But rebelling for what?

A mass uprising against the Irish government would be joined by more than half of young people in the country, a survey reported in the Independent has indicated. Fifty-four per cent of 18 - 34-year-olds said they would take part in a “large scale uprising against the generation in power if it happened in the next days or months”.

36 per cent viewed politicians as corrupt, while 40 per cent said they were partly corrupt. Forty-five per cent said they didn’t trust politics “at all”. However, 25 per cent said very few politicians were corrupt, a figure lower than most of those in the same generation who were surveyed in 14 other countries.  

Only two per cent of those questioned said they completely trusted the Church and 56 per cent they didn’t trust it at all. Eighty per cent of men and 78 per cent of women said they could be happy without religious belief and just 20 per cent said they couldn’t.

The police were not trusted by a large portion of people surveyed said did not fully trust the force. However, the army scored highly on trust levels, with nearly 50 per cent of people trusting it to a large extent.

The Socialist Party welcomes any upsurge in the militancy and resistance and organisation of our class. Protests may demonstrate great strength of feeling but they will also demonstrate a great weakness and this is the lack of control of those who take part and their dependence on the decisions and actions of present power structures. Protests often claimed to be about opposition to capitalism but they were actually much more focused upon a particular element within capitalism. The point is to change society, not to appeal to the doubtful better nature of its power structures. It is a question of cause and effect; we can demonstrate against all kinds of things that we consider ‘unfair’ but unless we recognise and tackle their cause the problem will only remain. Demonstrators can at best hope to alleviate a problem, but the respite is only temporary. The world cannot be made ‘fair’. We must seek to stop the skirmishes by winning the class war and thereby ending it. This is only possible if the capitalist class is dispossessed of its wealth and power. That means that the working class as a whole must understand the issues, and organise and fight for these ends themselves – by organising a political party for the conquest of state power that will convert the means of production into the common property of the whole community.

Join us in the Socialist Party by 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