The riots, Tommy Robinson, and the left we need to build
David Renton •After the racist riots and the antifascist counter mobilisations in the summer, David Renton offers a perspective on the way forward for antiracists and the wider left.
With former EDL leader and far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson planning a return to London on 26 October, it is worth remembering what happened the last time he was allowed to march. On 27 July, around 30,000 of his supporters marched from Fleet Street to Trafalgar Square. Robinson livestreamed a film, ‘Silenced,’ about Jamal Hijazi, a Syrian boy he has stalked, resulting in the latter bringing a libel action against him. Robinson has since spent much of this year outside Britain to avoid having to pay Hijazi the damages Robinson owes him. In terms of opposition, Robinson’s event was wholly unchallenged. Those participating in it were not opposed in any way, the sole TUC-backed Stand up to Racism campaign (SutR) counter-protest having negotiated with the police to end their march at Whitehall, a timid 400 metres away from the far right event.
The caution would be understandable, if it was a one-off decision – in July, Robinson supporters outnumbered SutR. It’s right that protest organisers prioritise the safety of their own people over stunts that might end in failure. The problem is that ever since 2018 SutR events have clung to the same pattern, always keeping their distance from Robinson. SutR organisers have negotiated sterile zones with the police, following their (and therefore Robinson’s) plans for his events, so that there could not be a clash even if numbers were favourable. There has been no attempt to build or organise differently since last October, even though tens of thousands of Palestine solidarity protesters have been marching every month. SutR organises on the same pattern as it did when there was no anti-war movement and all the activist networks were less than they are now.
Robinson’s supporters left London enthused, believing that they ruled the streets. Two days later, a story in the news provided them with the perfect opportunity to build on their success. A young man had killed three children in Southport. Robinson’s supporters and allies spread myths about the identity of the killer, who they wrongly identified as a Muslim, then falsely claimed he was an immigrant who had come to Britain on a small boat. They then took over an event in Southport in honour of the dead on the evening of Tuesday 30 July, after which they attacked a local mosque. Several of the Southport rioters, including Patriotic Alternative’s David Miles, and Christian fascist Rikki Doolan, had been part of the crowd at Robinson’s march just three days before.
On Saturday 3 August, further riots took place in around two dozen towns across England. In Liverpool, a large crowd of Robinson supporters outnumbered the left, the first time that has happened in that city in years.
By Wednesday 7 August, anti-fascists were organising in multiple cities in response to a list of supposed far right targets. A large number of people rushed to join anti-fascist networks. The list of possible targets was generated by a single far-right account, one with little standing in right-wing circles, and then circulated in our movement as if it was Tommy Robinson’s supporters’ own blueprint of where they would go next. Voices on both the “left” and the “right” of the anti-fascist movement warned people not to put too much weight on the targets. But those warnings were ignored by other activists – who rushed, wholly understandably, to defend targets whether they were in danger or not.
Our crowds were large, multi-racial and confident. It felt like the large left mobilisation of 7 August reversed the far-right’s long run of mobilising successes. But that sense of victory could be misleading, if people drew on it to think that we mobilised, they didn’t, and that fascists will have been demoralised by our success.
We were organising to defend a list of buildings which the right had not targeted and against which they never mobilised. The scale of the organising showed that if people organise properly, we can outnumber the right. But in most areas, the numbers of far-right supporters turning out were in the ones and twos – the crowds of thousands had melted away. We came onto the streets after the far right had vacated them. Talk of an anti-racist ‘victory‘ was premature – at best, we were starting to see what victory might look like. 7 August was not a confrontation between two sets of forces both ready for a fight; it was not a Cable Street in 1936, nor a Lewisham in 1978, nor even a repeat of Walthamstow in 2012.
The politics of the riots
Online discussion of where the riots came from has identified different possible causes. For Richard Seymour, writing in the New Left Review, the post-Southport riots were a protest neither of the poor nor the marginalised. The rioters did inhabit ‘declining regions’, but they are “as likely to be middle-class as workers”. The riots were generated by a fear of the loss of the wages of whiteness – the premium that white people used to enjoy in terms of better experience in the labour market, privileged access to benefits and social housing. “The terror of white extinction is the fear that without rigid boundaries and borders those who have hitherto been protected will plunge into the toiling mass of humanity.”
Anton Jäger replied that Seymour was guilty of ‘anti-economism’: “The word ‘austerity’ does not appear in Seymour’s piece; ‘region’ features only once, even though practically all the riots took place in areas hit hard by Cameron’s cutbacks, many of them counted among the poorest in Northern Europe.” The discontent, Jäger argued, was the consequence of a belief held “at the lower end of the labour market” that “immigration remains an indispensable part of the low-wage regime to which the policy elite is committed.”
Jonas Marvin, in Marx’s Dream Journal, described the movement in these terms, “This heterogeneously classed fascist movement, tied together by a libidinal union, violently raging against Muslim communities and the ‘invasive boats’ filled in Andrew Tate’s words with ‘military-aged men’, is precisely the growing possibility we have to smash.” In his account, they were engaged in “an intermittent attempt to forge a psychological wage in the face of capitalist realism’s zero-sum abyss. The proletarian racist laments the image of a national social democratic moment when the white worker was a beneficiary of the racialised, imperial division of labour.”
One of the most celebrated analyses of fascism is Leon Trotsky’s description of that as ‘human dust‘, ‘the crazed petty bourgeoisie‘. It’s natural to think that, if fascism had that class basis then, probably, it would have similar support today. Yet British society is not as neatly divided into two main classes as Germany was in the 1930s. Nor is working class opinion as united. There was an obvious affinity between the class position of the petty bourgeoisie and the politics of classical fascism, based as that movement was on a promise to deal simultaneously with imagined enemies both above and below.
The position is murkier today, with Britain following other countries in suffering a recurring set of political conflicts (“culture wars”) which pit on one side the young and women and racialised minorities and those who remained in education beyond 18, against a coalition of the old and men and white people and those who left education between 16 and 18.
Seen from that perspective, the research which has been done on the race rioters records that they were from districts which were older and poorer than average. (More than nine out of ten of those arrested were also men). Those arrested were not, on any meaningful standard, privileged. This is, in fact, what any serious history will tell you; that at every moment since 1900, popular forces have been split – with significant numbers of workers supporting the first anti-alien laws, anti-Jewish riots in 1947 and anti-black riots at Notting Hill in 1958. As Tony Cliff once argued, “the struggle between the workers and the capitalist class is always reflected in the struggle between the section of the working class which is under the influence of the capitalist class and the section which is opposed to the capitalist class.”
The key demand of the protesters was to send back out of England as many black people and Muslims as possible. (This demand is similar, of course, to Conservative promises to ‘Stop the Boats’ or, before them, to National Front demands to repatriate immigrants). As rioters descended on Southport on the evening of 30 July, they shared TikTok films demanding ‘Mass deportation’. The attempted arson in Rotherham and Tamworth appears to have had a similar motivation – to kill migrants or to scare them.
There is a passage in Marx’s Capital which tries to explain why it is that workers do not resist capitalism in even greater numbers. He writes, “The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker.”
Most Marxists have focussed on their third of these sentences, and the idea of mute compulsion, which – for example – provides the title of Soren Mau’s recent book. Under this theoretical insight, capitalism survives from day to day not merely through the active participation of capitalism’s beneficiaries and advocates, but from the essential, recurring reality that most people do not have enough property (i.e., means of producing wealth) so that they can afford to live without working. Accordingly, they attach themselves to the market anew each day, and that this essential relationship of ongoing subordination is the essential reason why most people cannot visualise alternatives to the market better than the ones offered by conventional politics. From the perspective of the worker, you can protest, or you can eat. The mute compulsion over capital over the worker tends to normalise and legitimise other forms of social hierarchy, even though there is no particular reason why capitalism should depend on a particular form of family structure or require the subordination of women, gay or trans people.
Mute compulsion, where it succeeds, teaches habits of obedience towards authority, making it easier for people to imagine struggles against their neighbour than it is to conceive of struggles against the system. We can start to explain, therefore, why opposition to trans rights is one of the slogans of the Reform Party, or why Tommy Robinson tried to build his original protest by having it on the same day as Trans pride in July 2024. Mute compulsion does not determine that, over any long period of time, old social hierarchies must always prevail. There are countervailing tendencies. What it does help to explain though is how, in Britain in 2024, self-subordination is easier to imagine than collective liberation. Or to put it another way, mute compulsion explains how the far-right crowd could be superficially very disobedient (unashamed to fight the police) and yet craven towards bosses, the rich, etc.
There’s also another idea in that very same passage from Marx which might explain our moment. He wrote that, under capitalism, “the constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital.”
That last sentence touches on similar themes to the right-wing argument that labour cannot be free in a society of high immigration, since wages (including social wages, i.e., welfare benefits and welfare generally) are kept low by the over-supply of population with a result that corresponds with the interests of capital. Supporters of the far right wouldn’t disagree. They’d add only that the problem isn’t capital but bad, foreign, wealth – because (they’d say) if only bosses were patriotic, they’d grasp that workers and the rich have the same essential interests, and the latter would choose to forgo their wealth so all would benefit.
Where Marx differs from the far right is in his explanation of what causes the social price of labour to be low. The problem is not a lack of patriotism on the part of the rich who, if they were properly patriotic, would of course sacrifice their living standards to support white British workers over foreigners. The problem is rather the very separation of capital and its power to advance its own interests, a process which causes all workers harm whatever their nationality.
Here, according to Mau’s reading of Marx, are some of the forms a surplus population takes. There is a ‘floating surplus population’, i.e., workers belonging permanently to the labour force but temporarily under- or unemployed; next there is a “latent surplus population,” i.e., proletarians who are not regularly a part of the workforce but can be drawn into wage labour when capital needs them; finally, there is a ‘stagnant surplus population’, the lowest strata of the working class, i.e., those who have extremely irregular employment. In Marx’s model of the capitalist economy, long-term pressures cause each three groups to exist and (absent countervailing tendencies, e.g., the demand for labour during war) the surplus to rise.
From this perspective, the violence of the race rioters may serve the interests of capital, but the people involved choose it is a rational strategy to increase the bargaining power of white labour; alternative forms of collective struggle (‘black and white unite…’) being, within the right-wing imagination which they have chosen to inhabit, absolutely closed off to them.
What now?
Racism, I have been arguing, is a distorted form of class struggle. You don’t defeat it by patronising the people who fall for it, or by cheering when those who fall for it are imprisoned. You beat it by offering those caught up in it a better strategy for collective advance.
It is a significant weakness of the left that anti-fascism is split between an older generation of anti-fascists, the sort of people who organise in trade unions, identify with Stand up to Racism, that demographic almost completely distanced from the younger generation, the people who take part in Palestine Action protests. A far better approach would see the movement changing, and with both parts agreeing to merge their forces in a joint, mass, radical protest.
You could see the problems of the anti-fascism in plans for 3 August – several town centre protests were called, as if what the movement needed were large static mobilisations at some distance from fascists. In fairness, by the time you got to 7 August, those calling the protests had corrected, and people were standing outside whatever building was threatened.
I’ve already set out the problems of 7 August. Here, the problem was a subtler but still important one. The people who do mainstream anti-fascism in Britain have no intelligence wing, and make no meaningful attempt to monitor or analyse their enemy. But the same is also true of the more physical force wing of anti-fascism – new groups have been formed but are heavily dependent on too few people’s volunteer time – and are not well enough known to influence the decisions of larger activist groups.
There’s not just a split between left and right in anti-fascism, in other words, there is also a fundamental split between campaigns and intelligence. A genuine mass movement would need to set itself the task of healing both those splits. With Tommy Robinson due to return to England on 26 October, we need to find that unity in action urgently.
There have been other times in the past when anti-fascist tactics had grown stale, and stagnant, and the movement had to in novate. In August 1977 at Lewisham, the largest group on the British far-left, the Communist Party, called an anti-racist march at a significant distance from the fascist National Front. Militant anti-fascists didn’t give up on that party, but leafleted their protest, calling on those taking part to join a more confrontational event later that day. They built a practical unity which gave the Front their greatest defeat in years.
Sixteen years later, at a time when anti-fascists were divided into three warring groups (Anti-Nazi League, Anti-Fascist Action, Youth Against Racism in Europe), the first of those networks sought to unite the left and take on the headquarters of the British National Party at Welling. By calling their movement a “Unity” march and by involving new forces with which they were not already in alliance, anti-fascists were able to call a march of 40,000 people and establish a unity on the streets – outnumbering a previously-confident right.
I’ve heard activists describe the 7 August protests as a fire alarm. If so, then it was a practice, a chance to prepare for the real battle yet to come. But there’s no point turning up for the alarm, unless you get moving when there’s a fire.
The next challenge is 26 October – will anti-fascists actually oppose Robinson next time?
rs21 will be mobilising with other groups for the counter demonstration in Central London on 26 October 2024. Join us!
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