50,000 march in London against austerity measures

[radiocaroline]

Stand up and do what? Mobilise for what? I'm not criticising the "people's assemblies" for not starting a revolution, I'm criticising them for not being able to secure reforms at all. Reforms can be won only through the militant pressure of the working class - economic and political pressure on the bourgeoisie. Not marches and rallies and speeches and "we are the 99%"-style populism.

And seriously, Brand made some noises about socialism (big deal, so did Bombacci and Rosselli), but he's obviously some sort of confused liberal. But just because he made some vague statement about something he calls socialism, and because he's a celebrity, the "left of Labour" crowd thinks he can inspire people to fight for their own interest! What an incredibly cynical view of workers, as if a prole needs some celebrity toff to tell him he's being oppressed.

I'm not a big fan of Brand and his political ideology is confused. But I am saying he helps develop interest.. I'm not being cynical of workers in saying that Brand has helped to at least attempt to raise awareness of a movement for people in austerity. People cannot do much unless there is an organisation which can help them get a point across, which has been lost with New Labour

[Comrade #138672]

There's so much grassroots and largescale organising going on that gets ignored that, if only people knew about it, could be the start of a wider movement.

Which explains why it is being ignored. Which means we must spread it instead.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Why can't this be a space for contacts to be made and occupations to be planned?

Well, it could be. So could the local pub. One advantage of the local pub is that it doesn't divert working-class militancy into struggles for reformist "left of Labour" formations or "anti-austerity" populism.

What actions can we, as the millitant part of the working class, undertake to raise class consciousness and resist austerity, and from there on capitalism?

I disagree with the way in which the question has been framed. It is not a matter of resisting austerity "and from there on" capitalism, as if there are two stages to the struggle - first one resists austerity (or the more nebulous "neoliberalism"), forming a bloc with "anti-austerity" bourgeois forces (the Greens, Die Linke, SYRIZA, dead and decaying Old Labour, whatever), then one fights against capitalism. But it doesn't work. What happens is that the bourgeois forces you helped to power in the "first stage" betray you and you end up with a lot of workers who have been burned out. You resist austerity alongside capitalism in general, fighting for reforms where appropriate but never forgetting the final goal of the overthrow of the bourgeois state (and not simply as something that will happen in decades or centuries).

I'm not a big fan of Brand and his political ideology is confused. But I am saying he helps develop interest.. I'm not being cynical of workers in saying that Brand has helped to at least attempt to raise awareness of a movement for people in austerity. People cannot do much unless there is an organisation which can help them get a point across, which has been lost with New Labour

Ah, and what, pray tell, could "Old" Labour do to "help them get a point across", send the army against striking miners? Arm sectarian gangs in North Ireland? Participate in the rotten, anti-communist "Socialist" International? Labour has been a bourgeois workers' party since it was founded.

[Futility Personified]

A lot of ordinary people will not have accurate conceptions of capitalism, some of them are under complete illusions about what the government is doing, austerity is a key part of capitalist cycles. Austerity is the latest attack on living standards and so the closest head of the leviathan to strike. Before this thread ends up derailed, i'll iterate my point a bit more clearly in relation to the initial topic.

If the BBC are not reporting opposition to austerity, then they are not accurately reporting dissent with the attack on living standards. If people are unaware of an opposition existing, then they are going to be more alienated and feel more hopeless about struggling against capitalism, if they even see capitalism as an entity as something to be opposed.

Capitalist media is going to be hostile to any revolutionary aims, so their approval is not being sought. But raising awareness of the existence of opposition brings the potential for new people to get involved. The legitimate anti-capitalist left would ideally inveigle itself with these movements styling themselves as mass movements to demonstrate anti-capitalist ideas. There was that "what should the left be doing" thread floating around here somewhere where people demonstrated a lot of ideas that would be relevant to increasing the militancy of a 'movement' like this. If the political grounding is poor, then surely it exists as a recruiting pool?

These things can be gateways to pointless reformist demands, or annoying "old labour was the way forward" campaigning, but they can also be introductions to direct action and why direct actions can result in concrete gains for workers.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

Oh my Russell.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Nyet, but because GMM explicitly criticised the BBC for only reporting about strikes "so they can spin it" (as if they wouldn't spin the reporting of this march). Surely strikes are much more valuable to us than marches alongside liberals.

Just to be clear, I think the media is very specific about which strikes they report and which marches as well. They'll report quite heavily about the teachers' strikes or the London Underground strikes because they can try to spin that to reflect badly upon the workers; "Millions of children out of school"/"Millions disrupted in London over 500 jobs" - that sort of shit. But they won't report about the Hovis factory workers winning a strike against zero-hour contracts, for example, even if they're running programmes on tv centred around the controversy of zero-hour contracts.

It's obvious that the bourgeois media has very specific criteria regarding what parts of the workers' movement they report, namely in such a way that attempts to sap the motivation of workers to engage in struggles.