The anarchists who marched on Saturday with the TUC and took delight in throwing paint at Top Shop on Oxford Circus, trying to wreck the Ritz hotel on Piccadilly, and occupy Fortnum & Mason on the same street, did so as part of “direct action.”
Ostensibly this action is directed against government cuts; in reality the anarchist movement are simply opposed to government. It does not matter if it is a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats or a Labour government, anarchists are opposed to them all. This would explain why when Ed Milliband gave his speech at the TUC rally in Hyde Park, anarchists were trying to drown him out by screaming “Don’t vote Labour.” Let us consider an imaginary situation where the government said that they were not going to install the cuts, would this satisfy the anarchists? The answer is no. What they want is the end of government and the end of capitalism itself.
What attracts people to political violence? Paul Hollander comments in his edited book, Political Violence: Belief, Behaviour and Legitimation ([Palgrave Macmillan, 2008]p.2):
The recent critiques of globalization … derive from the longstanding visceral aversion to capitalism, which used to be the foundation of the sympathy for state socialist systems such as the former Soviet Union and present-day Cuba. This durable and emotional rejection of capitalism holds it responsible for all major deformations of human character and social institutions and is at the root of the sympathy for the apparent or imaginary alternatives to it.
Robert Conquest has noted (Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiqués from the Struggle for Truth [The Free Press, 1989] p.8) that “time and time again” we see “progressive” people who are simply “hypnotized” by this very idea of a better society. The belief in how much better the world would be in this imaginary alternative to the capitalism leads people to wanton acts of violence.
None of this means that some of the so-called anarchists on Saturday’s march understand anything about anarchist theory. It is amusing to watch the tactic of these so-called anarchists, who associate themselves with UK Uncut, and, who direct screams of “Pay your Tax” at their bête noire Philip Green. Paul Staines knows a thing or two about anarchism. Writing under his nom de plume Guido Fawkes, and commenting on the anarchists at Saturday’s rally, he states, “Remember kids, real anarchists don’t pay taxes.” He is correct. If there is no government, and if “Anarchy is Liberty,” then there can be no taxation. The late leading international anarchist, Albert Meltzer, in his handy reference guide, Anarchism: For and Against ([AK Press, 1996] pp.46-47) made it clear that supporting taxation for an anarchist is a patent absurdity:
Taxation perpetuates the myth that those with more money help those with less. Taxation grabs money out of the pockets of the less well off even before they have had a chance to look at it.
It is one thing to campaign for higher corporation tax, but to do so while claiming to be an anarchist makes about as much sense as declaring you are a non smoker while puffing away on a cigarette.
But what of the violence? The problem with the violence, and the vast majority of people who marched on Saturday are aware of this, is that it turns people off. Some people are scared of even turning up to such demonstrations due to the risk of getting caught up in violence and others do not like turning up lest others think that they are associated with such violent types. Author and Times journalist David Aaronovitch put it quite bluntly and vulgarly in one of his Twitter messages last night: “daubing ‘fucks’ in red paint on postcard landmarks pisses off the people.”
Looking at a different country, at a different time, for a different cause, we can look at the hindsight recollection of Mark Rudd, someone who, in America, supported violent opposition to the Vietnam War. Reflecting on his past behaviour in his memoirs, Underground: My Life With the SDS and the Weathermen ([William Morrow, 2009] p.viii), he made an observation that he should have made before he decided to lead the occupation of Columbia University in 1968:
[W]e isolated ourselves from our friends and allies as we helped split the larger antiwar movement around the issue of violence. In general, we played into the hands of the FBI—our sworn enemies. We might as well have been on their payroll.
It is exactly for that reason that Nick Cohen is correct when he said for his piece on the Spectator website
The far left is now the British right’s secret weapon. The Tory Party should consider funding its determined effort to destroy the causes it professes to support.
