International Socialist Issue 4

N30: A chance to ignite strugglesThe announcement of national strike

action by 14 unions scheduled for November 30th is a welcome move that we should seize to renew the

culture of trade unionism in this country. But in understanding its impact, we should be aware of two contradictory dangers.

There is the danger, firstly, of seeing the trade unions as redundant dinosaurs. To this, we should respond that the March 26th protest, called by the TUC in Central London this year, was the biggest of its kind in British history. Likewise, if the November 30th strikes go ahead, they will be the biggest one-day actions in Britain for generations. Despite their undoubted problems, the unions can mobilise mass numbers when they bend their forces.

But we should not blind ourselves to the problems underlying these actions. The unions are not acting from a position of strength, but rather of weakness. This year’s TUC conference was, by all accounts, the smallest and least motivated for years. It featured the discomfiting spectacle of a poodle-savaging from embattled ‘Red’ Ed Miliband.

There is little rank and file pressure behind these strikes. They have been initiated by a trade union officialdom concerned at possible meltdown, as we face the biggest cuts since 1919 with no discernible fightback from organised labour.

Compounding this is the predominance of unions in the public sector and their massive weaknesses in new and expanding private sector industries. Unite, Britain’s biggest union, has been losing members hand over fist since the merger of Amicus and T&G.

To put it simply, waving our pom-poms like cheerleaders for the heroic workers is a blind strategy. The organised labour movement lacks the ideology, the street-smarts, and too often the motivation to make November 30th the day of mass protest that it needs to be.

These competing perspectives - wild pessimism and wild optimism about union struggles - will lead the movement to ruin.

To concentrate our forces on the ‘real movements’ on the streets, in the communities and campuses, etc, as the unions finally flex their muscles is to miss a major opportunity to renew the struggle with mass numbers and economic muscle.

Equally, the sad syndicalist militant who delights in branch meetings and ignores the

fighting elements of renewal from the student movement and the independent anti-cuts campaigns will have a bumpy landing to reality waiting on the trade union leadership to act effectively to spread the action. We cannot forget that any action called by the bureaucracy can be withdrawn by the bureaucracy. Even today, November 30th is constantly embattled from potential sell-outs unless the political movement against austerity gathers pace.

The political movements and the anti-cuts campaigns have the capacity to do something the unions cannot - they can make November 30th a day of political struggle.

As it stands, the industrial action concerns public sector pensions. Anti-union laws have made this the only conceivable basis for the actions until unions have the courage to defy the draconian Tory laws, and we should not shirk the pensions debate. But it is, in truth, the most divisive platform imaginable unless it draws a wider anti-cuts, anti-Tory atmosphere.

The street movements have the capacity to mobilise some of the most oppressed, precarious elements of the private sector workforce, like young people and students, behind the slogans of the workers’ movement. In addition, elements of pensioners, the unemployed, the women’s movement, etc.

Without this, we can lose the ideological battle, which they will undoubtedly attempt to portray as a struggle between ‘vested interests’ in the public sector and ‘victimised families’ working in the private sector.

Union leaders who are concerned about their own future must understand this equation. While unions are not necessarily Jurassic, their propaganda abilities are often lamentably Stone Age. The key aspect of this debate is not how to organise the public sector, which is forced to act anyway, but how to mobilise new support from the private sector.

Lastly, we can’t forget that the Con-Dem coalition is weak and losing credibility on every front. Their political crisis is compounded by the ongoing Eurozone chaos, and the examples set by the protest movements on the continent.

Allying the creativity and energy of the students and anti-cuts campaigners with the muscle and infrastructure of the unions could make for an intoxicating day of action.

Our rulers have little room to negotiate; nor do we. Brutal honesty is necessary as we enter this life and death struggle with the Con-Dems.

isEditorial 10.2011

EUROPE, the LEFT, and AUSTERITY

Contents

Editorial 2News Review 5SNP, Independence, English students, SDL...

FEATURES

Europe, Austerity, and the Left 8Can the Left benefit from protest movements across Europe? Chris Bambery reports.

Interview: NHS in Crisis 14The Con-Dems are intent on NHS privatisation. We interview health expert Prof Alysson Pollock.

Precarious Work 15As public sector workers gear up to strike, Sean Coyle on life in the unorganised private sector.

Where Next for Anti-Cuts? 18With the coalition looking desperate, what tactics should we use to ramp up the pressure? Suki Sangha, Lucky Dhillon, Aisling Gallagher.

COLUMNS

Chile: Students and Workers Unite 7Aisling Gallagher looks at the spread of education struggles to Latin America.

Impact of Cuts on Women 12We should not forget the impact of neoliberalism on gender equality, argues Laura Jones.

End of the Tories in Scotland? 17Phil Neal looks at the apparent meltdown of the Scottish Conservatives.

REVIEWS

Exhibitions and Books 21Tom Whittaker looks at Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History; plus Katherine Stewart on Brank and Heckle.

International Socialist Magazine is the monthly publication of the International Socialist Group (Scotland). We welcome submissions and encourage debate and new ideas. Please get in touch with new articles and responses.

Editor: James FoleyWebsite:internationalsocialist.org.ukEmail:[email protected]: 12 MonthsBritain £20;Europe £25; Worldwide £35

Issue 4 | International Socialist | October 2011 4

18Aisling Gallagher, Suki Sangha & Lucky Dhillon

ANTI-CUTS: a guide for the movement

8 Chris Bambery

INTERVIEW: CRISIS IN NHS Professor Allyson Pollock13

SNP to slash budget

In a sign of their increasing pro-business agenda, the Scottish National Party is to announce massive cuts to public sector budgets in Scotland.

Finance Minister John Swinney will tell MSPs that public spending in 2014-5 will be £3.3 billion lower in real terms than in the peak year of 2010-11.

‘Soft targets’ like spending on local councils will likely bear the brunt of any SNP spending cuts. This could mean that key pledges like the freezing of council tax will be abandoned in coming years.

The SNP has openly paraded its intention to cut taxes for wealthy corporations. They are now emphasising the importance of large infrastructure projects, such as the new £1.6bn Forth crossing, over local services.

The SNP will place the pressure on local councils to use their own borrowing powers to manage infrastructure projects.

Alex Salmond is playing a game of brinksmanship over these questions. On the one hand, he blames Westminster for cuts.

But on the other hand, he says he is ‘quite irritated’ that Scotland will suffer from national debt.

The SNP are thus happy to pass the blame for cuts to Westminster, while passing the effect of cuts to councils.

This is the latest development in a developing ruling class strategy of ‘devolving the axe’, i.e. passing on the political risk and blowback effects from damaging cuts to public services.

Success or failure for the SNP will rest on this shaky strategy over the coming years.

This underlines the importance of supporters of Left supporters of Independence involvement in the independent anti-cuts campaigns in Scotland.

SDL Humiliated

The Scottish Defence League were humiliated yesterday in Edinburgh after their ‘static’ protest attracted less than 100 from across the UK. Most were from outside Edinburgh and included hard-line Nazis from the north of England infidel groups plus EDL members.

A campaign lasting over a month has seen the SDL

becoming increasingly isolated in Edinburgh. They tried to gain permission for a march which if accepted would have seen them march to the symbolic Wellington Statue in Princes St. Every Saturday there is a peace vigil there by Women in Black as well as socialist and anti-war stalls. They wanted to replace this with their race hatred and anti Muslim rhetoric the day before the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

The size of the turnout and the fact that EDL members had to be shipped in to provide at least half of the numbers proves that this tiny, rag-tag group of fascists are utterly isolated in Scotland.

Edinburgh Council received an unprecedented number of objections to the SDL march application and despite the police saying they had no concerns about the march going ahead and the Scotsman newspaper carrying an article the day before saying that the SDL were set to get permission to march, the council committee responsible felt compelled to prohibit them from marching.

Whilst the SDL were out of sight in Regent Road ( a very quiet part of Edinburgh), ‘Edinburgh United Against Racism’ marched along Princes St where around 400 anti-racists congregated.

Support for the march came from MSPs, local councillors plus organisations such as the Scottish Trade Union Congres, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the UCU, UNISON, the Equality Network and Radio Ramadan. Colin Keir, SNP MSP, spoke of Scotland´s long tradition of anti-fascism and Malcolm Chisholm, Labour MSP, spelt out how the SDL had lost their right to free speech through their peddling of race hatred.

The isolation of the SDL and other fascists must continue through campaigning to expose them but also through challenging the racism & islamophobia of the Con-Dem government that creates the climate in which violent far-right thugs can raise their head above the para-pit .GRAHAM KIRKWOOD

Independence Support RisesLEADERSHIP: SNP has navigated the storm of recession successfully so far

A RECENT POLL has put support for Scottish Independence at its highest for years, further putting the pressure on unionist forces in Scottish politics.

TNS-BMRB found ‘a nation evenly divided over the political future of Scotland’ with 39% supporting independence, 38% in opposition and a ‘significant’ 23% remaining undecided.

The clear implication of this, besides being a show of defiance to the pro-austerity agenda from Westminster, is that the SNP’s victory has contributed to ‘eroding the fear factor’ about Independence, which is starting to look like a realistic possibility.

The report accompanying the poll says: ‘It is interesting that the decline in opposition is reflected more in a shift to “undecided” than to “support”, which is perhaps not surprising. It would be a major step change to move from opposing to supporting independence over a short period.

‘What this does suggest is that resistance is being challenged and more people are being encouraged to reconsider their opposition to independence.

‘With the SNP now forming a majority government and being seen to do so with some credibility in performance to date, this may be eroding the fear factor for some previously unconvinced that Scotland could manage its own affairs.

‘Recent poll trends suggest that, for now, the ball is rolling in favour of the SNP and independence. However a lot can change over the next two to three years.’

Other polls have put the

swing towards support for Independence at more moderate levels. But the poll underlies that the mood and the conviction is shifting towards anti-union forces in Scottish politics.

The shift has produced a great deal of uncertainty in the politics of the British parties, who are all in a state of inner turmoil.

An internal report chaired by Sarah Boyack and Jim Murphy has found that ‘there is no doubt that the Scottish Labour Party has to change.’

The report recommends a series of measures designed to adapt the Labour Party to the realities of Devolution by creating separate Scottish organisational systems and structures.

Conservative leadership candidate Murdo Fraser has gone even further, suggesting that his party should dissolve the existing Scottish party and rebuild under a different name after a series of disastrous results (see page 17).

In the medium term, the question will be whether the pro-Unionist forces can re-establish hegemony North of the border in a major rebuilding exercise.

But the long-term trajectory remains towards an increasing Scottish dimension in politics, reflected in the transforming structures of virtually every party North of the border.

Panicked by recent polls, many are now pushing for ‘devolution max’ to be put on the ballot paper alongside the status quo and full independence.

The hope is to split support for independence between ‘moderates’ and ‘maximalists’ and thus derail its momentum.

News Review:SNP, Independence


IMF slashes forecastsThe International Monetary Fund (IMF) has slashed forecasts for growth in the UK amid warnings of a ‘dangerous new phase’ for the global economy. As the effects of the cuts bite in 2011, British growth has been downgraded to 1.1 percent - behind the US, Canada, Germany, France, and even the embattled eurozone as a whole. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘Calls for a Plan B are growing. The Chancellor must change course before he causes even more damage to the economy.’ However, the Con-Dem coalition have left little room to compromise as they wage class war on public services.

Greek humiliationThe Greek government has complained of being ‘blackmailed and humiliated’ after the EU and the IMF called for the sacking of 100,000 public sector workers to meet the conditions of its austerity regime. Greece has already lost a considerable part of its industrial and economic output as a consequence of drastic austerity measures designed to protect bad eurozone debt. This is a warning of the fact that austerity measures do not lead to new growth, merely to the control of financial capital.

Website updatesWe live in a time of global crisis and the situation is always evolving. Don’t forget that you can always keep in touch with the latest coverage and analysis in Scotland and beyond atinternationalsocialist.org.uk

News Review: N30, Fees...

NEWS BRIEFS

English student fees

Students from St Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh have occupied the George Square lecture theatre at Edinburgh University against the proposed introduction of £9000 a year for students from the rest of the United Kingdom.

Aberdeen, St Andrews and Edinburgh have already announced that they will set fees at £9000 and other Scottish universities are expected to follow suit in coming months.

The Scotland-wide show of solidarity at Edinburgh University is to show that whilst the SNP government has ruled out fees for Scottish students, it is unacceptable that they are willing to impose the Con-Dems policies on students from the rest of Britain who want to come to Scotland to study.

The argument that Scottish universities have no other option are unfounded. The SNP government should be making the rich pay, rather than milking rest of UK students. Free education should be a right of everyone no matter where you are from.

Student unions should also be aware of the dangers. These fees could easily be used as leverage in order to bring more fees and privatization for Scottish students.

For the thousands of students who protested across Scotland last year, these latest announcement should be treated as a declaration of war. We must renew our culture of demonstrations for a new layer of students and start the task of build alternative leadership in the Unions.

Fighting these fees is no less important than any other part of the privatization agenda.

Massive one-day strike action set for NovemberThree million public sector workers will take joint strike action to defend public sector pensions. The major union battalions are going to ballot their members for action that can shake the government. A special meeting at the TUC conference to coordinate the action led to Brendan Barber announcing November 30th as the date for united industrial action. The right wing press are already up in arms with the Sun declaring the campaign as a ‘winter of hate’.

This can intensify the crisis for the ConDem government. Major strike action combined with the continuing economic crisis and an expected 2.75 million unemployed by the end of the year.

This cannot be seen simply as an industrial dispute: public sector strike for public sector pensions. This must be a political strike against the government, a strike to for the welfare state and for our class. That is why we need to gear up for this day by providing a wave of solidarity, protest, occupations and actions. The length and breadth of the movment can be involved.

In all of this there is also a warning against complacency. Until the strikes are voted on and set the movement as a whole needs to continue to work towards ensuring battle commences. We need big, confident strike returns.

Dave Prentis, Unison General Secretary has often said the formally right thing but utterly failed in action. At the TUC conference he said ‘We will ballot for industrial action-it will be the biggest ballot this country has

ever seen. It will include strikes in our schools, our civil service, our fire brigade, our local government service, our health service.’

Good words that should be applauded. But this was followed up with ‘We have still time to negotiate, two to three months to sort things out, we want to sort things out.’

It is impossible to ‘sort things out’ through negotiation with a government intent on class war. The only way to ‘sort out’ the govenment is to wage class war back. We need to fight every inch of the way to ensure that pressure mounts to make these strikes the biggest and most militant as they possibly can be, rather than simply a bargaining chip for negotiation.

That is why it is a primary task to build broad alliances like the Coalition of Resistance that focus on action and activism to prepare the ground for the day, and our national in focus so that they can develop the forces to argue an independent way forward to the union machine if and when its neccesary.

When we say all out for N30, it is not just a call to public sector workers, but to everyone of us who wants to stop the cuts and bring down the government. The battle lines are drawn, our weapon is mass solidarity; a mass movement against the austerity agenda coupled with millions taking industrial action.

In Scotland, the first stop in building the mass movement we need is the STUC demonstration on October 1st in Glasgow. A huge show of resistance on that day can get the pulses racing for N30.


Aisling Gallagher

2011 has seen a remarkable swelling of social and political unrest. From the Arab Revolutions to the riots that swept England in August, the world has watched astounded as countries stood up and announced their refusal. However, Latin America, unquestionably the most militant region of world politics ten years ago, has been strangely subdued recently.

Now, that looks set to change thanks to the upsurge of student and youth-led protests in Chile since June. Drawing parallels with Spain’s indignados, the new Arab revolutionaries, and Britain’s student protesters, youth in Santiago and beyond have engaged in pitched confrontations with the centre-right government of Sebastian Pinera, demanding equality in education and social change for the working class.

The movement began with calls for reform of the education service in the country, where 90 percent of school students are educated in either privately or locally run institutions. Young people have demanded the nationalisation of the school system to ensure a fair and equal education. Like so many other movements, demonstrations began peacefully, with moderate slogans.

Violence has escalated as a result of the intransigence of the Chilean government and their refusal to consider the demands of the protesters. Pinera’s inflexibility, coupled with police brutality, has radicalised a generation in a manner remarkably similar to that of the student protesters in the UK last winter. Like the British student movement, Chile’s has been a catalyst for further protests, bringing to public attention demands for jobs, better pay and fewer cuts to public services.

Like Cameron’s government, Pinera was elected with a right-wing mandate for neoliberal reforms – but as the cuts bite, his popularity has nosedived. During the Copiapo mining accident in 2010, Pinera’s popularity was at an all-time high of 63%. In the space of merely a year, this has fallen drastically to 26% due to the government’s unwillingness to address even the most basic demands from the working poor and the young.

In stark contrast to Pinera’s dramatically falling approval rating is the popularity of Camila Vallejo, the recognised leader of the ‘Chilean Winter’, as it has been dubbed by some commentators. A member of the Chilean Communist Party and only the second

female to be elected as President of the University of Chile’s student union, Vallejo is the voice and the representation of a generation betrayed. She asserts that young people across the globe must take the reins in the fight against austerity, championing the message of her fellow Chilean students as well as expressing the anger felt by young people around the world.

It is evident that Chile is a country in crisis. Anger and discontent with Pinera’s leadership is growing and he looks unlikely to claw back anything near the amount of popularity he enjoyed during the heady days of Autumn 2010. His coalition government has collapsed and the student and trade union movements are united in their demands for fairer pay, better services and a universal education.

Pinera must decide quickly how he will tread. He can continue to ignore the protests and maintain an obdurate façade in the face of mounting resentment and demands for reform. This tactic may well buy him some time in which propaganda can secure the support of the middle classes and maintain his grip on power for a spell. However, Pinera must realise that even his most ardent of supporters will begin to tire of the strikes and protests, which will undoubtedly continue to grow if he does not enter into some sort of dialogue with the demonstrators.

Equally, the protesters also find themselves in a tenuous situation. The student movement will soon discover that a counter-hegemonic challenge to the government is far from maintainable and their current tactics of resistance are unsustainable in the long term. Even if they are successful in making Pinera crack, the notion of a student-led government is impractical at best and the workers’ movement in Chile is too disorganised to provide a genuine alternative of government.

Vallejo is ostensibly in the more influential position of Chile’s two recognised leaders; she has the backing of the Left and the poor, and is a symbol of the resistance. However, in order to challenge the legitimacy of the Pinera government in a manner that will achieve the reforms they seek, the student movement must organise better and they must do so quickly, or risk missing a unique opportunity for change which may not present itself again for many years.

Chile students and workers fightLatin America might soon see a pattern of struggles similar to the Eurozone and the Arab Revolutions if events in Chile increase their momentum.

International: Chile Strikes & Protests


EUROPE: AUSTERITY & THE LEFT

International:The European Left Today

European capitalism seems to be permanently embattled. Young people across the continent are filling city squares in protest against cuts and austerity, and protest movements are spreading beyond the usual circles. But the Left is nowhere in elections. Chris Bambery responds.Issue 4 | International Socialist | October 2011 8

www.internationalsocialist.org.uk

As resistance to austerity measures grows globally we should be cheered but it should not obscure one uncomfortable fact: that the radical and revolutionary left

is weaker today than it was a decade ago. It is a stark fact and one which should raise alarm given it was a decade defined by 9/11 at its beginning and by the sharpest recession in decades at its close.

The numbers of people within Britain who have been on a demonstration and who identify themselves as left has risen in the last 10 years but those people clearly have not found a home within the existing left organisations.

Left Out? Electoral Wipeout for Anti-CapitalismThe figures for the electoral performance and membership of radical left parties and alliances in Europe over the past decade make uncomfortable reading (see Bertil Vedert’s introduction to New Parties of the Left: Experiences from Europe, Resistance Books, August 2011).

The most shocking event was the removal of any communist deputies from the Italian parliament in the 2008 general election following the participation of Rifondazione Comunista in the disastrous coalition government led by Romano Prodi in the previous two years. The right have constantly referred to this as evidence that radical left-wing politics has no future in the advanced economies.

But the suicide of Rifondazione was only the most extreme example of a general trend. In France the hopes generated by the launch of the New Anti-Capitalist Party have turned to disappointment as its electoral results disappointed, it was overtaken by the Left Front and then spurned an offer of unity from it. In Britain we saw the collapse of the Scottish Socialist Party and then Respect south of the border and the end to a brief period when the radical left had enjoyed parliamentary representation for the first time since the 1945 Westminster election.

The first half of the last decade seemed to offer so much. It opened with Seattle and carried through events like the G8 protests in Genoa and the first European Social Forum in Florence, both of which triggered a dramatic period of mobilisation in Italy and beyond. In February 2003 millions demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq. Everything seemed possible, but while mass mobilisation on the streets remains an almost permanent feature of the period (allowing for ups and downs in particular countries) the fact that the Left has not garnered the promised harvest remains.

Left and StrugglesThere were and are two big differences with the last great upturn in struggle which began in 1968 with the biggest general strike in world history, the French May. The following year’s ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy was on similar scale but more intense. All of this meant

‘The number of people in Britain attending demos and identifying themselves on the Left has risen’

BE A SQUARE: Young people inspired by Arab Revolutions have thronged in city squares


International:The European Left Today

The centrality of the working class is not taken for granted in the radicalisationthere was wide spread acceptance among the new left that emerged that the working class was central to social change. As a teenager having the lights go out in your school classroom because power workers and miners were on strike was an obvious demonstration of that.

In the last 10 years we have not seen a May 68, the possibility has been there but it has not happened and currently we are seeing strike action against austerity in Europe limited to one day general strikes. They are impressive but fall short of a French May or an Italian Hot Autumn.

So the centrality of the working class is not something taken for granted in the current radicalisation. There is also the question of who and what is the working class? Academics, the media and the likes of Tony Blair have argued the concept of working class is outmoded. The Left has to offer an explanation and analysis of the structure of the working class in 2011 which is accurate and convincing but that is largely lacking yet.

The Movement and the Crisis of Leninist ‘Cadres’In the post-1968 period virtually every new left formation defined itself as Leninist in one way or another. In the last decade Marx has experienced a comeback, despite attempts to confine him to the grave, but Lenin certainly has not. In large part that is a result of sustained ideological assault on the 1917 Russian Revolution.

The demise of the Soviet Union and its satellite states should have been a cause for celebration, but even those on the left who celebrated as the Berlin Wall could not conceive the ideological assault on the legacy of the Russian Revolution which followed in schools, universities, in countless books, articles and TV and radio programmes is caricatured as a grubby coup d’etat carried out with little popular support with the aim of creating a totalitarian one party state. Stalin was simply Lenin’s natural successor.

Yet the Left did achieve growth in the 1990s and the first half of the last decade despite all that so we need to add to an explanation about why things have fallen back so badly.

In New Parties of the European Left a member of the Danish Red Green Alliance points out, that in ‘reaction to the sectarianism and factionalism of the Left of the 60s, 70s and 80s’ the coming together of various groups and individuals ‘was established with a mood of “no more infighting”.’

The idea of an ‘ideological free’ left was an attractive one for many alienated by the all too frequent sectarian squabbles which marred much of the left but it would also mean a series of very real issues would confront the radical left to which all too often they had no coherent answer.

From very early on after 9/11 the issue of

Islamophobia was one. Too many retreated into an anti-religious stance which owed more to Voltaire than Marx, did not allow them to confront the key ideological underpin of the ‘war on terror’ or to build unity with the Muslim communities in their own country. Since then we have seen a growing number of states and regions follow the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in banning the burqa, which is extends the attacks on Muslims to support for excluding them from European “society.” In recent months we saw confusion reign over what attitude to take towards western military intervention in Libya.

A second trend noted in New Parties of the Left is the problem of shifting existing ‘cadre.’ The word is French for network, the idea being that around this framework growth will bloom. But the price of survival for revolutionary organisations is always high. The party cadre is immensely proud of its achievement and of the party routine they have developed but the same cadre and routine can become an obstacle towards immersing the organisation into new movements and offering an ideological edge which is sharp and relevant to a new generation of activists.

The experience of the Russian Revolution was one in which Lenin had to overcome the resistance of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ again and again, often from a minority position within the party, the most famous example being his fight for acceptance of the ‘April Theses’ which put socialist revolution as the dominant strategic aim. The Bolsheviks were a clandestine party until 1917 and subject to less ‘routinist’ pressure than their counterparts in western European democracies but the conservatism of those who’d held the organisation together in the previous years came into play when a sharp shift was required.

Accumulated Inertia in the UnionsAnother pressure noted by members of radical left parties in Europe flows from the fact that many members were central to holding trade union organisation together through years and decades of low levels of struggle. Many became piled up with case work or took facility time which removed them from the shopfloor. The result is again too often a holding back when a sharp turn is needed.

This should not be viewed as a denunciation of ‘old members’ but it is to point out the contradictory pressures at play in the class impact into left-wing organisations especially when working class struggle is at a low level. It is also the fact that every upsurge in struggle tends to throw new forces to the fore.

In Britain the dominant tradition on the far left has been one which accompanied a stress on trade union work with propagandism, making fairly abstract appeals to socialism. This was often washed down with an anti-intellectualism which produced ideological sterility.

ABOVE: Spain’s protest movement has provided the opportunity to revitalise the forces of the Left

SYSTEM ERROR: The capitalist system produces resistance, but Left infrastructure to fight electoral, union, and street battles is not growing


Any whiff of that is going to repel those who are radicalising fast although not necessary according to the recipes of the existing Left.

Building AfreshThe huge and dramatic rise of a student movement at the close of 2010 in Britain was

of immense importance but it ebbed away after the Christmas break. In part that might have been inevitable but in part too the failure to sustain a degree of momentum came from the existing Left’s failure to unite into one single campaign but rather maintain rival campaigns which bred confusion and cynicism.

The Left’s response to the August riots and social unrest in London and other English cities was at best mundane and quickly seemed to be reduced to being seen as an opportunity to sell more papers.

Upsurges in resistance can and do bypass existing organisations and nor do they need left organisation to happen. Capitalism breeds resistance, as Marx argued. That has happened in Spain with the indignant movement and in Italy where the dire state of the Left has not

stopped a one day general strike in September and many other mobilisations. There the Left in its broadest sense counts hundreds of thousands who identify themselves as communists and, despite being orphaned, will rally to resistance. In that sense it is clear that the Italian, Greek and even Spanish Left has greater social weight than in Britain and much

of northern Europe.As we enter a global battle against

austerity and a western ruling class who will be more confident after Libya of launching further imperialist wars, we need a revitalised and growing left.

‘Bending the Stick’That requires facing the hard reality that most activists look at the left and do not recognise themselves, and either the left waits for them to change or it changes. The latter seems to me what the likes of Lenin did.

It also means something else. In every fresh upsurge revolutionaries have to base themselves within that section of the working class that is in the van of the struggle. In 1917

Lenin, in order to win support for carrying through a socialist revolution based on the soviets, appealed over the heads of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ to the factory workers of St Petersburg. In 1968 that meant focusing on the students fighting back on campus and forming the biggest percentage demonstrating in support of the Vietnamese. A few, short years

later, in Britain, that meant shifting focus to the young, militant shop stewards who were breaking free of labourism and the shackles of trade union officialdom.

Of course that does not mean dropping everyone else. The point is to organise to ensure those in the van set an example which others follow. That means going back at some point to win that argument among other sections of the class, and indeed party.

This is what Tony Cliff, following Lenin, called stick bending. Both knew the stick would be bent too far and at some point a readjustment would be necessary but the point is that a revolutionary organisation always bases itself on that section of the working class which wants to fight. That is never a fixed group of people, year in and decade on.

SILENCED: A generation of young people feel left out and betrayed by mainstream politics

‘We must face the hard reality that most activists look at the Left and do not recognise themselves in it’



Laura Jones

THESE DAYS we are told that equality of the sexes has been achieved; that the womens’ movement is over. But women are still the lowest earners, have the lowest private wealth and do the majority of unpaid labour. The austerity measures being pushed through threaten to undo what gains women have made. Attempts to dismantle the welfare state are already affecting women disproportionately. Women are more likely to work in public sector which is threatened with thousands of job losses. Children have been hit very badly by the cuts with reductions in child credits and closures of nurseries and centres. As capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis, women are the repeated target of onslaughts from the right who claim that the most vulnerable people in society must endure the worst of the financial disasters they create. We must put forward the demand for real equality now, so that women don’t pay the price for the crisis with their futures.

As new markets and jobs emerged in times of growth, women were told that it was

possible to have a career and a family, that they faced no limitations. But female employment has remained generalised to particular forms of work, predominantly low-paid and insecure, and because of the persistence of sexist legislation and assignment of roles which place the responsibility of child-rearing on women, women’s employment is usually subject to difficulties surrounding child care. Prevailing attitudes towards women and work have not progressed. While some women have climbed to the top on hefty salaries and attempted to smash the glass ceiling, for the great majority of women, as women in Greece and Spain are realising, neoliberalism has largely meant enslavement to the common financial policies of right-wing governments.

It is not coincidental that a proliferation of articles by ‘post feminist’, generally middle-class women, encourages us to return to our traditional roles in the family and not to pursue a career. When we are not being told to agonise over whether or not to breastfeed our children, or feel guilty about being unable to spend enough time with them, we are told to celebrate the differences between genders and even to use our sexual appeal to get ahead in an environment where what you look

like can often be more important than your skills or input. In a country where a disproportionate number of teenage girls aspire to be glamour models, young girls are still being fed the idea that the ultimate goal in life is to find a wealthy man. It is not irrelevant to consider that raunch culture is not nearly so prevalent in countries like those in Scandinavia where the difference in earnings is not as high and where they have more developed child care provision. The appeal of accepting short-term, insecure, low-wage employment as a stop gap before settling down is unsurprising in a country where government ministers can say it is reasonable for employers to refuse to employ women of child-bearing age, where sexism makes workplaces an often hostile environment for women and where four times as many women are now claiming unemployment benefits as men. Meanwhile, this ideal is simply unrealisable for the vast majority of families, who cannot survive on one income and women often have difficulty

finding a solution to the joint pressures of work and family.

Women remain massively underepresented politically. All the major political parties have both failed to remedy this issue and attempted to claim credit for doing so. But the mainstream political parties don’t put fighting inequality at the front of their agenda. They continue to pursue measures that are damaging to the welfare of women and continuously fail to address the pay-gap or provide adequate support for families. The cuts are being implemented by the government alongside businesses who are exploiting the financial crisis to force a reorganisation of society. If they have their way, women will be driven back into positions of dependency and the most vulnerable sectors of society will be left without support or representation. The answer to fighting for women’s rights in the workplace and for the protection of services vital to women does not lie in having more female candidates in elections.

The argument about inequality has to come from the left. While it is regrettable that the political element of the struggle for women’s liberation is often been eclipsed by arguments surrounding identity and cultural sexism , a deeper understanding of gender in society

is a necessary condition of women’s ultimate emancipation. When it comes to women’s issues, an irrational paranoia about man-hating feminists (fomented by the right-wing media) pervades the discourse. But while all women experience inequality because of their gender, they do not see their interests as separate from those of the men in their lives. Socialists must call for the greatest unity in the fight to defend jobs and services. We must expose the lies surrounding aggressive austerity measures by

contesting them on all fronts. When the media denounce people with disabilities as a burden on the state, we must counter their arguments. When the government blames poverty and unemployment on foreign immigrants, we must defend them. And when the two conspire to repeal the gains that women have made, we must continue to push for genuine equality.

We also need to recognise that the targeting of women in this way is related to the larger issue of women’s position in society. True equality cannot be achieved unless attitudes and legislation surrounding maternity and child care are addressed or while the sexism that pervades our industries goes unchallenged. Equality can never be achieved in a society where families and individuals must struggle without support to make ends meet in times of high inflation and a shrinking job market. The interest of the ruling class is to enact regressive policies to force women out of employment and off benefits. They rely on the notion that the most vulnerable in society cannot fight back. Women need to show that they are ready to fight back but the battle for equality is unwinnable unless it is linked to the greater fight against capitalism. Socialists have the task of putting the demand for real equality at the heart of that movement.

Cuts Impact on WomenThe Con-Dem cuts are not just an attack on working class living standards. They also threaten to roll back decades of victories for the women’s movement in Britain.

‘The battle for equality is unwinnable unless it is linked to the greater fight against capitalism’

Opinion: Women and the Cuts


Interview: A Critical Time for the National Health ServiceThe NHS is more in danger today than it has ever been thanks to the Con-Dem plans for privatization. But what is the future of socialised medicine in Britain? Graham Kirkwood speaks to leading public health expert Professor Alyson Pollock, author of NHS PLC.

GK: What are the dangers to the NHS in the Health and Social Care bill?

AP: I’ll start by explaining the health and social care 2011 bill which is about to have its second reading on September the 4th in the House of Commons. The government suspended the passage of the Bill in May because it had created so much controversy and convened a group of the great and the

good, known as the Futures Forum, to conduct a

listening exercise and respond to the Bill.

It was a political exercise and heavily stage managed with little

reference to evidence; following the summer

recess it is set to be rushed through parliament with government assurances that all concerns have been remedied. The main concern

of this bill as set out in our BMJ paper is that the bill as amended doesn’t actually rectify our key concerns.

These are that the Ministerial duty to provide or secure provision has been repealed along with the sections which would have delegated those functions to the secretary of state for health. So in effect what will be established is an independent NHS free of direct parliamentary control. The secretary of state for health will no longer be able to delegate or instruct or issue guidance to the national commissioning board or to the new national commissioning bodies and groups which are being established. So de facto as the legal analysis commissioned by 38 degrees tells us, that’s the end of the NHS, a national health service (http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/content/NHS-legal-advice/)

Increasingly there will be enormous variation in who gets access to care, on what basis and what is paid for and what is free at the point of delivery.

The second big problem is that the requirement that primary care trusts had to serve all residents within a geographically defined area on the basis of need is also dissolved and so it’s no longer clear whether

Interview: Professor Allyson Pollock

DOCTORS AND NURSES: Across the country, young workers in the NHS have protested to stop the disastrous impact of cuts and privatization.


the new bodies, which are being created, will serve geographic populations. The big implications are for resource allocation and second for planning; in theory resource allocation mechanisms work on the basis of the needs of their population. New commissioning bodies and new commissioning groups if they can pick and choose patients or patients can elect to go to them from across the country it will make fairness of resource allocation virtually impossible. So that’s very significant.

A further concern is that it enables the further break up and privatisation of the NHS, so increasingly these commissioning groups will be able to contract out care to for profit and not for profit providers thus exposing the NHS to competition policy and competition law. Since competition law trumps public health, this will make it increasingly difficult to plan, to monitor and to provide on the basis of need. The new commissioning groups will find it very difficult and increasingly local commissioning groups and the bodies answering to the commissioning board will have increasing power to determine what is NHS funded care and what is non-NHS funded care and thereby introducing the spectre of top ups and user charges. Top ups are already permitted for some aspects of cancer care, the Richards report enabled that to happen unlike Scotland which went in a very different direction.

The way in which the NHS is being reconfigured is in the model of US style health maintenance organisations. (http://www.hsj.co.uk/news/the-american-way/32853.article) What we will see is the break up of national funding stream for the NHS so it enables new sources of income to be generated by the private sector namely through user charges and sale of private health insurance. So we will be moving much more towards a mixed funding system which is the current situation in the US; whereas NHS services may not be charged for, increasingly commissioning groups will have the ability to decide what is and what isn’t NHS services in their patch and thus what services are charged for.

GK: Is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contributing to the current financial crisis many hospitals in England now find themselves in?

AP: PFI has been shown to be a factor because the PFI charge takes a bigger share of the hospital budget over time and this no doubt is creating more deficits and fuelling mergers and service closures.

GK: Are there differences now between Tory and Labour policies towards the NHS?

AP: The problem is that New Labour inaugurated or developed many of these policies on privatisation in its NHS Plan 2000, under Milburn so New Labour actually inaugurated the plan for privatisation and there’s no clear sign that Labour is trying to put clear water between it and the New Labour policy of 2000.

GK: Is Scotland different from England in how the NHS is

configured?

AP: Scotland is committed to a publicly administered

health service which is integrated around health boards and retains mechanisms of redistribution

and direct ministerial control, how long that

will last remains to be seen. Expenditure cuts for the NHS in

England, will be meted out in Scotland. So Scotland will find itself in a real bind committed to maintaining a national health service but against a background of the treasury cutting the budget for both England and for Scotland and forcing and driving more privatisation and greater exposure of services to competition policy.

GK: Finally what are the implications of the Health and Social Care bill for the NHS in Scotland?

AP: I mean I think that’s a really important question to ask and perhaps one that’s worthy of legal and policy analysis. It’s not unlikely that there will be challenges, it may be that patients in England will come to Scotland for treatment that they can’t get in England or they may move. A second question is the extent to which competition policy, when England starts to open up its services, will rear its ugly head in Scotland. Scotland already has more PFI per head of population so expenditure pressures are problematic and it may be hoist with its own petard or rather variants of PFI.

Interview: Prfoessor Allyson Pollock

‘Expenditure cuts for the NHS in England will be meted out in Scotland’


Prof Allyson Pollock is professor of public health research and policy at Queen Mary, University of London. She set up and directed the Centre for International Public Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh from 2005 to 2011, and prior to that she was Head of the Public Health Policy Unit at UCL and Director of Research & Development at UCL Hospitals NHS Trust. She is the author of NHS plc (Verso, 2005, £9.99) and co-author of The New NHS: A Guide (Routledge, 2006, £35.95).

Precarious Jobs?Sociologists often argue that the weakening of trade union and labour bargaining power has given rise to a ‘new class’, the precariat. Precariat struggles have been a big deal on the continent and in Japan for over a decade. Sean Coyle looks at the reality behind this.


In what is to be the most serious escalation of the struggle against austerity yet, the 30th of November in Britain will see a national one day public sector strike. It is

predicted to be the largest industrial one-day struggle Britain has seen since the 1926 General Strike and it will doubtless be a focal point for the whole anti-cuts movement.

But in the propaganda war that will ensue the government will launch an extensive ideological offensive in an attempt to divide public opinion. The argument will run: in a time when those in the private sector are facing wage repression year on year and make do with ‘realistic’ pensions, why should the public sector be any different? The trade union response thus far can be summed up by Mark Serwotka’s call to ‘resist a race to the bottom’. Whilst the ‘race to the bottom’ is the correct analysis of the ruling class offensive, it is not a slogan for the whole movement as it leaves out all prospects of militancy in the private sector.

Although the strike action itself will be called over public sector pensions, the trade union movement should learn from the series of general strikes in Europe and build them publicly as ‘national strikes against austerity’. This immediately broadens and increases the political level of the strikes. If the trade unions are to re-generate and become a force in British society again then they must be seen to be in the vanguard of the struggle against austerity which means concretely fighting for all workers.

In a period where the word “austerity” is now synonymous for the majority of people with the major attacks on working peoples living standards in Greece, it has the potential

to increase the unity and strength of the movement more than a breakdown of details of pension payments. In the private sector employers are using the financial crisis as an excuse to further attack wages which have been falling over the past decade. Employers have quickly learned that the preface ‘In the current economic climate’ can be used to justify attacks on their workers’ pay and conditions.

By sticking simply to the pensions line the trade union leadership leaves a measure of ambiguity over the question of the cuts. Do they accept that some cuts are necessary? An ambiguity that the goverement will ruthlessly seize upon. But deeper than that, it is a reflection of the defeat of the trade union movement over the last thirty years and the changes to class relations which have resulted. It is these changes that socialists and the trade unions must come to terms with if there is to be a truly united working class movement that can challenge the government.

The Rise of a ‘New Class’? Precarious WorkersThis has led some on the Left to proclaim a new class altogether, the ‘precariat’. Whilst the Marxist Left has busied itself with a discussion on the economic roots and nature of neo-liberalism, it has been left to academics like Guy Standing to study its effects on class relations. For Guy Standing, the precariat is a ‘new and dangerous class’, distinct from the working class as he understands it. Standing works by compartmentalizing classes into different historical periods, with the ‘industrial proletariat’ being resigned to the period 1920-

1960 and that period alone. It is Standings’ lack of conceptual framework however that gives him most bother:

‘It consists not just of everybody in insecure jobs,’ Standing argues, ‘though many are temps, part-timers, in call centers or in outsourced arrangements. The precariat consists of those who feel their lives and identities are made up of disjointed bits, in which they cannot construct a desirable narrative or build a career, combining forms of work and labour, play and leisure in a sustainable way. The precariatised mind is one without anchors, flitting from subject to subject, in the extreme suffering from attention deficit disorder. But it is also nomadic in its dealings with other people.’

By understanding a precarious standard of living to be the defining characteristic of this new social class, Standing confuses the standard of living in the 1950’s-1970’s as the normality and our current period as a watershed. But it is in fact the reverse that is true: the post war boom that produced rising living standards was the historical anomaly of capitalism and the current period a return to normality. From British dockworkers heroic struggle for consistent work and wages to the nomadic lifestyle of American fruit pickers eternalized in the works of John Steinbeck, the lack of consistency in working people’s lives is as old as the capitalist system itself.

However it would be unwise to focus all energy and attention on simply disproving in theory the fact that precarious workers are a new distinct social class. The Marxist method is useless if it simply remains in the realms of abstraction. The fact of the matter is that

Analysis: Precarious Workers


despite its theoretical errors, the conditions of the ‘precariat’ that Standing describes, speak to an increasing layer of people in society. In Britain 1.7 million people rely upon the inconsistency of agencies to find employment, 1.2 million people have been forced into part time work, youth unemployment has hit one million with the full extent of the crisis being buried under statistics for higher and further education and 2.5 million people are unemployed. These facts cannot be ignored.

Neo-liberalism was an attempt by the ruling classes to re-address the balance of power in favour of capital over labour, in a desperate attempt to increase declining levels of profitability. That this was an attempt to increase the profits of a struggling capitalist class accounts for the ruthlessness with which the project was carried out. Despite its inability to increase levels of profitability in the long run, the neo-liberal project was successful in what it perceived as the means for doing so; destroying the power of organised labour. The full frontal assault launched by Thatcher on organised labour, followed by the period of consolidation in pursuit of flexible labour markers under New Labour has left a working class radically different from that of the 1970’s. The mantra of flexible labour markets was to mean in practice the destruction of all favorable terms and conditions, the erosion of any job security and the shifting of responsibility from employer to employee.

Unlike their parents’ generation, any young person entering the job market today is under no illusion that they will find a job for life. The situation was captured by ex-mayor of London, Ken Livingston’s response to the recent youth riots: ‘There used to be a time in this country when young people would grow up, have a steady job, a family and a home. That time is now gone.’

The Youth Crisis and the Generational DivideA whole generation of young people have grown up having never seen a practical purpose for Trade Unions. The terms ‘ballot’, ‘picket’ and ‘scab’ are completely foreign.

Yet it is this very generation that comprise an increasingly insecure workforce resigned to dead end jobs, low wages and lack of social security. Precarious work is not exclusive to young people but that flexible labour markets were achieved by the defeat of the labour movement of the 1980’s is itself a demarcation along generational lines.

In Britain only 1 in 10 young people are a member of a trade union, halving to 1 in 5 for those in part time work. That 49% of all young people are in part-time work exposes the weakness of the unions. 80% of all British students work part-time to support their studies and the lack of prospects for graduate employment ensures that more than half of graduates are forced to stay on in part time employment. Concentrated in the private sector-retail, hospitality and catering-they are resigned to a life of low, fluctuating pay.

That the current crisis is also a youth crisis can be seen from the shape of resistance thus far: the Tunisian 26 year old whose suicide was to spark a series of Arab revolutions, the youth movements in Greece, Portugal and Spain, the student revolt in Britain followed by the politically blunt riots. The painful contradictions involved are most clearly exemplified in the case of Spain where the massive youth mobilisations of the 15 May Movement and Real Democracy Now! brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets to challenge austerity but explicitly rejected the official trade union movement. The result has been that despite the size and obvious potential the movement has died and the austerity agenda unscathed.

This division and defeat has a precedent in Europe with the rise and fall of the ‘Euro May Day’ movement. At its height Euro May Day attracted hundreds of thousands of participants, organized in complete opposition to the official trade union movement on its most historic day, claiming to represent the most “precarious” elements of society that the unions choose to ignore. Since 2006 however numbers have dropped away as people fail to see any real results. This situation cannot be allowed to repeat itself. It is a combination of the movements and the industrial struggle that

will be needed to defeat austerity and it is how these two struggles interact that will be of key importance in months ahead.

It would be wrong to suggest however that the Trade Unions are choosing to ignore these problems. Unions like Unite have launched promising campaigns, opening up union membership to communities and reducing membership rates for younger workers. The general secretary, Len McCluskeys’ comments in the lead up to the TUC conference that: ‘trade unionism is not only about the public sector’ should be welcomed as should their involvement with the Coalition of Resistance. The upcoming European Conference against Austerity, initiated by Coalition of Resistance is an example of pulling both the movements and the unions together, where both will be forced to confront their weaknesses and accept the importance of forging unity.

Public and Private:As the reality of Austerity Britain begins to sink in, the terms ‘precariat’ and ‘precarious workers’ are no longer the intellectual property of the Left, with even mainstream commentators from the BBC accepting that: ‘Whatever their age, the prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity’. Before Christmas this year half a million agency workers are predicted to loose their jobs as 1 in 3 employers plan to sack their workforce before the new European Agency Worker Directive comes into force. David Cameron’s’promises to employers that he will use whatever means necessary to ‘water it down’ highlight the importance of agency workers to maintaining British business.

The global Austerity project is not simply about privatising the public sector and smashing up the public sector unions. Of course we should stand with those in the public sector resisting these attempts but that much is obvious. More deeply, the austerity project is an attempt to re-shape the whole of society, to squeeze harder and longer on the lives of working people, to pull even further in the direction of capital over labour.

The part-time contracts, the petty wages, the debt, the pay day advances, the housing, the employment agencies, the arm’s length partnerships; it is here that the trade unions must revitalise their forces and rebuild fighting unions for the new century.

‘This generation comprise an increasingly insecure workforce resigned to dead end jobs, low wages, and lack of social security’

Analysis: Precarious Workers


Phil Neal

MURDO FRASER’S declared intention to split the Scottish Tories from Westminster has been described as ‘a hand grenade into the middle of an otherwise ritual contest’.

The party, long-considered a toxic brand north of the border, has never recovered from their humiliating wipe-out in 1997. Despite a concerted effort by both the Westminster party and its Scottish branch, the 2011 Holyrood elections were another disappointment for Britain’s governing party.

This may have escaped notice in the wake of an SNP landslide in which Labour was the principle victim. The Tories only lost five seats

and their limited support base held firm.But within their own ranks, this has only

served to highlight the terminal stagnation of the organised centre-right in Scotland. Despite their centre-left rhetoric, Salmond’s SNP are increasingly winning the favour of Scottish business – the Tories’ natural supporters – with their policies on corporation tax.

There are clear advantages for the centre-right if they were to set up a new party in Scotland. The Tories are perennially regarded as anti-Scottish and historical fact supports this belief – Thatcher’s decimation of Scottish industry and introduction of poll tax are still raw in Scottish consciousness. With Labour also in tatters the race is on between these two parties to get their houses in order to

control a ‘No’ Referendum Campaign that, if run effectively, could reap benefits for the successful party.

The decline of the Westminster parties to the benefit of the SNP is seen to be a result of Labour, Lib Dem and Tory candidates failing to present themselves as credible representatives on Scottish issues. This is supported by evidence from the Scottish Election Study, which shows that voters in Scotland primarily think of their homeland first in elections. The fact that the Tories have the lowest rating of all parties in the study, with 0.75 out of 4, speaks volumes for the degree to which the Scottish Tories have lost the trust of the Scottish electorate.

Whether Scottish Conservatism wakes up to this reality is a different matter. Fraser’s closest contender, Ruth Davidson, provides a less ambitious solution for those not ready to jump ship just yet. She recognises the need for change within the party and is favoured by Cameron, but perhaps does not realise that merely being a lesbian kick-boxer (her attempt at a ‘normal’ image) does not automatically shed the toxicity of the Tory brand and mean she will connect with voters. People will not forget the lingering homophobia that pervades the rest of her party.

It is clear that the twilight years of Scottish Conservatism have arrived. What remains to be seen is whether it reinvents itself as a credible alternative to those who vote SNP to protect Scottish interests but aren’t convinced

by the dissolution of the Union, predominately big business and Scottish capital.

While the notion of independence is currently popular, the business support the SNP has garnered could begin to fade if it cannot demonstrate itself as capable of providing a market-friendly independent Scotland. The solution to this is a stronger ‘Yes’ campaign which says no to austerity and stands shoulder to shoulder with the European working class fighting against cuts.

Fraser’s new model has the potential to gain the support of Scottish capital if the referendum fails and the SNP cannot control the economy for market interests.

As the economy worsens and a double

dip recession looks likely, Scottish capital is hesitant to stray away from similar policies to those of the Tories in England. Cuts are likely to get deeper in the absence of a united fight back composed of unions, communities and the unemployed.

The danger here is that Fraser provides an opportunity for a recalibration of Scottish capitalism that politically strays away from the issues of independence and having to provide decent public services and jobs. The solution is to build a new Left that takes on the arguments for an independent Scotland free of big business influence and cuts to essential services. While Scottish Conservatism is near death, the ideology of centre-right neo-liberalism is still dangerously active.

Scottish Tories’ midlife crisisThe Tories have had a torrid time north of the border. Their decline is irreversible, and they know it. Fraser’s mooted rebranding of the party is the latest attempt to dress-up neoliberal policies.

FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY? Tories will become more dangerous if they adapt to the realities of Scottish devolution, as Murdo Fraser (pictured) has advised

‘Fraser’s new model has the potential to gain the support of Scottish capitalism if the Independence referendum fails’

Scotland: Scottish Tories


ANTI-CUTSBritish Politics:Anti-Cuts Movement Today


A guide for the movement

The Con-Dem coalition is a government plagued by crisis. Merely a year and a half into their

tenure, they have been rocked by the Hackgate scandal, involved the country in an unpopular and expensive conflict in Libya and overseen a series of cuts that have called into question the legitimacy of their leadership, as well as failing to adequately deal with the bankers’ crisis and expenses scandal they inherited from the previous government.

The past year has seen the growth and development of an anti-cuts movement that has challenged the government and radicalised a new generation of protesters in the fight against austerity. Those most affected by these cuts are angry and with the TUC’s call for co-ordinated strike action on November 30th, the time is ripe for the anti-cuts movement to further develop our strategies and challenge the legitimacy of the ruling classes’ agenda and their systematic attack on the poor and working classes.

Protests One of the most effective mechanisms for challenging the legitimacy of the government has been the protests against the effects of austerity such as the students’ demonstrations of late-2010. Protests, if effective, can shake the entire establishment and can accelerate the political crisis of the government.

If we take for example the protests against the rise of tuition fees, what was originally planned as a diplomatic dialogue with the government where thousands of students would march and discuss their issues and then go home, turned into an eruption of anger for a generation betrayed. The demonstration at Millbank broke the consensus that there was ‘no alternative’ to the Coalition’s austerity agenda.

Millbank radicalised a very significant layer of young people, a feat not achieved since the birth of the Stop the War movement in

2001. London was in lockdown as the government voted through an increase in tuition fees, with thousands of students thronging the streets in a display organised without the aid of the NUS bureaucracy. Young people found the confidence to take history into their own hands – and the social contradictions were clear for the world to see.

Similarly the recent riots in England exposed the weakness of the Con-Dem government and highlighted their inability to provide adequate leadership in a time of crisis. The harsh sentencing of those involved in the riots was a panicked overreaction that demonstrated clearly their own glaring knowledge that they have a complete lack of mandate to lead. The riots also wiped millions of pounds off the stock exchange, sending shockwaves through financial institutions as Britain had typically been seen as an ‘austere’ safe haven free from violent expressions of resistance and frustration.

To develop an effective strategy, we need to consider where the impetus for protests will come from. The Coalition is devolving responsibility for cuts to the local authorities in order to split the resistance and share out the blame, thus minimizing the political dangers. Some of the catalysts for struggle will be drawn from local community actions and not just as a result of national trade union demands.

Campaigns like Save the Accord characterize the necessity for local movements to build momentum in the anti-cuts campaign. If demonstrations like the 500 strong march that opposed the closure of the centre were to occur regularly then we would soon be in a position to build an accumulative mass that could pose a massive threat to the austerity programme of the government.

At the same time as pushing for community level activity the temptation to become localized should be avoided. All these

actions must be tied together with a national perspective which links every level of resistance to create the biggest and broadest movement against the cuts. Restricting ourselves to fighting the cuts at a purely local level will limit the impact that we can have. A mass movement which fights for action in the localities as a means of building mass demonstrations and strikes will have a much bigger effect on serving a serious blow to the government. We need to build anti-cuts groups that link up with a national campaign and movement in order to most effectively challenge the current cuts agenda.

In order to effectively challenge the legitimacy of the government, the trade union movement must link up with community campaigns. We need to be confident in calling for more protests and actions at a community level. Demonstrations have the potential of damaging governments, questioning their legitimacy and scaring economic markets.

The class struggle should not be confined purely to actions called and organised by the trade union movement. It is imperative that we engage with other forms of protest in order to create the strongest movement possible. Local campaigns and community organisations as well as student groups are as essential to the building of the anti-cuts movement as the trade unions.

Strikes In a similar vein to the importance of protests, strikes such as the significant action called for November 30th are crucial in furthering the anti-cuts movement. The co-ordinated strike action has the potential to deliver millions of workers and anti-cuts activists onto the streets of Britain to collectively voice their anger in a display that will panic the government if we ensure it is executed properly.

The TUC call for co-ordinated strike action comes in the wake of

What sort of actions will be effective in combating the Con-Dem agenda of cuts and privatization? Aisling Gallagher, Lucky Dhillon, and Suki Sangha look at the tactics we will need.


‘The class struggle cannot be confined to actions called by the trade union movement’


the political movement which has developed on the streets of Britain. The TUC conference this year was the smallest yet, but called one of the most important actions of the resistance so far. We are at an important juncture with the anti-cuts movement as the intensifying Eurozone crisis puts pressure on the ruling class. Austerity is becoming more evidently ineffectual as a solution for the economic crisis. The bailing out of banks in Europe has pushed enormous amounts of debt onto nation states. The last proposed injection of relief to Greece was offered as

the defining solution but days later the stock markets plummeted. The streets of Greece are rife with protest on a daily basis. The European Conference Against Privatisation and Cuts called by the Coalition of Resistance is a stepping stone into a European-wide campaign against austerity.

While we must reflect and draw on the experiences and successes of the past, it is important to be honest in our assessment of what the trade union movement is today. A one-day Public Sector General Strike on its own will be neither inclusive nor radical enough to represent the aspirations of the movement and the position in which the working class find themselves today.

Even though we have an ever-expanding private sector, only 1 in 6 private sector workers are members of a Union. Even in the public sector, once the bastion of the unionised workforce, only half of workers are affiliated to a Trade Union today. In order to properly consider and discuss the importance of co-ordinated strike action such as November the 30th we have to be very clear about discussing the unions in their true modern form and the current political context.

Accordingly, there are issues in the fact that November’s strike action has been called by the upper echelons of the trade unions whilst the rank and file of the organisations is at an all-time low. Traditionally in the trade union movement, the membership has always been more militant than the leadership but now we

find ourselves in a situation where this has reversed and the leadership are steering the call for action as opposed to being compelled by the rank and file.

Therefore we are faced with the task of revitalising the trade union movement. The trade unions need to spread out their base and attempt to build in the largely un-unionised private sector. The strike in November, although backed by 14 unions, could be easily isolated and deepen the divide between public and private sector workers. The stronger the movement, the more desperate the ruling class

become and therefore appealing to private sector workers is as important as building in the public sector. For example, strikes in France build among the wider public as a mechanism of resistance against austerity, uniting the battle across society and including everyone so that the government are unable to use the tactics of ‘divide and conquer’. Initiatives like the Strike Support Buses, organised by the Coalition of Resistance, are a good device for bringing people together in raising practical solidarity for striking workers.

To ensure success, it is essential that there is a vibrant and political movement to guide the strike, win over doubters and put in place an effective leadership from the best of those who are currently in place as well as by recruiting new and vivacious members to the class struggle.

Elections While it is important to consider both the impact of community action and of strikes, a discussion should also be had around the importance to the future of the anti-cuts movement of the Left gaining electoral success. As the 2012 Local Council elections approach, the ever-tightening effect of the austerity package on the poorest members of society must push the Left and the anti-cuts movement as a whole to seize the opportunity to expand our political influence. As observed in a recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies,

the poorest are set to lose out most through mass cuts to public services and employment prospects, with Britain’s families facing cuts of 10% in their living standards over the next three years.

However, standing single-issue anti-cuts candidates in the Local Council elections is not the way in which the Left should capitalise on the backlash from the unpopular austerity measures. An action such as this would be extremely self-limiting, meaning that the Left would be restricted to Local Council campaigns and agitation and making more difficult the

efforts to nationalise the resistance. This tactic, in fact, effectively ignores the need to take the fight against austerity to a national level and risks the probability of local campaigns remaining local and being unable to unite the resistance. This would result in fractious action, through local campaigns remaining small and ineffective and being unable to unite with the larger national picture and any action called by trade unions.

So what are the next steps for the anti-cuts movement? The 30th November strike action called by the TUC is an intensification of the resistance against the Con-Dem coalition’s austerity agenda. Campaigns such as Coalition of Resistance have already begun the process of building support for the strike and it is important that everyone is working together to achieve the biggest day of action possible.

Additionally protests, both on a local and national level, will be integral to exposing the weakness of the coalition and challenging its legitimacy. In order to achieve this we must unite all campaigns, movements and unions on a national and international level. A strong and effective Left whose focus is to build a broad anti-cuts campaign will be fundamental to this in the coming period. The anti-cuts movement has the potential to be an umbrella under which the Left, currently divided and weak, can come together and provide a voice for those currently experiencing the full force of the government’s cuts programme.

Britain: Anti-Cuts Movement Today

‘This year’s TUC conference was the smallest yet, but called one of the most important actions so far’


Reviews

Exhibition: Brank and HeckleKatherine Stewart

‘Brank and Heckle’ is the first major UK exhibition for Aberdeen artist Ruth Ewan, described as an ‘archivist of the left wing’. It’s geographical positioning at Dundee’s contemporary art gallery is pertinent, given the city’s rich history of class struggle, from the Jute mill strikes of the 1910s, the school pupil strike of 1911 to the more recent and prolonged industrial action taken by Timex workers in the 1990s.

Ewan as an artist seeks to deal with and document the sociological descriptors that link people in struggle and the methods they employ to resist: protest, strike action, music and art. Folk music and it’s ethos in particular run through her artistic practice like a thread in a tapestry of human documentary.

This exhibition features a work first exhibited in 2009 entitled ‘A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World 2003 – ongoing’ with 1500 (a selection from 2000 and counting) protest songs, archived under such headings as ‘peace’, ‘land ownership’, ‘feminism’ and ‘ecology’. This is a fascinating record of the genre. Ewan also worked with local school children in Dundee to explore the radical history of the former industrial city, and in particular the character of famous revolutionary, musician, poet and Jute mill worker Mary Brooksbank. The result of this is a disarmingly honest portrait of the imagined Mary, by pupil Lewis, aged 11, enlarged onto the gallery wall. The school strike of Dundee is also explored in a piece entitled ‘Nae Sums’, the imagined

slogan of the young strikers whose demands included less homework and an end to corporal punishment. The words were constructed from letters cut from reclaimed school desks.

Also on show is a piece about singer and activist Paul Robeson (who performed in Dundee in 1930). The sculpture of Robeson is based on an original created in the 1920s, which mysteriously disappeared en route to the forgery to be cast in bronze.

The title of the exhibition ‘Brank and Heckle’ is a metaphor for the opposing themes of oppression and free expression. ‘Brank’ from the tortuous ‘Scolds’ bridle used as punishment in the Middle Ages – prohibiting speech by the (usually female) wearer to discourage ‘gossip’ or ‘riotous’ talk – symbolises the silencing of victims of oppression. ‘Heckle’ from the Hecklers – the most politically vocal workers – of the Dundee Jute Mills signifies the oppressed speaking up, or shouting, or singing about their struggle. Robeson’s legacy is one of both victim of oppression by the US and UK governments during the Red Scare witch hunts, and outspoken champion of civil rights and freedom.

Refreshingly, Ewan describes her practice as ‘conceptually led but socially realised’ – a challenge perhaps to so much of conceptual art that alienates and patronises audiences with its removal from all that is real and recogniseable. This show has allowed the artist to explore her ideas of social change with more depth and clarity and will be of interest to those who appreciate contemporary art with a conscience.

Dominant ideologyLiberalism: A Counter HistoryDomenico LosurdoVerso 2011 £15.99

Domenico Losurdo ends his Liberalism: A Counter-History suggesting that only through bidding farewell to the habitual hagiography of the subject can there be serious consideration of the contribution to intellectual

and political thought made by liberalism. Hagiography Losurdo’s book certainly is not. He opens with the question ‘what is liberalism?’, asking whether we should consider a figure such as John C. Calhoun, champion of the slave-holding south of the USA, as a liberal. Most people would certainly consider slavery to be the absolute antithesis of liberty and the rights of man. However, for a prominent nineteenth-century liberal, such as Lord Acton, there was no doubt that Calhoun was a liberal. Indeed, he was a ‘champion of the cause of the struggle against absolutism’ and of the ‘defence of minority rights against the abuse of an overbearing majority’ (p.2).

Losurdo presses this point further, suggesting that if we reject the idea that Calhoun was a liberal, on account of his support for the institution of slavery, then ‘why should we continue to dignify John Locke with the title of father of Liberalism’? Locke, whilst of course a famous opponent of the ‘political slavery’ practised by absolute monarchy, considered slavery in the colonies to be quite normal. Therefore from the outset Losurdo illustrates how liberalism has always been an ideology full of contradictions, moreover one characterised by an unfolding dialectic of freedom and un-freedom. Liberty for ‘the community of the free’ has coexisted with oppression and exploitation for the many excluded from this community.

A tangle of emancipation and dis-emanciaptionThat liberalism has acted as an ideology of emancipation in the struggle against numerous tyrannies is without doubt. The history of liberalism is to a large extent the history of the great modern bourgeois revolutions, England 1640-1688, America 1776-1783, and France 1789-1794. Yet a darker side to liberalism also exists, its ‘counter-history’, one too frequently neglected by ideologues for the system, past and present, but one with a deep immersion in colonialism, slavery and brutal class oppression.

Losurdo suggests that the development of liberalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is best explained by focusing on its two ‘macroscopic exclusion clauses’, which kept people outside of the ‘community of the free’. These exclusion clauses were applied to slaves, populations of colonial origin, and also ‘servants’ (workers both urban and rural in the metropolis, p.181). A third exclusion clause directed towards women is acknowledged but deemed less central, if only because some upper class women, (such as female slave owners), formed, albeit it in a subordinate role, part of the community of the free.

Un-freedom in the coloniesWith regards to the first of these exclusion clauses, slavery, Losurdo focuses upon the slogan of the rebel American colonists during the war of independence, ‘We won’t be their Negroes’ (p.301), suggesting that this highlights the ‘tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation’ taking place. The Colonists’ rebellion both demanded equality in relation to Great Britain whilst reasserting inequality in relation to Blacks and Native Americans. As Losurdo remarks; ‘liberalism and racial chattel slavery emerged together in a twin birth’ (p.302).

One consequence of this was that the American Revolution would have to take place in two acts, not being completed until after the defeat of the South in the civil war of the 1860s. Furthermore, and as wisely predicted by Adam Smith, the abolition of slavery in America would not take place under ideal liberal conditions of representative


self-government, but rather in the form of the union army and military dictatorship.

It was not only the American Revolution that fell short of its emancipatory potential. Losurdo describes how the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, (mockingly referred to by Marx as ‘a parliamentary coup d’état’), whilst finally ending the era of monarchical absolutism, also enabled the English landed aristocracy to consolidate its colonial domination over the Irish and gave considerable impetus to slavery in the colonies. At home, it led to the enclosure of common land and the exclusion of the peasantry from their main means of subsistence. Such contradictions in these revolutionary processes provide much of the context for the ambiguities and inconsistencies to be found within the liberal tradition.

Un-freedom in the metropolisThe second of Losurdo’s ‘macroscopic exclusion clauses’ focuses on what he terms white servants in the metropolis. Often their conditions of existence were not remarkably better than the black slaves in the colonies. Adam Smith spoke of ‘vestiges of slavery’ within Great Britain, particularly with reference to certain salt works and coalmines in Scotland. Here the workers were often kept in a condition similar to serfdom in Eastern Europe. They and their families were considered to be a part of the mine or salt work. Were it to be sold, they would also pass into the service of a new master. Shockingly, many workers were even obliged to wear a collar on which the name of their master was inscribed. De Tocqueville, upon visiting England in 1842 remarked that ‘equality is everywhere extending its dominion, except in industry which is daily organised in increasingly aristocratic form’ (p.189).

That such oppression existed amongst white servants in Great Britain was a point that was not lost on the defenders of slavery in the USA. As civil war neared, Calhoun, somewhat opportunistically, went so far as to positively contrast the condition of American slaves with that of inmates of workhouses or poorhouses existing in England at that time. Indeed, Losurdo notes, with some irony, that the Poor Law that massively expanded the workhouse system, was passed in the same year (1834) that slavery was finally abolished in Britain’s colonies. Engels, in condemning the workhouse, described it as a ‘total institution’. However, for a key liberal thinker like Jeremy Bentham, this was precisely the point. His infamous Panopticon, a building that could achieve surveillance with no hope of escape, could happily function as a prison, a workhouse or a factory, suggesting that in nineteenth-century liberal Britain there was little difference perceived between each.

Ultimately the boundaries between the community of the free and those excluded from it, ran as much along class as along racial or national lines. Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, there was still little sign of a serious liberal challenge to the exclusions. Why was this the case? Losurdo reveals a large part of the answer when he writes:

‘At its inception, liberalism expressed the self-consciousness of a class of owners of slaves or servants that was being formed as the capitalist system began to emerge and establish itself, thanks in part to those ruthless practices of expropriation and oppression implemented in the metropolis, and especially the colonies, which Marx described as ‘original capitalist accumulation’’ (p.309).

Liberalism is the ideology of the capitalist class. Therefore its contradictions arise from the fact it was required to legitimate both the revolutions that put this class into power, and the systems of domination that then arose out of the functioning of capitalism.

Beyond liberalismIf the exclusion clauses cited by Losurdo were eventually successfully challenged, that challenge came largely from outside of mainstream liberalism. Losurdo suggests that the crisis of the American Revolution, in particular its failure to deal with the institution of slavery, prepared the ground for the greater radicalism of the French Revolution and the emergence of a distinctly ‘radical’, as opposed to liberal tradition. This radical tradition was associated with figures such as Condorcet and Diderot, and their distinctiveness was owing at least partly to the fact that they were prepared to support ‘revolution from below’ as a means of abolishing slavery. Diderot, somewhat prophetically, envisaged the rise of a Black Spartacus who might lead a slave revolt, which is of course what happened in the form of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the

Black Jacobins in San Domingo (Haiti).

Meanwhile in the metropolis the struggles of the excluded grew throughout the nineteenth century and began successfully to force concessions from the ruling elite. In 1848 de Tocqueville had voiced concern that the working-class revolution would no longer be solely political, but also social in content. He was probably not unrepresentative of liberal thinking of the time in believing that economic laws were, or at least should be, of divine origin. Consequently they should be safely beyond the reach of social change. However, regardless of what the likes of de Tocqueville thought, demands were raised by the working class, not only for the right to vote, but increasingly also for the right to healthcare, education and leisure time. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the context in which these demands were raised was far removed from the revolutionary turmoil of 1848, thus allowing liberalism greater room for manoeuvre.

Whilst many liberals still opposed concessions to the working classes, others, such as T. H. Green in Britain, began to see the need for greater state intervention to bring about some amelioration of the stark inequality and injustices that scarred society. This ‘new liberalism’ would eventually culminate in the Beveridge report and the establishment of the welfare state, but only after further and more intense social struggles on behalf of the excluded.

ConclusionLosurdo urges ‘that we bid farewell to the myth of a gradual, peaceful transition from liberalism to democracy’ (p.341), neatly making the point that the two are by no means identical. Indeed, for most of the nineteenth century, liberalism was distinctly hostile to the idea of mass democracy based upon a universal franchise. Liberals, such as Robert Lowe, feared that the working classes would use the vote to press their own sectional interests as opposed to the general interests of society. Politics, henceforth, would be determined by the sheer numerical strength of the lower orders, rather than the wealth and intellect of the upper classes.

Liberalism was to undergo something of a transformation in terms of its attitude to democracy during the twentieth century. To a large extent, this was in order to meet the challenge posed by socialism and, in particular, by the Russian Revolution of 1917. As Lenin suggested, some sort of democratic republic was now seen as the best political shell for capitalism. However, the facts that many liberals from Locke onwards were simply opposed to democracy, that unprecedented violence was often required to bring about democratic change (the US Civil war), and that emancipation was very often external to the liberal world (San Domingo), all serve to underline Losurdo’s point about the myth of a peaceful transition.

Ultimately, Losurdo deems the most important reason for rejecting this myth to be the tangle of emancipation and dis-emancipation, meaning that the extension of the suffrage in Europe, was accompanied with simultaneous colonial expansion and the subjugation of peoples and races deemed inferior. Above all, liberalism sacrificed democracy on the altar of colonialism, slavery and empire.

In 2011, as great political struggles for democracy shake the Middle East and beyond, debates will emerge as to which ideological visions can best harness people’s desires for emancipation. Liberalism, despite its recent regression into neo-liberalism and consequent association with powerful economic elites, will no doubt be touted as the default ideological setting for these movements to adopt. Those who seek a deeper emancipation and more radical solutions will however need to move beyond the contradictions of liberalism. In such an ideological context, Losurdo’s critical history is a timely and invaluable contribution.

By Tom Whittaker. This article first appeared on the Counterfire website @ www.counterfire.org

Reviews: Domenico Losurdo

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