LCC URBAN RENEWAL: Litter-Picking Action with Community Residents

Londoners! Join us Sunday, March 29th at noon as we stare futility in the face and laugh: we're joining tens of thousands of proud dorks nationwide who love their communities and want them to be more beautiful. We refuse to accept that life under capitalism means swimming in the unwanted filth of our plastic-addicted civilisation.

Sturdy gloves, bags and picking tools will be provided, so just bring good shoes, durable clothing and a fearless determination. Joining us will be residents of the local area who need our help to bring some pride back to their neighbourhoods.

We'll meet at noon at Abbey Wood station on the end of the Elizabeth Line, about 20 mins from central London. Our community partners will lead us onwards from around 12:30.

The intrepid picker who picks the most will win a £10 Co-op gift card!

Why is LCC doing litter-picking? Read on for our analysis of why this form of mutual aid is both necessary and weirdly fun.

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Have you noticed that lately, the filth seems to be spreading? Living in a great megalopolis like London, it's easy to gaslight ourselves into believing that it's always been like this, that "cities are just dirty"; and anyway if there's a problem, the council should solve it! What else do we pay taxes for?

But no, it's not your imagination. Halfway through the 2020s and we really are living through an unprecedented explosion in fly-tipping and general filth. It's true that, across the country, many of the local governments whose job it is to collect trash are going bankrupt or getting close. In Birmingham, which went bankrupt in 2023, this financial situation has provided cover for a refusal to pay sanitation workers a fair wage, leading to one of the longest all-out strikes in modern British history and sky-high rubbish piles - even as the council says it's no longer bankrupt.

None of this really explains what's going on in London, where local authorities are still mostly solvent and sanitation workers not on strike, at least after Tower Hamlets settled its dispute a few years ago. This despite the fact that London has some of the highest fly-tipping rates in the country. To our historical-materialist minds here at LCC HQ, there are bigger forces than councils at work, namely: the exhaustion of the global supply chain in recycling and waste on the one hand, and on the other, the ongoing colonisation of our spectacularly corrupt political economy by organised crime. These days there's simply too much trash for councils to deal with, at any price - which is where fly-tipping comes in.

Without most of us being aware, China - once the leading importer of the world's waste - quietly stopped accepting westerners' trash in 2018 as part of National Sword. Having allowed the recycling and waste-processing infrastructure necessary to deal with it ourselves to collapse along with the rest of our industry, since foisting it on the Global South is more to our liking, we are now swimming in an ocean of garbage with no idea what to do with it. A paltry 600,000 tons of waste, including valuable recyclables, is now being dumped abroad annually - and with Indonesia having just joined China in banning waste imports, it's no wonder that things are really starting to get bad here.

Perhaps this explains why over the past couple years, criminal gangs have been porting millions of tonnes of our junk away from the cities, mostly to illegal "mega-tip" sites in the countryside. We've already buried ancient woodlands and bluebell fields in Kent under hundreds of tonnes of rubbish; we all saw the news about Kidlington's 150m long, 15m wide, 10m high super-tip. Now that these sites have become too large to ignore, suddenly laws are being enforced out there. As of writing, it seems that the chickens have come home to the cities to roost: fly-tipping gangs are now simply leaving our alleys, parks and road by-passes strewn with a distributed, ever-growing network of waste piles. A situation now exists where the reality of waste has become impossible to ignore in the traditional way, that of putting it in the bin and forgetting its existence: the streets are proof that, in the age of plastics, nothing can ever really be "thrown away". In fact, there is no away. Alongside the proliferation of chemical waste, human shit and other effluvia now coursing through our rivers and water tables, we can add the trash crisis to Britain's overall sanitation crisis.

So what? Like so much about life under modern capitalism, from the Epstein revelations to skyrocketing food insecurity, the mind looks for an escape route when confronted with the scale of the problem. British leftists raised on a steady diet of Novara Media-style social-democratic welfarism will protest: working-class people work hard enough without having to clean their own streets! The government needs to fund waste collection properly, rebuild our recycling plants and crack down on the fly-tippers! All that may be true. But Britain doesn't have a government, it has an occupying army of capitalist parasites wearing a liberal-democratic skin suit. They're not going to help us and they never will, because there is no sanitation crisis inside their gated communities.

What's a proletarian supposed to do? Live with the indignity? Get used to living like an unloved animal, just because conditions outside are like a pigsty? You can definitely write your councillor, petition Parliament, and generally campaign for a state-led clean-up. But if we've seen much evidence of anything in politics in the last twenty years, it's that this kind of activism is niche. Too niche to make much of a difference. This won't change from the "top down", with one more big push by activist groups to get everyone involved in their letter-writing campaign. People, largely, lack the confidence to get involved in anything political. To rebuild that confidence, we need to work from the bottom up. Many hands make light work, as the saying goes - workers together can really transform an area in the space of an afternoon, if enough of them rally to the task.

In this case, we're working from the very bottom: picking up trash may not represent even a small-scale political "victory", but having a more beautiful local street or park does make for a marginally more enjoyable daily life. Meeting and building solidarity with other people who love their community and aren't afraid to put some work in to make it better is also a powerful reason to get out there. Not quite "another world is possible", but maybe this - especially for those who are looking for a community of like-minded people - could be a step towards achieving that consciousness. Litter-picking groups have grown in popularity across Britain, but not so much London as of yet. Why? Maybe we think we're too cool for something so profoundly dorky, thankless and Sisyphean. Isn't the trash just going to come back? Maybe - but one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

So pull on those work gloves and join us for a bit of litter-picking!

https://www.tcv.org.uk/media_hub/litter-picking-a-beginners-guide/