What are the conditions of refusal’s possibility? What transforms it from a logical possibility into a real one; from an if only into a yes, let’s? One such condition is consciousness—an awareness of the situation, and one’s own entanglement in it. Spike Robson was a lowly stoker, an ordinary person from an impoverished background, yes; but he was also a committed communist with a history of internationalist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist militancy, for which he had been variously jailed, fined, and even deported. There can be little doubt that Robson’s connections to the international communist movement were part of what motivated the Linaria action. In addition to this, the Linaria’s last port of call (bar a brief stopover in Gibraltar) had been Mariupol; the contrast between Soviet solidarity with Republican Spain and the British state’s cowardly, anti-communist policy of non-intervention could not have escaped the crew’s notice. Here is another condition of refusal’s possibility: the understanding that things could be otherwise; that what is is not inevitable. The precondition of internationalism is the willingness to see things from outside the self-fulfilling cycle of work → pay → conditions → work → pay → conditions, that endless loop which draws a tight perimeter around the sense of what is possible.

Another condition of possibility is togetherness. We know this; it is the basic principle of trade unionism. Workers have power at the point of production, but that power is only significant when it is enacted collectively. “A worker who thinks,” to paraphrase Rancière, “would break the machine”;⁸ but unless that singular can be made plural, this destruction can only ever be temporary and minor in its effects. To make this power felt, it is necessary for workers to think together and act together.

In October of last year, as the extent of ‘Israel’’s genocidal intentions began to make themselves apparent, and absent any other militant labour movement organisation in response to the call from Palestinian trade unions, New Socialist tried to initiate a project that we tentatively named Trade Unionists for Palestine. We wanted to help to create the conditions of possibility for such a refusal: not to be in charge of it, but to plant the seeds from which an organised, collective, and practical resistance to British state complicity might grow. “If workers have the power to act against a genocide,” as we wrote, “they also have a duty to act.” The point we were trying to make was not that workers in general have some sort of abstract ‘power’, by virtue of their victimhood, or even by sheer force of numbers (ye are many…); but that workers have power at the point of production. And so workers engaged in the provision of arms to ‘Israel’—employed at the point of production of death—have both the power and the duty to act: the power and the duty to refuse.

The task, then, was to make that refusal possible in whatever way we could. The problem was (and remains) that the ‘political’ left exists and operates in almost complete isolation from these workers. Almost complete, but not quite: the fact that Unite and GMB—the two largest unions with members involved in the arms supply chain—are both general trade unions offers a possible point of overlap. Unite, for example, represents logistics and so-called ‘defence’ workers,⁹ but also those in what Poulantzas called “new petty bourgeoisie” jobs:¹⁰ trade union employees, education workers, charity and NGO workers—people who, let’s face it, are more likely than your average docker or arms factory worker to come into contact with New Socialist.¹¹ Here was a place where something might begin.

We wanted to create the conditions of possibility for refusal. By publishing a statement and a call to action, we hoped to both encourage and, if needed, facilitate the forming of connections between workers within these general unions, across sectors and branches, who sought to think together and act together; to influence from below their union’s policy and practice in regard to Palestine. To a certain extent, this was successful—we were able to assist rank-and-file members in getting solidarity motions passed in their branches, and there was a clear appetite for further action, in line with what had been called for by the Palestinian trade unions. But if this togetherness was to mean anything, it had to translate into meaningful, concrete action. And for action to be meaningful, it needed to be informed.

This is where consciousness comes in—where do we stand in relation to the production of death? What is a weapon’s lifespan, from conception to development to manufacture and transportation? Where are the weak links in the supply chain? What leverage do we have? What pressure can we apply? All of these things a successful movement needs to know. And the more we researched these questions, the more obvious it became that this would take the time, the skills, and the knowledge of the whole movement. It’s relatively easy, for example, to discover where arms are manufactured; but that does not necessarily mean that arms factories are a weak link. Transportation and logistics, on the other hand, might hold some potential for successful disruption, because logistics workers handle all sorts of commodities, which means their livelihoods are not reliant solely on the transportation of weapons and components. But, because logistics workers handle all sorts of commodities, often without much knowledge of what’s inside the containers they’re handling, it is extremely difficult to establish what is being transported, and where, and when.¹² To do so would require the coordination of workers along the supply chain; which, realistically, would only be possible with the support of mid- to senior-level trade union officials. And this is where it all began to go wrong.

During the drafting of the initial statement—which took weeks, for reasons which will become clear—we reached out to various regional, mid-level figures within the trade union movement. Initially, some were keen to collaborate. They soon changed their tune. Progress began to stall; drafts were returned with comments that can only be described as obstructionist nitpicking. We did our best to work towards consensus, while staying firm on the fundamental line; we thought we’d done a good job. And then, on the morning of publication, every union figure involved withdrew their backing. The proxy they’d appointed to communicate with us relayed their objections: the idea of British workers ceasing to manufacture deadly weapons on political grounds—something that had literally happened within living memory—was dismissed as “nonsense”; “an ultra-left fantasy”. One of them insisted on the necessity of “a just transition” for arms workers, without which, one is forced to conclude, he intended to continue scabbing on the call from his fellow workers in Palestine.

It’s obvious, in hindsight, that we were naïve, and it’s important not to hide from that fact. We were wrong to assume that these trade union officials would be willing to expand their support for Palestinian liberation out from expressions of principle—such as statements of solidarity, or calls for a ceasefire—and into concrete action. We were wrong to imagine that they would be willing to go against the flow, to detach themselves from the apparatus and act on their consciences—whether through agitating to affect union policy, or through sharing the information that was needed for others to act. And, frustratingly, the level and depth of the research that needed to be done meant that their connections, their knowledge, and their expertise were essential. It was the NUS in 1937 all over again; the most craven, the most pathetic abdication of responsibility. There hasn’t been a morning since that I haven’t woken up and wondered: how many deaths could have been prevented, if these men had been brave enough to act? How much blood are British union bureaucrats happy to be soaked in? The answer, it seems, is almost infinite amounts.

We published anyway, and for a while, the project flourished—but soon, inevitably, it hit a wall. We’d known from the beginning that the whole thing was a long shot; without the support of these figures, it became even more of one. The vast majority of the rank-and-file members who got involved were employed in industries that had little to do with the arms trade; even those academics whose universities were involved in weapons design and development quickly found that their departments and UCU branches had no contact with the STEM labs where this work was taking place. Our research showed that arms workers are heavily-unionised, and often quite militant when it comes to disputes over pay and conditions; and yet the rest of the left—even the most macho, self-defining ‘workerist’ bits—seemingly had no contact with them at all. On the one hand, perhaps this is understandable: would you want to have a pint with somebody who spends their day making instruments of slaughter; who wakes up every morning and cheerfully proceeds, Fred Flintstone-style, to the white phosphorus factory? But on the other, it’s a signal of the (British) left’s weakness, its shallowness, its fragmentation, its retreat. I began to feel angry, mostly with myself. What had we—what had I—been doing for the past decade? Building a movement?—or just something that looked like a movement; that gave the impression of being a movement, if you scrolled its social media accounts? “The working class is back?” It can’t even rouse itself to interrupt a genocide—a genocide provisioned in part by its own constituents.

And so it came about that the best the left could muster was more of the same: desperately rifling through a toolbox filled with tools intended for other contexts, bygone times. Banner drops; A-to-B marches (complete with the usual opportunist paper sales and recruitment drives from the various sects and splinters); banner drops; petitions; social media posts of decontextualised excerpts from 20th century texts that were written about struggles long past; banner drops… Handfuls of well-meaning people, led by a motley vanguard of senior lecturers, off-duty health professionals, and privately educated ‘left think tank’ guys, showing up outside arms factories with their banners to protest; defining themselves as a workers’ movement in hopes, perhaps, of magnetising or catalysing an actual workers’ movement. Is there anything to be said for dropping another banner?

I remember talking to a friend—politically sound, but (like most people) neither involved nor interested in the petty machinations of the left. I was in full flow, hands waving around, giving it all that about how angry I was that the major trade unions, who could interrupt the production of death almost at the stroke of a pen, had chosen not to. But hang on, my friend said, looking puzzled. Haven’t the trade unions been the ones shutting down all the factories? She’d seen the headlines—the left media ones, which regurgitated press releases in order to supply their audience with affirming content; the right wing ones, that sought to whip their readers up into an anti-left frenzy—and, being (like most people) neither involved nor interested in the petty machinations of the left, had taken them at face value. And so an affinity group, many of whom also happened to be in trade unions, doing a few one-day pickets outside arms factories went down in history as Trade Union(ist) Shutdowns.

But listen: I march too, and have done since the start (though it would be wrong to describe the marches as unambiguously or militantly left wing; one of the striking, and most powerful, things about them has been their diversity, of which the left forms only one part). And I don’t want to be sour: people signed up to these mailing lists and showed up to these banner drops and pickets in good faith, because they wanted to make the killing stop, because they, like me, like all of us, wanted to—had to—do something in a situation where all possibilities felt blocked. And yet, and yet. The dishonesty around the factory pickets annoyed me, the overstatement,¹³ the reduction of whole histories of working class struggle to a set of SEO keywords for campaigns led by rich people. I worried, after that conversation with my friend, that the organisers’ inexplicable desperation to lay claim to a ‘trade union’ identity had the effect, not of persuading The Workers™, but of letting the leaders of the responsible trade unions—Unite, GMB, Prospect, RMT—off the hook for their failure to act. But these are second-order concerns. If a strategy works, then it doesn’t matter how much it annoys me.

And that’s the worst of it: it was clearly never going to work. Do we think that arms workers don’t know full well what they’re manufacturing, and what it is for? Are we supposed to pretend that they’ve all somehow been duped; that they think they’re making sweets? They know what they’re doing; they either choose it because they don’t much care about the consequences, or they ‘choose’ it through mute compulsion—a dependency on wage labour or a lack of alternative options for skilled and secure work in their area. Is there any amount of persuasion that can counter this? And, even if there were, would this be the way to do it? There is no working class person on this earth who, when they are doing something wrong, does not deserve to get told; but (as I wrote last year) “the question of who is doing the telling, and how, remains pertinent if we want to move beyond punishment and towards transformation”—or beyond gesture and towards action.

The question of who is doing the telling remains pertinent; and no argument, no matter how right or justified, will ever land well when the person who’s making it reminds you of your boss, or your headteacher. This isn’t a moral point, but a strategic one: for workers to be met, outside their workplace, by a crowd of people who’ve apparently come down from London for the day specifically to tell them off is very likely to be experienced as class antagonism, and lead to a sort of stubborn doubling-down. And this gives the responsible trade union leaderships an alibi for their own inertia. This alibi was enthusiastically taken up by Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham, in a lengthy and paranoid internal communiqué sent to Unite staff in March of this year. In a section headed ‘Palestine’, she declared:

We cannot and will not endorse any organisation which decides unilaterally and without any discussion (let alone agreement) with the workers themselves, to support the targeting of our members’ workplaces… No outside body will be allowed to dictate terms to our Union and our members…

To be clear, I think that Graham is wrong here; I think that arms workers deserve a telling-off, and more besides: they are at best scabs, and ought to be treated as such; and the targeting of a workplace is entirely justified if the work being done there is the work of death. But if our aim is to prevent the arms from being manufactured, as quickly and efficiently as possible, then the effectiveness of a particular approach bears consideration. If arms workers at the grass roots are persuadable—and, I repeat, it is very likely that they are not—then it seems clear that the persuasion needs to come from their peers: their colleagues, their friends, their direct community (by which I mean the people whom they know and see every day)—or, perhaps, their trade union. If they are not persuadable, then no number of banners or leaflets or chants will make much difference to the production of the weapons and components that have been, and continue to be, used against the Palestinian (and Yemeni, and Lebanese, and Iraqi, and Syrian…) people. We know this; we know it because, after a year of these approaches, the weapons and components are still being produced.

And so the only possible grassroots strategy left to us is a militant one, along the lines of what Palestine Action have long been practising: lengthy, sustained blockades and shutdowns, and acts of sabotage that strike at the heart of the war machine. Yes, the risks are high—there is mounting evidence of state interference to ensure the aggressive prosecution of those who act in solidarity with Palestine—but so are the stakes. To borrow from the author and militant Pitaya Chin: “What is asked of you might be unfair, but this has no bearing on the outcome if you fail to do it.” This is the situation.