Class War is over
Long live the Class War!
One measure of the success of the Class War Federation is that so
many of the readers of this article will immediately recognise the
name as belonging to a British revolutionary group. Well officially
Class War is no more and what's more they produced a final issue of
there paper to prove it, No 73 headlined 'Class War is Dead...long
live the Class War'.
Class War originated in London in the early 1980's. It built a
'fearsome' reputation on a paper that concentrated on reporting on
violent individual and collective attacks on the ruling class (or its
agents). It also pulled a number of media stunts like the 'Bash the
Rich' marches. Not surprisingly the media (and many others) confused
these two aspects and came to the conclusion that Class War was
somehow behind the events covered in its paper. The papers coverage
was deliberately shocking, for a long time it featured a 'Page 3
Hospitalised Copper', and popular front covers included the 'we have
found new homes for the rich' over a picture of a cemetery.
The thinking behind this was that the revolutionary left in
Britain was (almost) entirely composed of pacifist students led by
'middle class wankers' who alienated the working class. Class War,
by being populist and staying clear of 'theory', could appeal to the
mass of unorganised working class activists and in some undefined way
this would improve the chance of a revolution in Britain.
Cop Killer
The attraction of Class War, while based in a frustration with the
existing left, was also about the need to fantasise a left that the
ruling class were actually scared of. To a lot of its readers it was
the organisational equivalent of Ice-T's 'Cop Killer'. To it's
members it offered more then this if a magic way could be found of
converting the thousands of people attracted to this fantasy into
activists in their workplaces and their communities. But again and
again they found that those attracted by the fantasy were not all
that interested in the often unexciting reality this work involved.
Their strategy grabbed media headlines (particularly when Class
War were blamed for the Poll Tax riot) and sold papers (a
circulations of up to 15,000 was claimed), but apart from this it
failed. Hence the decision by the majority of the federation to
scrap the project in the hope of starting a discussion on an
alternative. The last issue of Class War is an attempt to set down
some parameters for this discussion.
It's impossible to summarise this analysis here, you'll have to
get a copy and read it. However there are some obvious comments that
need to be made on it. First off, although the paper carries the
heading 'An open letter to the Revolutionary Movement', it ignores
the debates that have already occurred in the post Cold War era. The
idea that the left went wrong somewhere and that the cause of this
failure is not yet completely understood is hardly new; it has been
discussed by many, many activists over the last few years.
Also lacking is any serious discussion of the failure of the
anarchist movement in Britain to build even one semi-convincing
national organisation. Despite the fact that thousands consider
themselves anarchists, Britain is remarkable for having no sizable
national anarchist organisations nor any real desire on the part of
anarchists to build one.
Instead there are a number of tiny organisations based on a couple
of dozen core members which pretend to be national alongside dozens
of local organisations who engage is struggle but do little to
promote anarchist ideas. Class War acknowledge that they suffered
from this problem in saying "the truth is that Class War, in it's
entire existence, has never had more than 150 members, and membership
numbers have often hovered around the 50 mark".
The thinking anarchist
This is really the big question for anarchists in Britain thinking
of constructing a new movement. It is impossible to answer in a few
hundred words written from Ireland but one suggestion is that the
root of this problem lies in the division between theory and action
that parallels the division of national and local organisations
there. National organisations have tended to see their role as
reporting on local struggles and theorising about them rather then
getting involved in them on a co-ordinated basis, on a national
level.
Locally, Class War members were involved in struggles and
nationally their paper wrote about them but there could be no real
attempt to take things further with ideas on the national level
because there were no common ideas. The reasons for this are
complex, not least a lack of willingness to discuss disagreements and
adopt a national strategy; and this leaves 'action' as something
which can only occur on a local basis.
The last issue of Class War carries on the tradition of pretending
this isn't a problem when it says "One of the common criticisms of
Class War is that we don't have an agreed 'position' on Ireland or
unions.. In fact we have always regarded it as a strength that there
was no line, no dogmatic position". This sounds fine but how can an
organisation that is unable to even agree on such fundamental
questions as what to do in unions or to oppose British imperialism in
Ireland ever hope to be more then a circle of friends who have the
odd debate. To become a mass organisation you must be able to work
with people you have never personally met, and the only way you can
do this is if you have reached a formal agreement on what you are
going to work on and what tactics and ideas you will put forward.
Class War are quite right to dissolve themselves if they see no
future for the approach they espoused. The last issue is well worth
reading as an explanation for why this approach offered little. It
is also a contribution to the debate that has been going on over the
last number of years inside and outside the anarchist movement on
revolutionary politics. However unless the conferences their last
issue proposes tackles the question of how a national organisation
can involve itself in working class struggles as an organisation it
is likely that whatever emerges will just represent more of the same.
Joe Black
If you have access to the internet you can read the last Class War
at
http://www.oocities.org/CapitolHill/6170/organisation_debate.html
