Don't Run Before We Can Walk

In response to previous articles relating to the effects of drug policy on users and communities, Bob Martin argues that while State policy creates the illusion of prohibition, the reality is one of withdrawal and containment

My family live in one of the many areas of the Black Country currently plagued by a growth in heroin use. Robberies and burglaries are rife, hence it's no coincidence that prostitution, pimping and gangsterism are also widespread.

There's inextricable daily evidence on these streets that where one facet exists the rest will follow. Within twenty or so yards of our house in each direction there are smack users, at least two are known burglars, one is also a mugger. Another is dealing, and is rumoured to be involved in under age prostitution. One is a decent lad, but he's only been a recognised addict for three months or so, and therefore probably not yet struggling to support a £200 a week habit. A lot has changed in the eleven years we've lived in this street. A once vibrant solid community is being sucked dry. It's never been perfect, but where has? Many good families are leaving, and many more want to, ourselves included. It's not that we're isolated - we've got many good friends and allies in the community - but collectively that community structure, from the family to the street to the neighbourhood, is under sustained attack, and as things stand, ill-equipped to fight back.

All the perpetrators, from the big-shot dealers and pimps to the 'wannabes' involved in robbing and street gangs, operate with an alarming degree of impunity. It's common knowledge who's up to what, the information is freely available on the ground to any casual enquirer. Obviously, the problem is wider than just smack, but it's a fact that smack is a big component of the deterioration. An observer could only conclude that key individual police officers have vested interests in allowing 'acceptable' levels of crime, or that the police and the council as a whole are involved in a deliberate containment strategy, an active policy of 'ghettoisation'. If that's the case then New Labour, Keith Halliwell and all the prohibitionist bleatings of the government sponsored anti-drugs campaign are tokenistic and meaningless, because on the ground there's a conflict of disinterest. Regarding "the devastation allegedly caused by drug use on our estates" (RA Vol. 4, Issue 2) frankly, there's no 'allegedly' about it.

Although drugs themselves clearly aren't the root cause of run down estates, the drug economy and related activities compound the problem more than any other side effect of social decline and should be dealt with accordingly, and that means realistically. The problematic elements have nothing to gain and everything to lose from naive attempts to establish 'social contracts'. While we're at it, perhaps it might prove expedient in the long term to draw up similar social contracts with the police, councils and other anti-working class aggressors. Likewise, other arguments tabled about 'displacing' the problem are nonsense, unless we conclude the same applies to fascists, paedophiles and other equally reviled elements. We have to be both realistic and representative in our approach to the problem, lest we may become seen as a part of it. Community responses to drug/hood related problems (as more often than not the two are synonymous) aren't about the 'demonisation of powders, plants and pills', it's about fighting scum off, scum who don't give a fuck about their immediate friends and family, never mind the wider community.

We are all living in difficult conditions, and bleeding heart excuses for involvement in the most derogatory aspects of drug culture could also apply to any other disruptive, harmful or intimidating behaviour. These people are not 'Robin Hood' characters, they are shitbags with no moral regard for the consequences of their actions. The romantic images of abject drug visionaries yearning escapism don't apply, it's more about 'badass' identity, and an emulation of glorified ghetto gangsterism. This falls neatly in tow with Labour's emulation of American government policy towards it's own ghetto 'underclass'. Containment and withdrawal creates a vacuum that only the communities themselves have the potential to positively fill, and the IWCA will only contribute to that if it can establish a clear, no-nonsense strategy around the drugs issue.

There are notable examples of successful local initiatives to promote social responsibility, some of these cited by the drug users movement, but when the situation has gone so far they are the exception rather than the rule, and so naturally remain secondary to the resolution of the drug-related social problems that concern affected communities here and now. As stated, there are plenty of examples of socially responsibie people who hold down jobs and run families etc, or at the very least don't let their habits curtail their social 'decorum'. These users don't pose a problem, because on the whole if you didn't know them you probably wouldn't be aware of their drug habit in the first place. They may get into problems, some will inevitably die of misuse, but the social impact is limited. Within this community I've never heard of anyone condemned solely for drug use, without there being some adverse anti-social activity to warrant the condemnation. Ultimately, the question is, how can you realistically market collective social contracts to; 1) The perpetrators - anti-socialists, who thrive on a scared and fragmented community (Note, not all drug users, and not all of them drug users) and 2) The 'victims' (i.e the bulk of the community) who understand point one only too well?

Charlie Dow's articles have detracted from the significance of the alarming combination of drug-related economic interests, and the overall political disinterest that blight working class areas. These problems, and eventually the people behind them, must be publicly identified and confronted. Without a mandate there is no strategy, and in turn there will be no mandate unless we open a dialogue based on the apparent facts. That is not a euphemism for bowing to prejudice and hearsay, but dealing with the issue as it stands, not as we'd like it to be in a more ideal world.

There are obvious risks involved in taking on hoods, there is also a risk of touching a potentially reactionary 'raw nerve'. But such risks haven't dictated our trajectory in the past, it's only ensured we've been more careful in our preparation. We should identify a clear middle ground between prohibitionism and what could be dismissed as liberal naivete. It has to be progressively tangible without being ultra-liberal, and uncompromising without being reactionary. From that position we'll be able to, yet again, deliver a strategy that is both applicable and groundbreaking.

Reproduced from RA Vol 4, Issue 3, Oct/Nov '99

Carrot and Stick?

Markedly different perspectives on the issue of drugs surfaced during debate on the subject at Red Action 's National Meeting. Here Charlie Dow again puts the case for a more 'enlightened ' approach.

Drug use remains a minefield for many on the Left. On one hand working class activists see the devastation allegedly caused by drug use on our estates and in our communities. On the other, many people themselves take part in non-problematic drug use or at the very least enjoy the 'occasional' drink. This has led to a widespread confusion, and a general avoidance by the Left, of community campaigns on drug use.

This position is in contrast with the priority placed on drug use by those who live in working class areas. This urgency arguably shows the power of anti-drugs propaganda which leads people to express their frustrations about poor housing, run down estates and the absence of youth services, in terms of their fears about drug use. Undeniably, it also reflects the prevalence and impact of drug use in these areas. Whatever, the underlying cause, if drugs is the starting point for a discussion about the neglect of working class estates, then to fail to have a strategy becomes a major handicap to the Left.

However, it is important to recognise that drugs use is becoming increasing normalised among young people. Over 50% of young people have experimented with drug taking and their experience rarely matches the sensational headlines and Government poster campaigns. A pro-prohibition stance may set Left-wing activists against young people and serve to reinforce divides within local communities and workplaces.

In striving for more effective strategies, we need to acknowledge that drug use is here to stay. In doing this we need to question the central myth of prohibition which casts all drug users as hopeless losers. In reality the vast majority manage their drug use without significant problems. To make successful changes in our lives, we need to have good self-esteem and believe in our capacity to change. Condemning drug users, undermines these factors and forces people to become outsiders. If you are outside a local community, it is easy to disregard your neighbours and behave in an anti-social manner.

At the same time we need not to romanticise drug takers. In deprived areas, drug dealing, and the knock on effects of problem drug use, can cause significant aggravation and damage which working class activists cannot walk away from. Therefore, we need an approach which enables us to remain engaged with local communities without condemning drug use out of hand. This may be described as looking for the course of least resistance in terms of community politics and drug use.

As has been argued before in Red Action, the starting must be to allow local communities to have a platform to express their frustrations and aspirations. This allows us to expose situations where drug use is being used as a smoke screen for the failings of the local council or national Government. Where problems are directly associated with drug users and drug taking, activists should be unafraid to let people express these concerns. When local communities step out of the anti-drugs hysteria, it is possible to identify rational and effective strategies that can lead to real benefits for both drug using, and non-drug using, members of working class communities. For the rest of this article, I will give an overview of the main areas for intervention:

Drug Education Backfires:
One of the greatest fears of all parents is that our kids may become involved in drug taking. Today, almost all young people will have to make choices as to whether to use drugs or not. Availability is now reaching into even the most remote of areas.

Drugs prevention campaigns are a widely favoured strategy. However, bill board campaigns are known to be largely ineffective and at times can even be counter-productive. The 'Heroin Screws You Up' Campaign was initially thought to be a huge success as young people rushed for copies of the poster. Later, it was realised that the spotty character had become a counter-culture hero which was displayed, as a sign of rebellion, on many teenagers' bedroom walls.

Schools based 'Just Say No' Campaigns can also backfire. Research indicates that children who have received such drugs education are more likely to go on to use drugs, than their non-drugs-educated peers. The problem is that many young people reject the anti-drugs messages, and in doing so may enter drug use without taking any precautions. Also, they may switch from one drug type to another, without any awareness of the varying risks of different substances. Anti-drugs campaigns give simplistic slogans instead of thoughtful guidance.

Integrating advice on drugs into wider health and social education, avoids the issue of drugs from becoming singled out for special attention. It also allows us to offer appropriate advice to different age groups in a non-judgmental manner. Drugs becomes one of the factors of risk that young people have to make choices about as they grow up.

Importantly, we need to look at the underlying factors that leave young people on the streets without facilities or opportunities. Waiting for the impending revolution may be a good excuse for inaction, but it does nothing to help young people. Again diversion schemes do better if they avoid an explicit drug focus but it stands to reason that where kids are occupied and engaged they are less likely to fall into problematic drug use. It is unsurprising that we have seen a massive rise in problem drug use among teenagers at the very same period that we have seen massive cuts in youth and community services.

A Harm Reduction Approach:
Problem drug use can cause significant harm to individuals, as well as distress to families and friends of those who get into difficulties. Responses to drug use are too often limited by the moral judgements of those who fund or provide services. There needs to be a dual approach which recognises the needs of the many who don't want to stop illicit use, while also providing effective drug treatment options for those who want to move away from street drug use or stop altogether. This is the basis of a harm reduction approach.

For those who are using drugs, needle exchange, methadone prescribing, health education and peer based support schemes, have all been demonstrated to be highly effective in protecting people from the damaging consequences of drug use.

There is a direct relationship between social policy and public health. In the mid-1980s it was found that 50% of injecting drug users in Glasgow had HIV infection. This was closely linked to a police policy of restricting the supply of syringes into the city as an anti-drugs strategy. This led to rooms of injectors sharing a single syringe thus widely transmitting blood borne viruses. This was not an active choice but a response to the environment. Liverpool, another city renowned for its high levels of heroin use in the 1980s, had an HIV rate below 1% because it intervened early and made available needles and syringes on demand.

Despite the strong evidence to support methadone maintenance, access to this important service varies dramatically across the country. Drug users are left to commit crime, or be at risk from health problems, which affects not just the individual but the wider community. Community campaigns to fight for improved services reunite local communities, challenging drug users to respond constructively to their new allies.

Drug Use and Working Class Communities:
Drug use impacts on local communities through crime, nuisance, discarded needles or open dealing scenes. This raises legitimate concern for local communities. A liberal approach, which only promotes tolerance and understanding, is inadequate. It is right that local people should seek to improve their local environment, however, driving drug users out of local communities may just displace a problem. A more effective approach may be to set standards for all local community members and to agree local social contracts.

Where drug users are invited to be part of the solution, peer pressure and user-based strategies can be applied to tackle local problems. In east London, local drug users set up user patrols in a local park to pick up discarded needles, and raised the problem with other local users. This was so successful that those running the local park are now providing a payment to those running the patrols.

The response of both the Basque separatists ETA and the Irish Republican Movement provide examples of how local communities can be mobilised against individuals who come into conflict with local communities.

Opening up communication between drug users and local communities may initially be volatile but it enables people to understand each other's problems and to develop social contracts about what is, and what is not, acceptable to local communities. Making demands of drug users, without offering them any rewards for their social responsibility, will just be experienced as further discrimination against an already repressed community. A genuine partnership allows both groups to change their immediate situation, providing a chance for both sides to win.

Drug Dealers:
Open drug dealing scenes in particular pose huge problems. Where dealing takes place on the street, it makes areas unsafe, increases noise pollution, and causes concerns about the safety of the frail and vulnerable. Many approaches, whether from the police or community activists, target those who supply drugs rather than the users. Undeniably such approaches do have an impact on the targeted dealers, but what about the wider impact on the drugs scene?

Studies on the impact of severe police action on drug scenes suggest that such approaches increase the risks for local users, at best displace drug dealing for a period and rarely affects the levels of use in an area. With continued demand, the most ruthless dealers survive and control the market. Where drug scenes are repressed, either by the State or by community activists, the result is probably the same - drug users suffer, levels of drug taking tend not to be affected and dealing becomes more organised and controlled. This experience adds to their sense of alienation which increases their likelihood to take personal risk and anti-social behaviour.

Irish Republicans have mobilised local communities to campaign against key local dealers. Dealers can be 'named and shamed', dealer's houses can be marched on or dealers physically targeted. It is not to argue that such models can never be appropriate or effective, rather that they can have greater success, and cause less collateral damage, when applied more selectively. To target dealers who deal to young children, commit acts of violence, or otherwise abuse the local social contract, allows people to change their behaviour, or supports the adoption of replacements who are able to operate within social contracts. The application of social contract can be effective in stabilising the drugs scene and reducing its wider social impact. It may also isolate problem dealers from the wider drug using community. In fact, where social contracts can be secured, drug users can apply their economic power to boycott dealers who bring conflict into the community. Drug users successfully improved the quality of drugs by boycotting poor quality suppliers in the 1970s in Amsterdam.

Drug testing: the Bosses New Weapon:
Drug use is also being used as a means to ferment division in workplaces and there are also reports of drug testing being disproportionally targeted at working class activists. The effective model proposed in this article allows workers and unions to defend colleagues against such attacks by arguing that workers should be judged on their capability not their choice to use drugs.

To summarise, drug use poses problems for local communities and the Left. However, it is important to distinguish between the affects of prohibition and drug taking. The State uses the scapegoating of drug users to divert attention from wider social problems and it is a powerful tool of divide and rule in working class communities. The solutions are not easy but require an application of an effective response which recognises the needs and rights of all who live in working class communities.

Reproduced from RA vol 4, Issue 2, Aug/Sept '99

Cracking Up

In this first of a series of two articles, Charlie Dow looks at the impact of drug use on working class communities and looks at the development and impact of drugs policy through to the development of the drug users movement.

There has always been a strong relationship between substance use and working class communities. In the Victorian period working class people frequented the old gin halls and also took laudanum (a formula containing opium) to stave off the hunger pangs that were part and parcel of living in poverty. Working class substance use has always caused concerns for the establishment. It should not be forgotten that Bank Holidays were introduced during the industrial revolution to normalise the idea of regular working hours, as previ­ously Mondays were widely seen as the day to recover from the weekend excesses.

The Victorian middle classes were horrified by this behaviour and the numbers of religious or university missions across the East End of London, and other inner city areas, bear testament to their desire to morally educate’ the working class.

Interestingly, middle class drug use seemed to cause less fears and a quick look at Queen Victoria’s pharmacy bills show how partial she was to cannabis tincture, cocaine and opium (for medical purposes only of course!). Also, the whole romantic movement of artists and writers were inspired by their use of many of the same substances. As ever, no surprise that there is one rule for the rich and another for the working class. Also we should remember that we live in a country that actually sent the gunboats into China to defend Britain’s right to sell opium.

Today, substance use remains as ingrained in working class culture as it was a century ago and, in many ways, as frowned upon by the middle classes. However, there is a marked difference between these two eras. Substance use has now been artificially divided into two groups: the legal and acceptable (alcohol, tobacco and caffeine) and the illegal and prohibited (cannabis, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy. et al). It is unclear what informed this process of division, as it is inconceivable that alcohol and tobacco would have been selected as the substances least likely to cause health problems. Some believe, that the US chose to endorse substances linked to the dominant communities while prohibiting those linked to black communities. Since the late 1970s, there has been a rapid increase in illicit drug use. 50% of young people report having tried illegal drugs by the age of 16 (mostly cannabis and ecstasy). Despite all attempts to halt this upward trend, some commentators think that drug use will become increasingly normalised as more and more people try illicit drugs while a percentage go on to become regular users. Patterns of drug use vary. The vast majority of people who use drugs do so without major problems, despite that lack of information, variable quality and the absence of positive role models. A small number of people do, however, get into problems. Some drugs are more likely to cause problems than others. However, there are examples of people using all types of drugs who stay in control most of the time while conversely there are examples of people getting into problems with most types of drugs. Equally while the stakes may be higher with some methods of taking drugs this is heavily affected by someone’s social setting, and injectors have largely changed their behaviour in light of advice on HIV/AIDS.

When looking at data on drug taking, one factor is absolutely clear. There is a strong relationship between problem drug use and class. This does not mean that more working class people use drugs. Drug use is spread relatively evenly across all social groups. So why the link with problem drug use and class? There are probably a number of factors:

*If you cannot afford your drugs you are more likely to end up involved in crime and facing health problems. Prohibition massively inflates the price of street drugs, which makes matters worse.

*Working provides a structure to your life, so using drugs and having nothing to do all day can be a risky combination.

*Drugs, particularly crack and heroin, provide insulation against the limited opportunities and poor housing for those who live in run down areas.

*Inner city areas provide a stable market for drug dealers with sufficient demand to offset the risks of supply (although recent evidence shows all drugs spreading into even more scarcely populated regions).

*In areas with high degrees of visible drug use, young people are forced to make a choice about whether to accept the offer to use.

*As drug dealing becomes established, and has a public profile, kids see a way out of poverty, which in turn leads to greater availability.

Working class areas get caught in a Catch 22 situation. The condition of an area contributes to the level of drug taking, while the impact of drug taking runs the area down further. The State has made a huge investment in combating drug taking. Ironically, the money thrown into the War on Drugs could easily have ensured a free, clean and unlimited supply of drugs to every user across the world and thus limited both personal risk and the widespread social consequences of drug taking. Despite this fact, there is surprising unanimity among Governments about drugs policy. The public position is that illicit drugs are dangerous and only the sad, mad and bad take them. These people, and their suppliers, should be hunted down and punished or at the very least forced into treatment.

Against this backdrop an alternative approach has been developed. The Harm Reduction movement came to prominence in the late 1980s with the advent of AIDS. In 1985, reports surfaced that 50% of injecting drug users in parts of Scotland were infected with HIV, the virus that can lead to Aids. If this pattern had been repeated across other parts of Scotland, England and Wales, the effects would have been devastating, leading to fears that injectors would provide a potent source of cross-over infection to the dominant population. These fears led the Thatcher Government to support a pragmatic harm reduction policy, which put public health above moral objections. This led to the development of needle exchange and the expansion of methadone maintenance prescribing (offering dependent drug users a stable dose of a heroin substitute).

Through the 1980s and 90s, the harm reduction approach has lived in an uncomfortable relationship with a public order model, albeit one which placed an increased focus on getting the dealer rather than the user. However, some within the harm reduction movement have started to fear that while Governments were willing to fund harm reduc­tion in the HIV era, the support for progressive interven­tions is ebbing away as this health crisis subsides. To support this view one only has to look to the epidemic of Hepatitis C (HCV) among injecting drug users. The 60- 90% infection rates of HCV among injectors seem to have left most Governments unmoved. This has led one leading interna­tional drug user activist to comment, “there seems to be a direct correlation between our ability to secure funding and our likelihood to infect the dominant population”. Unlike HIV, HCV is very infectious ensuring very quick transmission between injectors, but HCV is not sexually transmitted thus limiting crossover transmission. Simply put, it seems that as long as epidemics of blood borne viruses can be contained among drug users then the Government seems unpersuaded of the need to fund public health campaigns. To demonstrate their total disregard for drug users, a recent consensus statement from European experts on HCV recommends the exclusion of active injectors from the only costly treatment (approximately 90% of the total HCV infected population arc injectors). This effectively protects State funded health services from the impact of their Government’s decision not to meet their obligation to respond to this new public health crisis.

The desire of Government’s to press on with the War on Drugs, despite the substantial weight of evidence against prohibition, has led some to question the underlying motivation to the War on Drugs. Drug users provide effective scapegoats who can be blamed for poor education, run down housing estates and an over-stretched NHS. Simultaneously, the War on Drugs justifies the need for the extension of CCTV schemes, more police and the removal of fundamental human rights such as the right to silence, the right to free assembly, and the right to privacy. Most impor­tantly, anti-drug user propaganda brings division right to the heart of working class communities and, particularly with drug testing, into many work places. New Labour, New Scapegoats! Conveniently, the very poverty of many working class communities ensures the spread of drug taking while at the same time providing someone to blame for the poverty.

One cannot talk about drug use without considering the role of the US Government. From a US perspective, drugs have replaced the ‘red threat’ in the post-Cold War era. No longer is it the ‘reds under the beds’ but ‘junkies destroying our communities’. Interestingly the War on Drugs justi­fies US interference in man5’ of the same geographic regions as the Cold War. To many, the moral rage of the US Government is laughable given the recently published report into the Contra affair. The long-awaited declassified version of volume 2 of the report was released on 8 October 1988, just one hour after the House of Representatives voted to conduct an impeachment inquiry into President Clinton. This has purposely and effec­tively killed comment on this revealing document. The report, which has been in the hands of the Intelligence Committees of both houses since the spring, is a virtual confession by the CIA that it engaged in a conspiracy to hide drug trafficking and gun running throughout the battle against the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua. The report points an accusing finger at Oliver North, the National Security Council and, indirectly, at George Bush, who was then head of the CIA.

This confirms that the US has a pragmatic position all of their own. Rather than reducing harm, they want to maximise division. Either through direct intervention, or deliberate non-intervention, the US in particular, seems happy to allow the spread of problematic drug use within certain sections of the community. The close connection between the location of major crack use and the sites of the race riots of the 1980s, in both the US and Britain, is worthy of note. So it is clear that the US is happily having its cake and eating it. Drumming up, and benefiting from, anti-drugs propaganda while at the same time willing to play for political advantage with the impact of the drugs trade. Prohibition has clearly placed the drugs trade firmly in the hands of organised crime and driven out the more amateur enthusiasts such as Howard Marks. This was hardly difficult to predict as the US had already seen the devastating impact of their abandoned attempt to prohibit alcohol. Attempts at progressive policy change, such as the legal prescription of heroin to dependent users in Australia, is met with US threats of international sanctions. The US is not alone in this behaviour. Both Germany and France have put huge pressure on Holland to withdraw its progressive harm reduction approach and New Labour, with their American-style Drug Tsar, are increas­ingly beating the prohibitionist drum.

Even if readers of this article are untouched by the human rights case put by drug user activists, then the attempt of the drug users movement to reach out and form alliances with others affected by drug use is an inter­esting challenge. Drug use clearly has a major impact on working class communities, which cannot be avoided by those who are committed to championing working class agendas. It is clear that the State has got its act well together on drug use. There is an opportunity for us to stand back from the demonisation of plants, powders and pills and to address the social consequences of drugs policy and the desire by the State to maximise the potential of divide and rule from scapegoating drug users. Drug use is not an easy issue to manage and it promotes strong feelings among those it has touched. However, it is an issue that the Left ducks at its peril.

In the next edition of RA, the second article in this series will consider the range of responses from the Left and put forward a progressive model of community organising around drug use in working class communities.

Reproduced from RA Vol 4, Issue 1, June/July 1999

Outlaws and Renegades

At issue is not whether drugs are good or bad, suggests Joe Reilly, but how the subsequent anti-social problems should be managed. Key to this is deciding from a Marxist perspective, whether ‘junkies’ are part of the working class or a key component of the most dangerous of classes opposed to it.

“Degenerate youth! Guttersnipes! Pimps! Bums! Thieves! Plunderers!” was the headline appeal of a Communist Youth newspaper in Germany in 1923. Had it been produced 50 years earlier in Marx’s day, it might have read: “Street Gamins! Riff-raff! Vagabonds! Beggars! Spivs!” Today: “Joyriders! Ram raiders! Pushers! Junkies!” would undoubtedly figure prominently.

In pitching their invitation, the Communist Youth authors did not attempt to offer any judgement on the accuracy of the epithets, beyond expressing their contempt for the bourgeois press that applied them to street gangs known as ‘cliques’ and it’s ‘gibbering’ about the “moral degeneration” of ‘youth’.

This appeal represented the beginning of a campaign by the German Communist Party (KPD) to try and organise and politicise the sections of society previously referred to by Marxists as the ‘lumpen proletariat’. Their reasons for so doing were many. In the first place, the KPD claimed as its strongholds the very neighbourhoods in which the cliques were at home, and the milieu of the cliques was reflected in its own composition. Secondly, while the KPD had a disproportionate number of manual and unemployed workers in it’s ranks, the main Social Democratic Party (SPD) retained the allegiance of the great majority of organised workers; which forced the KPD to seek recruits outside the ranks of the organised and employed working class. Thirdly, the KPD then was an avowedly insurrectionary party, which adopted and even welcomed the role ascribed to it by its opponents and rivals as a ‘party of outlaws’. The SPD regularly accused the Communists of having brought an unheard of coarseness and brutality into political life on the streets and in parliament, while for it’s part the Communists were known to be relatively tolerant of ex-convicts in its own ranks and whose chief political newspaper named spies and traitors to the movement and urged readers ‘to teach them a lesson’. Last but not least in the battle for the streets, as a result of the Brownshirts attempting to establish itself in strongholds of the Communists, knives and guns were being brought into the conflict as well as fists. Given that the credibility of the combatants depended on their displaying an active and effective response to the physical and political threat posed, the advantages of mobilising the energies and abilities of the cliques ‘in their own cause’ was fully apparent.

However to pretend that the strategy of orientating, organising and recruiting outside of the realm of the ‘idealised worker’ outside of its ‘proper’ constituency went smoothly, without controversy or contradiction, would be wrong. In fact the KPD never fully reconciled this departure from the orientation to the ‘point of production’. Indeed when the communist movement approached the worker outside the workplace or the working class child who had never known work, it always did so with suspicion.

Tellingly, when the party leadership thought of the gangs it saw them as possible allies rather than as bone fide members of its own constituency. A party less constricted in its vision of class and of politics, might have been expected. Indeed may have felt obliged to develop an analysis of the street gangs and their role within a progressive movement. It was never attempted. Logically there were only two lines of argument open to the Communists: on the one hand, they could acknowledge that the cliques and all they represented were marginal to the working class, or even that they were a symptom of the actual ‘pathology of the proletariat under capitalism’, but that the party while recognising them as degenerate nonetheless regarded them charitably.

On the other hand they could have concluded that the fact that individuals or groups were categorised as criminal, was the result not of intrinsic qualities that disqualified them from participation in the revolutionary movement, but of belonging to a single and universally (if not uniformly) oppressed working class, all of whose members were subject to the same pressures, processes and categorisation. In terms of the cliques this would have meant the KPD accepting they were no less representative of the working class for not being in work. In fact the KPD attitude on such related questions as anti-social crime, youth and so on, forever hovered between these two approaches. This ambivalence was particularly vivid when young Communists behaved like clique members. For instance the active and fighting formations of the Communist youth (with an emphasis “on ace lads only”) were often characterised by a style and mentality strikingly similar to those of the cliques. Inevitably this led not only to renewed concerns about the dangers and values of the latter, but interestingly, also became a source of conflict between the leadership and the rank and file. In 1931 this led to one of the most explosive moments of the conflict within the party as a whole. In an attempt to hold on to its tenuous legality, the definitive statement issued by the leadership in November 1931 of it’s rejection of ‘individual terror’ and ‘adventurist tendencies’ within the movement ended its insurrectionary phase. Which in turn led to open accusations from activists of the leadership having abandoned their revolutionary ideals, as well as betraying any effective defence against Nazi incursions into ‘Red’ neighbourhoods.

The leadership countered, that tendencies to ‘individual terror’ reflected a mood of ‘desperation’ and ‘revenge’, motives that characterised ‘the uprooted, insecure, petty bourgeoisie gone mad... alien to the socialist working class’. This depiction of the street fighters as ‘petit -bourgeois’ only exposed the inability of the party to describe, or accurately put into words activists who were in its view, neither perfectly disciplined Communists nor members of an alien class.

The KPD had no way to acknowledge that one might be working class, and yet behave in ways considered undesir­able. This was a genuine confusion that arose within the Communist movement whenever a distinction had to be drawn between what was proletarian and what the emanci­pated proletarian ought to be, what the party had to deal with in terms of actual working class culture and what it was meant to make of it: and this confusion was not irrelevant to the party’s own capacity to carry out the political tasks it had set itself. Chief among them being social revolution, which was its raison d’etre. Instead of a social revolution what it actually got was a political counter-revolution and fascist dictatorship.

Considering the many other obstacles the KPD faced (not least Stalin’s own fears of the impact on Russia of a successful German revolution) it would be a mistake to imagine that a coherent class analysis alone would have made triumph possible.

Nonetheless if it was even to assess the prospects of change accurately and present them convincingly to actual and potential followers, the party had first to understand the reality it was aiming to change, and to confront the nature of its own constituency in its totality. And this it could not do with any consistency.

The party’s self image continued to be dominated by a view of class struggle that implied it should not be and need not be, dealing with the cliques in the first place. This view had no place in it for the analysis of working class culture as it reflected the construction of collective interest outside of the work place. There is no question that the elements of a new and inven­tive approach to the politics of every day life were present in the theoret­ical utterances of some spokesmen for the movement, and even more obvious in the actual practices of the KPD.

But as long as the party’s leaders continued to argue as though the progressive politicised culture it expected its members more or less spontaneously to represent, was the only real culture of the working class, they ran the risk both of blinding themselves to the points of vulnerability in class and movement alike, and of alienating their own followers who knew better.

Though we are self evidently addressing an entirely different situa­tion in a different country, in a now different century, the lessons to be learned remain critical. All importantly~ the main point of conflicts within the KPD, have, due to time been resolved.

One, social democrats anywhere, pronouncedly in the case of New Labour, can no longer count with any confidence on the allegiance of ‘organised workers’. Two, the sections of the class most in need of organising are for the most part no longer unionised.

Consequently ‘the point of production’ as the best or indeed only basis from which to organise the working class in pursuit of its ‘immediate interests’, is in a complete break with a century of socialist custom and practice, passé, in Britain at least. It was on this premise that the Independent Working Class Association came about.

Three, there is of course Red Action itself. Here is an overtly political organisation formed by precisely the same social elements, who as a result of a confrontation between leadership and rank and file fighters, were accused of a propensity for ‘individual terror’ and expelled from a party riddled with markedly similar contradictions to the KPD.

But unlike their predecessors, rather than drift out of political life, they, rather impertinently, set themselves up in political opposition. Tellingly, of RA’s initial modest objectives, ‘to accommodate ordinary working class recruits within the then wider socialist family’, was one. To ‘celebrate working class culture’ another. Because many of the founding members, who if not exactly ‘convicts’, were not entirely unfamiliar with a prison cell either, there was never a danger of a conflict between the political rhetoric of the group and the reality of working class culture coming into conflict - and Red Action surviving.

Of course whether Red Action has marked an evolution or regression is dependant on your opinion on the proper boundaries of both proletarian behaviour and class, Suffice to say that up to the present, in line with tradi­tion, the consensus amongst the mainstream Left is that Red Action is not merely a ‘party of outlaws’ but has, and continues to be for a wide variety of reasons, a menacing ‘party of renegades’.

Interestingly despite said developments, the potential for conflict either within Red Action, or between sections of the class on the question of class demarcation has not altogether abated. For instance, by some distance, the most heated debate at the RA Annual Conference in 1999, and the one which drew the greatest number of contributions (24 in total) was in relation to some proposals on the drugs issue. Since then, the debate has continued within the pages of our publications. Off the record the respec­tive positions have been referred to (probably unsatisfactorily) as either ‘liberal’ or ‘reactionary’.

Quite properly all involved recognise that a) politicising working class neighbourhoods and avoiding the issue of drugs and related issues cannot be put off indefinitely and b) helping the IWCA define an appropriate strategy is not only crucial in itself, but could in conquering what is considered an insoluble problem, prove the lynchpin in progressive working class thinking on related issues.

At issue is not whether drugs are a good or bad thing, but how the subsequent problems should be managed. Personal behaviour, approval or disapproval, is neither here nor there. The key is devising a strategy that works. And works moreover in the interests of the real working class, politically and socially. And here we get to the root of the matter. Are ‘junkies’ and indeed ‘dealers’ to be consid­ered part of a working class constituency, or are they a key component of what the 1848 Communist Manifesto referred to as the ‘most dangerous of classes’ opposed to it. How this question is resolved will be key in addressing the problem on the ground.

Marx to whom the phrase ‘lumpen proletariat’ is attributed was totally unambiguous in regard to the threat ‘the scum’ posed, in particular to revolution­aries. Time and time again he went in to bat on the subject. ‘Marginal, itinerant, obsolete, downtrodden, dregs’ were just some of the metaphors attributed to trades and livelihoods such as “beggars, vagabonds, rogue’s, police spies, spivs, Street gamins, petty thieves, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, pimps, brothel keepers organ grinders, rag-pickers, brothel keepers”: those who could not and were for the most part, unorganised, who contributed nothing productive and so lived as a parasite on society. (Importantly. this view does not extend to the ‘reserve army of labour’ the unemployed; who are ‘a consequence’ but also all importantly a ‘condition’ of capitalist production.)

Significantly as a result of their intimate studies of revolutionary endeavours across Europe over three decades their initial hardline view, only hardened as time went on. In 1870 Engels evaluated them thus: “The lumpen proletariat, this scum of all classes.., is absolutely venal and absolutely brazen. If the French workers in every revolution inscribed on the houses: Mort aux Ouvres! Death to Thieves! and even shot some, they did it not out of reverence for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary above all to get rid of that gang”. And again: “What all these elements, honest or dishonest, have in common is that they are functionless outsiders, discards of the system, or self discards”. Experience demonstrated to Marx and Engels that on the whole, whether ‘honest or dishonest discards or self-discards’ the ‘lumpen’ tended to be inhospitable to social ideals and are typically moved by cynical self interest on the most vulgar level, available to the highest bidder, untrustworthy even when bought up, and dangerous not only as accom­plices but even as tools: “the worst of all possible allies”, as Engels commented. Consequently anyone who “relies on them for support proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement”.

In contemporary terms the casual drug user (either hard or soft) is not automati­cally fitted into such a catchment. It is not a question of personal morality. For our purposes, it is entirely dependent on how it relates to wider society generally, and working class communities specifically. Nonetheless it is evident that the historic character profile of the ‘discards and self-discards’ is an all to familiar one. Nor does it need a revolutionary conflict for their malign presence to be felt. Their corrosive effect on the self esteem, morale and material well being, once they have come to the fore within working class communities is well documented. That their defining character is a decidedly parasitic one is beyond question. Equally any progressive movement that had serious ambitions would face a confronta­tion with them sooner or later: that they are the enemy within is without doubt.

Clearly for ‘working class rule in working class areas’ to be made operable the real working class would have to be master.

Thus the revolutionary responsibility is three fold. Social democracy has ditched the working class, respectable and otherwise entirely, so all are now subject to the same bourgeois ‘underclass’ categori­sation. The upshot being that the IWCA has the opportunity and moreover is obliged, to operate under the principle of the “big tent”; in the sense of accommodating and organising from the broadest class basis permissible (as against the position of the Communists who had no choice but to concentrate exclusively on those sections of the class rejected by social democracy).

Secondly, much like their employers, the police role in working class communities such as it is, has been re-defined as one of de facto containment. Finally, when the real working class counterpoise their inter­ests in an organised fashion (most visibly in Dublin) to those who are feeding on their children, the state rushes quite brazenly in on the side of THEIR allies. In such circumstances to confront or even execute dealers as the IRA have done on occasion is ‘not out of reverence for the law’ but the opposite. Above all, for any progressive movement to continue its advance within a working class neighbourhood it will prove necessary ‘to get rid of that gang’. Get rid not merely as a by-product, but as an end in itself. Given the stakes, not taking sides is not an option.

In practical terms this means, as the IWCA have done on Blackbird Leys ‘dealing with them’ at an early stage by organising the real working class against them. This is not in itself a political solution but it is the founda­tion for one. For on the matter of class demarcation there can be no room, not least within Red Action, for any ‘ambivalence’.

Furthermore only when it is fully understood and accepted they are a natural adversary can it be worked out how their influence is ameliorated and under­mined. But only when we ourselves are absolutely sure where we stand politically; are crystal clear on where the demarcation line is drawn, then and only then, can we allow any solution the luxury of the necessary liberal and charitable ingredients; ‘the carrot’ undeniably required to make it effective.

In the meantime the existence of the contemporary ‘lumpen’ is a glaring ‘point of vulnerability in class’ and potential movement alike and we who are best placed, the ones who ‘know better’, must not blind ourselves to this reality, or indeed, in particular, to the implications of the current balance of forces on the ground. For as the writer D.H. Lawrence put it:

“No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb - unless the lamb is inside”.

(Research on KPD from an essay. Organising the Lumpen Proletariat; Cliques and Communists in Berlin during the Weimar Republic by Eve Rosenhaft, acclaimed author of Beating the Fascists. Material courtesy of C. Price, Baltimore.)

Reproduced from RA Bulletin Volume 4, Issue 5, Feb/March '00