For a real right to work movment-organise the unorganised in a fight against the bosses system

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

The TUC to the rescue of the middle class-working class! We need communist unions

The Trades Union Congress is a rather a rarefied organisation at the best of times. This umbrella organisation for the vast majority of Britain's trades unions, currently 6.7 million strong, has a brief of to act as the eyes and ears of the unions, combating the bias against organised labour at government level, whilst producing research and policy papers to attempt to influence legislation. The official brief is set out as follows:

The Trades Union Congress:

-brings Britain’s unions together to draw up common policies
-lobbies the Government to implement policies that will benefit people at work
-campaigns on economic and social issues
-represents working people on public bodies
-represents British workers in international bodies, in the European Union and at the UN employment body - the International Labour Organisation
-carries out research on employment -related issues
-runs an extensive training and education programme for union representatives
-helps unions develop new services for their members
-helps unions avoid clashes with each other
-builds links with other trade union bodies worldwide

Basic stuff, but clearly focused on working class people in the publicity guff. In reality the TUC, and British unions in Toto, have always failed to be organisations of the working class in general. 6.7 million workers is less than one third of the working class population. The make up of the TUC is also heavily biased in favour of the public sector, where unionisation was easier to achieve; or in the skilled trades of the private sector. In some areas we have the legacy of state sector unionisation combined with the privileged private sector, for instance in the rail industry. So, when the TUC speaks as an advocate of working people in truth it speaks as an advocate of a privileged section of the working class, those in secure/skilled jobs where the costs of organisation and recruitment by full time union bureaucrats is felt to be worth while financially. The neo-liberal phase of capitalist political economy has not wrought significant changes to the higher wages and security of employment in the unionised sectors of the workforce.(1)

The enormous shake-out of industry in Britain, with the mass closure of mines, mills and large industrial plants has had a devastating effect on union density. Unions organised almost 50% of the workforce in 1979, the decline post Callaghan would clearly have effects on wages for the working class generally. This effect has been negative for those not unionised, but positive for those unions which survived. This is despite unions not making any serious effort to organise the unskilled, women, migrants and the like.(2)Those unions that have survived are the stronger and, as such, better able to command a wage premium (thus raising the “batting average” of unions). It is this capacity to garner a wage premium which is the unions central role. Contrary to the popular view on the left that Britain's industrial decline in the twentieth century is synonymous with Britain's decline as a world impenalist power, and therefore with lower real wages for all workers, the obverse is in fact true. Now we can see the significance of Lenin's argument that imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. The export of capital, the creation of large financial corporations and capitalist monopolies and the emergence of rentier states, and growing predominance of financiers and bankers, was the consequence of the increasing problems of finding profitable outlets for 'surplus capital' in all the dominant capitalist countries at the turn of the twentieth century. It was this that Lenin called imperialism, a product of capitalism at that particular time. This process began in the 1870s, with the scramble for Africa. By 1914 the world had already been partitioned, there were no new outlets for profitable investment etc, so it now had to be repartitioned according to the economic power of the major capitalist states. And how else could the matter be decided except by military conflict? But the outcome was not what Lenin or anyone else had expected. Although capitalism was overthrown in Russia, opportunism and chauvinism in all the major working class movements -- something which Lenin could explain -- prevented revolution in all the developed capitalist/imperialist countries. After a second world war, there was an outcome which, although very different, was similar in impact to what Kautsky thought possible under his 'far-fetched' ultra-imperialism. One country, the United States of America, totally dominated the world economy. It was this outcome, which Lenin could not have predicted, which allowed the 'peaceful' rapid expansion of capitalism of the major imperialist countries. The wars and revolutions, the poverty and oppression were confined, for the time being, to the rest of the world.

But the laws of capitalism did not change. The massive export of capital, the growth of financial and transnational corporations with global aspirations continued, and as Japan and Germany rebuilt their economies to become powerful competitors of the United States, inter-imperialist rivalries have reappeared in similar form to those Lenin outlined at the turn of the century. In this respect imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. Imperialism is alive and well and stomping its British jackboot over the lives of hundreds of millions of workers and farmers today in what are described as 'developing countries. Imperialism is fundamentally mono–poly capitalism. It is the historical period of the decay of capitalism and is characterised by parasitism. Imperialism is the era of finance capital in which enormously concentrated banking capital has fused with industrial and commercial capital. The export of capital – that is global investment – as opposed to export of commodities becomes the distinguishing feature of imperialism.

As a result capitalism has grown into a global system of national oppression and of financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of advanced countries. Imperialism divides the world between oppressed and oppressor nations; at the same time it brings about class differentiation within both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – the existence of purely parasitic financiers [rentier class] and the labour aristocracy bribed out of the superprofits of imperialism. Finally, after the territorial division of the world by a small number of rich capitalist countries at the beginning of the 20th century, the different pace of development of monopoly capitalism in different countries drives nations into conflicts that can only be resolved by force – that is by war.(3) This is what makes sense of the warmongering by US and UK Imperialism regards Iran.

Lenin was concerned to show how imperialism splits the working class movement and creates opportunist currents in the working class movement internationally, arguing that the ‘fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.’ That is why he attacks Kautsky who attempted to contain irreconcilable trends of the left and right within the same socialist movement, to justify ‘unity’ with the apologists of imperialism, refused to fight opportunism, and found himself and his followers united with the extreme (right) opportunists supporting imperialist war. Kautsky detached the politics of imperialism from its economics. Kautskyism, Lenin argued, is not an independent trend, because it has no roots either in the masses or in the privileged stratum of the working class which had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie. It attempts to reconcile the working class with the ‘bourgeois labour party’ to preserve the unity of the working class with that party. It is, Lenin argued, the ‘inevitable fruit of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, whose entire way of life holds them captive to bourgeois and petty bourgeois prejudices’. Such tendencies have to be combated by the party of the proletariat.

Britain’s relative industrial decline has been combined with a dynamic, aggressive imperialist expansion of commerce and finance overseas. This development has now reached unprecedented levels. Britain’s overseas assets in 2005 were £4,837.1bn, nearly four times Britain’s GDP. 56.4% of these assets, £2,727bn, more than double Britain’s GDP, were ‘other investments’, mainly loans and deposits abroad by UK banks – a ‘gigantic usury capital’. Only 15.6% of the overseas assets, £753.2bn, were direct investments (an investment in an enterprise abroad with 10% or more shares or voting stock), and 27.5%, £1,332.1bn, were portfolio investments (investments in shares, bonds and money market instruments). Britain’s overseas assets are now increasing every year by around 60% of Britain’s GDP. Since 1997 when the Labour government came to power they have increased nearly two and a half times. In 2005 at the current exchange rate they were 92% of the size of US foreign assets – $9,190.5bn to $10,008.7bn. However the foreign assets of the US were only equivalent to around 80% of the US GDP.(4)

At a certain historical point the tendency towards Imperialism expresses itself profound crisis:

‘The aggressive character of imperialism likewise necessarily flows from a crisis of valorisation.* Imperialism is a striving to restore the valorisation of capital at any cost, to weaken or eliminate the breakdown tendency. This explains its aggressive policies at home (an intensified attack on the working class) and abroad (a drive to transform foreign nations into tributaries). This is the hidden basis of the bourgeois rentier state, of the parasitic character of capitalism at an advanced stage of accumulation. Because the valorisation of capital fails in countries at a given, higher stage of accumulation, the tribute that flows in from abroad assumes ever greater importance. Parasitism becomes a method of prolonging the life of capitalism.’(5)

It is this point, when even the higher wages engendered by Britain's leading role as a exploiter of the world become an impossibility that we have the opportunity to transform the organisations of the working class, primarily the trade unions. This will not be done by the current leadership of the Trades Union Congress, which has recently issued a policy brief on why the government need to save the hard working middle class, which the TUC conflate as anybody on 21k per year. This judgement takes the US approach to class relations, which sees all people as middle class. There may be a rich and a poor at the marginal ends but basically everyone is middle class.Bear in mind, the TUC has a defined brief as fighting for working class people, not a vacuous middle class. The brief ends thus (concerning who the TUC and Labour should be on the side of): 'the real middle Britain, they remain the great neglected electoral group, doing badly under the Conservatives and standing still at best under Labour.'(6)

This utter tosh is what passes for TUC leadership today. To make such claims as these is to ignore the world imperialist role of the British capitalist class. A shown above, our masters currently have almost 5 times the national GDP invested abroad. The tribute from this is what allows our bloated middle class, which is people on way above 21k, to maintain their lifestyles. Th real middle class are those professionals/small business owners who are not economically, nor culturally close to the working class. This new sociological chicanery is the flip side of the 'we are all middle class now' thesis developed by neo-liberals who wanted to smash industry in Britain.

This classification of middle class in American terms is simply a method of denying a working class, a la US, for the reason that if you admit a working class exists then you have to really admit a non working - bosses class exists also. Where is the evidence that even the broad layers of the working class have done badly under Labour? Anybody who has gone to a hospital, a school, a city center etc in the last ten yrs should attest to the real material benefits which flow from being the worlds second Imperialist power. The tax take from the City of London used to make up a third of all tax receipts, providing the revenue for the funding of the NHS and Education, which, whilst standing below the level of Sweden perhaps has matched Franco-German spending through the 00s.(7) PFI schemes have undermined the benefit of this to working class people, allowing parasites to take large swathes of this funding. This reality does not challenge the idea that the better off workers gathered in the trade unions, as well as the middle classes, have been complicit in a social imperialism based on the super exploitation of the workers and poor abroad. Their is no escaping this reality.

The solution to this social Imperialism is the extension of the trade unions to the poorest sections of the working class. The early trade unions were built by the poorest and most oppressed groups, such as farm and mill labourers, and operated as strike funds and solidarity committees, rather than the permanent bureaucracies of today. The struggle must also be waged to win the leadership of the unions. This would make possible a class struggle, as opposed to a class collaboration approach to worker-boss relations. This would not go far enough though. Between 1979 and 2005 the total number of workforce jobs has increased 13.2%, while public service jobs have risen by 36.8%, total service jobs by 46.1%, and finance and business services by a massive 111%. Manufac–turing jobs have over the same period declined by more than half – 52.3%. Workforce jobs in the manufacturing sector in September 2006 at 3.03m are at the lowest level since records began in 1841. Manufacturing output at the end of 2005 was no higher than it was when Labour came into power in 1997. Over the same period Britain’s industrial base fell to less than 16% of the British economy. In 2005 financial services alone accounted for 8.5% of GDP, up from 5.5% five years ago, while the share of manufacturing has fallen by over one third in 10 years to 13.6% of GDP. The struggle against allowing a working class to become a parasitic organism living off the super exploitation of workers abroad, must begin with winning the unions for communism. Communist led unions would fight for state power so as to expropriate under workers control and management the largest banks, insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds, and what remains of domestic industry. The foreign holdings of British bosses would be exposed for the workers of the world to see. Workers labouring to feed the parasites of the City of London, and vicariously large swathes of trades unionists in the public sector and the skilled trades would be given ownership of their plants, stocks and shares in an act of solidarity; communist led unions would state clearly : we don't want to exploit you as our bosses did.

How do we get there? Do we rely on the lefts within the unions? No and No again! Bob Crow of the RMT has presided over spectacular victories for train drivers on the London Underground, now some of the highest paid workers in Britain. He has also been complicit in the development of a racial caste of cleaners, many of whom earning below the minimum wage (see, http://brennanism.blogspot.com/2009/11/tube-and-tfl-union-rmt-will-be-holding.html). Crow has also railed against Chinese workers willing, in his words, 'to work for a bowl of rice'! He has also called for an alliance with the mass murdering state to save the jobs of workers who support Naval expeditions against the poor of West and Central Asia (see, http://brennanism.blogspot.com/2010/01/unravelling-trot-bashing.html). Do we trust Serwotka? No! He has managed to lead a union through the loss of 130k members, whilst maintaining the pay and pensions of the older, more secure workforce-classic aristocratic trades unionism (see,http://www.bolshevik.org/Leaflets/PCSbetrayal.html)

We cannot rely on the established lefts within the unions. They are concerned with scrabbling for the crumbs they currently receive from the bosses table. These mis leaders have no qualms about selling out the majority of union members and the wider working class to further that nefarious end.

Workers need a rank and file movement within the trade unions aiming at expanding, renewing and controlling the unions from below. Workers also need clear communist leadership of their organisations to take advantage of the crisis of the system, where even aristocrats such as builders and engineers are forced to fight to defend their pay and conditions, pay and conditions the bosses can no longer afford. This crisis has been our opportunity. A revolutionary led union movement, committed to overthrowing the bosses at home and abroad, and of freeing the chains of parasatism whih have shackled the workers movement for too long is a vital goal all communist trade unionists should be fighting for.





(1) David Blanchflower, 'The Union Wage Premium in the US and the UK' :, p.2

(2Metcalf, D., K. Hansen, and A. Charlwood (2001), ‘Unions and the Sword of Justice: Unions and Pay Systems, Pay Inequality, Pay Discrimination and Low Pay’, National Institute Economic Review, 176, 61-75.

(3)David Yaffe: http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/index.php/britain/1042-britain-parasitic-and-decaying-capitalism-frfi-194-dec-2006-jan-2007.html

(4)ibid

(5) Henryk Grossman: The law of accumulation and breakdown of the capitalist system, Pluto Press, pp122-3)

(6) Who are the middle classes?: ToUChstone blog: A public policy blog from the TUC - http://www.touchstoneblog.org.uk

(7) Polly Toynbee, 'A spending landmine that enshrines Labour priorities for years'://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/29/taxandspending-economics

Global Warming is a Farce, article by Alexander Cockburn

Interesting article on subject of global warming. Funny how the solutions to man made global warming always involve workers consuming less whilst paying more in tax to the Imperialist state etc, when proposed by the bosses and their political flunkey's. If the world is veering towards a meltdown then only a world socialist plan, the consequence of a world revolutionary process, can solve such fundamental problems.

December 24, 2009
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce

By Alexander Cockburn
The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. It became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and "institutes of climate change" across academia. It's where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

Many of the landmines in the CRU e-mails tend to buttress longstanding charges by skeptics (yours truly included) that statistical chicanery by professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the 20th century, a historical fact that makes nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the 20th century. Here's Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an e-mail Sept. 22, 1999: "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. ... I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago."

Now, in the fall of 1999, the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important "Summary for Policymakers" - essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into nonexistence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures.

Briffa's reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-20th-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a "problem and a potential distraction/detraction." So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa's reconstruction. The CRU's Jones happily applauded Mann's deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over "Mike's Nature trick."

Other landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU's Tom Wigley: "How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!"

Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that "we are no where close to knowing" how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering - such as carbon mitigation - is "hopeless."

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that "greenhouse" theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner's "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics," updated in January 2009.)

Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention - geoengineering - could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it's a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it's a terrible tragedy.

Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/12/24/anthropogenic_global_warming_is_a_farce.html at January 08, 2010 - 01:03:39 PM CST

Anti Imperialism is the key to fighting fascism

Gordon Brown has slammed a militant group, Islam4 UK, who plan to demonstrate against returning murderers (troops)in Wooton Basset. Such statements (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/04/wootton-bassett-islam4uk-parade-troops) are of course to expected from this savant of the bosses. Also to be expected is the hysteria amongst some sections of the left, who greeted the news that the British fascist English Defence League were planning a counter demonstration in support of Imperialist butchers, with undisguised horror. Individuals from groups such as the Alliance for Workers Liberty are joining facebook groups condemning what is described as 'Islamo-fascism' in the non Marxist parlance of this third campist outfit.(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=231086644930&ref=mf).

How should communists approach anti-Imperialist resistance by groups which have reactionary social platforms and which are not part of the working class, although having the allegiance of important and fighting sections of the class? Islam4UK seem to have the ear of a small but militant section of mostly poor/working class Asian and Muslim youth. To simply condemn the righteous anger of these oppressed groups - anger at both Imperialism and the effective neo-colonialism they face within Britian - is the politics of the playground. Opposition to the Trotskyist and Leninist understanding of the anti Imperialist united front is the foundation stone of what communists have come to know of as third campism - that is, the refusal to defend colonial countries/oppressed groups from attacks by the bosses and their fascist adjuncts. The rationale for this is that such groups/regimes have anti working class politics. The real cause of this effective support for Imperialism, and in this case the fascists, is the housebroken form of socialism these groups espouse, riddled with bourgeois morality and liberal, as opposed to a Marxist understanding of how to best defend the oppressed and defeat the bosses.

All communists who can should attend the demo against these butchers of Iraqi and Afghan peoples, making the case with secular, socialist and anti Imperialist slogans. If the reactionary leadership of Islam4 UK attempted to split the demo and attack our side then more power to us in appearing as the best defenders of oppressed peoples, seeking unity with all those fighting Imperialism. We may even make inroads to the people attracted to what amounts to the anti Imperialism of fools. Anybody attending as a third campist, effectively ignoring the march of the bosses troops, is siding with them and Messrs Obama, Brown, Patraeus et al.

This quote from Trotsky, taken from a discussion concerning the importance of communists being the most implacble fighers against Imperialist tyranny has much to credit it today. If we extend the last line to include the absurdity of reducing world antagonisms to the struggle between democracy/secularism and fascism/Islamo fascism and us socialists, then we are on the way to understanding how we should approach the likes of this planned demo.

"I will take the most simple and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat. Truly, one must have an empty head to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. Under all masks one must know how to distinguish exploiters, slave-owners, and robbers!"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/09/liberation.htm

The CWI and the old Labour Party

The article below is from the English and Welsh section of the Committee for a Workers International, the Socialist Party. Appearing in Socialism Today, de facto theoretical journal for the International, the piece reflects the thinking of this important grouping on the question of what party working class people need to fight for socialism. Appended to the article are some critical notes from this blogger.


www.socialistworld.net
website of the committee for a workers' international
30 December 2009
Britain

Lessons from Labour’s early history


The British Labour Party was formed over 100 years ago to provide an independent political voice for working-class people. Ed Doveton describes this struggle, which is paralleled by today’s campaign for a new mass workers’ party. First published in Socialism Today
Ed Doveton

THE LABOUR PARTY was founded in 1900, first as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) then as Labour Party in 1906. It emerged as a broad-based organisation reflecting the diverse range of existing organisations already developed by working people under capitalism. It encompassed the varied working-class political trends: the newly organised, militant, unskilled workers; the more traditional skilled workers; those involved in the co-operative movement; and others focused on issues such as education. Within its ranks were socialists, Marxists and reformists, such as those in the Fabian Society. The Labour Party in that sense became an arena within which the political arguments for socialism, and the differing policies and tactics to achieve it, were debated. It was seen by the working class as a tool with which it could fight for change, as a class.

A long period of struggle had preceded the foundation of the Labour Party, centred on the idea of establishing independent political representation of the working class, separate from the existing capitalist parties. In the 1890s, the major obstacles to the new workers’ party were two-fold. Firstly, the organisational support given by the traditional trade unions to the Liberal Party. Secondly, the mass electoral support for the Liberals and Tories by those working class men who did have the vote.
In an ironic twist of history, the situation in the 1890s has similarities 100 years later in our present day politics. Once again, socialists and class-conscious trade unionists have begun struggling for the creation of a new workers’ party. This time, however, the major obstacle is not from the Liberal Party but from New Labour. This party has become a clone of the capitalist parties it was set up to replace!
In the 1890s, the major trade unions saw the Liberal Party as the political party which would best represent their interests, although the unions were not formally affiliated to it. National and local union officials were often Liberal Party members and were wined and dined by the Liberal hierarchy. Trade unionists would put forward a version of Liberal ideology: that the economy of ‘the country’ was important and that the interests of capital and labour could often be the same.

This attachment of trade union officialdom to the Liberal Party began 40 years earlier in 1867, during the culmination of a mass working-class movement demanding the right to vote. The years 1866 and 1867 had witnessed large demonstrations all over the country and a mass rally in London which ended with a riot in Hyde Park. The establishment parties were fearful of a growing mood that hinted at revolution. To stem the tide, they quickly passed legislation giving the vote to millions of urban working-class males. The victory was incomplete, not least the exclusion of women and rural workers. But, in the ensuing general election, the Liberal Party moved quickly to absorb the trade union leadership in a successful attempt to capture sections of the new working-class voters.

The Liberal grip


THROUGHOUT THE following three decades the links between the unions and the Liberal Party remained solid. Over this period, the Liberals were seen by many as the ‘natural party’ for the working class. Some workers became Liberal councillors and in mining areas, where the working class vote was overwhelming, trade unionists actually became Liberal MPs (becoming known as the Lib-Lab MPs). Trade union leaders would argue that their relationship with the Liberal Party was beneficial, and would point to minor pieces of legislation, passed by Liberal governments, that helped the working class or the trade unions directly. The term used by these working-class Liberals was ‘labour representation’. This concept was expressed year after year during the 1880s and early 1890s at the TUC annual conference, as the TUC parliamentary committee reported on its work with the Liberal establishment.
Within this convivial partnership there were constant tensions. A relationship between a capitalist party like the Liberals and the working class is full of contradictions. When it came down to a direct decision about favouring profits and capitalism against working-class interests, it was always the former which was supported. Often employers headed the local Liberal Party establishment or, at a national level, the Liberal Party would simply ignore calls for more deep-seated reforms, such as the demand for the eight-hour day. The antagonism was also expressed in an attempt by the Liberal Party to keep out the undesirable working class from representing the party as councillors or MPs, not dissimilar to the control on these positions by the contemporary New Labour machine, which regards socialists as an alien species which should not belong to the party.

Some of these tensions would eventually spread into TUC conferences. As early as 1887, the president opened the conference by arguing: "One thing is certain, this labour movement is the inevitable outcome of the present condition of capital and labour; and seeing that capital has used its position in the House of Commons so effectively for its own ends, is it not the strongest policy of labour now that it has voting strength to improve its surroundings?" This speech set the tone of a debate to set up a new workers’ party headed by the then young delegate, Kier Hardie, representing the Ayrshire miners in Scotland. But the idea was soon squashed by a series of delegates, who were Liberal Party members. They put forward the argument, often repeated, that a new party would split the Liberal vote and let the Tories in. The voters were not ready for a new party of labour and it would be much better to keep with the Liberal Party. Hardie was ferociously attacked by the Liberal MP, C Fenwick (delegate of the Northumberland miners), because he dared raise the anti-working class record of a Liberal parliamentary candidate recently supported by leading Liberal trade unionists at a by-election in Northwich.

The striking turning point


A CHANGE CAME in 1889, in what would later be seen as a turning point. This was the victory of newly organised trade unionists in the gas workers’ dispute, leading to the formation of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labours. Later that same year came the London dock strike, which also saw the setting up of a new union. These disputes brought previously unorganised workers into the trade union movement, led by men who were socialists and who supported the demand for a new workers’ party.
By the 1893 TUC conference, one of these leaders, Ben Tillett, was moving a motion for a separate fund to support independent labour candidates and an elected committee to administer these funds. It included a worked out process to select candidates who pledged to support the policies of the trade unions. James MacDonald, later an early leader of the Labour Party, put forward an amendment, (passed by 137 votes to 97) calling for all such candidates to "support the principle of collective ownership and control of all the means of production and distribution". It was the first move in the creation of what would eventually become the Labour Party. But, in the manoeuvrings of the conference, Liberal Party members ensured that this resolution became a dead letter. This was signalled in the defeat of a further resolution by Hardie calling on labour members of parliament to sit in opposition to the Liberals.
Over the next few years, socialists and militant trade unionists attempted to put flesh on the bones of this resolution, while Liberal trade unionists attempted to block its effectiveness. A critical issue centred on finance. The Liberal Party trade unionists prevented the funds of the unions they controlled from being used to support working-class candidates standing independently of the Liberal Party. Unlike today, when MPs make themselves rich by gaining a parliamentary seat, being an MP was a non-paying job. Only the rich could afford to sit in parliament. So it was necessary for trade unions to find the money for the election campaign and to pay a salary should the candidate be elected. By blocking funds, the Liberal trade unionists could hold up the creation of a new workers’ party.

Equally, the Liberals curtailed further debate on this issue in the TUC, defeating resolutions and proposals at the 1894, 1895 and 1896 congresses. In 1895, the congress president, councillor Jenkins, a Liberal president of Cardiff trades council and a delegate from the Shipwrights’ Society, used his opening speech to carry out a full frontal attack on the Independent Labour Party (ILP) for standing candidates in the 1895 general election. He even attempted a slur that, because independent labour candidates undermined Liberal Party votes, the ILP was funded by the Tories.

Catalysts of change


BUT THE TIDE of history was about to turn against the Liberals. Conflict between labour and capital was intensifying as the economic upturn of the early 1890s took a dip towards the end of the decade. Additionally, British manufactures were experiencing sharpened competition from the expanding economies of the USA and Germany. As a squeeze on profits developed the bosses turned to reduce wages and attack the power of the trade union movement to defend its members’ interests. Although the Tories were in power, having won the 1895 and 1900 general elections, the Liberal Party was reluctant to commit itself to reversing the attacks on the labour movement. Many Liberal Party members were also employers, the very people carrying out some of these attacks.

At the same time, throughout the 1890s in one local area after another, small but determined groups of socialists were beginning to influence the organised movement, enabling them to replace Liberal trade unionists with socialist representatives in a few places. This activity by socialists on the ground, combined with the numerical growth of the new unions such as the gasworkers and dockers, helped to transform the situation. This process, alongside the alienation of some of the more traditional unions from the Liberal Party in the late 1890s, began shifting the ground of support within the TUC.

The eventual formation of what would become the Labour Party was not automatic. There was a dialectical relationship between the general economic forces creating conflict between labour and capital, the old and new unions, and the conscious intervention of socialists acting as a catalyst of change. As the famous phrase of Karl Marx states, "man makes his own history, although not in circumstances of his own choosing". But within this it is necessary that man does indeed ‘make his own history’.
Historians often cite two legal judgments as being critical in the development of the Labour Party: Taff Vale (1900-01), and Osborne (1909). Both were strident attacks on trade unions. In reality, these judgments rapidly increased a trend which was already underway, rather than sparked the creation of the Labour Party itself. Setting up the LRC had been agreed a year before the Taff Vale judgment, at the 1899 TUC conference. This laid the foundation for what would become the Labour Party, and brought to an end the period of the pre-birth of the new workers’ party.

The next two decades would see the growth and spread of the new party in working-class communities, reflected in unions, local councils and, increasingly, parliamentary seats. But, as with the previous decade, success would not be automatic. The working-class voter was still wedded to the habits of the past and remained attached to the capitalist Liberal Party. Many of the old Liberal trade unionists were still influential and continued to claim that the Liberal Party was the party for workers. They cited as evidence the fact that large numbers of workers still voted Liberal, mistaking voting habits for a zodiac sign determining the character of the party.

Looking back at this history of the Liberal Party, which by its policies and ideology supported the interests of capitalism, we might wonder how little has changed today. The New Labour government and Labour-controlled councils act like ruthless employers, affecting millions of public-sector workers, who have endured low pay, effective pay cuts through below inflation pay awards, alongside real and threatened job losses. Labour stands by as employers close down businesses and sack workers. At the same time, the government gives away billions of pounds to prop up the banks. Its stated intent is restoring the profits of firms while demanding that the working class picks up the bill. It is this context that poses once again the need for a party which can represent the interests of working-class people. Conscious socialists should be fighting to achieve this objective.

What's wrong with the CWI view?


Principally the idea that just some amorphous Old Labour Party will stand for the workers interests. This is a flat refusal to view the history of the LP without reformist glasses on. The following section is the most revealing:

'The eventual formation of what would become the Labour Party was not automatic. There was a dialectical relationship between the general economic forces creating conflict between labour and capital, the old and new unions, and the conscious intervention of socialists acting as a catalyst of change. As the famous phrase of Karl Marx states, "man makes his own history, although not in circumstances of his own choosing". But within this it is necessary that man does indeed ‘make his own history’.'

This caricature of Marxism - economic forces created class struggle, with a splash of socialist action=LP. The actual content of these three aspects are ignored. Was the economic depression vital to the formation of the LRC in 1900? I would say not. The trade union aristocrats who made up the trade union movement well into the 1920s and 30s were opportunistic as hell. They often supported Tories as well as Liberals, depending on who promised the best deal for the less than ten percent of workers employed in skilled trades. The fact British capitalism suffered a boom-depression in quick order perhaps speeded up the development of a third opportunistic trade union politics-the LP, but it was likely to occur anyway in Britain, given the diseased nature of the economy, and the intransigence of a ruling class which had no understanding of the necessity to realign the political economy along collaborationist lines, apart from the fringe 'Empire Socialism' of the Chamberlain wing of the Tory Party (interesting to note Chamberlain was a former Liberal). It is vital to view capitalism as a social system, not a crude agglomeration of economic functions or bland class relations.

The approach the SP tend to use when producing their regular series on why we need an Old Labour Party is economic determinism, which is so often trotted out (pardon the pun) in lieu of a real and sophisticated understanding of both Marxism and working class social and political history. It postulates that economic crisis = the unions realising they needed their own party, with the assistance of some socialists. The economic dis juncture is vital to this schema in masking the issue of who built the LP? It is a very different narrative if we actually attempt to answer that question: the LP was built by trade union leaders who had for generations sucked at the teet of racist and often genocidal British Imperialism so long as they got a good share of the milk. When this Imperialist class began to falter in their class rule, linked obviously to both the rise of essentially better Imperialisms, and also due to anti-colonial revolts, the unions had to defend these hard won gains. What were these gains? the tiny minority of unionists had much better wages than the average, had access to employer insurance schemes, better holiday pay etc (see Eric Hobsbawm, 'Laboring Men', particularly the chapter on the labor aristocracy in C19th Britian,). This was paid for out of the super profits leached from the toil of workers abroad via the dual mechanism of unequal exchange of manufactured vs. agricultural/raw material products, and the huge surplus on overseas investments (even today five X the national GDP). This was all covered in Lenin's Imperialism, and has yet to be bettered or rubbished as a basic outline of the roots of social imperialists parties of the Labour Type.

Problems of labourism

If the SP were to admit that a privileged section of the class built a party to continue to defend those privileges, the argument in favour of a warmed over version today would be slightly undermined. This is the reason for the bluster about the new unionism of the late 1880s. The fact these unions largely died a death, due in no small part to the outright hostility of the skilled unions to these uppity labourers and women workers, is ignored. Also ignored is any recognition that the much lauded 'pioneers' of socialism were in fact reformist/trade unionist type socialists, whose imprint on the LRC and the LP was that of a class collaborationist and social imperialist organisation. The SP can lambast the SDF and other Marxists for cocking up an intervention into the LRC movement from the 1890s onwards, but they cannot ignore the fact the LP was built by an aristocracy of labour, assisted by reformist socialists, and as a non fighting, Parliamentary force.

'Within its ranks were socialists, Marxists and reformists, such as those in the Fabian Society. The Labour Party in that sense became an arena within which the political arguments for socialism, and the differing policies and tactics to achieve it, were debated. It was seen by the working class as a tool with which it could fight for change, as a class.'

The sophistry of the above statement, perhaps unintended (I hope), is patently absurd given any serious reading of the history. It was not a working class party, not then, not in the 70s, and not now. The party was always bourgeois in program and leadership. Is it a surprise that the LP only became a mass force after the Russian revolution, when the fear of Bolshevism gave a fillip to the left turn on nationalisation, and an organisational impulse to out-organise the fledgling communist party? The rewriting of our history is a travesty. What about the multi million syndicalist movement of the late 1910s and run up to WW1, a struggle and movement the official unions and LP did everything they could to smash and undermine? Where is the analysis of how this wonderful party scabbed on the post WW1 revolutionary wave, the 1926 General Strike etc and etc. This is all ABC stuff. (See, James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867-1974, particularly C.5, The Labour Unrest, 1910-1914, and C.7, Working Class organisation between the Wars)

This is not to say that the LP can be equated simply with its leadership, or that it was always a party of the aristocrats-the industrialisation and monopolization boom of the depression, WW2 and post war, gave a real foundation to the growth of mass trade unions amongst the unskilled, and through the unions, the LP. This is what created the extensive branch network, the trades councils (A.J. Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain's Trade Unions, Part Four) and the necessity of communists to work to win the fighting base of the LP to a class struggle program and party, in the early period as well as up until the 90s.

Best book on this subject is Paul Allenders 'What's Wrong with Labour: A Critical History of the Labour Party in the C2Oth, Merlin Press, 2001) which charts the essence of labourism embodied in the LP. Labourism embodied in the LP amounted to a reformed capitalism, shorn of its roughest edges by elements of public ownership, welfare provision and progressive taxation. Even Labours 1918 Manifesto, Labour and the New Social Order makes explicit the commitment to capitalism. The CWI, as advocates of a militant reformism, cannot go beyond the framework of labourite parties wielding the capitalist state power in the name of socialism, hence the CWI position that socialism will come to Britain via a Parliamentary majority introducing an enabling act to nationalise the largest companies. The ideological power of reformism has bent many groups and individuals to its logic of class collaboration. The recent CWI leadership of xenophobic strikes, and the No2 EU chauvinist political party which flowed from this displays this in an almost chemically pure form. The more things change in the trade unions the more they seemed to stay the same, hence from Liberalism to Labourism; from labourism to...a new 'old labour'?

Latin American Workers in Unite: From heroes to pariahs

Below is a statement from the Latin American Workers Association. In this bloggers opinion it explains the policing role the trade union bureacracies play in Britain today, and why our unions need to be extended to the unskilled and most exploited workers. In this broadening it is clear that union activists will not be able to rely on the support of the permanent officials, all too concerned to hold back militant struggles against the racist and anti-worker immigration laws passed by the Unite funded Labour Party.

In September 2009 Unite the union ordered the Latin American Workers Association (LAWAS) without notice to vacate the office which it had provided the Association with in its southeast region HQ in Manor House, thus ending a five year partnership. This followed an organised campaign by officials againt LAWAS, because of the latter´s support for an unofficial dispute and support for undocumented workers. But what was the background to this breakdown in the relationship, and the closure of this well known point of contact between latino workers and the trade union movement, and what is the future for LAWAS?



Firstly , some history. LAWAS was reformed in 2003 by Ernesto Leal, Julio Mayor and other Latin American workers in London, many of them political exiles and trade unionists in their own countries. It was in fact the second incarnation of the Association as the first version existed in the 1980s, which is a story for another day. The aim was to address directly the exploitation and abuses faced by Latin American workers in London, and to link these workers to the broader working class movement.



The new LAWAS operated out of cafes and park benches and temporarily in a community centre in Dalston, before being offered a more permanent home by various organisations including Unite (then the T&G), whose offer was accepted in mid-2004. Thus began the partnership. LAWAS was supported by Unite with office space and volunteer expenses, but maintained an independent existence and was never part of Unite´s democratic structures.



From its small room in Unite´s Manor House offices LAWAS combined advice and representation by workers for workers with a huge union recruitment drive, of which Unite was the main beneficiary with new members running into four figures, concentrated above all in contract cleaning. Word was spread through a publicity drive in the Latin American community taking in radio, newspapers, churches, embassies, public meetings and festivals like the annual Carnival – all of which are still key points of contact with the community. Email bulletins to the ever growing list of members and supporters became and still are a key tool of communication. Some coverage was achieved in British left media, but in the words of a Unite organizer assigned to working with LAWAS, its work was largely ´under the radar´ of the union. The response of the community was overwhelming, and LAWAS became known colloquially ín the community as the ´sindicato latino´.



At the same time the Justice for Cleaners (J4C) campaign was getting into gear and LAWAS´s efforts fed into that, as a majority of the workers who approached LAWAS worked in this sector. A good working relationship was developed with individual J4C organisers and activists in activities which ranged from English classes to organizing buildings, and in general promoting J4C in the Latin American community. Indeed LAWAS´s first office volunteer, Jose Vallejo, was reruited within a year by J4C. IN 2007 the J4C organisers branch made a sizeable donation to LAWAS in recognition of its support, especially in union recognition fights and organising the first ´papers for all´march. On the surface LAWAS was a success story which the T&G/Unite was happy to sell and did so, both inside and outside the union.



However, for the many latino cleaners who joined Unite but did not work in the buildings targetted by J4C it was almost impossible to take part in their new union. Lacking a functional branch, LAWAS became their de facto ´branch´, but this put LAWAS under an intolerable strain as it lacked the normal facilities of a branch, and because the union often would not assist when collective issues and organising opportunities presented themselves: the National Physical Laboratory and the BBC being just two examples. Where possible these workers and LAWAS did what they could alone. But without organisational backup this was difficult. It often felt like LAWAS was just there to increase membership numbers and take the strain alone of new members with all their problems.



In these circumstances LAWAS made it a priority to educate its new union members. For a long time it was unable to get serious union support despite repeated efforts, so it organised its own English and workplace rights classes, both alone and in conjunction with the College of North East London (CONEL) and the London Coalition Against Poverty - activities which continue to this day. Finally, thanks to pressure from both LAWAS and key J4C organisers, Unite arranged a piot English course. LAWAS made this possible by supplying a professional volunteer teacher and enough students to make the pilot project such a success that a large scale programme of education in basic skills was then laid on for cleaners. This programme is now a major showpiece of Unite´s educational work.



A similar process happened when a pilot immigration law course were arranged by the Migrant Rights Network for Unite activists following immigration raids. LAWAS drew on its pol of Latin American activists to provide half the students and interpreting for the Spanish speakers. Again, the success of the pilot course led to it being invested in and rolled out nationally.



Links were also forged with the hospitality and domestic workers branches of T&G/Unite; with a host of Latin American solidarity and community groups which evolved into the Coordinadora Latinoamericana; and with other unions such as the CWU and RMT, and TUC initiatives such as the Vulnerable Workers Project. Joint Employment Tribunal work was carried out with community law centres in cases where union lawyers or officers had failed to support members, on one well known ocasion because they didn´t grasp the legal issues facing migrant workers This was not just an issue with Unite.



In 2008 LAWAS gave unconditional support to a number of inspiring cleaners´ campaigns both inside and outside J4C. A public meeting in Elephant and Castle at the end of the year organised by LAWAS and other groups brought together a number of these previously isolated campaigns. A grassroots reinstatement campaign for 5 Colombian cleaners sacked for circulating a leaflet at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was in full swing, and was important as the first recent example of a campaign driven by Latin American workers. Those workers as well as others from Schroders Bank, and SOAS spoke of their experiences in struggle. Some raised criticisms of the ways union officials had handled their disputes. But as the Bolivian UCU activist who chaired the meeting stated at the end “despite the criticisms we are not anti union, because we are the union”.



The issue of immigration checks and raids was a constant theme at the meeting, as a means by which companies and the government itself were intimidating workers who organised. Unite Regional Industrial Organizer (Jose Vallejo) turned up to make the case for supporting the Strangers into Citizens campaign for a limited amnesty, while the majority present advocated a ´papers for all´ position which would not preclude critical support for the upcoming Strangers into Citizens march. Shortly afterwards his boss, regional secretary Steve Hart, in a sign of things to come, warned one of the sacked NPL cleaners that their campaign was being backed by ´extreme groups´. Needless to say, Unite made no effort to support the NPL cleaners campaign beyond the strictly and legally necessary, despite pickets taking place within walking distance of their national headquarters. Was this related to the fact that one of the cleaners main grievances before being sacked had been the use of an immigration raid to break their incipient organisation?



In 2009 official indifference turned into extreme hostility triggered by two issues: LAWAS´s support for sacked cleaners at the Willis building in the City of London, and its ongoing committment to a full regularization of undocumented workers.



In January 2009 a series of unofficial weekly protests by a shop steward and three workmates from the J4C campaign began, after they had been sacked by cleaning contractor Mitie at global insurance giant Willis in the City. The sackings were framed as redundancies after the company awarded the Living Wage but counter-attacked as elsewhere by drastically altering shift times, cutting personnel and smashing union organisation in the process. Union leaders argued they had done all they could and it was the workers fault a deal was not sealed. They disowned the protests, afraid of ´damaging the good relations with Mitie´, as one official put it. The workers felt let down and said so publcially after the union withdfrew all support. But from then on they concentrated their fire on the two companies, despite legal threats. Other cleaners flocked to the protests, including other ex Willis workers who had found work elsewhere but supported their colleagues´plight.



After four months LAWAS and the Coordinadora Latinoamericana forced a meeting with the Regional Industrial Organiser, in which the official pledged to try and open up a new space for negotiation with the employer, presumably making the most of the good unon-employer relationship to find four appropiate At the end as people packed up to leave, the official proposed a trade off for the support offered, whereby the Latin American groups supporting the Willis cleaners would support the May 4 march for a limted amnesty. Suspecting there was more to this, the groups present argued this was a separate issue and should be dealt with as such.



The offer of support was then quashed in a letter then sent by Assistant General Secretary Jack Dromey to the cleaners involved, which reiterated that no support would be given and making no mentin of the aforementioned meeting. In response to this a petition with four hundred signatures of trade unionists was raised at union and community events and branch meetings, and publically presented at Unite´s central office in Holborn. Among the signatories were dozens of union cleaners as well as as MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, and film director Ken Loach.



When the petition was presented those present were filmed and photographed by a sidekick of the regional industrial organizer, until he was confronted and stopped from doing so. This was the first sign of a vicious organised public campaign driven from the highest reaches of Unite, initially against the Willis cleaners and ultimately against LAWAS and indeed any critical voices. Leading the attack was the Regional Secretary supported by the likes of Women and Equalities Officer Teresa Mackay (ironic for a dispute involving mainly ethnic minority women) and their internal allies such as the Regional Industrial Organizer.



Unite officers went into overdrive to convince J4C branch committee members and the wider union, using highly confrontational language to suggest the workers involved were the main enemy: “people need to decide whose side they are on” wrote Hart in a briefing, contrasting the “mass of the cleaners” with “tiny groups seeking to undermine our united campaign”. And yet when Willis shop steward Edwin Pazmino presented himself as a candidate to the cleaners branch committee at its first ever elections, he gained a credible 29 out of 80 votes, despite never being informed of the meeting unlike other candidates, who were able to campaign beforehand. And if one thing characterised the Willis protests, and previous disputes led by Latin American workers, it was the solidarity of cleaners from different companies, as reported in the Morning Star throughout the long course of the dispute.



A leaflet was produced in the name of Justice for Cleaners and distributed by officers, despite not being approved by the new branch committee and certainly not its Latin American cleaner members, who along with many ordinary members almost unanimously supported the Willis cleaners. The leaflet trumpeted J4C´s successes in organising and education. This was ironic, because it was people like the Willis cleaners, and their supporters in LAWAS and elsewhere who had done so much over the years to create these successes in the first place. Instead fellow official and Regional Industrial Organizer Jose Vallejo was lauded to the point of featuring a colour photo of him on the leaflet, along with members of a youth group hired to wave Justice for Cleaners flags. The ´four cleaners and their handful of supporters´ were described as leading a ´scurrilous campaign´ which did not have the support of the majority of branch members – an allegation contradicted by the support actually received.



In another incident, a Unite branch which tried to speak about the dispute was silenced at a regional meeting of the ´United Left´ faction of Unite, to the disgust of many of those present. At a public meeting later organised by the Labour Representation Committee, fellow trade unionists from Unite, Unison and RMT proposed mediation in the presence of Unite officials, amnd suported by speakers John McDonnell MP and NUJ president Jeremy Dear. The proposal was ignored.



Why the ferocity of the attacks? This was not the first time union members had criticized official positions, held unofficial protests or presented a petition. The problem was that Justice for Cleaners was a flagship campaign controlled from the very top since its inception, and image meant everything. While criticisms and unofficial actions were had to be tolerated in sections of the union with a longer history, this new campaign had to be tightly controlled, and if that meant crushing internal dissent by any means necessary, then so be it. They chose to forget the basic point that it is workers who make campaigns, not officials, and sometimes, unfortunately, workers will take their own initiative and also be critical.



The other issue which Unite could not tolerate was LAWAS´s support for papers for all undocumented workers. Only two years previously LAWAS had worked closely with J4C organisers on this basis. Now however the official position had changed and dissenting voices again could not be tolerated. On the May 4 amnesty march organised by the Strangers into Citizens, LAWAS and other groups in the Coordinadora raised the slogans of ´noone is illegal´and ´papers for all´. Incidentally among these other groups were the UK branch of Colombia´s main opposition party (Polo Democratico) and the main Bolivian and Ecuadorian community groups mobilizing diaspora support for left wing governments in their countries - MERU and Bolivia Solidarity Campaign). Hardly extremists!



In May LAWAS representative Miguel Puerto asked to meet the Regional Secretary Steve Hart in order to find a solution to the Willis dispute. Instead he was met in worst company management style by not one but three officials including Hart, who instead of entering into a positive dialogue launched an all out attack on LAWAS for its support for the Willis cleaners and its behaviour on the amnesty march.



Worse was to follow. Around the same time LAWAS and J4C activist Alberto Durango was arrested in a trap sprung by his employer Lancaster, a tactic used on other migrant workers previously. They were unhappy with his recent activism at the bank. But police and UKBA officials also asked him about his employment at Willis – despite the fact he didn´t work there. But Durango and Schroders cleaners´ public support for the Willis dispute made them think he did. This raised the spectre of a blacklist among cleaning companies. Durango was freed without charges and dismissed. And yet when a picket was held outside the appeal against his dismissal, at which he was represented by a Unite lay representative, his union reacted by ordering an ´ínvestigation´ into him and, on Vallejo´s orders, refusing him access to educational courses! Six months later there has been no result of this mysterious investigation, nor a lifting of the ban.



Vallejo then went further by claiming at the cleaners branch committee that those involved in cross-union protests against recent immigration raids at both the Willis building and SOAS (University of London), were being sponsored by the cleaning companies themselves. Apparently other unions (Unison and RMT) were “approaching and dealing with the companies before organising their members” and that



“the so-called Cleaners for Justice called the members to disobey and as a consequence some were arrested facing deportation. We should ten [sic] have every reason to believe that the organisers of this campaign, Cleaners for Justice are paid by the Cleaning Bosses to attack the cleaners.”



It should be noted that Cleaners for Justice has never existed beyond being a slogan used by sacked Unite cleaners to express their desire for a cross-union cleaners campaign, with the workers themselves in the driving seat. This is an ideal which LAWAS has always supported, in place of the foolish competition which led, for example, to Unite not supporting cleaners strikes on the underground in 2008 but then publically claiming the credit for the successes of the strikes while offering no solidarity to those victimised through immigration arrests and the like as as a result.



Unite then moved to force LAWAS out of its office. At the start of the year he had presented a relative of his to LAWAS as a new office volunteer. LAWAS accepted in good faith. But it soon became clear that this relative wanted nothing to do with LAWAS and instead was there to act as Vallejo´s personal secretary. LAWAS then put forward a new volunteer of its own, as had always been the custom, but was prevented from doing so by the Regional Secretary. Instead the family member came to work an increasing number of days in the office. Volunteers were paid ´loss of earnings´ at aorund $65.00 a day once they had completed some basic training, but the monies paid to her were never revealed by the union despite requests by LAWAS. This stood in complete contrast to the rule enforced by Unite officials for five years whereby volunteers had to sign one and the same weekly expenses form for each day of work.



LAWAS held off by making a public statement about all of the above so as not to prejudice Juan Carlos Piedra, a LAWAS and J4C activist who after intense pressure from many quarters had succeeded in getting Unite representation after being sacked for union activity from his job at University College London. Instead LAWAS sought as always to resolve its problems with Unite by requesting another meeting with the Regional Secretary, and was about to do so but was pre-empted. Firstly, Vallejo took control of the volunteer rota on the basis that LAWAS had been advising workers to join other unions. A ridiculous allegation, because workers simply been advised in LAWA´s bulletins to join the union which corresponded to their workplace or occupation – as previously instructed by Unite officials! Still, LAWAS continued publicizing Unite and recruiting into it far more than into any other union. A week later regional secretary Steve Hart, sensing perhaps that a scandal might be on the cards, ordered LAWAS out of its office without notice. Even after that move a meeting was requested to address the situation, but to no avail.



And so an era has ended. But despite the problems, the last year has been a very positive one for LAWAS. The campaigns it supported breathed new life into the organisation and won it many friends across different unions and in the Latin American community. As a result the annual assembly held in August 2009 was the largest ever and a new committee was elected which for the first time represented almost all the main Latin American nationalities resident in London. With its new temporary premises in the National Union of Journalists, it is up to that committee and all Latin American workers to secure the future. This means fighting inside unions, including Unite, so they are led by the members, and joining with workers of al nationalities and backgrounds in doing so. It means working with those officials who are not corrupt and self-serving, and unmasking those who are. And it means recognising the achievements of struggles, but also preserving the right to criticize aspects of these and act independently when necessary.

RMT leadership must put action where their platitudes are

TUBE AND TfL union RMT will be holding a demonstration in support of London Underground cleaners fight against privatisation this Wednesday (18 November) as it emerged that senior TfL bosses have received a 50% increase in bonus payments over the past two years from £3.6 million in 2007 to £5.3 million this year.

The tube cleaners, who are also fighting for TfL Chair Boris Johnson’s London Living Wage, will be outside the former Metronet headquarters at Templar House, 81-87 High Holborn at 12 noon on Wednesday 18th November.

RMT is demanding that all tube cleaning services should be brought back in house on decent wages and terms and conditions with the cleaners recognised as an integral part of the London Underground team rather than a soft touch for cuts and exploitation.

In a separate part of RMT’s campaign for Cleaners Justice the union has attacked the private company Advance – who clean train trains for Southern running out of London Bridge and Victoria – for slashing staffing levels in order to prop up their profits. RMT is warning that the cleaning cuts will leave trains dirty on these important London commuter services.

Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary said:

“The continued attacks on tube cleaners, and on the staff working for Advance on Southern, show that senior tube and rail managers, and the Mayor himself, are prepared to turn a blind eye while those doing the dirtiest jobs on the lowest pay are kicked from pillar to post. That’s a disgrace.

“Londoners should not tolerate a situation where TfL bosses get a 50% increase in bonuses over the past two years while some of their own cleaners on the tube are denied the Mayor’s London Living Wage and are forced to endure the uncertainty of repeated privatisation.

“RMT’s fight for justice for cleaners on our transport system will continue to put this issue right in front of the Mayor and the senior bosses who have the power to stop this exploitation.”

This is an absolutely crucial fightback by some of the most exploted workers in Britain. Largely immigrant and working at night, the mostly female cleaning teams have to literally run the course of their cleaning routes to make the quotas. The action by the RMT comes after occupations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in support of a victimized migrant cleaner over the summer. The movement to defend and extend union rights and organisation across the often illegal worker dominated cleaning industry is one the official union movement is finally getting behind, with Unite also backing the campaign.

However, the failure of the unions to fight effectively for their members on the low pay grades is clear from the above press release, which makes clear the shocking reality that unions have not even won the London Living Wage for their members yet! This minumum, raised in May by london Mayor Boris Johnson, estblishes £7.60 as the base wage for all Londoners, in theory. The reality is that 47% of part time (heavily biased against women) and 15% of full time workers are still paid below the London minumum (The Guardian,Friday 22nd May, 2009)

The failure to secure a wage that even the viciously anti working class Mayor of London increased, does not bode well for the fight for better pay and conditions for cleaners beyond that still poverty line level. The question could be asked of why no industrial action to force the minum wage for cleaners as a base from which to fight for a standard RMT rate for all jobs? The answer is that Crow, Woodley and co, despite the different degrees of militancy in taking action to defend trade unionists who are considered 'core' union members-permanaent workers in stable and relatively secure jobs-are both united in their commitment to not fighting with the same militancy for those considered a lot of effort-migrants, women, the lower paid who are more transient and less likely to stay in the same workplace and union for a long period of time, i.e. the people who most need militant and fighting trade union oganisations and leaders.

Crow has form for failing to actually fight for the low paid and vulnerable. As Workers Fight stated: "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)

What we have is a lot of talk and bluster. We have a campaign. We get zero industrial action! If Crow was to build and argue for strikes across the rail and Bus netowrk to support these demands for the London living wage and better conditions for thousands of workers, then this would be real action, not mere waffling and platitudes. This will not happen without massive pressure on Crow and the RMT leadership. It will also not happen without the creation of a strong communist caucus withn the RMT ranks. Such a caucus would make the case for strike action to defend and extend the pay of cleaners, whilst arguing for a grading system to level up the wages fo all RMT members to the level of the highly paid drivers. This would win the support of the station workers, who have pay grades far below that of the drivers on the underground. The National Shop Stewards Network, although compromised by the patronage of the Crow leadership and the perspective of building it as a cheerleading force for lefty union tops by the dominant force in the newtwork, the Socialist Party, does have space for a real communists to fight for a perspective of communist renewal of the compromised union leadership.

Demonstrations, petitions and lobbying MPs is all well and good so far as it goes. If Bob Crow is serious about winning justice for cleaning workers then strike action across the rail network would surely be a start. An end to the excuse of work being outsourced as a cause of poverty pay must be exposed. RMT train drivers recieve some of the highest wages in the industry despite the outsourcing of their jobs. They do this because their union leadership have made the effort, or been forced to make that effort, on behalf of the heavily unionised sectors of the rail network inherited from the British Rail days. Stop the excuses. Fight for a levelling up of all low paid workers in the rail industry now!