The Socialist Workers Party front campaign-the Right to Work Conference-takes place this weekend in Manchester. Boasting an impressive list of speakers, the conference threatens to:
Defend services and pensions
Unite the public and private sectors
Demand a million green jobs
Jobs not bombs
Defend migrant workers – jobs for all
Marx was way ahead of these epigones when he said that the right to work was a bourgeois demand which had no pedagogical power without the clear link to workers control of industry, hiring and firing-that is without a transitional programme. The unwillingness to make the call for a break with union sell outs (indeed, to actively sell out a strike) and fight for the complete, root and branch renewal of our organisations, is something which hamstrings the SWP in their union activity. Instead of these front groups, we need to build unemployed workers associations which are built as part of the fight to reclaim the unions, unions which have been decimated by the economic crisis despite the bluster of the union leaders and the national chauvinist Socialist party that the best way to defend union jobs was by restricting entry to Brit-local workers.
The task for Marxists should be the mobilisation of the unemployed against a system which has given them nothing but poverty and immiseration. The biggest obstacle to this are the misnamed trade union leaderships which are acting as a fifth column for the bosses within the working class. Even something so basic as the fight for jobs needs the ousting of this leadership. This is the task of tasks for the employed and the unemployed. The scab leaderships of our unions have been able to entrench their positions due to an entire epoch of defeats for militant class struggle going all the way back to the miners strike of 1984-5. The lesson that struggle = failure, and that there is no alternative path, be it within the unions or at a societal level, has meant that the right and 'left' leaders have been given a free reign. The social crisis consequent to the global economic meltdown of the last period has removed all stability from this situation. The mass unemployment, always much higher than estimated, has now burst into national life. This reality undermines both the legitimacy of capitalism as a system delivering the goods for broad layers of workers in even the rich Imperialist countries such as Britain, but also undermines the legitimacy of the do nothing trade union leaders.
All who consider themselves communists should have their central task as fighting to lead the unemployed into the union movement in order to wrestle the leadership of our organisations from our enemies. The agitation and propaganda should not be to get fake socialists like Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka onto platforms so as to give a front campaign legitimacy. Bob Crow and Mark Serwotka have refused to fight on behalf of their own workers on numerous occasions, the unskilled and low paid sections most frequently. Serwotka led the 2005 pension sell out for new, lower paid workers in the civil service. He has also presided over the massacre of low paid jobs. Bob Crow, when he is not making racist comments regarding Chinese workers, can be found refusing to back the unskilled and the low paid within the rail industry. As Workers fight highlighted: "In late 2008 when bus and train company National Express announced 750 job cuts in December and proceeded to outline cuts in its East Coast Mainline and East Anglia train services along with job cuts (on the East Coast Mainline, 18% of the on-train catering workforce, for instance), the union delegates to the company council were able to claim that there would not even be any need for voluntary redundancies at some depots - because in fact the company had been topping up its low staffing levels with agency temps, all along. And it was "only" these agency workers who stood to lose their jobs. Of course these workers are not entitled to any statutory notice period nor redundancy pay unless they have been with the company in unbroken employment for two years, which is not the case. This, basically, is how many companies are at present getting away with murdering jobs with impunity, while union bureaucrats boast of having prevented compulsory redundancies!(Workers Fight, 'Britain - The social crisis and the union leaders' response', In Class Struggle, #82, Jan-Feb 2009). These leaders are our enemies. They should be exposed as such by putting forward the basic demand that the unions organise the unemployed and fight against the bosses crisis in the interests of all workers, not simply the trade union workers, almost 50% of whom are professional/skilled workers, and who make up less than one third of the total working class in Britain today.
As the National Minority of Movement of the mid 1920s advocated, the unemployed and the rank and file trades unionists should coalesce:
1. Around a fighting programme.
2. Around concrete demands for union consolidation and reorganisation.
3. Around the necessity for creating a new ideology amongst the union membership.
4. Around the necessity of training and developing a new leadership to replace the old."
This is how JR Campbell of the Communist Party and NMM viewed the tasks of revolutionaries:
“Every candidate for even the most insignificant post should stand on a revolutionary platform. While the communists supported the left officials against the right and strove to transform the “muddled and incomplete left wing viewpoint of the more progressive leaders into a real revolutionary viewpoint”, they warned against reliance on them and never forgot their “main activity must be devoted to capturing the masses”.
Instead of the flabby reformism of the SWP/RTWC demands, the NMM fought for six main demands: a six hour day; a sliding scale of wages and hours (40 hrs pay for 30 hrs work) which would have ended unemployment and forced the bosses to pay for the crisis; unemployment benefits set at the national minimum wage; workers control and management of industry which had failed the mass of workers; a workers government based on the NMM program and movement. By 1926 the NMM had over one million members.
Note the program comes as part of the fight for a new ideology in the unions, a new leadership and new organisations. The first step today, with a much lower level of class struggle and class organisation must be-organise the unorganised-the temps, the migrants and the agency staff so long ignored. Build unemployed workers unions. Without organisation there can be no political fight
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