May Day

Photo by Philip Myrtorp on Unsplash

The first decade of the millennium was my decade of demos. Almost every weekend there was some kind of political march. It started with the anti-war protests, first against the war in Afghanistan in 2001, then the massive march against the invasion of Iraq just over twenty years ago, in February 2003, which brought over a million people onto the streets of London. In the years that followed, the demos began to flag and so did I; the regular route down Park Lane and up Piccadilly Street dragged when there was no music. So I joined the samba band Rhythms of Resistance; when a friend visiting from the Basque Country joined me on one demonstration she remarked on the contrast between dancing our way through the streets and the manis back home, which she described as “more like funeral marches”.

Then there were protests in Parliament Square against government plans to restrict protests (plus ça change). And on top of that annual anniversary or celebratory marches, like International Women’s Day, Pride and May Day.

It's not that I stopped marching after 2010; but things slowed down, in my little activist world anyway. Today demos are something I do a couple times a year rather than once or twice a month. The last few months have felt like ones of missed marches. I’m living in a country in the midst of nonstop public sector strikes (including by my own union, the UCU) and protests, but bar the odd picket line, I’ve been absent: either dragging myself through work or crashed out by bouts of illness. Today, the 1st of May, the streets are filled with striking NHS nurses, and I’m in bed nursing a cold.

If you’d told me fifteen years ago, I would be scrolling twitter in search of videos of kids with brightly coloured hair and sound systems defending Drag Queen Story Time, rather than dancing in the streets myself, I’d have been horrified.

Maybe I remember May Day 2010 so well because it was the end of an era for me. A time that marked a shift away from being at what felt like the centre of a mass movement for change (it wasn’t of course; there is never a centre, or rather there are an infinite number of centres), to a more splintered political existence.

It was a relatively calm affair, nothing like the dazzling (and occasionally vandalist) May Day demos at the turn of the century, in the early years of the global anti-capitalist movement, when anarchist activists practised guerrilla gardening in Parliament Square and gave Winston Churchill his now-famous grass “mohawk” (a rendition of which I recently saw printed on a t-shirt in a souvenir shop in Oxford).

No, this was a proper march rather than a riotous street party. I gathered with other activists near the Marx Memorial Library. There were banners and babies. We’d been campaigning hard for a couple of years to get some of the bigger trade unions to adopt policies supporting the labour rights of sex workers, and it felt like a coup to be at the front of the march, dressed to the nines. Those were days when I dressed up for demos – a habit I owe to two dear friends who used to come up from Brighton for the anti-war protests sporting smashing jumpers. The first time I commented on this, one replied, “Just because we’re demonstrating doesn’t mean we can let the fashion side down”.

This was a shorter and more straightforward march compared to the old winding peace protests. It was more like an amble with the occasional chant and singing. There was plenty of time to visit with friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen for a while. I’d just been through a difficult break-up and there were lots of commiserations. A friend introduced me to someone cute, and we flirted for a few blocks. We got to Trafalgar Square early enough to watch the rest of the march trickle in. I remember standing with a friend and watching in amazement as the small Stalinist parties passed by with their enormous banners featuring photos of Marx, Lenin, Mao and Stalin. Probably not the best advertisement for May Day these days; yet I have a lingering admiration for those who carry – literally in this case – the historical memory of the Old Left, especially in an era when everyone seems to think they know what fascism is, while the c-word is almost nowhere to be found. Mind – we owe modern-day May Day marches not to the socialists, but to the anarchists, who took to the streets of Chicago to defend their rights as workers around Haymarket Square in 1886.

My marching posse stuck around for a few of the obligatory earnest post-protest speeches, before making our way to a nearby gay pub – our usual watering hole after demonstrations, and one of the few remaining queer spaces in Central London. I ended up hanging out with two friends and their partners – one straight couple, one lesbian. We drank a lot of beer and danced to cheesy pop music. At some point the other two women took their tops off (I’d never got into baring my breasts as a political statement, though as I write this it occurs to me that these days the people proudly marching topless tend to be those who’ve had top surgery). Eventually I hopped on the 38 bus and went home.

Is that it, then? Writing about protests past as a quaint exercise in activist nostalgia? Making a map in my mind of how life and my politics have changed over the years?

I guess like with any exercise in activist autobiography, there’s inevitably an element of that. But just like the Stalinists holding up the images of the dour faces of the fathers of communism, I feel compelled to record these (admittedly less grandiose) moments of political memory. If I’ve been writing quite a bit about this theme in this newsletter lately, it’s not just because I feel endlessly compelled to search through the debris of the past, to rescue my own history from the dustbin, but because in this never-ending moment backlash and regression I need to remind myself of the small victories. I need to recapture, even fleetingly, that conviction, that feeling that change is possible.

Writing about protests is also a way of thinking about what they mean, politically. What they do, individually, collectively.

Political marches are powerful expressions of solidarity and purpose. They can be defining moments of rage and resolve. They bring people together and can act as both expressions and catalysts for action.

Like activist writing, political marches can’t be grasped except as fleeting expressions of something that is much bigger, but less tangible and visible, less loud. They’re flashes of a collective movement that lives and operates in the day-to-day, night-to-night, in the cracks and instances between the eruptions – of bodies, of chants, of words.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.