Relaxed atmosphere at today’s #BlackLivesMatter protest in Hyde Park. Slightly contentious moment though when the compere hushed a “fuck Boris” chant, arguing we shouldn’t be directing hostile chants towards someone to whom we’re appealing for political change.
This points to the question every social movement has to confront: what’s the agency that can deliver the change we want, what leverage do we have over it, and how can we use that leverage to force the change?
The #JUNETEENTH2020 strikes in the USA, and historic struggles like the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, show how organised labour can be a strategic anti-racist actor, connecting workplace struggles to wider social struggles for equality.
With organised labour in the UK fairly weak and marginal as a social force, with strikes at historically low levels, it’s little wonder most #BLM protesters aren’t necessarily thinking in class-struggle terms or seeing the labour movement as an agent of change.
So the question for socialists in the labour movement is: how can we transform our movement, including by imbuing it with radical anti-racist politics, so it’s able to use the unique social power that labour has to pursue demands for equality and change? #BlackLivesMatter
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