Royal Mail’s assault and our political tasks

As expected, attempts to broker a deal between Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union have been unsuccessful. Mike Macnair examines why Royal Mail, encouraged by the government, has been determined to push ahead with confrontation, and looks at the implications of this decision

A Sunday Times front-page headline reads: “Brown faces winter of discontent” (October 25). In other words, this is not the only industrial dispute in the pipeline at the moment. There are a whole range of them expected to come to a head in the next six months.

There is a risk – one that would not be at all surprising, as it is normal to the British political cycle – that the last months of this Labour government will be characterised by large-scale industrial disputes and substantial disruption. This will therefore see an increasing degree of support for the Tories from suburban middle class voters due to the perceived lack of Labour control over the trade unions. Certainly the Tories are already winning a substantial number of votes. Nonetheless, the fear of a “winter of discontent” is plainly an element in the calculations of the government in relation to its attitude toward the current postal dispute.

The media are producing their usual outpouring of anti-strike propaganda. In particular it is said that Royal Mail is habitually losing money – surprise, surprise! Most postal services across Europe are subsidised. Even the early privately owned Thurn und Taxis postal service back in 17th century Germany had to have state-backed monopoly rights, for the very simple reason that a profit could not – and still cannot – be made without them. A universal postal service is, precisely, public infrastructure. Privatising the postal service or requiring it to make profits is like selling off the public highways in pieces or prohibiting public expenditure on ‘unprofitable’ repairs to roads and bridges.

It is true that the universal postal service is, in some senses, of decreasing use because people have turned to email and other forms of electronic communication. The same has been the case in relation to businesses for quite some time: private couriers offering same-day delivery were used for some time before fax and email became routine.

So there is lower demand for postal services than there has been in the past. The government has been looking for ways to undermine wages and conditions, drastically reduce its pensions commitment, casualise the workforce and hopefully even get rid of the universal service obligation. This assault is aimed at creating conditions for privatising the postal service – government subsidies would be withdrawn without too much worry about the major losers: people living in the countryside.

There would actually be some losses for business out of this policy. Who will deliver all the junk mail – probably the bulk of most post bags these days? Equally, online mail order operations like Amazon could suffer, as it is unlikely that private couriers could actually deliver with the same coverage and at the same price.

The government and its servants in Royal Mail management demand ‘modernisation’. What this actually means is not primarily automation. That claim is bullshit. What it means is a major speed-up, attacks on working conditions and a move to, in effect, piece work, resulting in people not getting paid for a full shift. The language of ‘modernisation’ is merely code for a huge attack on the workforce.

Provocations

In reality there has been industrial guerrilla warfare in Royal Mail locally for at least four or five years. Certainly there were major disputes going on in the more militant sorting offices as far back as the last general election. It was clearly decided in the spring/summer of this year to bring this simmering guerrilla warfare to a head, and have a massive, national confrontation with the CWU.

I say ‘clearly decided’ because it is obvious that in the last six to nine months there has been an escalation of unilateral action by management in the form of provocations, victimisations, etc. Actions that can only be intended to trigger local action and a climate of militancy, leading to a massive vote in support of industrial action. It is equally clear that management (and behind them business secretary Peter Mandelson) intended, as Thatcher and co intended in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, to control the timing of the national dispute. Here the point is if possible to break the union before we get into the Christmas run-up, which is the peak of the mail service business.

Similarly Thatcher aimed to bring out the miners before the overtime ban had reduced the coal stocks to the point where there would be forced power cuts. These tactics have been reflected in the political sphere, with absolute and complete intransigence on the part of Mandelson. And with Mandelson’s unequivocal backing, the Royal Mail management has stood firm to its assertion that it will not go to the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service without a pure and unambiguous guarantee from the CWU that there will be no strikes. But  the CWU could not deliver this even if it wanted to, because most of the industrial action has been local, over which the national union has less direct control.

Of course, this is not all one-sided. The CWU executive is generally seen among the membership as a militant leadership, and it, too, has been using the period of local and guerrilla struggles to prepare for the larger struggle which has now arrived.

What we have seen in the last months in relation to this dispute is therefore the run-up to a major class confrontation just like in 1984-85. There is an intention in government – at least among Peter Mandelson and his co-thinkers – and among Royal Mail management, to have a big confrontation and inflict a massive defeat on the CWU workers similar to that of the miners’ strike. This is expected to knock on the head any serious industrial militancy in the next six to nine months, as it will be an object lesson to other unions and other workers.

It will also be an object lesson in a second sense. The Labour government will demonstrate to capital, and to the capitalist media, that they are a safe hand on the tiller, that it is possible for a Labour government to smash an industrial offensive of the working class before it gets off the ground, and therefore capital should leave Labour in place rather than back Tory leader David Cameron.

The bourgeoisie has its concerns over Cameron. Yes, there is at the moment massive support for the Tories. Yes, the media have been backing him. But there are worries about how safe Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne will be as managers of the economy, at a time when quite a lot of media commentators are worrying about when the second shoe is going to drop in relation to the economic crisis.

There are also worries that a Cameron government might tip relations with Europe so far into Eurosceptic territory that Britain can no longer build alliances to block further EU integration. This is a central part of the role Britain plays for the United States in Europe: controlling a possible global rival by building alliances against Franco-German integration proposals.

So there are reasons for the capitalist class to have concerns about a Cameron administration. And if the Labour government can show, in these circumstances, that it can break a substantial public sector trade union, derecognise it and casualise its workforce, then Labour might, from that point of view, be in with a chance of regaining some of its lost bourgeois and middle class support prior to the next general election. There are, then, clear political calculations why this government might be thinking about doing a ‘Thatcher on the miners’ job in relation to the CWU.

Labour Party

In discussing the government’s policy I have referred particularly to Peter Mandelson. The reason is not merely that he is the relevant minister, but that there are indications that Gordon Brown is rather less up for a full-on confrontation (see Financial Times October 24); the failed TUC-sponsored talks (without the precondition demanded by Mandelson and management that the strikes be called off) represented a slight retreat by the government.

Behind this is a fundamental political fact. For Thatcher to set up a major class confrontation with the aim of breaking the National Union of Mineworkers was ‘extreme’ from the point of view of the 1940s-70s, but perfectly consistent with the longer historical role of the Tory Party. For a Labour government to actually smash one of its own major affiliated unions in a major national class confrontation would be something different altogether. Rather than allowing Labour to retain power, it would be more likely to break up the Labour Party. The result could be a split by the unions and the left, or – as in the 1931 fall of the Labour administration and the formation of the National government – a party revolt, leading to a split of the right to join up with the Tories to force the confrontation through.

True, the current Labour government since 1997 has faced down trade union action more than once (for example in the case of the firefighters). But in general the workers’ movement had not responded in a militant way. What appears to be different this time is the willingness of the movement to fight. A major conflict between the government and the CWU would pose severe problems for the Labour Party, that is for sure.

If Brown does back down from an all-out confrontation, it will be presented by the media as yet another Brown U-turn. Brown’s reputation for dithering not only reflects a hostile media, but is a real phenomenon. Unlike cynical careerists such as Blair, Mandelson and co, Brown was a genuine convert to neoliberalism from the left; hence, the 2007-08 crash shook his convictions and left him rudderless in policy terms. If Labour does go ahead with a major attack on the CWU, and the result is not a major split in the party, we in the CPGB will certainly need to reassess our current judgment that Labour remains a bourgeois workers’ party: the event would look like the party finally ditching the ‘workers’ side of the contradiction.

But, whatever exact diagnosis we make, if the government goes ahead with plans to break and derecognise one of the Labour Party’s major affiliated trade unions, this will be a fundamental shift in politics and in particular of Labour Party politics.

Our tasks

I have no idea why CWU general secretary Billy Hayes let himself be reported as saying he is in a stronger position than Arthur Scargill was (The Times October 17).

True, strike action has received very clear majority support in a ballot. But the actual underlying sectional economic positions are if anything weaker than those of the NUM in the 1980s, and the ability of the postal workers to sustain their internal solidarity in relation to a furious media offensive is likely to be less than the miners. The miners lived in concentrated communities, had networks of solidarity outside the pits in place, and indeed, as a workforce, were highly concentrated. Postal workers are concentrated only in sorting offices, but atomised when out on the streets. So the actual position of the CWU is relatively weak in the purely trade unionist, sectionalist-syndicalist sense of its ability to disrupt the economy.

However, this situation is to a considerable extent general in the service sector (and, indeed in some industrial sectors dominated by highly automated plant with small workforces). In this sense in future disputes the CWU will indeed look like a union with strong sectional power. But this is entirely consistent with my fundamental point: namely simple reliance on ‘industrial muscle’ – ie, sectional ability to disrupt production – is decreasingly adequate as a strategy to defend working people’s immediate interests.

Even if the sectional strength is less than Billy Hayes’ Times interview suggested, the possibilities of the strike winning broad public support are real. Precisely because of the increasing atmosphere of class confrontation in the dispute, because of the intransigent alignment of the government behind Royal Mail management and because we see the unanimity of the bourgeois media behind ideas most clearly expressed in the Daily Mail headline, “The lemming strike is on” (October 22), there has been some public reaction against the capitalist united front. We are beginning to see some, inchoate, inadequately politically represented, support for the postal workers. A poll reported in The Independent on October 24 showed 50% supporting the postal workers and only 25% supporting management and Mandelson.

So where does that leave us? It looks like we are headed for a major class confrontation with a serious and unambiguous effort to break the CWU, and thereby give an object lesson to the rest of the trade union movement, in the hope of preventing a “winter of discontent”.

What should the political left be doing? There are two sorts of task: simple solidarity ones, and those that are specifically political. The first of these are tasks that the labour movement and left will probably do well in spite of divisions and disorganisation. Raising the issue in other trade unions, getting CWU speakers to meetings, organising solidarity campaigns and support groups, collecting for strikers in hardship and so on. Promoting the idea of solidarity action: thus, for example, in Unite the question of instructing the managers not to scab has been posed.

The Socialist Workers Party is therefore entirely correct to advocate the rapid formation of strike support groups, which can play a critical role in mobilising public support and solidarity. There is also the question of international solidarity. Even if this is only symbolic in character – as, in this dispute, it inevitably is – such international solidarity would strengthen the morale of strikers and assist the struggle for broader solidarity within Britain.

A specific task lies in the student movement, because traditionally students have been recruited as casuals by the Royal Mail. We must agitate against students acting as scabs – this is an issue to be raised, addressed and spread. Indeed the general attitude towards scabs is critical. Casualisation is already extensive in the Royal Mail, partly inevitably because of the seasonal nature of the business. Nevertheless it is vital to get across the message that during this dispute taking casual jobs is scabbing. This is partly a job for the student movement; but it is also a job for strikers themselves: the movement needs to revive the basic ideas of non-cooperation with scabs, and that picket lines mean don’t cross. And it is also a job for PCS members working in job centres and so on: scab ‘casual’ jobs in Royal Mail are not ‘normal’ jobs to which the unemployed should be sent and PCS members should refuse to fill them.

Political tasks

The other aspect, where the far left is traditionally much weaker, concerns specifically political tasks. The far left is bad at these because they are the tasks of a party. Solidarity campaigns are necessarily broad movements of all those of whatever political complexion who wish to support the strikers. Hence they necessarily find it hard to address the politics of the strike.

For example, there is an early day motion opposing Royal Mail management’s intransigence, etc. Has your local Labour MP signed it? If not, why not? If your local Labour MP is supporting ‘modernisation’ and all that crap, perhaps it is time that his/her constituency office or surgery should be besieged by strikers and their supporters.

This sounds like a solidarity campaign-type action. But actually it turns out that broad solidarity organisations find it extraordinarily hard to undertake campaigns to besiege scab Labour MPs or whatever, because the Labour lefts and the trade union officials would be unwilling to pursue them. Stop the War Coalition in the 2005 election is an excellent example of the problem – it was unable to make any recommendation on who to vote for. Even in the 1984-85 miners’ strike this issue was posed, as the union leadership was very reluctant either to enter on the terrain of politics itself or for the support groups to do so.

What was said above about the Labour Party means that an absolutely central issue is the question of sharpening the divisions between left and right which a major confrontation with the CWU will inevitably produce. Parts of the left will undoubtedly call for the CWU to disaffiliate from Labour. But at the moment that would be a counsel of retreat and a road to depoliticising the union: neither ‘son of No2EU’ nor any of the other left groups and ‘unity projects’ presently represents a realistic alternative electoral project. What is immediately needed is for the CWU to adopt a tactic of reducing general financial contributions to Labour, targeting any support on Labour MPs and candidates who have backed the strike, and also being willing to back selected workers’ movement candidates outside Labour; if this leads to the party leadership seeking to remove affiliation, the union should fight back.

In other words, the requirement is not (yet) to run away from the Labour Party, but to promote and sharpen a fight both within and outside it against the most pro-capitalist wing of the party.

Equally important is explaining both the character of what is going on, that it is a class confrontation motivated and driven by politics. That is a task for a Communist Party, for communist papers, and for leaflets addressing the broad masses in the districts where they live. The far-left press and the splintered groups do part of these jobs, but we are too limited by our divisions and the left press and leaflets often restrict themselves to basic trade union solidarity – the Morning Star as a daily is closer to having the resources, but prints only what suits leading union officials.

Strike support groups cannot substitute for these tasks, for the reasons already given. Neither can the splintered organised left and the even more splintered ‘independents’. A coalition of the far left could begin to do some of them. In doing so such a coalition would be beginning to act as a party. But for the moment most of the far-left groups fetishise either their own independence as ‘the revolutionary party’ (all 57-plus of them); or ‘broad unity’, which leads to an inability to take political action because it has to include some element of the ‘official lefts’; or both at the same time. So, as valuable as a far-left coalition for the purposes of political solidarity with the postal workers would be, it probably will not happen.

CPGB

Realistically, the CPGB cannot play this role either, because of our very limited resources. We can and should argue for Communist Students to campaign for students not to scab on the postal workers: a campaign which could be conducted in unity with other left student groups and could be very successful. Our contacts, through Hands Off the People of Iran, with the Iranian workers’ movement, can and should be used to promote symbolic international solidarity with the strike.

More generally, what we can do is largely limited to the use of the Weekly Worker, with which we can propagandise around the idea that solidarity has to be more than just hardship support and agitation in the trade union movement; that solidarity has to address the politics, the MPs and the political context of the strike.

The paper also needs to make an effort to contact CWU militants in the localities and get their stories. In spite of the fact that this is something the whole of the left is doing, in the context of the bourgeois media overwhelmingly giving the management and government version of the story, low-level exposures of the provocations management has been engaged in is a useful activity. We need to develop more and broader contacts across different localities, and get the information into the paper.

Equally militants and the left need information about the political alignments within the CWU and about what is going on in the dispute at national level. Are the far-lefts, some of whom sit on the CWU national executive, acting as communists or merely as trade union officials? We need to try to get the information and publicise it.

Across all this, the fundamental point is to use all the resources we have to try and develop the sense of the political context of the dispute, its significance and the question of solidarity of the working class as a whole with the strikers.

Postal workers: form strike committees, build strong picket lines

Today it is the jobs and conditions of postal workers that is on the line, writes Jim Moody. But if New Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have their way, it will be all of us on the chopping block tomorrow

Backed to the hilt by the state, Royal Mail’s aim is to crush the postal workers’ strike and destroy their union. This has become ever clearer during the last fortnight. So, as the first two days of national strike action begin, rank and file workers are faced with the challenge of how to fight for their jobs and save their union from annihilation.

With 120,000 Communication Workers Union members having had the opportunity to vote for strike action, the massive 76% in favour is decisive. A resounding success for those in the union who have hammered away in the localities, building the strike movement piecemeal. Certainly that was the only way that the union’s leadership would counternance holding a ballot for national action. Far from becoming dissipated or dispirited by the time it has taken for the leadership to get its act together, militancy has grown by leaps and bounds at the ground level.

By now we all know how vile the management of Royal Mail is. Exposed by Newsnight a week ago, Royal Mail’s secret document Dispute: strategic overview clearly lays down management’s intention of continuing to implement a policy of undermining the CWU’s role in labour relations. Even going so far as to consider the possibility of removing it as the recognised trade union. If union bureaucrats do not play ball – and at present the membership won’t let them – then Royal Mail plans to institute a “programme of reducing relationship with union.”

As a first stage to derecognition, the document advocates taking away union representatives’ current rights to carry out their duties during work time (‘facility time’). In addition the provision of meeting spaces for the CWU in local offices will be withdrawn. Royal Mail has also made it clear that it will carry through plans that will decimate the workforce and increase the work burden of those who remain employed, all “with or without union engagement”.

Royal Mail has provocatively cancelled a planned campaign sponsored jointly with the CWU, Ban Bullying Week. As the CWU says, it has done this just when management bullying and harassment are causing more and more problems in the workplace. One of many examples followed the introduction of computerised Geo-Route plotting of postal walks and drives: when it failed to live up to the hype, it was the man or woman on the ground who got blamed – despite the many warnings from the union that the system was unworkable.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Royal Mail is more than happy to see its customers suffer through strikes. It estimates that this will undermine its employees’ stand against cuts, by eroding public support. So they will be beaten back to work in defeat – or so senior managers imagine. As Royal Mail’s hitherto secret document makes clear, “demonstration of commercial impact of dispute – strikes make things worse – the more we can demonstrate this to our people, the better.” In effect Royal Mail is saying that the more business it loses, the better.

Readers will know that Royal Mail wants to recruit 30,000 scabs. Ostensibly they are being brought in to deal with the backlog that the series of local one-day strikes has resulted in, though it is arguable whether this is legal under industrial relations legislation. The scabs are to be used after Royal Mail refused to allow postal workers to do overtime work: CWU members could not possibly be allowed to ‘benefit’ from their strike action by receiving a meagre time and a third in overtime to clear the backlog.

Equally bellicose has been unelected business minister Lord Mandelson. He has clearly expressed the Labour government’s position: Royal Mail has to be ‘modernised’ at the expense of jobs and conditions. So there is no point looking upon the government as some kind of ally, despite the CWU contributing handsomely to the Labour Party’s coffers over many years. True, there is a wide body of support for the CWU coming from backbenchers, including in the form of early day motion 2035. Nevertheless it is hardly surprising that many CWU members are incandescent with rage over a Labour government which is in effect egging on a management attempt to break their union.

Royal Mail might have offered to take part in arbitration to avoid the strikes this week. But that was simply a publicity stunt: its conditions were that the CWU roll over, call off the strikes and begin negotiating away jobs and working conditions. Rightly the CWU has rejected this out of hand. Royal Mail has simply refused to go for arbitration in all but name. It wants confrontation. However, why should workers be forced to accept what Acas decrees is reasonable? It is not exactly a surprise that such establishment bodies tend to favour … the establishment – in the guise of a compromise settlement.

Despite Royal Mail manoeuvring and clear intentions to break the union, Billy Hayes, CWU general secretary, seems to be banking on Acas. He insists that the CWU “remains available for talks”. However, he says, any third party involvement,  needs to be on “an entirely transparent basis” with a “joint intention of reaching an agreement” (www.cwu.org).

The problem with all this is that it leaves rank and file postal workers around the country as passive onlookers. There is also the danger of a rotten sell-out. So strike committees need to be set up, giving the rank and file its own input into the aims, running and termination of the dispute. Local strikers will push forward new, energetic and popular leaders and they obviously need to lead local CWU organisations for the duration of what looks set to be a long and bitter struggle. Local strike committees are especially needed when faced by a strikebreaking force of 30,000 scabs. They are equivalent to a quarter of the CWU membership. There should be no cooperation with such casuals in between strikes, and strong picket lines should be imposed on strike days.

The CWU and CWU strike committees would also be well advised to learn the lessons of the 1980s miners’ and printers’ strikes and organise hit squads to persuade strike breakers not to scab. Obviously such bodies do not organise themselves and certainly the idea of them needs first of all to be popularised.

CWU militants are aware that the union leadership is, even at this stage, looking for a cosy compromise rather than winning the fight against the imposition of speed-ups and job losses. For Hayes and co what matters above all is that management is imposing, not consulting. Of course, rank and file members are right to insist that management must negotiate with their elected representatives. But they must remain vigilant against what is an inevitable tendency of union bureaucrats to settle for a less bad deal when their members are under attack.

Of course, most postal workers have taken part in local strikes precisely because they damned well do not want any more job losses. Somewhere around 50,000 have gone already in the last two years. Enough, they say, is enough. It is true that for the ordinary CWU member every day out on strike means a day without pay. Not that postal workers are well paid in the first place. But if Royal Mail, New Labour and the Tories have their way, they will be even more poorly off in the future. These workers have known for months that they have to make a firm stand. There can be no more acceptance of vicious attacks lying down.

Collections for the postal workers at workplaces and elsewhere are important. But more is needed. Supporters must be encouraged to join picket lines outside sorting offices and distribution depots. PCS members at job centres must not help recruit scabs for Royal Mail, and student groups and student unions should launch a campaign to stop their members from taking temporary postal work while the dispute lasts. Public sector workers and their unions should also be brought into active engagement with the postal workers. That means delegations, resolutions and above all a refusal to cross picket lines or in any way strike break. Joint days of action would be a real boost too. The attack on the postal workers is a precursor for what all three main political parties intend to do. Cuts, cuts, cuts. Pension holes, alleged overmanning, etc, will all be used to break other unions, push down wages and force through speed-ups.

The state machine is already preparing for combat. According to one report, “The Association of Chief Police Officers … said that it was closely monitoring the situation and had issued guidance to forces on dealing with large-scale strike action. Each police force is assessing and reviewing the implications for public disorder that might arise from industrial action” (The Guardian October 17).

It is up to the rest of the working class to give solidarity to the postal workers. But in order to make this really effective we must generalise this dispute and give it a political form and content. We must challenge Royal Mail and its right to manage; we must challenge New Labour and the Tories and their cuts programme; we must organise our own combat party with a programme that can link our day-to-day struggles with the perspective of a new society that replaces the capitalist imperative of profit with the communist principle of production for the common good and distribution according to need.

Jim Creegan reviews Michael Moore’s (director) Capitalism: a love story

Searing indictment of US capitalism spoilt by nostalgia for Roosevelt’s New Deal

Reporting over a year ago in the Weekly Worker on the US presidential elections, I observed that ‘capitalism’ is a word seldom heard among the radical-liberals who comprise most of the American left. Michael Moore has gone a long way toward correcting this omission.

In his latest documentary, Capitalism: a love story, Moore takes advantage of the still reverberating shock waves from the great crash of 2008 to move beyond the single-issue muckraking of his previous films. Capitalism is nothing less than a full-fledged indictment of the social order. A profit-driven economy, Moore concludes toward the end of the movie, is irredeemably evil. It cannot be regulated to serve human needs. It must be abolished. Such an explicit declaration represents a radical departure for one who is perhaps the best known spokesperson for a broad leftish current that has not dared to dream about revolution for over 30 years. Yet, as we shall see below, Moore’s indictment is not quite as sweeping as it may at first appear.

Trademark tropes

Anyone expecting Moore’s bold new content to be accompanied by corresponding innovations in technique will be let down (or reassured, depending on taste). All his trademark devices are on full display.

There are the self-dramatising stunts: once again, the faux-naive, ursine everyman in a baseball cap shambles forth to confront the CEO of General Motors as he did 20 years ago in his first film, a meditation on the auto industry in decline titled Roger and me, only to be unceremoniously rebuffed for a second time. He then descends upon Wall Street carrying a burlap sack into which the financial behemoths are invited to deposit their misspent bailout billions for return to the US treasury. When they refuse, Moore single-handedly cordons off the New York stock exchange with yellow police tape, informing the occupants through a loud hailer that they are all under “citizen’s arrest”.

There are also the familiar mordant juxtapositions of current news clips with archival footage and sound. Capitalism opens with an old made-for-the-classroom movie about fall of Rome, intercut with parallel scenes of contemporary American decay, starring Dick Cheney as a latter-day Nero. Franco Zefirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth is redubbed to produce a neoliberal Christ, who refuses to heal the lame beggar on the roadside because his affliction has been classified as a “pre-existing condition”. But, now as before, Moore is at his best in bringing to light tales of horrific suffering inflicted as a result of capitalism’s insatiable and calculating profit lust.

Capitalism takes the audience into the living room of a Tennessee family, nervously huddled together filming its own eviction for mortgage delinquency at the hands of the local sheriff. He is beating down their door with a crowbar, backed up by six squad cars of police.

In a segment that Dickens could not have outdone, Moore interviews several teenagers sentenced to confinement in a recently privatised ‘juvenile detention facility’. Their offences included “throwing a piece of meat at my mom’s boyfriend” and posting sarcastic comments on the web about an assistant headmaster. It was later discovered that the judge who gave some of them a year in jail after hearings lasting about two minutes each was being bribed by the reformatory owners to lock the kids away so the owners could collect a per-head government fee on their incarceration.

We are introduced to a grieving widower whose young wife recently died of an asthma attack. He accidentally discovered that her employer had collected $1.5 million on her death from what is known in business circles as a ‘dead peasant’ life insurance policy, taken out in secret by the company, which gave nothing to the bereaved family. A lawyer-expert says this practice is routine among some of the country’s biggest corporations; he produces an actuarial analysis from one firm, which concludes that the insurance policies did not meet original expectations of profitability: although as many insured employees died this year as last, two of this year’s deaths were suicides, which could not be counted upon to recur regularly in future.

Then there are the full-time airline pilots paid less than a McDonald’s restaurant manager by their non-union companies (between $16,000 and $20,000 a year). One of them was forced to moonlight as a waitress in a coffee shop, another to take government food coupons. The propeller jet that went down in a ball of flame over Buffalo, New York, last year, killing all aboard, was operated by two such underpaid, undertrained pilots. In a typical attempt to blame workers for the disaster, the media reported that the plane’s black box had recorded the pilots chatting about their careers at the time of the crash. Moore points out that their ‘career chat’ consisted of complaints about low pay and exhausting flight schedules.

Tales like the above are not only heartbreaking; they are also becoming typical. Sicko, Moore’s 2008 exposé of the American healthcare industry, concentrates not on the country’s 47 million uninsured, but rather on tales of woe from those who could afford to purchase the commonly high-priced, woefully inadequate coverage offered by the insurance profiteers. Similarly, Capitalism’s horror stories are told not only by illegal immigrants or denizens of impoverished black ghettos, though these are included. The subjects are also white people – of city and country, young, old and middle aged, most of whom have solid work records and consider (or until recently considered) themselves solidly middle class. With Katrina fresh in the country’s collective mind, and the crash of 2008 still sending out tidal waves of evictions and redundancies, feelings of solidarity across racial and national lines may be quietly gaining ground – a process toward which Moore’s Capitalism is an outstanding contribution.

Contradictions of Capitalism

Yet if Capitalism exhibits many of Moore’s characteristic strengths, it also suffers from his principal weakness: the absence of a solid explanatory framework. His films are like rambling monologues, in which images, soundbites and talking heads tumble forth in torrents, sometimes forming divergent streams or, at other times, running in counter-currents.

So, for instance, one part of Bowling for Columbine, Moore’s 2002 reflection on US gun violence, notes that the death-by-firearm rate in Canada is lower than that in the US by several orders of magnitude despite the ready legal availability of guns in both countries. The overall argument of the film, however, is for stricter anti-gun laws in the United States in order to prevent grisly shootings like the one perpetrated by alienated students upon their classmates at Columbine high school in Colorado. But surely the US-Canada comparison indicates that the absence of tougher American gun laws cannot explain the disparity in violent crime? The inconsistency is never resolved.

In Capitalism Moore meditates on a much bigger theme, and is caught up in a far more serious contradiction. The movie’s major premise is that capitalism cannot be fixed and must therefore be abolished. Yet the film is awash in nostalgia for capitalism’s ostensible golden age of the 1950s and early 60s. Old home movies show a carefree pre-teen Moore romping in the backyard of his family home in the auto-manufacturing town of Flint, Michigan, where he grew up. His accompanying voiceover speaks wistfully of the plentiful, decently paid jobs and accessible higher education of that contented time. He says our bygone prosperity was grounded in an economy that produced useful things like cars and steel, as opposed to credit default swaps.

One of Capitalism’s final clips is of Franklin Roosevelt reading a proposed bill of economic rights a year before he died. This is followed by scenes of the grieving multitudes that thronged Roosevelt’s funeral procession, accompanied on the soundtrack by the plaintive lilt of (Thomas) Moore’s ‘Last rose of summer’. Elsewhere in the film, Moore speaks glowingly of western European welfare states.

The above segments pose a number of questions. How did we get from the post-war halcyon days of Moore’s home movies to the security-camera film of bank robberies, with which Moore opens the film and intends to symbolise the gangster capitalism of today? And are not the more congenial capitalist regimes the director praises – under Roosevelt or in Europe – capitalist regimes nonetheless? Would it not be more realistic – and maybe a lot easier – to humanise the social order, as it was humanised, in the past and in other places, than, as Moore proposes, to risk the well known pitfalls of attempting to abolish it altogether?

If Moore is suggesting that the welfare state was due in significant measure to the beneficence of a Roosevelt, and – as he also implies in the film – that its undoing can be traced to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, cannot a less voracious capitalism be restored by the rise of another liberal benefactor (like Barack Obama, perhaps)? These questions are barely raised in the Capitalism, let alone seriously answered. They are obvious enough, however, to have popped up in various forms on the television talk shows where Moore is now appearing to publicise his movie. His answers are no more convincing there.

A popular documentary is not a theoretical disquisition. It would be unreasonable to expect Moore to delve into the falling rate of profit or Kondratiev’s long waves. Yet Capitalism would benefit from a stronger interpretation of recent history. It might go along lines something like these:

Ever since the industrial revolution got into full swing following the civil war, the United States has been dominated economically by the owners of capital, which is, broadly speaking, huge hoards of privately owned money in search of profitable investment. The capitalist ruling class that controls these hoards has also enjoyed the decisive voice in politics.

However, in times of great crisis, when the economy has ceased to function, and greater numbers of people are becoming disaffected with the system, the ruling powers sometimes feel constrained, albeit reluctantly, to concede to certain popular demands in order to rescue the system as a whole. Such a time was the great depression, and such concessions were embodied in the ‘new deal’. Then the population obtained government old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and the right of (mostly white) workers to form unions, bargain with their employers over wages and working conditions, and strike.

But the ruling class was never completely reconciled to these broad popular gains, as they will never be to any major reforms of benefit to the working class. What is more, the enormous wealth concentrated in their hands gives them not only the will, but also the power, to undermine progressive reforms. In the decades immediately following World War II, when unions were strong and the US was unrivalled among imperialist powers, it was true that most of the American bourgeoisie concluded that a frontal assault on the new deal was not worth the social and political risk. They contented themselves for a time with more modest efforts.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 placed severe limits on the use of the strike weapon, but did not challenge the right to organise and strike as such. Employers did not as a rule use scabs to break major industrial strikes. Instead, they quietly began investing less of their capital in the union-dense industrial belts of the northeast and midwest and more in the non-union south and southwest. This was the period that certain liberal historians have dubbed capitalism’s ‘golden age’, in which there was said to be an tacit ‘social contract’ between capital and unionised labour.

As US world hegemony eroded in the early 70s, the previous class détente began to come apart. Other major capitalist powers, devastated by the war, were on their feet once again, offering competition to American products in both foreign and home markets. The American policy of ‘containment of communism’ had suffered defeat at the hands of third-world revolutionaries from China to Cuba. The Vietnam war was bankrupting the treasury, and turning a whole generation of American youth not only against the government, but against the entire greasy-poll-climbing ‘work ethic’ upon which the system operates. And, most important, all these trends were reflected in a severely diminished rate of corporate profit, which fell precipitously in 1966, never to regain its previous heights until the late 90s, and then only briefly.

Faced with these challenges, the capitalist class’s former attitude of grudging complacency was clearly no longer sufficient. With the labour movement now bureaucratised and purged of radicals, and the system as a whole not threatened as it had been in the 30s, the capitalist class felt less inhibited about fighting back. Beginning hesitantly under the Carter presidency, but growing exponentially under Reagan, a series of attacks were mounted on the people’s standard of living through monetary and fiscal policy, union-busting and corporate deregulation. The attacks met with a degree of success that probably surprised even the attackers. And the fact that the ‘reforms’ Reagan put in place were not significantly reversed, but consolidated, under the eight-year term of Democratic president Bill Clinton illustrates that what Reagan had wrought was viewed as a gain for the whole ruling class, and not just its Republican faction.

Efforts were no less intensive – and just as successful – on the foreign front, where the US was also striking back with redoubled vigour after the ’loss’ of Vietnam. These efforts paid off in the Suharto coup in Indonesia in 1965, the overthrow of Allende in Chile, the negotiated defeat of the guerrilla insurrection in El Salvador, the peaceful toppling of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and the most spectacular victory of all – the downfall of the USSR and its eastern European client states (the US and its allies did not bring about this development, but helped it along at crucial points, and did not hesitate to take credit for it).

These events, in turn, created the most hospitable climate for international business investment since before World War I. No longer fearing third-world revolutions or nationalisations, corporations felt free to invest around the world where labour was cheapest, hollowing out the industrial base of the west and further weakening first-world unions and political parties based on them.

What does this history teach us about the capitalist system as a whole? Moore could have argued that, even in the preternaturally unlikely event that the conditions that produced the New Deal could be reassembled, economic power, and hence the balance of political influence, would remain in the hands of a minority dedicated to undoing whatever was accomplished, and hence that the only way to ensure uninterrupted progress is to break the power of the capitalist class and move toward a society in which no-one will have any motive to challenge rule by the majority for its own welfare.

But Moore avoids such an interpretation of recent history, and the conclusions that would seem to follow from it, not because it would have been too arcane for the broad public he is trying to reach. Had he been inclined in the direction of a more systematic critique, there are a number of Marxist authors and professors (Richard Wolffe and Adolph Reed come to mind) who could have filled in the details in a lucid and publicly accessible way. It is rather that such an analysis would have shifted the film’s focus from morality to the struggle between classes with irreconcilably opposed interests, and from reform to revolution.

So Moore invokes the memory of Roosevelt as opposed to Lenin (or even Eugene Debs or Mother Jones), seeks anti-capitalist inspiration from two Catholic priests and a bishop from his native Michigan rather than from Marxists, and views democracy rather than socialism as the answer to the crimes of the profit system his film does so much to expose.

Capitalism is animated by the commendably radical impulse to synthesise the disparate issues of recent ‘social movements’, as well as those of Moore’s previous films, into a more comprehensive critique of the social system. This intent is, however, compromised by what seems like the director’s almost irresistible urge to lapse back into liberal ideology, just as his 2000 support of the independent presidential candidacy of Ralph Nader was followed by his hasty 2004 retreat back into the Democratic fold, when many left-liberals sheepishly concluded that their earlier experiment with political independence had helped to re-elect George W Bush.

Much of Moore’s equivocation no doubt arises from the genuine confusion of our time, in which the way forward is much less certain than it once appeared. It probably is the case that Moore’s anti-capitalism is grounded less in Marxism than in the Catholic activist inspiration of his youth, which the film emphasises.

But he is much more aware of the Marxist tradition than he chooses to let on, and one cannot escape the suspicion that the sentimental, soft-focus, moralistic anti-capitalism of Capitalism contains a strong element of political calculation as well. Moore probably feared that a harder, more analytical presentation would have been badly received, given the disrepute into which Marxism has fallen with the disappearance of the USSR. Maybe he was right.

But what his strategy gains in public acceptance and critical acclaim it loses in intellectual consistency. One can only hope that, in his future efforts, this cautiously treading partisan of the working class will see fit to carry his radical impulses through to their logical conclusion.

Global collapse and post-Soviet capitalism – Boris Kagarlitsky video

Boris Kagarlitsky gave this talk in London at Communist University 2009.

more about "Global collapse and post-Soviet capit…", posted with vodpod

Victory to the postal workers!

Postal workers have voted overwhelmingly for industrial action. Jim Moody gives the background in this article written for the Weekly Worker shortly before the ballot result was announced

Postal workers are preparing to step up their fight against Royal Mail’s proposed redundancies and speed-up following the expected overwhelming vote for industrial action due to be announced on October 8.

Such has been the anger against the threat to jobs and conditions that the leadership of the Communication Workers Union, Billy Hayes, Jane Loftus and the so-called Broad Left, had no choice but to give official sanction to local strikes during the three weeks of polling. In just the last 10 days before voting closed, one-day official strikes shut numerous delivery offices around the country – from Coventry to Looe and from Middlesbrough to Ely – as well as across London.

Royal Mail has seen backlogs of undelivered mail build up to such an extent that it has had to rent warehouse space near major depots. Nonetheless, management has made it clear that there will be no overtime available (paid at a measly 33% above normal rates) to clear the backlog, because it does not want postal workers to “benefit” from their industrial action. Sod any purported public duty that Royal Mail might have to actually deliver the mail, of course; Royal Mail is deliberately drawing out the delays in an attempt to erode public sympathy for the postal workers.

The local action since April was part of the build-up towards a national ballot for a strike. As summer came into view, CWU leaders made it clear that once local actions started to involve a majority of the membership then they would issue the ballot call. Now that its 121,000 members have had the chance to express their opinion in favour of industrial action it will be up to the union’s leadership to decide what to do next.

Militants are not expecting an immediate strike. It is thought that leadership noises initially will be about Royal Mail coming to the negotiating table. However, if this does not produce a positive response it is likely that a series of national one, two or three-day strikes will be called. Despite their obvious militancy, postal workers are not at present busting a gut for a costly all-out, indefinite strike. That can, of course, change, depending on how CWU leaders act and how Royal Mail responds following the ballot. An initial, nationally coordinated one or two-day strike may be all very well as a warning shot. It may also serve to boost morale. But above all members must be presented with a winning strategy, part of which must include a willingness to launch indefinite action.

It has been a common criticism within the union that the leadership unnecessarily delayed the strike ballot – there was, after all, local action aplenty almost from the beginning. But the fact that the CWU felt obliged to rubber-stamp continued requests to make local action official is indicative of the rank and file members’ intransigence. As a result, local strikes have played an important role in strengthening resolve. They have shown that postal workers are prepared to take on Royal Mail over redundancies and conditions.

Anger reaches beyond Royal Mail and its plans. There is a real mood for punish the New Labour government by breaking the link with the Labour Party. Unelected business minister and de facto deputy prime minister Peter Mandelson, was vocal in March, pressing for a 30% Royal Mail sell-off in return for the government taking on its £8 billion pension deficit, as well as guaranteeing a continuing universal postal service. Faced with widespread opposition in the labour movement, including amongst Labour backbenchers, the government backtracked, but it clearly remains an aim of the New Labour leadership cabal.

Understandably hostility to Labour, the party of government, has grown and grown. Last month there was a consultative ballot of the CWU’s London membership. A crushing 96% voted in favour of ending affiliation, though some pro-Labour union militants have questioned the conduct of the poll, especially the way ballot papers were processed by branches. Nonetheless, the mood is unmistakable.

At the Trades Union Congress in Liverpool, the CWU proposed a motion calling on the TUC general council to “convene a conference of all affiliated unions to consider how to achieve effective political representation for our members”. It was defeated by around three to two. The motivation was clearly a questioning of the link with Labour. This was something that most union bureaucrats were unhappy about discussing, even if the CWU had been forced, however reluctantly, to put it on the TUC’s agenda by rank and file pressure.

The CWU’s motion to the TUC and the London consultative ballot has been triumphantly reported by the Socialist Party in England and Wales. According to The Socialist, it shows the need for “a new workers’ party” (The Socialist September 30). For some this means the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, for others Respect, Scottish Socialist Party, Convention of the Left, Solidarity or some other dreadful halfway house. However, many CWU militants did not see it like that. Amongst those behind the motion were members of the Labour Representation Committee. Their intention, doubtless prompted by the anger amongst CWU members, was that the trade union movement as a whole should be given the opportunity to discuss all the issues surrounding the political representation of the trade unions. They certainly wanted to answer those calling for disaffiliation.

However, while there is this groundswell of antagonism against Labour, there is nothing viable on offer as an alternative. Under those conditions calls to ditch the Labour link are in effect calls to depoliticise the CWU and restrict its activity to the purely trade union sphere. This is not something that Marxists should support.

At this stage we should be demanding that union leaders withdraw their blank-cheque backing for Gordon Brown: finance to Labour should be made dependent on the party agreeing to a set of minimum conditions, including a pledge to ditch privatisation once and for all, an end to the current government-backed Royal Mail offensive on jobs and conditions, and protection of hard-earned pensions for all workers. In the meantime support should only be offered to those Labour candidates prepared to accept key union demands.

As might be expected, neither of the two fringe meetings the CWU held at Labour Party conference in Brighton dealt with affiliation. But strangely neither did they deal with the most important issue: the current dispute with Royal Mail. It was something that CWU militants in Brighton challenged. And, as it happened, around 200 striking postal workers from London delivery offices attended the September 27 demonstration outside the Labour conference.

In actual fact, the CWU leadership’s silence about the dispute is symptomatic of its lack of a strategy. It desperately wants negotiations with Royal Mail to get a deal and hopes that the large majority for strike action will be a big enough stick. Unfortunately, CWU leaders are not sharing with the members their thinking on what happens afterwards. If they get to negotiate, the biggest danger for postal workers is that they will sell at least some jobs in order to settle the dispute.

This much has been clear from the start, when union leaders complained that Royal Mail was intent on sackings without consulting them. Their objection seemed not to be job losses as such: just that they needed to be carried out voluntarily after due process. For our part, we do not oppose new technology and ‘modernisation’ per se: we demand that working hours should be cut and pay and conditions improved as a result of more efficient working methods. However, the union leadership hopes to use the ballot result to pressure Royal Mail into negotiating a ‘compromise settlement’ where jobs and working conditions will be exchanged for peanuts.

This is at variance with what has motivated postal workers to go on strike again and again and to vote ‘yes’ to national action. As far as most of them are concerned, their efforts have been directed quite definitely at saving jobs. Not at doing a deal with Royal Mail that involves not sacking quite so many as it would have liked.

Most disturbingly, elements of the left that are to be found within the CWU, largely SPEW and Socialist Workers Party members, have not produced any workable strategy either. They have left such things to the union bureaucrats, with the predictable consequences that we see them making things up on the hoof. There is no challenge from these sources to the current line of the union.

It is crucial that the autonomy achieved by local CWU branch activists in mobilising for local action in the current dispute be built upon. The industry is crying out for rank and file organisation. But most of all we need to encourage postal workers to move beyond the limits of trade union demands into the sphere of politics.

CWU members must be won to fight for a political programme based on working class independence, extreme democracy and genuine internationalism – ie, to the programme of Marxism. Unless workers’ militancy is accompanied by a fight for a party that champions such a programme, even in the most favourable of conditions it cannot hope to achieve more than partial, temporary gains.

In other words, a break with Labourism must be the aim, not with Labour.

Conservatives prepare for massive attacks on the working class

The Tory conference gave us a flavour of what a Cameron government will bring, writes Eddie Ford

Unemployed? Public sector worker? On incapacity benefit? A woman and not far off retirement age? Well, start to get seriously worried – as should many, many, others. At Bournemouth this week the Tories were red in tooth and claw, revelling in their role as the tough guys who will make the tough decisions to pull UK PLC back from the brink of calamitous debt and economic ruination. Steely-eyed supermen to the rescue of British capitalism, unafraid to cut, slash and burn. Yes, the ‘nasty party’ is back.

George Osborne

So hypocritically declaring that “we are all in this together”, the Tory shadow chancellor, George Osborne – the brilliant economist who virulently opposed the nationalisation of Northern Rock and attempts to lessen the impact of the financial crisis through ‘quantitative easing’ – proceeded to reveal his plans for a full-scale attack on the public sector and the ‘undeserving’ poor, such as the work-shy unemployed and the lying and lazy on incapacity benefit. Or, as the Tories like to phrase it, of course, cutting back on ‘red tape’, ‘bureaucracy’ and the ‘nanny state’.

Hence Osborne announced that a Conservative government – a very real and dreadful possibility – would impose a one-year pay freeze in 2011 for the four million public sector workers earning more than £18,000. These workers will no doubt be delighted, if not positively grateful, to learn that Osborne is doing this for their own good – as the pay freeze is the “best way to try to protect your job during this period”, he explained,  “equivalent to saving 100,000 public sector jobs”.

As for those one million public sectors workers on less than £18,000 a year, they – rejoice – would still be ‘entitled’ to a pay rise of … almost certainly bugger all. Of course, Osborne hastily added, our brave boys and girls serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere would be exempt from the pay freeze – indeed, their ‘operational allowance’ would be doubled from £2,400 a year to £4,800. So everyone join the army then?

Osborne went on to state that one of the “hard choices that could not be avoided” was raising the retirement age, arguing that Labour’s current proposals were not “ambitious enough”. Thus the Tories would lift the pension age from 65 to 66 for men, but this would not happen until “at least” 2016 – up to 10 years earlier than under Labour’s plans, which envisages the state pension age for men gradually rising from 65 to 68 between 2024 to 2046. As for women, said Osborne, it would be 2020 “at the earliest” before they see their retirement age raised to 66 as well – though a review has been promised to further examine this knotty issue, with Tory leader David Cameron reassuring us that it would “take account of the interests of women”.

Obviously, bringing the move forward in such a way would mean that many more workers, particularly those aged between 49 and 59, would have to work for an extra year before qualifying for a state pension. Some would call this nothing more than a con-trick – getting already poorly paid workers to work longer for less. But for the Tories this is a price well worth paying, claiming that their scheme to raise the retirement age would save “the country” £13 billion a year.

Playing to the populist gallery, Osborne vowed – with bloodcurdling conviction – that a Conservative government would “target” tax evasion and offshore tax havens, sternly telling the bankers that he believed in the “free market, not a free ride” (audience cheers!) – and that there would be big trouble if he discovered that taxpayers’ money was being “unreasonably diverted” into paying for “bigger pay and bonuses” for the former masters of the universe hoping to recover their position. Doubtless quaking in their boots by now, the bankers were further warned by Osborne that he “reserved the right to take further action” against them, using the tax system if necessary. How he would do this was left unexplained.

Osborne also said he would abolish the national child trust fund, as it only benefited “the rich”, and remove tax credits from families earning more than £50,000. Furthermore, a Tory government would restore the earnings link for the basic state pension in the “next parliament”; slash the cost of Whitehall bureaucracy by a third; cut government ministers’ pay by a savage 5%; reduce the overall number of Westminster MPs by 10%; close off parliament’s “unaffordable” pension scheme to new members, and naturally “protect the most vulnerable” by preserving child benefit, winter fuel payments and free TV licences for pensioners.

Of course, the grisly showpiece of the Tory conference was the grand unveiling of the “ambitious” plans to attack the sick and ill – sorry, I mean to ‘incentivise’ them into finding gainful employment. Perhaps this is what Osborne meant when he pledged a “complete change” from the last 12 years of Labour government. And what Cameron had in mind when he described the ‘anti-sick’ propositions as lying at the centre of the “new” Conservative Party project.

David Cameron

So it was the Tory leader himself who announced that he hopes to impose a £25-a-week benefit cut on up to 500,000 incapacity benefit claimants – talk about throwing out scraps of juicy red meat for the hungry bigots in Daily Mail-land to veraciously consume. This noble end is to be achieved by initiating a more vigorous ‘medical assessment’ process, which with total scientific objectivity will discover that these half a million indolents are indeed quite “capable of working” – what shirkers. If so, the happy souls will be shunted off incapacity benefit, which currently stands at a princely £80.90 a week, and onto jobseekers’ allowance – now worth a not-so princely £63.40 a week. Bingo, or so the Tories say, you save £600 million over the first three years and £1 billion over a five-year parliament. So there is “compassionate conservatism” for you, as we all know that the Eton-educated David Cameron could easily survive on £63.40 a week (indeed, we would fully expect him to make impressive ‘savings’ every week).

This “tough and tender” approach, so boasted the Tory leader, will form the backbone of a “big, bold, radical scheme” to get millions of people back to work. How come? Because the £600 million saved by ‘incentivising’ the sick back to the wonders of work will pay for the Tories to ditch the New Deal and erect a single one-stop shop, ‘back to work’ benefit (or ‘super-benefit’, if you like) which will include the present 2.6 million incapacity benefit claimants and lone parents. The scheme would also incorporate 100,000 additional apprenticeships, 50,000 additional training places at colleges and 50,000 “work-pairing” places for young people.

Naturally, after six months of unemployment on your Tory ‘back to work’ benefit, “work experience” and “training” will become compulsory. That is, you will have to work for your dole, being forced to participate in so-called “community work” for up to one year – at the end of which the unwilling conscripts will have to undergo a fresh reassessment and accordingly start a fresh ‘back-to-work’ cycle. Of course, in reality many if not most of these “training” centres are nothing much more than semi-militarised detention centres seemingly designed by an evil genius for the sole purpose of making  you feel worthless.

The Tories have openly admitted that their near sadistic plans for the unemployed are largely based on Australia’s various ‘work for the dole’ projects – which were first proposed by the Liberal Party in 1987, trialed in that country in 1997, then permanently enshrined in 1998. Therefore anyone unemployed for 12 months or more, and who has been judged by their ‘job network member’ as having a “pattern of work avoidance”, is referred to the ‘full-time work for the dole’ programme. Naturally, this scheme offers no additional benefit payment – forget it – but substantially increases the required total mandatory participation time to 1,100 hours, with a minimum of 50 hours per fortnight. The programme usually takes about 10 months to complete.

Needless to say, the ‘working for your dole’ programme becomes a wonderful source of cheap labour for the government and the bosses – virtual modern-day slave labour even. So during the 2000 Olympic Games all those of an eligible age who had been unemployed for three months or more and lived in Sydney were made to participate in various Olympic-related schemes and projects.

More scandalously still, in December 2002 the ‘drought force initiative’ was enacted. Prior to that, all the ‘work for the dole’ projects were supposedly meant to “directly benefit the public” – whether in the shape of community organisations or civic assets. However, the ‘drought force’ scheme expanded its remit to also include work for privately owned agricultural properties in those areas deemed to be experiencing “exceptional circumstances” (ie, drought-hit areas).

Now, thanks to the Tories, it looks like Australia may well come to the UK – and unfortunately we are not referring to the weather.

And, in true Tory style, this ‘back to work’ programme will be run largely by voluntary groups, especially “faith”-based ones, of course – that is, institutionally corrupt charities and assorted private sector outfits out to make a quick buck. To this end, treasury rules would be altered to allow the government to use “benefit savings” once someone had found work in order to pay the ‘welfare-to-work provider’ – that is, private sector providers would be given 20% initial funding for each jobless person taken, with the remainder paid by the state after the unemployed person has been in work for one year.

In other words, we see an essential return to the callous ethos of the Victorian Poor Laws – try to make life as unbearable as possible for the unemployed in order to ‘motivate’ them to accept just about any old crap job going. Once the welfare/benefits ‘safety net’ has been effectively removed, you are in a prime position to force people into the labour market under virtually the worst possible conditions imaginable – which in turn leads to a general downward pressure on pay and conditions for all workers. Welcome to the Tories’ brave new world.

For sure, unemployment will continue to rise this year and in all probability will keep on climbing in the next year. If the Tories get to implement their spending cuts blitzkrieg – delivering a short, sharp, shock to the UK economy – while at the same time withdrawing the various Keynesian monetary and fiscal stimuli, then unemployment could quite easily reach some four million or so. However, if large numbers of public sector workers are made redundant and there are indeed ‘apocalyptic’ cuts in public spending in 2010 – as many in the Conservative Party want and desire – then five million or more unemployed is not entirely inconceivable. Self-evidently, this would represent a massive attack upon our class.

Of course, in one sense the Tories have embarked on a big gamble – and in doing so have given Labour an open target. By attacking so many sections of the population, they risk aiding a Labour recovery as the election draws nearer. But they know that Labour’s programme is for cuts too, only enacted with a little less enthusiasm perhaps. Besides, the Conservatives have been reassured by recent poll findings that a clear majority of the population favours some ‘belt-tightening’ as a way of resolving the economic crisis. In the absence of a working class alternative the nationalist-inspired “we are all in it together” can have a good deal of resonance, particularly when the Tories are also seen to be making noises against such easy targets as greedy bankers and MPs on the make.

Although the signs do not look good, it is not too late for the left to get its act together in time for the general election. Both the Tories and New Labour are set on attacking our class to make us pay for the crisis of the system they both defend – a system that is clearly seen to have failed. The need for Marxism could not be more evident.

Writing on wall for Brown

Brown’s primary objective at Brighton was to present himself as the saviour of capitalism, writes Eddie Ford

“We’re not done yet!” – so proclaimed Gordon Brown at this week’s Labour Party conference. On more than one occasion. Maybe so, but that is not what the latest Mori survey suggests – with the Conservatives on 36%, Labour on 24% and the Liberal Democrats on 25%. This is the first time since 1982 that Labour has come third in such a poll, and all the various other such surveys and polls indicate similar results.

Unfortunately for the Brown team, depressing poll returns are not the only bad omens. Far more significant than Mori’s statistical tea-leaves, The Sun - the newspaper that claimed not entirely without reason to be “wot won it” for John Major in 1992 – has finally deserted Labour and gone back to its natural ideological home, the Tories. So its front-page headline reads: “Labour’s lost it” – and goes on to inform us: “After 12 long years in power, Labour has lost its way and now it has lost us too” (September 30). Cripes, maybe the writing really is on the wall for Labour.

Perhaps naively, home secretary Alan Johnson responded to The Sun’s electoral body blow by saying it was “electors that decide elections, not newspapers” – a sentiment echoed by Brown, who ventured the idea that he would, of course, “like the support of every newspaper”, but it is “people that decide elections”. Very profound. However, the plain fact of the matter is that it is very rare for The Sun not to sniff which way the populist wind is blowing. Hence Rupert Murdoch ruthlessly ditched the Tories in 1997, as he knew they did not have a hope in hell of winning the general election – or as The Sun put it at the time, Blair’s New Labour represented the “breath of fresh air this great country needs” in contrast to the “tired, divided and rudderless” Conservative Party under the final dog days of John Major (March 18 1997).

Similarly, David Cameron – according to George Pascoe-Watson, The Sun’s political editor – is now apparently the man with the “vision, the energy, the drive, the ideas to take the country forward”, and The Sun eagerly anticipates in particular that the Tory leader will “cut away a lot of the red tape which is strangling British business”. As if things were not bad enough, Labour now suddenly finds itself confronted by a formidable and rapacious foe in the shape of the tabloid ‘fourth estate’.

Unsurprisingly then, with Labour facing the very real prospect of a resounding electoral defeat – possibly even a cataclysmic one akin to the victory of the Ramsay MacDonald’s Conservative-National Labour-Liberal coalition when Labour was reduced to a mere 52 seats – morale among the Labour troops is beginning to plummet, even amongst senior apparatchiks within the cabinet. Expressing his frustration with such backsliding elements, the chancellor, Alastair Darling, sharply lambasted his colleagues who appear to have lost the “will to live” – comparing them to a “gutless football side” who have “allowed their heads to drop well before the final whistle”. Instead of indulging in such defeatist sentiments, Darling told The Observer: “We have got to come out fighting” (September 27).

Faced with such extraordinarily unpromising conditions, Brown’s speech this week at Brighton attempted to pull the iron from the fire – though first we had to endure yet another sickly-sweet, lachrymose introduction by his wife, Sarah, who described him, Michelle Obama-style, as “my hero” who “loves his country” and “will always, always, put you first”.

Therefore Brown urged party activists to “reach inside ourselves for the strength of our convictions” and to “dream big dreams and watch our country soar” (a reference to Goethe’s Faust - probably something The Sun missed). As part of this big dreaming, or “vision thing” as a US president once memorably put it, Brown announced a shopping list of new policies, such as: 10 hours of free childcare a week for 250,000 two-year-olds from families “on modest or middle incomes”; a plan to house 16 and 17-year-old single parents in state-run “shared houses” rather than council flats; a £1 billion “innovation fund” to boost industry; a new National Care Service to “provide security for pensioners for generations to come”; a “commitment” to allocate a whopping 0.7% of GDP to international aid; the abandonment of a “compulsory” ID card scheme for British citizens; a pledge to force the courts to issue more Drinking Banning Orders, or ‘drink Asbos’; a draft bill to abolish the remaining unelected Lords before the next general election; proposals to implement a ‘right of recall’ of MPs if more than 25% of their constituents demand one, and – in a move which caught virtually everyone by surprise – casually tossed in a reference to a referendum on “voting reform”.

However, genuine democrats should not get too excited by the latter remark, it does have to be said. Brown’s stated preference, if indeed that is what it is, is for the ‘alternative vote’ method, as used in the Australian House of Representatives – being not a proportional electoral system, but rather a majoritarian one which looks extremely similar to the current ‘first past the post’ mechanism. Indeed, the results produced by an AV system could conceivably be even more distorted, or less democratic, than under FPTP – making electoral life for ‘extreme’ or non-mainstream parties (eg, BNP, Communist Party, etc) just that little bit harder than it already is, and under AV coalition governments composed of mainstream or establishment parties would be no more likely to arise than they are under FPTP. No wonder Brown is prepared, if need be, to accept such a voting system.

Of course, Brown’s primary objective at Brighton was to present himself as the saviour of capitalism – the man of steel who took the lead and made the decisions that had to be made in order to prevent the entire global economic-financial system plunging into the abyss with near unfathomable consequences. Unlike the spineless and irresponsible Tories, Brown implied, who would have let the banks go under due to their dogmatic and selfish adherence to the Thatcherite ideology of ‘never bucking the market’. What “failed” last autumn, he declared to conference cheers, was the “rightwing fundamentalism that says you just leave everything to the market” and “says that free markets should not just be free, but value-free”.

Well, he – Gordon Brown, no less – had no fear to ‘buck the market’ when it came to the crunch and when the Tories “were faced with the economic call of the century”, they “called it wrong”. Wrong, wrong, wrong – and of course Brown got the prolonged ovation he wanted, and needed.

Brown obviously has a point, of course – it would be churlish to say anything else. The Tories’ essentially laissez-faire approach would almost certainly have seen them copy the criminal stupidity of George Bush and ‘do a Lehman’ – that is, petulantly refuse to ‘throw money’ at the problem and thus kick off a domino effect that would have triggered a tsunami throughout the UK’s entire credit-financial system. Whoops apocalypse. After all, the Tories adamantly opposed the nationalisation of Northern Rock, so what other measures would they also have opposed?

Furthermore, it is clear – as the financial pages of the newspapers love to point out – that the economy is improving, albeit sluggishly and tenuously. In other words, the economy has stopped going down the plughole quite as fast as it was previously, and in that sense Gordon Brown and the other governments that followed fashion – by massive state intervention in the markets – self-evidently acted in the best immediate and short-term interests of capitalism. The fact that the ‘free market’ system is still with us at all in its current shape and form is testament to that fact, especially when you consider the long-standing and persistent rumours (or leaks) that at one stage last year George Bush was on the verge of declaring a state of emergency – even drawing-up contingency plans for a ‘limited’ period of military rule.

However, having said all that, we can see that increasing swathes of the population are being persuaded to believe that the ‘credit crunch’ and the general economic downturn was Gordon Brown-induced – not an inevitable consequence, or by-product, of the ceaseless ‘boom-and-bust’ cycle of capitalism, regardless of who happens to be sitting in No10.

Worse, the idea that cutting public spending – though, of course, dressed up as being ‘anti-waste’, ‘anti-red tape’ and so on – is the only way out of the mess we are still in, is steadily acquiring the status of ‘common sense’ in official political discourse. Hence all the mainstream parties are now committed to cut-backs and ‘cost reductions’. The only debate – if you can call it that – being about your degree of enthusiasm for a spot of muscular axe-wielding.

Of course, those who argue for the continuation – if not an intensification – of Keynesian stimulation have more than a valid point. Unemployment is still going up and the recovery, such as it is, could easily flounder – and we could find ourselves stuck in a classic ‘W-shaped’ downturn. But such voices will not be heard come the next general election amongst the clamour for cuts, cuts, cuts.

Peter Manson spoke to Labour left MP John McDonnell about the Labour Party conference, the general election and beyond

How do you see the main issues at the Labour conference?

The New Labour leadership will be trying to use the conference for yet another relaunch of Gordon Brown. If it’s anything like the public relations exercise of his TUC speech, it will be extremely dispiriting and disillusioning – it will hardly be successful in terms of launching the general election campaign.

What they will be trying to set out is some form of difference between themselves and the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, but they have all now reached a consensus on the key political issue – they expect working class people to pay for this crisis, not the bankers themselves, and they’re not looking for any transformation of the system. They are now looking for a massive onslaught in terms of cuts in public services, attacks on trade unions and undermining any reaction against neoliberal policies and the restoration of market dominance. I don’t think there’s any discernible difference between New Labour’s position and that of the other main parties.

It could be argued that the Tories are playing into Brown’s hands by declaring their intention to make deeper and further cuts with relish, whereas Brown will make the same cuts with tender, loving care.

That might have been the case a week ago, but the scene has changed so dramatically. We’ve just had Ed Balls announcing education cuts on a scale we haven’t seen for years – there seems to be a Dutch auction going on about who can be more brutal in their attacks on the working class in terms of cutbacks in public expenditure and, inevitably, assaults on people’s pensions and welfare benefits.

It is possibly the most disillusioning exercise we’ve seen in politics in recent generations. Not only will people say, ‘There’s no difference between you’: there is no difference between them in the content of their attacks on working people.

It reminds me of Tony Blair’s first election victory in 1997, when he promised to keep in place the Tory cuts for two years. People voted Labour on the grounds that they couldn’t be any worse than the Tories and that seems to be the basis on which trade union leaders are recommending a Labour vote.

Some trade union leaders. They are working on the basis that you might as well have the devil you know rather than risk the Tories.

Remember, in 97 what happened was that people marched to get rid of the Tories. It wasn’t that they had any confidence in Blair – the electorate didn’t really have a clue as to what the ramifications of his victory would be.

When you are in the situation where all the parties are virtually presenting the same programme, people react according to what they are actually experiencing at the time – they will march again to get rid of the incumbent government. New Labour is seen as pursuing the same policies of attacking working people as the Tories and, despite the savage cuts proposed by the Liberal Democrats last week, I think people will want to take it out on the government.

What happened to Keynes? I thought we had to spend our way out of the crisis, but all of a sudden, with a general election looming, that seems to have gone by the board.

There are three examples of Labour being in power when a crisis like this has hit – two were under Ramsay MacDonald and Jim Callaghan. You could argue that Keynes was a competing economic theory in the 30s, but you couldn’t argue that about Callaghan’s time. Both MacDonald and Callaghan rejected Keynesianism, let alone any form of socialist practice. What happened to them? They turned on their own class, cut welfare benefits, increased unemployment and slashed public expenditure. The reaction was absolute opposition from working people and the removal of Labour from power for a decade.

The third example was Attlee, who came to power in a crisis, when the country was bankrupt, and successfully used taxation and public ownership to redistribute wealth and establish the welfare state. What is interesting is the ignoring of the Attlee experience and New Labour’s seizing upon Ramsay MacDonald and Jim Callaghan, with Keynesianism going out of the window. Not that I think Keynesianism is the solution, but even in their own terms New Labour has rejected an alternative. It’s panic, absolute panic, that is setting in. Every policy is aimed above all at trying to secure a continuation of power.

Just as the media and many commentators were urging Ramsay MacDonald and Jim Callaghan to be ‘responsible’ and look after the ‘national interest’, exactly the same has been pouring out of the pages of The Guardian, The Times, the FT and the rest. They are all urging ‘responsibility’, which means cuts.

It is almost as though the world has lost its senses, even on Keynesian terms. They are introducing massive cuts during a recession, which will produce more unemployment and keep the economy on a downward spiral.

You are convenor of the Trade Union Coordinating Group. What is the TUGC’s role?

We established the TUCG at the TUC congress in 2008. Initially there were four unions which had worked together in a few individual campaigns such as Public Services Not Private Profit, and they felt a more consistent alliance was needed. They were advocating similar policies and looking for further coordination and campaigning, whether that be public meetings, organising demonstrations or even coordinating action in the future. The TUCG has now doubled in size to eight unions.

It was quite clear what divisions there were within the TUC this year. TUCG trade unions are calling for a much more aggressive approach in terms of industrial relations, so that people don’t have to pay for this crisis in terms of cuts in wages or conditions or their jobs. They have a much more independent line – it is just not acceptable to expect people to support a government which has turned on its own class.

What unions are involved?

The original four were the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, Public and Commercial Services Union, Fire Brigades Union and National Union of Journalists. Now there are also the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, National Association of Probation Officers, Prison Officers Association and United Road Transport Union. Only the Bakers Union is affiliated to Labour.

How do you see the TUCG in relation to, for example, the Labour Representation Committee?

Well, to be honest, the TUCG is a trade union grouping, which addresses a whole range of issues from a trade union perspective and will prove increasingly effective, I think, as we go into this next period, whoever is in government. Whoever it is, they are clearly going to come for people’s jobs, working conditions and pensions, and the trade unions are the only organisations that can play a leading role in protecting them.

There is also a role for the TUCG in the discussion about future representation as well as future action. It will be convening a conference aiming for February, looking at a strategy for the unions in the run-up to the general election and beyond it.

There is no formal link between that and the LRC, which is a separate political organisation. But the TUCG is one of many initiatives being undertaken at the moment, whereby people are feeling their way forward on how they can make alliances across industrial, economic and political struggles, and what structures best suit those struggles at any one point in time.

Just as the LRC is an attempt to form alliances of the left both within and outside the Labour Party, here you have a group of trade unions that are allying to make themselves stronger and more effective, but that are also looking to work with others in the promotion of political objectives as well. So the TUCG unions came behind the People’s Charter, and will want to work with groups like the LRC in campaigning on issues they agree upon.

In the general election you will be a Labour candidate, but the message you are putting over is that there is no difference between the three main parties. So on what basis will you be campaigning for a Labour vote?

It’s interesting how many individual Labour candidates in the general election will be standing on policies that they’ll be advocating locally and will have no reflection on what’s happening nationally. They will be pursuing policies that a number of us have been advocating for a period of time.

Those candidates will be opposed to working people having to pay for this crisis and, calling for the redistribution of wealth and power, advocating public ownership, arguing for peace, opposing the war in Iraq and calling for troops out of Afghanistan. That will be a fairly common platform for which a number of Labour candidates will be campaigning, because it’s the only way in which they’ll be able to save their seats. I expect that there will be quite a large number of Labour candidates who will be distancing themselves from the policies they’ve even voted for over recent years.

Unfortunately, however, a tiny percentage of the electorate vote on the basis of what the local candidate, as opposed to their party, is saying.

That’s why if there isn’t any change in Labour policy nationally there’s a good chance of a wipe-out. The only thing that will save Labour – not as a government, but from being wiped out – will be the incompetence of the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

Some of the TUCG unions may well give at least tacit support to non-Labour candidates. How do you view their position?

Well, I’m a Labour MP, so I’ll be standing on a Labour platform. I’ll be putting forward policies I’ve been advocating for a number of years.

Individual unions will make their own decisions, but I think the recommendation of TUCG unions to their members on how to vote will be based on a critique of the record of the particular candidates and the policies they’re pursuing. I think you’ll see a number of unions supporting candidates based on a realistic assessment of their track record.

Even some of the most New Labour-loyal union leaders – Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, for example – are arguing that members should only vote for candidates who support union policies. We’ll see whether that translates into reality, but I think TUCG unions will take such a position.

Do you think any substantial left-of-Labour groups will stand?

Various discussions are going on, I’m sure, as reported in your own newspaper. I’m sure there will be non-Labour left candidates, but there seems to be an increasing awareness that they shouldn’t be running against Labour left candidates.

At the same time I’m hoping that, in the general election campaign, from somewhere there will be a political debate. If that comes from left candidates in the Labour Party, and from left candidates outside, at least working people will be able to see that some people are arguing for an alternative.

We’ll see what happens in the general election. However, the main debate about the future of the left will come afterwards.

Iran: mass protests re-ignite

Yassamine Mather calls for support and solidarity for workers in Iran

If anyone was in any doubt about the continuation of the political crisis in Iran, demonstrations on Friday September 18 in Tehran, Tabriz, Mashad, Shiraz, Isfahan and elsewhere put an end to that.

Tens of thousands of Iranians, ignoring repeated warnings by the security forces, used the state-sponsored demonstrations for ‘Qods day’ (Jerusalem day) on the last Friday of Ramadan to voice their opposition to the government and the clerical regime’s supreme leader. Undeterred by two months of executions, arrests and show trials, the opposition used the opportunity to fill the streets and voice their protests.

Earlier, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had once again done harm to the Palestinian cause by repeating his abhorrent holocaust-denial claims: “The holocaust was a false pretext for the establishment of Israel in 1948. It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim … Why shouldn’t we be allowed to research this? … All western governments are victims of a Zionist conspiracy that dictates their foreign policy.” Never mind capitalism or imperialism – it is all to do with conspiracies. Many will remember anti-Semites making similar remarks in the 20th century.

But it is not just this anti-Semitic message that helps the Zionists. A section of Iranian youth who have heard nothing but empty rhetoric about Palestine, all mouthed by a reactionary dictatorship, are not as supportive of the Palestinian cause as older generations. In a country where the majority of the population live in poverty, those who are foolish enough to believe the Shia state’s exaggerated claims relating to financial support for Hezbollah or Hamas blame such largesse in ‘foreign aid’ for their own destitution.

However, last Friday was mainly about opposition to Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and Ahmadinejad. The demonstrators were shouting for the Iranian government to go, with slogans such as: “Death to the dictator. We will revenge our dead. Death to Khamenei. Coup d’etat government, resign, resign! Dictator, dictator, have shame; the Iranian people are ready to revolt – this is our last warning.” A number of slogans were addressed to the bassij (Islamic militia) – some calling on them to stop siding with the oppressors and join the people, others warning them of the consequences of killing protesters.

A minority were shouting a reactionary, nationalist slogan: “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon. My life for my country.” This was a reference to the regime’s support for Palestinians in Gaza and Shias in Lebanon, and it was promoted mainly by rightwing forces. This slogan had been rejected out of hand the week before the demonstration by sections of the left.

A statement by the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers of Iran (Rahe Kargar), distributed last week, reminded Iranians of their shared destiny with the oppressed in Palestine and Lebanon. Saying that Palestine should not be equated with Hamas. Rahe Kargar pointed to the unprecedented solidarity shown by people throughout the world for the protest movement in Iran. The leaflet called on demonstrators to reciprocate this internationalism and proposed the slogan, “Wake up – Iran has become Palestine”.

This was a timely reminder for sections of the Iranian left, many of whom are increasingly tailing bourgeois liberal politics rather than coming up with a leftwing alternative. The Iranian working class cannot struggle for power in one country; if we are serious about ditching the Stalinist idiocy of socialism in one country, the tasks of the Iranian working class cannot be limited to the borders of Iran. More importantly, whether Iranian rightwing nationalists like it or not, it is the US and western powers who in recent months have associated the two issues of Iran and Palestine more than ever before.

Obama

In late August news from the Middle East was dominated by claims that Barack Obama had managed to convince Israel to freeze its construction of new West Bank settlements in exchange for the US adopting more stringent policies regarding the Iranian nuclear plan. Soon afterwards, especially following the visit of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Europe, leaders in London, Paris and Berlin were singing from the same song sheet. We were ‘reliably’ informed that US special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell was preparing to announce the resumption of peace talks by the end of September. The American promise to take a firmer line against the Iranian nuclear plan was supposed to convince Jerusalem it needed to get on board the initiative. The US, Britain and France plan to pressure the UN security council to expand sanctions against the Islamic Republic, including sanctions on its gas and petrol industries – a move that is claimed will destroy Iran’s already collapsing economy.

Less than a week after these pronouncements it became clear that Israel had officially approved the construction of more than 500 new homes in the occupied West Bank. This is in addition to Netanyahu’s refusal to apply any freeze at all to the colonisation of Greater Jerusalem, or to stop construction projects that have already been started. The new homes will be built in six settlements – all of which are included in the blocs Israel wants to retain under any peace agreement, according to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper.

On the other hand, despite news of direct talks to be held in early October, threats of military action against Iran are increasing. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal in early September warned Obama that the United States must quickly put a stop to the Iranian nuclear programme, otherwise Israel will bomb the facilities: “An Israeli strike on Iran would be the most dangerous foreign policy issue Obama could face,” the paper declared. Another Republican hawk, former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, maintains that additional sanctions alone will not be enough to make the Iranians abandon their nuclear ambitions. William Cohen, who served as defence secretary during the Bill Clinton presidency, says that “there is a countdown taking place” and that Israel “is not going to sit indifferently on the sidelines and watch Iran continue on its way toward becoming a nuclear power.”

Netanyahu has skilfully used the huge general onslaught against Obama by the forces of the US right, with whom the Israeli PM is allied. Together they have managed to deflect the pressure on Israel to freeze colonisation of the occupied territories, and divert attention to the Iranian ‘threat’. At the moment it seems that the US right and their Israeli ally are ahead. George Mitchell’s trip to the Middle East got nowhere, and it is unlikely that Obama will make any progress in talks with Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

We in Hands Off the People of Iran have always maintained that threats of further sanctions and war have nothing to do with the alleged development of Iranian nuclear weapons. All the evidence suggests that the Iranian regime’s plan is (eventually) to achieve nuclear weapons capability, rather than actually produce nuclear weapons.

However, we are witnessing a conflict between two alternative US strategies regarding Iran’s future role in the region. During his election campaign Obama seemed prepared for some accommodation, allowing the Islamic regime limited regional influence in exchange for better cooperation with the US. But the US right and Israel preferred to continue the Bush policy of no accommodation, tighter sanctions, regime change from the outside and the threat of military action. The American promise to take a firmer line against the Iranian nuclear plan was supposed to convince Jerusalem to get on board the initiative, yet less than a year into the Obama presidency, pressure from Israel and the US right – at a time of political uncertainty in Iran, combined with Ahmadinejad’s holocaust denial – has ensured there is no progress in this area. The threat of an Israeli military strike against Iran, as well as the possibility of new sanctions, is today as serious as ever before.

Whichever way one looks at the problem, the issues of Palestine and Iran cannot be separated. Yet an oppressive regime in Iran cannot be a genuine ally of the Palestinians; and the liberation of the Iranian people cannot be achieved while the region continues to suffer war, occupation and repression.

On September 18, prompted by the left, some demonstrators in Tehran had the right slogans: “Whether in Gaza or in Iran, stop killing people; Iran has become like Palestine.” The dominance of this slogan in the Tehran demonstration showed the presence and effective role of the left. The demonstration was also unique in a number of other ways. As many commentators have said, it marked a new phase in the continuing struggle between the government and the Iranian people. The massive turnout almost two months after the protests of June and July prove the vulnerability of the unpopular president and government.

New phase

The composition of the protest differed from earlier demonstrations, in that protesters in Tehran and in other major cities were almost uniquely from the poorer districts. The middle classes only came out mid-afternoon, when reports of the size of the demonstrations assured them of safety. It was the first real nationwide protest – tens of thousands came out in Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashad, Tabriz, Rasht, etc. Older women were present in large numbers, probably for the first time since the recent wave of demonstrations started. According to many accounts, Iranians had left their homes in the morning of September 18 fearful that they would be in a small protest surrounded by vicious bassij militia. Only when they reached the agreed assembly places did they become aware of how large the protests were.

Many recount with joy the fleeing of the state’s ‘Hezbollahis’ and their oversized speakers, once they realised how big the opposition protests were going to be. In many of the films on the internet, the faint voices of pro-government demonstrators are being drowned out by slogans from the much larger and more militant opposition. Before the demonstration, it had become clear that Ahmadinejad and his government favoured using the full might of the state to frighten the population. However, the supreme leader and his allies in the conservative faction of the regime, increasingly worried that further repression might challenge the very existence of the Islamic regime, tried to portray the Qods demonstration as a day of ‘national unity’. In the end, of course, the day exposed the deep divisions in Iranian society for all to see.

Although tear gas was used and a number of people were arrested, the level of force use against the demonstrators was less than on previous demonstrations and certainly less than threatened. It will be interesting to see how the protesters will react to this clear retreat of the supreme leader.

Another important factor regarding the September 18 protest was the continuation of the protests at an important football match in the evening. The spectators’ anti-government slogans could be heard for miles around the stadium, but the national radio and television company was forced to abandon live coverage of this rather crucial game between Estghlal and Steel Azin, blaming faulty cameras in the stadium! Foolishly the match was broadcast live on radio, so very few people in Iran are in any doubt about the nature of the state broadcasting authority’s ‘technical’ difficulties. In another victory for the demonstrators on the same day, Ahmadinejad was forced to cut short an interview on national TV, as shouts of “Death to the dictator” could clearly be heard during the broadcast.

No doubt the events that day will  shape the coming weeks and months. Schools and universities are opening this week, although many campuses will remain shut until November. The experiences of the demonstration and the football match clearly show that, as soon as a crowd gathers, political opposition to the regime will be voiced. On the other hand, short of calling for a curfew and direct military rule, how can the government avoid public gatherings? And, if it does go towards a curfew, how will reformist opponents within its own ranks react? Are they going to ban football matches? Will they close down universities and high schools?

In a clear sign of retreat, Khamenei’s speech at the end of Ramadan continued a theme taken up earlier in September, in an attempt to pacify sections of the opposition. Khamenei had earlier rejected the idea that foreign powers were involved in the country’s post-election demonstrations: “I do not accuse leaders of the recent events of being stooges of aliens, including the US and Britain, since it was not proved for me. We should not proceed in dealing with those behind the protests on the basis of rumours and guesswork.”¹ On September 20, with ‘reformist’ ex-president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani standing a couple of metres from him, he warned government supporters against accusing opposition members of wrongdoing without proof: “While a suspect’s own confession was admissible, his testimony or accusations could not be used to implicate others.”² A clear dismissal of the show trials which have dominated the government’s agenda in the last few weeks, where ‘reformist’ prisoners accused Rafsanjani and fellow reformists Mohammad Khatami and Mir Hossein Moussavi of collaborating with foreign enemies.

Khamenei’s speech has pacified leaders of the ‘reformist’ movement, as shown by Rafsanjani’s conciliatory tone in a speech to the council of experts on September 22.³ But it is clearly too little too late as far as the protesters are concerned.

In another development, ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri (once the designated successor to Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini), has replied to a letter from Moussavi, who was seeking guidance, in this way on September 22: “The path to reforming the current system is a very difficult one: the entire regime has lost credibility … A government that was supposed to be the pride of Shias throughout the world has turned the youth and the masses in our country against Islam and religion.”⁴

The September 18 protests came after three weeks of intensified workers’ protests. In Pars Wagon (train carriage makers), workers angry at non-payment of wages smashed tables and chairs in the canteen. In the Iran Khodro car plant, workers commemorated the death of a fellow worker who collapsed after working three successive shifts. Similar workers’ protests took place in Arj (manufacturer of electrical household goods), Arak Aluminium and many other workplaces. Although most of these protests started off in support of economic demands and against closures, whenever the security forces appeared this prompted the use of the now familiar slogan of “Death to the dictator” – an echo of “Death to the shah”, which dominated the workers’ protests of 1978-79.

Workers in Iran need our support and solidarity – against both imperialist threats and the repressive religious state.

Notes

1. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8223606.stm
2. Associated Press, September 20.
3. www.alalam.ir/english/detail.aspx?id=80499
4. www.amontazeri.com

Fundraising social for Milton Keynes Stop the War group

MILTON KEYNES STOP THE WAR GROUP

invites you to:

A Musical Evening at The Well at Willen

Sunday 27 September – 7.00pm to 9.30pm

featuring local band:

“Blue on Blue”

singing peace and other popular songs

This is a fund-raising event and will include:

• raffle – excellent prizes!

• Bric-a-brac sale!

• Nibbles (included in admission)!

• Tea, coffee, cakes for sale!

• Wine etc available (donations per glass will be requested)

Admission: £3 (£2 concessions)