Ten Days at the Space attempts to be as radical as the Russian Revolution

We may be living in revolutionary times. Extinction Rebellion are taking to the streets to prevent a climate catastrophe and the amount of workers on strike has not been this great in 50 years. It’s only natural that this potentially revolutionary moment is reflected in art.

This is why I was excited to see Ten Days, which recently finished its run at The Space theatre in the Isle of Dogs, a play that shows the revolutionary possibilities of the present by connecting now with the most famous revolution of all: the Russian Revolution.

The play charts the ten days that led to the Bolshevik’s revolution in Russia in October 1917 (by the Julian Calendar used in Russia at the time). It’s based on the account written by American journalist John Reed, who had an astonishing level of access to the senior people behind the revolution at that crucial time. His account is the most compelling and comprehensive of those fateful days that shook the world.

A radical approach to theatre

This new stage adaption of Reed’s book was written and directed by Matthew Jameson and performed by BolshEpic Theatre. It attempts to be as radical in its approach to theatre as its subjects were in their approach to politics. This included pay-what-you-are-able pricing and means to draw the audience into the radical events of the play (more on that later).

At nearly three hours Ten Days is a long production, but it’s still a condensed version of the events leading up to the revolution. Jameson himself plays John Reed and moves through the action to narrate events. Jameson made the sensible decision to cut many of the long speeches that Reed reproduced in great detail, which gives the play a fast pace that helps offset its long running time.

Many short scenes keep the drama focused on the narrative of a country hurtling toward revolution and the small cast cope well switching between different characters and locations with minimal set and costume.

The appeal of the Bolsheviks

The production’s great strength is how it captures the rising tension as the situation escalated in St Petersburg in 1917. You feel the growing frustration as the unpopular provisional government continued to prosecute a disastrous war whilst failing to deliver meaningful improvements in living conditions. This caused the Russian people to look to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - aka Lenin - and the more radical Bolsheviks - who offered peace, land and bread - as the solution to their problems.

The play captures the frantic feeling of those crucial days, as Reed does in his book. Ten Days is filled with the possibilities of radical change following the February Revolution that many felt had not changed Russian society enough. Frenetic uncertainty was seized by the Bolshevik’s to lead a second revolution in only a few months.

This is mainly achieved through a strong script and a series of great performances, notably Matthew John Wright as Lenin and Oyinka Yusuff as Leon Trotsky who form the core of the play. With many cast members assuming many different roles of both historic figures and representatives of broad social groups, it helps to have these two actors as anchor points portraying the two most important people in the story.

Bringing the history to life

As well as capturing the mood of the time in an entertaining way, there are lots of small details in the play that go beyond Reed’s book and show that Jameson knows his subject matter. All of the key factions and historical figures are included, which is a lot of people for a small cast to represent.

Many important historic details, which less well researched accounts overlook, are included; such as the February Revolution beginning with women marching on International Women’s Day, or the fact that the storming of the winter palace was more of a quite creeping in through a backdoor than the spectacle staged by Sergei Eisenstein in his film October: Ten Days That Shook the World.

The play also includes many of the comedic moments of the revolution; such as Lenin’s enthusiasm for disguises, the delay in beginning the October Revolution that was caused because a comrade at the Peter and Paul Fortress couldn’t find a red light to signal the Bolsheviks and Kitchkin declaring himself leader of all of Russia when he barely controlled the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.

Modern parallels and modern culture

The radical history is very entertaining, but to become a transcendent work of art this needs to connect with how the audience feels right now. Many modern parallels are drawn out; from strikes, a cold winter, inflation, a useless and unpopular government and above all a feeling that everything is getting worse, everyone has had enough and change is needed.

Modern language is used in the script to reinforce the point, such as references to “snowflakes” on the left or fighting in Ukraine. Recent dance music was played in the intermission, whilst a video was projected onto the stage approximating how cable news would cover the fateful ten days if they were happening right now. Following the climax, the cast exited to the sounds of Pig With The Face Of A Boy’s Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris, which ended proceedings on a humorous note.

Rising to the revolutionary moment

Not only did the play attempt to make its radical themes relevant to the modern day, it also attempted a radical use of the medium of theatre. Red flags were handed out to the audience, who were encouraged to wave them, participate in the chanting and to keep our phones on to take pictures during the performance.

The audience (at least at the performance I attended) didn’t rise to the revolutionary moment. We behaved like a traditional audience, watching events in silence and not participating. The fact that the people were hesitant to act when presented with something radical was itself a more powerful metaphor for the present political situation than the historic parallels that Ten Days drew out.

Are we ten days away from a revolution?

Despite the audience not embracing the more radical parts of the show, I was impressed by Jameson and BolshEpic Theatre wanting to create a piece of art that captured (the spirit at least) of the revolution in avant-garde art that was unleashed by the Russian Revolution. Their imagination and creative use of a small theatre, minimal set and props is inspiring. Revolutions, artistic and political, come about by radical ambition and it was great to see this alive in the 21st century.

Ten Days is a great dramatic play about a key moment in 20th century history. It is more than an entertaining retelling of historic events. This play is urgent, relevant and has something to say about contemporary politics: i.e. when people are suffering we may only be ten days away from a revolution.

Monument to Lenin image created by Watchsmart and used under creative commons.

100 years since the Russian Revolution: The legacy for the left

This is my second post the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The first can be found here.

Left wing journalist and commentator James Butler said that the legacy of the Russian Revolution was that it shows that revolution is possible. Although, he did add that it's unlikely that we would see one in Britain any time soon. The other legacy of the Russian Revolution is that it shows how revolutions can go wrong. It shows how hope for a better world can turn into brutal oppression.

One thing that made Revolution possible in Russia, when it had not occurred in the other industrial nations of Europe, was the ease with which the ideas of Marxist class struggle were adopted into politics of Russia. There was already an idea of “us” and “them” in Russian politics that came from the division throughout most of Russian history between a large class peasants and a few wealthy landowners; a division that carried over into industrial relations as Russia urbanised and led to Russia being the most strike prone nation in Europe in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

When factory owners called the police or sent in Cossacks to break up strikes (by killing and maiming strikers), the result was that workers saw bosses and the apparatus of the state as different arms of the same system of oppression. This further spread Marxist ideas about class struggle. The Revolution was possible in Russia because of the belief in Marxist ideas that were widely adopted in Russia, more so than elsewhere in Europe. The lessons for the left here is to work with existing struggles to spread Marxist ideas.

The revolution fundamentally changed how Bolsheviks saw the state as the means to achieve their goals. Before the October Revolution, it was believed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in alignment with Marxist doctrine, that the state was something that would wither away under socialism. After the Russian Civil War, they believed they could use the state to create socialism. This has led to a lot of radical left regimes, from China to Venezuela, being infatuated with state power and attempting to create a top down model of socialism.

Radically democratic

A revolution needs to be radically democratic as well as socially and economically radical. It should bring more power to people, not just change who is at the top of an oppressive regime of state terror, as the Russian Revolution did. If the left wants to achieve anything then it must break up centres of power and to give people more control over their lives. The state as it is currently constructed is not the means to achieve socialism. We need to make it more democratic first

The relationship between the Bolsheviks and the different nationalities that made up Imperial Russia is complicated. In some cases the struggle for national autonomy dovetailed with the struggle against the Tsar; in other places Bolsheviks and nationalists were bitterly opposed.

The left has a complex relationship with other causes and sometimes shows outright hostility to other causes or considers them a distraction to the "real" fight. The left works best when we are united with others fighting injustice. They left needs to take on other causes of people who want to change the world for the better and are fighting oppression, from feminists to environmentalist, as the Bolsheviks failed to do with the nationalists of the Russian Empire.

The American politician Mario Cuomo said: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” Although most people know that line from The West Wing. It is even more true for revolutions, as it is for peaceful transfers of power. It is the poetry of the revolution that moves people to overthrow an old regime, however, once the new regime is established idealism often gives way to practicality. After the American Revolution the Founding Fathers argued about a debut union between the states. After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks established War Communism to fight the Russian Civil War.

War Communism

War Communism imposed a huge cost on the Russian people. Many died fighting the war, but many more died of disease and starvation. Political terror was used as an instrument of the state and many were violently oppressed. The Kronstadt sailors, who were amongst the most radical of the military units that supported the Revolution, rebelled against it. The garrison of the small naval training fort near St Petersburg had thrown off its oppressive officers and mutinied at the outbreak of the February Revolution. The Kronstadt War Communism rebellion was crushed by Lenin and the Red Army. With the Kronstadt died the utopian hopes of the Revolution, as the Bolsheviks turned against some of their most idealistic early supporters.

Was it necessary to impose War Communism and terror to defeat the White Army and protect the Revolution? It would take a whole book to answer that question fully, but what I will say is that being in power is different to leading a revolution. When you enter power the complexities of the world have to be reckoned with. They are rarely as simple as the poetry of campaigning and this is something the left continues to struggle with.

The Bolsheviks had an idealistic vision of transforming Russia not only into a modern industrial power, but also into a state run for the benefit of all, not just the rich and powerful. They wanted to throw of Russia’s Russianness (the problems of huge distances, harsh climates, scarcity, different cultures in the same nation) as they felt it was holding them back. Over time these factors made themselves more felt and the Bolsheviks couldn’t change the Russianess of Russia. In the end, rather than changing Russia with Communism, Communism and Russia melded into a synthesis of the two and the ideal of transforming society was completely lost.

Between 1917 and 1991 many millions of people were killed by the Russian state, either through its many waves of political terror or mismanagement that lead to starvation and disease. It cannot be understated how many people died and there is no justifying death on such a scale.

No amount of difficult circumstances or complicating factors can excuse what happened. The particular authoritarian strain of Communism created by Lenin - which is for most people (bar a very few geeky, bookish far left types like myself) synonymous with Communism - has coloured left wing revolutions since and underpinned tyrannies from Poland to Cambodia.

We need to make sure this doesn’t happen again and the way to do this to understand what happened. Every socialist should read about the history of the Russian Revolution and try to reach their own opinions about what happened and its legacy. What I have offered here is my opinion.

It is the work of every socialist to try to understand and learn from our own history. That way we can, hopefully, one day realise the idealistic dreams that our movement is built on.

100 years since the Russian Revolution: What happened

The Russian Revolution could be the most significant event in the history of left wing politics. During the course of 1917 a group of radical left wingers overthrew an authoritarian government and then tried to do something that had never been done before: create a state that exists for the benefit of everyone and not just the few in power. Any hope of this ended with the terror of Joseph Stalin and his purges. Mass death on a scale never seen before.

What went wrong? is the question I ask myself over and over. When did the noble idea of equality and emancipation from toil give way to violent oppression? The answer depends on what you want the “lesson” of the revolution to be.

What happened?

Some say that it was always doomed to end in terror: these are the people who cannot imagine a better world. Some say that the February Revolution was a flowering of liberal democracy and the October Revolution was an authoritarian coup: this is a simplistic reading of history. Some say that liberty won in 1917 was crushed by Stalin; this overlooks Lenin’s authoritarian streak.

Some say that it was Russia itself that corrupted the revolution. These people want to try again somewhere else without learning anything. Some praise the hope and mourn the loss of opportunity. These are the people who dwell endlessly on counterfactuals.

What you need to know

All of the above have some truth to them, but none are a complete explanation. After researching this question, I can say that I don’t know what exactly went wrong. To find out, I would need to read many more books and probably write one of my own to cover all the details. What follows is what all of us on the left need to know about 1917 and the Russian Revolution.

Russia in 1917

It cannot be understated how terrible Tsar Nicholas II was as ruler. Even amongst the royal families of Europe, he was especially authoritarian. He tolerated no opposition to his authority and believed he had a divine right to rule over all of Russia. He executed dissidents and suppressed newspapers that were critical of him. At several points the revolution (and ultimately his death and that of his children) could have been prevented if the Tsar had allowed a few modest, liberal reforms. He refused, and when reform fails, revolutionary sentiment will grow.

At the start of 1917 almost all Russian Marxists believed that Russia was not ready for a socialist revolution. The country was too backwards, there was too little industry, too many peasants and not enough industrial workers. Orthodox Marxism stated that a bourgeoisie revolution was needed to create a capitalist economy in Russia, which could then be overthrown by a socialist uprising. Many thought Britain in 1917 would be the better site for a socialist revolution than Russia.

The February Revolution

The February Revolution was a spontaneous uprising that took revolutionaries and reformers by surprise. Due to this, the February Revolution was many things and it cannot be said what it was for and what its trajectory was. It was not necessarily a liberal, democratic revolution like the American Revolution or the revolutions of 1848. The Provisional Government it created had many flaws, which led to the October Revolution.

The Provisional Government was weak. There were many far right and proto-fascist groups, such as the Black Hundreds, which talked openly about a military coup and creating an authoritarian government. Between February and October there were pogroms against Jews. Fascism could have easily been born in Russia and not in Italy.

The Provisional Government

The Provisional Government was not like the liberal, bourgeoisie governments of Britain or America at the time. It suppressed critical newspapers and jailed dissidents. It also didn’t do enough to satisfy the peasants on the key issue of land reform or improve the lot industrial workers. Strikes and unrest continued under the Provisional Government as it had under the Tsar.

The Provisional Government lost the support of the people and the army. This was mainly because it continued support for Russia’s involvement in the first world war. The war was unpopular and went badly for Provisional Government, as it had for the Tsar. Opposition to the war united disparate socialist groups that would have argued between themselves. Lenin adopted popular positions against the war and in favour of land reform. Ultimately, the October Revolution happened because the Provisional Government failed to effectively govern.

War Communism

After seizing power the Lenin and the Bolsheviks were thrown into the struggle against military counter-revolution and then the Russian Civil War. Millions died from the disease and starvation during the war. Both sides showed a terrifying degrees of cruelty against civilian supporters of their enemies. The War Communism that the Bolsheviks imposed on Russia was authoritarian in nature and put huge pressure on Russian society.

The task of managing and feeding the Red Army lead to increased centralisation of power, which was necessary to fight the war. The Red Army became the main engine of the Bolsheviks state and all talk about decentralisation and a workers’ run state were dropped under War Communism.

NEP and Stalin

After the Civil War, Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) brought a degree of liberalisation. NEP was also a move away from economic policies of equality and towards policies focused around industrialisation. The Bolsheviks’ control was total, but all the idealism and potential of Revolution, and a government for the benefit of all, had been replaced by a one party authoritarian state.

Stalin increased centralisation and the authoritarian powers of the government. But Lenin had already created a state that was effective at crushing individual freedom and equality, a state where power was hoarded centrally and opposition was suppressed as it had been under the Tsar. The Bolsheviks’ state was already a dark place when Stalin began his blood soaked rule.

Overall

Despite the terror and blood shed there was progress after the October Revolution. There were advances in economic development, healthcare and literacy as well as women’s rights and a degree of autonomy for the separate nations that had made up the Russian Empire and now made up the USSR (such as Ukraine and Finland). Despite this, it was clear by the early 1920s that Lenin’s Russia was not a country moving towards equality of workers and emancipation from toil.

You can use the above as colours to paint any picture of the Russian Revolution you like. Was it doomed to failure because of Russia was not ready for a socialist revolution? Or was the flowing of freedom of February crushed by October? Or was the radical hope of October eradicated by the Civil War? Or was it Lenin’s thrust for power and refusal to accept opposition that killed the hope of a better form of government?

The Russian Revolution was many things in many different ways. There is no one truth of what it was or what it meant. Everyone on the left needs to take some time to understand it and find out what they think for themselves. The Revolution also has a long legacy for the left, which I will explore in my next article.

Monument to Lenin image created by Watchsmart and used under creative commons.

Reanimating the Levellers

Students threaten to reanimate the Levellers

claimed one satirical news article back 2010 at the height of the student protests. This came as a surprise to a lot of Levellers fans who knew the band had been consistently touring and producing great music during fourteen years since the Swampy and the Fairmile A30 protests. In fact their 2008 album, Letters from the Underground, is the best thing they done since the Zeitgeist. 

A sign of the continuing popularity of Levellers is the fact they a simple Google search for their name returns the band as a result above the 17th Century political moment they take their name from. This is interesting as the 17th Century Levellers had a profound influence on the shaping of western democracy and a lot of what we now take for granted began with them. I find it strange that they are not more widely known about, just as I thought it strange that The Daily Mash thought The Levellers were dead.

The Levellers were an important political movement after the English Civil War and were one of the first movements campaigning for what we would understand as modern democracy. They had no fixed goals or manifesto and were not a political party, however, they did have a loose list of demands for reform. These included suffrage for the entire adult male population, reform of the electoral process, parliamentary elections to be held every two years, religious tolerance and end to debtors’ prisons. These demands did not make up the whole of what Levellers stood for; they were a broad political and social movement for all men aimed at removing corruption from the political and judicial system. They wanted to make the government more open to ordinary people and remove some of the bias towards the wealthy land owners who dominated 17th Century politics.

During the lifetime of the movement, few of the Leveller’s demands were adopted by parliament. The surviving Levellers themselves might have thought they failed - but ultimately they our modern democratic system is based on a lot of their demands. No longer is the country ruled by the landed elite, and suffrage for all, religious freedom and regular elections are considered the cornerstone of the democracy Western nations export around the world.

More than this, the Levellers became an icon of the everyman’s resistance against the oppression of the wealthy elite. They are the promise that a corrupt and exclusive political system will fall and that egalitarianism will triumph. This spirit lives on in the radical politics of today, as it did in the late 1980s when the band Levellers formed. Levellers incorporated the earlier Levellers iconography into their own identity, combining it with modern ideas about anarchism and environmentalism. This all felt very appropriate under a Tory government in the pockets of wealthy business owners, with no working class representation in government. Thatcher had been power for a decade when their first album, A Weapon Called the Word, was released and the goals of the Levellers seemed as relevant then as it did during the time of the New Model Army.

It is also relevant today with growing numbers of MPs from privileged backgrounds - a third of MPs are privately educated, compared to only 7% of the population. Again we have a Tory government in the pocket of large business and growing feeling that most people’s views are not represented by the political classes. The time seems right for another Levellers movement, what we go was something similar.

When Occupy took up resident on Wall Street on 17th of September 2011 they were accused of being a lot of unwashed anarchists, the age old accusations levelled at anyone who wants change but does not come from an acceptably privileged background. There was also a lot of criticism of their lack of focus and absence of clear goals. They only had a nebulous list of demands, including more protection for the environment and an inquiry into the role of big business in politics. I am sure the same criticism was made of Levellers over three centuries earlier.

I cannot help the seeing the similarity between two these two radical movements, both staked up against enormous vested interests, both with a list of general critiques of the political system. Both with the same underlying principals: our government is skewed towards the vested interests of the wealthy, our political system is corrupt and we do not get an adequate say in how we are governed.

Occupy might seem like a failed dream now, much like the Levellers goals did in 1650, but the criticism lives on and maybe in the future things will be different. Perhaps in three hundred years time the goals of Occupy will underpin our political system, political systems where checks and balances are put in place against views of the wealthy being over represented. Maybe in the future there will be a band called Occupy who will be more famous than the movement and most people will take for granted the political freedoms people in the past suffered for.

The enduring legacy of the Levellers is that the desire for change, for a fairer society, does not die and gets reborn with every new generation who take the goals of the past and combine it with the needs of today. The desire for a fairer, free, less corrupt and skewed society cannot be stamped out. It might take centuries for change to manifest itself but a wealthy few cannot hold back the tide of righteous anger of the many forever. Remember that Levellers are still alive and producing good music and remember that the dreams of 17th Century radicals are still alive and influencing people today.

Do as I say, not as I do: Religion in the Middle Eastern Uprisings

A wave of revolutions have taken place across the Middle East, and in their wake, a lot of people are asking what sort of government do they want to see. Unfortunately, a lot of the people asking these questions are neither from nor based in the Middle East. Westerners feel the need to meddle with these newly emerging regimes and shape them according to their own personal bias.

Recently in Egypt the democratically elected Islamist president was ousted by the military and a new government is being formed. In Syria the process of overthrowing the old regime is still going on and the opposition groups are becoming increasingly fractious. They are divided along religious and ideological lines mainly in their views of what the new Syria should look like. Iraq and Libya are facing the same problems of spreading sectarian violence.

In the UK bloggers are pontificating over what people far removed from them should do. Mainly they talk about which factions the UK should support. Religion is frequently a factor in this as it is divisive across the Middle East. The growing conflict between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims for control of certain countries is well documented, however, other groups such as Alawite Muslims in Syria stand to gain to lose depending on what form of future government rules there. The Middle East is also home to a lot of Christians, especially in Egypt where Christians make up ten percent of the population and are worried about the implications of an Islamist government. Syria also has a sizeable Christian population (again around ten percent of the population) who have similar concerns as Sharia law spreads amongst the rebel groups.

Recently the Catholic Herald wrote an article in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and criticising the UK's support of the Syrian opposition. Conservative Christian bloggers were quick to point out that Christians were better protected under Assad's brutal Ba'athist dictatorship, which is secular, than they would be under an Islamist government. This was accompanied by a chorus of support for the Middle East's secular regimes. It seems that Conservative Christian bloggers support secularism in the Middle East but have a different attitude to the UK where they are deplore the “aggressive secularism” of the British government in its plans to legalised gay marriage. The hypocrisy of this is beyond belief. I do not see how you can justify supporting a dictator who uses chemical weapons against his own population whilst criticising a government's attempts to extend equal rights to all its citizens. I assume the fact that chemical weapons are not mentioned in the Bible as sinful makes the Syrian government more righteous than the British one. According to certain Conservative Christian bloggers, secularism in the Middle East is the best form of government - even if it comes couched in brutal military oppression - but in the UK secularism threatens to undermines the basic values of the family.

Another claim of Conservative Christian bloggers is that the UK is a Christian country and that government policies should encourage Christian values. In reality only 13% of people identified as being members of the Church of England in the last census. Congregation numbers are falling across the UK and many Churches are left without a folk. They can hardly be representative of a silent majority of British citizens who want the British government to enforce Christian values. Still, Conservative Christian bloggers assert that the UK is a Christian nation and the government should reflect this. In the Middle East, the majority of the population not only identify as Muslims but actively practise the religion, and want their governments to match the demographic make up of their nations. Especially in some countries where years of military rule has enforced secularism to prevent an Islamic uprising. Mohamed Morsi was democratically elected as an Islamist leader by the population of Egypt. The West preaches democracy and then complains about the outcome when the Middle East takes up the mantra. Conservative Christian bloggers would prefer secular regimes in the Middle East (secular Middle Eastern regimes only come in the aggressive kind) despite the wishes of the population for a government that reflects their values. Again this hypocrisy is staggering. The UK can barely be described as a Christian nation beyond that the fact that we have an established church that is heavily in decline due to overwhelming Christian apathy. However, according to Conservative Christian bloggers the UK government should adopt Christian values (despite widespread support for gay rights and a woman's right to choose) while the Middle East must have aggressive secular regimes despite what the people of these countries want.

Hypocrisy among Conservative Christians bloggers is nothing new, but this latest wave of hypocrisy is surprising and I advise Conservative Christian bloggers to look at the difference between what they desire in the Middle East and desire here at home. It's hard to claim to be the voice of morality when you clearly endorse whatever is best for your own group above the needs and wishes of the general population. If Conservative Christian bloggers do not like the aggressive secularism of the British government then I invite them to live under the Assad regime and see what really aggressive secularism is like before telling Middle East countries what they should do.

Culture of Resistance

There is a long-standing trend across society of people feeling alienated from the political establishment. This is not a movement with ideology or leaders behind it but more a broad feeling of disaffection felt by many. Individuals have sought to express this through music, film and political action drawing many who feel the same towards them but without forming a tangible movement. In recent months in the UK this has grown more apparent as opposition to the Tory government and their program of austerity has grown. I suggest the coining of a new phrase to describe this movement of the dissatisfied and how the feeling is expressed as the culture of resistance.

The culture of resistance is a general anti-establishment view point. Best described by a friend of mine as the 'fuck the police' mentality. It incorporates those against the established ideology of neoliberal free market capitalism but, in its actuality, is a broader dissatisfaction with the status quo and the dominant political philosophy. It covers a spectrum of people from those who wear Che Guevara hoodies to squat dwelling anarchists. It can be manifested in those who subscribe to specific anti-establishment ideologies such as socialism and those who take direct action against the establishment in the form of protests. However, it can also be seen in those who feel alienated from the main political discourse and social norms. The culture of resistance is not specifically opposed to or against anything that can be easily defined. That is a characteristic of a more defined movement with influential figures and a more defined ideology. The culture of resistance is more of general expression of dissatisfaction felt by many who do not fit within the establishment and are disenfranchised by this.

In one aspect it can be summed up in the general anti-establishment vibes given off by bands like Kasabian but it encompasses such diverse songs as the anger of Anti-Flag’s Die For the Government to Tracy Chapman’s more subtle Talking About a Revolution. It encompasses a range of films, from James Dean's non-specific rebellion in Rebel Without A Cause to the anti-big business rhetoric of Michael Moore’s documentaries. From the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to Iain Bank’s Complicity. It covers those who feel disenfranchised from the political and social establishment by their gender, sexuality, race, poverty or sub-culture.

For those of us on the left to be a more effective political force we need find a commonality in these disaffected individuals covered by the broad term of the culture of resistance. We need to seek out the root causes of political alienation and social disaffection and mobilise people against their oppressors. I am fully aware of many on the left who feel alienated and disaffected by lack of a strong left-wing voice in mainstream politics calling for progressive change. Many also feel dissatisfied that Labour frequently fails to be this progressive voice. Individuals form isolated causes or individuals take direct action as they feel disconnected from a larger political movement. This in essence is the culture of resistance.

It is job of those on the left to form alliances between dispirited groups and people who fall under the culture of resistance. Many of the root causes of political alienation and social disaffection are conflicting problems. Power structures within the culture of resistance make this difficult, as is forming connections within such a diverse group of people. However, forming alliances between dispirited groups has always been one of the great strengths of the right. Consider the many differences between neoliberal, free-market corporate conservatives and the faith, family and flag social conservatives who sit together (not always happily) on the benches of Republican Party. In the British Tory party we see a similar uneasy alliance between the anti-immigration lobby and supporters of the interests of large companies who exploit the cheap labour migration brings. The right counts forming political alliances as one of its strength and so too should we on the left.

There are recent examples of direct action taken by large groups of members of the culture of resistance against their political oppressors. The main instance of this is students demonstrating against tuition fee rises. A diverse group students of different ideologies and different social backgrounds united by their opposition to a single issue and their general disenfranchisement with the political establishment.

The student tuition fees protests are a clear example of the increasing degree to which young people are disillusioned with political establishment. The protests of thousands of young members of the culture of resistance in the lead up to the Iraqi war were largely ignored by mainstream politicians and thus alienation of those outside the main political discourse is continued. In recent student protests the culture of resistance were driven to property damage and occupation in response to the feeling that the voices had been ignored or silenced before. Through the media branding them as violent trouble makers, the alienation and disaffection of the culture of resistance is perpetuated.

In the Arab world we have seen a string of uprising by the political oppressed. Again a broad cross section of society has been united in a common movement of the politically alienated and the socially disaffected against their oppressors. In Egypt, a country fraught with religion divisions, Christians and Muslims were brought together against the dictatorial establishment. This should be an example to those who wish to effect social change that through a common culture of resistance very divergent groups can be brought together and ultimately topple their common oppressors.

Very recently in Tottenham, north east London the poor and disaffected lashed out at an establishment which they felt was repressing the community. This is an example of an entire community and culture falling under the label of the culture of resistance due to the disenfranchisement of poverty, the alienation of the lack of having adequate political influence to effect necessary local development and perceived over policing. The culture of resistance does not only cover isolated individuals but can incorporate entire social groups or movements.

The culture of resistance has only grown larger and more pronounced as time has gone by and more people felt alienated from mainstream politics by the dominant ideology. We have seen that there is a great power in this disenfranchisement once mobilised. Those of us on the left need to work on building bridges that unite the disaffected in a common movement if we are to effect serious and lasting social change.