This is obviously a calamity for the Left, particularly for anyone interested in building any kind of radical left-of-Labour alternative.  At a time when the two major parties are lockstepped in the austerity drive, and when we can hardly count on the TUC to lead the resistance (this notwithstanding), yet another disastrous quietus was the last thing we needed.  That is not Salma Yaqoob's fault, obviously.  The usual suspects will spread vicious gossip ("she's taken the New Labour shilling" etc etc) but as far as I can see, her decision is perfectly justified.  I'm sorry to say it, but George Galloway did it to himself: he ought to have had the humility to retract his statement rather than relying on the diminishing fan club to issue cloying rationalisations.  

There are serious questions raised by this nadir, and not only about the gender politics.  If, only months after Respect's second coming, the whole thing could come crashing down like this then there are wider issues about the politics, institutional setting and tactics of left-of-Labour formations that need be thought over.  Not much else I wish to add for now. 

The concept of 'racial formation' was coined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in what is really - despite its avowed distance from marxism - a Gramscian enterprise.  Although the authors focus on somatic racism, their arguments are relevant here.  Defining race as "a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies" (and, one would add, cultures defined in a univocal, essentialist manner), they described racial formations as: 

"the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. Our attempt to elaborate a theory of racial formation will proceed in two steps ... [W]e argue that racial formation is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized. Next we link racial formation to the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled. ... From a racial formation perspective, race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation."

The work of cultural and ideological representation is done by 'racial projects'.  A racial project "is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines".  Racial formation, then, is a conjunction of these various racial projects with the social structures (labour market hierarchies, criminal justice, educational selection etc) on which they act.

It was not long after the reality television show Make Bradford British was aired that George Galloway swept the bye-election in Bradford West by an overwhelming margin.  This victory was a long overdue rebuttal to the idea that the problems and aspirations of poor, working class areas like Bradford can be reduced to 'race'.  But the primary interpreters of the result in the media didn't see it that way.  For them, it could only be more proof of just how potent 'race' is as a determinant factor in people's behaviour.  'They voted the dreadful man Galloway in: Islam is more powerful than we thought.'  This is linked to two types of racial project, which I think are the dominant types in relation to British Muslims, and British Asians more generally.

The first is actually that produced in the Make Bradford British programme.  The title of the show connoted a racist precept - that is, an idea of Britishness as something that is disturbed by the presence of 'foreigners', racial Others.  The producers would claim, I imagine, that this is to misunderstand their goal; that their idea of Britishness is one of mutual tolerance, multiculturalism and respect, which extremists 'on both sides' would tend to threaten.  Such, indeed, appears to be the surface premise: the idea of bringing together diverse Bradfordians, from the racist copper, to the devout Muslim, and every shade of racist and racial subject in between, under the same roof.  And tolerance is not the most repugnant of misanthropic virtues, particularly when it is invoked as a shield against oppression.  However, whether the producers claim to have been aware of this or not, the very idea that Bradford needs to be made British is connotatively linked to an idea of British nationality as 'white'.  And the way in which tolerance is linked to this notion discloses the racist logic of tolerance in this case.  

If the explicit assumption is that 'divisions' arise from a lack of intimacy between different groups, the implicit assumption is that before the 'foreigners' there was a relatively stable British identity, which can only be restored through the domestication of these interlopers.  In this project, multiculturalism is explicitly embraced, even if the submerged logic tends toward integrationism; likewise, the projected resolution is consensual, organised around the sharing of experience and views, even if the hidden logic points to the need for coercive programme of 'British values'.  The meaning of race disclosed here is purely discursive; it has no positive reality either as a somatic fact or as a social structure, even if at root there may be 'legitimate grievances' which are crudely taken to be erroneously understood in the language of race.  This is a liberal, managerial racial project.  And I will leave it here, because this one is dying.

The second type appears in David Starkey's comments on the recent case of a gang of British men, of Pakistani origin, who were convicted of grooming children.  Starkey argued that this was a reflection of values inculcated in "the foothills of the Punjab or wherever", that it was a case of men who had never been taught that using girls in this way was inherently wrong, and who needed to be "inculcated in the British way of doing things".  (Yes, Britain, where children are happily unmolested except by foreigners with different ways to our own.)  Don't imagine that Starkey represents an insubstantial minority.  At the Times debate where he made these comments, and where Starkey was expertly trolled by Laurie Penny who called him out as a racist bigot, there was clearly a fairly substantial sentiment in favour of Starkey.  His supporters on this occasion included the dim libertarian ex-RCPer Claire Fox, who dubbed Penny a disgrace to women and the Left for not joining the kulturkampf against those whom tabloids have dubbed "Asian sex monsters".  

In fact, anyone who has followed the coverage knows that Starkey is not in this case pushing at the boundaries of acceptable discourse.  People like former Labour MP Ann Cryer, who began campaigning over 'Asian sex gangs' in 2000, are complaining that the police wouldn't take the problem seriously due to 'political correctness'.  (In fact, the trial seems to have disclosed that the girls were not taken seriously in their complaints because they were poor, from broken homes or care, and would not be considered credible before a court: an old story about misogyny, not political correctness).  Starkey's comments, malicious as they are, are in concert with the dominant tone of the media's coverage.

So, using the idiom of culture and nebulous 'values' (because apparently you have to subscribe to a nationally specific yet extremely vague set of 'values' to know that it is wrong to use children for sex), this project specifically rejects multiculturalism and the rhetoric of tolerance.  The explicit logic is coercive and punitive, not consensual.  Increasingly, since the 'profile' of the 'Pakistani street groomer' is being developed by police and popularised by the mass media, this means racial profiling and extended state surveillance and intervention into the lives of one million Britons.  But again, there is a slightly deeper logic in the call for an enforced pedagogy in the "British way of doing things".  For the suspects in Rochdale were all, bar one, born, raised and socialised in the United Kingdom.  Their life experiences, education and work were not those that one would receive in "the foothills of Punjab".  Therefore the assumption that their 'values' would reflect those of the Punjab, leaving aside the scandalous way in which those 'values' are being depicted, tends to shade into outright biological racism.  Otherwise, it segues into a cultural essentialism so deterministic that it makes no difference.  Social structure appears here only as an appurtenance of race.  And the implication of such a stance is that even assimilation is not possible, that coexistence is only possible at great distance.

So, here a set of antagonisms prevalent throughout the social formation - those engendered by patriarchy, poverty, the social care system, the depletion of public resources, policing, and the precarious existence of working class girls arising in that context - has been represented and signified through the bodies of 'Asian men' or 'Pakistani men' to create a racial meaning and struggle for a particular kind of racial solution.  This brings us to the role of racial formation in hegemonic practices.  Hegemony is not typically a state sustained over a long period of time, but rather a state which is constantly worked toward and worked on.  It signifies not a normal condition of rule, but an exceptional state of dominance in which a class or class fraction has assembled a broad social alliance along multiple axes of class, oppression and identity, behind a certain historical mission.  It involves not just the transformation of the 'common sense', as it were, but also the profound reorganisation of political violence and terror.

There is a tell-tale dimension of this Rochdale case referred to by Judith Orr here, which is the introduction of a racialised neologism in the context of moral panic.  In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall et al described the origins of the term 'mugging', which was introduced in the British popular press from the United States in 1971-2 to refer to an apparently new criminal menace which was strongly associated with young black men.  In the period 1972-3, there appeared in the press to be a 'mugging epidemic', connotatively linked to the 'ghetto', the black criminal 'underworld', etc etc.  There was, then as now, a totemic case, that of the violent robbery of a man in Handsworth, Birmingham.  'Mugging' was not a specific crime, but rather linked a number of types of criminal action to a set of racial connotations.  The media led with this, arguing that the police and courts were overwhelmed with this new type of crime, which was not new, and not significantly increasing in frequency.  And this provided the imaginary material for the New Right's articulation of an authoritarian-populist agenda.  

So today we have the invention of this term "street grooming" or "on-street grooming", which does not signify a specific criminal offence, but which is laden with racial connotation as it is used almost exclusively in association with sex crimes committed by 'Asian men'.  That's why statistics on this are so difficult to obtain and unreliable: the police actually arrest, charge and prosecute people accused of 'street-grooming' under a wide variety of offenses.  The main way in which newspaper reports get round this is to look at police figures to do with the detection and prosecution of extended gangs involved in sex with children.  This, they say, shows a greatly disproportionate cohort of men of Pakistani origin.  This is very much like the case of 'honour crimes', which reclassify existing crimes according to a racialised code.  Thus, according to this logic, you'll probably find that the overwhelming majority of honour crimes are committed by Muslim men, because you've re-defined the crime (say, the murder of family members) in such a way as to focus on one aspect of it, and thereby ignore most of it.  The same is true of the 'grooming' panic, which seems to be a stronger candidate for a racialised moral panic, where the resonant racist imagery of brown-skinned men preying on white girls offers a very potent way of turning the real experiences of exploitation and abuse into a language of authoritarian racist crackdown.

It is also connotatively linked to the ongoing mythos of British decline, something which reactionaries date to Indian independence and the arrival of Windrush.  In the context of real declines (in relative income, living standards, social services, employment, job security, infrastructure, pensions, etc.) and amid a turbulent and seemingly endless crisis, there is more than enough material, already saturated with racial meanings, to make this articulation work.  This would be linked to a project of British revivalism, already in the works: the 1945 reenactment society has been doing its best drape everything both literally and figuratively in the Union Jack, even as the union threatens to come apart.  It would obviously be linked to a belligerent europhobia, particularly as the EU looks like its leadership is barely capable of survival.  It would ally, as its pivotal class alliance, the most 'eurosceptic' and hyper-Atlanticist sectors of the bourgeoisie, over-represented in the ownership of the media, with the most nationalistic sectors of the petty bourgeoisie.  

Yet, for all its resemblances to early Thatcherism, it would have to be different in several particulars.  Neither the individualist rebellion against the nanny state or union bosses, nor the aspirational politics sharp-eyed and ruthless social climbing, has escaped the crisis without some stigma.  If such a project were to reach into the working class, its material substratum could not be a promise of rewards unleashed by financialisation and good pay for loyal, skilled, non-militant workers.  Rather, it would seem to call for a certain paternalistic turn - which is by no means incompatible with privatization and an increase in the rate of exploitation.  It would demand carefully targeted material concessions through the state, perhaps coupled with a punitive strike against those on the wrong side of respectability, such as single mothers and immigrants.  If and when David Cameron is deposed from the Right, I would strongly expect the putsch to be organised around these sorts of policy thematics, and it would be tailed relentlessly by 'Blue Labour'.

However, although within a racial formation a single racial project tends to be dominant, it is not exclusively or necessarily so.  The task of the Left is to link a politics of militant racial egalitarianism to the language of everyday experience.  This becomes much easier in the context of rising class and social struggles in which the appeal for unity has a clear experiential basis.  We can see from the example of antifascist organisation how the activation of concrete forms of multiracial unity can pose a different meaning of race.  We also saw how anti-racism formed the dominant culture of the antiwar movement, despite a reasonably large antiwar sentiment on the Right, and provided a counterpoint to the demonisation of Muslims.  So, if the dominance of a given racial project is decided by the types of situation that are popularly understood as 'racial', and if the Right tends to have the whip hand here, there are clearly resources on this front for counter-hegemonic mobilisation.

This loan shark says, make them pay, beat them until they pay everything, but don't beat them so hard that they can't keep paying.  That loan shark says, if you don't make an example of this one, the others won't respect you.  Beat them to death.  And it is between these two poles that the bankers, ratings agencies, and EU leaders oscillate.  

Earlier this week, Greek workers walked out on an impromptu general strike.  This was a moment of acute pressure applied to the 'technocratic' regime led by Lucas Papademos, as it struggled to agree austerity measures to satisfy Eurozone leaders, thus qualifying for bailouts that would satisfy the bankers and bond markets.  For a moment, it looked as if the government wouldn't reach agreement.  Eventually, the deputy minister for labour resigned in protest, and a package was agreed, in which the minimum wage was cut by 22% and a further 150,000 public sector jobs were cut.  Achieving this was a fraught affair, but it hardly concluded the matter.  Strikes and protests continued.  The bond markets didn't relent for a second in their punishing assault on Greek government debt, and lenders instantly conveyed their doubts.  More ministers resigned, this time from the extreme right LAOS.  The PASOK deputy foreign minister also departed, along with the minister for labour.  Papademos has been forced to announce a cabinet re-shuffle.  But so far, he and his subordinates have stuck with the EU's austerity demands loyally and doggedly, regardless of the immediate consequences.  And you would have thought that the EU's finance ministers would welcome this.  You would be wrong.

The Eurozone leaders reacted to the deal, to this complete capitulation signed on behalf of Greece by its unelected government, by dismissing the agreement and demanding more.  The actual amount of additional cuts they demanded is fairly piddling compared to the agreed total and, you would think, hardly worth scuppering an agreement for.  But the contempt conveyed by this gesture is jaw-dropping.  It goes without saying that they don't care if a fifth of Greek workers, and just under half of young Greek workers, are unemployed.  Knowing that the government is widely seen as a slave of external powers, European bankers, EU leaders, the ECB, and the IMF, they demanded further prostration from the Greek government and ruling class.  Knowing that the struggle against cuts in Greece is now suffused in the popular imagination with the national resistance to Mussolini's invading forces beginning in 1940, they opted to underline the sense of national humiliation.  Knowing that the left-of-PASOK parties could win any election called in the near future, they demanded the bourgeois parties add petrol to their own immolation.  Knowing that there is a volatile, violent mood, that the tempo of working class struggle is escalating, that strikes will continue over the weekend when the package is put to a vote, that more defections are on their way, and that the government may not survive for long, they smacked it down for following orders.  Knowing, aside from anything else, that the police federation is angrily claiming that it is not willing to keep a lid on popular anger, and that the head of the civil servants union is predicting a "social uprising", they've raised their two fingers and said 'bring it on'.

Of course, as I said, this wasn't necessarily a good idea on their terms.  The demand for more cuts has been like the proverbial straw, provoking aghast outrage from people who had otherwise signed up to the austerity agenda.  The government is falling to pieces.  The Torygraph thinks the EU is trying to drive Greece out of the Eurozone.  No.  The government will probably have enough supporters to force the deal through parliament, with the participation of the two major parties.  What the EU leaders stated very clearly when they rebuffed Papademos was that they expected Greece to comply, that in the future its treasury and ministerial budgets would be overseen by the EU, that the sell-off of assets would be accelerated, and that there would be renewed drive to enforce tax collection from people who cannot afford to pay in order to facilitate the ongoing transfer of wealth to the bankers.  What's happening, I suspect, is that the EU is keeping the screws turning until the very last minute, until they know that the Greek government will give just about anything to avoid a 'disorderly default'.  Yes, they've just made things harder for the government, and the class, that they expect to impose this on Greece.  But you have to understand it from their perspective. Greece, so they keep telling anyone who will listen, caused this crisis.  It could bring down the Eurozone.  They are very unhappy with the Greeks.  And so, unsurprisingly, they want the Greek ruling class to suffer a bit for its continued membership of the EU.  Meanwhile, Greece's neoliberal 'technocrats' insist on staying the course - yes, things are hard, says the arch-privatizer and former finance minister Stefanos Manos, but we need to do this, and in fact we need to do even more.  People just don't get it, but they must be made to.  This has been the dispensation in Greece, to greater or lesser degrees, since it belatedly embarked on its neoliberal turn in the 1990s.

Even so, the EU's rulers have probably over-played their hand by acting in such a provocative way.  The disintegration of the government, the warning noises from the police, the further shift to the left, and the signs of industrial escalation, are indicative that they may have gone too far.  Amid the second general strike in a single week, both called on very short notice and with considerable success, the chances of this government surviving to implement any package it can agree are shrinking fast.

American Insurgents is a revealing, often surprising history of anti-imperialism in the United States since the American Revolution. It charts the movements against empire from the Indian Wars and the expansionism of the slave South, to the Anti-Imperialist League of Mark Twain and Jane Addams; from the internationalists opposing World War I to the Vietnam War and beyond. It shows that there is a surprising, often ignored tradition of radical anti-imperialism in the US. Far from being ‘isolationist’ in the fashion of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the book contends, these traditions were often the most internationalist and cosmopolitan currents in US political history. The most ambitious movements formed direct relationships with the victims of US expansionism, from the abolitionists uniting with Native Americans to stop colonial genocide to the solidarity movements in central America and the ‘human shields’ in Palestine and Iraq. Far from being the privilege of the rich and educated, antiwar activism has been most evident among the poor and oppressed. It has been most militant when visibly connected to domestic struggles and interests, such as slavery, civil rights, women’s oppression and class. Above all, the book contextualizes each anti-imperialist movement in the evolving structure of US expansionism and dominance, and explains how some movements succeeded while others failed. In so doing, it offers a vital perspective for those organizing antiwar resistance today.

Francis Fox Piven conceives of "disruptive power" as that form of usually implicit power that people have as a result of the interdependencies that social organization gives rise to:

"All societies organize social life through networks of specialized and interdependent activities, and the more complex the society, the more elaborate these interdependent relations. Networks of cooperation and interdependence inevitably give rise to contention, to conflict, as people bound together by social life try to use each other to further their often distinctive interests and outlooks. And the networks of interdependence that bind people together also generate widespread power capacities to act on these distinctive interests and outlooks. Agricultural workers depend on landowners, but landowners also depend on agricultural workers, just as industrial capitalists depend on workers, the prince depends in some measure on the urban crowd, merchants depend on customers, husbands depend on wives, masters depend on slaves, landlords depend on tenants, and governing elites in the modern state depend on the acquiescence if not the approval of enfranchised publics.

"Unlike wealth and force, which are concentrated at the top of social hierarchies, the leverage inherent in interdependencies is potentially widespread, especially in a densely interconnected society where the division of labor is far advanced. This leverage can in principle be activated by all parties to social relations, and it can also be activated from below, by the withdrawal of contributions to social cooperation by people at the lower end of hierarchical social relations. I call the activation of interdependent power disruption, and I think protest movements are significant because they mobilize disruptive power." (Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 20)

This analysis is consistent with many theoretical perspectives, and the concept of disruptive power certainly has an affinity with the marxist conception of class capacities, or more broadly, structural capacities.  It follows from this that disruptive power is not a particular tactic.  Disruptive power may be violent, depending on the context of the struggle that activates it, but it is not necessarily so.  It may be noisy, or carnivalesque - but again, not necessarily.  The presumption in social movement literature is, says Piven, against violence and in favour of spectacle; but this dual presumption is based on a misunderstanding of protest movements, conceiving them as essentially a form of communication intended to win the support of wider audiences, whereas this is not always the case.  In fact, the exercise of disruptive power is mainly about leverage.

We understand the sheepishness about speaking of violence in social movements.  It is not a comforting or politically sympathetic thought that popular violence has been productive; that without it, unjust systems would not have been overturned.  Yet, aside from the fact that the automatic assumption against violence is actually an assumption against popular violence, the intriguing thing is how easily it shades into an assumption against disruption as such.  For example, following a recent direct action at UC Berkeley, the Chancellor complained: "It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience."  In fact, linking arms and obstructing police is precisely an example of non-violent civil disobedience.  If there was a textbook, this would be in it.  The elite arbiters of protest ethics, who are always assuring us of our right to peaceful protest, conveniently forget what "civil disobedience" actually is.  At the same time, what is often truly regrettable about what is called violence (usually small scale property damage) is its tactical implications.  Sure, there is a moral case against anticapitalist protesters spraypainting graffiti or breaking windows.  One could certainly apply similar standards retrospectively to striking miners and steelworkers who made US history in frequently violent struggles that went well beyond property damage.  However, as someone once said, every morality presupposes a sociology, and in this case the moral argument implies the point of view of the ruling class.  The point of the exercise of disruptive power is not to empathise with the ruling class, but to gain leverage over the ruling class.  This brings us to the next point.

Disruptive power is distributed widely, but that doesn't mean it is easy to actualise.  Piven cites six difficulties that obstruct this: first is the problem of getting people to recognise the relation of interdependence that endows them with disruptive power; the second difficulty is that the exercise of disruptive power requires people to break rules, defying institutional mechanisms that enshrine the cooperative (if fundamentally exploitative and oppressive) relations that sustain daily life, with the resulting risk of repression; third, this disruptive power has to be coordinated across many different groups and individuals who contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations, in order to be effective - "the classical problem of solidarity"; fourth, the people exercising disruptive power are enmeshed in a network of relations with multiple others who may attempt to restrain this disruption (church, family, etc); fifth, those involved have to find ways to endure the suspension of the normal cooperative relations that allow them to effectively reproduce themselves in their normal condition - strikers need to eat, occupiers need tents, etc.; and finally, those engaging in disruption have to consider the threat of exit by those from whom they have withdrawn cooperation - the rich taking off with their capital, partners leaving relationships, etc.  The means to overcome these obstacles "are not solved anew with each challenge", but rather enter the "language of resistance", and "become a repertoire" (pp. 21-32)

This will do as an interpretive grid for understanding what the Occupy movements in the US are going through at this moment.  Their challenges are all comprehensible as those arising from the exercise of disruptive power: how to attack the dominant ideology, coordinate heterogenous groups, sustain their own 'rule-breaking' and support others in their 'rule-breaking', and resist repression.  It is through the prism of the latter question that I want to assess the current state of the Occupy movement in the US.  The recent wave of renewed police assaults, some of them apparently co-ordinated across eighteen cities by both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been severe.  From pepper-spraying the elderly to macing students, the intention has been to physically atomise these collective enterprises.  It is tempting to say that such an over-reaction indicates the degree of apprehension on the part of the ruling class.  In fact, however, apprehension has been far more apparent in their hesitations, retreats and fumbling attempts at co-optation, than in the resort to brutality.  The latter is their default: far from being a panic reaction, it is how the US ruling class does business.  As far as cops are concerned, it is "fairly standard police procedure".  Their reliance on such methods may in fact reflect an underlying lack of concern, an insouciance, a feeling that this movement is a nuisance, but ultimately a brittle, shallow affair.  To deviate from such methods would show that state planners are concerned that this is a movement which cannot be managed by escalating the costs of participation.

For the sake of argument, anyway, let me assume that the police actions in Portland, Seattle, Oakland, New York, UC Davis, and elsewhere, all reflect a consensus among ruling elites that a sufficient show of force will produce a collapse in confidence among the occupiers, deter their supporters, disorganise their alliances and leave them reduced to a hardcore of easily contained and potentially vilified activists.  The timing would support this, as city managers would expect winter to start thinning the numbers anyway.  A disorienting attack, a forcible shutdown, before the occupiers have had the chance to fully conceive and implement strategies for managing the cold months ahead, would be tactically intelligible in this context.  Yet, although the police offensives have had some of the sought effects, forcing the occupiers onto the back foot, depriving many of them of their secured bedrock, they have nonetheless failed to thwart the momentum.  The scale of the mobilisation in New York last Thursday, where an estimated 32,000 people took part in a day of action to shut down parts of the city, followed an ostensible victory on the part of city authorities three days earlier.  This was when the police attacked the camp at 2am, and the mayor obtained a court ruling denying occupiers the right to camp in Liberty Square - though the city could not stop protesters from actually gathering there.  The evictions demanded a bigger response from the occupiers and their periphery of active support, and Thursday provided it.  Liberty Square is still occupied every day; it is still a meeting place, a pedagogical forum, and a launch pad for further action.  So, the initiative remains in the hands of the protesters; not the state.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, this is a movement that is still in its upswing.  A full-frontal attack on a movement which is still growing, and still popular, can be a dangerous mistake to make.  The problem for the authorities is that such an assault isn't a technical operation but a political wager.  As technically proficient as a repressive manouevre may be, the political effects aren't easily calculable: the same tactic that kills a movement today may consolidate it tomorrow.  Second,  as the statement from Occupy Wall Street following the eviction notes, the movement is serious.  This seems nebulous, moralising even, but it has a precise political meaning: most of those joining the movement fully expected repression, and were mentally prepared for it.  There are arguments that the police are just blue collar workers who should be on the side of the 99% - though, when former NYPD police capitain Ray Lewis asserts that his ex-colleagues are "workers for the 1%" and "mercenaries for Wall Street", one can safely say that such arguments are losing traction.  But the occupation in Wall Street came to national prominence following a particularly brutal NYPD assault.  It is a simple but reasonable inference that those who joined OWS and embarked on similar projects after this, knew that repression was a risk.  So, the movement is far less brittle in this respect than its opponents perhaps estimated.

Third, as a former head of the CBI has pointed out, the ideology of free market capitalism has lost a significant part of its material basis: it cannot as easily claim to be more efficient than rival forms of organisation, or delivery greater prosperity for the majority over the long run.  The increasing sympathy for socialism and communism among Americans has something to do with this disintegration of capitalist ideology.  There is enormous sympathy for this left-populist movement, and those deemed complicit in its repression run the risk of being publicly shamed and of losing allies rapidly.  Fourth, and relatedly, the repressive response from the ruling class may be coordinated and bipartisan, but it is far from unanimous.  Some elements of the ruling class have preferred to try and co-opt the movement rather than simply attack it.  This is most visible in the liberal segments of the capitalist media.  From the very early days, it was obvious that the New York Times and perhaps also MSNBC favoured co-option rather than simple coercion.  The fear of the banking industry, as their professional lobbyists have summarised it, is that this strategic fracturing of US ruling class opinion may be disadvantageous to their position.  As they are not their own best advocates, they require public advocates - and the fear is that politicians under pressure to respond to such a movement will consider it imprudent to publicly defend financial capital.  But the more the repressive option fails, the more the emphasis will fall on co-option.  Finally, the occupiers have worked hard to build alliances with groups who already know how to wield disruptive power and have their own sets of repertoires.  The response to the first attempted assault on Occupy Wall Street was based on an alliance with unions; the response to the first assault on Occupy Oakland, a city-wide 'general strike', was based on an alliance with the unions too.  Of course, one must be wary of what Glenn Greenwald detects is an effort by pro-Obama union leaders to direct the movement into the Democratic fold.  And solidarity work has taken other forms, such as the attempt to obstruct foreclosures.  But there is a genuine convergence of interests between organised labor and the heterogenous groups assembled at OWS - whether debt-shackled students, workers, the unemployed, or dissident former soldiers.  The union leadership knows it, especially after the defeat of the union-bashers in Ohio.  The alliance between these groups has to be negotiated and constructed.  But the material basis for it, which the slogan 'we are the 99%' communicates, is a shared class interest.  This shared interest, at a time of sharpening class antagonisms, is making solidarity easier to achieve, and is laying the basis for a new Left.

"We talked about the importance of building a movement that is inclusive, but recognising that the unity of the 99% must be a complex unity.  Movements in the past have primarily appealed to specific communities.  Whether workers, students, black communities, Latino communities, women, LGBT communities, indigenous people, or these movements have been organised around specific issues.  Like the environment, food, water, war, the prison-industrial complex.  Speaking of the prison-industrial complex.  This is the movement I have been personally associated with.  We have tried to call attention to the inoperable damage prison and the prison-industrial system has inflicted on our community.  So we have called for a reduction of the prison population.  Decarceration - decarcerate Pennsylvania.  And we have called for the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment.  But we have also called for the revitalisation of all our communities.  We have called for education, health care, housing, jobs, hope, justice, creativity, equality, freedom!  We move from the particular to the general.  We have come together as the 99%.  There are major responsibilities linked to your decision to assemble here in communities.  How can you be together?  I evoke once more Audre Lorde.  Differences must not be merely tolerated but seen as a fund of polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.  Finally, let me say a few words about my home town, Oakland, California.  You have heard about the police assault.  Scott Olsen remains in the hospital.  Oakland General Assembly met in the renamed park Oscar Grant Park and responded by calling for a general strike on November 2nd.  Many unions have already supported the call.  I end by sharing the language of the poster: decolonise Oakland.  We are the 99%.  We stand united.  November 2nd, 2011, general strike, no work, no school, occupy everywhere.  Occupy everywhere."

The deepest, cruelest cuts in public spending were made to council spending. The worst hit councils also happen to be in the most deprived areas. Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Newham, Liverpool and Manchester are among the worst sufferers. The Local Government Association expects to shed a total of 140,000 jobs, and the total cuts over the next few years will amount to a real terms cut of 31%. The Tory strategy seems to involve attempting to devolve blame for cuts onto local councils. Local councils then say "we have no choice, the government has cut our funding and we must set a legal budget, or risk having the process taken over by a section 151 officer, who will impose cuts in the most inhumane way". If they're a Labour council, they might say, as Lewisham Central councillor Mike Harris did in communication with the local anti-cuts campaign, that it's surely better to have "democratic socialist" cuts than Tory ones. A similar case was made by Islington councillor Charlynne Pullen at the Right to Work People's Convention this weekend. Local trade unions will be mobilising across the country with strike ballots, and working to pressure council leaders to stop cuts. In Lewisham today, there are protests at the town hall, and cops and crowd control barriers are out in force. So, it's really important to get this right.

While one understands the difficulties faced by councils, and while it would seem hubristic to expect the return of Poplarism in this day, it is worth considering exactly what the options are. First of all, it is true that a council has to pass a legal budget, or an appointed S151 officer can take over. Manchester City Council has drafted a legal document explaining some of the background (and basically justifying cuts) here. Secondly, it would seem improbable at the least that council tax could cover what is needed, even if that was a fair alternative. The tax covers only a small proportion of local council income. In Wales, trade unions and the local administration have reached a deal whereby they collectively consider all available alternatives, including raising taxes and charging for certain services. But, of course, that coopts trade unions in a cuts process and it's hardly fair that working class communities should have to pay more for services. On the face of it, unable to raise adequate money, bound by legislation to pass a balanced budget, councils are left with no option but to cooperate. But the trouble is that passing 'democratic socialist' or 'lesser evil' cuts is still imposing cuts - deep, savage cuts - and it still involves councillors who should be attempting to defend their local communities in savagely attacking them - which most of them don't want to do. What could a radical left-wing council do that would be different?

Previous instances of defiance include not only the Poplar rate-capping rebellion in 1921, but also the Clay Cross councillors, who refused to implement the Heath administration's Housing Finance Act. Most famous, perhaps, is the defiance of Militant Labour councillors in Liverpool, who took on the Thatcher administration in 1984 by passing an illegal budget. The context is the Thatcher government's war on local council spending. They cut the 'Rate Support Grant', which was essential to local councils to support services. They said that rents and rates would have to go up, or cuts would have to be made. They then imposed the Rates Bill, which capped rates to ensure that spending was kept low. This was all part of the neoliberal social engineering, to create a more conservative society, expanding the social bloc with an interest in opposing 'municipal socialism', and to transfer wealth to the middle classes and the rich.

The incoming Labour council in Liverpool, which was under strong Militant influence, had inherited an austere budget, but they were determined to increase spending on housing. In postwar administrations until 1979, no Liverpool council had built fewer than 1,500 council houses. The highest number built was by Labour in 1972-3, which built over 4,000. Between 1979 and 1983, the hung council built a miserly 127 houses. And since housing conditions were so terrible, the Militant councillors felt they needed to spend at least £25 million on top of what the council had already budgeted. So, against opposition from Liberals, Tories and right-wing Labourites, they pressed ahead. The government at that time was in the middle of a titanic fight with the miners and sent Patrick Jenkin as Environment secretary to look at housing conditions. Jenkin, who had pushed rate-capping legislation through parliament, insisting that he would resign if it wasn't passed, conceded that the government might offer the council £20m. The success can be over-stated. The number of houses that the Militant-led council succeeded in building was short of a thousand.

However, the example it set was immediately taken up by others on the Labour Left. The leaders of Labour councils in Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark and Greenwich agreed to a strategy of non-compliance with the Rates Bill. John McDonnell, who was then chairing the finance committee on the GLC, also signed up. David Blunkett, leader of Sheffield council, participated in non-compliance. In some cases, councillors were willing to defy the law and risk being fined and disqualified. In July 1984, Labour's Local Government Conference resolved to defy rate-capping. Bastions of resistance were cropping up all over the country, and often gaining popular support.

Thatcher ranted and raved about how the enemies of law and order stretched from the IRA to the hard Left. But she would have found it far more difficult to defeat this campaign had not Kinnock been determined to break this policy. The mainstream of Labourism had always seen the law as a neutral force, which could be used by elected administrations . Kinnock was therefore not defying orthodoxy when he insisted that Labour councils should work exclusively within the law to defend local services - "better a dented shield than no shield at all", he said. Following the defeat of the miners' strike, he collaborated with Ken Livingstone to undermine any attempt by the GLC to resist rate-capping. Within weeks of the end of the strike, most left-wing councils gave up the ghost. Only Lambeth and Liverpool continued defiance and Thatcher, in a triumphant mood, instead of making concessions stuck the boot in. The councillors were 'surcharged' (fined), and disqualified. Meanwhile, the Militant were witch-hunted out of Labour, left-winger Eric Heffer was drummed off the executive, Labour Party Young Socialists was attacked and its paper shut down. By 1986, the atmosphere of defeat in Labour was such that most members were willing to go along with the witch hunts, an the 'new realism' favouring free market policies. The Labour Party that emerged from this process was one that ended up imposing the hugely unpopular Poll Tax, refusing to support non-compliance campaigns and prosecuting non-payers through the courts.

The lesson of the above would appear to be that the success of non-compliance campaigns depends on a mixture of political will and wider circumstances. If the government of the day is already experiencing difficulties, and if you are able and willing to mobilise grassroots support for your strategy, then it may pay off. But perhaps this seems academic. Today, even left-wing councillors are not promising defiance, but grudging compliance. This is despite the fact that they do not face fines any more, and are not really in danger of disqualification. The SWP's Preston councillor Michael Lavalette has been pressing for a non-compliance position but, despite the deep unhappiness of local Labour councillors with the cuts, they're all voting for them. Their mood is determined by their feeling of weakness. The political culture of the Labour Left has not survived Blairism, and the stranglehold of managerialism. Neither, in fact, has Labour's presence on local councils, which was seriously eroded over the last decade or so. So, Labour councillors are not feeling ebullient and combative. The coming struggle is therefore likely to resemble the Poll Tax campaigns more than the rate-capping campaigns, inasmuch as anti-cuts movements are likely to be operating in defiance of Labour councils more than in collaboration with them. There are some councillors who want to encourage public sector resistance to the cuts without actually leading that resistance themselves. But unfortunately the result is the same: they push through 'humane' cuts, finding 'efficiency' savings, and relying on 'voluntary' redundancies and 'natural wasteage'.

Some Labour supporters argue that one shouldn't criticise Labour councillors for imposing cuts this year, as they have to move in a very short space of time and aren't likely to be in a position to build extra-parliamentary resistance, even if they were so motivated. This is a comprehensible position. However, it is also a destructive and politically defeatist position. If arriving at a quick stopgap is the concern here, then councils are in a position to borrow and draw on reserves in the short-term. This is what the Socialist Party has been arguing in Lewisham. But that's obviously not the concern. There is also a tendency among those defending 'humane' cuts to snigger at the idea of opposing all cuts - should we really defend every white elephant project, every single manager's job, every single inefficient outlay? The answer is clear: we should oppose any cuts in the spending totals. If councils want to deploy resources more efficiently by shedding managers and stopping useless schemes, and spending more on the vulnerable, all well and good - but if so, shouldn't they have been doing that already? At its worst, this argument says that everything should be subordinate to getting Labour back in office. Only that will make a difference, and nothing else matters. This exact logic, which relies on the willingness of working class voters to put up with anything Labour does and keep voting for them, is precisely what cost Labour 5 million voters between 1997 and 2010. Yes, the legal position is clear. It is true that the government can resort to imposing a budget through section 151 officers. But do they actually want to have to do this? Or would they rather have the connivance of local councils giving the cuts the appearance of a democratic mandate? Is the difference between section 151 cuts and 'humane' cuts sufficient to justify going along with this attack? And is the fear of taking on the government not a little exaggerated? This isn't Thatcherism at the height of its powers, but rather a weak Tory-led government amid a generalised crisis of the system they're defending. Their cuts are deeply unpopular, and have already provoked tremors of resistance that caused a panic in Tory HQ. They can't even sell off the forests without encountering resistance big enough to force a retreat. If the obstruction of local councils were large enough, the campaign threatening enough to them, the Tories would make concessions, as they have been compelled to do before.

If Labour councillors aren't prepared to resist, it will fall to trade unionists and community activists to defend services. And if Labour councillors defy strikes and local community campaigns, as the logic of their position may compel them to do, then anticuts campaigns would be strategically justified in standing candidates in local elections, explicitly standing on a platform of non-compliance. That may alienate Labour activists, but the latter surely can't expect everyone else to tail the local Labour leadership.