#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #UK #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) UK, Solidarity Federation - Fuck the Tories... and Then? Liverpool Anarchist Final Issue (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Anti-Tory sentiment has been rife in Liverpool for decades, beginning during

Edward Heath's government, and being set in stone by Thatcherism and its legacy.
This is partly due to neo-liberal Tories overseeing the de-industrialisation of
Merseyside, and battling the industrial unrest and Militant Council of the time.
Thatcher and her government are said to have intentionally pursued a policy of
"managed decline" in Liverpool following the Toxteth Riots. Added to this, the
right-wing, pro-Tory newspaper, 'The Sun', has been boycotted in Liverpool since
1989, when its report on the Hillsborough disaster blamed and slandered the
victims. This anti-Tory attitude continues today with resentment towards Tory-led
"austerity measures", their reactionary politics, authoritarian legislation, and
utter contempt for the working class.
This widespread hostility towards the Tories has
provided a basis for popular mobilisations against
the government and particularly harmful policies.
We have seen "Fuck the Tories" raves and continual
protests against everything from the latest police
bill to "hostile environment" policies. There has
been a passionate opposition to the past decade of
Tory rule that goes beyond party-political rivalry.
Yet, Liverpool is also a stronghold of the Labourle -
those socialists and social-democrats who still
cling to the myth of Labour as the party of the
working class and a vehicle for social change.
While some of the anti-Tory zeal feeds into positive
activism and protest, mostly it is just the backdrop
for voting Labour. Labour MPs have won every
constituency in the city since 1997, and the local
council has been dominated by Labour since 2010
(contested with the Liberals before then) despite
rampant corruption.
Anarchists can take anti-Tory sentiment as an
opportune environment to agitate and organise
against the government and its attacks, but this will
simply feed back into electoralism if it does not go
any further. It is important to meet people where
they're at, not staying aloof from the great majority
of people who know nothing of anarchism;
however, that does not mean dispensing with our
own ideas and methods to fit into the crowd. Anti
Toryism lacks a revolutionary perspective because
it opposes one faction of the ruling class and its use
of state power, rather than opposing state power in
itself. The problems we face and possible solutions
are cast in terms of party politics. The Labour Party
is the only realistic alternative to support, or at
least tolerate as the "lesser evil". Politicians take
full advantage of this to pave the road to power.

Anti-Tory sentiment becomes, in reality, the perfect
environment for the recuperation of autonomous,
grass-roots social struggle into parliamentary
politics.
What's missing is a fundamental critique of
political power and the capitalist economy it
oversees. The state is the network of institutions
and structures that control society in the interests
of the ruling class. The government, whether
elected or imposed, is the body that directs this
state power within certain limits. The modern state
is an administrator of capitalism, maintaining
advantageous conditions for domestic markets, a
productive labour force, stable hierarchies, and the
security of capitalist property. Democratically
electing a le-wing Labour government, or
replacing a democratic government with a
revolutionary socialist dictatorship, will achieve
nothing more than the continuation of state power.
Finally in the driving seat, they must continue to
maintain and administrate capitalist exploitation,
or else see the basis of their new-found power
collapse. Historically this has sometimes brought
better living and working conditions for the
working class; but this has been faustian pact, with
the price of undermining or suppressing
independent working-class organisations and
leaving behind revolutionary aspirations. The
continuous fight for freedom and equality is put on
hold, misdirected, or crushed altogether.
Successive British governments, Labour and
Conservative, have pursued the necessary policies
to maintain capitalist growth and manage its
inevitable crises, through Keynesianism in the
midtwentieth-century to neo-liberalism from the
eighties onward. That is the inherent role of the
state and the political clique who happen to be at
the top. Considered structurally in this way, the lie
is given to the popular image of Labour as the party
of the working-class, an illusion also broken by a
cursory study of how Labour have governed. Even
under the almost mythical 1945 Labour
Government, they used the military to break
unofficial dock strikes and imprisoned the rankand-file
organisers. Many workers also refused to
join these strikes in the first place as they thought it
would undermine "their" government. Abroad,
Labour brutally maintained colonial regimes,
imprisoning and murdering trade unionists. If a
Corbyn government had been elected, our current
strike wave would also be a threat to their project,
not because of their character or ideas but because
of the institutions they would inherit. This is not to
say that "they're all the same", but that the
difference is between one form of domination and
another - our fight is against the structures of
domination they are competing over.
We need to pursue our struggle on our own
terms, by our own methods, following our own
principles, which we simply cannot do within the
realm of party politics. To water down our ideas
and practices to the lowest-common-denominator
of anti-Tory protest might gain us short-term
support but at the expense of our long-term goal. It
can also backfire, as we saw during the surge of
Corbynism when many anarchists jumped ship or
equivocated about their anti-statism in the hope of
a le-wing government to find relief from Tory
austerity. Allowing one political party to be held
responsible for the latest development of global
capitalism is a weakness of theoretical understanding
that obscures the reality we face. When, in
Greece, the democratic socialist party Syriza were
elected on an anti-austerity platform, they were
forced to make extensive cuts anyway by
international financial institutions.
Miring ourselves in party politics also gets in the
way of building working class solidarity, winning
over our co-workers and neighbours. Casting the
millions of working class people who vote for the
Conservative Party as class traitors places
culpability in the hands of those with no real
power. The reactionary world-views that leads
some to vote Tory (xenophobia and obsession with
"law and order", for example) are shared by many
Labour supporters, and while these clearly
contradict our values, many also vote for them
simply because they think they will better govern
the economy. Ultimately these views and prejudices
can and must be overcome by the experience of
collective struggle and the emergence of a
compelling alternative.
Yeah, fuck the Tories. But let's take every
opportunity to push that anger and opposition
further, revealing what's beneath the surface,
breaking the spell of Labourism and socialdemocracy.
We need to be the voice of revolution
and the mirror of the free society we fight for.
---------------------------------------------------------
Final Issue

Aer 24 issues, having begun in October 2019,
this will be the final release of Liverpool Anarchist.
The newsletter is wrapping up due to people
moving away from Liverpool. As it stands, no one
has chosen to take over the publication, but it is a
possibility for the future. Regardless, the anarchist
movement in the city and surrounding areas will
continue and hopefully pick up as more people
seek genuine solutions to the many crises biting
into our lives and futures.
Throughout our run we have sought to shine a
light on the social struggle and industrial unrest
that is usually hidden or misrepresented, to clearly
explain anarchist theory, and to uncover some of
Merseyside's radical history from which to draw
inspiration and important lessons.
We intend to write a retrospective evaluation of
the newsletter, looking at both the theoretical
framing and practical organisation of the project,
such as our development from an umbrella
anarchist newsletter to having a consistent,
anarcho-syndicalist editorial line.
We would like to thank everyone who has
contributed to the paper, whether that be through
writing articles, distributing copies, or providing
feedback. Goodbye and good luck!

https://liverpoolanarchist.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/issue-24.pdf
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