The three whales of Bolshevism

Roderick Cobley The militant slogans of the Bolsheviks after 1905 were colloquially known as the three whales of Bolshevism. At Marxism this year Paul Le Blanc challenged comrades to name three whales for 2013. Roderick Cobley from Walthamstow SWP puts forward his suggestions. A strategy for the social movements must also aim for SWP comrades to be well-rooted in them. This means not just intervening to air our politics and sell papers, but participate in building the different campaigns so that we become trusted and seen as part of the movement rather than interlopers, as will no doubt be the instinctive reaction of many, coming as they will overwhelmingly from autonomist circles.

Paul Le Blanc, in his talk at Marxism, referred to three whales of Bolshevism, a notion that came out of an old Russian folk tale of the world being balanced on three whales. In Le Blancs talk, he stated that the Bolsheviks saw the whales in question as being three demands for them to agitate and organise around: an eight hour day, land reform in favour of the peasants, and a constituent assembly. This article argues that for the revolutionary left in Britain, there are similarly three whales the highly unionised public sector workers, the largely non-unionised private sector workers, and the social movements. Furthermore, I will suggest that the party has overbalanced its strategy too much towards the first of these at the expense of the latter two, and that this raises a number of important questions. Much of this article does little more than repeat what has been said elsewhere I make no claims to be an original thinker! However, I do want to offer a perspective in particular concerning the role of the social movements in Britain in comparison to other places internationally where there has been a high degree of struggle. Orientating on the public sector For the last two years, an orientation on the public sector, and specifically on the bureaucracy of the public sector trade unions, has been central to the SWPs strategy. There is no question that, at least initially, this turn by the party was the right one. It allowed us to have substantial influence in pushing for a fight in 2011, leading to the huge protest on 26 March, the joint strike by five unions on 30 June, and the magnificent show of strength on 30 November, thrown away by the trade union leadership just days later. However, although that analysis was correct for that time, once the sell-out occurred there was no real attempt to take stock and review our strategy in light of the changed situation. The leadership analysed that the root of the problem, at least in immediate terms, was due in part to the nature of the trade union bureaucracy, which will seek to limit struggle for fear of losing control, and the current lack of confidence among the rank and file to fight without support and approval from their leaders. But rather than looking to reorient, the party merely continued with the existing strategy in the hope that something would happen as Mike Gonzalez wrote in a recent article. There was a denial of the fact that the strike wave and accompanying demonstrations, although a result of pressure from below, were essentially bureaucratic in character and thus easily turned off by the bureaucracy. And there was a continued insistence that a new upturn was round the corner, culminating in predictions of a hot autumn in 2012 which failed to materialise.

Unite the resistance Central to the our strategy in the public sector has been Unite the Resistance, which when initially set up was portrayed as focusing on putting pressure on the bureaucracy by working with those sections of it that are more open to the idea of militant action. The idea behind this was not as well explained as it could have been, but essentially sought to answer the question of how to get mass struggle against the cuts at a time when rank and file organisation remains weak. It was based on an analogy with the Minority Movement of the 1920s but without any real attempt to discuss the possible pitfalls of this approach, bearing in mind the problems identified by Chris Harman. How to avoid these problems has never been discussed. Two years on, there has now been a turn towards making UtR a forum for militants who do want to fight so they can network with each other to that end. This is undoubtedly a reasonable path to pursue, but again has been an adaptation in absence of any more concerted analysis - or explanation. As has been said elsewhere, there are possible problems arising from having a membership that is packed with public sector workers, many of whom are in elected positions of one sort or another. It has been noted that the number of elected positions we hold is out of all proportion to our base inside the public sector unions. This creates a danger that the partys perspectives become skewed by this, and warning signs can be seen. One key example is the dismissive attitude taken to the Pop-Up Union at Sussex University because they are not within the unions established structures. Irrespective of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach behind the Pop-Up Union, such a response from the party indicates a possible sliding to a position where putting pressure on the bureaucracy from the left becomes almost the only game in town. The danger is we could find ourselves in the position of being a ginger group within public sector trade unions rather than trying to build a rank and file that can take action independently. There are also wider issues, to do with the way that the working class has been recomposed over the last thirty years, dominated as they have been by neoliberalism. Public sector workers are clearly part of the same world as the wider working class, and so the current state of play in the public sector has to be taken in context of the wider workforce, to which we now turn. Trade unions decomposed The majority of workers are in the private sector and the vast majority of them are nonunionised. I have personal experience of asking a young worker in a call centre if they were interested in joining a union and getting the response: Whats a union? As Alfredo Saad-Filho noted in his talk on Brazil at this years Marxism, this is representative of the fact that during the neoliberal period the working classs traditional sources of representation and organisation (of which trade unions are arguably the single most important) have been decomposed. Recent work on this by Neil Davidson and Julian Alford is very useful in examining the dynamics of this process. They vary from country to country, but in the UK, they can be summarised as combining the successful assaults on the fabric of social democracy, with changes in the composition of the working class and the culture and structures of the workplace. So the proportion of manual workers, a traditional bastion of trade unions, has declined while non-unionised office work such as call centres has increased, and this has happened alongside a cultural shift towards a more atomised, individualised workforce with the right to manage re-imposed. Further, there has been a growth of a neoliberal culture, often described as being consumerist which has resulted in almost every aspect of our lives becoming individualised and de-politicised. Examples can be seen in the way voting in elections is now often compared to shopping and how a business ontology has become dominant which regards as impossible any attempt at organisation not done along entrepreneurial lines.

Trade unions have followed suit in this, shifting from workplace organisation to individual representation at grievance or disciplinary hearings alongside providing discounts to local commercial outlets. Clearly, this has also affected public sector unions, which are possibly more in hock to bureaucracy and beset by an organisationally weak membership, than at any time previously. However, despite this disarticulation of working class organisation outside the bastions of the public sector, some of the most militant actions by workers since the start of the crisis have been in the private sector. Among the most memorable are the electricians dispute in 201112 and the occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight two years earlier, the latter in a non-unionised workplace. Im also aware of a local dispute in Waltham Forest where workers at a local Gu pudding manufacturer, again non-unionised, organised a strike with no union presence at all and won gains. A strategy for the private sector? Clearly, then, the private sector remains to be won and this means that a strategy aimed at building resistance in the private sector against job losses, falling wages etc, is vital. This is something we should take seriously, at least as seriously as our work in the public sector, as this is where the majority of workers are. Unfortunately, although no one would suggest that the party is consciously dismissive of this aspect of our work, nothing like a proper strategy is in place. In a paper published a month or so ago, a group of comrades outlined some very basic suggestions for practical action on the first of these. These included producing local industrial leaflets, among others. In no way can these be seen as amounting to anything like a strategy, but they would be very useful if carried out across branches. So what would a strategy look like? This article is far too brief and general to suggest one, but one recent article looking back at the 2011 riots points towards a potentially deep-rooted problem concerning the credibility of the trade union movement itself, particularly amongst younger workers. The article describes how a speaker from the far left arguing for young people to support the trade union movement was booed by the overwhelmingly young audience at the premiere of the documentary Riots Reframed. The writer argues that: With many young people increasingly finding themselves in privatised and precarious work, the Left's focus on the trade union movement can at times be very alienating to those in workplaces that are notoriously difficult to unionise...It can also appear to offer the same professional class of "politicians" that young people have grown instinctively to distrust. If there is any truth to this at all, then it raises a question mark over whether a traditional focus on the trade union movement is necessarily always the best starting point. Instead, we should consider that right now the best starting point is to be to draw workers into other forms of struggle and at this point the social movements become relevant to the picture. Erupting social movements If we look at the wider world, we see a complex interaction between the labour movements and social movements in every nation. In Egypt, a lengthy period of intense trade union struggle prefigured the revolution, with its epicentre in Tahrir Square, which in turn bolstered the strike wave so it was able to become a key factor in toppling Mubarak. Elsewhere, dramatic explosions in the streets and squares forced the trade union bureaucracy to respond. In both Turkey and Brazil, with varying degrees of effectiveness reflecting their strength on the ground, the trade unions called strikes following the eruption of social uprisings. In the UK, the students movement and its militant action in November in attacking Millbank created a climate that drew the trade unions into the action. However, the short-lived nature of the movement in all three cases meant that no prolonged period of industrial action followed. In Turkey, the extreme weakness of the trade unions almost certainly rules out them playing a substantive part in the current movement. Greece, on the

other hand, saw an uprising in late 2008, which may have helped create the possibility for the sustained mass struggles we have seen. However, the struggle appears to broadly be under the control of the trade union bureaucracy, and no separate social movement is visible, with mass protests for instance as a rule being held to accompany strike days. The UK currently faces a situation where the level of industrial struggle is very low. One graph shows that only 250,000 days were lost in strikes in 2012, the second lowest on record after 2005. This is hardly surprising if we accept the picture above of a largely deunionised workforce, with both the structures and the attendant traditions of workplace organisation having been broken down. However, that does not mean that workers are acquiescent. In fact many workers, if they become politically active, are much more likely to do so in a social movement of some form. They predominantly take the form of community campaigns, such as the myriad anti-cuts groups, the Anti-Bedroom Tax Federation, the campaigns to defend the NHS and those fighting the far right. Most of these are rooted in local communities even if they are part of national campaigns. Aside from this, there are also other campaigns more closely related ideologically to the social movements that exist in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Carrying a strong affiliation to autonomist tendencies, they include UK Uncut and the Occupy movement, and to a lesser extent Disabled People Against the Cuts which stands in a direct action tradition of disability activism. Such movements are composed predominantly of working class people and have to a greater or lesser extent been supported by and built relationships with trade unions. This is even the case with Occupy, who supported N30 and the sparks. Clearly, the possibility exists for a revival of trade union affiliation among workers to be fostered through their involvement in these campaigns. Unites Community branches are perhaps relevant here, in unionising the unemployed and it might be worth demanding the other unions follow suit. Conversely, trade unionists need to be encouraged to get involved in these movements as trade unionists so they can imbibe the militant culture many of these movements have, making it easier to replicate this inside the trade union movement. A strategy for the social movements must also aim for SWP comrades to be well-rooted in them. This means not just intervening to air our politics and sell papers, but participate in building the different campaigns so that we become trusted and seen as part of the movement rather than interlopers, as will no doubt be the instinctive reaction of many, coming as they will overwhelmingly from autonomist circles. We also need to be building for both the 29 September demonstration outside the Tory conference but also, just as importantly, for the 5 November day of action. Fast Food Forward There is no question that the public sector unions should remain a key focus for us, but current events suggest they are unlikely to be the vanguard of new struggles due to the strength of the bureaucracy. Therefore, instead of trying to artificially make them into the vanguard by pump-priming through Unite the Resistance, a better focus might start with making the building of rank and file presences in workplaces key, as well as supporting whatever struggles emerge, including innovative initiatives such as the Pop-Up Union. Unite the Resistance can undoubtedly play an important role here. We also need to make the social movements, ranging from Occupy to the Benefit Justice campaign, as central to our activity as our work on the industrial front. Crucially, building links between social movements and rank and file trade unionists is key. It might be worth looking at ways that social movements can be brought to the trade union struggle though by avoiding instances in the Global South where foreign NGOs have been taking on union organising and bringing their liberal aid politics into the equation. In this context, current events in the US fast food industry are interesting. As of writing, there has just been a nationwide strike by tens of thousands of fast food workers organising through Fast Food Forward, part of the campaigning group New York Communities for

Change. Although involving existing unions, and in particular the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has provided much of the funding, this campaign involves much broader coalitions. It has also used very different techniques from traditional union organising, ones more akin to those of Occupy. The scale of their success thus far in terms of building and striking is noteworthy and possibly a harbinger of future developments in US activism. An echo of this might be seen in the effect of the Blacklist Support Group. This was organised specifically as a single issue campaign against blacklisting in construction, involving the unions but not controlled by them. However, it helped generate impetus to the sparks, who organise as part of Unite, and is now a motor for Unites attempt to get recognition at Crossrail. Linking the three whales Whatever else, our participation in the Peoples Assembly, the leaders of which appear to see both the NHS demo and the 5 November as central, is vital to a strategy around social movements. The broad range of this body means that the social movements are very likely to gravitate there, as will the trade union leaders and rank and file activists, so we need to be there too. Here we have to have an argument against this bodys leadership over their tendency to whitewash the role of the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party. However, this should not be based only on arguing for more strikes although that is part of it - but on a broader critique of the reformist leaders that starts with concrete demands rather than denunciation. Also, we need to work to ensure that as many of the wide range of campaigns and movements that are emerging, including Occupy and UK Uncut, both of whom took an unfortunately sectarian and ultra-left position, are involved in the movement. Such a broad-based and radical movement uniting socialists, trade unionists, community campaigners and the autonomist fringe, with its tendency for imagination and originality, could be a potential game changer in the way things develop in the months to come.