trains and having to get kicked off in random towns where we would spend the night before trying to either jump another train or find a hitching spot again, all without any food except for what we could steal, find in bins, or make money busking to buy, as my travelling companion was also a good singer and could play guitar, able to freestyle amusing psychedelic lyrics easily.

We spent a couple of nights in the French Basque country after being taken in by a nice guy who picked us up outside Bordeaux, who also arranged for us to stay with his Friends on the French Spanish border, where we easily got a lift to Madrid with a Polish lorry driver who picked us up thinking we might have weed, which we didn’t.

After we reached Madrid our problems started again. We jumped an intercity train in the direction of Portugal and got kicked off at the first stop, a town called Avila, where we spent the night in an abandoned building full of pigeon shit before standing for ages in the hot sun the next day before finally getting a lift for Salamanca. There, we chose a terrible place to try and hitch from outside the city at a tiny petrol station near a motorway and ended up having to walk back into the city, where we slept on some grass in a park and woke up covered in dew and extremely hungry. We had been reduced to eating the root vegetables Joe had carried with him all the way from the ZAD the night before, and then spent the last of our money on some bread and beans from a shop.

We were stuffed with beans when we found our way to the city’s Anarchist social centre – almost every city in Spain has one – and found that they were having a big vegan dinner at that moment, so we could have saved our money and eaten for free there. The people who ran the place lived over the street and let us stay with them for a week while we tried to busk up enough money to get a bus ticket to Portugal, before eventually one of them drove us to a good hitching spot and an old English hippy couple picked us up and took us all the way to the Portuguese border, where we could jump a train to Porto.

The whole journey had taken about 2 weeks, when we had hoped it would take 2 days, and we had completely missed the protest camp against the hydroelectric dam, but I had been holding out hope the whole time during all the hardship on the road that once we got to Porto we would be able to relax as the type-writer guy’s girlfriend would put us up in her flat or wherever she lived. But when we arrived there it transpired that she didn’t have a fixed address herself and was just sofa surfing, so we were in a strange position trying to talk our way into staying with people she barely knew, and sometimes ending up sleeping rough.

By this time I was going pretty nuts from all the stress, and at one point when I was busking alone, having lost the others, I lost my temper at an old blind beggar who had nuzzled in on my busking spot and was getting people to give change to him instead of me, and a whole crowd of angry Portuguese people formed around me, taking his side.

When it was finally time to go to Freekuency festival I was happy to be reunited with my friends, including my “soft-of girlfriend”, though at first she didn’t seem too happy to see my dishevelled appearance after the crazy few weeks I’d had. Back at the Zad a few weeks earlier she,  a mutual friend of ours and myself had all made a “pinkie-swear” that we would travel together from the festival down to Tangiers Morocco, to see what the situation with migrants at the border of Spain and Morocco was like. We wanted to volunteer to in some way if there was a chance to, before returning to England to tell other activists in the No Borders movement about the situation there, to encourage them to also travel down.

All of this did eventually come about, and the No Borders Morocco website we created on that trip is still active with a team of international activists that update it occasionally with news about police repression on the border. So our ill-conceived, poorly planned and extremely poorly executed plan did have its saving grace in that the basic idea was sound: if you go and find out about something horrible happening somewhere and then come back and tell people who already care about stuff like that about it, they will probably care and want to help in some way if they can.

But it took a huge toll on me to play my part in achieving the success of this plan. As I have explained, I was already in a pretty bad shape in terms of my mental health at the very beginning of the project: when we drunkenly came up with the plan and made the “pinkie swear” in the Zad, I was already traumatised from 2 years of trying to both live outside the system and participate in actions I considered consistent with the idea of attacking it from the outside, and drifting more and more towards nihilistic and fantastical notions of insurrection as way of escaping from the reality of the contradictions of my lifestyle and values.

I then ruined my mental health even more through the insane journey across Spain, trying to act like Jack Kerouac but without the advantage of speaking the same language as the people you were trying to get rides off. The rest of my memories of Portugal are mainly happy: the festival, then some time hanging around the anarchist scene in Lisbon trying to squat buildings, going busking, and having people to stay with when we did inevitably get kicked out of buildings we squatted by police in the morning, before hitching down to the Algarve to busk to English tourists and hang out on beaches.

The moment we crossed the Spanish border, though, everything got worse. We spent the night in a tent outside a creepy old Barn in Ayamonte, a shitty border town as most border towns are, full of bugs and paranoid about strange noises in the night. Somehow after that we made it to Seville where we spent a few days sleeping rough in random bits of scrubland and trying to go busking but mainly just getting exhausted by the heat.

From Seville we should have logically gone South towards Tangiers, but our spirits were so low that we didn’t feel ready to jump into a crazy humanitarian crisis that we knew nothing about right then, so instead we jumped a train to Granada, hundreds of miles in the wrong direction, but a place I had been to before and knew would be a welcome haven for people like us.

Many travelling hippies do turn up in Granada, find a nice squat or cave to live in, and have a beautiful time hanging out living almost for free in a beautiful city with great views of mountains and the ancient Alhambra castle, and we did experience some of the joys of that life, busking and getting plenty of free food and alcohol as waste products of the Andalusian lifestyle. But we lived in a complete shit-hole: a burnt out old building that used to be the changing rooms and offices of a swimming pool that had long since closed. We lived with a random collection of Spaniards, Catalans and Italians who mainly just took speed, smoked hash, got drunk and sometimes let Hard-Tech sound-systems come into the place to have huge raves that sometimes went on for days. But we had no running water and only electricity at night when the streetlights we stole our power from came on.

For drinking, cooking and cleaning water, for about ten humans and the same number of dogs, we had to go every day with two shopping trolleys of old plastic bottles to a public drinking fountain to fill them up and them push the heavy trolleys back home. As we were all usually too drunk and stoned to plan anything properly, we would usually run out of water in the hottest part of the day and have to do all this while dehydrated and hungover. In short, we were idiots, and often in a bad mood, especially as it there was not a lot of money to be made busking, and the three of us had an extremely limited routine.

Given that the reason we had come to Granada was to relax, improve our mental health and prepare ourselves for the trip to Morocco, none of this was ideal. But we did manage to go to the public library several times to research information about the Morocco-Spain border issues and even started to print off academic articles and make timelines on the walls of the squat to help understand the history of the situation better. After two months of this slow research work, hampered by our alcoholism and poor life choices, we decided the time had come and headed for Tangiers.

The reader by now will not be surprised to learn that the journey from Granada to Tangiers itself did not go in the least bit smoothly. It took us almost all day to find a lift south to the coast and there we had to spend the night sleeping in a tent somewhere random before trying for hours to hitch the next day to Malaga. At Malaga we again slept rough before busking up enough money to get a bus to the Port of Algeciras where we once again slept rough and then tried to convince lorry drivers to take us onto the ferry to Morocco for free.

Amazingly, we actually did find two Portuguese lorry drivers who were travelling together in separate lorries and each had space for one person, so our friend and I each took one of them, as my girlfriend has already found a lift. Shortly though, we saw her walking around looking for us as the Lorry driver she had gotten in with had tried to sexually assault her, so I let her take my place in the Lorry. Eventually after hours in the hot sun I paid for a foot passenger ticket onto the next Ferry, after trying to find my own lift for a while before getting chased away from the lorries by security guards.

I was able to pay for the ticket, and also for accommodation once we arrived in Morocco, because I had asked my parents for money for the trip to Morocco, justifying it to myself as being acceptable because they were donated to a radical cause, so I was taking money out of their middle class hands and using it for something I theorised as being part of the class struggle. I was too fucked up in the head at that point to simply accept it as a gift from some loving parents to their foolish but well-meaning son.

So we arrived in Morocco, finally, after all of these ordeals, with no real idea of what we wanted to achieve there, and very little money or emotional resilience to deal with the situation. We spent two weeks in Tangiers, staying in the cheapest hotels we could find in the centre of the old part of town, the Medina. During that time we did eventually meet two Senegalese migrants working for two different small organisations helping other West African migrants, as well as a Moroccan who was on the board of directors for one of them.

Speaking to these people made us realise that the situation was even worse than we had been led to believe by what we had read in the Library in Granada, and that though there were some good NGOs which we felt we could be allies with, they were very small and there was indeed a need for more activists from richer countries to come and set up other organisations, while supporting the ones that were there.

This meant that we were able to feel that despite all our faults and disorganisation, we had achieved something worthwhile and we finally got back to the UK after another series of disasters hitchhiking all the way back through Spain and France, via a brief stop off to a friend in Germany due to a hitching error taking us a thousand miles off course.

Once back in England we wrote a small pamphlet called ‘Beating Borders’ that was half full of the information we knew about the situation, and half full of the story of our ridiculous journey to find it out. Few people actually read this pamphlet, but some did, and it did start people in our circle of friends and extended networks of activists back in the UK talking about Morocco, which was all we were trying to do.

The basic idea I had was that if we just put the issue on the map by having a small website and having a name of an organisation to make it seem like there was already something for people to get involved in, an organisation would naturally grow up around this. Really, I should have spent a lot of time travelling around the UK and Europe, giving out our pamphlet and doing public talks to encourage people to think about going down there, and organising meetings to figure out practical ways we could help, and then organise them. But I was not in the right headspace to do any of this at that time as I was consumed with a desire to get back to Morocco and start off a permanent activist presence there.

I thought that if there was a group of activists there, and that it was known in wider activist circles that they were there, then more activists would eventually show up until a kind of revolving-door situation developed in which activists could come and go, with the experienced ones training up the newer ones before then leaving them to take over, so that no one had to burn out all their energy.

With hindsight I should have spent more time in the UK planning this out and convincing people to commit to coming there at a particular time to relieve me before going out there myself. But instead I just went out there alone and hoped that people would join me later. Again, this was not as crazy as it might seem and some of my best friends did in fact join me out there after I had been there only a month, but there was no-one planning on coming after them to replace us all once we started to burn out.

When I went there on my own, I didn’t even know that these friends of mine would come a month later, but I did believe at that time that my girlfriend was going to move to Tangiers with me and stay with me there for at least six months or so. I thought that during that six month period we could achieve a lot and provide a space for new activists to stay, and that maybe at the end enough newcomers would have gotten involved that we could leave them to it.

So when I went there on my own I looked for a flat that I though would be good enough for the two of us to live in while providing enough space for guests to stay as well. She actually gave me money to use as a deposit on the place, and so I was very surprised when she finally arrived and told me that she was not planning on staying for six months after all, but only for a couple of weeks.

She had decided that she felt too uncomfortable to live in Morocco due the level of street harassment she received from men, but she had been too anxious to let me know that she had changed her mind until the last moment. This caused me to have a mild breakdown as I had based my whole life plan for the next six months, and the whole strategy for starting the solidarity network we wanted to start, on the idea of us being equally committed to being there together for the first six months.

When my two friends arrived later, they were not thinking in the same terms as me and were not as emotionally invested. I wanted them to be a replacement for my girlfriend and commit to dedicate all their energy to helping me build an activist network, but they had come more with the intention of helping out for a little while and then travelling around Morocco and Spain, having a good time, which was fair enough really.

But I had let my whole sense of self become wrapped up in the project that I started to resent them for it and I ended up having a huge argument with one of my friends, prompted by him objecting to my attitude. He had worked with me on one of the first serious pieces of news reporting we did for the website, interviewing the sole survivor of a migrant boat which had sunk, which had made both of us feel quite depressed and out of our depth. After the low level stress around us led to our big argument, he ended up leaving Morocco and going to Spain, while my other friends were down travelling in the south of Morocco, soon to leave for Spain themselves, and my girlfriend had already been gone for two months.

The only friend I had left in Tangier was himself a refugee from the Gambia, named Ibrahim, whom I had been writing songs with about the situation, publishing them on soundcloud.com  under the name “Interzone Music”. After everyone else had left I was an emotional mess, and Ibrahim was there as a real emotional support to me, even though he himself had much worse things going on in his life. I felt like a total failure, coming there thinking I was somehow able to help these refugees and finding that they were the ones helping me instead.

Around this time I met a German young woman who was there working an internship for an organisation that was concerned with refugee issues, and she was going around interviewing female West African migrants. She was paying a lot more than I was for her rent as the organisation she was volunteering with had chosen it for her, so I offered her to move in and replace my friends who were gone, thinking this could at last be the beginning of the project in earnest.

I ruined everything on the first night she moved in by trying to have sex with her, and getting rejected, which created a terrible atmosphere in the house between us for the next month and a half before eventually I had another breakdown and started shouting at her before storming out and moving into Ibrahim’s house.

He lived in a much poorer area on the other side of the city, in a building full of other West Africans surrounded by Moroccan neighbours who seemed to hate them for being Black and foreign. A family of Nigerian Christians lived downstairs and their apartment was actually set on fire by local Moroccans because they were noisily celebrating on Sundays.

A group of intimidating young Moroccan men constantly hung around on the street outside their house, and there was no plumbing inside, so the West Africans in the house all had to go past this group of Moroccan men every time they needed to get water from the communal well in the street. On the very first night I moved into the building, after the fight with the German girl, a Senegalese guy went out to get water around 6pm after we had all been up all night talking and getting stoned, apart from some of the migrants who were strict Muslims and didn’t smoke hash.

When the Senegalese guy went out to get water on that first night I was there, the gang of young Moroccan thugs who were hanging out on the street outside, obviously drunk, rushed into the building while the door was still open and starting stabbing the guy who’d gone for water and also my friend Ibrahim. I went with both of them to the police station, while they were both visibly bleeding, and the police did not care, simply asking them for their documents as if they were threatening to arrest them for being Black.

The police said they needed documents from a doctor before they would do anything, so we had to go to the hospital and wait for hours before they got seen, and then wait for more hours just to get the piece of paper to prove they had been seen. All the time we were doing this, sleep deprived and traumatised after the night before, the gang of Moroccan youths were still back at the house terrorising the rest of the West Africans, throwing stones in all the windows, and yet the police and neighbours did nothing.

After we got the paper from the hospital, we went to a different police station and waiting for hours again while the police did nothing, until I eventually lost my temper and started ranting at them in very bad French, after which they eventually came with us to the house. After that the Moroccan youths stopped attacking the house, but they were never punished by the police, just given a talking to.

I had lived in Tangiers for 6 months by this point, but had been so concerned with interpersonal problems between myself and my European housemates that I had not really witnessed the true horror of the situation the West Africans were in. I had spoken to several of them and heard many terrible stories, and seen the impoverished condition they lived in and the casual racism they experienced on the streets every day, but it was only when I actually moved into the house with Ibrahim that I really started to understand on an emotional level.

Nothing similar happened at any point after that during my time there, although I did fall very ill for a few days immediately after and had to deal with having extreme diarrhoea in a place with only a squat-toilet and no running water, but after I recovered from that we settled into a steady routine where every day I would pay for breakfast for my roommates, before working on the music and eating dinner all together very late at night.

There were six of us sharing a tiny room which would could only just about all fit in to lie down to sleep. We spent almost 24 hours a day in that room in extremely close contact. The youngest guy would always run the errands, there being a strict age hierarchy that I was not used to, coming from the anarcho-squatter scene which always pretended there were no hierarchies within it.

The whole six months I had been living in the Medina I hadn’t gone busking, assuming no one would give money to a white man, but when I lived with the migrants I found I was wrong. I would take Ibrahim and sometimes others with me and we shared out the money equally. I carried on writing songs with Ibrahim and recording them in the cramped room full of other people. I lived like that for a month, and Ibrahim was the only one who spoke English. The others were Senegalese so I could speak simple French to them and understand some of what they said back to me, but when they spoke to each other it was all in Wolof, which they speak in both Senegal and Gambia.

Living with them like that meant that Ibrahim showed me new sides to his personality I had not seen when he had been visiting me in my nice place in the centre of town, and he also spoke more candidly to me about things he had been reluctant to speak about before. He told me that he had never imagined white people would live with them like that, sharing a cramped room, eating food with them, as he had only seen white people in Hollywood movies, or rich tourists staying in fancy hotels. So I built up trust by living with them and they let me know about how things really worked.

There are camps in the forests outside Melilla where migrants live for months at a time while they attempt to jump the border fences in huge numbers of several hundred, which happens quite frequently, but I had not realised this until moving into the flat, because they have a strict security culture about these camps. But finding out that the migrants were engaged in regular violent confrontations at the actual physical border fences allowed me to talk about the situation there in terms that would appeal militant activists back in the UK, as it showed clearly that they were actively engaged in a struggle with the same state authorities that we ourselves were in struggle against.

So I went home and wrote a new small pamphlet from an Insurrectionary Anarchist perspective and started doing talks at anarchist social centres in the UK, and also at the No Borders camp in Rotterdam in 2013. I spent the first few months I was back in the UK in a daze trying to do whatever I could to make sure that people in the anarchist scene knew about it, and even used my mother’s journalist contacts to ensure that the issue got national news coverage on Newsnight. All the while I was doing this I was not really thinking about my personal life situation and what I was going to do to support myself or where I was going to live, and eventually I felt I had done enough and applied for government benefits to get a place to live, with the help of my parents.

A group of activists who I was friends (and friends of friends) with went out to Tangiers that winter, moving into Ibrahim’s house thanks to the fact I had already made friends with him, while I stayed in my new house in Bristol slowly beginning a long journey of recovery. Because they lived with the migrants from the very beginning, the group that went out there that winter experienced a lot more traumatic events than I had. There was a huge increase in police raids at migrants’ houses, followed by a large street riot that was almost like a race war between Blacks and Moroccans, then a period when the police backed off enabling the migrants to attempt more fence crossings, with tragic results.

Not being aware that any of this was going on and assuming from their lack of contact that they were simply doing nothing, I did not make my comrade’s lives easier by writing arrogant angry emails to them criticising what I saw as their lack of sensible organisation. Due to my poor mental health, I was extremely agitated all the time and desperate for news from Morocco, so when I didn’t get it I lashed out at the very people I should have been supporting.  Eventually they were joined by some better prepared German activists, who completely transformed the No Borders Morocco project into something much more organised, and most of my friends eventually stopped being involved, as did I.

I can say without false modesty that I laid a lot of the groundwork for the whole project and that I worked incredibly hard to do so, experiencing a lot of psychological hardship in the process, which I did not feel that many of the activists who got involved later were really able to understand. I partly felt proud of myself for having not given up on it during any of the several moments when I should have, but I also felt ashamed of myself in many ways for my own failings during the project and all the people I had argued with or hurt along the way.

I entered into a serious depression and developed a drinking problem which caused me to spend all my housing benefit money on alcohol and weed instead of my rent, which in turn caused me to move out and go back to squatting. By this time squatting in residential buildings had been criminalised in the UK but there was a long-term squat I was welcome to move into in Cardiff in an old pub, with no electricity, lots of mould and very little natural light.

It had once been a successful anarchist social centre, before the electricity had been cut off, and people still lived there occasionally organising anarchist events. I started organising benefit gigs to raise money to send to the activists in Morocco and began to feel better about myself as I felt I was helping the project again instead of just causing problems and pissing people off.

A friend of mine, who had been out there the year before, moved into the squat in Cardiff with me and I supported him emotionally to go out there again to try and record interviews and music with migrants for a new website I wanted to start, called Interzone Voices. The two of us have continued to work together on that project ever since, keeping separate from No Borders Morocco.

The Interzone Voices project has now culminated in my friend producing an entire film, which I helped him with a little mainly simply through emotional support and contributing a few ideas, as well as raising some money through organising concerts, though he raised most of it himself by organising his own catering events.

Apart from this I have not done very much to help the cause of solidarity with migrants in Morocco for the past few years, as I have been trying to sort my life out in order to be able to better help the situation in the future. I gave up drinking for two and a half years, got back together with my girlfriend, moved in with her to a flat in Bristol and worked a series of poorly paying jobs to pay the rent before finally getting a student loan to do my Masters in Global Political Economy at the University of the West of England, which I started a few weeks ago.

Once I have written my final dissertation for my Masters about the situation in Morocco and how it fits into the wider political economy of the world capitalist system, I hope I can use it to further encourage solidarity activism with migrants in Morocco. Hopefully developing a more thorough analysis of the situation will help inspire ideas for how we can try to work towards campaigning for meaningful changes, rather than simply providing very small amounts of humanitarian aid and acting as a watchdog to the situation, which are the main roles that No Borders Morocco has been able to play so far, as far as I can see.

I now no longer hold Anarchist Insurrectionist views. This means that I do not believe that it is possible to simply attack the border regime through direct action until it breaks, which would be an Insurrectionary Anarchist strategy, and was the kind of image I had in my mind during the time I lived in Morocco and had extremely poor mental health.

Now that I am able to think more clearly, I have realised that I identify more as an ‘Anarcho-Marxist’, which is an extreme form of Democratic Socialist, and have joined the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn as a result. This is not because I believe Jeremy Corbyn is an Anarcho-Marxist or that he would not probably sell out the working class in some way if he were ever to take power, due to the inevitable constraints of the demands of the world-system on nation-states, but this is not good enough of a reason for me as a compassionate person not to support the more short-term program of concrete improvements in working class living standards which he represents.

Unlike in my Insurrectionary phase I now believe that all democratic socialists should work together to achieve material gains for the global working class, even if these gains fall short of total revolution and mean making alliances with people of very different ideological backgrounds. Ultimately it is only through political reforms that the situation in Morocco will be improved, and achieving these political reforms cannot be done purely through working ‘outside the system’ and using direct action techniques. Rather, a diversity of tactics must be used, which may and almost certainly will involve direct action techniques, possibility even militant and destructive ones, but these will depend for their success ultimately on other tactics to ensure there are policy-makers willing to make the right decisions in response to such direct action.

This means we must support efforts to make sure that people sympathetic with radical demands actually achieve positions of power within the system, so that if a large enough popular movement for reform does rise up, there will be people within the government advocating that concessions be made to such a movement. Without such voices of reason being present in the offices of state power, authoritarian nationalist politicians will simply repress any popular movement no matter how big it is or how just it’s demands are.

It must be understood that politicians main aim is power, and that capitalists main aim is to accumulate capital. We may despise these people for their greed and megalomania, but we cannot fail to recognise that it is they who have the most power to stop the violence against migrants in Morocco. Therefore, as reprehensible as it may seem to us, we must somehow construct arguments to convince them that they will make more money and gain more power by stopping the violence, before somehow convincing them to actually listen to those arguments.

I know that these seem like two pretty big ‘somehows’. But they seem less big to me that that which says “somehow we will destroy, or radically change the border regime from a position of extreme poverty on the fringes of society, without establishing strong allies with any political influence”.

The refugee crisis is not going away. Despite the economic crisis in Europe, it is still a ‘core’ capitalist region that will inevitably attract workers from ‘peripheral’ countries for so long as the world system remains so divided and unevenly developed.

Meanwhile the political context in Morocco is changing. Many more African migrants have now been given official documents and the right to remain in Morocco legally, improving their life chances. Morocco has also re-joined the African Union, which means that other African states will be able to exert more of an influence over its policy, though how much so remains to be seen.

Moroccan police still abuse the basic human rights of Black African migrants on a regular basis, arresting people on mass and driving them out to be dumped in the desert, as has been going on for years, and there is still regular violence at the border fences and the migrant camps nearby them.  This can partly be explained by the fact that Morocco’s shaky economy still depends on European export markets for the vast majority of its GDP, and so has a lot of incentives to cooperate with the EU in all aspects of foreign policy, including migration policy.

Whether ‘development’ is defined as ‘Freedom’ or simply ‘Economic growth’ Morocco clearly remains an underdeveloped country with a huge amount of unemployed and extremely poor people who have a direct material interest in a change in the overall structure of the economy. More Moroccans need jobs, and more production in Morocco should be done to meet the needs of the people rather than simply for profit. In short, Moroccan workers, like workers everywhere, have an interest in shifting their economic mode of production towards a more socialistic one, to whatever extent is practically possible given the realities of class struggle.

The Political-Economic dependence of Morocco on Europe not only causes the extreme violence of against the small Black African migrant population, it is clearly not working for the population as a whole, and in that sense it can be argued that Moroccans and African migrants have a common interest in fighting for a new system. Figuring out what that new system would realistically be, and how to organise a movement to achieve it.

Whatever the new system would be, it would be far from an Anarchist utopia, much more likely just a nation-state which has a different strategy for temporarily preventing the inherent contradictions of capitalism from causing its total collapse. Forming such strategies is the main business of governments in the capitalist world system, and it may be that one can be found that both materially improves the conditions of life for both Moroccan citizens and stops the systematic repression of African migrants, but is also acceptable to enough sections of the Moroccan elite to be politically achievable.

There will be new crises of capitalism coming soon, and at such moments political and economic systems always change. When there are organised factions with ideas about how to change the system, they often are able to use crises to get their way – and the people who are most organised to exploit these crises are usually capitalists who will make things much worse for working people and further strengthen repressive border regimes. But history also shows us that when Democratic Socialists are properly organised and have built up enough social support through political education of the masses, they two can use moments of crisis to the advantage of the oppressed.

We are now in a moment of calm before the next storm. A new global financial crisis is certain to happen within the next ten years, possibly much sooner. The last one was only solved through the Chinese government flooding the world economy with money through giant public works projects that were ecologically disastrous, but the Chinese government now is becoming dangerously indebted, and will not be able to repeat the same magic trick next time.

Those of us who want to see the lives of migrants in Morocco improve should be using this time to prepare the ground for the next crisis, to make sure that the situation at the border comes out of it in a way more to our liking than currently, even if it will not be completely solved forever. That is the difference between Marxist attitude and the Insurrectionist one: both want Anarchy and Utopia as and end goal, but true Marxists actually study the real world and figure out how to use that knowledge to achieve forward progress towards the eventual goal, whereas Insurrectionists simply live in a fantasy world in which they imagine utopia will emerge from the ashes of destruction, which is an inherently nihilistic attitude, not compatible with humanist or compassionate ethics.

Back in the real world, there is a lot of intellectual and political work to be done by compassionate people who value all human lives equally to come up with realistic ways forward for the struggles of the oppressed, including those of Black African migrants in Morocco.

Let’s get on with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greenpeace, or Red War?

Sitting in a shack in an eco-village in Mexico in early 2010, arguing with a German guy and a girl from California who grew up on a weed farm, I realised something sinister about Hippies. Some of them at least, I wouldn’t want to make outrageous generalisations (as fun as that is) for I myself am something of a Hippy, and always have been. I have long hair, partly with dreadlocks, partly shaved, I have been a life long vegetarian,  I am found of psychedelic drugs, and much of the music of the late sixties/early seventies.

But I am also, crucially, not in favour of the deaths of billions of the poorest people in the world. I just don’t think it would be that… you know, groovy, or whatever. Some of these Hippy types, though, with the long hair, colourful clothes and permanent fake grin on their faces, they actually do long for most of the human population to be wiped out.

That’s what this German guy was saying anyway. I was trying in vain to convince these people of why it was worthwhile and in fact vitally necessary to build a radical mass movement of the global working class to achieve the kinds of revolutionary changes necessary to save humanity from the effects of climate change.

The German guy said that he had already tried that and that it didn’t work. Now he had a smug and patronising expression, as if I were a naive child clinging on to foolish and outdated notions he’d long since given up on.

Some might find it hard to believe that this one man, in his early thirties, could have successfully rallied up a mass movement of 99% of humanity and led them nearly to victory before suffering some terrible defeat, and yet still be so unknown that even I cannot remember his name. But of course, this is not what he meant.

In fact, as he went on to explain, what he meant was that he had once worked for Greenpeace as a street fundraiser, and found that many people had simply walked past him. This he had taken as proof that the ‘masses’ were hopelessly unenlightened, a lost cause, and that true environmentalists’ role should be to retreat to the eco-villages on the fringes of society and simply wait for Gaia, the earth goddess, to do her work of killing off everyone else.

This was supposed to happen on the winter solstice of 2012, but of course it didn’t. I happened to be in the Atlas mountains of Morocco on that date with a bunch of other Hippies who believed in The Prophesy, and didn’t witness any apocalyptic events, just Hippies getting stoned, singing, doing yoga and trying to shag each other.

Fast forward to September 2016 and I am entering the Greenpeace UK headquarters in Islington, London, to begin my training as a Door to Door Fundraiser. Would I suffer the same fate as the German guy and become a cynical, patronising old bastard with no faith in humanity?

For years I had been banging on about the need for us radical activist types to get out of our own little subcultural bubbles and start ‘engaging with the working class’, but I had done very little to actually practice what I preached, being myself a middle-class Hippy, hopelessly removed from the everyday struggles of most working class people.

This was my big chance to finally get some experience under my belt of going outside of my comfort zone, talking to people who read the Daily Mail and other hate-filled rags spewing divisive lies for the benefit of millionaires, and actually try to win them over to progressive politics.

It’s true that I would only be talking about environmental issues, rather than those such as migration, social services and workers’ rights, which would have been much tougher to argue with hardened Tories and UKIPers about, but still, I was looking forward to the challenge.

One of the reasons I had never done much of the type of activism which leads you to knock on random strangers doors and to discuss serious political issues with them, was quite frankly because I was too afraid to. I am now no longer so afraid, which is something at least, and I even felt I had some successes in changing a few people’s minds.

I managed to get about 35 people to join Greenpeace, over the course of about 10 weeks. Keen mathematicians will note that this is an average rate of 3 per week, whereas the target was 6 a week, which is why much of this article is written in the past tense.

Unlike my last job, which I describe in the article ‘Betraying my Principles for Money’  this was not a job in which I felt my ethics were constantly at odds with what I was doing, but instead the ethical dilemmas I faced were far more complex. There was one the one hand a tension between being a good environmental activist and being a good Greenpeace employee, on the other a tension between being a good Greenpeace employee and a good class warrior, and on a freakish ‘third hand’ a tension between being a good Greenpeace employee and being an honest, compassionate person.

Charity fundraising is a highly precarious form of work, in which workers are often treated like complete shit. You can usually be fired without any notice (which is in fact what happened to me), and are often expected to work far more hours than you actually get paid for. As a socialist, of the anarchist tendency no less, and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, I felt duty bound to do what I could to fight against these injustices from within.

To this end, I tried to get to know my fellow workers as best as I could, to develop as friendly relations as possible with them, ask what they thought about these types of problems, and encourage them to join the IWW with me. I thought perhaps the union might give us advice on how to start some kind of campaign for changes from below, and I would have kept on working on this if I’d ended up lasting longer.

Normally when I am working a job in which I feel the bosses are exploiting me and denying me my legal rights I react by working as slowly as I can get away with. On a charity fundraising job though, you have to meet targets, which you will not do without actually trying.

As someone who is genuinely concerned with the issues, I liked the fact that my job involved talking to people about them, and I had some really fascinating interactions with people. Some were people who didn’t know much at all, which meant I had to explain various things as simply as possible, which I feel I am fairly good at so long as people are in the mood to actually learn something.

Others were people who thought they knew a lot but had actually had their heads filled with nonsense by newspapers owned by shareholders in the very corporations responsible for destroying the environment. These were harder to talk to, as they often were quite hostile, having been misled into thinking that Greenpeace activists were all idiots hell-bent on destroying their way of life for no good reason.

A really surprising amount of people seemed to have confused Greenpeace for some sort of Terrorist group, thinking that Greenpeace had sunk ships, whereas in fact it had been one of Greenpeace’s own ships, the Rainbow Worrier, which had been sunk by the French secret service in 1985 in Auckland, causing the death of a Portuguese activist. Many others had simply mistaken Greenpeace for other groups such as Earth First! and the Earth/Animal Liberation Front.

It felt like I was betraying my comrades in these organisations to play along with the ‘Good protester/Bad protester’ divide and smugly reassure these people that Greenpeace was 100% committed to non-violence, when in fact I have often actively advocated insurrectionist tactics, but that’s what I did.

The third category of people I met were those who already knew about the issues and agreed with the aims of radical environmentalists, but who had simply lost faith in the idea doing anything about it. These were the people I wanted to speak to the most, because it meant speaking about the psychological barriers stopping them from taking action, which is now my favourite topic.

Why do so many people who already have left-wing and environmental views fail to go out and argue against the lies of the corporate media? There are millions of progressive people in the UK alone, but they are not organised into a movement that is capable of going out and convincing the rest of the population, despite the fact they have all the arguments and evidence on their side. This is a topic I have already written about and will probably continue to write about forever.

But the point is, I wasn’t able to carry on these conversations as long as I would like to. At the risk of sounding overconfident, I feel I could have convinced a lot of people to become more engaged that they already were, and to have set a lot of people straight on things they had been lied to about. But that wasn’t really what I was being paid to do, just something I wanted to do because of my silly unpopular obsession with the future survival of humanity.

What I was being paid to do was to convince people to join Greenpeace, and to do it then and there, on their doorstep. If people were obviously not going to do that, I was not supposed to waste time talking to them, but instead to move on to try and find others who would. This is the tension between being a good fundraiser and a good environmentalist.

Did I really believe that raising money for Greenpeace was more important than talking to people about the issues directly? No. That would be insane, but it’s what you have to tell yourself if you want to stay sane doing a job like that. You have to convince yourself that actually you were helping protect the environment more by raising money for this particular organisation than by talking to people in your own city, even though you knew how much the organisation wasted money on stupid bullshit.

I don’t want to slag off Greenpeace too much here, because they have achieved a lot, and are still actively campaigning on many issues which I really hope they are successful with. But the fact is that someone paying the standard amount of ten pounds per month would have to be signed up for a year just to cover the administration costs of signing them up.

On top of that Greenpeace pays it’s higher level staff far above the living wage, which to me is simply unacceptable for any organisation that claims to be progressive and to care about social justice. So many people are out their risking arrest and even death in order to protect the environment without getting paid for it at all, so the head of Greenpeace UK really doesn’t need to be earning 76 grand a year.

Frankly, I don’t believe in hierarchical society or class division at all, and think everyone should get paid the same, or better yet, just receive the basic necessities of life for free, and if we want to achieve that we need to live according to those principles right now, not reproduce hierarchical class relations in our own organisations.

Then there are all the tasty vegan treats, unnecessary travel expenses and shiny gadgets which the Greenpeace organisation spends money on. For me as someone used to the world of protest camps and squats full of broke unpaid activists eating food from bins, it was a joke.

This is related to the tension between being a good fundraiser and being an honest, compassionate person. I think that people who are successful at being fundraisers are doing something objectively quite good and morally correct in the sense that they are indirectly helping various organisations do good work (minus all the administration fees and stupid salaries of executives). However they are also clearly good at manipulating people into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

You don’t convince someone with logic, that’s what I was doing wrong. You don’t try to actually get them to see the world in a different way, even if the way they see the world right now is terrible and likely to cause them and others suffering. Good fundraisers just somehow make people feel happy, and lure them into doing something using their natural charisma. If you are an attractive young woman, you can flirt your way to success. If you are an authoritative older man, you can tap into people’s unconscious fear of authority. You can do all kinds of shit. But I can’t.

Maybe some younger girls did sign up because they thought I was hot, and maybe some younger guys did too. Maybe some older women thought I was a loveable young scamp and some older men thought I reminded them of themselves. Who the fuck knows. They might have actually listened to what I was saying and thought it made sense. But whatever it was, I wasn’t good at bringing it out.

If people don’t want to sign up, but you feel like they are teetering on the edge, you are supposed to keep on trying different tactics until you get them to do it. Even if they don’t want to talk to you at all at the beginning, you have to somehow just ignore them and keep on talking till you win them over. This requires a lot of mentally blocking out whatever they are saying to you, and basically, not sympathising with their situation, just pretending to for the purposes of manipulating them into something they don’t want to do.

I am not trying to say that I was bad at my job because I am too nice, because a lot of the time I actually probably wasn’t nice enough. I tend to get annoyed at people for being stupid, apathetic and arrogant, which rules out most of the people you are likely to meet, and I am not very good at disguising my annoyance. But the thing is, I don’t really like to bother people too much, because I myself don’t like to be bothered.

When I heard people say they didn’t want to sign up right then and there but might do it another time, or that they didn’t feel they could afford it, a voice in my head said ‘fair enough’. This is not how you are going to win this game. You have to really believe that people all should sign up and that they are just giving you silly excuses which you will eventually be able to break down.

Basically, it means having a very poor view of humanity and a very arrogant attitude regarding your own organisation and abilities. When I heard other fundraisers talking like that, it always made me slightly disgusted, which brings me to the third tension: between being a good Greenpeace employee and a good class warrior.

It’s pretty hard to unite with your fellow workers in struggle against the bosses if they seem to either actively hate you or not consider you worthy of even a feigned interest. I am not talking here of the majority of my fellow workers, just the two who were ‘team leaders’ I had to work with.

To me the invention of the category of ‘team leader’ is such an obvious attempt to divide the workers by appealing to crass egotism on their part that I am shocked anyone would fall for it. But then again, I’m pretty shocked by most things. I have a type of brain which constantly attempts to order the universe I observe into rational patterns which the Universe seams to delight in proving false, which is both a blessing and a curse.

I had worked with team leaders in the past who seemed to get that their job was mainly just to keep their workers happy. When you deal with angry members of the public all the time and constantly feel emotionally drained as a result, you are much less likely to simply give up in despair if you have colleagues around you who you feel care about you and actively try to keep your spirits up.

Everyone I met in the interview and training was so bubbly, caring and positive, in true annoying hippy fashion, that I had assumed that this aspect of the job was something I could take for granted. The very first time I spoke to my team leader, however, this illusion was shattered.

Now, I am not going to launch into a big rant about this person, because I don’t have any reason to. I am a pretty anti-social person myself, and sometimes I am too caught up in my own head to pay proper attention to the feelings of those around me. I certainly can empathise with someone else being shit at social skills. It’s just that if that person’s job is to be good at keeping me motivated, I probably wont be very motivated.

Very often I would find myself spending most of the day trudging around streets completely by myself, gradually losing the will to live, and then when it would come time for a break or to meet at the end of the day to go home, would not be cheered up at all to find my team leader invariably in a foul mood and not seeming to be interested in how I was feeling, or indeed, anything about me other than how many people I’d signed up.

When I was struggling, it didn’t seem that my team leader felt it was their responsibility to help me, other than to the extent they’d been ordered to by the higher-ups. Rather, I seemed to be an object of contempt for not being as good at my job as they were, though they never said this out loud. It was all in the eyes.

Nonetheless I ploughed on with my attempts to build some kind of relationship of solidarity with them, listening to their various grievances against the management and patiently suggesting ways we could resolve them. Eventually they even joined the IWW and I set up a meeting with a trained representative from our branch to explore what our options might be.

On that same week, however, for three days in a row my team leader fell sick and without notice just left me and the other two employees, both of whom had only just started, to work completely on our own, and as the most senior person there, despite only having worked less than three months, I tried my best to encourage them and explain what they should do that day.

Then when the team leader came back, the first thing they did was berate me down the phone for not following their instructions to the very finest detail, which was the last straw to me, and caused me to do what I had been trying not to: tell the higher-ups the truth.

This is the tension between being loyal to your fellow workers vs being a good employee. I was fired the next working day, supposedly for my low scores. The team leader sent me a sarcastic text the next day accusing me of having lost them their job as well, which of course made me feel guilty but I later found out wasn’t exactly true: the managers had tried to find a solution but the team leader had just stormed out angrily at quit, being apparently unable to take criticism.

This made me not feel guilty any more, as I had not directly gotten them sacked, and had, after all, tried my best to be on their side against the management first of all. But it was not the only way in which working for Greenpeace created a tension for me regarding my views on class struggle.

For one thing, Greenpeace is not an anti-capitalist organisation, but one that works with transnational corporations on a case by case basis to try and convince them to destroy the environment a little bit less each time. This does not make Greenpeace part of the ‘Class Enemy’ in my view, though it might in some people’s eyes. I feel that the small victories that Greenpeace regularly has in influencing the policies of governments and corporations are worthwhile ones, which cause less animals, plants and humans to die than would otherwise. Saving lives is clearly more important than ideological orthodoxy, unless you have no empathy whatsoever and are some kind of Marxist robot.

These campaigns, however, do not on the whole help to empower the global working class in ways consistent with ecological ethics. It is clear that there is an urgent need for decentralisation of agricultural, electrical and industrial production if they are to become both ecologically sustainable and democratically controlled by working class people.

When electricity generators, land, greenhouses, factories and workshops are mainly producing for the needs of the local population, there is not only less need for polluting and destructive forms of transport, but also there is greater potential for the local population to be able to exercise power over them.

A shift to a global economy based on decentralised units producing mainly for local populations and only secondarily for those further afield, and then as locally as possible, is consistent both with Anarchist-Socialist and ecological ethics.

This shift can not happen over night, but requires decades of campaigning at all levels of society, but most importantly among the lowest ranks. Unless the poorest people of the world actively want such a society, to the extent that they will be prepared to protest, take direct action, and potentially risk arrest, violence or death, for decades, such a society will never come about because it simply cannot be imposed from above.

Therefore, it is my opinion that environmentalists must focus on political education and agitation among the global poor, to unite struggles for basic survival with those of ecological sustainability. It is a huge task and one which no-where near enough effort is being made by even the most radical environmentalist organisations, such as Greenpeace, Earth First! and ELF/ALF.

Trades unions, community groups, landless peasants movements, and other organisations of the global working class should be equally committed to this shift towards a decentralised, democratically controlled and ecologically sustainable mode of production. It requires challenging vested interests, including the multinational corporations and banks, but also the land-owning classes throughout the world. It requires class struggle.

Class struggle means saying to the exploiting classes “you don’t have a right to exploit us any more”, and to the land owning classes “this is not your land any more”. Monoculture farming would not be possible without the monopoly of violence by the state. Companies are able to use the land in destructive ways because the State lets them. The State has the power to let them or not because it has the means to inflict violence on anyone who disagrees with it.

When people try to take land away from landowners, they often get shot in the head. Sometimes mass movements are able to use non-violent direct action to achieve things. Non-violent direct action has achieved a lot of progressive change over the years. It has also led to lots of people getting shot in the head.

Sometimes when people take up arms and take the land, to collectivise it and bring it under control of the local people who will then use it in ecologically sustainable ways, it works. The Zapatistas for example, have been going for over 20 years.

Sometimes armed movements get repressed and everyone gets shot it the head. There is no catch-all solution to not getting shot in the head.

I advocate a diversity of tactics; use non-violence when it is likely to work, use violence when it is more likely to. Either way, you risk dying. But you also risk dying if you do nothing at let capitalists destroy the earth and exploit you to death.

The ‘Reds’ and the ‘Greens’ are still not united enough for either to be successful. If I want to help play my own little part in bringing them together, its not going to be as a Greenpeace activist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why the headlines didn’t say: ‘Fascist Terrorist Assassinates Elected Politician’

(Originally written on the Anti Capitalists Against Brexit (ACAB) blog on 20 June 2016)

That is what the headlines should have said when Jo Cox died. The man who killed her was a Fascist – that was clear from the fact he shouted the name of a prominent Fascist organisation – Britain First – as he shot her, and has since become even more clear.

It was also, clearly, an act of Terrorism. It was something done for a political purpose, and the tactic chosen was one intended to cause fear in the hope that this would achieve that political end.

It was also an Assassination- it was the targeting of a specific figure in the public eye who represented something that the killer wanted to see destroyed – white non-Muslim people having solidarity with Muslims of different skin colours or at the very least British Citizens having solidarity with non-British Citizens.

But the same media organisations that are usually happy to use the word ‘Terrorism’ as soon as possible if the suspect is believed to be Muslim, were very reluctant to use this word, or the word ‘Fascist’, or even the word ‘Assassination’.

In the British flawed ‘Representative’ democracy, the only way an ordinary citizen stands a chance of influencing the affairs of State is by writing to your MP or talking to them at a constituency surgery. Constituency surgeries are perhaps the greatest claim the British state has to actually being any kind of democracy at all, rather than the plutocratic oligarchy that it appears to be to the untrained eye.

It was precisely this event that was chosen as the seat of the attack by a man who does not believe in any kind of democracy whatsoever, to carry out the murder of an elected official. It may have been chosen simply because it was an event she was guaranteed to be at, but nonetheless the symbolism is powerful – this was an attack on democracy by anti-democratic forces.

Again, the same media organisations that normally love to use this kind of language utterly failed to do so. If a government far away chooses to allow it’s oil to be sold in a different currency to the US dollar, as Saddam Hussein and Colonel Ghadaffi  did, this is grounds for war to ‘protect democracy’, even though the US dollar is the property of the completely unelected Federal Reserve Bank, which even American citizens have no say over, let alone British ones.

So is the British army going to be sent to war against Britain First and other Fascist groups? It seems unlikely. Just the other week in Bristol I witnessed what must have been tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of pounds being spent on policing and fences to allow a group of 14 Fascists to have access to one of the most popular parks in the city, safe from the hundreds of anti-fascists who gathered to oppose them.

Such things are very common. The British State allows Fascists to march regularly and is prepared to spend an awful lot of money to protect their ‘freedom of speech’ to do so, even though under Fascism the rights to freedom of speech and protest would not exist. We are often told that this is because of the State’s democratic liberal values – that they are so principled as to defend someone’s right to say something even if they disagree.

Yet under an Anarchist or Democratic Socialist system, there would be much greater democracy, much greater freedom of speech, and yet the Anarchist, Socialist and similar-minded movements in the UK are rarely given this expensive police protection (quite the reverse!) even when we are on the streets trying to ‘protect democracy’ from Fascists.

We also have the disadvantage that we do not have sympathetic newspapers being sold in every newsagent in the country, blasting out propaganda for us for free.

Imagine is for every news story attacking immigrants, people on benefits, squatters, travellers and Leftists there was a corresponding one attacking corrupt bureaucrats, violent police thugs, rapacious transnational corporations or bigoted lower-middle class racists.

Imagine if for every article suggesting we should scrap the human rights act and put more people in jail, there was one saying we should give people more rights and take more people out of jail.

Imagine if when an Anarchist smashed a bank window or dared to use self-defence against a cop trying to smack them in the face with a steel baton, the newspapers asked the public to be sympathetic to their mental state rather than immediately labelling them a terrorist or trouble-maker.

Of course, anyone performing any kind of act of violence is probably not in the best mental state. Of course, it is wise when someone attacks you or someone you care about to try to hold yourself back from immediately judging them as ‘evil’ or dehumanising them in some other way. It is difficult to do so, but it is wise, and through meditation and much reflecting on the ways in which deep down all humanity is one and the same, I believe it could be possible.

So I am not criticising the media for looking into the mental health of the Fascist Assassin and Terrorist. I am criticising them for not also calling him a Fascist, Assassin and Terrorist at the same time. It’s easy to write a sentence doing both, e.g. What mental health factors drive someone to become a Fascist Assassin and Terrorist? See, easy.

I am also criticising them for not applying the same sympathetic considerations in other cases of Terrorism. Do they consider Muslim Terrorists to be completely mentally stable?

The Terrorist who killed dozens of people in the club in Orlando was also suffering from mental health problems. It seemed he was attracted to men and was repressing it, possibly due to being brought up with homophobic beliefs, causing him to lash out against openly gay people. This is a common psychological phenomenon and the cause of much of the homophobic violence in the world.

A media organisation that wanted to help the public understand violence and how it could be avoided might want to invite it’s readers or viewers to consider such things.

However, a media organisation that actively wants to promote racial and religious hatred among white working class people in the Western world to encourage them to support imperialistic wars in the Muslim world and be indifferent to the human cost, might report any act of violence carried out by someone who may be Muslim in such a way as to dehumanise them (and their entire religion) to make them appear evil and worthy of death.

A media organisation seeing a white working class person with mental health problems whipped up into a violent frenzy through years of its own propaganda to the point where he assassinates an elected politician, might not want its readers to think about whether or not it was to blame in any way for it. It might therefore not use the same language it uses in the case of Muslim terrorists. It wouldn’t want other white working class people to stop and consider that it is not a good thing to be a Fascist, essentially.

Of course if media organisations were behaving like this, this could be considered a threat to democracy in itself. If instead of impartially and unbiasedly reporting on similar crimes in a similar way regardless of the ethnicity or religion of the suspect, they were in fact using a double standard and protecting the fascist movement while continuing to stir up hated against ethnic minorities to encourage more people to become fascists – it could be considered that these organisations were actually pro-Fascist ones themselves.

How lucky we are that instead of living in a plutocratic oligarchy with a strong and thriving Fascist subculture and media protected by the power of the State, we instead live in a liberal democracy where power rests with those who are elected by the people rather than whoever has access to a gun.

Boris Johnson, a charismatic right-wing populist leader who is obsessed with ancient Rome and who could become the most powerful man in the country without having to stand for election goes around speaking on podiums that say #TakeControl . Nothing fascist about that at all, is there?

Let us not be afraid though. Truly, that is letting the Terrorists win. Jo Cox stood for Britain remaining in the EU, for letting more refugees come in, and for Peace. Let us continue to fight for these things, knowing that by doing so we are acting out of love for all humanity, rather than fear for whoever the Fascist media say we should consider our enemies.

Let us also consider the mental state of other prominent Fascists, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, and not dehumanise them as they dehumanise others. Perhaps one day they will learn to be comfortable in their own skin and not feel they have to constantly make spectacles out of themselves to get attention.

Speaking of spectacles and being comfortable in your own skin, here is a video of some naked people, trying to inject some positivity back into the referendum campaigning after all the doom and gloom last week.

Stay positive, and never give up

Why anti-capitalists should campaign against the Brexit

I was shocked to see the Socialist Workers Party and several other supposed anti-capitalists supporting the Leave campaign, on the basis that the EU is pro-capitalist. This completely misses the point.

In a capitalist society such as this, all State institutions can be understood as supporting the interests of the capitalist ruling class, whether they are EU institutions or not. Therefore the fact the EU institutions obviously act in the interests of capital is not in itself enough of an argument for Anti-Capitalists who happen to be British Citizens to vote for leaving the EU in the upcoming referendum.

In fact, the argument I am about the make is that an independent British State would be even worse for the interests of the majority of people – the working class – and would consolidate power even more into the hands of a tiny minority of capitalists.

Despite the fact that all capitalists share certain interests – the protection of the concept of private property, the continued existence of a subordinated class of workers, access to natural resources etc – there are many issues on which the capitalist class is divided, and this is the main reason that separate political parties and factions exist in so called ‘democratic countries’. The issue of the “Brexit” (‘British Exit’ of the EU) is one example of this.

Some capitalists think they will make more money if Britain remains in the EU, and others think they will make more is Britain leaves. This is why both the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ campaigns are each well-funded, and each able to claim that what they want is better for ‘the economy’. What the mean by ‘the economy’ is profits for themselves and people like them, rather than anything to do with the interests of the majority of people.

As Anti-Capitalists we believe that the interests of the majority of people in the long term lie in the abandonment of capitalism as the dominant economic system and its replacement by a system based on values of freedom, equality and harmony with wider eco-systems. As far away as this goal seems, it will seem a lot farther if we leave the EU.

In the short term the interests of the majority of people are more obvious. People need more access to the basic material resources necessary for a dignified and happy life, which in today’s world means higher wages, better working and housing conditions, access to healthcare, education and other social services, as well as security and justice. If we leave the EU what little we have of all of these things will become even less.

The Leave campaign represents the interests of only a minority of the capitalist ruling class, let alone the rest of the population. There are certain capitalists interested in letting the British economy depend even more on financial services to other capitalists from around the world. They can see that the dominance of US imperialism will not last much longer and neither will the international economic system based on the US dollar and it’s links to the price of oil, or the institutions such as the World Bank and IMF that are effectively controlled by the US government.

The new situation in the world will be characterised not by Western dominance but by a balance of power between the West, Russia, China, India, Brasil, Iran and the other oil producing states. Certain British bankers and financiers want to be in a position to take advantage of this by getting rid of the various limitations placed on them by the EU. They also want British workers to be poorer, and to be prepared to work longer hours for less money, so that we can ‘compete’ with workers in other countries, another reason they want Britain to leave the EU.

This minority capitalist faction is represented in parliament by UKIP and the pro-Leave Conservatives. To achieve their political ends they have relied primarily on whipping up a frenzy of xenophobia and racism among the lower-middle class and certain sections of the white working class. There are actually only a very few companies that control the main news outlets in the UK, and it is not hard to tell that most of them have an interest in the Brexit.

They have tried to make racists afraid of the hundreds of thousands of traumatised refugees seeking safety from what are often British-made bombs, and to also give them the impression that somehow the EU is making it easier for them to come to Britain, despite how many people are murdered by EU-funded goons at the external borders.

They have also tried to make it seem like a bad thing that so many workers from other EU countries are in the UK, without ever talking about the benefits that British workers have received from being able to work in other EU countries, or the fact that the number of British workers living abroad is at least as great or greater than the number or EU workers in Britain.

Finally they resort to the good old excuse of Terrorism, and it’s best friend, Islamophobia, stirring up even more hatred of the Muslim community, blaming an entire religion for the crazed actions of a minority whom most Muslims openly say are not real followers of the faith. The European Court of Human Rights is made out to be something that lets terrorists evade justice rather than what it actually is, which is a last final hope for British citizens when our own police and court systems unfairly lock us up for crimes we didn’t commit, which is happening more and more often.

In short they are exploiting the fear of ignorant people who have not much to lose, and are afraid of losing it – who feel lonely and terrified of a complex world they don’t understand and seek comfort both in a strong leader or sense of identity as well as a feeling of superiority over people the papers say it’s OK to hate. This is exactly how Hitler came to power – not because the majority supported him, but because the financial elite and the racist lower-middle class did.

It will take a lot to defeat this agenda, and even if Britain remains in the EU, we will still have many more battles to fight against the institutions of the EU itself -not least of which is the struggle to end the deaths and human rights abuses at the external EU borders -but at least we will have millions of other EU-based anti-capitalists as allies instead of being trapped on this island with the Tories.

If anti-capitalist activists do not get involved in campaigning against the Brexit, making arguments on doorsteps based on class struggle rather than liberal idealism, and clearly explaining that it is not about being ‘pro EU’ but simply about being Anti-even-worse-capitalism, the referendum may be won by the Leave campaign. The Remain campaign will make unconvincing arguments that the majority of workers will not respond to, and try to glorify the EU rather than honestly admit that it too only represents the interests of a minority.

The Anti-capitalist movement can use different tactics to fight our battles than liberal capitalists will. We can take to the streets and make a noise. We can occupy buildings owned by the companies funding the Leave campaign and the general xenophobic racist propaganda of the press. We can organise cultural and artist events to bring together the different sections of the public who have the most to fear from the Brexit- migrant communities, marginalised people who are often victims of police brutality and injustice in the courts, low paid workers etc.

These are the kinds of actions that we can take as a minority movement to help build a bigger movement that might be strong enough to win this fight, and go on to win others afterwards. If we do not start organising such a movement, who else will?

The momentum of the popular movement that existed in 2011 has been lost, and no big unifying topic has come up again since then as an opportunity to build it back up. If the Brexit referendum is not that opportunity, what else will be?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The truth is that Borders have never really existed

The truth is that borders have never really existed. There is no separation between peoples, only the illusion of separation. A language shifts and changes throughout time, evolving as it comes into contact with other languages. The very fact that people can sit in a room together to have a conversation in which words from several languages are used is proof that these languages do not really exist. They are simply noises in the air, that human brains are translating into meaning. The very fact that people can cross borders so long as someone does not physically stop them from doing so is proof that these borders do not really exist.

 

The Tuareg people of North Africa cross borders all the time. They live in the desert, called ‘the Sahara’ – which is just a word meaning desert to the people who speak words that someone once grouped together and called ‘Arabic’. In different places there are different words that are clumped together and called ‘Arabic’, because there is no such thing as Arabic really, and no such people as “Arabs”. There no ‘Whites’, no ‘Europeans’, no ‘Westerners’. There are no ‘Blacks’, no ‘Africans’, no ‘Subsaharans’.

 

There are no Tuaregs. They are just a type of Berber. There are no Berbers. There is no Berber language. There is no Moroccan language. There are no Moroccans.

 

There are No Borders. What there are is fences, guns, handcuffs, vehicles, prisons, doors, locks, boats, uniforms, and human beings who have completely lost sight of reality.

 

A family of people on the backs of Camels can walk from one sand dune to another, or a van full of people, or just some desperate, hungry people with heatstroke walking through the sand. These people are not ‘crossing borders’, they are just walking in the desert. A camera up in the sky on a satellite maybe be filming them and that camera may be connected to a computer upon the display of which lines have been drawn by people under the orders of men commanding other men with lots of guns, but that doesn’t make it real.

 

Angry, violent people often let their egos run away with them and say ridiculous things that people would just laugh at if they wern’t afraid of getting hurt. They say things like ‘I’m the best’, or ‘that belongs to me’, or ‘that belongs to MY people, MY tribe, MY gang, MY nation-state”. People don’t laugh at them, they humour them, they say ‘whatever you want boss’, or ‘Sure, that’s your sandwich, that’s your wristwatch, that’s your continent’.

 

Let’s stop humouring these people. Let’s force them to confront reality. Make them see what dicks they are being and force them to stop it, for the good of everyone. They must first of all be stopped, then sat down and given a good talking to, made to understand what they have done wrong. If they express no remorse, they should be made to feel afraid of doing it again through threats of violence, which should then be carried out. This is how you would treat anyone who was fucking things up for you and your whole community.

 

When good people do nothing, that’s when bad people do things. We all know this. We mutter it to ourselves. So what are we going to do?

 

Every day, remind yourself that we are at war with all Nation-states. Their laws do not apply to us, nor to anyone else, least of all themselves.

 

Do not allow your consciousness to be poisoned by illusions. Laugh at nonsense. Laugh at those who think they are better than other people or have any right to anything on this earth. We are all equal, and this Earth does not belong to anyone.

 

We are all Equal and we are All Free. Don’t forget it, just because some men with guns have forgotten it. Remind them of it.

 

Remind them that private property does not exist. Money does not exist. Capital does not exist. Classes, nations, races, genders, even football teams – none of them exist. What exists is the universe. You can touch it, feel it, see it, breathe it. I listen to it all the time. It’s my favourite song.

 

If you break the law and there are no police around to see it, the law did not exist. If you break it and the police decide to let you get away with it, it does not exist either. If you do not break any law and the police arrest you, charge you, and give false testimony about you, the law still does not exist, even though you didn’t even break it. What exists are men with guns, women with guns, buildings, locks, doors, handcuffs and clubs. There are people who sit around on comfortable chairs with lots of shiny wooden panelling in the room, shuffling bits of paper and sentencing people to death or imprisonment. They are perhaps least in touch with reality than anyone.

 

I would like to witness a court case in which someone told the truth, just once in my life. I would like to hear someone say ‘my defence is that we are hurtling through the cosmos at millions of miles per second, so what does it matter if someone’s illusion of private property got shattered? It was good for their soul’ or ‘all of us are one, so we are all equally guilty’ or ‘I call a surprise witness – the moon’. Will that day ever come?

 

Don’t be afraid to die for the truth. Don’t be thinking of all the things you didn’t get a chance to do when you hear a big-headed idiot claim to be somebody’s lord. Say it right to their face – whatever it is that they need to be told. Do not be afraid – and they will fear you, or else they will kill you, but you would have been expecting that anyway, so it’s ok. Don’t think of all the things you haven’t done yet. That’s not a good way to die. You do not exist. You are the person that may kill you, you are the whole universe and everything in it is you.

 

There are no borders. No boundaries between yourself and others, yourself and the ground you stand on or the air you breathe. It is all everything and you are it as well.

 

But least, least of all, is there France.