Since 1998, the government has made expert use of the power it wields on behalf of the establishment. By devastating the social infrastructure of the nation and narrowing the scope of political consensus, they have made things like achieving meaningful change, gaining control over our lives and simply making things better, seem impossible. Protest– the means by which we once attempted to exercise agency over our domain, has been transformed into a means of expression and performance– one way to blow off steam before we go back home to rot in front of a screen, docile if unsatisfied.
Every Saturday, in every major metropolis, we have the big demo about the biggest item in the news. The initiated put on a sad festival where newsreaders can gather, in the hopes that they may perhaps be spurred to a lifetime of dedication by tablecloth stalls, soap box speeches and, with a helping of generosity and good faith, the feeling of doing something. Who can blame any of them? What else is there to do?
After all, the most seasoned demonstration veterans will point out that ‘our very right to protest is under attack’. This is true in a sense. Amidst weekly demonstrations against the Israeli bombing of Gaza, where the ranks of regular protestors are bolstered by a militia compromised of a migrant population sympathetic to the struggles of the Middle East, the government signals a toughening up of protest laws. The police will be given new powers, high profile members of the government accost their wayward subjects in the press, and the popular opposition heralds the beginning of a new tyranny, just around the corner, yet again.
The figurative ‘attack’ on our right to protest represents the structural corralling of the ways we attempt to exercise control over our lives and environment. It exploits how the left ties its hands through legal compliance, implicitly recognising the authority of the state of affairs it seeks to abolish. Israeli tanks smoulder in the streets of Gaza, as the left demands that the government call for international bodies, to ask Israel for a ceasefire rather than a ‘pause’. The establishment, having long decimated any working-class force able or willing to care, quickly shifts the field of battle to the cultural grounds on which it is most comfortable. A struggle, largely for language to begin with, quickly becomes another.
Neither the government nor the establishment it represents, have any intention of abolishing a right to protest on which they so desperately depend. Having broken the unions, entwined with the Labour Party, and exported much of the means of production itself, there has to be something for us to do to feel like we live in a democracy. The mythology of the post-religious, ‘post-history’ Western world, depends on the idea that the century before represented the triumph of the forces of democracy over tyranny in the form of fascism and then communism.
What they have done and what they intend to continue to do, is limit the actual forces of democracy. Our enemy seems better able than us to understand, that change is made primarily through economic means. Rather than banning our ‘right to protest’ in a broader sense, the government has recently targeted specific direct-action methods that have had a substantial economic impact. Palestine Action, who work to drive the manufacturers of Israeli arms out of Britain by physically disrupting and blockading factories, have been targeted by protest laws, with varying degrees of success. Legislation focuses on demonstrations that disrupt ‘day-to day’ (read: economic) activity, locking onto gates and blockading infrastructure.
Climate groups like Just Stop Oil are potentially the main target, amidst popular disdain towards their genuinely disruptive tactics. Culturally ‘middle-class’ and armed with shock tactics inspired by the Suffragettes, members of JSO, and to an extent Palestine Action, are made into a scapegoat of the Unacceptable Protester in contrast to the Respectful Democrat who doesn’t exist. The leftie activists who see themselves as above the everyday punter just trying to get to work on the tube.
The reality is that the new laws merely seek to legislate the existing relationship protest has with the state. The heroes putting sledgehammers through industrial machinery, occupying buildings and blockading roads are as affected by the requirement to give the police six days’ notice for a demonstration as the people who have already been doing that for decades. They have never sought to act within the confines of the state, unlike those who purportedly seek to seize and perhaps even destroy it.
Maybe it is true that these people represent the few of us with time and resources to sacrifice. Perhaps too, in opposition to democracy as the rule of the many, Aristotle had a point when he posited that property and leisure were essential elements of virtue. The working class without property and without time, resigns itself to standing in the rain on Saturdays. The establishment, with property and power determines the struggles that take precedence. The middle class, whatever it may be, flails for its place in history.
If we can even count the number of victories from the weekly mobilising churn on one hand, they still pale in comparison to those won through collective direct action. Defined as the use of numbers to control physical space, it has been the primary feature of almost every working-class advance. The strike, the occupation, and even the guerrilla war all use the advantages that ordinary people have over our more powerful enemy – our numbers and our dispersion. The pervasive democracy that exists regardless of any force of law.
Consider if the British government was to push a button tomorrow, ban the right to protest outright and round up the People’s Assembly. The people used to marching from point A to point B and the people fired up from what they read in the Metro that week might start thinking about that pervasive democracy available to them.
Adam Curtis and Michael Bay’s fantasy drama The Way bases itself on a similar, Britain’s Road to Socialism-like scenario, where an industrial dispute in Wales converges with the mass of social and cultural struggles to create a revolutionary situation. The series is well worth a watch and stands in opposition to much of the futureless content coming out of the BBC in recent decades.
Nevertheless, the flashpoint that creates the show’s scenario depends on a healthy suspension of disbelief. Progressive activists, ‘antifa’, independence supporters and even the far right, have rallied against the potential closure of a steel mill and corresponding strike action. The government makes the inexplicable and largely unexplained decision to send in private security firms with assault rifles and the army to dispel riots that start when scabs are bussed in to break the strike. This leads to mass violence, the closure of the border and total breakdown of order. The series does a good job making you believe the disorder must surely lead to something better.
Under the disbelief we suspend, lies an understanding of the real operation of the British state. The oldest and most learned of all bourgeois societies rules by consent over coercion. It combines its monopoly on force with a relative reluctance to use it. The scenes of the miner’s strike feature so prominently in The Way and our historical memory, precisely because the violent running battles between worker and lackey, have been the exception rather than the rule.
Consider what would have happened without the army or the private security guards and you get a good picture of the real-world situation. The strike might have achieved its goals and the factory stays open. Equally, it may have failed, and site closes. Everyone goes home. Never a powder keg to begin with. That’s what would really have happened, and the government knows this. It is hard then to see, a real-world situation where the government would risk hardening the soft commitment of the protest goer, through a ban which would pit them against the real violence of the state, hitherto reserved for people abroad.
While the government seeks to create the impression that it wants to attack our right to protest, this right plays its part in sustaining the absence of actual democracy. With one hand, the government seeks to promote liberal, performance protests, and with the other it limits the real, effective forms of protest.
Worshipping the mirage of democracy and dooming about protest laws neglects this basic reality. Instead of fighting for the ground the establishment wants to fight us on, while decrying the adventurism of those who take risks, the established left would do well to note the latter’s tactics.
Micheal Roch is a member of the Young Communist League’s Lancashire branch
