Anti-militarist, anti-war direct-action politics has a long history in Britain, related to the traditions of feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism, socialism, anarchism, and other more independent political movements. These histories are filled with stories of people from various backgrounds, classes and histories, for different reasons, principles and politics, who came together to directly change the world around them through their own actions. Rather than appealing to a higher or “legitimate” authority to effect change.
Such direct-actions over the last century in the UK have included blocking roads to Arms Fairs, occupying military bases, arms factories and committing property damage against buildings, vehicles and aircraft complicit in the oppression, subjugation and murder of people all around the world. As Chris Rossdale, author of Resisting Militarism states “Direct action is primarily signified by a refusal to appeal to a “higher power” to achieve one’s aims, and by replacing such appeals with interventions which seek to impact directly upon a situation”. Direct-action politics in Britain, despite being made up of people from a wealth of different political traditions has tended to be represented as a form of political action which works to emancipate us by being based upon prefigurative forms of politics.
That is, direct action attempts to reflect the society which we want to build through the very process of its enactment, or as the late David Graeber states “Direct action is the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free.”
The Corbyn project helped to organise and radicalise many who had been previously disaffected from politics. With a leader who represented the values of millions of people who wanted to create a better society as well as promoting radical ideas such as resisting militarism, the arms trade and imperialism internationally.
However, it is fair to say that that project has been smashed to pieces by the machinery of not only the British state and media, but also the Labour Party itself. After the collapse of this project and the attempt to create a Labour Party that could reflect the values of humanity, liberation, and internationalism, many formally involved within the movement have felt at a loss as to what to do next. Some have remained in the party, some have joined other political parties, while some people have dared to engage in spontaneous and emancipatory forms of political action that are coming to define our current political era.
The mass based forms of political action we are seeing from movements such as Black Lives Matter, Sisters Uncut, and Palestine Action, from blocking the streets of London and Bristol, to directly resisting police violence through force and solidarity, to occupying the arms factories of Elbit Systems. The struggles of these movements set the stage for the potentials for broader and deeper coalitions which intersect the relationships of race, gender, class and internationalism.
It is the possibility of connecting these movements which openly threatens the hegemony of our current political order. One which charges cavalry into Black Lives Matter protesters, attacks vigils for a woman murdered by a police officer, and incarcerates and raids the homes of those that use their bodies to halt the exporting of devastating weapons abroad.
As Angela Davis has stated, “when we are engaged in the struggle against racist violence … I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality … that when we see the police repressing protestors in Ferguson (and today we can say Minneapolis or Bristol or London) we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protesters in occupied Palestine”. It is through the radical praxis of direct action in which we can build such an exercising of intersectionality and broad-based coalition building against the overwhelming violence of the British state, police militarization and British Imperialism.
The politics of direct action allows us to situate global struggles and contest them on the ground in which we stand, on our own terms. What this means is that confronting Britain’s ongoing complicity and support for Israel’s settler colonialism and Apartheid regime in Palestine, is also a struggle for confronting police militarization and violence against women, sex workers, refugee, migrants and racialised communities, particularly Gypsy/Roma/Traveller and Black people’s in Britain.
It is Palestine where the technologies of violence, and surveillance are perfected to be exported back here and to be used upon poor and racialised communities. It is Elbit Systems drones, “battle tested” on Palestinians, which are now being tested for use by the British police and deployed by the Coastguard and Maritime Agency to surveille the channel for migrants and refugees.
Now is the time for those of us in Britain who’s politics are premised upon anti-capitalism, anti-militarism, anti-racism, feminism and internationalism to consolidate our politics around these mass-based participatory movements and direct-action politics and their emergence as an intersectional political force. It is through taking politics and power into our own hands from the ground up, not through political parties and politicians, in which we can and will effect change.
It is in confronting, through direct action, the transnational links of arms, technologies and strategies of containment, control and policing, from Palestine to the US to Britain, that we can struggle to dismantle the forms of violence that incarcerate, brutalise and often kill women, black people and Palestinians. Every day that the Policing & Crime Bill is resisted, every day that Elbit Systems is shut down is saving lives. The struggle to shut down Elbit Systems, the struggle to confront racist and sexist police violence, the struggle against borders, depend on confronting through our own collective power these transnational links.
What today’s contemporary political movements, from Palestine Action to Sisters Uncut and Black Lives Matter show us is that the idea of raising political consciousness first and acting after, must be exchanged for consciousness raising through the very act of our resistance. It is through the radical politics of direct action against Elbit Systems, the surveillance state, and the police, in which we can dismantle so as to rebuild.