THE success of today’s People’s Assembly events in Manchester and the Cable Street anti-fascist demonstration in east London shouldn’t be measured only by the numbers, the tens of thousands, taking part.

The demonstrations’ significance will be far greater in inspiring sustained day-in, day-out struggle across Britain’s communities and trade unions — not just for the day of the demo.

This is now the task facing all who are serious about defeating this government.

Today is another opportunity to lay down markers of our intentions to “build back better” — against the billionaire blaggers and capitalist cronies, for a people’s Britain — to challenge their system’s corruption and the crises facing our class.

The People’s Assembly lists the targets of the Manchester demo as:

Kill the Police Bill

Renationalise key services

Provide decent housing for all

Sack corrupt politicians

Properly fund a fully publicly owned NHS

End the marketisation of education

Tackle the climate emergency

Create safe workplaces and save jobs — end fire and rehire

Fully fund social care

End institutional racism

There are clearly many more targets. If we are serious about achieving these — and we are — we can see the size of the battle ahead goes well beyond demos and slogans.

The question is stark: after October, what happens in November and December?

After 2021 — what about next year and the years after that?

Demonstrations can be in defence of a community, an eruption of fury, a militant statement of solidarity, a demonstration of strength — and many other things central to our movement — but they don’t constitute the movement in themselves.

If we restrict our demand to the “right to protest” — now threatened by the Police Bill — we concede the right of the current ruling class to rule.

Our protests and demonstrations cannot be one-offs. They are simply the milestones, way-markers and signposts along the road of the sustained daily struggle of opposition, resistance — and for socialism — in our workplaces and communities.

We need to remember the line from a poem written over a century ago by James Connolly, the Irish revolutionary socialist: “Our demands most moderate are … we only want the Earth!”

We are not content with periodic protest. We want a truly democratic society whose foundations lie in the needs and the authority of our working class — currently routinely exploited, abused and oppressed in so many ways.

That takes a real sustained fighting spirit, solidarity, determination and strategy.

At the founding conference of the People’s Assembly back in 2013 thousands of people representing organisations from across the working-class and progressive movement, applauded as the Unite representative said: “If the government insists on continuing to govern the country in this way, our task is to make the country ungovernable.”

They have continued to govern in the same way; our task remains the same.

Such a struggle does not happen spontaneously. One of today’s demonstrations commemorates the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, where an estimated 20,000 east Londoners defeated the police, who were attempting to force a way through for Oswald Mosley’s fascists.

After the battle was won, someone remarked to Phil Piratin, one of the principal Communist Party activists, what a great spontaneous response there had been from the people.

“Yes, mate,” Piratin is said to have replied, “and spontaneity like that takes a hell of a lot of organising!”

So the success of today’s demonstrations will be measured by their lasting effect on the development of a sustained movement in every town, city and village in Britain — and that depends on all of us, the tens of thousands taking part in the demos, becoming organisers of the daily struggle — not simply demo participants.

The latter is good — but it’s not enough. We need more grassroots organisers in trade unions, in anti-austerity campaigns, in communities, against cuts, privatisation, poverty and injustice — against racism and division.

There are many organisations developing charters, campaigns and plans of action — including the Communist Party and its Employment Fightback, which suggests actions for jobs and justice, from roundtable discussions between union and community activists to the development of workers’ solidarity centres, from the difficult task of building union organisation in a particular workplace to a sustained plan to organise precarious workers across the town, from direct action on poverty and homelessness to a developing workers’ voices video project, from identifying monopoly corporations and other super-exploiters to getting local organisations focused on issues particularly important to young workers — and much more.

But charters are not enough either. The key is to focus our efforts now on building our strength right across Britain in our local communities — and this was the clear view and commitment of a recent online meeting of local People’s Assembly reps.

Shortly following today’s demonstrations, we will be seeing a People’s Assembly local groups organising conference.

Once again, the parlous state of the Labour Party simply reinforces the eternal truth that working-class people have to organise for ourselves and organise a unified sustained active movement to force the pace of change.

It is mass popular movements with broad, transparent, democratic leaderships and committed, organised activists that make history.

Parliament, as Tony Benn used to say, fundamentally just rubber-stamps it.

Bill Greenshields is a member of the Communist Party’s EC, its anti-austerity commission and represented the CP on the People’s Assembly committee 2013-2021.