Some of these groups have a publicly stated goal of overthrowing British democracy - doesn't seem unreasonable for them to be monitored by the police and security services.
Of course, that's true of every organization. How do you know that the Kensington Garden Club isn't plotting the violent overthrow of the British government? But there's some level of plausibility where you should investigate. (Note well: I am not claiming that the British police drew the line in the right place.)
I would add that enterism is a real thing with quite a few notable cases of a minor fringe group within a moderate party serving as a spearhead to takeover the reigns and leverage its goodwill to advance extremist ideals. This sort of thing is only caught by insiders keeping tabs on the organization's inner workings.
Britain doesn't have a democracy, it has a monarchy. The queen "consents" legislation, PMs, etc. They also have an entire "house of lords" which is literally a forum for the aristocrats to counter the democratically elected parliament.
One could argue they spy to avoid democracy, not protect it.
As long as they're not doing it violently.
An interesting issue. Mass action that demonstrates voter interest is a form of democracy. Mass action that threatens physical harm to people and property is not, it's anarchy and mob violence.
Let us also consider the ideas of structural violence in this discussion. It is often missed because the perpetrator is an entire structure, an abstraction.
Just to note, it's interesting to me how your post has lumped "people and property" together so easily, as if one cannot talk about a person without talking about their property too.
As much as this is an interesting issue as you say, your post comes across as much more of an endorsement of the prevailing ideologies; the only form of collective action is voting action, and if your goals cannot be reached within those confines then your action must be condemned. As others here have pointed out, doesn't this restrict the capabilities for change significantly in almost every qualitative aspect?
Taking the UK by example specifically, the parliament operates a website in which you can submit a petition, and if your petition gathers some specified number of votes (10k? I can't remember) then they will debate the issue. Not a single petition has succeeded to my knowledge. Most petitions are returned with non-answers and restatements of the current position, as if the right course of action is determined by positions rather than knowledge.
These people who talk about "mass action" believe (rightly or wrongly) that the current system is compromised, and structurally so. To say that they should sit down and simply vote, perhaps hold up some signs outside of parliament is not only not engaging with their grievances (and possibly correcting them), it's remaining ignorant of the issues they present. It is missing the point.
Yes, quite obviously yes.
For starters, violence is obviously a form of oppression and goes agains the rule of law as well as a very long list of rights.
It's always amusing how these terrorist organizations actually believed that violence is justified when they see themselves as the ones dishing the beatings instead of taking them.
The definition of violence does not speak of the law. In fact, to say that the law can't be violent assumes that the law is good. But I'm sure we can both name states and laws which are unjust. If someone unjustly harms you, is that not a form of violence? If violence is oppression, does it not follow that the current state of affairs with widespread structural violence is oppressive, and oppression must be opposed by any means necessary?
Again, I'm no advocate of violence, but the idea that it is never justified is only nearly just as ignorant as the idea that it is justified only so long as the state exercises it.
Nonsense, and that argument is alarmingly pathetic. For starters, it makes absolutely no sense to insinuate that the same majority that outlaws violence would, somehow, contradict themselves and do the exact opposite.
And this sort of reasoning is even more pathetic when it's patently obvious that this argument is uses to try to put a thin veil of legitimacy on violent actions performed by extremist groups with absolutely no support in free and democratic societies.
My intention isn't to defend those who use violence, it's to say that the state having a monopoly on violence does not make this monopoly just, and furthermore that the state's use of violence is in many instances unjust, and finally that revolutions happen with violence whether you or I like it or not, they occur when a population is so pushed to that extreme, as happened in the monarchy of France, the founding of the U.S. and imperial Russia.
No, in fact, the fact that they are closely associated is one of the classic arguments against, or for only carefully limited versions of, democracy.
That cannot be what they are referring to - if the mass was a majority then they could use voting. They say they can't use voting, which implies to me they're planning some kind of minority undemocratic action.
In a system with perfect proportionality rather having systematic misrepresentation, sure; actual representative democracies tend to have structural biases favoring particular interests which means opposition to those interests often cannot succeed through voting merely with majority support, while the favored interest can remain dominant with a sufficient minority of support.
See, e.g., the US government, where this was dramatically demonstrated in the 2016 Presidential election, but has a more consistent impact in the federal legislature, particularly the Senate, and in the de facto “Constitutional legislature”—the body that can amend the Constitution—where, as in the Sense, voting is by State.
As such, a mere majority in the US favoring certain positions cannot succeed by voting alone.
In other words, small parties with little to no support can't just dictate their will onto the majority.
That's a feature, not a bug.
No, exactly the opposite: a minority that is structurally favored by the biases in the system of representation, can dictate their will over the objections of the majority.
Nonsense. In democratic republics, which are the norm in the West, the people pick their representatives and both the legislative and executive branches are determined by that vote.
It makes no sense to try to turn around the facts to pretend that democratic governments are not voted in by the majority but instead by a minority. That's absurd and has no bearing in reality.
And in real, rather than idealized, democratic republics, there are often systematic distortions in representation favoring certain identifiable interests, allowing those interests to attain controlling power with a minority of the vote.
As stated above, the US federal government provides a good example of this.
> It makes no sense to try to turn around the facts to pretend that democratic governments are not voted in by the majority but instead by a minority.
Both the current President of the US and the current Senate majority were voted in by outright minorities. The House majority was voted in by a plurality, but still the majority faction is substantially overepresented even if you consider only the ratio of major party votes.
> That's absurd and has no bearing in reality.
The current US government may be absurd, but it is absolutely reality, and not unique among democratic republics in history in being elected despite not commanding majority support in the electorate.
Denying reality isn't productive.
This is usually the basis for most revolutionary organisations. However, there is a major split between those groups that believe the way to deal with that is to participate in elections, try to win, and "just" be prepared when the establishment refuses to hand over power, vs. groups like the SWP that believes that there's no point in contesting elections at all.
The latter is a lot more dangerous, because like the Bolsheviks they may at some point delude themselves into thinking they have enough support without any evidence. But for a group like the SWP to actually become dangerous they'd first need to become magnitudes bigger than it ever was, and they just never got much traction.
I don't think anyone would suggest the police shouldn't have kept an eye on them, though. Nor do I believe they'd expect the police to ignore them.
The more relevant reason to question the effort that went into surveillance of them was that initial surveillance and ongoing evidence should have made it clear to the police, as it's done to anyone paying attention to them, that they were/are nothing more than yet another fringe group that are much better at talking than doing.
In the end, as it turns out, the SWP was so bad at doing and talking that they managed to tear themselves apart through their own internal idiocies than what the police ever would have hoped for, in the form of the crisis of their completely ludicrously offensive handling of a rape accusation [1] a few years ago.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/comrades-war-d...
They could use our consensus system to propose a new consensus system, but they aren't planning to do that.
You could argue that our consensus system is wrong and that they shouldn't have to use it, and it's oppressive to apply it to them, but at that point I'm not sure what to say apart from the majority of people I know think the current consensus system is the best we know.
How can you find out what the consensus is on our consensus system if you don't trust the current consensus system?
Ok, dropping the affected text-accent, I've definitely been in the room when people talk about how there'll be a black bloc coming to an event for "direct action", where we all know damn well that black blocs come to, you know, break stuff and beat up cops and fascists.
That said, I wish that the cops, the state, and opposition parties would all stop pretending that their violence isn't violence, because we all know it is, and just spend the rhetorical effort on justifying what they're choosing to do anyway.
I take it that the group that's in the room is collectively too scared to kick them out or to stop their violence.
That said, I wish that the cops, the state, and opposition parties would all stop pretending that their violence isn't violence
It is violence. That's how sovereignty works. The state has the monopoly on violence. The cops are acting on behalf of the state. All others who break it are either illegal instigators, or exercising the right of self defense.
Principled non-violent protest is the mark of a true activist. Violence is the mark of those who merely want power for themselves.
It's true that one particularly useful definition of a state is whatever entity exercises a monopoly on legitimate (a key qualifier) violence in a particular territory. But that is not an inherent property of whatever entity calls itself a state, and failures of legitimacy can cause a state to fail and be replaced; that a thing is called (and even moreso that it calls itself) the state has little bearing here. The definition provides a test for whether something actually is the state, not whether it may engage in violence.
Clearly, in the eyes of any group deploying violent direct action, the legitimacy of the State has been compromised if not entirely lost.
> Principled non-violent protest is the mark of a true activist.
It's the mark of an adherent to a particular ideology of activism, whose effectiveness (without some other group deploying or credibly threatening violence against the same target that they oppose) and morality in the face of extreme abuses have both been seriously questioned.
Or, in the words of CGP Grey: "Bigger Army Diplomacy." So, the implication, and the content of international law, is that if you have the power to enforce your will in a territory, you have the sovereignty. Someone who advocates for that approach to "activism" is advocating for a violent uprising by force. Someone who advocates for that from within a democratic republic, simply doesn't want to play by the rules anymore.
It's the mark of an adherent to a particular ideology of activism, whose effectiveness (without some other group deploying or credibly threatening violence against the same target that they oppose) and morality in the face of extreme abuses have both been seriously questioned.
Such was remarked about Ghandi's position that non-violence could oppose Fascism. So sure, if you're making an equivalency between the current US government and Fascism. However, that would be a prime example of false equivalency. There's more equivalency between white hooded KKK members and Antifa black bloc running around vandalizing and intimidating than there is between WWII Italy/Germany and 2018's USA.
A lot of modern states aspire to this. Many don't. It is not a current or historical requirement of "sovereignty".
Those are all things the state has the sole right to do, and not a random citizen who just felt like it.
No, the group that's in the room supports them, but also considers them strategically unreliable and a bit mentally unstable. Yes, your average urban socialist group does sometimes co-organize with Antifa or anarchist black blocs, to some extent.
>It is violence. That's how sovereignty works. The state has the monopoly on violence. The cops are acting on behalf of the state. All others who break it are either illegal instigators, or exercising the right of self defense.
Which makes it amazing how often the cops downright falsify their reason for hitting or shooting someone!
So then they are fine with crimes and violations of human rights done in their name. That clarifies their true ethical positions and that they are not principled in their "activism."
Which makes it amazing how often the cops downright falsify their reason for hitting or shooting someone!
The judiciary well knows that there is a temptation to lie when violence has entered the picture. The way to fight this is to be the side that is above lies and deception. Antifa and anarchist black blocs have demonstrated that they aren't above immoral acts, as those who know the history and sometimes co-organize with them.
That's literally what “direct action” means—action which, as opposed to indirectly dealing with the problem by convincing people to stop doing bad things, directly deals with the problem by interfering with the flow of required inputs to the act of doing the bad things, or by awwreducing the ability of people to do bad things by destroying or incapacitating either the instruments used in doing the bad things or the people who would otherwise do the bad things.
Like in Norway, where extensive illegal spying on the left was "revealed" in the mid 90's ("revealed" because many subjects of the spying had reported it for decades and been laughed at), a large part of the disturbing aspect of the scope is how little they found given the resources they kept putting into it for decades on end, and how clearly a lot of the resources were put in more to intimidate than to carry out surveillance. I used to know a guy that had been followed to and from work for years - he was a trade union rep and communist party member, and the only reason he had for why they might have done that was that his route went past the Soviet embassy; of course if he'd actually been a spy, he wouldn't have been dumb enough to meet them there, and presumably the police knew that as well as he did; his impression was that they wanted him to know.
I don't know if this affected their work in other areas in the UK (but note that they monitored a huge number of left wing groups and 3 far right groups), but in Norway their obsession with the left led to them largely overlooking the rise of the neo-nazis in the 70's and 80's despite increasing levels of violence including several terrorist attacks (fire bombs thrown at May 1st parades and the like). Instead of taking them seriously, police took advantage of a firebomb thrown into the book store of a tiny maoist group to illegally secure copies of their membership register for example, and went on to suggest they'd thrown the fire bomb themselves. It was first towards the end of the 80's that escalating neo-nazi violence forced the policy to refocus their attention on the far right.
To me that is a bigger concern than their monitoring of the left - any such group with something to hide would expect to be infiltrated anyway; most of them had nothing to hide. But when their myopic focus on one set of group makes them ignore other threats, then it because a risk to society.