Is Protest Really Enough? Demand The Impossible!

Well-meaning people from across Britain have again travelled to London to protest their outrage at the policies of Cameron and the ConDem Coalition.

It was heartening to see so many , united in common voice - it reveals the workers can be mobilised around issues they feel are important.

People power is in evidence everywhere, as we see in the Middle East and elsewhere but from our experience - and we've had over 100 years' experience of observing campaigns and demonstrations and protests around every kind of reform and demand imaginable we can confidently say that the demonstration was just one of hundreds over the years that address the symptoms, not the cause of the problem, and will make no significant difference to the established order, or to the way politicians think.

Demonstrators can at best hope to alleviate a problem, but the respite is only temporary.

The TUC protest may have demonstrated a great strength of feeling but it also demonstrated a great weakness; this is the lack of control of those who take part and their dependence on the decisions and actions of present power structures.

Because of this, protesters can become victims of a seductive but deadly process. The capitalist system constantly throws up issues that demand action amongst those who are concerned and by many people who think of themselves as socialists.

As a result, protest tends to become a demand for an “improved” kind of capitalism which leaves the long-term reasons for protest intact. This has been the history of protest.

In this sense, protest tends to set a stage for further protest and further demonstrations. Though the issues may vary the message stays the same: “We demand that governments do this, or do that or do the other!”

The spectacle of thousands demanding that governments act on their behalf is a most reassuring signal to those in power that their positions of control are secure. In this way, repeated demonstrations do little more than confirm the continuity of the system. The point is to change society, not to appeal to the doubtful better nature of its power structures.

Consider this.

Across the globe there are literally hundreds of thousands of campaigns and protest groups and many more charities, some small, some enormous, all pursuing tens of thousands of issues, and their work involves many millions of sincere workers who care passionately about their individual causes and give their free time to support them unquestioningly. Many will have campaigned on some single issue for years on end with no visible result; others will have celebrated minor victories and then joined another campaign groups, spurred on by that initial success.

Two things stand out: firstly, that many of the problems around us are rooted in the way our society is organised for production, and are problems we have been capable of solving for quite some time, though never within the confines of a profit-driven market system; secondly, that if all of these well meaning people had have directed all their energy - all those tens of billions of human labour hours expended on their myriad single issues - to the task of overthrowing the system that creates a great deal of the problems around us, then none of us would be here today.

Instead we would have established a world without borders, without waste or want or war, in which we would all have free access to the benefits of civilisation with problem solving devoid of the artificial constraints of the profit system.

Every aspect of our lives is subordinated to the requirements of profit - from the moment you brush your teeth in the morning with the toothpaste you saw advertised on TV until you crawl into your bed at night. Pick up a newspaper and try locating any problem reported there outside of our "can't pay - can't have" system. Crime, the health service, poverty, drug abuse, hunger, disease, homelessness, unemployment, war, insecurity - the list is endless.

All attract their campaign groups, all struggling to address these problems, and all of these problems arising because of the inefficient and archaic way we organise our world for production. We were unlike any other group there, out to reform capitalism, who beg governments to be just a little less horrid, who ask our masters to throw us a few more crumbs from the bread we bake. We are not into the politics of compromise and we certainly are not prepared to be satisfied with crumbs. We demand the whole bakery and the wheat-fields too!

We urge you to stop belittling yourself and your class by making the same age-old demands of the master class.

Demand what until now has been considered "the impossible"!

Join us in campaigning for a system of society where there are no leaders, no classes, no states or governments, no borders, no force or coercion; a world where the earth's natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled and where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used to the benefit of all; a world of free access to the necessaries of life.

Wouldn't such a campaign movement not only address the real root of every campaign and protest currently being waged?

The choice is yours - the struggle for world socialism and an end to our real problems or a lifetime attached to the "pick-your-cause" brigade and the certainty you will be retracing your footsteps here today in years to come.

If you lend your support to a political party or organisation that fails to question the real nature of capitalist society, how our world is organised for production and how power is distributed, then you are in effect supporting a system that created this recession—and will produce future depressions.

The Socialist Party