The Last Ask & The First Flame

A Manifesto Against Power, Permission, and Paralysis

Morning Comrades.

I’m tired. You're probably tired too. Tired of voting cycles that promise salvation but deliver the same boot to the neck. Tired of signing petitions, marching peacefully, getting kettled by riot cops, smeared by the press, and watching every plea for justice dissolve in the acid bath of parliamentary procedure. We are not "losing the battle of ideas"; the ruling class simply doesn’t care. They have engineered a system where no amount of moral appeal, electoral organising, or “nonviolent direct action” will change the trajectory of this capitalist death machine. And when these polite strategies start to gain traction, they are criminalised, surveilled, infiltrated, and shut down.

In every Western country, the window of permitted dissent has narrowed to a suffocating slit. Try to strike? They'll gut your union laws. Block traffic to protest genocide? Suddenly, you’re labeled a “domestic extremist.” Call for a boycott? Now it’s antisemitic. March without a permit? They'll beat you, jail you, and call it "crowd control." The democratic ideal we’re fed is a fraud, a fiction carefully maintained to give the illusion of participation while all real levers of power remain sealed off by money, militarisation, and elite consensus.

For the last 20 years, peaceful protest has been met with increasing repression across the West. And for the next 20, if we don’t abandon the fantasy that this system can be reasoned with, we’ll lose everything, from liveable futures to basic rights. This isn’t a call for adventurism or nihilistic violence. It’s a call to face the material reality: that the only way out is through the dismantling of capitalist governance by any means that will work. The ballot won't save us. The law won’t protect us. And the elite won’t permit change unless they are forced.

Democracy as Management, Not Representation

Western “democracy” is better understood as a method of class management than a system of representation. The illusion of choice masks a continuity of power across political parties. As Peter Mair put it, Western democracies have shifted from popular participation to “government by elites who are increasingly insulated from electoral accountability.”¹ The mechanisms of elections, lobbying, and NGO-driven reform serve to pacify and channel discontent, not resolve it.

Every major demand of the last 20 years, from stopping imperialist wars, to acting on climate change, to defunding police, to housing justice has been met with symbolic gestures and systemic inaction. Despite millions marching against the Iraq War in 2003, Western states invaded anyway. Despite youth climate strikes and record-breaking disasters, emissions continue to rise. Parliamentary politics do not offer meaningful resistance to capital. They merely stage its performance.

As Jodi Dean argues, liberal democracy “functions to absorb political energies and redirect them away from any challenge to capitalist organisation.”² It is not a neutral playing field, it is an ideological machine of containment.