We are facing the most generalised attack on the working class for 20 years. The government is waging class war to impose its cuts. It is setting up a special unit to identify areas of likely working-class resistance. This is open preparation for strike-breaking.
Where the Tory and Lib-Dem enemies of the working class movement are fighting the class war, what are our union leaders doing? They are sleep walking towards the abyss! The labour movement response is hugely inadequate.
The “March for the Alternative” on 26 March looks set, as we write this, to be very big. But it is not enough!
Without industrial direct action to stop their offensive in its tracks, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, services devastated and millions of lives ruined.
Without a fight for a political alternative to the Tory-Lib Dem government we will not have an overall alternative to this government and its policies.
Without a labour movement capable of creating such a government, we will not be able to rally large sections of the working people affected by the cuts in living standards around our banner.
The NHS as it has existed since the Labour Government created it, in 1948, faces virtual abolition if the Tories’ plans go through! And that is not all.
The unions will be hugely weakened and undermined, if the Government has its way. A wave of cuts in union facility time, and union de-recognition across the public sector, will most likely follow. The government will press home its advantage with new anti-union, anti-strike laws.
Britain will become a grimmer place, with workers even more under the heel of the rich and the ruling class.
And yet union leaders do little more than speak, vaguely, of big mobilisations to come (sometime, maybe). They are not willing to organise union members to fight back now. Now, when the Government can still be stopped in its tracks. If the labour movement uses its latent strength. What concretely, is the result of this?
• The union leaders undermine working class confidence;
• It blocks any fightback on issues where it is impossible to fight an adequate fight workplace by workplace, where a national mobilisation is the necessary response to the Government (pensions, sometimes jobs too).
All the unions have been slow in their response. The attack on public sector pensions began almost a year ago and goes into effect in April; yet the union leaders are still waiting to see if they can negotiate something with the government. The government that has declared war on them. and on the working class!
For us it is an unavoidable war, forced on us by the Tories and Lib Dems. For the union leaders, like Serwotka, to talk of a fight but do nothing to organise it is a species of throwing in the towel.
The National Union of Teachers now plans to ballot on pensions after their conference at Easter. That is good. But other unions — even the civil service union PCS, with a supposedly “left” leadership and big talk from Mark Serwotka — are, essentially, doing nothing to mount a fight on pensions.
In Unison there are many groups of workers who want to fight the cuts to jobs and services, but they are routinely being blocked. It is as if the union leaders don’t quite know that they now live in a world where the government has targeted working class living standards, and is out to gut the labour movement.
As if they can’t register the fact that this is the most anti-working class government since Thatcher’s government in the early 1980s
Far from encouraging Labour councillors to defy cuts, Unison and Unite have put pressure on councillors who want to vote against cuts to vote for them!
Evenhe national leadership of the RMT, the most left-wing union in Britain, recently called off its members’ fight against job cuts on London Underground.
One national union that has begun to fight is the college lecturers’ union UCU. They plan a national strike of workers across Higher and Further Education, on March 24. UCU is right to begin fighting now, by itself, rather than waiting for slower unions to catch up.
Can we win? Yes! There are plenty of small examples of cuts being stopped at a local level, by industrial action and political campaigning.
If the unions were willing to nurture, support and champion every spark of resistance, we would begin to push back the Tories and prepare for a situation where mass, generalised action is possible.
But the struggles, big and little and on their different levels, need to be tied together politically. The fight against the government is a political fight. Without being able to offer a political alternative, we fight with one hand tied behind our back. We need a workers’ government. A government that serves the working class as the Tories and Lib Dems serve the ruling class.
the shape of our fight
•Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is aligned with the unions against the Tory cuts. That is good. But it is nothing like enough either organisationally or politically.
• If the union leaders were to face up to their responsibilities, they would move urgently and vigorously to reclaim and re-organise the Labour Party.
• We need a mass trade union based party. The unions still finance the Labour Party. That party, which the Blair-Brown gang hijacked and reduced to its present shriveled state, can be rebuilt in the heat of the struggle against the worst Government since Margaret Thatcher’s, thirty years ago.
• Demand that Labour councils refuse to implement the cuts, and instead join our fight against them.
• Demand that the Labour Party supports the resistance, drop their support for milder cuts and pledge themselves to reverse the cuts and repeal all anti-union laws when they come to office.
• Encourage and champion every spark of resistance, local, industry-wide or national. Every group of workers or union ready to fight should start fighting, trying to pull others in. And we must fight to win, not just sabre-rattle in the hope of winning some token concessions. Fight every cut!
• Ditch, completely and finally, the notion of social partnership, of a common interest between employers and workers. There never was, and there never will be. There is a class struggle — in industry, in politics, and on the level of ideas. There is no such thing as a national “we”: there is only “them and us”. There is class war. Face that fact, and fight for the victory of the working class in that class war.
• Resist attacks on the Health Service, pensions, housing provision, pay, and other broad social issues. The labour movement can win the active support of large sections of the population if it takes the lead in this fight,
• Broader demands will allow us to build strong links between the unions and community campaigners and service-users. It will allow us to build support for a workers’ government.
• The consciousness of the movement will, if socialists do their job, grow as we take action.
• Build strong, democratic local anti-cuts committees.
• Everyone on the demo on 26 March should get involved in their local committee. The best anti-cuts committees have mobilised hundreds on the streets, storming council meetings, etc. We need united, open committees in every area, instead of national anti-cuts groups controlled by different left organisations (Right to Work, Coalition of Resistance) trying to create local fronts they can control.
• Rebuild the unions! Build rank-and-file movements. Our unions are not in a good state to fight. We need to renew them from top to bottom, fighting for democracy, bringing the bureaucrats under control and rebuilding workplace and industrial organisation.
• That in turn requires a serious campaign against the anti-trade union laws and for the right to organise and strike.
• Work to unite the serious left.
Keeping us in line
A massive Metropolitan Police operation will attempt to keep demonstrators in line on Saturday. But UK Uncut and others have organised fringe direct action events, that will test the Met’s attempt to present themselves as a family friendly police force for the TUC’s “safe family-friendly day out”.
Last year’s large, militant student demonstrations have made the bureaucrats in Congress House extra nervous.
The TUC has worked closely with the Met in organising the march; it makes logistical sense, but they are going far too far in helping the police to keep us in line. The police themselves are unlikely to “behave”!
The TUC should not help the police decide what constitutes acceptable protest, yet that is what they have been drawn into by accepting Met training of stewards and agreeing to share information on the day about potential “troublemakers”.
At the Met’s suggestion, the TUC has appointed Liberty as its official legal observer. Liberty say they will be “independent” of the police. They deny rumours that they would be “sharing intelligence” with the police. They do say:
“This is a promising, progressive opportunity, and displays a level of cooperation from the protest organisers and police that our founders could only have dreamt of. Liberty remains firmly opposed to many police public order tactics, particularly but not just ‘kettling’. Having access to the police’s special operations room won’t prevent us expressing our views, forcefully where necessary.”
How naive can you be?
Liberty should acknowledge that the police are allowing legal observers only because their policing tactics have come under unwelcome scrutiny.
For the police, Liberty are a known commodity, an unaccountable NGO, a civil rights “lobby group”, with a position in the establishment they can be pressured to defend. We should insist on our own independent monitoring,
