Our brothers and sisters working in the rail industry have shown the way forward, in their successful strike action so far this week. The fact that the Tories have been led into ever more excited and ridiculous levels of lying and fabrication about the dispute shows just what shaky ground the government is on, and the extent to which they are worried. We know that Boris Johnson is an inveterate liar, whether it comes to Brexit, Covid, or pretty much anything else. During this week we have seen that its a characteristic of his entire government. The blatant nature of the lies from Chris Philp, and Grant Shapps, were easily refuted, simply from viewing TV interviews, but, as usual with Tory lies, they followed the advice of Goebbels, and kept repeating them, and doubling down on them anyway. Meanwhile, the liberals of Starmer's True Blue Labour, disgraced themselves further.
Rail and tube workers face a particular problem, which is that although their employers in the train operating companies are not government owned – though Network Rail, responsible for the infrastructure is – they are bank rolled by the state, which pays out huge sums to them. In fact, whilst the operating companies continue to pay out around £200 million a year in dividends to their shareholders, they get around £2.5 billion in subsidies from the government, on top of the more than £3 billion grant given to Network Rail. So, the train companies are beholden to the government in a way that, say, TESCO is not.
When TESCO has faced a shortage of drivers, as it expanded its online deliveries, during lockdowns, it was able to simply pay them up front payments of £1,000 to get them from other jobs, and to offer them high enough wages to recruit them. Other haulage firms did the same thing, as lorry drivers' wages rose by around 30%. These firms know they have to pay higher wages to get the workers they need, in order to operate and grab an expanding market share, as demand for their goods and services increases. That is not true with a nationalised industry, or as with the rail companies where the state stands directly behind them as a significant funder. They can ignore the fact that they are losing income and profits, because the state simply fills the gap. Workers are always in a weaker position when they are employed by the capitalist state, as Kautsky described in The Erfurt Programme.
“If the modern state nationalizes certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, ii can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.”
So, its no wonder that the Tories are using all of their power to try to utilise this superior exploitative power of the capitalist state to defeat the rail and tube workers, just as Thatcher did in 1984-5, in using that power of the capitalist state to defeat the Miners. But, today, is not the period of stagnation and decline of the 1980's, and nor is it the equivalent of the 1970's. On the contrary, it is the equivalent of the late 1950's, and early 1960's, when a new period of more robust growth was just getting underway, and labour shortages began to emerge, giving the conditions in which workers could feel more confident, when the demand and supply for labour itself pushed up wages, and enabled them to begin to rebuild and reorganise their organisations from the bottom up.
This role played by the capitalist state in acting as a battering ram against the working class as a whole is shown in the repeated wage freezes that governments have imposed on government employees over the last decade or so that has also gone along with their policies of austerity, in restricting financing of the NHS, and Local Government, for example, as they sought to divert money instead to bailing out the banks, and ensuring that interest rates were kept down so as to inflate asset prices, and encourage further reckless speculation in financial and property markets, to boost the already fabulous wealth of the ruling class. The wages of government employees have fallen way behind the wages of workers employed elsewhere in the economy, as those businesses have had to raise wages to compete for increasingly scarce labour.
And, of course, the government has continued to ensure that those that represent the interests of the government, which, in turn represents the interests of the spivs and speculators who make their money from gambling in the financial and property markets, are well paid. The executives of the train operating companies earn around £600,000 a year, so its no wonder they are going to know which side of the bread is buttered when it comes to doing the bidding of millionaire Tory Ministers, in insisting that the workers, who actually do the job, and produce the revenues on the rails and tube, should be kept on below average wages, and be offered a measly 3% pay rise, which would mean an actual 8% plus pay cut, in real terms.
The government continues to insist that workers can't get pay rises even equal to the inflation that already exists, on the basis that if they did this would be inflationary! That is, of course, the usual economically illiterate nonsense we have come to expect from Tories who will pump out the most obvious drivel to try to defend their positions, and the interests of the ruling class. If the money price of bread is £1, consisting of £0.50 materials, £0.25 wages, and £0.25 profits, and as a result of inflation rises to £2 (100%), whilst wages rise by only 20%, then assuming that materials also double in price, we would have materials £1, wages £0.30, and profits now £0.70! In other words, money profits would rise by nearly 200%, whilst wages would rise by only 20%, and, in real terms, wages would have fallen by 80%, whilst profits would have risen in real terms by nearly 50%. Its pretty clear why millionaire Tories want to insist that workers wages have to fall way behind the inflation so that profits are able to soar, and so enable even more money to be paid out as interest and dividends, and boost the share prices of the spivs and speculators.
And, of course, just as the massive financial and property bubbles that were blown up, and led to the financial meltdown of 2008 were nothing to do with workers, but they had to pay for them as the bankers and speculators were bailed out, so the inflation that now exists is nothing to do with workers either. It is a consequence of the same money printing that blew up the financial and property bubbles prior to 2008, and has blown up even bigger ones in the 14 years since then. It is all the money tokens thrown into circulation in the last two years of lockdowns, when the government forcibly reduced the production of goods and services that has led to the current inflation, as I predicted, two years ago, it would inevitably do. That same ocean of liquidity is also confronted with restrictions on the supply of oil and gas, as NATO imperialism has blocked and boycotted supplies of Russian oil and gas, causing its price to spike, as consumers have looked to buy more expensive supplies from the US, and the same is true with food prices, as Russian supplies of grains and fertiliser have been blocked by NATO imperialism. None of that is caused by workers, but the Tories are demanding that workers pay the cost of it.
The Tories lies, backed by the Tory media have, of course, presented sob stories about people not being able to get to hospitals on strike days. The obvious response to which is, firstly, isn't that what ambulances are for, and what, in the past, dedicated hospital buses were for, all of which have been removed or reduced as a result of Tory cuts, used to divert money instead to the spivs and speculators. Secondly, would it not be preferable to have healthcare facilities close enough to where people live that they could get there by bus, taxi, or private car, rather than being so far away that they require a lengthy train journey. But, of course, Tory cuts in healthcare funding have made that impossible as they have closed down hospitals and facilities rather than providing additional ones. Thirdly, given that over the last two years of lockdowns the government has forcibly told people not to go to hospitals, and we have the longest waiting lists ever, its a bit rich for them now to complain that they might not be able to make the journey on one or two days!
They have also talked about kids not being able to get into schools to take exams, for which all the same responses as above are even more appropriate. We have had two years of kids being forcibly prevented from going to school by government diktat during lockdowns, even though COVID does not affect young people, and there was no reason why they should have lost any education at all. But again, how crazy is it that schools are so far away from students that it requires a lengthy train journey, which in itself eats into a large part of the day that should have been used for study. And, all of the other sob stories put out by the Tory media can be responded to in the same way, given that they have spent the last two years forcibly preventing people from moving freely around the country, not to mention the limitation on freedom of movement imposed by Brexit, which is itself having devastating consequences at borders in causing chaos and delays and raising costs and prices.
All of that could, of course, be expected from the Tories who have no shame, and will lie through their teeth, as the experience of the last three years has shown, yet again. Unfortunately, the disgraceful response of the liberals of Starmer's True Blue Labour was equally predictable. The best they can come up with is to demand that the Tories intervene to stop the strikes. Well of course, the Tories are intervening to try to stop the strikes – on their terms! Unlike Blue Labour, the Tories know which class interest they are representing, and are going full bore to do so. They are using the full force of the Tory media to spread their lies, and try to whip up moral panic against workers, using the same petty-bourgeois and reactionary forces that backed Brexit to do so. The vox pops are full of the whining of petty-bourgeois market traders, and small business people who believe that the world revolves around them, and that workers should sacrifice their own interests and well-being, just so that their businesses can continue to operate, and provide them with profits.
Starmer, and those that support him, like Paul Mason, collapsed into their reactionary Blue Labour nationalism and jingoism on the basis that they cannot see further the next election, and whose parliamentarist politics sees everything revolving around a few privileged Labour MP's, securing for themselves cushy positions in government, for no other reason than to then just pursue policies indistinguishable from those the Tories are pursuing now. In order to win those seats, these Blue Labour cretins think that its necessary to pander to a bunch of reactionary voters in the so called “red wall” seats in the Midlands, and North. The analysis was rubbish to begin with, because the truth is that those reactionary voters, in those areas, as elsewhere, have never been core, working-class, Labour voters anyway. Those voters who voted for Brexit, and who support other reactionary positions, are almost exclusively petty-bourgeois, or else they are part of that backward, lumpen layer that was never part of an organised labour movement, were generally hostile to Labour and the trades unions, and whose allegiance was always to the racists and bigots who appealed to their prejudices.
But, if you listen to some of those supposed past Labour voters, in the “red wall”, they claim that they had stopped voting Labour, because Labour had stopped being a party that represented ordinary working people. That is undoubtedly true in relation to the years under Blair, but the truth is that Labour has never actually represented the interests of workers, other than where it was also compatible with the interests of capital. Yet, if you really wanted a Labour Party that was clearly being distinctive in promoting the interests of workers, it was that under Corbyn, between 2015-2019. If Starmer really did want to appeal to all those old working-class Labour voters, then surely, like Corbyn and McDonnell, and even some on his front bench, he should be out openly supporting the pickets, and throwing his support behind ordinary working people in a life and death struggle with the Tory representatives of the spivs and speculators!
Lenin pointed out that industrial struggle, strikes over pay and conditions, is not class struggle. It is merely bourgeois trades unionism, bargaining within the system, not seeking to replace the system. It is struggle by individual groups of workers simply to obtain a larger slice of the pie. Only when strikes become general strikes, organised by the whole working class in opposition to the whole capitalist class, and its state, does it become class struggle, which is also why such political General Strikes should not be called for limited aims such as demanding “Tories Out”, as opposed to being part of an attempt to seize control of the state itself.
But strikes do act as schools for class struggle.
“Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war,” a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital.
“A school of war” is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its emancipation. When they see what power there is in a united working class and even in small strikes, some think that the working class has only to organise a general strike throughout the whole country for the workers to get everything they want from the capitalists and the government. This idea was also expressed by the workers of other countries when the working-class movement was in its early stages and the workers were still very inexperienced. It is a mistaken idea. Strikes are one of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if the workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class.”
At the present time, strikes are appearing like a rash on the surface of society across the globe, as workers naturally break out, in a response to the attacks on their living standards being imposed by inflation, and as they feel the firmer ground beneath their feet of rising employment, and strengthening economic conditions. This latter is why the representatives of the spivs and speculators continually hype up the possibility of economic slow down, or even recession, and why the greedy speculators themselves are again demanding that states impose recessions on economies so as to hold back workers wages, and rising interest rates so that their share and property prices can again be inflated. But, as Lenin indicates, strikes, and simply bargaining for higher wages can never be a lasting solution, though current conditions do put workers in a stronger position than they have had for 40 years.
Ultimately, as happened in the 1970's, if wages do manage to squeeze profits, the capitalists respond by introducing new labour saving technologies. We are twenty years away from that, but, in the meantime, its necessary to prepare for it, in a way that labour movements did not do in the 1950's, 60's, and 70's. In the end, the class struggle is a political struggle, it is not a struggle about who gets a bigger share of the pie, but about replacing one form of property with another. Currently, it is about replacing fictitious-capital (shares, bonds, property and their derivatives) owned by the ruling class, with the socialised industrial capital that is the collective property of workers, and is the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism, but over which the ruling class continues to exercise control. To change that requires a political struggle, which requires a Workers' Party. At the very least, it requires such a party that would raise the demand for changing company law, and removing the right of shareholders to exercise control over property they do not own, and to put in its place, company boards democratically elected by the workers in the company.
In reality, if such a Workers Government were ever elected, it would face immediate attempts to overthrow it by the capitalist state, in the way that happened with the Allende government in Chile, in 1973. It requires, therefore, that such a revolutionary workers' party combine activity in parliament with activity outside parliament, to prepare the workers to resist the attempts of the state to organise a coup against them. It requires that such a party promote a party based upon the self-activity, and self government of the working-class, establishing factory committees in each large company that can be the basis of organising democratic control of production, it requires the formation of similar workers committees, in each community, that could organise community policing and so on. It requires that we organise our own armed workers' militia to police and protect our communities and workplaces against the attacks of the capitalist police, and fascist paramilitaries, as workers have seen happen in the US, for example.
But, that is in the future. For now, we need to make sure that we provide utmost solidarity with the rail and tube workers, and with the teachers, health workers and every other group of workers preparing strike action to defend living standards. We must take that new level of activity into the political sphere, with socialists inside local Labour Parties turning out on picket lines, and strikers, and newly radicalised workers being drawn into the Labour Party to pursue the fight against Starmer's liberal agenda. It must be the basis of the unions demanding a democratisaton of the party, and introduction of mandatory reselection, so that we can kick out all of the dead wood, right-wing MP's who never should have darkened the door of Labour to begin with.
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