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Cost of Living Crisis: Enough is Enough Campaign

Smokeandsteam said:
One of the most depressing things on here lately has been reading the criticism of trade unions - the ones actually trying to do something, and do it outside of the labourist straight jacket too.

Of course, like a stopped clock, sometimes the criticism is right. Unions are massively flawed and come with the baggage of a century of a specific form of politics and, as you point out, also exist in the actual world rather than on the internet. My own union has threatened me and others who are involved with EiE, the bureaucrats in charge of unions - staff and lay - are by an large either useless or actively hostile.

Some of the criticism- does at least - comes with a coherent set of politics.

But, some of it is beyond the pale and revealing of how remote and divorced these people are: how dare these Fucking Unions call a strike off because the queen has died, why don’t these Fucking Unions organise direct action. Why haven’t these Fucking Unions built thriving community action networks in 4 months when they left had failed to do anything like it for over a century. Why don’t these Fucking Unions do what I think or read in a book they should do. Why aren’t these Fucking Unions like other Fucking Unions in other places that I’ve read about but don’t actually know anything about.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the RMT has booted the government and employer back to the negotiating table, the CWU faces a battle for the future of its industry as the employer attempts to destroy terms and conditions and a public service fought for by generations, UCU and others announce strikes over pay and the cost of living and EiE continues (too slowly and often without enough strategic direction but still..) to coalesce people outside of the dead end of labourism.

Some of the criticisms on here reminds me of the debates we used to have with posh student socialist worker paper sellers who used to gather outside our workplace to try to sell us their rag whilst telling us what we didn’t understand about our own workplace and own lives.
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Well a bunch of the political posters on here cut their teeth in libertarian left activist scenes, often around the alter-globalisation movement. That set of people has always had the critique that unions in the UK have almost never been a vehicle for radical politics. So firstly, you shouldn't be surprised to find that point of view here. But secondly, in the 20 years since then, it's hard to see what unions have done to change the opinion of anyone who held that view. You're talking to people as though they only just started observing unions yesterday, when many of us have been observing them for 20-30 years, and some are quite aware of their long history before that. If you're going to argue that it's possible for today's unions to take a radical path you're going to have to do more than argue over whether or not they should show deference to the queen (I don't much care either way) but you're going to have to argue that these unions are about to take a path that 100 years of history says they aren't going to take - away from narrow defence of their members and towards a more radical political project. EIE is not the first time unions in recent decades have acted like they want to build political power (beyond funding the LP) then not done it. They don't do it for structural reasons, because it exposes the leadership to risks - risk of failure, of denunciation, of losing their jobs, of causing rifts that undermine their own power base. I didn't want EIE to fail, I just saw that it was started by people who aren't going to take the risks needed to launch a functioning radical political project.
 
AmateurAgitator said:
Marching for a fucking general election at the demo in London today - glad I didn't bother.
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Don't they know that The Lady of the Lake-- her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur.
 
Karl Masks said:
Don't they know that The Lady of the Lake-- her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur.
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In fairness, pushing for a general election isn't exactly a surefire way to end the "cost of living crisis." Yes a Labour government might be somewhat less horrific than the current one, but there's no way it won't be seriously awful. We've been shown that time and time again. How can we say "Enough is Enough" when we're only demanding "We've had enough of this terrible shit, so can we please have this slightly less horrible shit."
 
Dystopiary said:
In fairness, pushing for a general election isn't exactly a surefire way to end the "cost of living crisis." Yes a Labour government might be somewhat less horrific than the current one, but there's no way it won't be seriously awful. We've been shown that time and time again. How can we say "Enough is Enough" when we're only demanding "We've had enough of this terrible shit, so can we please have this slightly less horrible shit."
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anarchism will never happen. pretending it will is just making perfect the enemy of good. No one believes Labour will make enough changes, but there are distinct differences, even under starmer. Throwing that away when the alternative is palpably and demonstrably worse isn't class politics it's suicide. I don't care about the People's Assembly, they are irrelevant. If there was a GE tomorrow i'd get out there and vote Labour. If some daft twat (not you) on the interwebs wants to call me a traitor or a sell out then boo fucking hoo
 
Dystopiary said:
In fairness, pushing for a general election isn't exactly a surefire way to end the "cost of living crisis." Yes a Labour government might be somewhat less horrific than the current one, but there's no way it won't be seriously awful. We've been shown that time and time again. How can we say "Enough is Enough" when we're only demanding "We've had enough of this terrible shit, so can we please have this slightly less horrible shit."
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And to your point about demands. I think calling for a general election can be part of an overall strategy and not an end goal. But I don't see revolution before the next GE. Something might bubble up given how bad things are, but I'm not banking on it
 
8ball said:
That and the massive amounts of money printed by the Government and handed to the rich, notably during the pandemic, but also beforehand.
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To be accurate, it's banks that print money, not governments. Governments rely on taxation and borrowing for their revenue. But otherwise I'd agree your point about billions being sprayed around in useless contracts during the pandemic.
 
Karl Masks said:
And to your point about demands. I think calling for a general election can be part of an overall strategy and not an end goal. But I don't see revolution before the next GE. Something might bubble up given how bad things are, but I'm not banking on it
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If our options are limited to "demanding" a General Election or waiting for a revolution (whatever that means) then we're fucked.
 
chilango said:
If our options are limited to "demanding" a General Election or waiting for a revolution (whatever that means) then we're fucked.
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I'm not demanding a GE, because the government won't give me one anyway. It's a fool's errand. All I'm saying is that's the only game in town. Do you have another option? A GE is going to happen one way or another, so working class people might as well use it to their advantage, no matter how meagre and tranient the outcome. It's a shit system, but what else is there?

By revolution, I mean something radical springing up from the ground. Maybe someone somewhere will kick something off if things get bad enough and the Tories don't throw some reforms or concessions our way (eg, the cost of living payments)
 
rasputin said:
To be accurate, it's banks that print money, not governments. Governments rely on taxation and borrowing for their revenue. But otherwise I'd agree your point about billions being sprayed around in useless contracts during the pandemic.
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I was talking about QE, where the amounts involved are eye-wateringly larger than Tory spunking of loot on nepotistic contracts.

As opposed to fractional reserve lending, which I’m assuming is what you meant (ie. the usual day to day method by which most money is created in the economy).

QE was ramped up in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis precisely because banks had become gunshy and weren’t creating money by means of lending.

This may be useful (the bit at the start, anyway):

www.econlib.org

Time to pay the piper? - Econlib

Quantitative easing is often described as printing lots of new money and using it to buying back government debt. It sounds too good to be true. And yet until recently there was relatively little inflationary consequence from all of this money printing. And even the recent spike in inflation...
www.econlib.org

Here’s the BoE version of events - if you look closely with a inquiring eye on where the money ends up, you may see the outline of a mechanism seemingly designed deliberately to enrich the wealthy at the expense of everyone else:

 
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Karl Masks said:
I'm not demanding a GE, because the government won't give me one anyway. It's a fool's errand. All I'm saying is that's the only game in town. Do you have another option? A GE is going to happen one way or another, so working class people might as well use it to their advantage, no matter how meagre and tranient the outcome. It's a shit system, but what else is there?

By revolution, I mean something radical springing up from the ground. Maybe someone somewhere will kick something off if things get bad enough and the Tories don't throw some reforms or concessions our way (eg, the cost of living payments)
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Whatever glitchhiker AKA Ghost Whistler
 
The left refuse to change their tactics, wonder why they never get anywhere?

23 bloody speakers at the Peoples' Assembly rally today in London. Whoever the fuck wants to actually stand around in the cold and rain listening to all that boring shit can't be right at all.
 
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AmateurAgitator said:
The statist left refuse to change their tactics, wonder why they never get anywhere?

23 bloody speakers at the Peoples' Assembly rally today in London. Whoever the fuck wants to actually stand around in the cold and rain listening to all that boring shit can't be right at all.
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Is it a latter day speakers corner?
 
I doubt we can vote away the end of the post-war consensus anyway. Its system change we need. If you demand a general election you're calling for politicians as the solution and that means demanding that fuck all actually changes.
 
Brainaddict said:
Well a bunch of the political posters on here cut their teeth in libertarian left activist scenes, often around the alter-globalisation movement. That set of people has always had the critique that unions in the UK have almost never been a vehicle for radical politics.
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Almost as if Unions claim that they are a vehicle for radical politics, when, in actuality, they're a single issue membership org based around collective bargaining. Yes they hold sway in the labour movement. But it's madness to expect them to be anything other than a fucking union.
 
Serge Forward said:
Anti-union laws and sequestration.
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Is it that though? Rmt of course do a good job of protecting their workers. But I'm talking about something bigger. They collectively have more resources (money/capital) than any other part of the organised left. Maybe I expect too much, maybe unions everywhere on the planet are similar, I don't know enough about unions in other countries, but reading that account upthread of the factionalism and containment hindering EiE suggests theres a deeper problem.

I can only guess... Is it a case of not wanting to be too radical so as not to draw flack? Or some top brass being too comfortable (labour aristocracy)... or thinking they've done enough for now, a Labour party victory is looking likely so don't rock the boat anymore ?
 
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ska invita said:
Is it that though? Rmt of course do a good job of protecting their workers. But I'm talking about something bigger. They collectively have more resources (money/capital) than any other part of the organised left. Maybe I expect too much, maybe unions everywhere on the planet are similar, I don't know enough about unions in other countries, but reading that account upthread of the factionalism and containment hindering EiE suggests theres a deeper problem.

I can only guess... Is it a case of not wanting to be too radical so as not to draw flack? Or some top brass being too comfortable (labour aristocracy)... or thinking they've done enough for now, a Labour party victory is looking likely so don't rock the boat anymore ?
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Sure, all those things too. But the impact of the anti union laws has been massive. The process you have to go through to actually conduct a lawful strike within a remotely reasonable timescale is ridiculous, and minimising ballot turnout and the effect of any industrial action is built into these draconian laws. As for any wildcat action, unions have to immediately repudiate or they're open to having their funds sequestered by the government. And for workers thinking of taking unofficial action, then it better be solid or you will be totally fucked.
 
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