Letters
Sparks' fight
On Wednesday August 24 I was proud to join 200 rank and file, grassroots electricians protesting outside Balfour Beatty's Blackfriars station construction project in London. It's a shame though that there were no Unite officials stood alongside us. Keep on keeping on ...
The dispute was sparked when eight major electrical contractors announced they would withdraw from the Joint Industry Board (JIB). They are Bailey Building Services, Balfour Beatty Engineering Services, Tommy Clarke, Crown House Technologies, Gratte Brothers, MJN Colston, SES and SPIE Matthew Hall.
Taking the piss or what, last year the chief executive of Balfour's gave himself an 8% pay rise, yet for us they propose three new grades for electricians: £10.50 per hour for a metalworker, £12 for wiring, £14 for terminating. The current JIB rate for electricians is £16.25 across the board. For the worst hit it's a 35% pay cut, coupled with major changes to other terms and conditions.
The Blackfriars protest followed a packed-out meeting organised by Unite rank and file activists from London and the south coast at Conway Hall, London on Saturday August 13. Five hundred electricians and pipefitters sent out a clear message to employers and the union that they will not accept the deskilling of their trade or the pay cuts to their national agreements.
The mood was electric - it was the biggest meeting since 2000. There was discussion from the floor and questions and answers to two London officials, who were really put on the spot over Amicus/EETPU failings in the past. The rank and file made it very clear that Unite needs to perform in this current dispute or the anger shown by many at the meeting will be vented against them. But the idea of forming a new union should not be considered. It had been tried and had failed miserably in the past. Now we are in the same union, we are far stronger.
A motion was passed unanimously that "Unite must immediately ballot members who are working for JIB firms who have been told that the terms and conditions will be changing in March 2012, and a campaign must be set up by Unite, distributing leaflets to all sites around the country opposing these attacks on our industry and to have regular feedback to the members."
It was agreed to call for unofficial action as soon as possible on large sites and that other sites should come out in solidarity, rather than wait for a ballot, as this would put the whole issue out in the open. When the employers go on the attack you can't always wait for a ballot. We can win this battle and turn over the eight firms who have threatened to pull out of the JIB agreement. We've done it before and we can do it again. The last time the electrical contractors attempted to cut wages by deskilling the electrical trade was 1999, which led to coordinated strikes on the Jubilee line, Royal Opera House, Pfizers and projects across the UK.
A national rank and file committee was elected by those in attendance on August 13. Further rank and file meetings will be held around the country in the coming months. There is a lot of anger and electricians won't stand for it - these grassroots protests will only get bigger and we will be protesting at major sites across the country until the employers change their minds.
This new movement is on a high and we can spread the mood throughout construction. There will be attacks on other trades too. We should try and build things involving Ucatt and GMB members as well.
The fight will be tough, but - together and united - we will win.
Sparks' fight
Sparks' fight
Cut-price
According to Labour Research magazine (September), in July, the general union, Unite, announced the launch of a community membership scheme. On offer is cut-price membership of 50p a week for students, the unemployed and single parents in a drive to organise in local communities as well as workplaces.
This is a small, but very significant development. It will enable the unwaged to become active within the Unite union and the wider movement, including trades councils.
Cut-price
Cut-price
Sex exclusion
On August 29 the Morning Star ran a feature article on sex work with various contributions, but not one from the GMB sex workers branch - GMB 150 branch. You can see the article, titled 'What path to a better life?', at www.morningstaronline.co.uk.
Given this is a labour movement paper, we do believe it is appropriate to have the voice of trade union workers in that industry heard. Please write in to the paper at lettersed@peoples-press.com and request that space be given to the GMB branch that organises sex workers.
Sex exclusion
Sex exclusion
Jarra lad
In response to the rather insulting and snooty dismissal of the Jarrow march in an 'Our history' footnote, which credits Mark Fischer as an authority, a word or two needs to be said ('The day of ragged processions is over', August 4).
Firstly, the march was motivated by the massive levels of unemployment (more than 80% for males) in Jarrow and surrounding areas. Real, hard social deprivation had this Tyneside population on the verge of literal starvation. This had been brought about by the general recession, but in particular by the closure of the Palmers shipyards, which employed most of the local male population. It had been added to by severe cutbacks in colliery workforces by 50% and in some cases two thirds, at the local pits. Remember that this followed bitter defeats and betrayals in the area in 1921 and 1926, with the colliery communities literally facing mass starvation, and the following decade did nothing to restore health and subsistence levels.
The situation was desperate and, at mass assemblies of the unemployed workers, the first proposals had been to march to London with guns and grenades in their pockets, gathering an army of armed workers on the way. I have this from at least three workers I interviewed who joined the march, and it is common local knowledge. It is not, of course, logged in any official records of the period, though David Riley, the march's radical leader, following the march's total failure, later commented that he "wished we had marched to London with 'bombs in our pockets'".
It is the reason for Alan Price's chorus: "If they won't give you half a chance / Won't even give you a second glance / Then, Geordie, with my blessing / Burn them down" ('Jarrow song').
This is unlikely to have been simply bravado. The Jarrow population is heavily Tyneside-Irish and at least some of the activists had been on active duty with the IRA - apart from the revolutionary politics which had inspired a generation of workers, especially the local miners, who also had explosives training.
It should be added that the Jarrow march was no "ragged procession" either. The men were marshalled into squadrons with NCOs and marched as a military unit the whole route.
'Red' Ellen Wilkinson, the town's leftwing MP and former founder member of the CPGB, who was instrumental in organising the march, at first approached Wal Hannington of the National Unemployed Workers Movement to jointly organise it. He and they rejected the plan for a specifically Jarrow march and urged instead Jarrow to be part of a national unemployed march taking place in October of that year.
This did not match the mood or patience of the town, and the Labour town council took over the organisation of a Jarrow march in the name of the whole town, winning the support of local Tory councillors and, of course, businesses which were also going to the wall. The march, while not now carrying guns, carried the hopes and aspirations of the workers of the whole region. I don't know where Mark gets the information that NUWM and CPGB members were excluded, because if that was someone's design it certainly wasn't fulfilled and a number of local communists and well-known revolutionary socialists were on it the whole way, as was Ellen herself, having left the party just eight years prior and still very much carrying the party whip.
That the march was accommodated at some strange venues is the fault of one glaring omission that Mark makes. Far from it being "officially lauded", both the TUC and the Labour Party condemned it and voted against any support for it. This was while it was progressing. Ellen took time off to attend the Labour Party conference and was horrified to hear the march and her participation condemned from the platform. Conference voted against support - and not, let us be clear, because it was too moderate. Circulars were sent out from the TUC and the Labour Party to all trades councils and Labour Party constituencies and wards not to support or accommodate the march and the marchers.
It was in those circumstances that other venues and means of subsistence for the starving marchers had to be found; it was not a question of choice or political cross-dressing, as Mark's footnote suggests. The marchers were wilfully deceived when they arrived in London, and were taken away from parliament on a river trip down the Thames, while their petition and resolution was summarily thrown out of the Commons with few supporters from any quarter.
The Jarrow march remains a symbol of the abandonment of the north by the largely rich and indifferent southern-centric ruling class it was meant to confront. It was meant to generate public awareness of the stark situation in Jarrow and towns like it. The men who took part in that endeavour are still regarded as working class heroes in this neck of the wood, and their class credentials are not tarnished by any mistaken strategy of their leaders, the indifference of the ruling elite or the ongoing treachery of the Labour leadership.
As for the Socialist Party's attempt to recreate the march, I don't like the fact that they chose to title it a Jarrow march. It doesn't come from Jarrow; there is no groundswell of militant opposition and renewed vigour in Jarrow for action, which frankly only revived briefly during the war and was soon abandoned again when the need for warships was over. I don't think anyone from Jarrow is actually part of the planning. Were it a Tyneside march for jobs, I would have no objection to that, as, given planning and sound preparation, I see no reason why it couldn't attract a lot of support, debate and ongoing organisation.
It would pose again the recent debate about restructuring manufacturing and rebuilding the industrial framework, redeveloping proper apprenticeship and skills, giving youth a chance to work and communities some heart and wages again. Not because we like the lash on our backs or because we aspire to wage-slavery, but because industrial capacity puts on the agenda the chance to take control of our lives and fulfil our social and material demands and needs.
Jarra lad
Jarra lad
Where was he?
I know that Frank Lansbury has been studying the issue of working class justice for many years now, culminating in his self-published Wearing your knee caps as earrings - a study of extreme justice in the north of Ireland, but I take umbrage at his mealy-mouthed assertions in his letter to the Weekly Worker (August 11). For the last few years (since the financial crisis and parliamentary expenses scandal) Frank has been calling for a 'justice squad' to promote his theory of extreme justice. Engels was quite clear, when discussing the Bavarian beer riots of 1844, that it is the duty of communists to be on the streets during civil unrest - but where was Frank? Finishing off his inquiry into civil disobedience in the long-running American TV show, The Simpsons? Doubtless there are many insights into the mind of the American worker to be found in the work of Matt Groening, but I'd like to finish with a quote which has featured often during bouts of looting and violence in Springfield: "What about the children?"
Where was he?
Where was he?
Spoilt brats
The Socialist Workers Party line on the riots forgets that the violence and destruction of homes, property and businesses is deeply irrational and by no means represents any kind of political act. It is not politics, but psychoanalysis, that is relevant to the understanding of rebel psychology.
These rebels would rise up against a workers’ government if they believed that the police were invading their patch and preventing them from carrying on their drug-dealing and gangsterism. The SWP and the CPGB should ask themselves if the Bolsheviks in power would have responded with jelly-bellied Guardian desire to understand the hoodlums, or would they have been decisively crushed, as surely as Kronstadt was perceived as a mutiny against the revolution.
The left should get real about these vacuous riots that told us more about the narcissistic groups, consumeristic and selfish, that put crime before the needs of the community, and are thus politically reactionary. Only the deluded ultra-left could believe that “pure joy and fulfilment” resulted from arson, theft and violence against the community (Weekly Worker August 11). Socialism is the vision of peace and solidarity, not violence and crime.
The result of the riots is a prime minister who appears weak, who tells us to ‘hug a hoody’, naive and out of touch. Thus the demand has been voiced to replace Cameron with a ‘stronger’ leader, more capable of beefing up the Metropolitan police. There were calls to use plastic bullets, bring in the army, etc. The reactionary behaviour of the hoodlums feeds the agenda of the far right. The left appears even more out of touch than Cameron. Well done, lads and lasses, you have helped bring about a more authoritarian state, the cessation of freedom of movement, assembly, etc, and fear in just popping down to the shops, or going to a Wetherspoons pub to meet a friend for a drink: a great leap forward - not!
The subproletariat works in crime against the interests of the working class and its organisations. For all its faults, the Labour Party has reflected the sentiments of the working class and trade unionists throughout
Spoilt brats
Spoilt brats
No better
James Turley argues that the Alliance for Workers' Liberty's position on the media is better than that of the Socialist Party in England and Wales (Letters, August 11). That is only superficially true. If you look at what they are calling for now, it is the nationalisation of the media by a workers' government, but in reality their definition of this workers' government in the here and now is, and can be nothing other than, a Miliband Labour government. I take it that James doesn't agree with that or thinks that such a government would actually be "some form of workers' rule". In that case, as I said, the AWL's position is no better than that of SPEW.
I have to say that I was also amazed at James' argument in relation to the monopoly issue. The implication is that the existence of several capitalist papers means that the ideological monopoly of capital is thereby undermined. That is like saying that the existence of several capitalist parties, like the Republicans and Democrats in the US, or Liberals and Tories in the UK, is a guarantee of genuine pluralism! Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, the left which so objects to this monopoly of ideas in the hands of media barons is by and large the same left that defends the even bigger, even more effective monopoly of ideas, in the form of state capitalist education - what Max Shachtman referred to as "capitalism's head-fixing industry".
To be honest, I think that if James thinks most workers buy newspapers - and in any case newspaper circulation has dropped significantly - for the ideas contained within them, then he is mistaken. Those who buy The Sun don't do so, mostly, for its intellectual stimulation. The biggest-circulation newspaper, the News of the World, didn't achieve that position for its in-depth political and economic analysis of current society, unless your definition of that is which celebrity is reported to be screwing some other celebrity. James is right that I think that those newspapers should, where possible, be occupied by their workers and converted to workers' cooperatives, but my main answer is that the labour movement needs to get its act together and create its own popular, mass-circulation newspaper. That is the best means of challenging the ideas of the bosses, not giving the illusion that press plurality can achieve it and that the ideas propagated in The Guardian are any less bourgeois than those in the Daily Mail, and so all we need do is ask the bosses' state to legislate such a solution for us. We should seek to ensure that the labour movement not only create a mass-circulation newspaper, but that it provides good and extensive online coverage, and that we take advantage of the development of technology to create a labour movement TV channel as the precursor to establishing our own comprehensive media.
I have no doubt that, should workers be successful in developing their own media empire, the bourgeois state would be only too glad to use laws to break it up to prevent monopolisation, just as they would use other such laws to break up workers' cooperative property that was deemed to be monopolistic. We should not provide them with the basis for doing so.
No better
No better
Lemons
Chris Stafford attacks the shift in CPGB policy of "winning the Labour Party to socialism" and says "this shift must be challenged by comrades in and beyond our ranks" (Weekly Worker August 11). If this means anything it is a call for a united front of all who want to overthrow the CPGB line on Labour. I respond positively to this call. We will see if Chris is serious. A united front doesn't mean we have the same theory of what is wrong.
In his reply to me Peter Manson says: "Comrade Freeman seems to have developed a new theory about the CPGB" (Letters, August 11). My basic thesis is that the CPGB hasn't completed its break with its Stalinist heritage. On the USSR the CPGB is roughly 'Trotskyist' in accepting that the USSR was not socialism. But on the party question the CPGB should be identified as neo-Stalinist. If Trotskyism and neo-Stalinism implies a contradictory formation, so be it. I am sure Chris Stafford won't agree with this. But it is not a barrier to a united front against Her Majesty's Labour Party and all who want to sail in her.
The hypothesis suggests that on the party question the CPGB has recently switched from its 'third period partyism' (1996-2009) to its 'popular front partyism'. This is the continuity of an ultra-left line switching to the right. Peter sees continuity in the 'before-after' CPGB line as correct-correct. I think it is wrong-wrong. We can agree on continuity. Chris thinks the current line is wrong, but it is not clear what he thinks of the 'before' period.
Of course a hypothesis is not proof. Evidence has to be gathered and mobilised to prove it. This is beyond the scope of a letter. But it is important to set out where I am coming from in discussing CPGB policy of "winning the Labour Party to socialism". However, let us park this hypothesis and move on. All CPGB members can unite in agreeing that it is wrong, ridiculous and off the wall. It doesn't matter. We can discuss the issues with or without accepting such an extreme hypothesis.
Since the 1990s in the UK a capitalist offensive has been carried out politically by the Tories and New Labour against a weakened workers' movement and fragmented communist movement. In these conditions revolutionaries must adopt a strategy with two tactics. First, there is a need for a revolutionary communist party and, second, a need for a workers' party. The first is directed to communists alone. The second is a united front slogan calling for communist and non-communist workers to unite.
The CPGB and Revolutionary Democratic Group approached these questions with different strategies, tactics and slogans. The CPGB strategy calls for a Marxist party and a reformed Labour Party. The RDG called for an international revolutionary democratic communist party and a republican socialist party. If there is to be a serious debate, then one set of strategic slogans can be contrasted with the other. If we call the two tactics 'oranges' and 'lemons', then we can compare 'oranges' and/or we can contrast 'lemons'.
I will give provisional names to the CPGB and RDG party strategies as the 'British road to socialism' and the 'republican road to world communism'. If we discuss the relative merits of the two oranges (Marxist party versus IRDCP) or two lemons (reformed Labour Party and the republican socialist party), we are having a partial debate extracted from the totality.
In its 'third period partyism' the CPGB contrasted its Marxist party orange with everybody else's lemons. It was easy to show that the CPGB orange was much sweeter than all the other lemons - variously called 'Labour Party mark two' or 'halfway house'. You would be forgiven for thinking the CPGB was all oranges and no lemons. However, this was false. When the CPGB turned to the right, it revealed its own lemon. Peter claims the CPGB lemon was there all along. In my view he is correct. But it was concealed under a smokescreen which is now banished, along with the words 'Labour Party mark two'. In the 'third period' the CPGB set the slogan of the 'Marxist party' against 'republican socialist workers party'. Now the debate must move on - the 'Labour Party mark two' or reformed Labour Party versus what Peter called a 'halfway house'.
This debate is not purely theoretical. It has practical consequences. It leads the CPGB into the Labour Party. Having ignored the lemon question for so long, the CPGB has now decided to bite the biggest, bitterest lemon at the wrong time. It leads comrades like me towards the independent, militant left.
Lemons
Lemons
Silly
Chris Strafford regards the Labour debate as "diversionary and doomed to fail" ('Labour debate: diversionary and doomed to fail', August 11). He argues that we must not repeat the mantras of decades long passed that have proven wrong hundreds of times and that we need a radical rethink.
No-one can say that it is impossible for the Labour Party to move to the left and take on capitalism at a certain stage. After all, the post-war Labour government did carry out radical reforms and introduced the national health service. People who oppose a pro-Labour Party strategy as a diversion do not understand that the situation which capitalism faces today has no historical precedent. It is far more serious than the conditions facing Labour at the end of World War II.
We certainly need a radical rethink. As students of the energy crisis know, the importance of peak oil is that it signals the end of growth in the global economy. Capitalism cannot thrive without constant economic growth. Therein is the problem for the bourgeoisie. What will Labour do when facing a capitalism in permanent decline with mass unemployment and an increasingly radicalised working class and middle class and when, like in wartime, the market is restrained and the state turns to rationing?
The main reason why the bourgeoisie were able to marginalise socialism in the advanced capitalist countries for decades was because they were able to steer capitalism to achieve stupendous economic growth. This possibility is no longer available to the leaders of capitalism, which, following from 2008, is teetering on another financial collapse either this year or next. No society, no class, no party has faced what the world will soon face, so it is silly to be dogmatic about the role of the Labour Party in this new situation.
Silly
Silly
Splitters!
Minor embarrassment at Workers Power headquarters: internal struggles over the organisation's line on the Libyan conflict have resulted in the expulsion of comrade Christopher Newcombe.
He is not the only member to have problems with the Workers Power line, shared by its oil-slick League for a Fifth International. There appears to have been a spirited, but curtailed debate on the issue at a recent conference, which affirmed the leadership's line of combining support for the rebellion with opposition to Nato intervention. There is but one problem - as the minority comrades laboriously point out, this is in flat contradiction to every extant version of Workers Power's programme (Newcombe has posted the minority document online - http://l5ilo.blogspot.com/2011/08/libya-programme-first.html).
Instead of seriously re-examining their programme, the leadership appears happy - in a depressingly storied tradition of Trotskyist sects - to bat down criticisms until the issue conveniently goes away. Perhaps, one of these days, we outside the WP/L5I ranks will be treated to yet another apparently ex nihilo announcement that the organisation has defended an incorrect line for a number of years, as we were when it 'suddenly' dropped the bizarre argument that the ex-Stalinist countries remained workers' states - though 'moribund' rather than degenerated or deformed - even after everyone else accepted that capitalism had been restored, the capitalists included.
On another note, comrade Newcombe's expulsion appears to result from that most modern of sins, a Facebook posting deemed insufficiently 'on point' by the leadership; presumably this is a second offence, the first being going into opposition in the first place. WP's political committee is alleged to have convened a meeting specifically to discuss this stubbornly uncensorable (that is, uncensorable by left bureaucrats) medium. Lord only knows what resulted from this discussion; hopefully nothing quite so stupid as the SWP's legendary warning to its own comrades in the early days of the internet against contributing to e-lists, but you never know.
It is certainly emblematic of yet another farcical consequence of the left's bureaucratic organisation - the tendency for paranoid leaderships to burn their fingers in the white heat of technology. How much longer must we do this, comrades?
Splitters!
Splitters!
Correction
My article ('Washington paralysis: a geriatric disorder', August 11) contains a confusion, for which I am responsible, between the annual US government deficit and total government debt. I wrote: "At 9.3% of GDP, the $14.5 trillion overall US government deficit ... is indeed high by historical standards."
The $14.3 trillion figure represents total government debt - actually about 96% of a projected 2011 GDP slightly upwards of $15 trillion. The 9.3% figure represents an approximation of the annual deficit for the fiscal year 2011 as a percentage of GDP - indeed high by historical standards.
Correction
Correction