Anti-fascism needs culture

West Runton punks, 1979 - Syd Shelton

I’ve held back from commenting on the Robinson march; I needed some time to process this new period we’re in. For a long time, the right has been able to out-mobilise anti-racist in Brexit voting areas (Rotherham, Nuneaton), but we continued to out-organise them in the university towns. This year, Britain First swatted away liberal and left protests in Manchester. In central London Robinson outnumbered the left by 10-1. If we can’t win in the big cities, what chance have we got?

For 30 years, I’ve believed that if the left just matched up our organisations to our level of support in the community, there would always be more of us than them. We can still achieve that against the sideshows, the losers of Homeland, the Nick Tenconi grift, but against the right organising as a social movement, against Robinson, that moment is passed. There is no organising trick that will bring back out control of the streets. Better leaflets which address the fascist campaigns for what they are not rather than what they were 50 years ago would help; renaming Stand Up to Racism, dumping the control-freakery, wrapping in Hope not Hate to a new coalition – all these would be welcome. But they changes would be minimal compared to the scale of the threat. Against a six-figure movement they won’t make a dent.

Anti-fascists need to find vast new reserves of energy, located outside the sphere of what we consider “politics”. The model, now more than ever, is Rock Against Racism. But calling for a strategy and making it real are such a huge distance apart. RAR did the trick because it was a cultural moment, because it connected to an art form (music) which turned young people into a collective. The kids of the 70s listened to the same songs, watched the same shows, were willing to fight for the utopian openness of new kinds of dound. When the stakes were so high – the papers full of anti-migrants, the Front on the verge of winning elections, schools and football grounds ringing with racist chants, people themselves had to (and did!) find a way to fight back.

It doesn’t help that anti-fascist have spent 50 years forgetting how RAR worked, lying to ourselves that the smaller, easier to repeat, better tacked on to the Leninist party form, more familair leafletting exercise which came afterwards, the Anti-Nazi League, was the secret to anti-fascism’s success.

But really, this is a much smaller problem than the much greater narrowing of the left which has taken place over the same time since – the vanishing of feminism out of our publications with its bold generous vision of transforming everyday life, the loss of interest in music, art, culture. Instead of Reclaiming the Streets, left discourse has shrunk to a following of celebrities and our desperation that they will form parties which might lead us. Culture has lost interest in us as we have ceased speaking to it.

Deeper still, too is the still inadequately phenomenon of the smart phone and its take over of day to day life, the technologies too which come with it, the disappearance of reading, of argument, of a concern with the truth. How are you supposed to talk down your racist uncle if the only person he’ll listen to it’s the AI on his Android, with its smooth reassurances that your aunt deserved everything he did to her? How can you defeat sexism and racism when the platforms are promoting them, making us seem the embarassing past? How are any of us supposed to fight the attention economy and the nest with which it cocoons our enemy – sending their cadres soft porn, pictures of crowds singing Allah is a Pedo. Swipe one way to support Reform, swipe the other and you can donate to Tommy’s this week cocaine fund.

And that’s before I get to America, the collapse of the left there, the sending of the National Guard into the cities, the elevation of Charlie Kirk to martyr status. Our society and economy are just as run by Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Nvidia as theirs. London could no more go its own way from Washington than could Tulsa. On any medium term – without political innovation so fast that you’d whip your neck seeking it - we’re every bit as doomed here as Socialist Vienna was in 1934 or 1938.

There is no alternative to change, but it must go deeper than the groups acknowledge. You need to do things differently, me too, and all of us. We need to see the causes of our crisis as well as our symptoms. Match our movements to the scale of the problem we’re facing. Shift to culture, take in the whole of the problem we’re against and resist with what we can. And be honest with ourselves. We’ve had 50 years in which things have been relatively easy but from here on it’ll be hard.