analysis

Friday the 23rd of November will see Wal-Mart, which owns UK chain ASDA and which has an entirely non-union workforce, hit with coordinated strikes and protests.  The date of these strikes is not arbitrary.  It's “Black Friday”, the busiest shopping day of the year in the US. 

This article, written by a American-born SolFedder who's worked retail in the past, seeks to explore the strikes: their roots and their implications for the American working class.

There’s been a lot of talk in the anti-cuts movement about the importance of ‘winning the argument’. This strategy holds that the best way to go about fighting attacks on wages, living conditions and services is to point out the flaws in the pro-cuts arguments and suggest alternative policies which would avoid the need for cuts.

Some even seem to think that if the argument is won, the government will see the error of its ways, stop the planned cuts and everyone can go home happy.

It isn’t hard to see where this strategy falls down. It certainly isn’t the weakness of the anti-cuts arguments; it’s been convincingly shown that these cuts aren’t ‘necessary’ at all.

No, its mistake is the belief that society is based on rational arguments in the first place. Our society is not a debating chamber, but a power struggle between different groups with competing interests.

A postgraduate student at Sussex university assesses the future facing graduates.

Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor has suggested of the unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, France, London and elsewhere that "at the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future".[1] All manner of lefties have been standing in Library Square, entreating us to 'defend education' with petitions, placards and processions. Few of us have taken up the request. What is there to defend? The current education cuts will no doubt make things worse, but it’s not education we need to defend but our conditions of life, both at university and more importantly for the rest of our lives. We need to turn our critical faculties both on our education and on the society it is preparing us for. Do we have a future? Is it worth the sacrifices it demands?

Much has been said about David Cameron’s recent speech on the failure of multiculturalism. Predictably the left have condemned what was said and rushed to the defence of the multicultural society.  Trouble is there is a big difference between the realities of living in a society with various cultures and the concept of multiculturalism.   In the years of the New Labour governments multiculturalism was pushed to the fore along with the twin ideas of equality and diversity. Of course this was all part of the New Labour mantra of ‘everyone is middle class’ that really fooled no-one, especially the working class. The idea of class was subsumed under the banner of multiculturalism and diversity. The industry that sprung up to around these ideas giving workshops and training on ‘equality and diversity’ concentrated on race, gender, sexuality, disability, even religion, but class was left off the list.

Neoliberal ideology is a crock of shit and everyone left of Labour knows it. Critics have pointed out its flawed assumptions regarding perfect competition, consumer access to information, human nature and a host of other factors that nowhere apply in the real world. They’ve also pointed out that where neoliberal policies have been applied, the results have often been disastrous and rarely matched the promised outcomes of prosperity for the rich and trickle down for the poor. One famous example was the so-called J-curve model for transitioning the former USSR to Western-style capitalism. The ‘J’, a small downswing in transition followed by a long upswing when neoliberal policies worked their magic, turned into something more resembling an ‘L’, plunging millions into worse poverty than before.

And then there’s the cuts.

Just when you think the credit crunch may be past the worse, along comes another bank, or two, or three, going bust and the financial system is thrown yet again into crisis. And as each crisis hits, governments rush in with our billions, to keep the whole financial sector from collapse.

So much for all that crap preached for years about the need for market discipline under which uneconomic companies are allowed to go to the wall. It would seem that the iron laws of the free market only apply to coal mines. The banks are allowed to play by another set of free market rules, in which the well connected are allowed to make billions from corrupt deals, then when it all starts to fall apart, we pay the price with rising unemployment, falling living standards and repossessions. In the words of the old song, it’s the rich who get the pleasure and the poor who get the blame.

The Millbank riot and some of the subsequent student protests have been widely condemned in the media as the actions of a 'violent minority'. NUS president Aaron Porter infamously described the riot as ‘despicable’. Property destruction, we were told, undermined the message of the NUS’ peaceful protest. This was the behaviour of ‘anarchists’, outsiders hijacking what would otherwise be respectable political protest in a liberal democracy. But liberals would do well to reflect on their own glass house before casting such rhetorical stones.

Liberalism: doctrine of the violent minority

Liberalism in fact is nothing but the ideology of minority violence par excellence. Margaret Thatcher’s favourite thinker, Adam Smith, was refreshingly frank about this back in the 18th century:

After the failure at the polls, much attention from socialists and trade unionists has fallen upon the possibilities of working class political representation. While some talk of ‘reclaiming’ the Labour Party for the workers movement, others feel this party has had it’s day, and a replacement is needed. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) can in many ways be seen as the springboard for the latest such attempt  – coming on the heels of past attempts, such as Arthur Scargil’s Socialist Labour Party.

Labour themselves resorted to ‘class war’ rhetoric in a supposed ‘core vote’ strategy during the election campaign. This is not of course a new idea. The Labour Party was founded in the early 20th century, and subsequently set about supporting imperialist wars and breaking strikes. So why after a century of failure is the idea of a workers’ party stubbornly refusing to die?

8-page leaflet looking at what we can learn from the 2007 postal strike, the 2008 public sector strike and the 2009 Visteon occupation.

The leaflet was produced for a demo against the Labour Party Conference on Sunday 27th September. It is based on several previously published articles and we try to draw the lessons of recent relevant struggles in the UK.

For Workers’ Control

Lessons of recent struggles in the UK

Recent years have seen promising signs of a working class fightback, after decades of attacks on working class living standards.

But it is still early days. What can we learn from recent struggles? How can we turn isolated victories into a class-wide fightback to improve our working and living conditions, and resist the further cuts that have been promised in the next few years? We can start to answer these questions by studying the lessons of recent workers’ struggles in the UK…