ska invita
back on the other side
I think thats this http://www.demo2012.org.uk/ Wed 21 Nov
London 20th- anyone going?
- Thread starter DotCommunist
- Start date
grogwilton
Well-Known Member
1) Not victimise trot reps such as Yunus Bakhsh, Tony Staunton and Karen Reissman. Having good reps regardless of political affiliation means you can get your members out.
2) Putting more emphasis on campaigning, fighting, and yes, striking over a long time in the union, or if you hadn't done that not be surprised when your pensions strike isn't that solid, shit yourself, and completely cave.
3) When you've realised that your strike wasn't as solid as you'd like it to be, instead of letting down the other public sector unions and caving, work out why it wasn't so solid in some areas and more solid in others, when your ballot returned a yes vote, and work hard to solve that problem. This third point was basically put to me by a Unison official I know who was shocked by the climbdown. On November 30th he said in a speech to a rally that the strike was 'just the beginning', and subsequently looked a bit silly when Unison sold out around Christmas/New Year (interesting timing).
4) Don't get your membership out to lose a days pay and settle for a deal you said was so bad you had to strike for it before the strike. That is literally the worst thing you could do to your membership, worse then not even bringing them out at all, as it means the next strike will be even less respected by the membership.
Had a place on a coach booked but got up thinking 'why bother?' Went out to the market and ended up in Caffe Nero. Got home and listened to the football and brooded on things I'm powerless to go back and change. Had a nap and went out again. Drank a lot and contemplated the descent into petit-bourgeois individualism on a proletarian income.
Bullshit. Pure fucking bullshit.
Bullshit. Pure fucking bullshit.
Your name a reference to Patrick Hamilton?
Nice first post. Welcome to the mayhem.
They're doing this atm in Hudderfield/Kirklees Unison. It's really bad coz if all the Trot reps go then there's no ready supply of competent replacements prepared to take over, and one of the best Unison branches in the country will be up shit creek.
Those of you a bit pissed off with the periodic "Big London March" after the last few times should spare a thought for those of us who can still remember stumbling repeatedly round London chanting "hurry, hurry, hurry... shoot Len Murrey" .. or even "Maggie.. Maggie, Maggie.... Out..Out...Out "! The TUC were always class collaborationist shitbags , and always will be... just re-read stuff on the betrayal of the 1926 General Strike. As other posters have correctly said, at present the entire purpose of the Big Marches schtick is to do a bit of lightweight posturing .. to provide the illusion to a shrinking membership that the union bosses are worth their gigantic salaries and pension deals, and to cause as little actual disruption as possible , so as to build up some mistaken belief that it might be somehow nicer or different "austerity" (in what real way though -- fuck knows ) under NuLabour. Whilst NuLabour continues to shit from a great height on each and every strike or general anti austerity resistance action by working class people.
Early days yet though.. the cuts of the austerity programme are in their absolute infancy - and the crap London-based temporary/short-time jobs which are massaging the unemployment figures wont be able to mask the mass unemployment still in the pipeline as the world Great Slump II really gets into its stride. The demos and officially sanctioned and spontaneous/rank and file protests will get larger - and new more radical working class "leaders" (representatives) will get elected in union positions. It's only the beginning of a much longer process. Much more exciting and morale boosting events further ahead. No need to despair ! I've waited nearly 30 years for even THIS low level of renewed struggle to emerge from the long night of neoliberal hegemony ... really since the epic class defeat of the 1984 miners strike and its aftermath! As all those motivational speaker bullshitters always say..."It's an opportunity.. not a problem".
Early days yet though.. the cuts of the austerity programme are in their absolute infancy - and the crap London-based temporary/short-time jobs which are massaging the unemployment figures wont be able to mask the mass unemployment still in the pipeline as the world Great Slump II really gets into its stride. The demos and officially sanctioned and spontaneous/rank and file protests will get larger - and new more radical working class "leaders" (representatives) will get elected in union positions. It's only the beginning of a much longer process. Much more exciting and morale boosting events further ahead. No need to despair ! I've waited nearly 30 years for even THIS low level of renewed struggle to emerge from the long night of neoliberal hegemony ... really since the epic class defeat of the 1984 miners strike and its aftermath! As all those motivational speaker bullshitters always say..."It's an opportunity.. not a problem".
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Urbanblues
Was that it, life?
No, yesterday's march was not "...leadership sponsored at the TUC Comgress...". The original idea came from the Left in Unite; and it was for a demonstration to defend the NHS. However, at a TUC GC meeting earlier this year (around about June as I recall) both Mark Serwotka and Matt Wrack proposed that the theme of the demo and rally be broadened to include all the other sectors and individuals feeling the pain of the cuts; and Unite agreed to the proposition.
Regardless of the 'effectiveness', marches are always a good social event. It would be nice if more people could be more militant but the state holds all the cards on that one given they can completely fuck up your life if they can pin any sort of crime on you and that deters many from out and out militantism.
GarfieldLeChat
fucking awesome but wrong
and how long before the gaols were full and the courts at bursting point...
so little imagination. they govern by consent, the quickest way to change would be to withdraw it wholesale and then let them attempt to suppress, which in turn would reveal the full nature of the status quo which would in turn lead to further protest. argue all you like about the occupy movement but staying put in large numbers has more impact than walking round in circles going nowhere
When it's no more than a relative handful of people (which is all it ever can be), everybody else will just shrug and carry on. And that's when they're not actively hostile.
We're caught in a trap.
Treacle Toes
Time
http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/201...nough-boycott-workfare-and-dpac-show-the-way/Marching Is Not Enough – Boycott Workfare and DPAC Show the Way
Posted on October 21, 2012 by johnny void | 10 Comments
Militant actions by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Boycott Workfare were the high points at yesterday’s TUC march which otherwise was depressingly reminiscent of the ever decreasing returns which demolished the antiwar movement at the start of the century.
Union leaders have repeatedly threatened campaigns of direct action or civil disobedience aimed at austerity which have never materialised. Yesterday hundreds of people decided to ignore their speeches in Hyde Park and take part in the mass shut down of workfare exploiters on Oxford Street or join DPAC in blockading Park Lane.
The Radical Workers bloc, called by Solidarity Federation, which joined the unofficial feeder march from South London, was well attended and spirited. Determined and disciplined fitwatching along the route of the march ensured that police intelligence gathering was kept to a minimum.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
I can't walk out...
Urban-Guerrilla
Active Member
Guineveretoo
Mostly bewildered
A genuine question, here. Which bit of Unison did all of this? Was it the national executive committee (or whatever it is called these days?), or the national officials/General Secretary? Or was the decision taken regionally? Did branches/regions put pressure on Unison to keep going, or to give in?
I am not having a go - I really don't know what happened and why they "caved in". I am a bit more aware of why PCS made a bit of a mess of the campaign, but I am not at all sure what happened with Unison.
Was it not helped by Unison members being in so many different pension schemes, so there were lots of separate negotiations? I wouldn't have expected that to make much difference, since the argument was pretty much the same?
An issue which appeared to be problematic for all the public sector unions was the perception that public sector pensions, even after all the changes, were still better than those available in the private sector. That one really annoyed me most when I saw it in the press, as it certainly didn't use to be the case, and would not have been the case, if unions had remained strong in the private sector. Not enough is being done to organise trade unions in the private sector, imho....
Anyway, bit a derail. Sorry.
Hmmm...sounds like a fatalistic self justification for doing nothing, and simply going down the pub to me. Fortunately for the future revolutionery struggle, capitalism worldwide is in a death dive with no obvious new point of profitable stability, certainly no new growth path. This is drawing ever more people into resistance like a black hole draws in all surrounding matter in physics. The final outcome could of course be a new utterly oppressive fascistic form of capitalism , or the "mutual destruction of all classes" as referred to by Marx in The Communist Manifesto... OR, it just could lead, after admittedly a lot of struggle and grief, to a better more rational society. I know what I'd prefer, and I don't think capitalism in death crisis mode is going to allow most people to just "sit it out in the pub" or just "shrug and carry on" as the impact of the crisis produces "Greece-like" economic and political conditions for masses of ordinary people right across the globe.
Look at the conditions of the Weimar Republic if you want to see how "easy" it was for people to just "shrug and carry on". That is the economic and political future in innumerable countries in the not so far off future as the economic crisis moves into its next "Deep Depression" phase. You'll find yourself sitting in the pub with no beer, no crisps, and no light I'm afraid SlaveofSolitude.. try being so "I'm not getting involved.. it's all hopeless" about that !
ddraig
kicking against the pricks...
straight question - do you think unison should have done more to fight for pensions, yes or no?
Guineveretoo
Mostly bewildered
I can't answer that question because I don't know why they did what they did. A union is only as strong as its membership. If it lost the backing of its membership, then the leadership, both lay and paid, had no choice but to give in. But I don't know if that is what happened.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Spot on posts Sihhi, I felt exactly the same wandering around yesterday. Same route, same speeches, same paper sellers calling for same things. Blah blah.
Can't blame TUC alone though. These things are agreed by the big affiliates like Unite, Unison, PCS etc.
emanymton
A cat politely sat on the flaming gardener.
The Unison bureaucracy actively called for and campaigned for a yes vote on the 'compromise' deal and did it's best to silence anyone calling for a no vote. This is what is know as selling out the membership like a bunch a scab bastards.
Hope that helps
It would have been fantastic is the vast majority of Unison members had been up for a fight.
They weren't.
The problem is not one of leadership over this one issue - but a failiure of the whole union movement to organise effectively over a whole range of issues for years (something we are all to blame for not just the leadership) - something that will not be changed by a handful of 1917 reenactors screaming hysterically for a general strike right now without having any plan for how to build for a sustained campaign of resistance.
Btw the decsions over the pensions was taken at every level by the elected lay leaderships - if the far left can't win a majority on those bodies to make the argument whose fault is that?
Treacle Toes
Time
Agree with you for the most part, but I also think even if the Unison members had been out in force the leadership would've still backed out. Remember they bailed out less than 24 hours after Nov 30th. There was no meetings with rank and rile or other reps, no post-mortem to analyse the strength of the strike, it was an executive decision taken immediately after the strike. More than likely they made this decision before the day of strike action, but were under pressure from their membership to go along with the rest of the Trade Union movement, so they reluctantly agreed to join in Nov 30. I think, as do a lot more senior Unison people who I've spoken too about this, that the leadership were reluctant from the start and would've bailed out regardless of what happened on the day itself.
Consider this, even if they had a massive turnout, would that alone have reversed the policy? No, of course not. The Tories won't budge an inch, and they're more than happy to use the full powers of the British state to have their way. If they'd had a massive turnout, I think that'd have made little difference in the end.
I also think that looking for uniformity in strike action with these massive amalgamated unions like Unison and Unite is a bit of a waste of time. These unions represent millions of workers, in many different areas, in different trades, with different pension schemes and political battles. You'll never get uniformity in these kinds of unions and looking for it is a waste of time. Furthermore, it's one of the age old excuses for calling off a strike. It was the exact same excuse the more moderate Chartist leaders used to dissuade the "physical force" Chartists from calling a national strike in 1838. It was one of the reasons the leadership of the TUC called off the General Strike 1926. If you look in detail you'll see this come up again and again. It's holding the movement to a standard they know damn well is impossible to reach, which provides a convenient pretext for bailing out and saving the Labour party the embarassment of having to publicly condemn strikes.
The far left is also to blame for this, because they have a nostalgic commitment to one big day of action, as if all it will take is one day of herculean effort and before you know it we'll all be storming the bastille. In truth this is a stupid policy. The strength isn't there for starters, and even if it was, the trade unions even at their peak are no match for a sovereign state, especially not one as stable, wealthy and militarised as Britain. Even at their peak with 17 or 18 million members we could never have done it. Once you call a general strike, you're effectively challenging the legitimacy of the state itself. It's not just bargaining. They learned this the hard way in France in 1968, once you've crossed that point you're in a fight to the finish with the State, there's no going back to asking for concessions once you've challenged the state like that.
EDIT: A quick note here. The main reason the far-left sects advocate these "days of action" isn't because it's a workable strategy, but because it gives them a huge opportunity to sell papers and recruit members. I remember going to a Trot-Meet shortly after the 30th strike. There I was told that the strike was a great success; they'd signed up 10 new members, got hundreds of names on a petition, they even managed to sell a record breaking number of papers, breaking the previous record held by the Anti-War marches in 2003. Barely a mention of how good the turnout was. They judge how successful these things are by how many papers they can sell, and they can sell more papers on these big demo's than they can anywhere else.
Ironicaly of course my area really did have a decent turnout. Every school was shut, the council offices were practically all shut, all the auxillary staff at every school, swimming baths, and hospital were out. The only place that wasn't shut was the job centre, which struggled on with a skeleton staff of about 12. There was definitely some potential here, although I gather the situation was different in other parts of the country? Why should we have to back down, just because somewhere else couldn't be arsed? Why should the people who couldn't be arsed be leading the struggle instead of the people who were?
There's also the fact the Tories would love nothing more than a huge centre-piece showdown with the Trade Unions at this point in time. One great big pitched battle which they know, ultimately, they will win because they can use force if need be. Look at how they reacted to the threat of an Oil Tankers strike, one of those few unionised industries that really could bring the country to it's knees if they went ahead. They revelled in the possibility of a re-enactment of 1984, we'd be foolish to give it to them. I'm no fan of Labour affiliated union bureaucrats, but lets be honest, if the far-left ran Unite they'd have gone headfirst into that fight with no thought to the consequences. As it happens Len McCluskey isn't Arthur Scargill, and Len boxed clever and ended up making a fool out of the govt by doing so.We're fighting an enemy that outguns and outnumbers us, so we can't just meet them in straight-up combat, we have to use guerilla tactics and gradually sap away at the enemies will (if you'll forgive all the shit military analogies)
What should've happened after November 30th is Unison should've looked at the area's with the highest turnout, and for all the doom and gloom there were many area's that did have a good turnout, and then started a series of local disputes in those areas. A slow and steady stream of local strikes, dozens of them simultaneously, and as soon as one stops another one in another industry strikes. No big "day of action" but a sustained campaign, so that the drip drip drip of news in local papers and regional news about strikes popping up all over the place gets out there, adding to the general sense of disapproval that this government already has hanging around it, like a fart in a confined space that won't go away.
People need to remember this is a deeply unpopular government. After only 2 years, they're polling -35 or more for their approval ratings; this is worse than Thatcher at her least popular, worse than Blair at the height of the Iraq War, worse than Brown during the height of the expenses scandal. All it could take is for one of these smaller strikes to catch the public mood and you never know it could surprise us all. But they aren't playing this game at the moment.
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