BDS activists protest outside UNICEF-UK, April 2015. Demotix/Mark Kerrison. All rights reserved.History has shown us that lasting positive change does not happen on its own. It requires those seeking to improve their position in society, and others standing in solidarity with them, to form a cohesive and informed critical mass that can transform their struggles into a substantive change in conditions.
With this in mind, it is necessary to ‘audit’ the threats and opportunities to the growth of political consciousness and structural power in civil society: where are popular struggles positioned in relation to the political establishment? What potential constraints are there to those struggles being realised?
To engage with these questions, we should recognise that the very forces we seek to challenge through critical thinking and action – capitalism, militarism, racism, patriarchy and so on – reproduce themselves by producing policies and discourses that actively limit the potential for resistance. We can see this in a range of recent policy initiatives, loosely justified under the banner of safeguarding national security. Through their prospective impacts on NGOs, universities and broader civil society, these policies pose a serious threat to the growth of critical thought and action in the UK, and thus to the potential for structural change.
