Support Our Rail and Tube Workers

On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, rail and tube workers are striking over pay, conditions, job cuts, and attacks on pensions. We should all support our rail and tube workers in these strikes. They are the first soldiers on to the battlefield, as we all face attacks on our living standards, resulting from the inflation that has been caused by years of money printing by central banks designed to inflate the paper wealth of speculators, by the idiotic lockdowns that reduced the production of goods and services we all require, by the NATO economic war against Russia and China that has boycotted supplies of energy, food and raw materials, pushing up their market prices on global markets, and by the relentless increase in profits at the expense of workers wages, pensions and benefits. The rail and tube workers are the vanguard in this fight, here, just as the US dockers are its vanguard, there. Their victory will be a victory for all of us.

Every day, rail and tube workers have to act like paramedics, dealing as first responders to people who have had accidents, heart attacks, and other health problems; they have to act like fire and rescue workers, enabling people to get out of dangerous situations, they have to deal with drunks and violent passengers; every day, they have to deal with sniffy speculators on their way into the big, rigged casino that is the City of London, where they gamble with billions of Pounds; and they have to do all of this as well as doing the main part of their jobs as train and tube drivers, guards, station workers and so on.

For two years, whilst the government, with the complicity of the Opposition, insisted it was necessary to lock down the whole of society, and pretended it was, the rail and tube workers, as with bus workers, had to continue to work to ferry all the other workers into work, because the claims of lockdown were a sham from start to finish.  It was obvious that millions of workers had to continue to work, and did continue to work, or the whole of society, starting with energy supply, would have collapsed.  But, the rail and tube workers, like NHS workers, have no control over the industry in which they work, and so had no means of ensuring that any of them actually at risk from COVID could be protected from it, or that safe working practices were in place.

Similarly, they have no control over the investment in the industry that has been sadly lacking from both the state and the rail companies.  So, when passengers complain that trains are late, do not appear, are in poor condition, that there are insufficient seats and so on, its not the government or the shareholders of the rail companies that have to suffer the complaints and abuse, but the rail and tube workers who are on the front line, and have no say in any of that.  Indeed, if the workers in the industry did control all of that they would have a direct interest in ensuring  that the trains ran on time, that there was enough of them, they were clean and so on, because, then, not only would it avoid them being moaned at by passengers, but it would mean that their own jobs were better protected into the future, as passengers increased, rather than looking for alternatives.

But, instead, the state seeks to invest as little as it can get away with, particularly, when its seeking to reduce its spending, when its bailed out bankers again, and the shareholders who never should have any say to begin with, because they are only creditors of these companies, are only interested in maximising their dividends, or boosting the share prices of the companies, before they use their money to speculate in something else.

But, of course, the Tories want to deny all workers any protection against the inflation that Tory policies – and the policies of New Labour before them – has created, and, of course, the conservative social-democrats of Starmer's Blue Labour cannot come out to support our rail and tube workers either.

Liberals like Starmer, and his Blue Labour MP's, talk about “our” NHS, but, of course when they do, they do not mean “our” NHS workers, in the sense that those who work within it, are “our” class bothers and sisters. They mean “our” NHS, only in the sense of it being the NHS of the capitalist state, and so, in reality, a million miles from ever being “ours”. Its not in the control of the workers in the NHS, nor under any kind of democratic control by workers in general. The liberals mean by “our” some vague concept of ownership by “the people”, even though the vast majority of the people, comprising the working-class, never have any prospect of exercising control over it, or it ever being run in their interests.

When the coal mines were nationalised by the 1945 Labour Government, this same nonsense about ownership by “the people”, was propounded, and even boards were erected outside collieries to that effect. But “the people”, whatever that actually means, never did have any control over those mines, which continued to be run in the interests of capital, and at the expense of the miners. The people brought in at the top of the coal board, as opposed to the day to day managers of the mines, members of NACODS etc., were people like Ian MacGregor, in other words, people who, on any other day, were also to be found doing the same job at some big corporation, and inevitably, they operated to exploit the workers in those industries in exactly the same way too, and that applies equally to the NHS, just as, in the past, it applied to British Rail, and all the other nationalised industries, and today applies to Network Rail, and so on.

This same nonsense about the “the people” is used by liberals when they talk about “the people of Ukraine”, to justify their support for the corrupt and reactionary government of Zelensky, backed by NATO imperialism, in its war with the vile and reactionary regime of Putin in Russia, as though workers have any reason to back either of these gangs of butchers. It would be like asking miners to have backed Ian MacGregor in 1984-5, on the basis of arguing that, things might be worse, because the mines might be privatised! In fact, the idiocy of that kind of lesser-evilist argument was exposed, in precisely that event, because, having defeated the Miners in 1984-5, it simply created conditions where the mines – or what was left of them – were privatised anyway.

The NHS is not “our” NHS, any more than the NCB was “our” NCB, or the war of the Ukrainian state is “our” war against Russia, but the workers in the NHS, in the coal mines, on the rails and tube, as with the workers in Ukraine, and in Russia, are “our” class brothers and sisters, it is to them, on the basis of class solidarity alone, that we give our support, and that support is given on the basis of a class struggle for the interests of workers as a whole, against capital as a whole, not on the basis of a misguided support for one form of capital as against another, one fraction of capital as against another.

Its not long ago that the Tories were claiming to be the real party of the working-class, a ridiculous claim that was only made slightly less ridiculous by the fact that, for a century before, the Labour Party had miserably failed to act in such a way as to give it an undisputed claim on that role. The reactionary Tories backing Brexit claimed that it would free them to be able to fulfil that role, and along with the billions that were supposed to flow into the NHS, it would mean that wages would rise, as immigrant labour would no longer be available to increase its supply. It was, of course, rubbish, because the Tories and Brexiters never had any intention of pumping billions into the NHS or of improving workers pay and conditions.

On the contrary, they wanted to pump billions instead into the pockets of the speculators, and to slash minimum regulations and protections for workers to the benefit of all those small capitalists that wanted Brexit, so that they could cut workers wages and conditions. Sure enough, there was none of the billions for the NHS, though billions did go to the Tories friends in payments for faulty medical equipment and so on, and now, the Tories come out openly to say that workers must accept further pay and conditions cuts, as they are expected to let inflation rip way ahead of any pay increase.

The same line was given by Alistair Darling back in 2008, when inflation was starting to rise. Back, then, however, it was only around 5%, compared to the double digits its at today, for workers. According to the fiddled CPI figures its at 9%, and the Bank of England forecasts it to rise to 11%, by November. In fact, on the basis of the old RPI, its already at 11%, which means that, by November, it would be more like 14%.

But, in fact, even RPI understates inflation as it affects ordinary workers, and we have yet to see the further effects of rising energy prices, later in the year, resulting from the boycotting of Russian gas supplies, of the effects of soaring global food supplies, as Russian grain and fertiliser is prevented from getting on to global markets, because of NATO's boycotts, and exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT international payments system and so on. On top of that is the other costs being imposed on workers, as a result of higher National Insurance, and other fiscal measures introduced by the Tories.

As I wrote a while ago, given all of these price rises, even a 20% pay claim is not at all unreasonable, and workers really need to be ensuring that their pay rises more frequently than just once a year, in these conditions, to prevent losing out. We need committees of workers and labour economists working together, probably under the auspices of local trades councils, to calculate actual monthly increases in prices as they affect ordinary workers, and to demand appropriate indexing of wages, pensions and benefits to it. The rail and tube workers are the front line of “our” forces in this conflict.

The liberals in Starmer's Blue Labour, along with all those to be found in the chattering classes, argue that workers cannot expect to have their wages increase in line with the existing inflation, because that would lead to inflation. The flaw in that argument, seems to have escaped them! And, of course, for years whilst wages and workers living standards were being crushed, as profits soared, the liberals, whilst bleating about how nice it would be if workers' wages could increase somewhat, in fact, did nothing about it, or about the fact that profits were soaring, along with asset prices, which made homes and pensions increasingly unaffordable for workers.

During all that time, the liberals never argued that profits could not be allowed to rise because higher profits mean higher prices! They never said that higher house prices had to be stopped, because it increases workers' cost of living, nor that higher share prices had to be stopped because it made it more expensive for workers to buy them to fund their pensions!  And, of course, they went along with all of the anti-working class policies that undermined workers ability to organise in unions and fight back.

For liberals, it is apparently only higher wages that cause higher prices and inflation, not higher profits, or other revenues for the exploiting classes. The truth is that its neither higher wages, nor higher profits that cause higher prices, and inflation. The easiest way to demonstrate that is to use the economists favourite fictional character Robinson Crusoe. Robinson works alone on his island producing the things he requires to live. Let us assume that he can work for ten hours a day. In order just to produce enough to eat, he has to work for, say, four hours, and, on top of that he has to work another 2 hours repairing his shelter, and his clothes. That leaves him four hours surplus labour.

Because there is no money in this economy, the “price” of things can be seen plainly as simply what they cost him in terms of his labour. The “price” of his food is the four hours of labour he must undertake to produce it, just as the “price” of his shelter and clothing is the two hours of labour he must undertake to obtain them. What would change these prices? It is clearly only if the amount of labour required for their production changed. If there is a storm, he may have to work longer repairing his shelter, fish might be harder to catch for his food, and so on. What does not change these “prices” is the amount of time he chooses to spend producing these “wages”, as against the amount of surplus labour he has left over.

If, for example, he chooses to increase his “wages” so as to eat 50% more food, and so now spends 6 hours producing food, rather than 4 hours, it does not change the “price” of his food, what he pays for it in his labour increases proportional to the amount of additional food he consumes, its unit “price” remains exactly the same . What does change, is the amount of surplus labour he now has, which drops to two hours from four hours. The surplus labour is the equivalent of profit under capitalism.

In short, the “prices” of all the things that Robinson produces, here, are determined by the labour-time required for their production, whether they be the things required for his own subsistence – wages – or those that form his surplus production – profits – which he might consume as luxuries, or else, as productive consumption, for example, building a pen in which to keep animals, which is the equivalent of the capital accumulation that occurs under capitalism out of the profits produced by workers' labour.

The only thing that would cause an inflation of these “prices” would be if there was some change in the unit of measurement used for determining them. For, example, if his watch ran twice as fast, although he would still work ten hours a day, his watch would record it as having been twenty hours. It would now appear that the “price” of his food was eight hours, of his repairs four hours, and his surplus product, now eight hours. The devaluation of the unit of measurement of value by 50% would result in an inflation of the “prices” of his production, by 100%.

As Marx sets out in his Letter To Kugelmann, and in Capital I, in the case of products, and direct production, value takes the form of individual value, and is measured directly by labour-time, whereas in commodity production, value takes the form of exchange-value, and is measured by money.

“Inflation”, in the case of the former, can only arise by changing the unit of measurement of time, whereas in the case of the latter, it arises as a result of changing the unit of measurement of exchange-value, i.e. by depreciating the standard of prices, e.g the Pound, Dollar, Yen, Euro etc.. 

That is what happens when these currency units/money tokens are produced in excess of the money/value they represent as equivalent form of value.  That is what central banks have done for forty years, to devalue currencies, and so massively inflate the prices of assets such as shares, bonds and property, on behalf of the ruling class.  Its what they have done, at a faster pace, in the last two years.  It is that which is the cause of current inflation, not rising wages nor profits, not rising costs, nor shortages of supply, nor excess demand. The source of the problem is not hard to identify given forty years of money printing by central banks to inflate asset prices, and given the huge amount of money printing in the last two years used to hand out to consumers, in exchange for them, as workers, not actually producing an equivalent amount of value!

For liberals now to blame workers for that inflation that has been created by that money printing, by lockdowns and so on, from which workers have, in fact, fallen victim, and to call on workers to suffer a further reduction in their living standards is obscene. For forty years money printing inflated asset prices to benefit the rich and the speculators, at workers expense. As in 2008, when all of that came crashing down, those greedy speculators and their liberal representatives want workers to again pick up the tab. Indeed, every day, now, the greedy speculators are demanding that economies be thrown into recession, that workers be thrown out of their jobs, so that their wages are reduced, so as to again boost profits, to reduce interest rates, and allow asset prices to go back up as they have thought was their god given right during the last few decades.

The problem for them is that, even without workers saying enough is enough, and demanding wages to cover inflation, the working of the economy itself is doing the trick. The demand for labour has reached levels whereby wages are rising anyway, as firms compete for available workers by having to offer more, as was seen with the 30% rise in lorry drivers wages, and so on. And, the reason that firms are doing that, as they face labour shortages, is that they also see demand for their goods and services continuing to rise, and do not want to miss out on grabbing their share of the market. So, whether workers demand higher wages or not, whether the government tells firms not to pay higher wages or not, the reality is that firms will pay higher wages to get the workers they need. Inflation will continue to rise, but not because of workers getting higher wages, but because central banks will continue printing more money tokens, so that firms can continue to raise prices to protect their profits.

And, its precisely because that inflation will then continue for several years to come that the labour movement needs to ensure that workers are protected from it, across the whole working-class, including for those in receipt of pensions and benefits. We need a workers' cost of living index, and the indexing of wages, pensions and benefits to it, updated each month; we need a substantial increase in the Minimum Wage, as a Minimum Monthly Wage of £2,000, and, instead of simply organising rallies and protests, the TUC should be organising a General Strike, to ensure that all of that is enshrined in law.