I have been trying to decipher the ongoing wars over the 'deficit ceiling' in the US.  Essentially, as you may have read, the Republicans in Congress are raising the prospect of forcing a default by refusing to raise the 'deficit ceiling', which would allow the US to borrow sufficient money to pay its bills.  They insist that they will only support an increase if the administration assents to a plan to repay the deficit with 100% spending cuts and no increase in tax revenues. 

There is precedent for this sort of conduct.  The creation of fiscal crises in order to force a transformation of class relations (as mediated through the public sector) is a mainstay of neoliberal ruling classes since, perhaps, the New York City fiscal crisis.  It's certainly how the Republicans have attempted to force through such changes in Wisconsin.  Even so, playing chicken with the government's ability to pay its bills might strike you as insanely counter-productive even from the perspective of the US ruling class.  A default would be deeply damaging to US capitalism.  And certainly, Wall Street is not happy with the Republicans' conduct, despite the latter's claim that they are merely deferring to the mighty bond markets.  It's important to appreciate just how far Obama has gone to meet the Republicans' demands.  He is quite insistent that trillions of dollars of 'savings' (cuts) need to be found over the next decade, and recently offered the GOP a $4000bn 'grand bargain', comprising deep cuts to social security and medicare - which has further alienated his base and shocked some on the left of the Democratic Party.  All the Democrats want is the ability to raise some of the money from tax revenues, and for a little bit of that to come from the richer tax payers.  As Shawn Whitney points out, there doesn't appear to be a difference of principle between Obama and his Republican opponents, merely one of degree. In fact, the strident articulation of neoliberal orthodoxy by the administration is one of the reasons why centre-left economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich keep bashing their heads against their keyboards.

There is a rumour, being encouraged by the administration, that by supporting cuts Obama is cannily positioning himself as a 'moderate' to win over frightened independent voters.  This seems superficially plausible, and feeds into the narrative, disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic, that Obama is trying to steer a sensible course between right and left whose silly ideological squabbles risks destroying the economy.  Yet governments always claim a pseudo-democratic mandate for policies they intend to pursue anyway by claiming that they're beholden to the voters.  The same governments, you tend to find, are quite happy to force through unpopular policies, while claiming that the issue is too important to treat as a political football (meaning it's too important for democracy). 

Obama will probably have no difficulty being re-elected, not because he has delivered for his voters, but because he has delivered for capitalism.  Yes, capitalism is now operating at a much lower growth rate, with a larger reserve army of labour.  But profitability has made a recovery, and some of the worst has been avoided, even if this does mean that there is a glut of unproductive capital that hasn't been destroyed.  (The Hayekians in the Republican Party are particularly exercised by this).  Jared Bernstein, a former Google exec who has moved through the revolving doors connecting silicon capitalism to the White House (I am assured I'm wrong about this, see comment thread), points out that the distributive trends under Obama's watch have been as terrible for wages as they have been a boon for profits, and provides this graph:

Note what's happened here.  Financialization has tended to mean not the dominance of financial corporations over industry, but rather the emergence of industrial and service firms as autonomous financial actors.  They tend to fund their investments from their own retained profits rather than from bank lending, and those profits have been increasingly augmented by financial holdings.  A classic example was GM making 40% of its profits from financial investments.  So, though industry is still sluggish, productive investment is low, and unemployment is settling at a higher new plateau (notably, the Obama administration accepts that this reflects a 'natural' or 'structural' rate of unemployment), the revival of Wall Street has boosted profitability.  

The result is that the US capitalist class is rallying behind Obama's re-election campaign.  His 2012 campaign manager has recently announced that Obama raised "$86 million for the first quarter - shattering previous fundraising records by incumbents, dwarfing the totals of the GOP field, and besting the campaign's own $80 million target".  The Republicans, as far as I'm concerned, are taking a dive this time.  The candidates they are fielding are heavily weighted toward the lunatic right, and the grandees don't appear to be disciplining the reactionaries ahead of the election.  As a consequence, no matter how much Obama disappoints his own base, his well-financed campaign, unchallenged in the Democratic Party, combined with revulsion over the Bachmanns, Santorums, Gingriches and Pawlentys, will probably ensure victory.  So, I'm saying that the dance-off between Obama and the Republicans is not mainly about the election.

What's really happening is that Obama is using the Republican right as a weapon against his own base to deliver policies that his class allies favour.  Yet he has no intention of allowing the GOP to force a default, and seems to be intent on avoiding a completely cuts-based approach to the deficit.  And he has the class power of Wall Street backing him up.  Apart from anything else, there's the strange relationship with Chinese capitalism to think about.  The US hasn't completely gone down the route of austerity in the way that EU ruling classes have, in part I think because the US-PRC axis which has basically driven global growth depends on America borrowing to buy Chinese products, while China ensures a profitable investment climate for overseas capital.  Defaulting, undertaking excessive or premature 'fiscal consolidation', or hitting consumer spending too hard, would presumably put that dynamic in some danger.  In other words, I think what's happening here is a relatively sophisticated and partially choreographed example of class praxis, with the political conditions being created for the rolling out of an austerity project with a degree of flexibility and pragmatism built in.  The deficit wars, from the White House's perspective, seem to be largely about putting manners on the Republican far right while using them to neutralise popular opposition to the coming capitalist offensive.

Dan Hind makes some astute observations here, on the need to break the coalition before the next election. He argues for a strategy designed to split the Liberals, and in so doing save them from historical oblivion. A few observations, then.

I would guess he rightly judges Labour's position, which is that the last thing they want at this point is political power. The Blairites are convinced that they would have to implement the same cuts as the Tories are doing, (ex-chairman Peter Watts has even bizarrely claimed that opposing cuts is hurting Labour), and that it would be much easier to allow them to get on with it. The Labour soft left doesn't yet have a coherent alternative, or at least not one they're able to articulate or willing to fight for. Neither side really wants to re-open an old civil war, though the Right are better placed to wage it if it comes. So, they are sitting it out, passively awaiting the Tory meltdown and their dream ticket in 2015. Their strategy would involve striking the correct poses in the face of catastrophe, while nonetheless doing little to prevent it. (Dan does not say, but we should note, that this has significant consequences for the conduct of the labour movement's resistance to austerity. If the trade union leadership subordinates its actions to the objective of getting 'their' party in government, then that most certainly entails an attempt to keep the lid on militancy).

Where I think Hind is wrong is in assuming that the Sage of Twickenham is some sort of radical liberal, a Yellow Booker rather than an Orange Booker, who could reconstitute the Lib Dems as some sort of progressive force. The source of this bafflingly, stunningly ridiculous idea is probably Vince Cable himself. Cable has been laundering himself as the 'left' conscience of the coalition for some time, though he has always been a continental 'economic liberal', a privatizing free marketeer, and a primary founder of the 'Orange Book' tendency. He has recently described himself as a 'social democrat', in an interview in which he seemed to vaguely rebuke the finance-led cuts strategy that he has participated in, with some qualms. But by his own account you can't believe a word the man says. More fundamentally, to attempt a rescue of the Liberals as a potentially reformist agency is to miss what is happening here. Dan fears that if the Liberals are wiped out, there will be some horrible stalemate, in which the Tories and Labour compete over an ever diminishing space in the middle ground, prosecuting the same basic neoliberal policies while the balance shifts periodically between social liberalism and authoritarianism. But if enough Liberal MPs can be tempted to break from the Orange Book freaks, then Liberalism can be reconstituted along '1908' lines, and electoral competitive pressures could still force the major parties to adopt beneficial reforms. Hence, save the Liberals.

The problems with this are various - we shall leave aside the disparity between ambitious ends and inauspicious means - but perhaps a good starting point is to look at the current electoral realignments. The haemhorrage of the Liberal vote in England, and the surge for the SNP in Scotland should be considered as parallel elements of the same process. This is not the first time we've seen such sudden, sharp alterations in political composition - consider the rise of the SDP after 1981 and the concomitant contraction of Labourism. It is the sort of realignment that Gramsci spoke of, regarding a period of 'organic crisis': "At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression ... [this] occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity." (Emphasis added) A logical result is "the passage of the troop of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class" at a speed "almost like lightning in comparison with periods of calm". ('Hegemony, The State & Civil Society').

The point here would be that the current recomposition of the electorate looks epochal rather than merely conjunctural to me. This does not mean it is irreversible, but that political solutions based on reversing such trends are conservative and perhaps oriented toward situations that are no longer pertinent. The Liberals' capacity to operate as a sort of surrogate social democracy reached its high point (and what a thrilling zenith that was) in 2005, oweing to the war, Blair's unpopularity, and a load of festering discontents over 'New Labour'. The war isn't over, but it's ceased to be foregrounded at the ballot-box; Blair is gone; and 'New Labour' has lost control of the Labour Party to a union-backed candidate. In the meantime, the Liberals had experienced an internal putsch against the mildly social democratic Charles Kennedy by the Orange Bookers. This process was mandated by the party faithful. In 2011, the Liberals are part of a privatizing, cutting, war cabinet, and show no signs of wishing to be anything but the Whigs to Cameron's Peelites. Beg their MPs, send them letters, petition and doortep them... but with their polling average at 10%, their leader a national hate figure unable to visit a daycare centre without being picketed, and their party mauled in local elections, is there any sign of anyone listening? The great majority of them have already voted for the cuts; they made their decision, knowing what to expect. And it isn't because they're masochistic - it's because they believe that if they hold on until 2015, growth will have resumed, people will feel prosperous, and the electorate will duly reward them.

This brings me to my next point, which bears on the sort of pressure that would be required to compel MPs to shift their position. Parliamentarians, as we have come to know, are effectively insulated from popular pressure by the institutions they work in. The ancient caricature of politicians chasing every vote, greasily promising all things to all people, vacillating to appease a mercurial popular will, doesn't even raise a smirk these days. Political careerism in this era means, above all, clinging doggedly to unpopular orthodoxy ('principle') and representing it as the only game in town ('realism'). Yes, they still worry about losing their seats, but as long as the general wipeout isn't too severe, then the effective ones can always be looked after. Since the Liberals are betting on a revival by the end of this five-year term, and since they almost all accept the argument in favour of cuts, they will calculate that pissing off millions of voters is a short-term risk they can afford to take. They certainly won't be inclined to take seriously the threat that the local anti-cuts committee will turf them out of office. Unless.

The only kind of pressure that could, for example, turn 38 cuts-supporting Liberals into anti-cuts radicals is the kind of disruption that would worry their bosses, and their bosses' bosses. We're not talking about protests, riots, occupying public or commercial facilities, or even big one day strikes. They've planned for that. They're ready to police it. We're talking about a fundamental, enduring and self-perpetuating realignment of leftist, labour and oppositional forces, their emergence as a militant political alliance such that capital began to worry for its ability to maintain control without making serious concessions, and such that the long-term viability of the parties making up the coalition was under threat. The coalition is, yes, highly unstable, fragile, comprising antagonistic components... but its breakdown would not have to work to the benefit of the anti-cuts Left. It could just as easily permit a re-polarisation of the Tory bloc, with perhaps some new Liberal allies incorporated, to the Right. Only if there were an anti-cuts campaign whose 'message' is being communicated with compelling force, and that campaign had something to do with the breakdown, would it benefit the Left. Yet, it is precisely such mobilisation that would hasten the contraction of the centre ground and thus help reduce the popular basis for Liberalism. It seems to me that at this moment in history, the destruction of the Liberals would be an aspect of our advance; and that to attempt to rescue them, even on a radical basis, even through threats and protest, would be a detour down an historical cul de sac.

I. The Right. The Right's response to the 2008 slump was fast and effective. They first participated in an enormous leveraging of the state, through the unprecedented bail out of financial institutions, then took every opportunity to explain that the problem was one of over-spending and indebtedness. It wasn't just the banks who had been too gluttonous. That old bogey, the socialist state, bore responsibility for burdening the British people with larcenous rates of taxation, in order to fund a useless and intrusive welfare state that left people miserable and dysfunctional. It's important to recognise how well-timed and well-pitched this was.

Prior to 2008, the Tories could not have made this argument and anticipated making any headway with it. Instead, their strategy was to match Labour's spending totals and conduct a war of position over the priorities within that accepted framework. But in a sequence notably punctuated by the quasi-comical (underwhelming, on its own terms) parliamentary 'expenses' scandal, the Right engaged in a series of manouevres which blamed Labour 'over-spending' for the deficit - 'over-spending' which, until then, they were committed to continuing. And they were given credence by a majority of the British people for a period of time. There was something very Thatcherite in the manner in which the Right sought to mobilise a certain residual culture of masochism behind austerity - you have over-indulged and must now repent. They operated on a series of connotative linkages, eg, between household and state expenditure, in which the private fear that one has borrowed more than one can afford to pay back is bonded to the ideologeme which holds that the state is always inefficient, always over-spending, necessarily unproductive, and always in need of perpetual down-sizing. This is the petit-bourgeois manner of thinking, univeralised - the nation imagined as a corner shop that has to balance its books and keep an eye out for thieves. Of course, no recipient of state largesse is more inefficient, and less productive, than the 'benefit scroungers'. Tory propaganda duly worked on this theme, and Osborne swung the axe heavily in the direction of the welfare lifeline. Polls tended to find that people approved of this aspect of the cuts agenda.

II. The Left. Until the student protests, the Left was beset on all sides by a pervading dysphoria and utter perplexity. We know the script after all. The capitalist system goes into an unprecedented global crisis, every stable co-ordinate of the political-ideological universe is unsettled, governments start borrowing and spending like crazy to stave off a complete collapse, suddenly the bastardised Keynesianism of 'old Labour' is back in vogue. In such circumstances, the Right should be on the back-foot and class struggles should take off. And by 'class struggles', I don't simply mean strikes and factory occupations. It is in the nature of capitalism to multiply sites of antagonism, and in each of these class will be present in different ways, whether it's over healthcare, supermarket chains, women's oppression, immigrant labour, the media, or war. Notably, the struggles that did emerge, in Vestas, Visteon, the Lindsey oil workers dispute, the Tower Hamlets lecturers' strike, etc., cannot be reduced to simple labour-management disputes over jobs, pay and conditions. Rather, each contained a pronounced 'political' element - the environment, pensions, education, immigration, etc.

Given an organic crisis in capitalism, a crisis in productive relations that could not be localised, but necessarily radiated to every political and ideological relation embedded in the system, the Left should have been aggressively making advances on multiple fronts. The Left should have been taking territory and hostages, leaving opponents reeling. But this is not what happened, barring the few flare-ups which I mentioned. And the case of Lindsey, which resulted in thousands of workers marching for "foreigners out!", showed that such struggles as did take off did not have to benefit the Left. This is the point at which, traditionally, one warns against 'vulgar economism' and 'workerism', but this is only a real temptation among a few hold-outs of the Left influenced by traditional labourism - recall that Gramsci's critique of 'economism' was aimed at the reformist trade union leadership. The more prevalent error today is to think that Leftist politics can be conducted without any orientation toward class. Still, it's hard to see how the Left, even discounting for its currently depleted, scattered state, could have done much about the level of class struggle. It was forced into a positional struggle, an ideological battle, in which the 'common sense' of neoliberalism initially prevailed over the competing 'common sense' of social democracy.

III. The War of Position. While we anticipate major social struggles continuing over the next few years, with no certainty of avoiding catastrophe much less of attaining victory, the 'war of position' will continue to be as important as outright combat. Indeed, ideological, parliamentary and cultural struggles do a great deal to prepare the pre-conditions for more militant forms of combat such as the withdrawal of labour, factory and university occupations, and other disruptive actions. Here, the Right has long understood something that the Left will do well to remember. Whatever the plane of crisis, whatever the axis of struggle, the issue can always be put another way.

The crisis of capitalism became a crisis of over-spending, just as the crisis of poverty became a crisis of social dysfunction, and a crisis of authority in the British state became a crisis of 'multiculturalism'. The Right didn't win all the arguments in 2008-9 - far from it. If the washout of yesterday's right-wing 'Rally Against Debt' is any guide, and it was plugged in the media far more than it deserved to be, there is hardly any enthusiasm for the latest assault on welfare and public services. But the Right doesn't have to win all the arguments, or generate enthusiasm. Its near monopoly of the popular and broadsheet press, along with the complicity of the centre-left, allowed it to operate on genuinely popular assumptions, absorbe the elements of popular discontent and polarise them to the Right.

The majority do want to keep some sort of well-funded public sector, don't favour privatization in the NHS, support state education, and blame the bankers for the recession. But distrust of the state (for some good reasons - the Tories focused a lot of their fire on New Labour authoritarianism and centralisation) is also widespread, as is discontent with how money is spent (again, for some good reasons - think of the PFI boondoggles). Anti-immigrant sentiment is at an all-time high, disdain for beggars and benefit recipients is widespread, and support for redistributive politics after thirteen years of New Labour in office is now a minority pursuit. Meanwhile, local councils are often encountered as some of the most inept, obstinate, and coldly indifferent bureaucracies in the country. So, with a near Pravda-esque capitalist realism propagated through the state and capitalist media - and one is struck by how often it is still taken as 'obvious' that some cuts have to be made somewhere - it only remained for the Tories and their allies to furnish the popular imagination with endless examples of alleged 'waste', incompetence, and fraud. Local councils spending your money on Muslim-only toilets, benefit fraud, illegal immigration, 'health tourism', etc. But things don't have to be this way.

IV. Winning. Left-wing campaigns have focused on reminding people that they hate the rich, really resent them and their power and arrogance; that they don't trust the Tories; that they like having free healthcare and schools; that the despised bankers caused the crisis, and not ordinary people; that mass unemployment is a social ill for which they will suffer; that they're against the wars for which there is endless government money; and that if they think the state is inefficient, they have already tried the private capitalism of Enron, Worldcom and Lehman Brothers. Since it is normal for people to entertain conflicting ideas and ambitions, the aim is firstly to shift the weight of emphasis along the continuum away from reactionary resentment and toward popular and class-based anger. Secondly, it is to destabilise the austerity alliance by attacking their weak links, and shaking free some loose elements ripe for re-appropriation. For all that we repeat that the ruling coalition is a Thatcherite one, we also have to constantly bear in mind its historical specificity. It is an unstable government, binding Whigs, Peelites, and High Tories, Thatcherite mods and rockers, Europhiles and Atlanticists, social liberals and reactionaries, have-a-go-heroes and hoodie-huggers, finance capital, producers, the petite-bourgeoisie and the progressive middle class. Attacking the unity of this coalition and dispersing its constituents is a precondition for any meaningful advance. Thirdly, the aim is to re-articulate many of the same elements operated on by the right into a new majoritarian leftist political mobilisation.

UK Uncut is an interesting political intervention in this respect. It can never fulfil the latter two remits, but look at its contribution to the former. There's been an awful lot of focus on its method of organising, which may be facing a crisis as it comes under the steamroller of police repression, but far more important is what it has said, the way it has interceded in the ideological field, drawing attention to the underfunding of the state by the rich, the state's leniency toward the rich, and the fact that cuts are not inevitable or necessary but rather a class-loaded 'ideological' project. From a peevish, sectarian perspective, one could write it off as a sort of middle class 'people power' movement that will change sfa. But that would be to miss the point entirely. It already has changed what it set out to change: the field of signification. This advance is highly circumscribed, was not achieved by UK Uncut alone, and leaves much work to be accomplished by other forces - but it's still not to be sniffed at.

The second goal, of shattering the coalition, which the Tories depend on to impose their version of austerity, is not something that one could just assume would happen as a result of the 'contradictions' of the coalition. It is something that has to be worked on. The student protests rightly targeted Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems as much as the Tories, turning the renegade Liberal leader ("wolf-eyed replicant"...) into a national hate figure, running the Liberals down in the polls, and ultimately making it difficult for them even to show their faces in public. I cannot understand the approach of those who say that the Tories are the real enemy and that therefore the venom toward the Liberal leadership is a waste of good spleen. It's because the Tories are the 'real enemy' that they have to be isolated, and this coalition broken. As of now, the Tories still don't have enough support to win an election by themselves. They briefly commanded an electorally viable plurality in the period from 2007 to 2009, but have since 2010 been back to their normal range votes, tending to be somewhere between the low to mid-thirties - this despite the astonishing ineptitude of a Labour leadership that never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Every time the Tories come out with some right-wing poison about immigration or 'integration', it places the coalition in danger. The harder they push for the deepest cuts, for privatization, the more the Liberal leadership has to placate its shrivelled 'social liberal' conscience. When the Tories hammered the disastrous AV campaign, it consistently put the Liberals on the back foot. Now they have nothing to show for their gambit, a sort of queen's sacrifice - bar the cuts, and the steadily accumulating ranks of knights, bishops and pawns on the Tories' side. The only rational thing for the Left to do in such circumstances is to keep hammering away, by every available means, until the coalition splits, or enough Liberals defect to trigger an early election.

The third goal, that of re-articulating the elements of popular discontent into a majoritarian leftist response to austerity, has proved more difficult. Let's not deny what has been achieved. The turnout for the big TUC rally was amazing, as deep as it was broad, truly representative of the British labour movement and its periphery - and what a powerful movement that could be if it decided to move all as one. There are real pressures for mass, coordinated strike action coming from below in every trade union. This hasn't turned into independent, rank and file initiative in most cases. Largely, the direction remains in the hands of the bureaucracy. But the pressure is there, and is contributing to the build-up for a mass strike on 30th June. But the attempt to build a national political campaign against cuts with similar social depth is taking time. Actually, there are several competing vehicles, and not one of them is adequate on its own; not one capable of extending beyond its party basis and periphery. While each broadly has the same analysis of the cuts, they all operate in different ways, relate to different constituencies, and address a different aspect of the same problem. Such parcellization almost guarantees that these vehicles will remain confined to the extant left, unable to harness wider forces. This isn't to play the sad old finger-wagging game of simply denouncing 'divisions on the Left', wryly referencing 'Life of Brian' for the boreteenth time, as if anyone is actually in favour of such divisions. Sometimes, these divisions are necessary, or have a legitimate basis, or are unavoidable; sometimes they aren't. There's no way, at any rate, to simply over-ride these. So, somehow, the different groups have to find the appropriate level at which they can engage in unified action, in order to coordinate publicity and solidarity campaigns, locally and nationally. One could envision, for example, a multiplicity of possible structures (more or less centralised, or federal, depending on the degree of agreement between the factions involved, and the degree of democracy each mode of organising permits) to which different campaign groups could agree to affiliate for a fee, and which would seek the funding and support of the trade unions, etc.. The alternative is to allow the political direction of the anti-cuts movement to be fixed somewhere between a Labour leadership that actually argues for (slower, less savage) cuts, and a trade union leadership some of whose big battalions have resigned themselves to doing the bare minimum to oppose cuts.

Of course, it isn't just about merging the vessels of the extant left into a single flotilla, at least not for its own sake. It is only worth doing if it increases the combined efficacy of the forces involved. But the point is to coordinate ideological and cultural counterpoints to the politics of austerity, which task seems to require a pooling of resources and combination of forces. As and when struggles emerge, unpredictably as they will, the aim is that they will not emerge in a socio-symbolic field cultivated exclusively by the Right, so that they merely appear as law and order problem, but in one where their actions are intelligible as logical and worthy responses to a widely apprehended injustice. This will be particularly important as, increasingly, we're forced to operate in the space between purely impotent civil society protest and illegal and potentially dangerous adventurism. The state hasn't been able to operate through cooptation and consent since the 1960s, and has thus tended increasingly toward the authoritarian end of the spectrum of rule. The criminalisation and suppression of protest, however peaceful and formally within the law, is consonant with that. The police will need to continually justify their mode of highly repressive policing without being seen as the armed wing of a particular government, which would be a threat to their legitimacy. Thus, they have to turn a growing number of protests into heavily fortified battlegrounds, with their opponents pre-designated as violent criminals. The propaganda battle is, of course, partly dependent on class struggles taking off. That is why some of the propaganda stunts are themselves miniature 'actions', forms of deliberate disruption. But even as they do, there can always be simultaneous work going on to reinforce the principles of articulation, the political logics by which diverse contestations are brought into a coherent whole. Opportunities for parliamentary mobilisation may come into this, although recent election results seem to have indicated that in most cases it's close to useless for left-of-Labour forces to stand their own candidates. But there will be other elections, where it is more plausible to stand: student and trade union bodies, local councils, etc. Certainly, legal battles will be important, as the recent G20 verdict demonstrates. Anti-fascist and anti-racist work will be important, as a desperate Tory party is apt to shore up support by attacking minorities. All of this can be done best if it is done with a constant focus on shifting the balance of common sense away from the neoliberal pole, and in the process transforming the contents of mainstream social democratic thinking in a leftist direction.

Take a deep breath, and don't let it out until you've finished this sentence: the Metropolitan Police are charging Alfie Meadows with 'violent disorder'. Now you can collect your jaw from the floor.

Alfie Meadows is the student who was beaten so badly by police that he had to undergo serious brain surgery. He was also, reportedly, denied an ambulance by police for a considerable period of time. When he finally boarded an ambulance, police attempted to prevent the ambulance from delivering him to Charing Cross hospital on the grounds that the hospital was reserved for the treatment of injured rozzers, not their victims. This happened on the afternoon of 9th December, Day X 3, the day of the parliamentary vote on tuition fees when tens of thousands protested in Westminster and across the country. It was on that evening, you may recall, that police engaged in a particularly nasty, punitive 'kettle' of protesters on Westminster Bridge. Alfie Meadows was beaten across the skull by a policeman with a baton, but is being charged for an offence that carries a maximum sentence of five years.

Eleven people have been charged with various offenses under the Public Order Act by the 'Operation Malone' unit of the Metropolitan Police. The unit in question was set up with 80 officers solely to investigate the student protests, and as such represents a massive outlay just to arrest people who are either innocent of any crime, or at most guilty of very minor ones. The inclusion of Alfie Meadows on the charge sheet is clearly politicised, bearing in mind the IPCC's ongoing investigation into the case. One also has to take into account the recent High Court decision that the kettling of G20 protesters was illegal, which could and should result in thousands suing the police. But it's also typical of the police's way of handling cases where they may be vulnerable. You might recall the example of Jake Smith, who was arrested after the Gaza protests in 2009. The case collapsed when it was disclosed that the footage showed, not Jake Smith engaging in 'violent disorder', but rather the police engaging in a violent attack on Jake Smith.

Of course, everything that is done by the state with reference to the student protests has a wider social mission, which is to preemptively criminalise the coming social struggles and validate the police's pre-meditated violence. Take the case of Edward Woolard, the 18 year old who dropped a fire extinguisher from the roof of Tory HQ. He was disgracefully given a sentence of 32 months. This was longer than the sentence handed out to some rapists, though no one was harmed. The judge's homily explained that the court was "sending out a very clear message to anyone minded to behave in this way that an offence of this seriousness will not be tolerated". Of course, sending out 'messages', or rather heavily moralised threats, is what the criminal justice system does by nature. And we get the message alright.

Yes, they beat someone's skull in. Yes, this was part of a series of violent tactics deployed by police, which included assaults on young boys, and teenaged girls. Yes, if the protests had continued, and the police had continued with their tactics, they probably would have killed someone just as they killed Ian Tomlinson. We'll be lucky if, in the next few years, they don't kill another protester. And their very clear message is that whatever happens, just as they did with Jean Charles de Menezes and the Koyair brothers, they will always find a way to blame the victim, exonerate or protect the guilty, and continue as before.

It was something that I haven't really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you're a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.

Before we go any further, a digression. Can I please make an urgent appeal on behalf of sense and dignity for people to stop repeating the idiotic journalistic cliche that a minority of 'hardliners' (or worse, 'violent extremists') spoiled things for everyone else. So much work, you hear them say, so much time spent building up a great day, and these wreckers - yes, wreckers! - have to come and ruin it. Certainly, if all that matters is having a fun day out, giving a good impression in front of the media, the police and the politicians, and 'raising awareness', then I can see the logic. But, quite apart from the fact that people don't necessarily freak out and change their perspective on public services just because a few windows have been broken and paintballs thrown, that is not all that matters. A big march like this a wonderful, confidence-giving, life-breathing event. It helps give definition to the forces, from the left and the labour movement, who are prepared to resist the austerity project. It gives those involved a sense of their potential power. And hopefully it will lead to strike action to defend jobs and services, as Mark Serwotka, Len McCluskey and Billy Hayes promised from the platform.

Yet, what is strike action but a highly orchestrated and strategically situated form of disruption? And is that not what those who occupied Fortnum & Mason's, the most pretentious shop in London with the possible exception of Harrods, and paintballed the usual UK Uncut targets, did today? Isn't the whole intention to normal commerce and governance impossible, to make life difficult until they stop their attacks on us? Surely, the only possible basis for criticising this from an anti-cuts point of view is tactical? If it harms the movement, then there's a case for having this out within the movement. If, on the other hand, it does not harm the movement, then the real wreckers are those dispensing pithy denunciations according to script. Let's also drop the idea that this was done by nutters in balaclavas and face masks. The people involved were a mixture of activists from a variety of political backgrounds, engaging in a serious form of disruptive protest. There were trade unionists outside Fortnum & Mason's cheering them on, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few inside as well. Effective protest will always depend on a minority who are willing to risk arrest, or state violence, in order to throw a spanner in the works of unjust policies. Ed Miliband, speaking today, made his usual bland plea for 'peaceful' (meaning legal, parliamentarist) protest, while also situating this movement in the history of suffragism, civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles. Such revisionism does us no favours. All of those struggles were won by people who broke the law, and who devised strategies for breaking the law.

So, that said, those who have tried to argue for an anti-cuts strategy that excludes Labour have a little bit less credibility today. It was actually vital, not only that this was organised by the TUC, but that the Labour Party mobilised for it, and that their leader felt compelled to make an appearance. The labour bureaucracy can turn people out when it wants to, and today it turned out half a million by the reckoning of the police, the organisers and The Guardian newspaper - possibly it was bigger, but there's no need to haggle. Not only was the demonstration huge, but the crowds present represented an extraordinary depth and breadth of people from every segment of the working class - it was a very large, but concentrated manifestation of the labour movement as it exists in this country.

It has become a cliche, but it remains important to say, that among the women's groups, Labourites, socialists, Greens, anarchists and unaligned leftists, were people who don't usually do demonstrations. I saw council workers, nurses, librarians, bin men, firefighters, railway workers, civil servants, and teachers. Each of the sixteen trade union contingents were big, some enormous. Whole workplaces came out for this. Communities mobilised. Over 800 coaches were booked, as were more than a dozen trains. Thousands and thousands came in by scheduled trains and buses, and many of them could be seen wandering around in clusters through the centre's unexpectedly pedestrianised streets well into the evening - wherever I went, and I did take a long walk, a group of protesters with union flags and placards would suddenly appear, and just as suddenly scarper. Beyond the congregation zones, both official and ad hoc, the cafes, restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, and trusted purveyors of the "junior spesh" could be seen packed with FBU uniforms, Unison flags, NASUWT t-shirts, and so on.

Of note is who the crowds in Hyde Park were attuned to, and who they were not. Ed Miliband's speech was, as I've mentioned, weak tea. He was cheered politely, heckled a little, booed by some. His elevating rhetoric almost always falls flat, and the detail of his policy don't inspire - a turnout like this, an historic day like this, and he still has to keep to the tired old policy nostrums. Responsible cuts, yes, but the Tories are going too far. Cut the deficit, but tax bankers' bonuses. And so on. However, unlike Blair, Ed Miliband is not hated by, and doesn't hate, the labour movement. He is not embarrassed to be seen at protests, or be around working class people. And he will have a lot to think about after today - because every sign is that neither the trade union bureaucracy nor the Labour leadership expected anything like this turnout. Christ, until yesterday, the TUC were still talking about expecting 100,000 people. On the other hand, the more militant speakers such as Mark Serwotka were received with glee, particularly when the latter said: "imagine what a difference it would make if we didn't only march together but took strike action together." You may say he's a dreamer. But today we have seen that he's not the only one.

A word about Trafalgar Square. As planned, hundreds - maybe at one stage thousands, I've heard different reports - of people gathered in the square for a bit of Rabelaisian carnival. Every eyewitness report has described it as a party, a rave, pungent with the smell of home grown, but with little prospect of it turning into a big deal. At least it was until riot police attacked it, batoning people and roughing them up. They turned a peaceful gathering into a frightened and bloodied huddle, kettled in a small space. They did not break windows, occupy buildings or paintball facades: they cracked skulls. Having waited all day, and maintained a relatively light touch as long as the official TUC march was going on (this is important - they probably don't particularly want to sour relations with the trade union bureaucracy), they found their opportunity at nightfall by attacking a very small and defenceless crowd of ravers. As they have done on previous occasions, they started a fight and then took the ensuing melee as an excuse to kettle their victims. Why would they do this?

You may as well ask why they would assault Jody Macintyre, put Alfie Meadows in hospital, punch a fifteen year old boy, and rough up teenage girls. It is because it is their job to contain threats to 'public order', and they see violence and intimidation against selected groups of identified 'troublemakers' and 'ringleaders' as the most effective means of doing so. History would suggest that they are not wrong. That's one reason why the people who suffer from police violence and harrassment need to our solidarity. It's also why it is vitally important not to fall into the knee-jerk, at best disproportionate, denunciations of 'violence' against property. Because in doing so, you corroborate the police's narrative and alibi. You displace the proper focus on far more serious and potentially lethal violence inflicted by people who are armed and trained in its application - I don't know how bad things got tonight, but they are going to kill someone one day if things continue in this direction. And you thus assist the weakening and intimidation of your movement. Earlier today, I was listening to a policeman complain to a member of the public that people confuse the police with the government, and forget they're public sector workers. I thought, but did not say, that it's easy to forget when the police spend all their time attacking the government's opponents with big sticks. On which note, this is doing the rounds on Twitter: "Unconfirmed reports that forces loyal to Cameron are attacking rebels in Trafalgar square."

Of course, you should follow me on Twitter today, for updates and quick snaps from the march, which is conservatively estimated to be drawing about 300,000. I'd bet it'll be bigger than that. People are already arriving and thronging into Embankment. It shall be leaving at noon, in theory, but the TUC expects the last marchers to leave at 2pm due to the size of the thing. If you're coming, here's the route:


View March for the Alternative Route in a larger map

I'll try and post updates throughout the day but, really, Twitter is where to find me.

I'm just recording an intuition, as I don't have time to work this thought out properly. If Cameron was looking for a Falklands effect - that is, a caesarist moment in which, by donning the khaki and giving Our Boys an imperial adventure, he could articulate the native sensibilities of a not yet fully decolonised public, talking over the heads of the establishment - he hasn't got it. I detect no enthusiasm for this war. Support in the dominant ideological institutions, parliament and the popular press, is broad but depthless. The usual gyrations from the right-wing tabloids lack conviction. Perhaps it's because they're not actually getting a ground invasion. I haven't seen any polls, but I expect this lack of enthusiasm probably reflected in public opinion.

If Cameron was looking for a Kosovo effect - which I would categorise as another kind of caesarist moment in that it consolidated the intelligentsia and political establishment behind Blair - he doesn't have that either. I remember the hysterical build-up to war over Kosovo, and there is nothing like the moral fervour and shrill liberal baiting that was prevalent then. They can wheel out the old satrap Paddy Ashdown to wheeze out some faded Gladstonian rhetoric, but it doesn't have the same ring to it. This isn't "overthrowing a tyrant", after all. The British military elites have made it clear that they're not up for that. Neither are other components of the fragile alliance against Qadhafi. This is about achieving a stalemate, with the likely result of a de facto partition of the country. That somehow isn't inspiring the bunting-laden festivities that are supposed to follow from British wars. It also points up a tension within the ruling ideology - humanitarian imperialism in this context sits uneasily alongside Islamophobia, especially when the latter is a far more predominant public sentiment. Those who could once be relied on to ventriloquise the intolerant martial bigotry of the popular press are no longer available for such ventures, especially if the supposed beneficiaries are, well, Muslims.

This loss of "imperial ardour", as Michael Ignatieff once called it, is devastating for those who seek khaki solutions to domestic woes. This Saturday will see a massive trade union-led demonstration against the austerity agenda in Britain. The TUC is calling it very conservatively, saying they expect 100,000 to attend. All signs are that it will be much bigger. The elements of Britain's shattered political make-up are still unsettled, still not reconfigured and re-polarised effectively; the opportunity is there either for a reactionary realignment based on Muslim and immigrant bashing, or for a leftist realignment based on the defence of welfare, public services, and trade unionism.

The results from the Barnsley Central bye-election:

This is a huge vote against austerity. The Liberals crashed from second to sixth place and lost their deposit - this in a seat where the Labour MP had been forced to resign due to his imminent imprisonment for fraud. Both the Liberals and the Tories saw their vote share slashed, from roughly 17% each in the general election. That is, the coalition parties saw their vote share cut by almost two thirds. The BNP vote is also down by three percentage points, though this can partly be attributed to the fact that UKIP more than doubled its vote share.

This means that not only is the electoral base of the Liberal component of the coalition shattering as working class voters rally to Labour as the only available parliamentary obstacle to the cuts, but the Tories' hard right base isn't dependable either. UKIP represents the defection of a racist, nationalist, Europhobic and hyperglobalising segment of the Conservative Party, based disproportionately on small businessmen, lone traders and the insecure newly affluent, initially concentrated in the suburbs and rural areas of south-east England. Its voters include many 'strategic defectors' from the Tories outside of general elections, middle class right-wingers who want to register their hostility to immigration and European integration without risking a Labour government if possible. However, the party has also assembled support from skilled workers in collapsing industrial areas, and its core support is demographically similar to that of the BNP, excepting that BNP voters tend to be a bit younger.

The Cameron-Clegg coalition was based on the existence of a large centre vote, as millions of voters looked for an 'honest broker' amid the crisis and after the dreadful New Labour years - but that centre ground is predictably collapsing. The austerity agenda is producing a rapid polarisation, with Labour consolidating its hegemony over the left vote (excepting in Scotland, where the SNP is consistently out-performing Labour as a rival reformist bloc based on soft left nationalism), while the right-wing fragments in multiple directions. With racism on the rise and about half of the electorate theoretically willing to consider voting for some kind of anti-immigrant party, the danger is of the most reactionary elements on the right using the support redistributed to them in order to polarise the agenda further to the right. The temptation for Cameron will be to steer to the hard right as his coalition crumbles - he can't really do without the Liberals, but he can manage even less without the Tories' core vote and in his despair he may have to gamble on re-pivoting his whole agenda on the basis of some reactionary-populist cynosures.

This is the terrain on which the anti-cuts left is going to be operating in the short-to-medium term. It is one in which the struggle against racism and fascism will inevitably be a crucial aspect of the fight against the cuts. The fire-fighting against the EDL mobs, the doorstepping in BNP target constituencies, and the painstakingly constructed cultural interventions of Love Music Hate Racism are currently retarding but not stopping the growth of the racist right. They are preventing the racists from fulfilling their latent potential, and thus keeping a space open for the Left. But it is when the anti-cuts movement takes off as a force in its own right, as when the student demos rocked Britain, that the far right looks weakest and least relevant. The EDL's impotent, foot-stamping fury at the way in which radical youths stole the agenda and limelight for the Left illustrates this beautifully.

It also means that those who think you can exclude Labour from the anti-cuts movement are kidding themselves, and would do well to free themselves from the Procrustean bed of formally correct but useless slogans. Rather, we should be operating on conflicts at the core of social democracy: the central conflict being between the Labour Party's aim to represent and convoke the working class as an agency for reform, and its inevitable drive to gain 'credibility' with capital, whose cooperation will be required once Labour is in office. In practise, this means that anti-cuts activism will involve interventions within Labourism itself, uniting coalitions of Labour members and supporters with those to their left, the better to oppose any concessions to the Tory agenda by the leadership, resist the 'realist' pro-cuts politics of Labour-supporting intellectuals, and put pressure on Labour councillors not to simply capitulate and vote for 'humane' cuts.

There you go. That's my short hand analysis of the Barnsley Central bye-election. Don't say I never do anything for you. Or at you.