03.05.2000

Blair's police stop May Day march

Publicity around London's May Day was this year dominated not by the organised workers' movement, but by 'anti-capitalists', who, consciously or not, are following a reactionary agenda. This shift away from organised working class-based politics is a symptom of the unprecedented weakness of the labour movement.

While the TUC was in Greenwich for its £10-a-head 'May Day in the Millennium Dome', the annual march to Trafalgar Square, traditionally dominated by the revolutionary left - particularly the large Turkish and Kurdish contingents - was stopped by the police in the Strand, and Trafalgar Square was taken over by a few thousand anarchists, environmentalists and lumpens.

Their event was billed as a "guerrilla gardening" protest - a conscious return to the agricultural origins of May Day, planting flowers and seeds in Parliament Square and generally turning it into a tip. It was backed by an array of disaffected youth, alienated by bourgeois society and its commodified values. A handful symbolised their opposition to capitalism by smashing up a McDonald's, breaking a few windows and daubing a statue of Winston Churchill and the Cenotaph.

This year the British TUC again proved how completely the official labour movement has been absorbed and neutered by the ruling establishment by eschewing any march or demonstration in favour of its jaunt at the Dome, designed to "celebrate Britain's racial and cultural diversity, speak out against low pay, and promote trade unionism".

As usual it was left to the TUC's south east region (Sertuc) - influenced by members and supporters of the Morning Star's 'official' Communist Party of Britain - to formally organise the march. Not that they do much, let alone exercise any effective authority. The attempt by 'official' stewards to force the London Socialist Alliance to the back of the march failed abysmally. Either way, around two thousand trade unionists, communists, socialists, Kurdish nationalists and various leftists gathered in Clerkenwell Green before heading for Trafalgar Square.

At the head of the column a sizeable group of Rover workers, who had travelled from Birmingham, marched behind a 'Rover workers rally for Towers bid' banner and carried placards declaring, "Blair - Phoenix will fly", and "My future lies with Towers". They chanted, "We ain't going away" and "There's only one Johnny Towers" and even "Rover, Rover, Rover."

While of course it is good that these workers are not taking the loss of their jobs lying down, it is symptomatic of the period that their slogans were totally bereft of any class content. Nevertheless, they obviously had the support of all the marchers. A sympathetic policeman was even seen to buy a badge backing Rover workers, and pin it to his clothing underneath his uniform.

Other trade union banners followed behind them, after which came the bigger Turkish and Kurdish leftist groups. As always, these contingents, with their revolutionary music, chants, banners and flags, were the most militant on the march. The isolation of these groups from the British working class movement remains a tragedy. Many of the Turkish and Kurdish cadre admitted as much in conversation with our comrades.

The British revolutionary left was represented by countless different groups, with around 30 different publications on sale. Most had no banners, those that did having a maximum of 20 people marching behind them. The fragmentation of the left was clearly demonstrated.

The Socialist Workers Party, for the first time in years, had a small contingent - most of its activists in London were out canvassing and leafleting for May 4. They and others, including comrades from the CPGB and Workers Power, marched with the LSA contingent - by far the biggest British grouping represented.

The march was halted in the Strand, on the approach to Trafalgar Square, for nearly an hour by a phalanx of riot police and police vans and then told to disperse. After a long stand-off - led by the LSA - the march slowly dissolved. The Rover workers heading back the Clerkenwell Green. This is the first time since 1946 that a May Day march has been stopped by forces of the state.

The Attlee government banned and then attacked the communist-led demonstration - heralding the politics of Cold War McCarthyism. Now Blair's Labour government has succeeded in breaking up this year's - what this heralds remains to be seen. The class struggle will decide. The official reason given for the police action was the danger to the trade unionists and socialists from the anarchist and hooligan elements if the two forces were allowed to meet. Loudspeakers had been set up ready for speeches by Sertuc officials and others, but these were never heard.

Guerrilla gardeners and others were already being pushed into Trafalgar Square from Whitehall by the police. By 2pm they were occupying the plinth, climbing up the column to install pot plants. Although boisterous, they were for the most part not threatening, mixing freely with the socialists and trade unionists who had arrived early or slipped past the police cordon. But skirmishes with the police broke out sporadically right into the evening, and almost 100 were arrested. Not a few challenged the Labour Party comrade bravely manning the 'Ken for London' stall. The general message was 'Fuck Livingstone, he's a politician'.

Livingstone himself afterwards joined in the chorus of disgust and disapproval of the guerrilla gardeners and their actions. He declared his full support for the Metropolitan Police. Conscious of his 'gaffe' a few months ago in seeming to support the direct action of anti-capitalist demonstrators in Seattle in an article in The Face magazine, Livingstone was eager to restore his respectable and business-friendly image before May 4 by making a point of asking people not to take part in the protest. Instead he called on people to attend the TUC event at the dome.

Any spontaneous upsurge of opposition to capitalism must be welcomed by communists - but we must be on our guard once it begins to take on an anti-working class and anti-socialist agenda. That is the case with many of those guerrilla gardeners who gathered in London on May Day. While their hatred of the ruling class and its establishment is commendable, the alternative - to the extent that most have any conscious alternative - is based on a profoundly anti-democratic, 'anything goes' individualism.

Inasmuch as the organised left is viewed as just another form of 'authority', anarchism is, in the last analysis, a reactionary phenomenon. Our class is today at its ideologically weakest for over a century, yet there is no other route to the emancipation of humanity than through the organised workers' movement.