Against Abstraction

Thoughts on a Protest

This piece was originally published to André Forget’s Oblomovism newsletter.

The leafy suburbs of Nether Edge and Broomhall and Heeley have made Sheffield the greenest city in Europe, but it’s down in the industrial parks by the River Don that the money was made. Travelling out from the city by train, one is struck by the size of the foundries—the Forgemasters complex with its black tower and low rows of sheds, the Vickers building with its red brick and ashlar stone. The Vickers family got their start casting church bells, apparently, but it was guns, boats, and bombers that made their reputation. The factory is abandoned, now, and the company has been swallowed by Britain’s largest manufacturer, BAE Systems. It made £26 billion last year, up 14% from 2023.

On Meadowhall Road, not far from the shopping centre that dominates this stretch of the valley, sits another factory, one of several in the area owned by the Forged Solutions Group. Inside its corrugated steel buildings, workers make various rings and casings and other small parts, some of which are sent on to Pratt & Whitney’s facility in Middletown, Connecticut, where they are used to build jet engines. Some of these engines are sent on to the Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, Texas, where they are attached to a type of aircraft known as the F-35 Lightning II. Some of these aircraft are then sold to the Israeli air force, which uses them to drop two-thousand pound bombs on the densely populated cities of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

A lot of people are unhappy about this chain of relationships. Several hundred of them showed up outside the factory last Tuesday to make their displeasure known. The protest, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, brought people in from Sheffield and the old coal towns of Halifax and Barnsley and Rotherham, and from as far away as Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, and the Black Country. The factory gates were padlocked and topped with a roll of barbed wire. The signage had been taken down, presumably to avoid having the brand show up in photos next to banners saying “stop the genocide.” A few guards stood watch behind the fence. A laminated sheet of paper had been fixed to the metal bars stating it was “not true” that Forged Solutions makes parts for F-35 jets in Sheffield.

This point is, to say the least, contested.

“The government told us that Forged Solutions is a supplier of the F-35 supply chain,” Jenny Patient, an academic who serves on a Trade Unions Congress task force, told the protesters as she laid out the rationale and demands of the demonstration. Forged Solutions is one of 79 companies currently registered on a UK government open export license to participate in the F-35 program; the government has explicitly stated this program will continue to supply parts for US-made F-35s. “Currently, it is impossible to prove that the parts being made by these workers are not being used in genocide in Gaza.”

Impossible to prove. In a global supply chain, a lot of things are impossible to prove. Forged Solutions says on its website that the Meadowhall facility makes something called an “aero engine shaft,” and they advertised back in 2022 that Pratt & Whitney was one of their clients. I contacted the plant by phone and email to see whether they could provide any evidence for their official statement, and the response I finally received this morning was almost sarcastic: “Please be advised that the Company does not supply the F35 program to Israel.” Maybe none of the Israeli air force’s modified F-35s contain aero engine shafts made in Sheffield. Maybe all of them do. Maybe it’s not engine shafts, but something else (the Coalition Against Arms Trade lists Forged’s production of “forged and rolled rings, casings and closed die forgings” as part of its contribution to the F-35 program, which covers a pretty wide range of products).

The whole process of contracting and subcontracting is designed to create as many steps as possible between producer and consumer, to completely obfuscate the relationship between them so everyone can play the plausible deniability game. And anyway, around 15% of the UK export data is kept in a parallel list that can’t be viewed by the public, and god only knows what’s happening in there.

But I don’t think the majority of the people crowded between the closed factory and the traffic speeding by on Meadowhall Road were concerned with such minutia. Everyone here knows Sheffield is a hub for arms manufacture. Everyone here knows the UK continued to ship thousands of pieces of military kit to Israel, including munitions, despite having suspended dozens of arms export licenses last September. It’s obvious that the UK has no intention of cutting off military support for Israel, just as it’s obvious that firms in Sheffield are going to continue to profit off the genocide.

Already, the works are expanding—a new munitions factories over the valley in Tinsley, and a high-tech aerospace facility built through a partnership between Boeing and the University of Sheffield. The public relations machine says this is about keeping Europe safe from Russia, but the UK is a client state of America, and America has shown little appetite for the kind of military action needed to end the war on terms favourable to Ukraine. Russia has nukes. Recent UK deployments, in obedience to Washington’s interests, have been to the Middle East or the Indo-Pacific. It’s the only thing this country knows how to do. That’s what people are angry about.

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Actually, that’s not true. What people are really angry about is the kids being killed. At every march and fundraiser I’ve attended since October 7, 2023, this is the particle of horror around which the anger collects and takes shape. It’s hard to know how many have died, in May the Gaza Health Ministry reported that at least 16,500 children had been killed since October 7, 2023. According to Unicef’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, 1,309 were killed between the end of the ceasefire on March 18 and May 27 alone. Last year, the UN reported that Gaza now has the largest number of child amputees per capita in the world. Even if the hasbarists have pulled out all the stops to rationalise and discredit the exact figures, there’s no explaining away the uncanny images of shattered and wasted cities, of tiny arms lying in the dust. It’s not 2003 anymore. Westerners don’t just see the missiles arcing gracefully over the skylines of foreign cities, they see what happens when they land.

There are many layers, many shades to the anger people feel about what Israel is doing. They could be seen in the signs the protestors carried. Stop Killing Children. Stop Gaza Genocide. Stop Arming Israel. Forge Solutions for Peace not Genocide. Al Shifa hospital bombed by F-35 jets; F-35 parts made by Forged Solutions. Welfare Not Warfare.

There’s the anger of the woman who stood behind me wearing a Jews Against Genocide t-shirt, of the community leader who proudly mentioned having attended the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna the previous weekend—anger at the logic of blood and soil that insists on calling it a lie wherever it crops up. There’s the anger of the old Yorkshire men and women who cut their teeth protesting apartheid in South Africa, who fought the army of cops Thatcher send to crucify the unions back in 1984, who remember what it was like at the Battle of Orgreave, fought only a few miles south of Meadowhall Road—anger at genocide in Palestine, but also anger at a thousand years of smarm and hypocrisy and violence from Westminster, at being told to work or die as the state demands but to shut the fuck up either way. There’s the anger of the students of various ethnicities and genders, children of a collapsing global order, who had their minds warped not by the sanctimonious both-sides-ism of the BBC, but by snuff films on social media.¹ And there’s the anger of people like myself, comfortable and guilty, who cling to the constantly-betrayed hope that a better world is possible.

Surely none of it can compare to the anger of people like Amin, who spoke about the assault on Iran, or of Musheir El-Farra, the Palestinian man who served as emcee. Every day, England tells them they must accept Israel’s right to destroy their homes or be accused of fomenting a second Holocaust. Every day, they watch a bit more of the world disappear.

At the climax of the protest, Musheir called for a moment of silence as two dozen bundles of red-stained linen were placed at the gates of the factory alongside a row of empty shoes. The sky was a dusty blue, a drought blue, and in the empty parking lot beyond the gates, heatwaves rose from the squat corrugated sheds. We could have been anywhere. It took an act of imagination to connect it to what I’ve heard, what I’ve read, what I’ve seen in pictures.

I probably shouldn’t have started this post with fifteen hundred words about the ins-and-outs of Sheffield’s connection to the arms trade. There are much bigger things going on—the balance of power in the Middle East upended, millions forced to flee, Trump and Netanyahu sitting at a craps table in hell while Lucifer himself rolls the dice. We are at a hinge point in global history. This is surely not a time to be thinking about export licenses, aero engine shafts, and closed-die forgings.

The thing is, it’s never time to be thinking about export licenses, aero engine shafts, and closed-die forgings, just as it’s never time to be thinking about sewer repair, data centre cooling costs, or the fact that the market for financial derivatives is six times larger than the value of the actual global economy. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I’ve seen enough hinge points in global history to think about them the same way I think about hot stocks: if I’ve heard about it, the outcome’s already locked in.

Still, behind every one of these hinge points, you find networks of people doing very quiet, very boring work that no one notices until it’s too late, and these are the people who actually make history. I’m not talking about sinister cabals; I’m talking about the sixteenth century wool merchants in England and Flanders who built the economic basis for capitalism. Colonial émigrés in Paris and London studying the political economy of the empires they’d eventually overthrow. Bureaucrats in Europe knitting US military tech into the infrastructure of their armed forces, gambling their sovereignty on ongoing American support. The kind of people who know about export licenses.

Back in 2022, while having a drink at the Roebuck Tavern, I fell in with a bunch of Boeing executives who were in town to check up on their Tinsley plant. Apparently, it had been underperforming in some way, and a young gun from the Pacific Northwest had been seconded there to improve outcomes. He and I got to talking at the bar. His family was from the Philippines, and he used to spend holidays with his cousins in Winnipeg; being a fellow-member of the International Fraternity of People Who Know About Confusion Corner, I was invited to join them for the evening’s drinking. And so as the number of pints consumed increased, I was given a brief glimpse into the jealousies, beefs, loyalties, and resentments driving one of the world’s largest aerospace manufacturers. Where it was being driven has since become painfully clear.

Last year, Irina and I were having lunch at a bistro on New Quebec Street in London when we overheard the group of men sitting at the table behind us start hashing out a deal to supply raw sugar from Mauritius to Coca-Cola plants in Israel and the occupied West Bank. The guy who seemed to be brokering the deal, a stocky Mauritian, kept gesturing at one of his compatriots and saying “This guy will deal with all the Arab stuff, you need someone who knows the Arabs, this guy will take care of it.” The Arab whisperer would then say something in Arabic, and the rest of the sugar dealers would laugh. Their client, or potential client, was an old British man in a flat cap. When he got up to take a call, the broker explained to the rest of the table that the old man was under a lot of pressure. “Both his sons are in the IDF.” We left before they closed the deal, and I can’t help wondering whether we’d witnessed a small twitch in the global supply chain, a conversation and a handshake that caused millions of pounds of sugar in warehouses half a world away to be loaded onto ships and ferried north.

I share these stories because they illustrate something about the webs of relationship that sustain political and economic power. The modern world is designed to look and act like a machine, and we in turn are expected to behave like parts—go to your repetitive job, receive your pellet of wages, hand most of it to the landlord, vent your frustration online using one of the half-dozen tired slogans, and cast your vote for whichever political brand you hate the least. This depressing reality gives rise to an equal and opposite utopia: if the world is a machine, all we (whoever “we” are) need to do is take control of it, and we’ll be able to make it work for the good of everyone (whoever “everyone” is). But the world is not a machine. It is, and always has been, a network of relationships, and none of these relationships are abstract. Not the relationships between European bureaucrats, not the relationships between organisers in South Yorkshire, and not the chain of relationships that connects the Forged Solutions Group to Pratt & Whitney, Lockheed Martin, the IDF, and Gaza.

If this can sometimes be difficult to comprehend, that’s because the structures of modernity have evolved to make these relationships seem as abstract as possible, the product of impenetrable bureaucracies, atavistic forces, and mysterious dialectics. Confronting the violence and brutality we are increasingly asked to accept as inevitable starts with bringing those abstractions back down to earth. It means thinking about aero engine shafts while the world burns.

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I am, I promise, getting to the point. Which is that the people who spoke at the protest on Tuesday understood their network of relationships. They understood that their job, as people who support the Palestinian cause in the north of England, was to puncture the abstractions and tie the struggle for Palestine’s survival to life in Yorkshire—to build and strengthen relationships between the people who live there and the people who live here.

This is not an easy thing to do. Propagandists have expended a lot of effort to create an imaginary in which “Europe” and “The Muslim World” are eternal foes. And even if Yorkshire isn’t being bombed, things still aren’t going well here. A lot of people are struggling to put food on the table, they’re fighting addiction, homelessness, the collapse of industries and hospitals and schools, the black mould that spreads across every wall and ceiling, that feeds on damp and the dereliction and five decades of state-sanctioned sadism. Getting them to protest the only industry their government wants to invest in is a big ask.

But framing the issue as a choice between moral duty and personal wellbeing would just mean retreat into another kind of abstraction—the one that makes every question a referendum on personal virtue. Instead, the protestors stressed the Labour government’s decision to cut benefits to buy weapons, its ideological vacuity, its lack of accountability. And they placed their criticism of the arms trade squarely on the shoulders of the companies that own the factories.

“We [need to] send an important message to the workers inside Forged Solutions,” said George Arthur of the Barnsley Trade Council. “We’re not calling for them to lose their jobs, we’re calling on Forged Solutions to stop making weapons, and to use the skills that the workers have here to make useful items for the benefit of all humankind.”²

What is needed, George said, is for the trade unions to remind the government of the weakness of the chain of relationships underwriting capitalism. This is what the workers at the port of Marseille had done on June 5^th when they refused to load containers full of military equipment onto an Israeli ship, and contacted union members in Genoa to stop the ship from docking there.

“Dock workers in Antwerp, Belgium have also refused to load Israeli ammunition parts onto Israeli ships,” he added. “We need more actions like this!”

This kind of messaging—that ties imperial war to domestic poverty—might be one of the reasons for the constant din of supportive car horns from the passing traffic on Meadowhall Road. And I suppose it’s why I’m still so invested in the labour movement, flawed and compromised as it is. Unlike the millions of charitable organisations that have sprouted over the past decades, each with their own niche concern, a trade union can teach its members to appreciate the interconnectedness of the world in non-abstract and non-moralistic ways. A union is an effective tool for getting things done precisely because it roots its appeal in self-interest, and puts the locus of action where people already spend most of their time: the workplace. Start with what people are already angry about. Build solidarity by identifying common enemies. Leverage begins at home.

As does politics. A lot of the ambient rage in this country results from the fact that the new Labour government has done little to differentiate itself from fourteen years of Tory rule, and on this question, too, the protest showed that interesting things are happening.

One of the final speakers was Alexi Dimond, a member of Unite the Union and the Green Party Councillor for Gleadless Valley. Dimond started by lambasting Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, for being “silent and therefore complicit” in the genocide, before moving on to the Prime Minister.

“We won’t stop at a ceasefire, we won’t stop until there’s an end to the occupation…and we won’t stop until we achieve justice,” he said. “And that means you, Keir Starmer—and everyone who has enabled this—in the dock.”

Dimond’s speech was evidence of a shift observed elsewhere: a manoeuvre on the part of some factions of the Green Party to capture the terrain opened up by Labour’s rightward turn. There are not enough votes here to form a majority in Westminster, but there might be enough to put the fear of god into Labour’s shaky coalition. Certainly, there are enough to put pressure on the mayors of the combined authorities in cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and South Yorkshire—England’s only sub-national governance bodies with real power. Either way, it's a reminder that politics is a marketplace and anger is one of its currencies. People are going to spend it somewhere.

I don’t mean to sound optimistic. There’s no reason to believe the larger structures of the neoliberal economy and the imperialist state are going to change absent some pulverizing shock. And it’s not as if the people who show up at these protests see eye-to-eye on every issue. But anticipating the apocalypse is another form of hopeful abstraction—at last, a period at the end of a sentence, a total breakdown in the corrupt order, the possibility of something new. It’s a fantasy. There’s never a clean break between generations or epochs, no year zero in which everything can start fresh. The spirit of the past always smuggles itself into dreams of the future. Whatever new thing will be born out of the current horror is already gestating in the relationships and networks created today. When the shock comes—as I suppose, eventually, it must—the form of the next dispensation will follow the outline of what’s already there. And consciously or not, our own relationships are how that outline gets drawn.

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Toward the end of the protest, a guy with a camera showed up. He was wearing a baseball hat, shades, and a bandana that said “Yorkshire” that covered the lower part of his face. A right-wing streamer, we were told, presumably here to rile up his congregation of sniggering weasels with footage of angry Muslims. No one talked to him, and I don’t think he got the violent confrontation he was hoping for. But I’m sure he was able to spin some sort of bullshit about foreigners trying to put decent English workers out of a job.

This guy is also not an abstraction. He’s part of a network of relationships that goes back to the English Defence League, the British National Party, the skinheads, Enoch Powell, the Union of British Fascists. Their movement is famous for its crudeness and vulgarity, but it might embody the most abstract political philosophy ever devised—the sacrament of blood, the absurd belief that ancestry unites us when we all know the nastiest conflicts happen inside families. Here in the north, these guys are trying to make “Yorkshire” mean something inverted and bitter, an empty slogan, a festering sinkhole of an identity that views the past only as a place for mining grievances, wrongs, and an attenuated, abstract glory.

It would be a mistake to let them do this. Yorkshire, as a living fact, is borderless and open to the world. Look at it—look at its mosques and churches and synagogues and gurdwaras, the chippy next to the manga store, the buddleias sprouting from chimneys, the mandarin ducks in the canals, the ruined abbeys, the arcade lights of the dying resort towns, the North Sea coiling over the mud of Doggerland. Its identity is whatever the people living here decide it will be.

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As I walked home along Abbeydale Road, I thought about what it means to live in a place. I thought of Madleen, a fisherwoman in Gaza, who had sent a message to the protest through a voice note to Musheir.

I’m sending you this message from the Gaza port, which is completely destroyed, she said, as Musheir translated. I look at it and I feel a lot of pain. It’s the place where I spent my childhood…I spent long years working here as a fisherwoman, and sadly there isn’t a single boat standing. Sadly, it’s been destroyed, and I feel sorry for the thousands of fishermen and women who lost their livelihoods—our dreams, our memories, our hopes for our children. The place where we lived no longer exists at the beach camp. All we hope is to live in peace, and to re-start our work as fishermen and women. We can’t, because we have nothing, now. We are hoping that you will continue to stand with us, and that this ugly genocide will be over. Our children are starving and we have no food. Nobody is standing with us but you guys.

A jet was flying south in the dusty sky above. If the pilot maintained his course, he would reach what is left of Gaza City in less than five hours.

Aerial view of destruction in Beach refugee camp, Gaza Strip. Credit: Abedallah Alhaj, Wikimedia Commons

1. Keir Starmer might be serious about putting the UK on a war footing, but polls say the new generation isn’t too keen on fighting for a country where one in three children lives in poverty. This doesn’t mean the kids are alright; it means they’re so cosmically fucked no one knows what they’ll do.

2. Special leaflets reaffirming this point had, I was told, been distributed to the workers themselves.