Lenin’s Tomb on the storming of a Tory HQ yesterday by students and the occupation today of Manchster University.
Some will inevitably try to paint imaginative, militant action as ‘violent’. So let me say this about the ‘violence’ yesterday. I’m not frightened by the media’s hysteria, or browbeaten by the servile centre-left that wants to keep opposition as timid as possible. When people ask why occupy a building, how that helps the cause, the answer is very simple: we want to disrupt the processes of power, and we want them be frightened to do what they’re about to do to us. We want them to be afraid of us. They’re about to dismantle our social safety net, shred higher education for millions of working class people, cut teaching in schools, raise the cost of living for everyone except the rich, throw hundreds of thousands of people on the dole, creating many more redundancies as a byproduct, and cheating a whole generation of the education and employment that they need for a decent life. That’s war, and you can’t do that to people and expect them to be polite about it. More occupations, protests, and strikes, would only be the moderate and sensible response to this government’s social vandalism.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A government intent on protecting the wealthy to the detriment to the rest of us is not democratic or fair, and needs to be opposed militantly. Sure, there are massive budget problems. But bludgeoning the lower and middle classes while helping the wealthy is both not the way to solve it and is guaranteed to lead to major social unrest. And in Britain, it already has.
I expect unrest like that here soon enough. But it probably won’t come from the traditional left, which is either asleep or narcotized by Obama. More likely, it will come from the heartland and be more along the lines of a populist uprising.
