YESTERDAY the bourgeois media was full of the thoughts of police chiefs who are preparing for a ‘summer of rage’, and pointing to the 120,000 strong anti-capitalism demonstration in Dublin, in the aftermath of the Greek revolutionary demonstrations, as just the semblance of what’s to come in the UK.
What has got the police and other representatives of the capitalist state so rattled is the universal nature of the current capitalist crisis.
At the time of the 1926 general strike, the middle class was loyal to the bourgeois order, and large numbers of students made themselves available for scabbing activities.
Even in the hungry days of the 1930s, the British Empire was still intact, as was the influx of loot from it, and for those who had jobs life was tolerable. These layers constituted a base for the bourgeois order.
Today, however, British imperialism is not even a shadow of its former self. It has lost its empire and thanks to Thatcher has lost its industrial base.
All those who said that ‘we’ did not need any industry – and that ‘our’ banks would rule the world, and that crumbs from the tables of the banking elite would find their way down to workers in the service industries – stand confounded.
The banks have all collapsed. What is left of industry is folding up and for the working class and the middle class life is becoming a hell, with the older generations seeing their savings vanish rapidly while they are wondering just how their children and grandchildren will survive.
What disturbs the police chiefs is that they can see no basic section of society prepared to go out onto the streets to defend the capitalist order.
The bankers are hated and capitalism is rapidly becoming a very dirty word.
This is why the police chiefs and the army officers are already anticipating demonstrations of millions of workers and middle class people on basic issues of jobs, wages, pensions and healthcare, all of which capitalism can no longer provide.
While the state is very concerned, it is however not totally unprepared.
The period of the 1970s was a historical rehearsal for the current developing situation.
During the course of it, army officers such as General Frank Kitson worked out just what the army would have to do when millions with just grievances came out onto the streets and overwhelmed the police with sheer numbers.
Kitson, who was a brigadier in charge of the 39th Air Portable Brigade in northern Ireland at the time of Bloody Sunday, wrote a book ‘Low Intensity Operations’, about this situation.
He said that it was vital that the army should intervene with the maximum ruthlessness to restore order, and that any fumbling or indecision would be fatal for the established order.
However, one of the features of the current situation is the battering that the British army has taken in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the consequent demoralisation of numbers of officers and soldiers who might not be prepared to defend governments that they blame for their defeats.
The issue for the working class is not to stand around waiting to see just what will happen, but to build up the necessary revolutionary leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party inside the trade unions and amongst the youth, to be able to take advantage of a situation where millions of people suddenly are able to take control of big cities in the days ahead, which is what the police are envisioning.
The revolutionary party must be able to act decisively and to mobilise the working class and the youth to lead the majority of the middle class to overthrow the government of the day, and take the power, breaking up the police and the officer corps in the process and in the aftermath.
This is the only way that capitalism is going to be put an end to, and the plans for a military police state in the UK defeated.
