"Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you"

George Bernard Shaw in Misalliance: "Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you."

Michael Chessum:

Police tactics have proven to be a political education in themselves. They have taught anyone who was on the streets that the state regards the safety of property twice as highly as it regards the welfare of people. The right to presumption of innocence, to sanitation and sustenance, to personal safety, all proved to be expendable. Anyone who followed the media will have noticed that smashed windows and vandalised buildings were the headlines; that Alfie Meadows – a philosophy student from Middlesex University who was apparently hit on the head by a police baton and left with bleeding on the brain – was seemingly deemed a secondary matter.

These are the symptoms of a society, and of a political class, which has internalised the values of neoliberalism to the point of absurdity and brutality. They come alongside a programme of cuts that will hit the poorest hardest – leaving many cut off from university education to join the masses of the unemployed and underpaid.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/31/direct-action-not-dinosaur-politics