more liberal wars for democracy?

This month’s editorial looks at the rising threat of war in Syria and Iran

March was quite a month for the champions of liberal imperialism. Not only does the raging civil war in Syria raise the prospect of Western intervention, but the social media-based ‘Kony 2012’ campaign  saw such luminaries as Russell Brand and Rihanna promoting the cause of humanitarian intervention in Uganda. Meanwhile, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu complained that his country would not wait long in attacking Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities.

dressed to kill

It was against this backdrop that David Cameron and Barack Obama reaffirmed the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States, a ritual of Prime Ministerial visits to Washington dating back more than thirty years. Many media noted their chummy relationship, including visiting a basketball game and playing table tennis.

april 2012 issue of the commune – out now!

Issue 29 of The Commune is now available. It features articles on the Sparks electricians’ strike, Tory workfare programmes, left nostalgia for Old Labour, casualisation and much more.

The paper is free: click the image above to see a PDF and see below for a list of articles as they are posted online.

International

more liberal wars for democracy? – This month’s editorial looks at the rising threat of war in Syria and Iran

communists and scotland’s referendum – Bob Goupillot and Allan Armstrong of the Republican Communist Network continue our debate on Scottish independence

the fight against NATO and their taliban friends – the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan marked International Women’s Day with a condemnation of the Karzai-NATO régime

Work

sparks’ strike rolls back bosses’ attack – Adam Ford reflects on electricians’ successful fight against pay cuts of up to 35%

flying low: grad opportunities working lates – Philip Stott continues our series on casual work with an essay on his experience as an airport baggage-handler and aircraft cleaner

love nor money: unpaid work at tesco – Sharon Borthwick looks at the absurd ideology behind workfare schemes

Anti-cuts

sheffield council targets workers, vulnerable – David Huckerby reports on an all-too familiar case of Labour Party cuts in jobs and services

time to cut the anti-cuts campaigns? – Sheila Cohen argues for a strategic focus in organising against austerity

Theory

from kicking off to revolution: avoiding the same old defeats – Mark Kosman reviews Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking off Everywhere

‘chavs’: nostalgia for old labour – Clifford Biddulph punctures the myths presented in Owen Jones’s book Chavs

the cat that got the cream (and avoided the ginger beer)

David Broder remembers one of George Galloway’s less glorious moments

In the aftermath of the ‘Bradford Spring’, I thought I’d share a brief recollection of one of my few face-to-face encounters with George Galloway.* It took place amidst a controversy pretty typical of Galloway’s career, where in the face of a straightforward case of socialist principle he instead jumped to defend the Iranian régime.

Four years ago, Galloway was in choppy waters. Having stretched the SWP’s loyalty to him to breaking point with his ‘outspoken’ views on sexual morality and his bizarre Big Brother appearance, in November 2007 he split their Respect venture as to still further exert his authority over it. Nonetheless standing in the May 2008 London elections (though still an MP), he was keen to stay in the media spotlight and thus made an appearance on Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff.

flying low: grad opportunities working lates

Philip Stott continues our series on casual work with an essay on his experience as an airport baggage-handler and aircraft cleaner

After graduating from university, I immediately started working for an agency who specialise in providing workers for the aviation industry. I thought I would write about two of my ‘assignments’.

Servisair are imposing redundancies on Liverpool baggage handlers, as the job becomes increasingly casualised

The first of these was as an aircraft cleaner for Derichebourg Multiservices at Liverpool Airport. I was part of a group of people in our twenties, some of whom travelled from as far away as Bury, who were taken on in order to work through the busy summer period. We worked a shift pattern, 10pm-6am; four days on, two days off and were paid an agency rate of £6.68 an hour (pretty bad for night work). Refuelling operators were the best paid and worked shifts, 8pm–8am, four days on, four off. There had been no pay rise at all for five years.

time to cut the anti-cuts campaigns?

In the lead-up to the latest national strike day on 28 March, Sheila Cohen asks whether the anti-cuts campaigns are working

I have been asked to write an article about anti-cuts campaigns, and said I don’t know much about them. I don’t know much about them because I don’t think they work. I don’t think they work because the government and ruling-class generally are rabid hyenas without an iota of inclination to give a flying **** about the needs and wishes of so-called “ordinary people” – if they did give such a thing they wouldn’t be, well, ruling. But I was asked to write nonetheless.

The several large demonstrations against the cuts programme have presented a confident outward image, mocking the Coalition: but what power do we actually have to stop Cameron and co.?

As a dutiful writer, I began preparing for this piece by doing (admittedly, a very small modicum of) research. One dedicated anti-cuts organisation I turned up which shall be nameless, but describes itself on its website as “a diverse collation of…groups and individuals that have come together to challenge social exclusion and promote social justice” includes as part of its many activities a project to unite unemployed workers, a “celebration” of its locality with a “one day community event” and, of course, intransigent opposition to racism – and quite right too. The community event was warmly received, with one participant commenting that it had, indeed, given “a real sense of community”. So what’s not to like?

sheffield Labour Council targets workers and the vulnerable

Barry Biddulph reports on the 550 council jobs to be axed in Sheffield.

Anti-cuts demonstration in Sheffield

Julie Dore, the leader of Sheffield Council, will make council workers and some of the most vulnerable people, who depend on council services, pay for the financial crisis. While Julie Dore sneers in public at protesters with placards, she tells Sheffield Star readers and trade union meetings that she has protected the most vulnerable. This is a dishonest attempt to justify choosing to make cuts, rather than organise to fight the government. The image of the dented shield only makes sense if you have taken part in a battle, not surrendered before the fight has begun.

the historical limits of capitalism

Just as feudalism was historically limited, so too capitalism, writes duvinrouge.

The rise of capitalists and their taking power from the nobility was a reflection of the changing economic conditions as manufacturing became more important than agriculture. Looking back, it’s quite easy to understand how the increasingly economically powerful capitalists seized power. The case for the workers taking power isn’t so obvious though. Many seem to think that capitalism will continue forever unless a political party can persuade working people of a better alternative. Such a subjectivist position shows a lack of understanding of how capitalism works and what Marx was getting at in Volume III of Das Kapital.

‘The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit’ is part three of Volume III. To understand the importance of this requires a good understanding of how capitalism works, what value is and in particular, the difference between absolute and relative surplus value. Value is essentially labour time. Not necessarily the sum of all actual labour time that has gone into all commodities produced, but the market-determined ‘socially necessarily’ labour time; not all commodities taken to market are bought at prices that cover their costs and return a profit because the capitalist has to anticipate demand. (Don’t worry if you don’t fully grasp ‘socially necessary’ labour time, the key point is values (prices) reflect labour time).

strikes and solidarity

If this year’s strikes are to have power, we must take our lead from the electricians, bypassing union attempts at defusion by offering each other solidarity in new ways and across artificial divides, writes Deb Harris.

Solidarity is illegal. Thatcher said so. She only permits us to strike if we have a specific and identifiable common complaint – we are not allowed to strike together in recognition of the general horror. In 2011, submissive as ever, the unions found the only thing that the public sector can legally unite around – pensions – and conveniently forgot that everyone is angry about a lot more than that. Their speeches, placards and leaflets were all about pensions. As if we had given up on anything but retirement.

Owen Jones and Chavs : Nostalgia for Old Labour

Barry Biddulph reviews,  Owen Jones, Chavs:  The Demonization of the Working Class, (Verso 14.99) 

Owen Jones describes how class hatred of  working people finds expression in  the gross  distortions of working class experience in the media. His book is also about why the working class is ridiculed. For Matt Lucas and David Walliams in Little Britain: the working class is foulmouthed,  feckless, and benefit dependent.  Owen explains how the mockery of the working class demonstrates their social inferiority. It’s a culture which blames the victims rather than social injustice. It’s the way the working class ‘underclass’ lives that’s seen as the problem. Owen blames class war:  the move away from true parliamentarianism and class harmony -the spirit of 1945. In Owens old Labour view “at the heart root of the demonization of working class people is the legacy of a very British class war. Margaret Thatcher’s assumption of power in 1979.” [1]

Owen has a very uninformed view of how workers were portrayed on TV prior to Thatcher and Neoliberalism. The comedy, The Rag trade , was not a sympathetic look at the life of sweated labour in the clothing industry. It ridiculed  mindless militancy and the supposed ignorant overconfidence of workers. Everybody out :  What a hoot! And what about the hatred of factory workers and shop stewards in the film, I’m all right Jack. The shop steward is a bigot who leads card playing lazy workers who have been put to shame by a new middle class employee who does not see the point in trade unions. Again Coronation street in the 1960’s was not a realistic portrayal of working class life. All the stereotypes were there. Elsie Tanner the single mother with dubious sexual morals and her son Dennis with a bad attitude to work and everything else.

For Owen “the dog eat dog individualism unleashed by Thatcher has also undermined the collective spirit at the heart of trade unionism.” [2] But the spirit of trade union officialdom is sectionalism and support for parliament and the state. It’s the spirit of defeat:  calling off  the General Strike in 1926, and the failure to show political solidarity for striking miners in the Great Strike of 1984-5. Even Thatcher was surprised at the lack of the fighting solidarity from the trade union leaders. They allowed Thatcher to put on the legal shackles that restrain the rank and file to this day. Thatcher’s destruction of industry in the 1980’s did leave the economy dangerously reliant on the financial institutions of the city of London. However, deindustrialisation has always been an essential part of  the way capitalism works. The idea that the interests of the wealthiest are essential for the well-being of society as a whole did not begin with Thatcherism and Neoliberalism, it has always been the dominant view at the top of the Labour Party and the Trade Unions.

Owen’s alternative to Neoliberalism is a return to the presence of  old Labour working class parliamentarians. He regrets the lack of opportunities for working people to rise through parliament from the pit, dock and factory. Once upon a time Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin and Nye Bevan who were responsible for state capitalist administration, reactionary wars in support of American Imperialism, and keeping most of the economy in private hands in the post war Atlee government are supposed to have been a voice for workers outside parliament. In Owens view, old Labour remained committed to the idea of raising the conditions of the working class until the 1980’s. But outside Owen’s old Labour view, the real history of  old Labour  is rather different. For instance, Old Labour did not organise the unemployed in the 1930’s, the Communist party did that. And Harold Wilson’s Labour Government’s tried to prevent the militant rank and file workers and shop stewards, in the factories of the 1960’s, raising living standards by winning wage demands.

For Owen, we can build up old Labour again, because unless working class people can be properly represented in parliament Britain faces the prospect of an angry right-wing populism. This is a grim perspective of a choice between a right-wing popular reactionary movement or workers entering parliament. Owen Jones  is fearful and pessimist about class struggle outside parliament. Owen shares his values of class harmony through parliament with the Liberal origins of the Labour Party. It was the liberal politics of Keir Hardie which were decisive in the fledgling Labour Party. He argued that the Labour Party should stand for the nation not class war. The result was working men in parliament with conservative and liberal views  led by parliamentary reactionaries. Many of Labour’s politicians such as Phillip Snowden, were profoundly conformist. Snowden was an economic liberal who kept to the Gold Standard which destroyed working class living standards, communities, and jobs, long before Thatcherism. There is historical continuity, since Dennis Healy and James Callaghan returned to economic liberalism in 1976, prior to Thatcher.

His history of working class communities is old Labour mythology. Owen stresses geographical community as the bonds of working class solidarity, which he associates with manual workers mainly in the old pit communities. He stresses contentment and pride in  factory work. On the other hand he gives an isolated example of his friend Liam who hated every second of his boring work in a print factory:  alienation in the work place has never been a strong point in the Labour tradition. Historically, the working class has been recomposed many times in terms of local community and workplace. Owen offers his experience of Stockport, as a typical of a rooted community. In Stockport,  like Owen, but speaking from more experience, there was deindustrialisation or factory closures long before Thatcherism. The Cotton mills closed in the late fifties and early sixties. Engineering factories were shut down in the late sixties and early seventies.  His talk of roots going back to grandfathers is also largely a myth. There was a movement of workers in and out of Stockport and other industrial areas as jobs and community changed complexion.

The old parliamentary Labour party also closed coal mines and refused to support miners striking in defence of their communities.Ramsay MacDonald, from the interwar years, and Neil Kinnock from the 1980s, both  left the miners to fight alone and go down to defeat.  Old Labour shares a big responsibility for the decline of the value of solidarity. Owen’s nostalgia for old Labour is also very selective. Owen’s working class heroes of the post-war Labour government all supported working class austerity and used British troops on a mass scale to break strikes. All three were committed to administrating and modernising capitalism at the expense of working class living standards.  They opposed any challenge to capitalism such as encouraging more power to the workers in their workplace. Nationalisation was a form of bureaucratic state capitalism applied to those public utilities and industries which were deemed to be inefficient. Despite Nye Bevan’s parliamentary rhetoric, he was in favour of leaving 80% of industry in the hands of private capitalists.

Trade union bosses and Labour party leaders still believe the interests of the wealthy are essential for the well-being of society. This explains the facts of inequality Owen presents.  It also explains why Ed Miliband can support a pay freeze for public sector workers, and refuse to oppose the cuts or promise to reverse them. Union bosses such as Brian Strutton of the GMB and Dave Prentis of Unison  sided with the state in the pension dispute or are leaders the government can do business with. Business interests come first, way above the interests of workers in the public or private sector. It is not enough to describe the demonization of the working class, if like Owen, you support a parliamentary tradition, which has put the working class  down and kept them away from any real power or influence.

Notes

1 p.10

2 p.153

self-managed socialism: possible, urgent, necessary

Writing for Passa Palavra, Brazilian teacher Henrique T. Novaes looks at advantages and limitations of the Latin American experience of workers trying to overcome capitalist work relations through their control of their workplaces 

The destruction of the welfare state in Europe and the continuation of the state of social ills in the rest of the world are the consequences of an irrational society. In Spain, Portugal and Greece 40% of young people are unemployed and the state has unpayable debts. After riots in England’s capital city the Government insisted on calling the youth “vandals without a cause”, dismissing out of hand the obvious social causes of the revolt. Stratospheric public debts, neo-fascism, unemployment, underemployment, the return of hunger and poverty to Europe: words which keep appearing in a region which managed to create a restrained, partly nationalised – but capitalist nonetheless – capitalism in the 1945-73 period.

Capitalism under the hegemony of finance, turbo-marketisation and the return of primitive accumulation can only survive with increasing repression and the criminalisation of social movements. To cite a Latin-American example, Argentinian society reacted to the process of financialisation of its economy in 2001, a financialisation which gained strength after the military coup of 1976, throwing the country’s popular movements into the dust. In 2001 they did fight back, saying “Enough! Out with the lot of you!”: it was a symptom of the tiredness of neoliberal reforms and the neocolonisation of Argentinian society. However, the popular revolt of 2001 rapidly transformed into a new politics of ‘development’ under President Kirchner.

reza shahabi must be free!

Omid Rezai looks at the case of a jailed militant on hunger strike in Iran

Reza Shahabi, an Iranian labour activist, has been in held in Block 209 of Tehran’s notorious Evin jail, for months without conviction or even proper charge. Paying attention to the reality of his case shows that the situation for workers and working-class movements in Iran is different to that in Europe only in degree; bureaucratic and bourgeois-legalist excuses manufactured ad hoc to justify his continuing political incarceration, his alleged second trial remaining always just around a corner, since he was found to have no case to answer to on 25th May.

The authorities have attacked him still further. He has been subjected to aggression and intimidation, pressured to cut even his scheduled fortnightly telephone conversation with his family. In response, Reza began a hunger strike, demanding his immediate and unconditional release. Beginning on 1^st November, his hunger strike led to the formation of a committee for his defence which attracted hundreds of signatories from across the Iranian labour movement. Mahmoud Salehi, himself recently released from jail, has become the spokesperson for the group. The authorities increased their attacks on Reza, at one point using his weaknesses as an excuse to stop him from talking to his family, telling them that he would not see them.

death by a thousand (paper) cuts

Taimour Lay reports on the crisis in the print-media from a journalist’s perspective 

Most of you reading this article won’t be regular buyers of a newspaper. You might not have the time or the inclination. You might be rightly hacked off with the tabloids or fed up with the ideological biases of the broadsheets. You might think most papers most of the time won’t cover what you want in the way you want it. That’s probably why you picked up The Commune (plus, like Metro, we’re free.) Or you’re reading all you need online, including this paragraph…

In a spin: newspaper circulation is falling rapidly

For those of us who work in newspapers, it’s obvious we’re part of an industry in crisis. And it’s not just a slump, it’s an existential panic, a growing realisation that we’re the last generation who will have worked in print. A whole language and culture of work will go – the backbench, downtable, going off stone, the four-star, the slip, the runner, top and tailing – it will all be history, along with the final edition.

taking control of our struggle

A college worker recently on strike describes how the  mood in her workplace has developed throughout the pensions dispute, in tandem with a local fight over redundancy and restructuring

In my workplace both the admin staff and the teaching staff were out on strike together for the first time in years, which made the strike a very different experience. Normally, although we talk to each other every day in the course of work, we don’t organise together or support each other much in the face of redundancy, restructuring, disciplinaries etc. The teaching staff are better organised than the admin staff and usually have better working conditions, and haven’t tended to pay much attention to the problems faced by the other workers.

Unions struck on the same day, but they aren’t necessarily well linked up with each other, still less the non-unionised majority

In the buildup to the strike we had some joint meetings, both informal canteen meetings and one formal union meeting, and we did some activities together, such as leafleting. It bought it home how separated we are in the two unions, UCU and Unison, and how unnecessary it is – I had never even met most of the Unison people, and yet we work in the same building. This is not only because of the union bureaucracies. We could easily talk informally to each other but we don’t, due to inertia and inward looking attitudes.

cops back bosses bullying cleaners

Siobhan Breathnach reports on Guildhall cleaners standing up against management bullying

The Guildhall cleaners started organising in the summer against bad conditions and non-payment of wages. They have joined the cleaners’ branch of the Industrial Workers of the World and fought for the London Living Wage and against bullying and harassment. The company, Sodexo, have responded to this by trying to force the organised cleaners to leave. They have suspended a union rep, who is still waiting for the resolution of his case after months.

Recently, the employer’s tactics of intimidation have got worse and some cleaners held a sit-in to protest, which started on 22nd December. They had been subject to all kinds of abuse, including one woman being locked in an area for two hours, and another being taken into the basement and threatened. Some of us from The Commune and SolFed went down to support them just after Christmas.