Issue 178 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published September 1994 Copyright © Socialist Review
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| Hands up for strike |
The continuing rail strike has put working class struggle and union organisation to the top of the political agenda.
Suddenly the power of the working class is visible to everyone, as 4,500 signal workers stop the vast majority of trains, causing chaos in the big cities and losing employers millions of pounds. Unlike many other recent strikes the rail strike is impossible for the media and the government to ignore.
The government and employers stumbled into the strike early in the summer. They assumed one of two things--or possibly both--would happen: the signal workers would tire of the action as it dragged on and would start returning to work; and that the strike would be unpopular, so pushing Jimmy Knapp towards a settlement.
No wonder, then, that the Tories and their allies now seem without a strategy to end the strike. So far they have pulled back from escalation of the strike. They look back admiringly at Ronald Reagan's sacking of the US air traffic controllers in the early 1980s and their replacement by military controllers. But they have no such trained replacements, so such a strategy would close down the whole rail system for months. Even the option of individual contracts looks fraught for them and has been resisted so far by the signal workers.
Support for the strike has also been widespread among other workers and even from commuters. Collections for the signal workers elicit a good response, and opinion polls show continuing support.
The employers have no clear strategy of winning. The ostensible reason for continuing with the dispute is that to do otherwise would breach the government's pay policy. The pay policy which caused the strike was itself a blunder, embarked upon in order to hold down further tax increases at last year's budget.
The government and employers are also finding it much harder to turn other workers against the rail workers. Partly this is because of the obvious merits of their case, and the fact that more money is lost on every strike day than it would cost to settle the dispute at the original 5.7 percent offer. But it is also because of the continuing unpopularity of the government and bosses.
The decline in support for the Thatcherite Tories has been matched by a rising contempt for the entrepreneurs who enriched themselves so much in the 1980s. The Tories are hardly likely to win the argument about the signal workers being well paid when there are almost daily announcements about the scale of bosses' pay rises in recent years--up 23 percent for finance sector bosses last year, while their equivalents in manufacturing industry managed 'only' 10 percent and most workers are told to settle for 1.5 percent. Barclays Bank profits at £1 billion for half a year, and favourable treatment from the water and electricity 'regulators' which allows their profits and directors' salaries to stay at record levels have all helped create a profound scepticism. The strike has also brought back with a bang speculation about a Labour election victory. Tony Blair's election as leader has been hailed as the greatest breakthrough Labour has gained in decades.
The accepted view of Blair's success is that he is a right wing moderniser who has distanced himself from the unions and so appeals to the middle classes. By this analysis the rail strike should harm Labour's popularity but it has done exactly the opposite. Maybe there are votes in some of the more traditional Labour policies.
Growing numbers of Labour supporters seem to think so. MP Peter Hain recently made a plea in the New Statesman for the party leadership to pay attention to its activists and to return to some basic socialist policies.
Blair's message certainly could hardly be more dull or cautious with its vague commitment to 'fairness' and its following of the Tory agenda on crime, support for the Criminal Justice Bill and attacks on single parents. Labour clearly thinks it is sufficient to simply attack high directors' salaries or hospital closures without actually doing anything. But the danger with this strategy can be seen in the rail strike.
The RMT executive is fighting the dispute in the most defensive way. It puts emphasis on public support and according to Jimmy Knapp--winning the support of the bosses' organisation the CBI. However popular this strike is it is clear that the government wants to sit it out and is prepared to pay over the odds to defeat the signal workers.
The union should not just sit there and hope that they will eventually be the victors. It needs to escalate the dispute. If the series of one and two day strikes had been one indefinite strike, it would almost certainly have won by now. And support should be forthcoming from the rest of the Labour movement.
The employers are clearly in league with the government and backed up by the press. Yet the TUC has done nothing so far for the strikers, and Labour has been equivocal about supporting the strike--even though Knapp is president of the TUC and the union's negotiator, Vernon Hince, is on Labour's NEC.
If the strike is to win, and if Labour's poll lead is to mean anything real, then the sympathy and anger have to be turned into action and solidarity.
A campaign of terror is being waged against France's immigrant population. In early August the interior minister, Charles Pasqua, ordered a police crackdown on terrorism. His pretext was the killing of five French embassy officials in Algeria and the need to fight the Algerian fundamentalist party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS).
Since then well over 5,000 people in Paris alone have been subjected to random identity checks. There have been roadblocks in those areas of the capital where most North Africans live and even on the Champs Elysées. The police have grilled anyone with an 'Arab' look, handcuffing and hauling off suspects.
This vicious, racist witch hunt has had meagre results, always assuming its real purpose was to flush out the threat of 'Islamic terrorism'. In total 22 fundamentalist 'sympathisers' have been interned.
Some of the suspects are unlikely terrorists. Ahmed Zitouni, a shopkeeper from near Calais, thought he was being arrested for drunk driving (an offence he had committed before) when the police turned up at his shop. Strict Muslims refuse to drink alcohol. His membership of the FIS is denied by those proud to belong to it. Many others interned in the concentration camp are simply devout, non-political followers of Islam.
The atmosphere of intimidation is reminiscent of what happened in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the Algerian war of independence, when the government launched a terror campaign against the North African community. Now the government is whipping up hysteria against the 800,000 Algerian community in France on the grounds that they are a fifth column for 'Islamic terrorism'.
Charles Pasqua is no newcomer to racist politics. He is on the right of the right wing Gaullist party, the RPR, which currently heads the government. In 1986 he was also interior minister in the shortlived right wing 'cohabitation' government under the Socialist president, Francois Mitterand. A bombing campaign gave him the excuse to crack down on immigrants. He had children arrested at gun point and held in police cells simply for answering back. Illegal immigrants were chained and led to deportation as if they were slaves. His police officers beat a student to death at a demonstration.
In 1988 Pasqua said he would cover up any police blunder. The cops took this as permission to shoot first and ask questions later. In the following weeks 14 people were killed. In the run up to the election (which the right lost) he made a naked bid to attract racist votes by stating that the Gaullists shared the values of Le Pen's National Front.
The present government has been rocked by protest. Despite its crushing electoral victory last year it has had to backtrack on a number of issues, the most important of which have been the Air France strike over redundancies and the demonstrations against cutting the minimum wage for young workers. One important section of the political leadership is now clearly hoping to regain the initiative by playing the racist card.
Pasqua is key to this. In the last few months he has brought in laws which allow random identity checks, car searches and summary internment. These have been put to liberal use in the current crackdown. He is also planning to bring in surveillance measures with police video cameras on every street corner.
None of this has gone without protest from human rights organisations and the trade unions. Even sections of the government are worried about the consequences of Pasqua's thuggery, if only for the reason that it puts him in position to succeed Mitterand over other right wing contenders. There is also fear that the beneficiary will not be themselves but the National Front, whose influence has been muted during the last few months' industrial protest.
In France working class anger was channelled to the left by the wave of strikes, demonstrations and protests earlier this year. The current Pasqua initiative shows, potentially at least, the danger of that anger being deflected into an anti-immigrant groove.
The first 100 days of the new Italian government have proved one thing. Far from representing a radical break with the past, as some have claimed, the Berlusconi regime has been rapidly exposed as the reincarnation of the Christian Democrats. The only real difference is the gloss provided by the new prime minister's control of the media.
Some even on the left saw Berlusconi's election win as a triumph for 'new politics'--a break with the politics of class.
In fact the depth of corruption in the old regime meant that a donkey could have become prime minister so long as they could pose as untainted by graft and bribery. The fact that Berlusconi's company, Fininvest, controls the largest private television network helped him project the necessary clean image, but this has lasted less than three months.
It was only a matter of time before the judges investigating corruption would have a go at Fininvest, a company with debts estimated at $3 billion. As the threat increased the new prime minister issued a decree suspending the right of the judiciary to hold people in custody when inquiring into corruption. This would have brought the entire investigation of corruption to an end, by allowing businessmen, politicians and their hangers on to block and delay inquiries indefinitely, or flee to their comfortable villas abroad, like the former prime minister Craxi.
The huge outcry and wave of protest demonstrations forced Berlusconi to back down. It was all a mistake, he announced, the decree had been 'hastily drafted'.
The only reason that Berlusconi might survive is the dreadful weakness of the opposition. Most of the Christian Democrat machine has now reinvented itself inside the Forza Italia movement. Forza Italia was an empty shell which allowed Berlusconi to present himself as a new leader, above the sordid world of politics, determined to restore 'Italian self respect'. The vacuum has inevitably been filled by those who have run the system for the past 45 years.
But the former Communist Party, the PDS, and to a large extent the harder left leaders of Rifondazione Communista have refused to go for the jugular.
If anything they have allowed the fascists of the MSI, inside the governing coalition, to pose as a 'clean' force for change. As Berlusconi's popularity in the opinion polls has slumped dramatically, so Fini of the MSI has emerged as a credible alternative. The MSI is posing as the 'guardian of the people', opposing the plans to slash the state pension, intervening to resolve disputes at Alitalia and on the railways.
Working class organisation remains strong and reasonably solid. Despite Thatcherite rhetoric the employers are fearful of breaking the consensus with the union leadership. The revival of the Italian economy gives some immediate breathing space. But this cannot last for long: the crisis of state finance is such that something has to give.
For the first time since 1975 there seems the real possibility of an IRA ceasefire. An influential group of Americans have appeared on the Belfast scene brokering a new deal. They include Bruce Morrison, the man who gained entry to the United States for Gerry Adams and who is set to join the Clinton administration; Charles Feeney, owner of the General Atlantic group; Bill Flynn, chief executive of the US's largest insurance company; Niall O'Dowd, publisher of the New York magazine Irish Voice; and an unnamed official of the AFL-CIO, the US trade union federation.
Talk of a ceasefire follows rejection by a special Sinn Fein conference of the Downing Street Declaration. But that did not close the door on a peace deal. Indeed what marked the conference was the degree of faith Republicans have in the declaration's authors, John Major and Irish premier Albert Reynolds.
There can be no doubting the sincerity of Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams in desiring a peace agreement. A leading Republican, Danny Morrison, reinforced that while released from prison on parole by talk of an unarmed strategy.
While Republican hopes of a military victory over the British have been dulled, Sinn Fein has also given up on hopes of overtaking the middle class Catholic SDLP electorally and of building any significant support in the Republic. This has led to what Irish journalist Tim Pat Coogan describes as: 'a growing realisation on the part of the Sinn Fein leadership that dialogue must take place'. Adams is now banking everything on winning Sinn Fein a place at negotiations.
The Northern Ireland 'troubles' began with mass demonstrations for civil rights. These toppled the Unionist government which had ruled Northern Ireland for 50 years. That is the single biggest gain of these last 25 years.
Since then the Republican politics which have come to dominate the Catholic working class of Belfast and Derry have failed to build on those gains. Republican politics rest on the idea that a few dedicated, armed or elected individuals can win national liberation. The days of mass mobilisation are long gone--except for the period of the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes.
British and Irish politicians blame the Provos for violence. That hypocrisy we reject. We will not join the demands that Republicans renounce violence. But neither do we glory in the military struggle. Rather we look to the tradition of mass mobilisation, to the strike by 2,000 Harland and Wolff shipyard workers against the assassination of a Catholic workmate or the demonstrations on abortion in the Republic two years ago.
A break from militarism towards that approach would be welcomed. Yet Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein are not about to do that. Rather every time Republicans have dropped the military campaign they have embraced constitutional politics.
Over the last 25 years there have been two traditions on the left. One has dominated Labourism on both sides of the Irish Sea and has centred on denouncing Republican violence while ignoring British repression. The other has been to act as cheerleaders or armchair advisers for the Provos in the belief they could provide a short cut to socialism.
That is something this journal has always rejected. When Republicans challenged British imperialism we defended them but we disagreed with their strategy and tactics. That strategy has now come to the end of the road.