The activist community needs to acknowledge the fact that the establishment is (often, if not always) much better at contesting campaigns over issues like public sector cuts etc than we are. The proof of this hypothesis is the fact that they've been able to implement such cuts etc at all. We need to face up to this, to coldly analyze how it is that they're able to de-rail our campaigns, and modify our beliefs and actions accordingly. If we don't do this, they'll win (again). If we do this, we stand a chance. Here are some examples...

1. UK Uncut

The fact that the UK Uncut group might (or might not) have used the word "target" to refer to the tax-dodging multinationals that they campaign against is no more sinister than direct-marketing companies referring to the practice of "targeted advertising". Nonetheless, in January 2011 Policy Exchange UK invited senior police, government and media figures to a conference (which was filmed for You Tube*) about State responses to the UK protest movement, which desperately tried to smear UK Uncut on grounds that their use of the word "target" somehow showed UK Uncut's (non-violent) protests were tantamount to "terrorism". Clearly the conference delegates were not too stupid to realise that liberal campaigns which block the entrances of clothing chains with young people chanting slogans about tax avoidance is not morally equivalent to terrorist campaigns which maim and kill innocent men, women and children, etc. This misrepresentation is not a product of stupidity, it's part part of a deliberate, on-going political strategy, whose purpose is to de-rail the protest movement and protect the interests of the multinationals and the agents that those multinationals sponsor within the secret State. At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, the way these people seek to wreck the protest movement is by misrepresenting moderate campaigners as dangerous extremists.

*  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3sc_prqw_s
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/05/478790.html?c=on

2. Dale Farm

Further evidence of this strategy is provided by recent media coverage of the Dale Farm campaign. The Daily Mail ran a front page feature trumpeting how the campaign had (in their opinion) been "Hi-Jacked by Anarchists". The text of the article conceded the alleged 1,000 activists were in fact "anarchists and student protestors" - in other words that alot of the protestors weren't anarchists after all, but then the Mail tried to prove their headline claim with photos (see web link) that showed a whopping half-dozen activists, identified as being "anarchist" on grounds no more convincing that they use boiler suits to help conceal their identities*. Now, it may be that some of these activists are anarchists, but on the strength of the evidence printed in The Daily Mail there are less than 10 of them, including at least one Daily Mail infiltrator, and the Daily Mail infiltrator quoted all sorts of statements allegedly made by these people, which, for the simple reason of being attributed to un-named individuals, can never be verified. Meanwhile, when a Dale Farm campaigner interviewed by BBC News 24 anchor Simon McCoy pointed out the evicting bailiffs have a reputation for serious criminal violence, the interview was cut-dead mid-sentence, on grounds that her claims could not be verified... how convenient! Still the damage is done however, as millions of members of the public now associate the Dale Farm campaign with... you guessed it... dangerous extremists!

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2038820/Dale-Farm-eviction-Travellers-glee-judge-halts-closure-illegal-site-11th-hour.html#ixzz1YSxpKZ3I

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/09/484830.html

3. March 26

The minimum estimate for the number of people who participated in the March 26 anti-cuts protest was the BBC figure of "more than 250,000", the maximum estimate seems to have been (ironically) The Daily Mail's figure of 500,000. Whatever the exact figure, the protest was huge, attracting the active support of hundreds of thousands of people who the State would love NOT to become active in long-term campaigning. An estimated 600 of these protestors (somewhere between 0.24% and 0.12%) vandalised property and threw things at the police (with allegations that some press photographers offered young people cash to break windows, and with a 2nd "bait van" being driven by police into the group we were in at Oxford Circus). While there's no doubting the righteous anger and amazing courage of black-block activists, just because an action's morally justified doesn't mean it's going to be political successful, and of 21 photos that appeared in The Daily Mail's coverage on 27 March, one was a photo of Ed Miliband, and all the others depicted scenes of violence, riot cops or disruptive protest, NONE depicted the 99.76+% of demonstrators who protested peacefully (unlike the photos accompanying this post). What's the outcome of this misrepresentation? Millions of members of the public now associate the March 26 protest with.... dangerous extremists.

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370053/TUC-anti-spending-cuts-protest-200-arrested-500k-march-cut.html

4. Indymedia & Agent Provocateurs

The example of The Daily Mail's coverage is being used here to illustrate a more general point, as misrepresentations of this nature have been used by the State to ruin its opponents' campaigns since... probably since ancient Rome and Greece. Recent Indymedia posts describe in detail how "false-flag" terrorism is "standard NATO modus-operandi"*, as States simultaneously manipulate both militant left-wing and right-wing activists to serve the interests of capitalism. Cases like Mark Kennedy / Stone notwithstanding, a common misapprehension is that so-and-so can't be an agent-provocateur because they live in poverty, but some State agents don't even need to be paid (let along paid well), they only need an outstanding criminal case against them, which the police choose not to investigate as long as their agent continues to play ball. Equally many agent-provocateurs actually believe in the campaigns they're being used to wreck, as all that's required to pursue this strategy is for a radical movement to have ONE Proper State infiltrator within it, whose incitements are then followed-up by the more gullible grunts. In pre-internet days this usually required State agents to run the risks associated with actually meeting (in some cases shagging) the potential cannon-fodder. Nowadays it's even easier, because all agent-provocateurs have to do is to troll Indymedia with posts celebrating destructive or violent actions (of the sort routinely posted on Indymedia by people like "Insurrectionary Anarchist") in the hopes that one of their readers might just be stupid enough to actually blow someone up.

*  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2011/09//484419.mp3 - listen to the discussion of how NATO uses false-flag terrorism from 14:39 into the MP3 especially

5. Conclusion

Whatever radical militants like to say to themselves and to each other about opposing the State, the most extreme forms of militant radicalism are an ASSET to the State in terms of how the secret services and media use extremism to divide and discredit genuinely popular and populist social movements. The radical movement needs to be reminded of this as often as necessary, and needs to learn from this and act accordingly. Radicals need to intelligently assess and use complementary liberal and militant strategies and tactics side-by-side, using non-violent direct action where it's needed to attract publicity, without being tricked into discrediting and de-railing themselves by association with genuinely dangerous extremism. Those Indymedia readers who are most offended by these facts are exactly the Indymedia readers who need to think about these facts the most.