15.05.2002

Don't be critical

Not all May Day demonstrators were trade unionists or socialists. Mike Metelits looks at the mass bike ride

I should have known better than to worry about being late for Critical Mass. Anything as adaptive and accumulative as the monthly bicycle ride through London, or indeed the May Day ride, often takes a very fluid approach to deadlines (last Friday of every month; meet on South Bank under Waterloo Bridge about 6pm). So I needn't have blasted out of my house and grafted hard across London to the Camden Town tube stop to hook up with the Northern Ride on May Day. The Southern Ride was meeting in Camberwell, and we were to link up at 12 noon at Hyde Park Corner. The gathering crowd at 7.30am was much like the assortment on the monthly rides: commuters with spiffy panniers, a few messengers, ex-messengers, and wannabes, a few home-rigged, pedal-driven machines with three or four wheels, and lots of recreational riders, casual and serious. About 150-200 of us set off about 8.15 on a winding tour through London, stopping by the magistrate's court, where the Womble Seven were about to be set free. Of course we had to stop and much of the crowd began chanting, "Free the Wombles!" Then we went our merry way, blocking traffic, handing out leaflets and receiving a good deal of applause and cheers of encouragement from pedestrians. We then pulled in for the second break of the morning at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest the "export of car culture". I considered heading in to get my passport renewed, but thought better of it. Concrete stanchions, nearly one policeman for every one of us, and a lot of distance between us and the embassy steps marked the approach. One old duffer went on a tirade at us as we sat in the unexpected sun reading the Hate Mail spoof paper distributed on the day. "If you spent less time worrying about the world and more time looking after your own future, you wouldn't have a future; your future would already be here. You'd be rich like me." Capitalism, it seems, can transcend the speed of light, and eliminate the time between riding in a mass protest and becoming a humourless bourgeois. Some outrageously dressed and made-up ringleaders gave a 'statement', which was seized upon by every media operative within 100 metres. It seems a habit to photograph and interview the offbeat at these events; it must make better copy. The statement itself was a soft green masterpiece, framing environmental sustainability purely in its own terms, with a bit of anti-US sentiment thrown in for good measure. We continued, making work for our police escorts, annoying drivers with high blood pressure, and eventually splitting up into several groups with different trajectories. It has to be asked (and it was by my comrades when I peeled off about 11.30 to deliver Weekly Workers in Clerkenwell) why a communist would ride in a nominally anarchistic event with strong overtones of radical bourgeois green thought. Frankly, because it's fun. Secondly, transport, pollution and the economics and politics of hydrocarbon-based fuels are working class issues. The pointy end of all these sticks usually gets jammed into the eyes of our class one way or the other. Working class areas often have high pollution levels, either from dumping or hydrocarbon waste; public transport is soon to be a thing of the past, and individual cars, while satisfying on one level, are polluting debt-traps. Let's leave aside the political and social costs that a high dependence on hydrocarbon-based fuels gives us. Yes, I know energy is a more complex issue than transport, and I know that bicycles aren't going to save the world. Thanks. I must have overlooked that. Still, anyone taking a car off the London streets in favour of lightweight, parking-friendly, food-driven, congestion-busting bicycles is doing the rest of you a favour. The more yuppie commuters, students, service workers and others who use bicycles for transport, the more room there will be on the roads for people who work in jobs where driving is a necessity. 'But the politics of Critical Mass - how can you support them?' I hear you cry. Hmm. Critical Mass is based on self-organising principles, collective solidarity (on those occasions where a police escort either doesn't turn up or is late, we work together to block traffic) and, yes, discipline. Tough to argue with, those. We could add to them, but I don't think our politics would translate well. Amusingly, one CPGB comrade seemed surprised that we often have a police escort, and implied that the authorities are on our side. They aren't. It probably saves time for them to ride with us (and they were shadowing as many groups as they could on May Day), since we're perfectly happy to block intersections ourselves. I'm sure they get called a few times by indignant drivers on mobile phones. Further, CM is a prime example of viral tactics: information and activity leads to involvement, which spreads information. This, in my view, is something we communists could learn a bit about, especially when it comes to intervening in mass movements. I don't know if or how we will apply these ideas, but it's probably a good idea to think about it. So where does that leave us? Events like Critical Mass are not what communists ordinarily think of when talking about changing the world. Still, they provide interesting examples of viral tactics, self-organisation, and direct action on environmental and some political concerns.