The Colonisation of Everything
Its time we were honest, and its time we were brave, working class people are being fucked over, we are having the worst of times. Our life expectancy is falling like the leaves off the trees in a middle class suburb, and like those leaves, working class people are being swept away from public discourse. We are being narrated, imagined and shaped by people who define themselves and their superiority against us. And by not being us.
We are refused entry to politics, to the culture industries; into the media, business and on and on it goes. The Austerity policies of this Government, and previous Tory governments in creating hostile environments for all working class people, Trade Unionists, disabled people, single mums, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, the low paid, and the unemployed. At the same time there has been a purposeful political strategy by the Labour Party to deny class struggle and to firmly position itself as a friend to the new cosmopolitan, and municipal left bourgeoisie that squat in the inner city communities that were once ours.
It matters not at all whether the middle class are left or right wing, liberal or conservative, that they support Boris or Jeremy, their class position means that they have gained through unfair advantages, advantages in their lives they have no meritocratic right to, and at the same time working class people have suffered unfair disadvantages, disadvantages that have meant they are losing in the game of neo-liberal life.
The middle class will argue, they will describe those advantages, private schools, good and influential social networks, access to cultural and political spaces, and soft nest egg that means they always have something to fall back on- on hard work, either their own or some family member recent, or way back. Yet at the same time they will deny those unfair disadvantages for the working class saying their failure is their own. We have never had it so bad, and they [the middle class] have never had it so good, they have managed to elbow us out of everywhere, our voices our not represented by us, and they stand for us and they speak for us, they tell our stories, and the stories that cant tell they devalue. And this is why we need strong and radical working class movements, movements that are led by us, structured by us, and with aim only to put an end to the middle class colonisation of fucking every
The Future of Working class Anarchist
Over the weekend there was a small but busy event where anarchists, libertarian socialists, direct action trade unions, and curious people came together at venues around London to share ideas, and to talk and to socialise. This event was called ‘Not the Anarchist Book fair’. Early evening about twenty people got together at The London Action Resource Centre in Whitechapel under the event heading ‘The Future of Working Class Anarchism’ we had three panel members that gave short talks, Erica Legalisse a Canadian Anarchist giving her view on Identity Politics, Martin Wright the veteran Whitechapel Anarchist, and myself.
The debate that followed was honest, there was an acknowledgment that working class people were suffering in our communities, food banks, poverty, illiteracy, and poor mental and physical health are the realities for working class people, yet amongst anarchists and the left in general class struggle and working class politics have been sacrificed for as Erica Legalisse argued ‘Identity wars’ and ‘oppression formulas’ and how intersectionality is about oppressions weaving and causing complicated knots for its victims to struggle in, rather than a measurement of how many you have.
As the meeting wore on we realised how ridiculous our current form of politics are, and how little we recognised as our own, we imagined our working class friends and neighbours and our communities coming into these safe spaces, and we realised that they are dangerous for the working class. Imagine if you speak out of turn because you don’t have enough recognised oppression capital, or you don’t know what non-binary means, or you want to talk about the issues that directly affect you, housing, education for your kids, low wages, and you want to voice an opinion you are not sure about it.
This ‘activist oppression’ upon ordinary working class people needs to stop, we need to use the term working class as often as we can, it has to be inclusive of all working class people, and at the same time exclusive towards the middle class. At this time when the middle class have taken all political, social and cultural space, working class movements need safety from them, we need to build confidence to platform and hear our own words and experiences. And we need to build trust with each other, have the difficult debates, and win those communities back into the politics of working class solidarity.