Red Bird #4 | Responding to Repression
Red Bird •
The crackdown against ecological organising continues apace. Following repression of Youth Demand and Just Stop Oil members who have faced police harassment, arrests and imprisonment in recent months, Reclaim The Power’s (RTP) summer camp faced heavy disruption from the police on the 8th August.
The weekend was meant to see a protest camp for political discussions and actions against mega-polluter Drax’s York site. Instead, pre-emptive arrests, house raids, extended interrogations and the seizure of considerable amounts of logistical equipment led to the camp being cancelled.
As RTP highlight, considerable resources were obviously put into such a police operation at a time when racist pogroms have been raging across the country, once again demonstrating the real priorities of the repressive apparatuses of the British state.
These developments pose strategic questions for ecological and socialist currents. Logistical questions about maintaining effective security culture are clearly pressing, especially in a context where gutter press hacks enter organisations and events to act as de facto agents of the state, as we see with the July arrests of JSO organisers after meeting details were leaked by Sun journalists. We need to find ways to ensure the safety of comrades and accomplices.
For some, recent developments may indicate a need for ecological currents to become organisationally tighter, more clandestine and escalate their tactics to even higher levels of disruption in order to make a difference. For others, such developments may indicate the futility of direct action strategies and once again point to the need for mass movement activity.
Ecological direct actionists say this, socialists say that, the debates go on and nothing really proceeds.
It is easy to get demoralised or frustrated, when the power of the state seems overbearing and we cannot work out how to build mass militancy.
As we have indicated in our bulletins so far, Red Bird wants to meaningfully think beyond the usual terms and work with others to push a strategic re-orientation which better meets the challenges posed by the ecocidal capitalist state in this period of climate breakdown. The key questions for us are how to build up a mass political force with a capacity for effective disruption, and how this can be done when the apparatuses of the state work hard to disrupt this.
This is clearly difficult in a period where the active mass base for climate activity seems relatively weak (we can compare the scale of mobilisations today to the 2018-2019 highpoint of Extinction Rebellion and the climate school strikes), while the expressions of more disruptive militancy face pre-emptive clampdowns or appear desperate and confused in nature (JSO members’ recent actions at airports for example).
We need to do our best to make these defensive struggles against the repression of JSO, YD, RTP etc into opportunities to mount an offensive challenge to the state’s current programme of ecocide.
The custodial sentences being handed out to activists are severe in nature and need to be widely opposed, whatever one’s perspectives are on their tactics.
We need to learn from the past as such repression is not new. RTP’s predecessor Climate Camp was impacted by significant police repression and infamously by spy cop infiltration when it targeted Drax in 2006. Yet, over the years it rebuilt and learned how to develop. It is possible for movements to survive and grow despite such repression.
A key challenge here, and one which connects the ecological struggles to the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the challenge to state racism, is continuing to work with elements of the labour movement at a point when the Labour government and trade union leadership offer some limited reforms, such as the scrapping of the anti-union Minimum Services legislation, while broadly maintaining the law and order consensus against more anti-systemic currents. Bringing in the politics of anti-repression organising to union branches seems necessary here as a starting point.
There are lessons to be learned from the successes Soulevements de la Terre (LST) has had in France in managing to re-orientate away from the usual minoritarian/mass binary and develop a mobilising approach which can encourage significant levels of militancy on the part of wider layers (discussed in Red Bird Bulletin #3). LST has in part achieved this through managing to bridge various parties and tendencies. What might that look like in Britain?
For organising in the face of state repression, there are many historical precedents, from the Black Panthers in the US to the H-Blocks in Ireland. Bringing in the politics of anti-repression organising to trade union and tenants union branches seems necessary here as a starting point.
We would love to hear your thoughts on how to build mass militancy in the current climate and respond to escalating repression – write to us!
Red Bird Editorial Collective
Action Roundup
On the 4th August, Energy Embargo for Palestine once again targeted the British Museum. They occupied the building alongside workers from across London’s cultural sector.
This is a great example of the long tradition of joint work between precariously employed workers at London cultural institutions, and those targeting the ways these museums and galleries are used to legitimise ecological destruction and genocidal companies.
On the August 3rd a demo was held in Parliament square in solidarity with the imprisoned.
Several hundred gathered outside Parliament to highlight the 21 people then imprisoned, including those locked up around Palestine Action activity.
On August 8th and 9th, supporters of the campaign Defend our Juries, sat outside courts in various locations across the country. They were protesting not just the recent imprisonments, but also restrictions increasingly placed on jury trials to prevent climate activists defending their actions based on ecological breakdown.
The following weeks, antifascists across the country came out in numbers to oppose recent racist pogroms.
The British state will continue to come down hard on those opposing the genocide in Gaza, disrupting fossil capital, and defending themselves from racists.
Our challenge is to unite these forces.
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