The public sector pensions battle is not dead. The lecturers’ union UCU has called a further strike for 1 March, and activists will be pressing hard for, at least, the civil service union PCS and the teachers’ union NUT to join in on that day.
But the campaign has been severely wounded by the decision of the big unions, notably Unison and GMB, to call off action and turn to haggling over detail of the Government’s supposed “final offer” of 19 December, which was in fact only a slight sideways rearrangement of its previous, rejected, formula of 2 November: work longer, pay more, get less. As well as pushing to continue action for pensions, activists need to review our position. The setback on pensions is a serious one. But it does not abolish the prospects for mobilisation.
Working-class history tells us that important battles do not necessarily start from the most predictable issues or flashpoints. Sometimes what looks in advance like the “main” issue, and the one most likely to rally a broad working-class mobilisation, passes with relatively little action; and an issue which seems secondary or off-centre creates a bigger stir.
There are plenty of issues coming up: service cuts, pay freezes, radical marketisation of the Health Service, benefit cuts, “new standards” in schools... And there is plenty of discontent to supply the raw material for mobilisation.
The capitalist crash of 2008 is visibly leading into a lengthy depression. The question now is whether there will be a new economic crash, triggered by a eurozone default, or whether there will “only” be prolonged, grinding stagnation or regression.
The Government’s cuts are visibly not healing the crisis. We are paying the price of those cuts, but not getting the benefit which the Government claimed for them, a reduction in the Budget deficit and a (supposedly consequent) private-sector revival.
Also visibly, these are not cuts where everyone suffers. The wealthy, after a brief setback in 2009, are doing very well, while the majority suffer.
Confidence about alternatives is still low; but dissatisfaction with things as they are is sufficient to push all the main party leaders into blather about “responsible”, “moral”, or “John-Lewis-type” (co-operative) capitalism, implicitly admitting that the capitalism which really exists, the capitalism which before 2008 they hailed as a new golden age, is irresponsible, immoral, and cut-throat.
Despite all the weaknesses of the Occupy movement, a worldwide poll in January 2012 found 53% of people sympathising with its protests, 35% undecided, and only 12% hostile.
The big-business daily, the Financial Times, has been sufficiently impressed to start a big new series on “capitalism in crisis”. Its main writer on economics declares that “people are closer to despair. Something seems to be wrong with the system... A thoroughgoing overhaul [is] urgent”.
The task Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity set ourselves now is not to guess the next flashpoint, or to read our tactics backwards from a prediction of what the next big struggle will be, but:
• To explain our basic view that capitalism is not at all “the end of history”, but a passing phase of human society; that it inescapably generates conflicts which organise and rouse the working class; and that the working class, mobilised and educated, can and must replace capitalism by a different form of society, a democratic cooperative commonwealth.
• To popularise and agitate for a “workers’ plan” of demands against the cuts and against privatisation which fit together with each other and with our basic socialist view.
• To rally to every working-class struggle, and argue for the labour movement to support, popularise, and build on each struggle.
A lesson from the past is relevant here. In 1921 the new, revolutionary, pre-Stalinist Communist Parties reassessed tactics because it was becoming clear that, outside Russia, capitalism had survived the great upheavals at the end of World War One.
They developed the idea of “transitional demands”, as an alternative both to revolution-or-nothing agitation and to a timid routine of seeking piecemeal improvements. They would propose a linked network of demands. Mobilisation around each demand, with united-front tactics, would open the way to further and more radical demands, and the whole network would culminate in agitation for a workers’ government.
Explaining this approach, the Communist Parties contrasted it with an older socialist theory, associated with the “Lassallean” strand in the 19th century German workers’ movement: “concentrating all the energies of the proletariat on a single demand, using it as a lever of revolutionary action that then develops into the struggle for power”.
“This theory is false. In the capitalist countries the working class suffers too much; the gnawing hardships and the blows that rain down thick and fast on the workers cannot be fought by fixing all attention on a single demand chosen in a doctrinaire fashion.
“On the contrary, revolutionary action should be organised around all the demands raised by the masses, and these separate actions will gradually merge into a powerful movement for social revolution”.