Though Cowards Flinch

This is not a far left rant intimating that, in the aftermath of some successful industrial action, we’re ready to seize control of the country. We’ve achieved a little. Paul is right when he suggests that a lot of people will come away feeling buzzed by the mood of the marches, demonstrations and conversations on that day. I certainly went back to work the next day feeling like we had made our point.

Paul is also right when he suggests that there’s plenty more to do. There are concerns even more pressing than his particular objections to protesting and marching ad infinitum, or at least til the momentum has worn away as in the anti-war and anti-top up fees campaigns. Succinctly; we need to wrest control of the movement before we’re all bored to death by mid-level union bureaucrats.

Tory Canterbury answered the call to strike with fair aplomb. Somewhere around two hundred and fifty people met at a local hotel to hear union representatives from NUT, ATL, PCS and GMB speak. UCU and UNISON were also in marked attendance. As the pickets from around the city began to come in, this number swelled until there were some five hundred people either marching or milling at the Dane Jon.

Without intending to give offence to the speakers from the above-mentioned unions, however, having a captive audience for a full hour, they managed to lecture us all in hesitant style about why we were on strike. As I said afterwards, and several random people within earshot agreed, we don’t need to talk about why we’re there. We need to be talking about next steps – and a hall filled to bursting with the people who turned up to picket and protest strikes me as exactly where we should be talking about this.

The lack of questions from the floor, and the extended contributions from people who have no more authority than the rest of us, meant that when important matters were mentioned – e.g. the potential for a Canterbury-wide Trades Council, pulling in public AND private sector unions – there was no follow up. This comes back to something Paul was saying the other day, about how these meetings should be structured, if we’re not to be put off by continued pontification from above.

It’s all very well the unions stamping their feet like some latter-day Pompey Magnus. and expecting the foot soldiers to spring into action. But having answered grassroots anger with a coordinated strike, most will be content to going back to sleep, for now. We can’t let the momentum fade. The best way to do that is to establish, by locality, lists of people interested in continuing work as organisers not just within their own unions but in other venues too.

Whilst I have my own ideas about what exactly we need to organise, I’m more interested in the establishment of a local centre of gravity than in dictating the future, one which invites contributions from all workers of whatever political level, whatever role they hold or don’t hold in a union. Through these contributions, union reps can only improve their own performance, better representing their members and their class. And people are more than willing to share, with a little help from a ruthless, watch-wielding chair. This environment – of rigorous scrutiny and vigorous democracy – should be the backdrop to deciding where we go next.

And there are complicated questions to be answered about what comes next. Are we activists only, or is there a cross-over into electoral politics? What’s the fastest way to get rid of the Tory government? Is that the ultimate objective? Are we prepared to accept the Labour doctrine of continued cuts, albeit slower and shallower? Is our role limited to industrial questions? Are there practical ways one union can render support to others, even if we aren’t all on strike?

I suspect that last question should be the first answered; there are immediate, practical ways to begin rebuilding the political consciousness of the working class – a goal which should be common to socialists in Labour, in the Greens, in the smaller parties and those who don’t like the current gamut of party politics. For example, one goal should be the re-institution of the refusal by one worker to cross another’s picket lines. This sort of thing is vital to prepare the next national strike – and there must be more.

Rather than engaging in the sort of sectarian banter that gives Weekly Worker readers a hard-on, communists can use their skills and their knowledge of history, of other places and situations and tactics, to throw down deep roots in their class and establish a natural leadership. Merely by pushing for an aggressive line with the government and for the full accountability of those who claim to be our leaders we alienate nine-tenths of Labour Party hacks. Most Greens for that matter. This approach would be the making of any socialist, in my eyes.

One of the things which struck me so forcefully was how absolutely anathema the people brought out on Wednesday last would consider the usual sort of stilted, bureaucratic meetings that any local Labour Party basically runs on. Similarly, how ruinously dull would be judged the “political discussion” meetings so beloved of the smaller socialist parties? Millions of people are up for the challenge of beating the government and answering their ideologically-driven cuts agenda; to do them justice, we have to escape from the old paradigms. And the first step is making every meeting count.

Both sides should “give ground”, says Mr Ed Balls (via the BBC), to avert Wednesday’s “hugely disruptive” strike. He says “the government has got to give some ground, so have the unions”. What does this mean, in practice?

Well, it basically amounts to a special tax on whatever proportion of the workforce are employed by the government. That tax is two-fold, coming primarily in an immediate contributions hike, and secondly in the number of contributions. This is a tax on people who are already low earners (the majority of public servants earn substantially less than the national average), never mind the additional strains low earners face.

I don’t want to rehash the argument about pensions. The government never had a leg to stand on – and their devious, British Airways-style attempt to bully democratic unions by offering a slightly less crappy deal and then threatening to withdraw it unless the strike is called off just proves what we all suspected. Tories are outright bastards, high on the stench of their own rank privilege.

I did want to shout out to all those people who gush about Miliband, Balls and company. There’s nothing like the Labour Shadow Chancellor telling the country that he can sympathise with extra taxes on the poor to really make one’s Sunday morning. Yes, vote Labour and watch them try to out-smarm George Osborne.

Balls, like twat Miliband, flipflop over strikes for two reasons. The first is pure opportunism. They want to seem like the voice of reason. One wonders what constituency they’re appealing to. The strike is going ahead; millions will follow the lead of the unions. Anyone opposed to it can get all the “voice of reason” bullshit they want from Francis Maude.

I’ll be staying an extra fifteen minutes at the pickets just for him, by the way, the supercilious shitbag.

The second reason is that Balls is really just Tory-lite. Dubbed “Labour’s Keynesian rottweiler” by one utter dicksplash at the New Statesman, the five point plan for jobs and growth is shockingly weak. Moreover, it says absolutely nothing about the state of public services. The reason? Because Balls will plough on with privatising prisons, privatising hospitals and privatising schools. In order to seem small business and family friendly, he too will be pushing pension “reform”.

He will be pushing “the cuts to welfare, education and Home Office budgets that [Labour] set out before the election”.

He will be pushing “discipline in public and private sector pay”.

And on pensions? “Under Labour contributions and the retirement age would be rising too”.

Essentially he concedes the central Tory principle; that the poor must pay for economic “recovery”. Workers must pay for the rich to stay rich.

So I say, fuck you Ed Balls.

Since I’m on leave, I made the mistake of wading into the usual storm in a teacup about who-interrupted-what-Tory-twunt’s-right-to-speak. This time it’s random activists with David Willetts at a gathering in Cambridge. O tempora! O mores!

Of course, having enjoyed immensely watching a Tory minister get shouted down (which is about all any government minister is good for), I wish to, ironically enough, have my own say about the whole affair, and to quirkily raise an eyebrow at some of the conclusions drawn by my good friend Paul Sagar, and the loonier types over at Liberal Conspiracy.

Paul suggests that because there’s no point in having the debate (all Tories being scum – right on, comrade), there’s no point in disrupting it either, lest we incur the wrath of a few pudgy academics and their intellectual offspring. Fair point, I suppose, but I’d rather shout down the Tory, as an expression of my endless rage at these fucks.

Moreover, not to get in the way of the rather worthy debate over who has what right to be heard, or determine what others hear, but I suspect that anyone who doesn’t want to yell and scream and burn Number 10 to the ground isn’t really feeling the effects of what the Tories are doing to the country, not to put too fine a point on it.

This was suggested to me by the people in the LibCon sandbox, sorry comments page, who also suggested that David Willetts isn’t, in fact, insane, but is “one of the more reasonable Tories”. This is the guy flogging yet another book about how terrible the Baby Boomers are? Christ! I can’t imagine how that fits in with the moral preconceptions of the Daily Mail.

Oh wait, yes I can. It’s all the selfish, solipsistic Baby Boomers, none of whom had to fight against tyranny. After all, who cares about Northern Ireland? Or sexism and racism? We beat Hitler! Let’s just wave flags all day! It’s nothing to do with the staggering concentration of wealth and power in ever fewer hands, screwing the majority of the boomers, and generations X and Y and sharpening the demographic imbalance.

This guy is sane? So why should I be worried about the people who genuinely think he has something of worth to say?

It’s simple: I shouldn’t.

The next election is not being fought in the heads of such people, nor is the future of the UK. They’ll prevaricate all the way through a potential revolution or will decide that revolution is impolite and line up with the Tories anyway. The next election is being fought in the heads of the millions being screwed who didn’t vote and who don’t turn up to Cambridge University how-d’you-dos!

According to the BBC figures, my household income is in the 8th decile, where 7-and-above see more taxes than they do benefits. I find it hard going at the moment, I can only imagine what the seven deciles below my household income are finding, especially as – never mind their ordinary wages being what we should classify as “Shit” – fair chunks of their material redress are being slashed.

Those people don’t give a toss about who gets shouted down – and neither do I!

Paul S explains his second grievance; that Willetts looks like the good guy, after all these people yelled him down. Question: to whom? Answer: some random anoraks in the blogosphere and his own side. Cry me a river. Such grievances demonstrate in stark terms just how incomplete is the Liberal acceptance that the media is owned by the enemy. They don’t need an actual basis in fact to create a story! They are the true children of Blair in that respect.

Lastly Paul goes on to refer to a previous incident with these Cambridge activists, suggesting that they don’t always know what they are talking about, and that some healthy doubt about their conviction might lend their actions some much needed moderation.

I find that amusing; here we are, a bunch of activists with no extra resources beyond our own heads and whatever scholarship we can lay our hands on – while juggling managing a home, going to work and all the rest – challenging a government with a huge staff of supremely qualified people. Challenging them evidentially, not just ideologically, for that matter. They should already be melting down the bronze for our fucking statues. We’re not always going to get it right. But then, there’s no IQ test, or knowledge test, to qualify for the vote is there? So what does it matter?

People are angry and the sooner we shake off the shackles of this rigmarole we have built around so-called ‘democracy’ and show that anger, the better; will all the equivocators please fuck off?

And I didn’t need to mention No Platform once!

Having been absent from the blogosphere for quite some time now (nor reading any articles, except the increasingly rare Splinty) I haven’t been party to the line-drawing and hissy fitting between the inevitable “Don’t attack / hands off the people of [insert name here]” and the interventionists. This made me happy because god knows I think 99% of you people are petty wankers with no braincells between you. However, at the march yesterday, conversation about all issues du jour was inescapable. So I gave in.

Kate Belgrave, Carl Packman and I had a sensible conversation about it and I thought now might be an opportune moment to commit thoughts to paper, or its modern equivalent. I am an interventionist, by instinct. My first thoughts upon seeing one regime after another tumbling to revolution across the Islamic crescent with Gaddafi resisting, was to hope that our government would blow the hell out of the military equipment we sold him.

On reflection, such a thought was silly. I knew nothing about the rebel movement. That they are somehow an improvement upon Gaddafi is an assumption of mine, borne on the fresh winds of democratic and revolutionary movements ‘appearing’ in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. I bracket ‘appearing’ like that because from the point of view of the Western audience, they did just appear. Our media barely gives any time to the nuanced politics of other nations, except America.

Moreover, Western involvement will almost certainly awaken reactionary, nationalistic forces within Libya – and outwith, if Gaddafi’s appeal to all Islamists to join him against the usual Western enemy actually succeeds.

That’s not to say I don’t feel a degree of responsibility for the terror that Gaddafi is able to unleash, with the bombing computers and other sundry hardware that we’ve exported to him. That I feel this is not a commentary on the guilt of the British people – I suspect I speak for a great many people when I say that we, the people, if we controlled our state, would never have sanctioned the sales in the first place. My sentiment is a commentary on the contrary interests of Capital and the national state – and the corresponding hypocrisy of our political elite.

Hypocrisy which has calamitous results, I might add. To see this clearly one must only look at the contrast between the rhetoric of the Allies when confronting Gaddafi, versus the continued silence and inaction when it comes to Bahrain and pro-Western nations which have no objection to slaughtering malcontents.

We shouldn’t be blind, either, to the self-interest in the actions of the UK, France and their allies. Not that I would be so crass to suggest that the whole conflict is motivated by a desire for further lucrative trade negotiations, or *cough* oil *cough*. Heaven forbid. Rather it is quite believable that by offering aid to the rebel leadership “from above”, they can sever the connections that leadership had with the unquestionably genuine and mass dissent which tipped several large cities into rebellion in such a short space of time.

It is not radical nor conspiracy theorising to see this as a possibility; indeed, Western armed force backed by gung-ho free marketeers is an unassailably solid fact of the 21st century. Our modern conquistadores, Jesuits and merchants. For this reason, Western bombing in Libya must be opposed – and this is what the “No Fly Zone” quickly developed into; bombing by submarine launched cruise missiles and from aircraft.

I’m still not opposed to a No Fly Zone – but it must be just that. If Libyan military aircraft take off, they can still be shot down. The NATO allies capacity to fly combat air patrols, to enforce exclusion zones as around their aircraft carriers, is surely insuperable for the Libyans, without the need for bombing any ground targets – civilian or military. Such a lightly treading presence has less capacity to rack up a body count and to summon Islamists to Gaddafi’s side. This is the opinion of an amateur of course and on it I remain flexible.

The opportunistic attitude of our Western governments is not, however, an opinion and the bombing must stop.

As an addendum, I’ve come across the view that we shouldn’t be spending money on military interventions when we could be spending it on (insert cause here). I think this is a nonsense akin to the silly posters I saw some unions carrying yesterday – that the alternative to Osborne’s cuts is to scrap Trident. Simple mathematics tells us that’s not true, though in hinting at the reprioritisation of spending, it’s at least grasping towards something positive.

If we want to challenge the economic orthodoxy sweeping governments across the world, stopping the odd military campaign isn’t going to help us much. We need to go much further. I do agree, however, that by mobilising anti-war opinion and linking the military adventurism of capitalist governments (Labour, Tory, Lapdog, doesn’t matter) to the same worldview that sustains their pro-cuts policies, we’ll be doing the country a service.

There’s something to the Take That song I heard on the radio just last night, which goes “They say nothing / Deny everything / And make counter-accusations”, referring to ”Kings and Queens and Presidents / Ministers of Governments”. Perhaps from Take That it’s just a catchy line – I doubt Robbie Williams has had a serious political thought since he was sixteen.

But the whole song, entitled “Kidz” seems almost custom-built for a video of the recent violence between police and students in London, as a result of the Conservative-Lap Dog coalition attempt to finally demolish whatever vestiges of equity remain in the education system. Everything fits if you just add in Vince Cable-and-assorted-others who got nailed in the Telegraph sting to fit the lines quoted above.

Cable has come out to condemn the Telegraph for demonstrating that the Lib-Dems are inveterate liars, saying one thing in public and another thing in private. His rationale is that the poor showing of the MPs who fell victim to the sting threatens the constituency-MP link. One wonders what state he thinks that link is in when MPs habitually lie to their constituents. Just a thought.

It is some indication of the stage I’ve reached that part of me wants Vince Cable’s head on a plate. Literally.

There is something righteous and eminently admirable about someone who takes up his position honestly and defends it rationally. This cannot be said about the Lib-Dems who have been exposed by this little sting. The worst of them were prepared to court privilege and position by saying nothing in public whilst expressing misgivings in private that would endear them to those facing the business end of this government.

So kill them all. What would we miss, exactly?

Of course the majority of me is governed by intellect and not instinct. I value human life. I also appreciate that these people aren’t entirely responsible for their actions – they are fallible individuals placed in a system which is organised from the top down, with the Prime Minister and his coterie wielding immense patronage, and to that extent it is the anti-democratic system which is fault.

There’s also the part of me which doesn’t want to simply disregard the bourgeois-democratic system as so many turkeys turning up to vote for Christmas and sees instead that these people were elected, however flawed the system. If people cared enough, they could vote for someone else, whatever inertia is lent to such change by other elements of the political system.

What pains me the most is the faux self-righteousness evinced (geddit?) by Cable in his attack on journalists who actually did their job for a change and showed up the penchant of certain MPs to act completely different in government and in private. It is reminiscent of the position taken by some MPs when their expenses came under intense scrutiny and I can’t help but feel that it results from a sense of entitlement.

Do these people believe they have some god-given right to govern, and that what is expedient for them must ipso facto be the right thing to do?

Meanwhile there are people who feel they have to riot and burn to have notice taken of them. Is it then too much to suggest that these two elements are directly related to each other, or born from the same root cause?

It’s not going to achieve much, when it comes to actually preparing the student movement and their allies in the teachers’ unions to take on and beat the cuts the Tory government demand, much less give them the class consciousness needed to take their struggle beyond a win for Labour (and their little better “graduate tax”) at the next election.

It was a risky proposition in that it may have ended up hurting people who have done nothing wrong, per se. But I bet bricking that Rolls Royce felt bloody good to those involved – and from even a cursory glance at the imagery involved, one can see why, when elected politicians are simply disregarding what they were elected promising to do.

Bad enough that wealthy men who are sucking ever so hard on the public teat themselves – whilst having enjoyed free university educations for the most part – are preparing to let university students get into massive debt, this was the monarch-to-be travelling in a car that is the last word in luxury to a gathering of immeasurably wealthy and self-satisfied celebrities who will never have to worry about such trivialities as paying for university education, blissfully unaware as the mere plebs created disorder.

Until that brick.

Some other imagery to consider. In parliament, the vote to raise top up fees passed by 21 votes. Twenty-seven Lib-Dem MPs voted to raise the fees. So the Lib-Dems are essentially responsible for the rise in top-up fees. An impressive feat for a party which promised – all 57 of its elected representatives promised – to vote against top-up fees. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Danny Alexander, educated at St. Anne’s College, Oxford – for free.
Norman Baker, educated at Royal Holloway – for free.
Alan Beith, educated at Balliol College, Oxford – for free.
Tom Brake, educated at Imperial College, London – for free.
Jeremy Browne, educated at Nottingham University – for free.
Malcolm Bruce, educated at Queen’s College, St. Andrew’s – for free.
Paul Burstow, educated at South Bank Polytechnic – for free.
Vince Cable, educated at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge – for free.
Alistair Carmicheal, educated at Aberdeen University – for free.
Nick Clegg, educated at Robinson College, Cambridge – for free.
Edward Davey, educated at Jesus College, Oxford – for free.
Don Foster, educated at Keele University – for free.
Stephen Gilbert, educated at University of Wales, Aberystwyth – for free.
Duncan Hames, educated at University of Oxford – for free.
Nick Harvey, educated at Middlesex Polytechnic – for free.
David Heath, educated at St. John’s College, Oxford – for free.
John Hemming, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford – for free.
Norman Lamb, educated at the University of Leicester – for free.
David Laws, educated at King’s College, Cambridge – for free.
Michael Moore, educated at Edinburgh University – for free.
Andrew Stunell, educated at the University of Manchester – for free.
Sarah Teather, educated at St. John’s College Cambridge – for free*.
David Ward, educated at Bradford University – for free.
Steve Webb, educated at Hertford College, Oxford – for free.
Read more…

Direct involvement with politics almost always results in a move away from the man in the street and a move towards a rather specialised environment with its own vocabulary, its own points of reference and its own intrinsic assumptions. This isn’t a criticism; the same is true of joining a book club or a rugby team.

Yet it’s helpful to go back and look at some of the assumptions and points of reference every so often. For example, media bias. Almost everyone involved in politics considers the media to distort the truth; whether it’s the anti-BBC privateers or the Murdoch conspiracy theorists. So let’s look at this subject again.

For me, the explanatory power of Marxist analysis is its major attraction. A major bone of contention I have with the media, however, is the increasing prevalence of reporting for the sake of it, without any attempt at explanation, or sense of proportion for that matter. A recent BBC article about Italian politician Nichi Vendola highlights what I mean.

It states, ‘[Vendola] has been criticised for how he has managed Puglia’s health budget, which runs a deficit, and for his opposition to the privatisation of the water supply system.’

The article does not tell us who criticised him for opposing water privatisation. Nor does it set the attempt to privatise water supplies into either a national or global context. In fact it explains nothing about this criticism but uses it anyway. Such unattributable remarks are unacceptable in a Wikipedia article, so why is it acceptable in our national news and broadcasting service?

There are other parts to the article which seem to me objectionable. For example, in discussing Mr Vendola’s homosexuality and Catholicism, it states:

‘He is also a devout Catholic, and has no problem combining his faith with his sexuality. “Catholicism is like my homosexuality, like my political beliefs,” he says, “All these things are part of my identity.”

The quote is simply a reformulation of the original sentence. There is no attempt to actually explain how Mr Vendola reconciles these things. Since the article has chosen to highlight this element to the story, about an up-and-coming governor from Puglia and his beliefs, I think it hardly unreasonable to expect this.

Similarly, when attempting to ‘balance’ the article with some people who do not believe that Mr Vendola is the next Obama, rather than actually investigating the criticisms rendered by the chosen opponent, Rocco Palese, it simply gives over space to polemic, which goes unchallenged by the author of the piece.

I am indifferent to Vendola. I suspect that he is just another social democrat with a communist past and a fetish for identity politics, but I don’t know. My point in raising these issues was not to slap the BBC about for being left-wing or right-wing; it was to criticise the quality of reporting and the style of writing. It is my view that such an approach is near-universal when it comes to reporting on foreign countries. Rather than actually explaining, it simply asserts.

This approach to studying history has left us with endless vapid truisms about how Hitler and Mussolini ‘did some good things’ (often a reference to the autobahns and the trains running on time). Addressing foreign affairs in the same way is likely to leave us little better armed with understanding.

I’m not sure how many people consistently read news from abroad, except perhaps for the odd war or famine. My impression is that it isn’t that many. So what does it matter?

Superficiality encourages superficiality. Not everyone is an original thinker (certainly not me). It should surely be a consideration that, imbibed in quantities however small over a period of years, this damages any attempt at a consistent, collective approach to politics? This is how people end up professing love for the NHS and social welfare but joining the far right, whose real record when in office shows them to be more gung-ho privateers than the Tories. Repetition of assertion rather than explanation is plain dangerous.

It is even more dangerous than the annoying and endlessly self-referential witterings of Polly Toynbee, Martin Kettle and Jackie Whatserface, who are at least aiming at an audience already involved in their cosseted little world. Though, it must be said, they are equally dangerous in restricting the political consciousness of the Labour-voting type, not to mention by name any prolific young Labourite bloggers.

We can return to the Marxist trope that being determines consciousness – and in a great many cases that is true. Class background, the conditions of current struggle, how isolated one is from that and other formative influences all have a much greater part to play than the media do, I believe. But that small part is still worth focusing on, just as we focus on everything else – actual injustice, workers’ rights or discrimination – as a means to lay the path to a better future.

Feel sorry for your conservative friends. Like Meatloaf in the video below (whose statement “I’m an actor” made me choke on my cornflakes, having seen 51st State and some of his other films), they’re perfectly willing to countenance the idea of things the public should not know about their leaders and still believe themselves to be upholding democratic values. They are just turkeys voting for Christmas.

Shakespeare would have appreciated politics today. The combination of tragedy, the evisceration of the remaining strands of the welfare state, with the comedy of the Westminster bubble would have provided fertile ground for plays.

Had the playwright been conversant in modern culture, it couldn’t have been long before we had satires of Baroness declaiming hysterically of Labour, “There’s Klingons off the starboard bow, scrape ‘em off Dave!” But this is not satire; it’s all too real.

“The only thing [Ed Miliband] knows for sure is that he is a socialist and will stick up for the trade unions.” [BBC]

Meanwhile the whole media would inevitably be cast collectively as Titania, from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, awaking from slumber to see a Nick Bottom that looks suspiciously like Oona King. Alas there’s no Puck to “restores amends”.

We can watch for real this sad troops of failed politicians trooping through the House of Lords, with nary a critical brow raised from a media that should be scathingly critical of such creatures. Compared to this, the now infamous Lord Young looks almost as if he should be taken seriously with his Supermac-cum-Marie Antoinette impersonations.

As for Ed Miliband, who knows what the bard would have made of him. Certainly no socialist, the strongest words to come out of his mouth have been a demand that Labour ‘reclaim’ the Big Society model from the Conservatives. Evidently all the hot air expended by the blogosphere on tearing apart the claims of Big Society have been lost on Miliband, who is also walking a very Kinnock-esque line as regards the violence of student protest.

We know where that line ultimately leads – and Miliband’s inability to escape the Blairite paradigm is already a step further down his road than one might wish. All the comments about how Labour must listen, to become a “people’s party” is the most watered-down tosh and ignores the strong and steadfast role a socialist political party must play if it is not merely to bow and scrape with each demand placed on it by “the market” (i.e. the capitalist class).

Of course Labour is not a socialist political party. The delirious (if politically shrewd) rantings of various Conservatives to one side, it’s fairly obvious from the banal witterings about “hopes and aspirations” that the Labour Party has not moved on from Blair. It has no definite programme, no concrete economic or social aims, no critique of its opposition beyond the populist emotive or cynically managerial – and nor is it likely to acquire such.

Thus the parade of people to the Lords will continue to be fairly inoffensive worthies and party cronies. Labour need merely tread water until people’s resentment of the Conservatives outweighs their demoralisation. In some cases that will happen fast, in some cases slow, but it will happen. Then the populist and managerial aspects to Labour will once more begin to unravel and we’ll have a Conservative government again, unless we interrupt this cycle.

Resentment is not a political programme, it is a reaction. Thus were people slow to cast off Thatcher and Major, thus were people slow to cast off Blair, despite his great and growing unpopularity leading up to the 2005 election. Nor is anger a political programme; the occupations of universities, the demonstrations and – potentially – the strikes of the next few years will not bring down the Conservative government by themselves.

They might bring down the Coalition, depending on how panicky the Lapdogs get, but a subsequent general election would almost certainly see a Conservative outright victory or a renewed Coalition unless much wider sections of the working class are moved into joining hands with those in struggle. The battle to do this will be at once emotive and intellectual; the appeal to solidarity and collective, class interest. There is no possibility of Miliband doing this, or letting it happen within his Labour Party without a moment like the 1985 Party Conference.

Perhaps the kindest minds of posterity will judge Mr Miliband a sort of Hamlet. Caught between the ghost of his father, alive in the presence of the demonstrators (though not the hack SU and NUS officials who ostensibly lead them), and what he sees as pragmatism, he’ll wander the bland halls of Victoria Square slowly going mad. Or will vanish with a whimper, like Kinnock, to take his place as a working peer, like so many of the dignified, restrained worthies he himself has and will elevate.

If, apropos Marx and Engels, the lowest common denominator of a State is a body of armed men, then full-fledged opposition to the State not only warrants violence, it requires it.

A truism this may be, though it seems to have escaped the voluminous ramblings of politicians and pundits after last week’s incident at Conservative Party HQ. Truisms cannot be the end of the story however.

This “body of armed men” do not simply represent naked force, they represent compulsion of all forms. If you disobey the law, the end result is forcible incarceration.

Resistance to this compulsion is a challenge to the legitimacy of the State. This is a violence equal and opposite to the compulsion of the State. Whether actual fisticuffs or property destruction takes place is frankly irrelevant.

To me this makes all the supportive noises around “civil disobedience” seem so disingenuous. If pursued to their logical conclusion, violence is inevitable; the ruling class will not relinquish power willingly. Human history threatens to bear me out on this point.

In critiquing the move towards violence, we must thus be more politically sophisticated than simply stating that violence is wrong, or recycling the truism that it is ‘counterproductive’, as though that answers anything. What the leaders of the NUS and other organisations usually mean by ‘counterproductive’ is that it upsets their pleasant media strategy, so they have to go on breakfast shows and apologise like naughty schoolchildren rather than pontificate.

This wouldn’t mean anything if the campaigns of ‘civil disobedience’ were concerted, sustained efforts dedicated to bringing about a democratic, accountable, mass movement that could override the authority of the State in the matter of education provision.

Attacking Conservative Party HQ was a tactical mistake, and a presumption by a minority of hotheads that they had the right to assume control of the whole march. It was anti-democratic, it served no purpose – but it was not wrong merely because it was violent.

Contra spokespersons for the Green Party (and inevitably the pro-capitalist parties), I believe that the announced plans of the Conservative/Lapdog coalition do justify violence. The question is what sort of violence. If they feel they can strip bare the lives of the least vocal, the least politic, the least able of this country, then they justify our pulling down the government and dancing in its ashes.

This is not a terroristic demand, nor does it take place separate from the political consciousness of the people of this country. It is a goal we realise through agitation along class lines; if workers are to be exploited by the cronies of those who run the State (cronies who at whiles populate the arms of the State), then workers have the right to resist.

As that resistance is a challenge to the legitimacy of government and State, it will ultimately be violent if we are to carry it through to its end – the reversal of these policies and the destruction of the class system which produced them.

Today’s continuing anti-fee protests and occupations might perhaps be a tentative first step along that road, beset as it will inevitably be by wrong turns, misjudgments and the fork-tongued.