This is what happens when you outlaw peaceful protest

[Joe Shlabotnik]

The banning of peaceful protest from Egypt to Spain is increasingly leaving citizens with no other way to express their opposition but through violence.
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Last night’s clashes in Madrid are only the latest in a long line of actions and reactions, uprisings and crackdowns, rebellions and repressions. All around the world, a nefarious process is afoot. In many of the countries that experienced dramatic social mobilizations from 2011 onward, terrified elites are now drawing up laws banning the type of street demonstrations that kick-started the Age of the Protester, desperately trying to institutionalize their Thermidorian counter-revolution now that the movements appear to be on the retreat. But everywhere these type of anti-protest legislations are being passed, the attempted closure is only drawing people back into the streets.

In Egypt, when the revolutionary movement suddenly resurfaced last month, the military-controlled government moved swiftly to implement a new law that would effectively ban all unauthorized gatherings of over 10 people. The day after the law was passed activists took to the streets of Cairo to denounce it and the regime responded by attacking and arresting the protesters, subjecting them to torture and sexual assault before dumping a number of them in the desert. Still, activists in Cairo warned that “we will not protest at the whim and convenience of a counter-revolutionary regime,” declaring that “the January 25 Revolution has returned to the streets.”

Apart from Egypt and Spain, similar anti-protest laws have been drafted up elsewhere as well. During the student uprising in Québec last year, politicians tried to deal with the outburst of popular indignation by pushing through emergency legislation banning the demonstrations. In Japan, the government is trying to do the same following the massive anti-nuclear demos after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. And wherever protest has not yet been made illegal by law, police forces are trying to do everything within their power to treat it as such — just take a look at the way cops treat students in the UK, or the coordinated fashion in which the federal government cracked down on the Occupy movement in the US.

The worldwide repression of popular protest should be seen as part of a general evolution in the nature of the capitalist state: away from a modicum of democratic accountability under the Keynesian social welfare state towards an ever more authoritarian neoliberal form. In this respect, the protest bans are indicative of a contradictory rearrangement of power relations. On the one hand, the movements have clearly left an impression: apparently the massive street demonstrations of recent years have terrified governments so much that they now consider such draconian measures necessary to maintain their grip on power. This reveals something about the ideological fragility of the dominant order, whose legitimacy was shaken to its very core by the uprisings of 2011-’13.

Middle 4 of 9 paragraphs from: http://roarmag.org/2013/12/spain-egypt-law-ban-protest/