BRISTOL was thrown onto the national stage on March 15 2021 when protesters against the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill were savagely attacked by police. The protesters responded by smashing a police station’s windows and burning a police van.

The people of Bristol were not dissuaded and sustained large turnouts on actions over the next week despite continued police aggression. More than 10,000 people showed themselves willing to put their bodies on the line and fight back against this Bill which, among other things, intensifies the persecution of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, strips protesters of their right to protest and hobbles the right of unions to use picket lines.

After the impact of Colston’s statue going into the River Avon during the Black Lives Matter protests, even the most cynical on the left harboured some secret hopes that opposition to the Bill could build into something really interesting.

Even the liberal press felt obliged to condemn the police violence (although sadly not any of Bristol’s MPs or the mayor). It was evident the police were losing control of the narrative, first after they started lashing out at peaceful protesters and working journalists — and then after they were caught wildly overstating the severity of their injuries to the press. The chief constable of Avon and Somerset police even had to step down, likely due to his handling of the situation.

When the Bill passed its third reading a few weeks ago, however, all that could be mustered were a few hundred protesters who managed to block the motorway into Bristol. The question any socialist needs to ask themselves is: how did we drop the ball so badly?

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To understand the false start of Kill the Bill (KTB) we need to look at how it was organised; all the actions were organised by entirely anonymous entities placing posters around Bristol or sharing posts online. It had what Jo Freeman calls The Tyranny of Structurelessness as an organising principle.

Freeman describes what this leads to: “As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know… must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.”

After the first night of violence that paranoia set in. Almost all organising took place on various encrypted apps, with no system in place to give access to activists who’d never used them before. This resulted in organising groups of anonymous strangers failing to keep up with events while maintaining a puritanical insistence on horizontalism.

Despite all this, the feeling of injustice was enough that the protests still picked up momentum. However, without any central organising point, all this led to was multiple protests being announced on the same or subsequent days and no obvious ways for organisers (whoever they were) to better combine their energies, or potential participants to ask questions.

This lack of direction could be viscerally felt on the protests themselves. Sometimes marches would wander aimlessly around town until everyone was exhausted or the march had split up into separate smaller blocks.

On some occasions, there’d be a sound system which at least created a central point – although the open platform led to some incredibly strange performances including a particularly farcical speech involving an extended bee impression. Attendees slowly drifted away, the spell of the crowd broken.

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As the weeks went by a malaise took hold. Each successive action got a little smaller, their targets less well defined. Atomisation set in, with people increasingly seeing themselves as individual participants rather than part of something bigger.

Symptomatic of this were those activists decrying the movement and saying they could no longer take part because of slights to their sensibilities in regard to tactics used or the content of chants. Any organisation worth its salt should stress the fact that resisting the Police and Crime Bill is too important to let overindulgence of individual grievances get in the way.

In her book Crowds and Party, theorist Jodi Dean explores how communist organisations can help channel explosions of public resentment or what she calls the “egalitarian discharges” of the crowd.

According to Dean, after an egalitarian discharge as dramatic as those seen in Bristol, there need to be serious structures in place that allow us to build on the openings created. These structures are required in order to feed the energy back into the socialist movement rather than letting ourselves be drained by the effort of chasing it after the fact.

Dean writes that “Knowing how things get done flows into a sense of what it takes to get things done — planning, organisation and solidarity — which feeds back in on and is reinforced in the affective space of the party.” Instead, in Bristol, unaccountable horizontalism led to strategic aimlessness sapping any confidence that the KTB movement had the power to enact its aims.

In discussing the historical Communist Party of the USA, Dean states that it provided “an affective structure that didn’t allow people to give in to their shallower desires and, in so doing, brought out the best in them.” The aim of any left dedicated to genuine resistance and societal transformation should be to build structures that resist the shallow desires of paranoia and egoism. Fundamentally, horizontalism is not up to the job.

Given how hard the state attacked and the very real risk of arrest, much of what is described above is understandable — but organising secret-squirrel style via encrypted apps just won’t cut it. Fear was something we could not afford — avoiding risk today left us facing a far more dangerous tomorrow: the Bill is now almost certain to pass, police overreach towards the left and risk of prosecution is now a fact of life. These are the material conditions that we are working with and it’s our obligation to build a party that can resist it.

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Dean asserts that “a left that speaks the language of radical change but refuses its forms is no left at all. It’s the means by which political energy and conviction is displaced into styles and practices that make us feel good by making us feel radical. To advance, we need to organise. We need to be a party for the people in the crowd.”

The failure of the Corbyn project can’t lead us to succumb to the comforting tyranny of structurelessness. We need to push, first for Momentum and then the Labour Party, to be organisations that empower the left and makes anti-working class legislation like the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill unenforceable.

We need to link up activists from the full range of the left, from social-democrats to Marxist-Leninists, utilising the tools we already have — like Momentum and the unions — to get them organising their workplaces and communities.

The fundamental aim must be clear, coherent and accountable ways of channelling the socialist movement’s energy, placing the class struggle first and foremost and harnessing these egalitarian discharges as the heightening contradictions of capitalism make them increasingly common.

Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins is a Bristol Transformed organiser, trade unionist and Bristol Momentum organising group member. He was also an active participant in Bristol’s Kill the Bill protests. You can follow him on Twitter @isaac_kh.