Some notes on my activism:
- I first joined the Labour Party in 1966, while a supporter of the Militant Tendency.
- In 1980, I co-founded the left-wing journal Labour Briefing and remain on the editorial board.
- During the 1984-1985 miners' strike, I worked with Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, Dave Douglass and members of the NUM in setting up the Mineworkers' Defence Committee.
- In 1996, I suggested to the environmentalist group Reclaim the Streets the idea of forging links with 500 locked out Liverpool dockers, helping to coordinate a festival of working class culture on the waterfront on September 28, the anniversary of the start of their dispute.
- Having met up with the Liverpool School of Samba on the picket line, I resumed teaching at the University of East London, where with my colleague Lionel Sims I helped found an activist samba band, The Barking Bateria. This band in turn played a key role in giving birth to the more widely known sister band, Rhythms of Resistance.
- In April 1997, I was asked by the Liverpool dockers to be Chief Steward on their London March for Social Justice, co-ordinating with Reclaim the Streets to stage Reclaim the Future, a Central London direct action event and festival of working class culture.
- In May 1998, faced with a management attempt to sack 60 staff, I and my union colleagues supported our students in a two-week successful occupation of the main (Barking) Campus of the University of East London. Following this action, management rescinded its redundancy notices.
- On June 18, 1999, the Barking Bateria samba band led a lively demonstration from Liverpool Street station to the London Futures Exchange in what we billed as the Carnival Against Capitalism.
- On October 31 2008, I helped organize a Hallowe'en street theatre event next to the Canary Wharf offices of the collapsed Lehmann Brothers. The reasoning is explained here.
- Over the following months, in the build-up to the April 1 2009 G20 summit in London, I helped co-ordinate a series of street performances staged by the Government of the Dead.
- In April 2009, I was suspended and subsequently sacked by my University's Corporate Management Team for my role in organizing the Alternative G20 Summit.
- On May Day 2010, the Government of the Dead organized marches to converge on an Occupy Parliament Square action. This established Democracy Village, which held the square until we were evicted more than two months later on July 20.
- On 28 April 2011, on the eve of the Royal Wedding, I was one of three republican activists arrested for attempted street theatre.
- On 30 November 2011, I was one of 21 Occupy London activists arrested and later charged with public order offences for occupying the Haymarket (Central London) offices of the mining company Xtrata. On 8 August 2012, I and my co-defendants were all found not guilty.
“One hallmark of humanity is our ability
to laugh at ourselves. Laughter
is our joyful response to absurdity, to the ideal
as it bumps into the real, to hypocrisy in the
service of power. A thorn in the side of despots
great and small, it’s the world’s primordial
leveller.”
Chris Knight and Camilla Power, 2012. 'Arrest for Attempted Street Theatre.'
mikhail bakhtin's great book, 'rabelais and his world', invites revolutionaries to rely not so much on leaflets, slogans and ideological speechifying as on laughter, music and song. the russian revolutionary poet vladimir mayakovsky expressed a similar idea:
“It’s a small thing to build a locomotive:
Wind up its wheels and off it goes.
But if a song doesn’t fill the railway station —
Then why do we have alternating current”
“JUNE 18, 1999. LIVENING UP LIVERPOOL STREET STATION”