Where are we now? posted by Richard Seymour

You could class this among the posts I've written about the relationship between state and capital. (By the way, Galloway is kicking some puce arse on Question Time as a write, so it is as well to note it now before someone asks him about the Schiavo thing - at which point I'm going to turn the telly off).

The Left has always had a fairly simple way of gauging its prospects - beyond psephological concerns, they inquire as to the health of the labour movement. If the prognosis is good, prospects for success are good. If the labour movement is weak, anaemic, perhaps crippled, then failure is too close for comfort.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the state was engaged in a war of attrition against organised labour on behalf of capital. This began with Barbara Castle's 'In Place of Strife' act, which was aborted almost on conception due to the hard resistance of the trade unions, in particular those who had previously been weak - bin workers, Leeds textile workers, the Ford women and others. The act proposed a cooling-off period before strikes could take place. Workers who ignored the cooling-off period and stayed out on strike were liable to prosecution, fines and imprisonment. The problem was that the first cracks in the comfortable post-war consensus were beginning to appear. Profitability showed its first weaknesses as the long post-war boom was coming to an end, and the system's ability to absorbe workers demands was narrowing. Hence, a Labour government was trying to impose laws that would seriously restrict the right to withdraw labour power, and thereby (they hoped) reduce the combativity of the labour movement.

When Labour lost the 1970 election to the eunuch Heath, the new Tory government tried to impose the Industrial Relations Act - if anything, more extreme than anything Thatcher managed. But the labour movement was particularly combative at this time, and as the government rode harder, became increasingly assertive in its demands. In particular, two massive NUM strikes in 1972 and 1974, with massive solidarity and flying pickets, broke the back of both that law and that despicable government (not only despicable, you understand, for putting Ricky Tomlinson in jail). Heath called an election, asking the nation - who runs the country: the government or the miners? They got their answer alright. Labour won two elections in 1974, the second time emerging with enough of a majority to govern properly. Among those opposed to Heath's election gambit was Margaret Thatcher, who believed that if only the miners were defeated, she would be leader of the Conservative Party shortly and therefore the Prime Minister.

Labour tried a different tack. As unemployment was rising higher, the OPEC crisis made its effects felt, and profits sank, employers lobbied the government to restore profitability to British industry. This they sought to do through the 'social contract' , which would restrict workers' wage rises to no more than 5% each year, in a time when inflation was on average about 20% a year. Effectively, wages were to be cut to make capitalism work. This was enacted through the connivance of left-wing trade union leaders. Because of this, the grass-roots resistance was often quite fractured and weak. However, the system did not last for long and, however weakened the unions were as their struggle entered a downturn, they still retained enormous purchase. In 1981, when Scargill won the presidency of the NUM, the young government of Margaret Thatcher was obliged to retreat on one of its offensives in the face of massive industrial pressure.

Yet, the Tories had a plan. The ruling class has its folk memories too, and, as one labour correspondent noted during the miners strike, "miners emerging from the bowels of the earth to demand their rights touch a raw nerve". The miner was a 'black avenging ghost' (as Zola put it) for the Tories, who had been twice humiliated by this cruel shade. Nicholas Ridley therefore proposed a plan in 1978 that would put an end to the NUM, which had been the cutting edge of working class militancy since the late sixties. They could, he said, defeat the miners if they started by establishing a trend. A series of heavy defeats inflicted on smaller unions would set the scene splendidly. Next, they needed to build up coal stocks and imports, encourage non-union road hauliers to transport the substance, develop dual coal-firing stations at plants, encourage other unions in the mineworks and develop a mobile police force capable of reacting to outbreaks of struggle where they occurred. This they did, and several northern cities were transformed into police occupations during the 1984-85 strike, as a Tory government deliberately set about destroying mines that were profitable and operative. Just as they had allowed unemployment to soar in earlier years in order to eviscerate the manufacturing unions, now they crippled huge sectors of the economy to pursue their class revenge against the miners. Scargill was prescient: this was an attempt to destroy the mining industry. The miners struck and were greeted with enormous solidarity. Even Sun printworkers struck in support of the miners in 1984.

While the miners were portrayed as an undemocratic entryist attempt on British democracy, the Tories delinquently ransacked British jobs - and, I might add, set the most extreme forces within MI5 to work targetting Scargill and his union, infiltrating it and fixing him up - a process which led to a series of bogus 'revelations' in 1990. Scargill's deputy at the time, Roger Windsor, now appears to have been an MI5 agent, as was the previous 'moderate' union leader, Mr Joe Gormley .

The defeat of that strike was far from inevitable, but it was decisive. After that, other unions were attacked and briskly defeated - including the printworkers. That trend was not so much bucked as rudely interrupted by the massive campaigns against the Poll Tax. It was not the first time the Tories were on the defensive but, again, it was decisive. Riots on Trafalgar Square finished Thatcher, and would have finished the Tories had it not been for the epic incompetence of Neil Kinnock and his last-minute PR election-grabber. The launch of anti-Poll Tax campaigns, and the later struggles against the Criminal Justice Bill, the environmental protests and Reclaim the Streets demos all captured something of a new radical spirit, and all would coalesce into the anticapitalist movement that erupted in the City of London in June 1999. Similarly, the Major government's attempts to undo the mining industry for good met stiff and bitter resistance as well as public defiance. While the media line on the 1984-5 strike had been that democracy was threatened by Marxist insurrectionists, even the Daily Mail found time to discover the 'honour' of the miners in 1992.

The victories of the signal-workers and airline workers during the 1990s represented a substantial recovery after the horrifying defeats of the 1980s. They in no way entered the scales in the same way that the defeats had, but they showed that capital would no longer have an easy ride, and the government would no longer be able to pursue its agenda with such roughshod force. While Thatcher had systematically and repeatedly tried to take out all the major unions, breaking the back of one after another, no government would risk this after the poll tax riots. The defeats continued, of course. The betrayal of the Liverpool Dockers is one of the most shameful episodes in British labour history.

Yet, however flawed, New Labour's trade union legislation and minimum wage laws gave new confidence to many workers. Not only have there been new unionisation drives (poorly exploited by the big unions), but there has also been a massive shift to the left within the unions, whose members are becoming more combative. RMT members in particular, however vilified, have won massively as a result of this strategy.

The firefighters struggles - thus far to no avail - and the postal workers more successful strikes have shifted the coordinates again. Even journos are getting in on the act, and the recent successful struggles by Telegraph journalists is testament to this. The most recent success - not yet an outright victory - has been the government climbdown on pensions for public sector workers. They were terrified, and so they should have been, of a massive spate of industrial action sweeping the country in the middle of a general election. When in 2001 the postal workers went on an unofficial walk-out during a general election campaign, they won more than they had even asked for, just as their later wild-cat strikes won solidly, hands down. The BA workers also demonstrated extraordinary militancy in the Summer of 2003, and made substantial gains with the threat of strike action in 2004.

I shouldn't downplay the significance of the defeat of the firefighters. Had the firefighters strike continued, and been fought successfully, the government would not have been able to go to war on Iraq. The army would have been too busy scabbing to go blow Iraqis' heads off. The defeat owes a great deal to the Labour loyalties of the leader, Andy Gilchrist. Inclined to be serenaded by ministers as he was, he called off crucial strike days just as the government was really feeling the heat. You know they were feeling the heat because Prescott felt the need to channel Thatcher and darkly intimate that we wouldn't go back to those days. When John Prescott is sent out to issue an intemperate, incomprehensible rant, you know the cabinet is falling apart at the seams. The fact that there was enough grass roots confidence to go for the strike is as significance as the fact that there wasn't enough confidence to defy the leadership.

A process of political re-alignment is taking place in the trade unions, of which the shift of support to Respect in some quarters is just an example. Clearly, continually being hooked to a devoid, neutered, parasitic organism like the Labour Party isn't a solution that offers any lasting appeal.

Where are we now, then? I would phrase it roughly as follows: The labour movement has recuperated somewhat from the locust years of the 1980s. But recovery is never an even process. Ideologically, the Left is enjoying a considerable resurgence. This has not yet filtered through into ubiquitous class struggle or unalloyed victories. While there is a clear anti-Blair mood in the country, and while most people want trade unions to be stronger, there desperately needs to be a new political direction for the labour movement, and the unprecedented scale of the antiwar campaigns offer the best chance of that. Respect seeks to support striking workers, oppose imperialism, defend civil liberties and oppose racism against Muslims and others. In this way, the unprecendented ideological upsurge is to be married to the as yet building potential of the new left in the trade unions.

That's why you should try to return a Respect MP at the next election. It will break through the dull triopoly of the main three parties, pressing a serious grass roots movement into halls of government. While a Liberal Democrat MP will vote to curb the right to strike (cf the resolutions passed at the recent conference), and while Blair will continue to grind every principled bone in the Labour party to dust (we needn't even speak of the Tories), Respect stands unwaveringly for repealing all anti-union laws, renationalising the railways, ending the disgraceful PFI projects, withdrawing troops from Iraq and opposing further warmongering. While other parties may play dangerous games with asylum seekers and gypsies, Respect won't stigmatise the most oppressed in our society.

One last thing. Vote Respect if you can. I don't care if you have some grudge you're nurturing against George Galloway. Get over it. If you can't vote Respect in your area, I leave it to your conscience. Vote Green, vote for an antiwar Labour MP, even vote Liberal or abstain... whatever you think will best help the radical Left where you are.