THE recent arrest of anti-war, pro-Palestinian activists alongside a steady attempt to delegitimise protest should be a cause for concern for everyone on the left – and will be a key part of the discussion at Arise Festival’s forthcoming Socialism or Barbarism day school.    
 
While the democratic rights we enjoy have been hard won, they have always come with limitations — we are, after all, still “subjects,” even today. As in the attack on, and subsequent arrest of, the Stop the War organiser Chris Nineham, these limitations are often imposed violently by police and security forces.
 
Engels explained how the state comes to be a force used by the capitalist class to put down resistance. In his important work The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, he wrote that in the development of human history “it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate class conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.”
 
A survey of recent British history shows how this “power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it” has been deployed by the capitalist class against workers.
 
The roots of many of the restrictions we face today can be traced back to Thatcherism’s drive to reverse the limited but tangible gains made by the working class following WWII. The case of the Miners’ Strike offers a particularly stark illustration.
 
The offensive against the NUM utilised multiple tools of the state – not only physical force by the police, but a relentless targeting of the unions by intelligence services designed to leave it divided, demoralised and defeated — as documented in Seamus Milne’s The Enemy Within.
 
Thatcher’s war on resistance not only involved taking on workers industrially, but politically, too. 

This period also saw the shutting down of the Greater London Council, which had not only implemented a bold policy agenda but given support to a variety of important causes for the left – including in relation to Ireland, where the clampdown on free speech extended to forcing broadcasters to engage in a form of reverse lip-syncing on footage of Gerry Adams speaking.
 
Like with many other Thatcher-era changes – while New Labour did make some improvements – it broadly accepted the direction of travel, with Tony Blair famously boasting of maintaining some of the strictest anti-union laws in Europe. 

Blair’s tenure also saw the breaking of the FBU strike in 2003 and the introduction of the Prevent programme four years later.
 
A programme which ran across both these premierships used spies to infiltrate a range of organisations — not only left groups but campaigns on issues like anti-racism, the environment, peace (and even the Young Liberals).