MUCH of politics is performance. The exuberant picket lines of this past year, the mass character of the strike movement and the enormous public support strikers and their families enjoy have breached the cloak of silence that renders the working-class movement invisible.

Mass mobilisation has transformed our routine activity into headline news.

The witty wordplay and irreverent humour of nurses and medics have transformed weary picket lines into living tableaus, while many union leaders now strive to emulate Mick Lynch’s deadpan delivery.

Ridiculing the ruling class and its hangers-on has always featured in working-class propaganda. John Heartfield’s classic 1934 cover of the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Newspaper) showed the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels fitting a Karl Marx beard to the face of Adolf Hitler when the Nazi tried to hijack May Day.

The anti-Nazi message — combined with popular street theatre — mobilised techniques developed in the turbulent years following the German defeat in the first world war when revolutionary artists, photographers, theatre performers and poets shaped a new oppositional aesthetic.

For the working-class movement, the street is our stage. When the dominant media is monopoly owned, the few spaces where the working class can find its voice and make it heard are precious.

It wasn’t an exclusively German affair: popular theatre, dramatic presentations, and tableaus all figured in French working-class culture, found an echo in Republican Spain, and the earliest May Day processions in Britain featured revolutionary tableaus.

We should think of the hunger marches of the unemployed as a street theatre of a special kind while the Spanish civil war produced a flowering of dramatic arts, banners and street theatre too.

The other side of what we might characterise as performance politics was the appearance on the streets of disciplined contingents of uniformed workers with the frankly acknowledged message that the Red Front Fighting League (Rotfrontkampferbund) was part of the working-class vanguard.

The context for this was the emergence in Germany of uniformed Nazi stormtroopers on the streets and armed attacks on workers’ neighbourhoods and workers’ organisations.

Things took a different turn in Britain. Fearing that the appearance of uniformed members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists might lead to a working-class militia, the British establishment pre-empted this possibility with a Public Order Act.

The 1936 Act banned the wearing of political uniforms in any public place or public meeting. It also required police consent for political marches to go ahead and prohibited the organisation, training or equipping an “association of persons... for the purpose of enabling them to be employed in usurping the functions of the police or of the armed forces of the Crown,” or “for the use or display of physical force in promoting any political object.”

Every state jealously guards its monopoly of physical force, and who commands the streets is, of course, an intensely political matter — which is why every important demonstration is preceded by an elaborate negotiation with the Public Order section at Scotland Yard.

Just how provisional any agreement with the state is was ferociously demonstrated last weekend when the police took out the leaders and organisers of Republic and banged them up just to show who commands the streets.

When the cops lose that command — as at the battle of Saltley Gate during the miners’ strike, or in Trafalgar Square during the anti-poll tax rally — it creates a crisis of state and government. The same is true of unplanned breakdowns of public order like the big city riots of the 1980s and more recently when people have reacted against killer cops.

Demonstrations in Britain are now much more colourful affairs. A decade ago the Communist Party pioneered the use of flags rather than the usually ubiquitous posters on a stick. This came about partly by accident when the party’s stock of hammer and sickle flags — obtained from a sympathetic stall holder in Camden market — was severely depleted by larcenous demonstrators on a student grants demonstration.

The calculation was that if people would steal flags they might also buy them and, with the assistance of an Italian enterprise of communist affiliation, several thousand hammer and sickle flags now appear on demos (and decorate student bedrooms).

Incidentally, the Italian flag manufacturer’s profits derive from the fissiparous tendencies of the Italian left which entails the regular introduction of new flags to signify its never-ending division and reunification.

My thoughts on this subject were stimulated by a sharply critical assault on the Young Communist League that appeared on this paper’s letters page.

The writer argued against “a band of red-masked YCL youngsters marching through Glasgow clutching staves, shouting trite slogans.”

“Do these sloganeers honestly believe that they will gain the support and attract the votes of the working class?” he asked, and asserted that their antics are more Nuremberg than Red Square — and are more likely to attract the lumpen elements of all classes rather than the working class.

Poor analogy. Nuremberg and Red Square were exhibitions of state power — one in the hands of the bankers who put Hitler in power and the other the state power of the Soviet working class.
When today’s YCL takes to the streets, their organisation and discipline are to be commended, even if people have reservations about the tactic and style.

There are few questions of principle involved here, save the necessity to avoid arrest under the provisions of the 1936 Act. The YCL demo style probably attracts as many as it offends and the YCL’s rapid growth suggests it is not much of a barrier to young people to get involved.

We should, of course, scrutinise political style of work with rigour.
On occasion, some young communists appear on demonstrations with their faces covered by red masks and dressed in black. A risky colour combination with contradictory antecedents, this has dramatic effect, signifies a unity of purpose, an unusual measure of discipline, and is an effective way to obscure their identities where this is necessary.

The significance of this last point should not be diminished. Many young people are in insecure jobs, with little employment protection and are vulnerable to unsympathetic employers. Just last weekend an employment tribunal chair told me that photographic evidence from social media is often introduced into evidence by employers.

The YCL are clearly alive to this issue. Challenge, the organisation’s magazine, quoted one young worker and YCL member: “On the Monday after the [Cop26 demo in November 2021] I was in work — I work on the shop floor of a multinational corporation that is deeply opposed to unions.

“The footage of the red block was playing on the news on the TV in the canteen and people had stopped to watch it. Someone shouted, ‘Hey that’s Martin!’ And my blood ran cold. It turned out it was a joke because they know I’m a bit of a lefty. The funny thing was, I was actually on the screen: they just didn’t recognise me.”

Martin’s account illustrates the problem of making the transition from being a “bit of a lefty” on the quiet to becoming an effective trade union organiser. While this is a process that entails abandoning anonymity it would be frivolous to ignore what might happen.

No-one should underestimate the determination of the state, in collusion with employers, to attack the workers’ movement. It has taken decades to lift the convictions of the Shrewsbury pickets, building workers who were sentenced for various offences including conspiracy. It is difficult to see how measures to preserve anonymity can be taken during the patient work of organising a building site.

Where critics of the YCL accuse them of performative politics they are not wrong, indeed YCL members themselves argue that it is an effective propaganda technique and is part of the organisation’s recent growth.

But it is far from the sum total of their activity. On picket lines, in High Street food collections, on innumerable mass demonstrations over recent months, the YCL has been exceptionally active with their faces on open view to an enormous number of people and this is another reason for its growth. And on most mass demonstrations — like the NHS marches — anything other than an anti-Covid mask is seen as frivolous cosplay.

As always there are plusses and minuses to any course of action. Experience will show what works and what doesn’t. Compared to older generations, young people are very savvy about communications technology and social media.

They know that the various measures deployed to keep communications confidential are effective enough in making the work of any agency charged with invigilating the working-class movement more difficult.

But when the state takes a deeper interest in the activity of a group or individual no organisation can avoid scrutiny and all are open to penetration and disruption.

When Roman Malinowski, the working-class militant who headed the Bolshevik fraction in the tsarist Duma, turned out to be a secret police agent Lenin remarked: “If he is a provocateur, the police gained less from it than our party did.”

What the state finds most difficult to deal with is the movement of the masses. MI5 and Special Branch traditionally devote much of their resources to monitoring the labour movement. But I doubt that much police activity over the years has gone into monitoring the Royal College of Nursing yet the RCN’s membership has shown exceptional enthusiasm for striking.

The best security is always found in a crowd. The police have more than adequate legal powers to arrest and charge anyone wearing what a court might find is a political uniform. And they will use these powers if it proves expedient.

If the criteria for evaluating any tactic is always whether and how it strengthens the unity and progress of the mass movement then we have a ready-made metric to measure what we do against the creative chaos of the crowd.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.