Down and out on Pall Mall - Anarchist squatters and the failings of contemporary leftism

Pall Mall reclines like a resplendent boulevard through the province of Mayfair, a pinion between Green Park and Trafalgar Square.  Nobility and high society have sloshed back and forth along this channel for several centuries, and so it is a point of not inconsiderable perplexity to be faced with the black-and-red flags and banners of a troupe of anarchist squatters who, for almost two weeks have managed to adopt as their home the vacated Institute of Directors building at number 123.

Styling themselves as the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians (ANAL), they lost their battle for possession at a court hearing on Monday and are now faced with imminent eviction.  The occupation of residential properties was made a criminal offence by the coalition in 2012, and Tory MP Mike Weatherley has (perhaps in apoplexy at ANAL’s audacity) launched a bid to apply the same rules to commercial properties.   

Indeed, the group have been shifted from one abandoned property to another in recent months; a bedraggled circus of misfits and rebels, a virulent strain inching ever closer to the nerve centre of representative power itself.  They claimed to have taken control of the building as a means of highlighting the staggering abundance of property left deserted and unused whilst homelessness in the capital fluctuates around the figure of 6,000, almost doubling during Boris Johnson’s mayoralty.  

It is certainly a worthy obscenity to force a spotlight onto, and difficult to think of a more potent spectacle that this ragtag bunch of would-be anarchists could have alighted upon – almost equidistant between Parliament and Buckingham Palace, and a mere stroll from Carlton House Terrace that last year was delicately placed on the market at £250m, making it the most expensive property ever sold in the UK.

When I went to pay them a visit, the pale white Neoclassical facade was necklaced with a banner proclaiming ‘Anti-Capitalista!’, whilst a placard denoting Tony Blair’s inauguration of the building for the recently-departed business leaders had been drastically modified. 

Inside this period building one of the first things I spotted was a bloody tampon hung from a supporting column like a dead mouse.  I asked whether this was an attempt at a modern art installation.  “We like to express ourselves honestly...this is natural so we need to get over it”, said one of the female squatters with a self-assured, attractive face and long hair wrought into dreadlocks.  If this was meant to be a kind of transgressive trophy it fell some way short, but nonetheless it did stay with me in a symbolic sense throughout my tour of the building.

There were a few laptops and acoustic guitars lying around, an assortment of posters and placards, bin bags engorged with food salvaged from supermarket skips.  A disparate huddle of teenagers sat around cross-legged, swigging beer and generally just hanging out, although most looked as though they had families and homes to go back to at the end of the day.  My tour guides were to be two older members who had been assigned (presumably by themselves) to “deal with the media”.

Their amiability was cosmetically applied to conceal a pallor of suspicion, perfectly understandable considering reports of bother from police infiltrators to the building.  On being prompted though they quickly launched into their ethos and mandate – to “exist in the cracks that capitalism creates”, to provide a place of shelter for the homeless and vulnerable, and provide a programme of events, workshops, film nights, as well as a ‘people’s kitchen’.  They were keen to stress that there are no enforced rules, except an intolerance of violence and prejudice.

It is hard to be cynical about their stated aim of hitting back at the increasingly intolerable ‘rentier’ culture that has settled itself upon London; the deck stacked so that the owners of ‘buy-to-let’ properties, professional landlords and letting agencies have an unjustifiably strong advantage over the often precarious renting class.  

While the main parties begin to taxi along the runway towards the general election, they have begun going through the pre-flight routine of giving prospective house-build numbers, to be shrugged off by a general public more interested in the in-flight entertainment options (a long-dead King’s burial anyone?).  But the fact that several thousand properties stand empty and unused makes a mockery of their pledges, as all the while, from Elephant and Castle to Barnet, social cleansing under the auspices of gentrification hacks away at existent communities, and luxurious apartment complexes sprout up to fill the space, almost entirely devoid of any human agency whatsoever - built by no one, to be lived in by no one, merely to exist as monuments to capital.

“We try to remind people how close they are, whether it’s one or two paychecks, from the predicament of homelessness”, one of my guides said.  “The system is set up so that people are made to feel like they aren’t so bad off, they still get to buy a pair of fancy trainers, they still get to do some fun things.  But all the while the rich are leaving everyone well behind...”

We took the elegant staircase that winds around the central trunk of the building, the walls adorned here and there with makeshift flags and posters of the usual anarchist insignia that seemed to have been strung up rather hastily as though under a sense of obligation, like a show-house having been prepped for a viewing with all the right visual indicators.

I asked whether the fact that the Green Party are enjoying something of a renaissance is something that the left as a whole needed to get behind and support instead of maintaining division.  “The whole problem is, as soon as you’re voting for a political party you’re effectively saying that a representative can make decisions on behalf of you.  We want a more horizontal form of political organisation”, was the reply.

In essence, this is the fundamental flaw of the left, the perpetual fractiousness that Monty Python so adroitly lampooned with their ‘People’s Front of Judea’ gag; the sublimated yearning to play the role of underdog constantly at odds with a powerful society that they despise precisely because they are denied any power of their own, except to play at being the underdogs.  It is a form of narcissism that exposes the ‘hard left’ to its own inherent contradictions, that for all their theorising about socialisation and establishing comity, their defensive ideological barbs, worn proudly to combat a society they see as being embattled against them even at the risk of alienating their own sympathisers, means that they can never remain cohesively bound together as a collective to be taken seriously.

I have sat in on meetings with academic Marxists and earnest socialists and listened with growing incredulity as dogmatic shot-puts like whether it’s preferable to identify yourself as being a ‘reactionary’ or ‘revolutionary Leninist’ are tossed into the wet sand-pit of pseudo-intellectual lethargy.  For such factions as these, the ‘revolution’ takes on a mystical quality in which to invest an unquestioning faith just like evangelical Christians waiting on the Rapture.   

Rudolf Rocker, in his seminal ‘Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism’, wrote that ‘...as long as a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity within society, the state will be indispensible to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges’.  

Instinctively, Thatcher grasped this and so presided over the abandonment of the social housing project that had been built out of the municipal ‘spirit of 1945’, providing everyone with the dream of becoming property owners.  Britain, unlike Continental Europe, is still a nation in thrall to this fantasy, the vision of the ‘Englishman and his castle’, for which politicians of all stripe strive to devise policy.  As important as the anarchists’ point regarding property is, their idea that society will devolve down into communalities in which we all have equal stake shrivels under the briefest exposure to daylight when you consider the deeply engrained faith in property as a British birthright to which no realistic political entity would dare lay challenge.

“For the present we just want to try and make peoples’ lives fairer and better”, the female member replied to my attempts at playing devil’s advocate, with earnestness that was certainly commendable.  “They need to get more females here...” I overheard a teenage member saying at one point; revealing in one off-hand comment an awful lot, not least of all implicitly ascribing a hierarchy of power within the group that their elders might have been happier to gloss over.

I couldn’t help but feel that the laudable aim expressed by the female member, of wanting to provide temporary shelter and help to London’s many down-and-outs, should be sufficient to justify their cause (even granting them the powerful statement of their Pall Mall appropriation), without the threadbare baggage of anarchism to which they cling, and regardless of whether or not Russell Brand were to turn up and in some way legitimise the proceedings with a sprinkling of celebrity dust.

Aside from coining a classic slogan in ‘we are the 99%’, the failure of the left to invigorate hearts and minds throughout the deepest recession in living memory remains utterly bewildering.  The problem as I see it is reflected across the whole of society, in its deference to established forms of expression, and an endless reverence of the past.  This terminal nostalgia acts as a tourniquet stemming any new flow of ideas, of movements, of artistic endeavour; rendering everything a simulation of something else, an endless copy.  These anarchists themselves, by setting themselves in opposition to society, are both a symptom of its ills and a reflection of its constant repetition of prescribed orthodoxies.

Classical anarchist theory by the likes of Pierre Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, though antiquated, still has a great deal to say and offer contemporary society.  And yet the 21^st century anarchists – with the stereotypically grungy appearance, staid iconography, and rhetoric recycled from the failed ‘counter culture’ movement – hobble themselves by their predictable conformity to a Sex Pistols aesthetic that demands simple categorisation and easy identification.

The bloody tampon hung as a greeting seemed to me to exemplify this: an inexplicable lust for outrage, for sensation, for rebellion that could not fail to hide the sad deficit of ideas at its core.

In the end, they make it all too easy for their opponents to counter with sneering derision, as an IoD spokesperson did, saying “there are probably still some Adam Smith or Hayek books left in there...maybe they could learn something.”

No matter how worthy the cause being promoted, and there is no doubt that it is, the shame is that the superfluous packaging it comes wrapped in will inevitably render it all too easily discarded.