The rail strikes have been continuing now for more than a year. ’Do you support the unions in rail strikes bringing Britain to a halt?’ The italics are mine but the question was that of the Daily Express on 21 June 2022, soon after the start of the current rail strikes. There is nothing like a neutral, unloaded question. 5,967 Daily Express readers replied no they didn’t want Britain brought to a halt, enabling the paper to claim that “Brits do NOT support the strike’.
But as the issues became clearer, this view (if it was ever true) soon changed. By the end of June 2022, an Opinium poll for The Independent found that 45 percent of respondents supported the strikes, with only 37 percent opposed. A year on, and a readers’ poll by The Press website showed that support had grown further. 61% of respondents supported the strikers.
There could be several reasons for this. One is the assurance and coherence of the arguments put forward by the union leaders, which contrast strongly with the empty aggression of the government and the weasel words of the official party of opposition. Blaming the workers, as do the Tories, for the economic problems of Britain, does not come well from such a dysfunctional government. Their steadily strengthening anti-union measures are equally counter-productive, given that they are an attack on organisations which represent ordinary people. And the reluctance of the Labour hierarchy to support the striking workers is simply a craven betrayal.
Mainstream hysteria
Another reason may be the hysteria with which the mainstream media have covered the strike. They hit out in many directions: the strikers were well-paid already; they were inflicting misery on thousands of commuters; they were preventing Britain’s economic recovery; their pay claims caused inflation. Arguments like this are not only erroneous in themselves, but set against the logical case of the union representatives, they are feeble enough for the public to see through them.
The right-wing press is fond of trying to drive a wedge between ‘the unions’ and the ‘general public’. The unions are said to be holding ‘the country’ to ransom, or creating commuter hell. But most people appear to recognise that ’the unions’ are not a thing apart, something to be distinguished from the ‘general public’. The unions are the general public, ordinary people getting together and organising themselves, to protect each other from exploitation and injustice.
There is now an awareness that being in a union gives you a better chance of protecting your job and working conditions. The value of being in or forming a union has seldom been clearer. Not only railway workers but also postal workers, refuse collectors, scaffolders, college lecturers and even barristers and hospital consultants have been taking industrial action. Groups like hospitality workers and packing and delivery workers, with poor working conditions and on low wages, have been trying to form unions. Some larger employers have been offering fringe benefits, like leisure facilities and health insurance, to try to manufacture a bond with their workers, and head off dissent.
But the issues go far beyond mere fringe benefits. The problems our society faces - poverty wages, poor working conditions, a rising cost of living, manifest inequality, depleted public services, perpetual warfare, a rapidly deteriorating environment - are all interlinked. The government and the mainstream media will always try to keep such issues separate, making it easier to divide any opposition. But we need to see that these problems are not only the result of this or that policy, but also of the system as a whole, and need to be confronted as a whole. There has been increased talk, even in the traditionally moderate TUC, of co-ordinated strike action between unions, to make a bigger impact. At present, this seems to fall short of calling a general strike, but even so it might be a first step towards strike action becoming more political - something which clearly frightens the government.
The Mass Strike
Rosa Luxemburg, more than any of the reformist socialists we see around us today, was strongly in favour of concerted industrial action (1). From her experience of Belgium, Poland and elsewhere she could see that economic goals and political goals were interlinked. She saw the mass strike as a key element in a process of revolutionary change. The very make-up of society - how wealth is created, who controls it, how it is used and for whose benefit - needs to be critiqued, debated and, above all, changed. The first step is for the people, banding together, to demand it.
It is in the interests of the ruling classes and their media supporters to explain industrial action simply as greedy workers out for themselves. However, the circumstances we are in - circumstances, let it be said, created entirely by our ruling classes - demand a widening-out and co-ordination of the struggle, for the benefit not just of individual union members, but of all those disadvantaged and deprived by the present system. The bourgeois state will always fight back, but in the end we are talking about people’s survival. Clear, radical thinking and concerted action will be needed. To go back to that Daily Express poll, we are not interested in bringing Britain to a halt, but in stopping a government determined to drag us into a morbid, self-serving anarchy.
(1) Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike (1906)
Photo: Diego Rivera mural - workers in Detroit
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