‘new’ tactics versus rubbish bosses

by Adam Ford

With the economic collapse and inevitable banker bailouts hitting national and local government budgets, politicians from all parties are determined to make working class people pay for the crisis of their system. While national Labour, Conservatives and Lib Dems are courting big business support by swaggering into TV studios, boasting of how tough they will be next year, local officials are wasting no time in going on the attack.

Under these conditions, the recent and ongoing struggles against refuse worker wage cuts are serving as a taster for the far bigger fights will soon be upon us. So yes, refuse collectors and street cleaners in Liverpool, Leeds and Edinburgh have withdrawn their labour in union-led campaigns. But perhaps more significantly, they have had active support from various groups, which has gone far beyond the passive routine of letter-writing and appeals to politicians. Desperate times clearly call for more militant measures, and though these isolated events have not tipped the balance in the strikers’ favour, they point towards new workerist strategies in the months and years ahead.

issue 8 of the commune

The October issue of our monthly paper The Commune is now available. Click the image below to see the PDF, or see articles as they are posted online in the list below.

To purchase a printed copy for £1 + 50p postage, use the ‘donate’ feature here. You can also subscribe (£12 a year UK/£16 EU/£20 international) or order 5 copies a month to sell (£4) online here. If you want to pay by cheque, contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com.

we’re not ‘all in it together’ – editorial of The Commune

update on the activities of our network

tuc congress: an opportunity wasted? – by Gregor Gall

fragile livelihoods at cowley mini factory – by  Brian Rylance

what is the london postal strike really about? – interview of CWU reps by Sheila Cohen

gordon brown’s workhouses for single mothers – by Zoe Smith

‘new’ tactics versus rubbish bosses – by Adam Ford

lessons of the tower hamlets esol strike – interview with two members of teaching staff

how we fought education cuts in tamworth – by Rob Marsden

on the necessity of pluralist communism – by Nathan Coombs

a letter from tegucigalpa: resisting the honduran coup – by a member of Socialismo o Barbarie

political report from the land of the haggis-eating surrender monkeys – by Allan Armstrong

electoral parties: let’s not put old wine in new bottles – by David Broder

a beginners’ guide to cuts – by Robert Kirby

platform of our communist network

what is the london postal strike really about?

Sheila Cohen (NUJ) interviews a London Divisional Rep and a workplace rep from North London to find out. Overall, the situation appears to be that top Royal Mail management are determined to follow a “New Labour” agenda of targets and savings on the backs of postal workers – however little sense that makes.

Workplace activists are equally determined to resist the intolerable impact on their members’ incomes and working lives. In some ways, it’s an irreconcilable impasse between the logic of neo-liberal capitalism and the reality of an industry which can only rationally be run as a public service. As our Divisional Rep puts it, “There’s a War Going On” – and as the workplace rep comments ruefully on the 2007 strike, “We had Royal Mail, and we let it go”.

(Download PDF of this interview in pamphlet form: To order online for 50p + 50p postage,  ‘donate’ the money here, making sure to specify in the text box what you are ordering)

lessons of the tower hamlets esol strike

Two workers who took part in the recent strike over cuts to teaching roles and student places in English for Speakers of Other Languages and other subjects spoke to The Commune about the lessons of the dispute.

Tell us about what unions workers are in, their organising capacity, and of their previous relationship with management

All teachers are in the University and College Union. Support staff/admin staff are mainly in Unison or no union. UCU has always been strong in the college and in the two years before the strike successfully campaigned to make 60 hourly paid teachers into permanent employees with higher pay and more rights. UCU also led an unofficial walkout earlier in the year to support our longstanding caretaker who was sacked.

electoral parties: let’s not put old wine in new bottles

by David Broder

If June’s European election results were disastrous for the traditional social democrat parties like Labour, France’s Parti Socialiste or the German SPD, they were unspectacular for the so-called ‘radical left’, despite the capitalist crisis. Yet recent general election results for Die Linke (‘The Left’) in Germany and Bloco de Esquerda (‘Left Bloc’) in Portugal have bolstered some left groups’ keen-ness to try and create something similar in Britain.

Die Linke won more than 5 million votes; 76 of the 622 seats; and the most votes in two of Germany’s 16 states. The Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal increased its support to over 10%. Certainly these results are the envy of any coalition the British left has managed to put together: from the Socialist Alliance and Socialist Labour Party to Respect and, worst of all, ‘No2EU’, the various unity initiatives have failed to make any impact on the national political scene, despite the size of movements such as Stop the War or the significant rightwards drift of the Labour Party.

a beginners’ guide to cuts

by Robert Kirby

In the last few months, the constant refrain from all the mainstream parties has been the need for cuts in the public sector. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg promised “savage”  cuts at his party conference – before rapidly backtracking when his attempt at virility didn’t go down well with the party faithful. David Cameron has promised an “age of austerity”; an entire political era built around government belt tightening. George Osborne has threatened a pay-freeze for all public sector workers. And whilst Labour party figures like Peter Mandelson have complained that the Tories would be “gleeful” in enforcing cutbacks, their “responsible” brand of austerity will mean the same cuts in living standards for ordinary people.

The UK national debt is currently around £800 bn; around 60% of GDP, and is predicted to rise much higher in coming years. The government runs an approximately 12% deficit, meaning that a predicted £175 bn more will go out than come in. Around half of this deficit is structural – meaning that it is a permanent feature rather than a credit-crunch induced blip. This means that the increasing interest on government debt has to be serviced, a cumulative weight on the exchequer that will get worse and worse without action. The deficit could raise interest rates throughout the economy, cause inflation and potentially lead to a devaluation of the currency. From the perspective of the ruling elite, these figures make it seem pretty imperative to restore the economy to balance and competitiveness. But ultimately, capitalism isn’t about balance and competitiveness, but about profit.

fragile livelihoods at cowley mini factory

Earlier this year BMW laid off 850 agency workers at their Oxford Cowley factory. There was widespread TV coverage of a video of workers angrily rebuking and pelting the Unite union official who had kept his members in the dark—but a planned mass picket of the factory the following week flopped. Here we report on the situation seven months later.

by Brian Rylance

The Commune’s 23rd February report on the BMW Cowley plant lay-offs has taken a new and unusual twist with the announcement that Mini production is to be increased, ‘safeguarding’ present employment and hinting at new jobs. This news has been greeted with considerable joy by the Oxford Mail. Yet the fact is that the jobs were cut in an unthinking response to the wider economic downturn, and as was reported by The Commune at the time, this was despite the fact that Mini sales were “not falling.”

gordon brown’s workhouses for single mothers

by Zoe Smith

“That’s better for them, better for their babies and better for all of us”
Gordon Brown on his proposal to house single mothers in state-run supervised homes

September was an exceptionally rough month for many mothers. They took a further beating at the hands of the state with the Labour Party’s stultified attempts to kick into motion its lumbering electoral machine, in the mad rush to outdo the Conservative Party’s social conservatism. During his mid September speech to the TUC on spending cuts the Prime Minister revealed that New Labour had decided to drop its manifesto pledge to increase paid maternity leave for mothers to one year. In a qualification to this decision Gordon Brown added that this would be counter-balanced by granting fathers the right to take three months of paid paternity leave during the second six months of their child’s life. This was on the condition that the mother returned to work. Following this announcement Brown proceeded to make a pronounced and very hostile attack on teenage mothers during his keynote speech at the Labour Party conference. The scale and seriousness of this attack can be seen as a new departure in the state’s attempt to control female reproduction, and to penalise and control some of society’s most vulnerable women.

new pamphlet – storming heaven: the paris commune of 1871

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first working-class revolution in history. With the French capital surrounded by the troops of the newly founded German Empire and the ruling-class government in Versailles presiding over military and economic chaos, the Parisian population overthrew the state apparatus and created a revolutionary government. The Paris Commune comprised diverse political forces, from radical plebian French nationalists aspiring to complete the 1789-93 revolution; to communists and anarchists: but its democratic way of organising and splitting of the army meant it represented what Karl Marx called in his first draft of The Civil War in France “a revolution against the state as such“.

The Commune’s new pamphlet features a chapter from Marx explaining how the revolution came about and its significance; and the reproduction of the text of a pamphlet by libertarian socialist group Solidarity critiquing the traditional left’s claim that the Paris Commune proved the need for a vanguard party to seize state power on behalf of the masses.

honduras coup: a letter from tegucigalpa

A report on the situation in Honduras over three months after the military coup against centre-left president Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya: by a member of Socialismo o Barbarie

The resistance is at its lowest ebb since the coup. The mobilisations have reduced in size to just a vanguard section: in the case of Tegucigalpa [the capital] marches of thousands of people have been replaced by meetings of a couple of hundred or pickets of twenty people of various organisations (for example, feminists, Radio Globo journalists, etc.)

I believe that this situation is the result of various factors emerging since the Zelayista majority on the leadership of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular put the brakes on the movement in the barrios [poor districts] which had been causing the coup government great difficulties and which had made them uncontrollable.

occupation at university of california, santa cruz

Students at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) have begun an occupation in protest at the slashing of services and jobs in the state. The current economic crisis has given the state government reason to carry out an ideological war on public services, and the occupation intends to resist such attacks: however, students are also engaged in a more thoroughgoing critique of how education is organised. One example of this is the recently published ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future‘, calling for such occupations, which we reproduce below.

Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.

reading for 5th october london discussion group now online

The next of our London discussion meetings on workplace organising is to be held from 7pm on Monday October 5th at the Lucas Arms, near King’s Cross. We will be looking at the questions:

– Are unions an expression of the self-organisation of the working class, or bodies which seek to win improvements on their behalf?

– What is the difference between ‘trade unionism’ and the revolutionary class struggle?

The recommended reading material and a map of the venue appear below. Email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com or phone 07595 245494 for more details.

the jewish orphanage in cracow

by Roman Rosdolsky
(Translated by Diana Rosdolsky)

Roman Rosdolsky, the Ukrainian Marxist scholar best known for his Making of Marx’s Capital, left a moving memoir of his stay in Auschwitz, which was published in English translation in Monthly Review in January 1988. He also wrote another memoir with reference to the Holocaust originally published as “Das jüdische Waisenhaus in Krakau” in Arbeiterzeitung, 15 April 1948. It appears below in an English translation by his granddaughter. (John-Paul Himka)

During the first months of the war I lived on Dietel Street in Cracow. It was a street that had the character of a boulevard with many lovely trees. For many hundreds of years it had separated the old, squalid suburb of Kazimierz, mostly inhabited by Jews, from the actual city of Cracow.

tuc: another wasted opportunity?

by Gregor Gall

This was by far the highest profile Congress of the TUC in many years, most of that being to do with the pre-general election period of more frenzied official politics. The Congress began with Brendan Barber suggesting that big public service cuts by any future government could not only create a ‘double dip’ recession but also bring about social disorder. But by Tuesday most of the affiliated unions had rolled over when Brown told them Labour’s cuts wouldn’t be as big, quick or bad as those of the Tories.

Then there was a bit of attention over a motion which had the temerity to suggest that the mandatory wearing of high heeled shoes by women was not good for their health. But the biggest bang was over a motion on Israel/Palestine from the FBU. And on the last day the motion on the People’s Charter was passed.