A direct hit

The imagery of anti-capitalist protests tries to portray them as the actions of small numbers of people determined on fighting with the police and the authorities. The furore about May Day in Britain has the press, the police, New Labour and even London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, lining up to denounce 'anarchist violence'. Protesters are as elitist as they are unrealistic in their aims, we are told. Most importantly, they have nothing to do with more traditional forms of protest and politics.

The mass demonstration in Quebec City last month gives the lie to that view. It is true that British newspaper and television coverage gave no feel of the mass protest. But the facts as told by socialists and trade unionists on the ground tell a different story. Up to 70,000 people from across Canada and further afield demonstrated against the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting in Quebec. The meeting, headed by newly elected US president George Bush, was an attempt to further the aims of the free market and neoliberalism throughout the whole of North and South America, despite the opposition of millions of people who have protested from Chile to Alaska at the effect of these policies.

What frightens our rulers and their spokespeople in the media is exactly that these actions are not isolated. Quebec City was a mass demonstration, with a heavy trade union presence. Increasingly workers are concluding, as did their counterparts in Seattle 18 months ago, that the fight for their rights and the fight against the system are converging. Quebec City was even bigger than the Seattle protest and presages a big mobilisation in Genoa against the G8 in July.

Those who argue that there are other ways of protest which can be effective have to answer why it is that only direct action has so far been able to stop these people in their tracks. This was the lesson of South Africa, where a mass movement has defeated the pharmaceutical companies who want to deny their drugs to the poor. It is the lesson in France where 25,000 trade unionists marched in Calais against job losses in multinationals such as Danone. Bush's response to reasoned argument, meanwhile, has been to renege on even the pitiful US agreements made at the Kyoto summit.

We have to draw the lessons of successful protest elsewhere here in Britain. All the main parties in the coming election argue that there is no alternative to neoliberalism. A government which has spent less on public infrastructure than its Tory predecessor, which is presiding over privatisation and record inequality, is terrified of protest. It is also terrified of the long dormant but now stirring trade union movement. The attacks on demonstrations are couched in terms of democracy but are really saying that there should be no opposition to global capitalism.

A second Labour government looks like it will be presiding over a recession with job looses such as we have seen at Motorola, so it is vital that we defend and extend the protest taking place. That means building for a huge demonstration in Genoa, but before that creating a real electoral challenge in the shape of the Socialist Alliance. It is the only force in the election willing to put forward a real alternative to Blairism, and linking it to real struggle in the unions and on the streets. In schools, post offices, on the railways and London tube, people are now meeting neoliberal attacks with industrial action. The better the vote for the Socialist Alliance on what looks like 7 June, the harder it will be for Blair to continue those attacks.