This is the first in a series of interviews with comrades of Plan C. The aim is to make space to listen to the variety of lives that involve themselves in collective revolutionary organising. Plan C has always been interested in working across generations and we have also encouraged attempts to reflect on the way revolutionary comradeship and theory are messy, complicated and joyful ways of being. We hope these interviews add to that ongoing work. We begin each interview by asking the comrades about someone they might consider to be a revolutionary ancestor, which generation they feel they are in and roughly where they do their work.
Our first interview is with Andrew X and you can find him on Bluesky over here.
Razorsmile (00:12) So comrade, can you just give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself?
Andrew X (00:40) Okay. Well, my name is Andrew. If we’re doing the ancestor / generation / location thing then: location – I’m in the Southeast of England. I’ve been in London at some points of my life, so I’ve migrated, but it’s always been in the Southeast. I am a Gen X person1, I think, in the generational scheme. And then if we’re doing the political ancestors2, I will stick with James Baldwin for now. I struggled with who to have as an ancestor, but I had a little badge which was James Baldwin with a little quote that said “You and I are history”. It’s from a longer quote, from a book called A Rap on Race that he did with Margaret Mead. Anyway, it’s taken from that, and he said similar things on various occasions, but it’s saying: we are history, we enact our history, history’s not dead. Anyway, it’s that kind of idea.
Razorsmile (02:14) Can you describe your journey into political organising and activity?
Andrew X (02:21) It’s interesting to talk about this because it’s often not a conversation that we actually have, I suppose. There’s a lot of people who I’ve hung out with or worked with and I don’t know what their answer to this would be and it’s interesting to find out. I basically politicised myself by reading books. But when I was a teenager I had no way of engaging with anything or I didn’t really know where to start, even though I was in London and presumably there were loads of things to get involved in. But if you don’t have any point of connection then you don’t know where to go. So actually being involved in political organizing of any form was basically when I went to university and there were people doing politics, who were like, ‘Come join us!’ So then it was very easy – just, ‘Okay, great’ and then you can join in. So I guess that was student politics. That was my way into actually working with people or doing practical activity.
Razorsmile (03:52) What’s a political concept or idea that you initially struggled with but now find essential or important to your understanding of the world around you?
Andrew X (04:02) I’m not entirely sure, but something that I found inspiring is the autonomous Marxist idea – which is a version of Marxism or ideas that come from Marx – the idea that class struggle is everywhere all the time. There’s always class struggle – it’s happening all around us, all the time everywhere in micro forms and macro forms. It’s also having an expansive vision of class struggle – so it also includes many forms of struggle that wouldn’t previously have been recognized as that. Another important part of autonomist ideas is that class struggle is driving this constant two-way motion. Lots of things that the state, the system, and capitalism does are in response to stuff that we have done, and so there’s this constant to and fro. Effectively, it’s a spiralling motion – capitalism is pushed onwards partially by its response to our struggles. And so then you get another struggle emerging on a higher level, and you can look at things historically and see that happening. That changes your view of the world or history. A little bit like that David Graeber quote – that the secret hidden truth of the world is that we make it every day and we can unmake it if we choose. That’s basically that idea, isn’t it? Instead of thinking that we are being dominated, or the world is dominated, by the state and capital and power and wealth, you can kind of flip your perspective and see that we’ve created everything; we’ve made everything; it’s all us. We’ve done it all, and the state of the system and the state of the world – all of it – is a response to our struggles and our self-activity. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t domination and power and all the rest of it, but that it’s always this double-sided, two-way thing. And so then you can start to see potential power I suppose, rather than just feeling depressed about everything.
Razorsmile (06:55) Can you describe a moment of collective joy or success that you’ve experienced in political organising?
Andrew X (07:07) They’re maybe not always the same, because one is your subjective impression and the other one is an objective success. They do go together sometimes but it is also interesting – well I guess perhaps experiencing collective joy is a success in itself I suppose – but it’s interesting sometimes when they are mismatched, when you can have something where technically you won but it doesn’t feel like it and everyone goes away depressed, or conversely you can say technically we lost but everyone feels great and really boosted and everything. There’s an interesting idea there of quiet victories and noisy defeats and a bunch of stuff I’ve been involved in have been like that. A lot of the ecological struggles that I was involved in in the ‘90s, like the anti-roads movement – all of the roads that people fought, they lost basically. But then they won – the victories were the roads that never got built because of the prior resistance of people to the other ones. So, on paper, if you look at it in one way, you had all these campaigns like the Newbury Bypass – it was lost; they built the bypass – what was the point of that? But certainly in terms of the collective joy, the creating community and movement and capacity and all of that stuff, many of those road protests were successful in that sense. And then your success is actually the fact that a load of other roads they never even started.
It’s interesting when those things don’t always entirely match up. Another one I would mention is the successful anti-fascist mobilisations. Anti-fascist mobilisations are often… there’s often not a lot of collective joy going on, but there have been occasional ones where it did feel like that. I could mention a couple, like Stop the March for England in Brighton, of which there were several… And actually the Posey Parker demo that was much more recently in Brighton, last year or something I think – that was similar I suppose. And it’s also true of the mobilisation that happened last year in Brighton when there were huge turnouts of people in the streets against the racist riots in August.
But the thing I particularly remember from Stop the March for England was that you couldn’t really draw a distinction between who was on the demo and who was just in the streets, because at one point the demonstration went through quite busy narrow shopping streets and the two merged into one another – the people who were technically on the demo would just merge into the crowd and then there were people who were just out doing their shopping and asking, ‘What’s going on? Fascists? I don’t like that.’ and they would then join in, so it was like there was this kind of two-way movement and you couldn’t draw a line between one and the other. The police were trying to force this little march of far-right people through town. And there were lots and lots of people in the streets trying to block them and stop them and get in their way and blockade it and turn them around and it felt like we were the city and we were all united together with all these people and that was quite a powerful feeling. It was also politically successful as well.
So I guess that’s an example of when the collective joy and the success run together, rather than sometimes running contrary. It was successful. It was effective in stopping them and making life more difficult for them and building capacity on our side or whatever. So it was effective in objective terms, but also was subjectively a morale boosting collective joy thing.
Razorsmile (11:55) In your experience, what’s the biggest disconnect between how political organising is often discussed or thought about and how it actually works on the ground?
Andrew X (12:05) It does seem like there often are those disconnects, I suppose. Maybe it’s about when political organizing is easy or when it’s hard. Sometimes you get this effect where there is energy and momentum and it feels like it’s going somewhere or is achieving something and then lots of people gravitate towards you and jobs get done easily because you’re just attracting people to you, people pop out of the woodwork, people offer help, stuff happens, things magically appear, but that’s because you’ve got some kind of momentum going on or some resonance or something. And then sometimes political organizing feels very like an uphill struggle if that falls away and for whatever reason you don’t seem to have resonance or momentum or it’s not inspiring people, and then it becomes very difficult because everything becomes a slog, no one wants to do anything, people don’t really want to volunteer. So then there’s a question of, ‘Okay, are we just doing the wrong thing here? Should we just stop?’ because it just becomes like pushing a stone up a hill and then you have difficult decisions about that.
So there’s an interesting question there about when to persist with things even when they’re difficult and when to cut your losses and fuck it off and when it feels like a campaign, a movement has found its moment and everything’s just running along. And obviously it’s important to go with that when it’s happening. Seizing the moment and being part of what’s happening is probably important and useful – being where the people are or whatever. But then, it’s more tricky on the other side of it – how do you decide how much of the uphill struggle you do, persisting with something that doesn’t appear to be really resonating much with people? And do you hang in there because at some point it’s all going come good again and at some point it will be useful and you’re going do some work that’s going be valuable? Continuity is important – it’s important to have political continuity and to have organizations and publications and groups and structures that persist over time. But then sometimes that can feel like very unrewarding work.
There’s a tendency to go with what has momentum and the things that have the wind in their sails. If you always just go with that, it can be very faddish and just hopping from campaign to campaign and issue to issue depending on what’s trendy right now and everything has a three month life cycle and then it’s on to the next thing, so there can be a problem with that. You need to do that to an extent, you need to get on board with what’s happening, but that can lead into this flitting around without substance. And then there’s building structures, building institutions, building continuity, doing developing work. That’s probably important for when the next issue comes along – it’s important to have a baseline of people who know each other or the social centre that you have or the website or publication or a social media channel – all this sort of stuff becomes useful in that moment. But then there are questions about when a project has run its course or whether it’s worth persisting with or how you make that decision.
Razorsmile (15:57) What’s something about contemporary British political life that you think isn’t being discussed enough perhaps even in left circles?
Andrew X (16:08) What I’m going to say is nationalism. It feels a bit funny saying it’s not being discussed within the left because, I mean, it probably is being discussed within the left. But it’s something that is very hard to combat or address and hard to get a grasp on, and no doubt, although it is discussed on the left, maybe it’s not discussed enough or maybe it’s something that we haven’t really got our heads around. In this country, although Brexit is now fucking years ago, it does feel like Brexit was the big revealing thing with that.
One factor is the power of nationalism – how incredibly powerful it is and how easy it is to just generate it out of fucking thin air. Politicians and demagogues, celebrities, people with a voice or a platform – it’s so easy for them to just go into a nationalist rhetoric or discourse or whip everyone up into a ‘Yeah, fuck them’ kind of thing – us and them stuff. And they can do it on the turn of a dime, which is shown every time there’s a war basically. As soon as there’s a war – and I guess it depends how old people are in terms of which wars you remember – but as soon as there’s a war, there’s just this massive wave of nationalist flag-waving jingoism that’s almost impossible to confront. Or if you try and confront it, you’re way out on a limb like some freaky weirdo or something. That’s an example of just how incredibly powerful it is, how hard it is to combat it or push against it, how easy it is to instigate. It’s very difficult for the left to deal with and so people try to dodge it. And I think Brexit was very revealing for all of that.
One answer would be – we’re meant to be internationalist, we’re meant to be anti-nationalist, so we should be putting forward a different perspective of cross-border or anti-border internationalism. And that’s a basic thing in left radical politics, so therefore we need to be having an anti-national stance which is hard to do. People who are a little bit more attached to the mainstream or who are trying to make inroads into the mainstream often just soft pedal it or don’t talk about it too much. So they don’t do flag-waving patriotism, but they also don’t really push back against it too much. They just try and not talk about it and just talk about something else, change the topic – talk about the NHS or whatever. I can see the value of doing that because the right wing, particularly around migration and borders, is constantly trying to turn the conversation into ‘defend the borders, stop the immigrants’. I can see the logic behind those who say, let’s move the conversational basis, let’s just talk about something that they don’t want to talk about. We’ll put the conversation on grounds that they’re uncomfortable with. Let’s talk about the NHS. Let’s talk about the social care crisis. Let’s talk about economic justice or something. But then you’re not really confronting their agenda head on. You’re just switching topics. There was a lot of this going on with the left response to Brexit.
Then there’s another left response, I suppose, which is something like left nationalism, where it’s the claim that we don’t want to let them ‘have’ the nation. So you get the Billy Bragg version, you know – the idea that we can be English patriots too because we have a tradition – which I guess also goes back to the Communist Party as well – we can have a tradition of patriotic left-wing Britishness or Englishness or something and it’s a failure if we let the right capture all of that patriotic energy and have it for their own thing. They would argue that we need to push back against that and say – no, we can have a radical English tradition and we can be fully patriotic, but also be left-wing, which I’ve never been convinced by. It seems very hard to not end up falling into jingoism, nationalism, militarism, borders, the state. So quite how you do that, even if you wanted to… quite how you do it without lending support to a right-wing agenda is very difficult.
So I tend to be more anti-national, internationalist and feel like we need to actively push against nationalism. But it’s very difficult and the left has often not really got its head around it properly or has never come up with a good answer. People tend to either try and do left-wing nationalism or ignore the whole thing and talk about billionaires and the NHS and economic justice and change the topic to be something that plays to our strengths. Or you can be properly anti-national and internationalist, but then you’re in a weird minority. And the whole thing around the Corbyn project and Brexit and the Lexit people who wanted to do a left-wing Brexit – it was a big fucking mess. It drew all of this out and kind of demonstrated it. It seems like we’ve never really worked it out.
Razorsmile (21:50) What areas of political intervention are most important to you at the moment?
Andrew X (21:59) The main thing I’ve been involved in over the last little while is anti-fascism on and off in various different forms. I have also been involved in other stuff as well, but that’s what I’ve been involved in most recently, and that sort of ties into the nationalism issue, although I don’t feel like I’ve got any very great answers to it. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult as you get the normalization of the far-right. And that raises lots of questions about what is a good strategy, what is a useful thing to do, because anti-fascism has tended to be running around on the streets chasing some other people running around on the streets. But then anti-fascism, particularly the more anarchist, autonomist, on the streets, physical confrontation anti-fascism, doesn’t really have anything to say about Reform or Nigel Farage or the Tory party basically becoming far-right. So one problem is that as you get an increasing normalization of the far-right and a mainstreaming of the far-right, that form of anti-fascism has nothing to say or do and has no plan. If you’re an anti-fascist, one of the main things you’re trying to do is stop them getting control of the state. And so then when they start getting control of the state, if we’re just immediately out of ideas that seems like a failing.
People went through this in an earlier iteration when the BNP stopped doing demos and started knocking on doors and delivering election leaflets and then anti-fascists had to try and pivot to deal with that. And they did it, not incredibly successfully, I think, but you know, an earlier generation of anti-fascists tried to deal with that. And I guess we’ve got something similar going on now in a slightly different way. We’ve just got this pipeline from the mainstream to the far-right – a continuity with no firewall straight into electoral politics. What is an anti-fascist or a left response to all of this stuff? We know if they’re having a demo we can have a counter-demo, but then, what to do when the Tory party have basically shifted to the right, so what the BNP were saying yesterday now Reform is saying and what Reform was saying yesterday the Tory party are saying now and everyone’s just shifted along this spectrum? It’s just like watching a slow motion car crash. You can just see it happening in front of your eyes and no one really has a very good plan for what to do about it. And it’s all being driven by nationalism and largely anti-migrant xenophobia. Anyway, that’s probably the thing that’s important to me now, I suppose, the intersection of nationalism and the far-right, which doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve got any brilliant ideas of what to do about any of it.
Razorsmile (25:25) Is there a particular writer or thinker who has influenced you in unexpected ways?
Andrew X (25:35) I don’t really know about unexpected ways. I would say that some of the radical history stuff that I’ve read has been a thing that has influenced me. So there’s a bunch of writers, particularly Peter Linebaugh, who crosses over with the autonomist Marxism I mentioned earlier on, because he was part of the Midnight Notes Collective, but he did the history bits. He did these history articles, doing a sort of autonomist Marxist history and often writing in this slightly flowery way. Anyway, yes, so Peter Linebaugh, I really like a lot of what he’s done and he’s worked on books with Marcus Rediker as well, particularly around pirates and seafarers. So that little nexus of radical history writers. And there was a book called Gone to Croatan that came out years ago that is probably out of print now, that I think was Autonomedia. I’ve forgotten what the subtitle was. It was basically dropout histories of North America or the USA. It was a different origin story of North America, where America was founded as a land of dropouts. From the very first colonialist people who rocked up in a ship, people fucked off and ran away and joined the Native Americans – instantly, like Day One or something. And there’s this continuous history of maroons and runaways and renegades and people running off to join the Native Americans and hiding in the swamps and inventing weird little subcultures. And so this book is a collection of history articles about this. And so that was quite inspiring. There’s probably a Peter Linebaugh article in there, I can’t quite remember. But anyway, that little collection of people and some of that radical history work I found influential. Some of those people write very well. It’s very beautiful, inspiring writing. And also because it has this idea – I mean particularly Gone to Croatan – it’s a bit like autonomist Marxism in general, flipping things on their head and being able to see from a different perspective and the idea of there being this big long continuity of struggles and of interesting weird people doing strange interesting stuff – I found that quite influential and inspiring.
Razorsmile (28:35) What’s something you’ve learned from either younger or older comrades that perhaps surprised you?
Andrew X (28:41) So that’s interesting. I guess there’s a question there about political generations… well, actual generations, and their analogue of political generations. You can learn or sometimes hear slightly surprising things from talking across the generations because there’s often – maybe this just happens in life also – but it feels like in politics there’s a particular problem with transmission across generations and you get these breaks and gaps, knowledge that somehow doesn’t carry across. This is like when people just assume everything’s on the internet and it’s all preserved forever, and then it turns out that’s really not true and there are massive gaps and things get deleted and websites disappear and stuff’s just gone. And in fact it’s way more gone than if it was on paper. And it seems similar with the political transmission of ideas. You assume that everyone talks to each other and things gets passed down and people know about a campaign or a movement. And then you discover there’s massive holes and people just don’t know or nobody talks about it or stuff that you take for granted someone else has never heard of or vice versa. There’s an assumption that knowledge is there or is passed on or it’s all accessible and then actually it turns out that’s not the case. So it’s interesting doing this, doing interviews, because often we tend to just get on with things and not talk about it.
I mean… that panel discussion which I go on about periodically, at the Plan C Fast Forward festival a few years ago, where they had people of different political generations talking about things that were inspiring to them. I think some of them I knew about. The woman who was talking about the 1970s feminist movement was the one that I really didn’t know much about. Someone talked about the Poll Tax movement and I kind of knew about that, and then someone was talking about some activism from the ‘90s that I was involved in that I knew about, but I think the ‘70s feminist movement one was a thing that I didn’t really know about, the extent of it. They had giant squatted centres and quite big structures that they’d created and I guess I had an idea that, ‘Oh yeah, in the ‘70s there were feminists… there was Spare Rib, there was Greenham Common in the early ‘80s, they wore dungarees, stuff happened’. Anyway, I just had some vague idea in my head that there was a ‘70s feminist movement, but it was really cool having someone who was involved in it talking about this whole world that you could enter into, all these groups and organizations and social centres and refuges and autonomous women’s shelters and squatted buildings that they set up. It was great having someone talk about the movement that got them into politics or that was their formative experience and not knowing about that and learning about it.
- There are currently seven generations: the Greatest Generation (1901-1924), the Silent Generation (1925-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1980), Millennials (1981-1996), Generation Z (1997-2012) and Generation Alpha (2013-2025). ↩︎
- The idea of political ancestors is probably self-explanatory. That said, Plan C has been using the idea of Members taking on specific political ancestors as part of the ways and means of maintaining memory in our movement. Honoring those who came before – in all their variety – is part of the work of a revolutionary and this is an experiment for us in exploring how to do that. ↩︎