My first and rather obtuse reaction to this eloquent and very smart article is to answer your final statement with: ‘you mean the elected minority?’. The voting of this country put the current government in power, one way or another…the use of ‘dictating’ is a bit inappropriate. Of course I doubt many people voted for this depth of cuts, or are willing/able to conceive of their real impact, but middle England had a vote and they used it. That is completely beside your point, but it led me to think….

Was the issue a complete lack of a worthy party in this country, with a respect to what you are asking for, leading us to Conservative by default? Why is that?
(just to qualify why I say that, I grossly dislike Labour for reasons not immediately relevant to this topic, Conservatives are as you describe them and on a par with labour for me, Lib Dems are unconvincing but up there, and Greens are mostly spot on but too immature as a party)

Assuming that all the major parties are dominated by the “overwhelmingly white, male, privately-educated, sickeningly- privileged group of politicians from the upper echelons of society” (seemingly so?). So is it the system that has created this situation…although I don’t know exactly what I mean by the system…

Ultimately, its called politics, not governance…good politicians do so much better than good and fair governors. And wealthy families and private schools, both passively and actively, are so so ripe for creating a political mind set, skill set and drive. Plus the connections. Its not a rule, but it means that the numbers are very much stacked that way. How do we change that? How do we make so that your upbringing has less impact on your ability to succeed in Whitehall? We should try to increase the political abilities of those outside of the privileged pathway, but they will always be outside of the ideal environment.

Why is the media not focusing on this? I don’t know. But thats why I love Ceasefire, and why my employers would hate it if they knew.

Any attempt to take liberal discourse and turn it back on itself seems to me bound to fail to develop any sort of useful critique of what is actually going on. As soon as we start talking in the language of ‘violent minorities’, ‘making our voices heard’ and ‘failure of representation’ we already begin to accept some of those precepts of liberalism that are most problematic.

First and foremost is the liberal conception of ‘politics’. Politics is conceived as something which happens away from the rest of society, importantly the economy. Moreover, politics is something in which only a select few participate in any meaningful way. Indeed the logic that, provided these select few adequately represent society (whatever that means), then the decision-making processes of liberal democracy are acceptable and even desirable is exactly what the black-bloc rejects. When people smash the window of a bank or supermarket in, they’re not expressing their anger primarily at those in power but at the power-structure itself. Their critique goes deeper than the ‘just a few bad apples’ discourse that dominates many left-wing articles and discussions. “If we could just vote someone better in…” they say, “if only there was a ‘worthy party’.” Parliamentary democracy is a sham. Anyone who threatens it’s hegemony over political discourse here and abroad is perceived as a threat (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/protesters-violent-minority?CMP=twt_gu).

Surely after the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq we have learnt at least one thing; that no matter how many of us are opposed to one or another government policy – we are completely unable to change it whilst operating within the framework of liberal democracy, by voting and going on peaceful marches, by signing petitions and writing letters. This is no longer a question of making our voices heard, of appealing to those in power to do something; this form of political engagement has finally revealed itself for what it is, a chimera.

It thus appears that TomK is looking for the answers up the wrong tree, indeed it might be that he’s in completely the wrong forest. Eva’s complaint that society is becoming “more cynical about politics by the day” should in fact be celebrated since the ‘politics’ she is referring to is quite clearly only that which is advocated by liberal discourse.

It seems to me that the first step we must take to break out of liberalism’s hold over our political discourse is to recognise what is going on for what it really is: class war. Of course class war has moved on since Marx’s time and I am in no way advocating a return to the stagnant and stifling tactics and approaches of socialists. Nevertheless, the reconceptualisation of politics as fundamentally that of class war will, it appears, allow us to escape talk of a failure of democracy since we will quickly develop the understanding (as Marx did in his critique of Hegel) that the institutions of the state can only ever claim to represent the common interest of society. Behind their veneer of universality lies their allegiance to the particular interests of power and wealth.

Shame I stopped checking this page just before you left that comment, apologies for the late response.

Haha indeed yes I probably am in the wrong forest as politics is certainly not my field of expertise (not that I particularly have one). Thankyou for guiding me in the right direction, very interesting words.