Well, what a day. I think all of us are still processing exactly what went on at last Wednesday’s London protest at Whitehall. There were the highs of seeing so many young people rush into Whitehall still wearing their school uniforms, there were the lows of being treated like animals by the state apparatus of her majesty’s government. And there was much else in between.

The energy and anger were palpable. The scenes reminded me personally of my own school student days in 2003, when thousands walked out en masse against the Iraq war. Despite what you will have read in the media, this anger was restricted to chanting, singing and whistling, interspersed with the occasional crowd breaking into a run along the road. School students are not going to take this lying down.

Coming down from ULU onto the Strand and up to Trafalgar Square, I found the march to be both lively and, yes, peaceful. I had some good chats with different people: some asking me why I was a communist and others asking how it was that the Weekly Worker was funded. As could be expected, many of the young people were more curious than anything. For most of them this was the first time they had been on a demonstration. I was pleasantly surprised by their rather pronounced class hatred though: “How could they do this to us?”

It was only when we got to Whitehall that things began to turn slightly ominous. One young black student was dragged off the march by two policemen, who insisted that they would search him. I and a few others stopped to see what was going on and try and get some police numbers – all the while some idiot holding a Unite placard kept saying – “nothing to see here, move on”. Solidarity forever, comrade.

The student was searched and then allowed to go. Little did I know that this was only the beginning.

The trap

For at the end of Whitehall, almost in the shadow of the ruling class’s Houses of Parliament, the police had blocked off the road completely. People were thronging into the demonstration now and I could sense that something was not quite right. A friend taking pictures bought a paper off me and said that the police might be looking to ‘kettle’ (ie imprison people). He went back up towards Trafalgar Square before they could – only to find himself trapped in a second kettle further up Whitehall.

But it soon became obvious that the police had set a trap. All the pictures you will have seen in the newspapers, all the footage on the television were orchestrated with the precision of a stage production of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. With nowhere to go, the police left a van (no petrol, no registration plates and just a few ‘token’ items like riot shields, jackets and helmets inside) in the middle of the crowd. This was then raided and smashed up, behaviour one would expect from a penned-in crowd of human beings. Should it have happened? No, we should not rise to their bait – what we should have concentrated on was getting our forces together to break through the (at that point) narrow police lines by the Cenotaph and re-assemble in a free space. But on a demo with no stewarding and little leadership, this could not really occur.

Then came the media who – what a surprise – all just happened to be rather conveniently perched around the van, with pictures and footage being beamed out live. The picture of a few kids on a police van could create the impression that this situation was somehow generalised across the city, with all hell breaking loose. It wasn’t.

Yet the police had their pretext. The ‘enraged’, ‘violent’ school students armed with little more than their blazers and rucksacks had to be ‘contained’ by those poor old police officers, armed to the teeth with riot shields, vans, horses, batons, helicopters complex communications systems and all the rest of it.

This was kettling – legally permissible at that particular hour only due to the existence of anti-terrorism laws which apply to the area. Anti-terrorism laws! Imagine that – the Chiswick High School Terrorists, straight out of double maths….

Yet once the media had got the images they wanted for the BBC, the Murdoch empire and the gutter press, they all soon disappeared. The show was over for them. It would last about another eight hours for the rest of us.

So let us be clear about the supposed ‘violence’ of the demonstration. Is it not particularly ‘violent’ to deprive thousands of people of their freedom of movement and associated for over eight hours in freezing cold temperatures? The whole point of the exercise was to send a message: don’t question the fact that you are a generation being robbed, don’t organise and rebel. If you do, then this will happen.

In terms of state violence we should also mention in passing the Milbank protestor Edward Woolward, who has recently admitted to throwing a fire extinguisher from the roof of the tower. Stupid and wrong, as he would himself probably admit. Caught up in the heat of the moment, he went too far. But he now faces jail.

A bright young man studying classics, politics and philosophy will now face jail. He hardly has a hair on his chin. But this is ‘violence’, right? Well how about the policeman responsible for the murder of Ian Tomlinson at last year’s G20 protests in London? This state-sanctioned murder is on film for all to see. However Tomlinson (who was not even a protestor but just coming home from work!) will not see justice. The policeman has got off scot-free. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4OfBcg9xy0&feature=related)

This is the nature of ‘violence’ under capitalist society. If the state (for Marxists, “bodies of armed men”) terrorise people with all their weaponry (tasers were used against students in Cambridge on Thursday) then that is ‘protecting public interest’. If it is a few people who, contained in a small space for 9 hours, start a few fires to keep warm or push up against the police to get out, then that is ‘violence’.

Despite the bitter cold, the crying need for food, water and rest, the protestors actually kept each other in largely good spirits. The occasional rallying speech delivered from the sidelines, the music pumping out from the mobile speakers and the warmth of the fire/the huddle more than kept people happy. Trapped like animals, there was also the euphoria in hearing news from the outside world. In the manner of a football scores announcer on the telly, one comrade was reading internet reports of the size of demos across the country from her i-phone. But these were more like cricket scores. Really big cricket scores. “2,000 in Bristol; 3,000 in Manchester, 300 in Monmouth!” Monmouth? Did she say Monmouth, that rather conservative, nay reactionary, old border town in South Wales? It was all rather surreal, but certainly kept us going for another few hours.

But by the end we were drained. The icing on the cake was the utterly cynical tactics of the police. All knackered and wanting to go home, we were hardly in a position to stand up properly, let alone run riot on the city. But true to form we were let out in groups of six, walking up towards Trafalgar Square past hundreds upon hundreds of police. We queued for over two hours.

Lessons

There are a number of political lessons that need to urgently be drawn if we are to ensure that our movement is able to get itself into shape for what this coalition is trying to do to us. This should be the subject of another, longer article, but some things are obvious. Here are the ones I think are most salient:

–    We should not be seeking to “occupy Lib Dem HQ”, or organise demos in places like Whitehall which allow the police to employ anti-terrorism legislation as they did so effectively on Thursday.

–    The anti-cuts campaigns must unite. If nothing else, this can ensure that at least we have one major rallying point for a demo instead of four and arrange well-organised, accountable stewarding to provide some leadership. The police have drawn the battle lines. We cannot have illusions that the state is a ‘neutral’ force or one that even ‘protects’ our demonstrations when they are charging pregnant women with horses and kidney-punching minors. We must take our own security and the protection of our own brothers and sisters more seriously. It could have been a lot worse.

–     We need a strategy for what we are trying to achieve, which cannot simply consist of ‘Action, action, action’ until we – somehow – bring down the government. We need to organise this anger and politicise it. We need large mobilisations – crucially drawing in all the other sections of our class who are going to be stomped on by this government – but we need politics.

–    We need to encourage mass political discussion, education and training in local groups. Why? What they really cannot deal with is a politically conscious movement armed with ideas. Take the egregious Martin Samuel of the Daily Mail. He says: “Why aren’t right and wrong on the curriculum?” “You know the problem with students?” he asks (presumably he was one who got ‘educated’ for free) “They get encouraged to think too much”. We communists are of a different opinion. We think that capitalist education is aimed at making a new generation of wage slaves who are docile, passive and unthinking. It is good to see that young people look at such ‘education’ and stick two fingers up when they get asked to pay for it.

–     Crucially, what we need to articulate is a vision beyond capitalism; a programme not just against cuts and fees, but one based on Marxism – radical democracy against the state forces so obviously defending them and not us. The recent demonstrations show that the raw material exists for such a mass, communist student movement. We must do our utmost to ensure that we raise the necessity of such organisation at all times – particularly in anti-cuts campaigns like the Coalition of Resistance, Education Activist Network, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts and others. We cannot let another radicalised generation disintegrate and become politically lost like that of 2003. We must win these brave young people to the most worthy fight: for a society where profits, classes, the state machine, war and ecological disaster are consigned to the dustbin of history where they belong.

Ben Bawerk