2011 and all that

[hitmouse]

Thinking about some of the stuff that chilango and others were discussing over on the Batley and Spen thread recently, about class and fragmentation and that. This Wednesday is the ten year anniversary of the first of the big public sector pension strikes, which... maybe isn't a date that's really gone down in history, but felt like something important might be happening at the time? In a month and a bit, we'll get to the ten-year anniversary of August 2011, when some other people did some other stuff. I don't really have a conclusion to go here, but I think it's important to think about how those two things, along with the 2010/11 student movement - especially the school student EMA end of things - fit together. Or if they don't fit together, whether there's any potential for any part of them to fit together. Ten years on, are "we" any closer to anything than we were then? If August 2011 or something similar to it kicked off tomorrow, how would you react, and how does that differ from how you reacted then?

 

[chilango]

I was out of the country in 2011 so didn't get much of a "feel" for what went on (also, I don't know anyone with a public sector pension tbh). I was over visiting during the riots though and that did feel significant. I'm astonished we've gone a decade without more of the same.

 

[brogdale]

Thinking about some of the stuff that chilango and others were discussing over on the Batley and Spen thread recently, about class and fragmentation and that. This Wednesday is the ten year anniversary of the first of the big public sector pension strikes, which... maybe isn't a date that's really gone down in history, but felt like something important might be happening at the time? In a month and a bit, we'll get to the ten-year anniversary of August 2011, when some other people did some other stuff. I don't really have a conclusion to go here, but I think it's important to think about how those two things, along with the 2010/11 student movement - especially the school student EMA end of things - fit together. Or if they don't fit together, whether there's any potential for any part of them to fit together. Ten years on, are "we" any closer to anything than we were then? If August 2011 or something similar to it kicked off tomorrow, how would you react, and how does that differ from how you reacted then?

In the context of the actually existing hegemony we live with, the fact that 10 years on the right party of capital says that it has rejected austerity as a macro-economic maxim might be considered some (temporary?) glimmer of hope?

 

[hitmouse]

To expand on my thinking from the OP a little bit, if you look at the 2011 riots and public sector pension dispute as a Venn diagram, they seem so different that it's hard to see any crossover at all. But then if you add Millbank in to that, then you can see Millbank/TUC crossover fairly easily - on an immediate level with the big TUC march and black bloc, and then over the past decade you've got the trajectory of the Novara lot on a high-profile level, and then on a less high-profile level with everyone who was part of the student movement and then went on to become a trade unionist and/or join Labour at some point. But I think you can also see Millbank/August 2011 crossover - I've got no way of proving this, but it feels like at least some of the school student/sixth former lot taking part in the EMA protests must also have been out on the street that summer.
I dunno if there's a way to bring those things together, but if those tenuous alliances or composition or whatever could have lasted from the winter of 2010/11 into the summer, then I feel like the last decade would've been very different. But they didn't, and we are where we are. Dunno, I'm not good at rousing conclusions.

 

[The39thStep]

I was on strike in the public sector dispute . Whilst there was a feeling that we could win it and the further education protests over EMA represented some welcome additional activity I didn’t pick up it being the summer of discontent tbh . We increased union membership but then had the decade of cuts , which as long as there were no compulsory redundancies , the national leadership went along with.
For rank and file activity the earlier Council strikes over pay( 1 day, 2 day , 3 day) were far more significant.

 

[The39thStep]

To expand on my thinking from the OP a little bit, if you look at the 2011 riots and public sector pension dispute as a Venn diagram, they seem so different that it's hard to see any crossover at all. But then if you add Millbank in to that, then you can see Millbank/TUC crossover fairly easily - on an immediate level with the big TUC march and black bloc, and then over the past decade you've got the trajectory of the Novara lot on a high-profile level, and then on a less high-profile level with everyone who was part of the student movement and then went on to become a trade unionist and/or join Labour at some point. But I think you can also see Millbank/August 2011 crossover - I've got no way of proving this, but it feels like at least some of the school student/sixth former lot taking part in the EMA protests must also have been out on the street that summer.
I dunno if there's a way to bring those things together, but if those tenuous alliances or composition or whatever could have lasted from the winter of 2010/11 into the summer, then I feel like the last decade would've been very different. But they didn't, and we are where we are. Dunno, I'm not good at rousing conclusions.

Fire and rehire is prob the best bet of an alliance

 

[hitmouse]

I was on strike in the public sector dispute . Whilst there was a feeling that we could win it and the further education protests over EMA represented some welcome additional activity I didn’t pick up it being the summer of discontent tbh . We increased union membership but then had the decade of cuts , which as long as there were no compulsory redundancies , the national leadership went along with.
For rank and file activity the earlier Council strikes over pay( 1 day, 2 day , 3 day) were far more significant.

Were the council strikes that that year, or earlier?

 

[The39thStep]

Were the council strikes that that year, or earlier?

I think the strikes against pensions were around the same time but the pay dispute was way before that .

 

[hitmouse]

Fire and rehire is prob the best bet of an alliance

Thinking about it, I think fire and rehire is an important issue and people should be doing stuff about it, but it feels to me like it's mostly an issue in already-organised workplaces where there's something to lose - I could be wrong about this, but I dunno if most call centre bosses and the like are bothering with fire and rehire, because they were pretty much doing what they wanted already?
Housing stuff feels like a promising area to me, but then I'm a renter who mostly knows renters, how you break out from doing stuff among renters to the scary unknown world of homeowners is a big question. I suppose one starting point is to divide the category of homeowners down into actual homeowners vs mortgage payers, because the latter are still at the mercy of/in an antagonistic relationship with capital when it comes to their homes, even if it's less immediately obvious.

 

[The39thStep]

Thinking about it, I think fire and rehire is an important issue and people should be doing stuff about it, but it feels to me like it's mostly an issue in already-organised workplaces where there's something to lose - I could be wrong about this, but I dunno if most call centre bosses and the like are bothering with fire and rehire, because they were pretty much doing what they wanted already?
Housing stuff feels like a promising area to me, but then I'm a renter who mostly knows renters, how you break out from doing stuff among renters to the scary unknown world of homeowners is a big question. I suppose one starting point is to divide the category of homeowners down into actual homeowners vs mortgage payers, because the latter are still at the mercy of/in an antagonistic relationship with capital when it comes to their homes, even if it's less immediately obvious.

I’m not sure what you are looking for here ie Opportunties to intervene or areas to unite?

 

[hitmouse]

I’m not sure what you are looking for here ie Opportunties to intervene or areas to unite?

I'm probably not sure what I'm looking for either tbh! On the first one, I suppose I'm thinking about how August 2011 feels like one of the most important events of the last decade, but also one that would be very difficult to "intervene" in in any standard politico sense ("nice job looting Tesco everyone, while we're here can I interest anyone in a newspaper?") I suppose the other connection to Batley & Spen would be that I imagine the public sector pensions dispute must have been one that at least in some way mobilised a lot of the people who are now being thought of as lost to Labour, hopelessly bought off and so on. So I suppose I'm interested in thinking about how different sections of the working class act to advance their interests, and if there's any way they can be brought together?
Or possibly I'm just doing this: