My own experience of the local anti-cuts movements development is that there's been an unplanned unconscious division of activity - people going away and concentrating on their own area of activity without the feedback into the wider movement that was understood as essential at the start of this stuff. Whether that's because of the failings of the larger movement to provide substantial solidarity to the various campaigns - and if it is, is this simply because of weakness or because of tactical errors or sectarianism etc- is probably the key question right now, at least in terms of re-integrating all the various activities into a connected whole. There've been other issues that have tended to take up peoples activities down here recently as well.
I think behind part of the turning away from the larger movement has pretty clearly been intra-group squabbling - parties fighting for influence, unions bureaucrats trying to keep out the influence of those more radical then them by all sorts of underhand methods and so on. Now, these people see this as politics, it's how they think things should take place, manouvering, battles lines and so on - the effect is to drive out the uncommitted or make those who desperately want to do something walk away and do it on their own, weakening us all.
Looking at if from the other way, from the top-down, the way the cuts have been introduced have helped this fragmentation too. In the past cuts tended to be introduced salami style, cut off a small piece here, a small piece there and eventually you've got half the sausage gone and because the successive cuts have been so small the hope is that they don't effect enough people at once to provoke a generalised reaction - although it often had the effect of allowing those opposed to cuts to concentrate all sorts of other people not immediately effected into the campaigns.
This time they've pretty much gone for the lot at once, which did initially provoke a wider reaction, but one that helped by/creating/pressuring the above divisions have partially managed to turn the pre-existing class/societal economic divisions to their advantage - and so we get people arguing that they can't see why people on the dole should support public sector pensions and so on. I don't know whether that was an intended result of the all-or-nothing approach, but it's ceratinly one i've seen amongst those who should know better. What's needed to get beyond that is pretty obviously some sort of across the board victory that highlights the inter-connected nature of these things, but the govt is managing its various retreats very well for now though.
So the immediate tactical questions are how to keep things together, and what's driven them apart - important to remember that this isn't the battle, this is just preparing the 'army'.
I hope this doesn't sound too pessimistic, because i'm not, on the contrary, i'm very optimistic, but also, i hope. realistic. I recognise that this is a long struggle and it's a process, it will have ebbs and flows, high points and low points. The key is not mistake one for the other but to get the general direction right. I don't believe the previously politically inactive (in formal terms) people on my street who were drawing up plans for local street committees and poring over local maps marking over the various workplaces and drawing up a network of whose mates/family worked where and so on with me only 3 months ago have decided to embrace the cuts since then - that the links they made (in all sorts of terms) have been broken. It's not time to panic.
