Strikes pick up the pace

The nineteen (albeit scattered) days of strikes planned by postal workers; outsourced healthcare workers in
Lancashire striking for thirteen days from 27 September; the indefinite strike planned by housing repair workers in Barnet from 17 October; and other sustained strikes show a good way forward for the continuing strike wave.

The pace of action maintained by the rail unions in their national dispute, consisting of 24 or 48 hours of action
at a time, with gaps of weeks between rounds of action, is becoming more an exception than the norm.

In all disputes, the question from which all determinations of strategy should proceed is: what will it take to
win? Almost all employers will be able to endure occasional rounds of one or two-day strikes which, whilst impactful on the day, can invariably be absorbed.

For strikes to win, employers must calculate that they will lose more — either through lost revenue, service disruption, or reputational damage — by facing down the union than it will cost them to concede at least some of the workers’ demands. Employers faced with indefinite or sustained action are significantly more likely to make that calculation than those faced with only sporadic strikes.

The significant coordination of different unions’ strikes seen on 1 October must also be repeated and extended.

That day saw rail workers in RMT, TSSA, Aslef, and Unite striking alongside postal workers in CWU and dock workers in Unite at Felixstowe and Liverpool, with joint strike rallies in many cities, mostly organised via the Enough is Enough campaign. That coordination, which Solidarity and others have advocated through our call to “unite the strikes”, represents the best way to generalise action, turning a collection of industrial disputes happening in parallel towards becoming a class-wide fightback against falling living standards.

Building local pressure for extensive coordination, through union branches, Trades Councils and ad hoc cross-union strike committees, offers a better path to a general strike than seeing a general strike as an instrument which we plead for some body — the TUC, or a collection of unions — to announce.

Developing rank-and-file confidence and independence remains the key task for socialist workplace activists involved in the current wave. Loyalty to the union is necessary to hold organisation together, especially during
protracted disputes, and it is inevitable that this will sometimes be expressed as loyalty to union leaders.

A rank-and-file strategy does not require seeing union leaders as traitors-in-waiting, cooking up devious plans to sabotage strikes. It is instead a matter of encouraging workers to assert their right to determine the direction of their own disputes, rather than waiting for orders from above.

Those orders may be good or bad, and it is not automatic that greater rank-and-file self-assertion and democracy leads immediately to greater militancy. There may be instances in which union leaders are more radical than the membership in terms of the action they are prepared to propose. But maximising democracy is a good thing in and of itself; the socialist project starts from the development of class consciousness and confidence, convincing workers of the idea that we can determine our own destinies.

If workers understand our role as simply being to follow union orders, that can brake action and impede building up that class confidence. If workers don’t see our own unions as something we directly and democratically control, then the idea that we could directly and democratically control the running of society will always seem like an impossible horizon.

As the strike wave continues against the backdrop of Tory government chaos and Labour surging in the polls,
questions of politics will be increasingly and unavoidably posed. RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said in a recent interview that socialism, which he defined as “the elimination of poverty”, will be achieved “through pragmatic reforms to our system”, rather than via an “ideology-based party”.

For union leaders to even talk explicitly about socialism as a political horizon is a step forward, even if their
definition and method of achieving it are limited or wrongheaded. Asserting that socialism, however defined, can be achieved via “pragmatic” reforms is, of course, a profoundly ideological claim.

Lynch’s comments give some insight into the thinking of at least a section of the trade union bureaucracy: that social transformation can be achieved via industrial disputes over economic issues, which win “pragmatic reforms”. The union leaders accept campaign coordinations (Lynch is a leading spokesperson for Enough is Enough), but not an “ideology-based party”, which attempts to organise workers across all fronts of class struggle — industrial, political, and ideological.

The working-class movement in Britain has confronted these questions before. Part of what held back, limited, and ultimately defeated the immense upsurges of the 1970s was the failure to develop a programme for a workers’ government, effectively abandoning the political terrain to a right-wing Labour leadership.

Winning the movement to that perspective — a perspective for workers’ government, which must, by necessity, concern itself with “ideological” questions — is some way off, and the current wave may well recede before that is won. Even much greater numbers of organised socialists than currently exist in Britain could not guarantee the success of a strike wave, or extend it at will into a movement for working-class power.

But if we commit ourselves to being educators, agitators, and organisers for working-class power, for socialism, within our own workplaces, then we work for the best results from the current battles, the best ongoing organisation to come out of them, the best lessons to be learned.