Though Cowards Flinch

I am thinking about doing a post on the intellectual incoherence behind David Cameron’s apparent fascination with, on the one hand paternalist libertarian and ‘Nudge’ author Richard Thaler, and on the other the quite opposing views of human nature emphasized by Black Swan Down man Nassim Taleb. 

Now, I’m here to please, and if people really want a post on this I’ll do one, but to be quite honest using Clifford Singer’s marvellous high-speed poster tool is so much easier.  So, as a filler, here’s a lighthearted post I did on this stuff  a while back, and here’s a poster.

So what to make of the government programme of Work Trials? I only learned about them on Friday while at the local Jobcentre. Councidentally Lenin with the Tomb posted about them as well, on Friday, and he seems very down on the whole thing.

Largely I agree with Lenin, but I think there a few other significant details which were not evinced to full effect. In all the triumphalism on the part of Labour about the minimum wage, that this Work Trials programme awards less than the minimum wage seems to have escaped everyone’s notice.

Through the scheme, people claiming JSA can go to work for private employers for up to thirty days. Instead of being paid by the employer, they continue to claim JSA, plus a lunch and travel allowance for the thirty days. The JSA (and the allowances) divided by the number of hours worked is less than the current minimum wage, to say nothing of the living wage that the Left is campaigning for.

In essence, the programme is a direct subsidy to business from the government, advertised to employers as “Try Before You Buy”, with no obligation whatsoever to buy. The only advantage it carries is that it gives people up to thirty days experience of a given job, though the companies involved generally employ unskilled labour from the jobcentre so the advantage is fairly negligible.

The other thing is that it doesn’t address the ratio of people to jobs, it simply allows for the private sector to absorb what it wishes to and ignore the rest. Theoretically an employer on unskilled labour could repeatedly allow individuals to fill a space the employer might otherwise have to pay for. The programme is thus not a solution or a way to decrease unemployment, short term or long term.

To do that, the government might have to get (got forbid) structurally involved in the economy through a series of public works programmes, where different skill sets could be employed doing what they have been trained to do, in a way that benefits our social and public services.

Employed so, the opportunities for unionisation would exist, and the insecurity that prevents people campaigning against the sub-minimum wage levels would not. Reading over some TUC guidance notes, it appears that the government actually changed the NMW laws in 2008 so that work trials could be exempt.

These programmes, and associated ideas, were the work of David Freud, the investment banker who was employed by the government (not a Work Trial!) to do a review of the welfare system. They were then stewarded by James Purnell and then Yvette Cooper, the former having supervised as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions the changing of the 1999 NMW laws to the benefit of employers.

Chris Grayling, Purnell’s shadow at the time, enthusastically backed the plans (and several bloggers said the plans were outright nicked from the Tories), which should truthfully be a warning all of its own. But it seems Labour couldn’t even wait for the Tories to get in before undermining what they continually spout as one of their major achievements.

A while ago, when I read of Hossein Ali Montazeri’s death, I knew I’d want to write something eventually. The whole organisation of Shi’a Islam, specifically the Twelver denomination, fascinates me. The theology is interesting, but particularly the organisation, the methods of appointing religious leaders and so on. It’s something I can’t for the life of me put an analogy to from the plethora of Christian sects.

The theology of the religion is collegiate. Grand Ayatollahs promote scholars of Islam and related subjects to different ranks. When these scholars reach the rank of Ayatollah, they can themselves issue edicts and interpretations of Islamic texts and law. Individuals of the Shi’a religion are free to choose among these competing maraji, the sources of authority, the people to emulate.

Obviously the central Islamic texts of the Qur’an and the Hadith also play an important role, though even in texts so important as these there are interpretations and even abrogations of ‘earlier’ instructions by ‘later’ ones. The application of such scholarship to the everyday world, in the Iranian state that emerged in 1979, with Montazeri’s support, was to be overseen by religious supervisors, velayat-e faqih.

This is one of those things which most of the newspaper obituaries in liberal papers omitted to mention.

As a secularist and a liberal, I cannot but be repulsed by the support of Montazeri for an institution which gives one person power over another on the basis of religion. And while Montazeri’s support for such a thing put him ultimately on the wrong side of the forces that fought the Revolution, Montazeri at least had the decency to denounce the undemocratic nature of the regime, and its human rights abuses, to call for the legalisation of political parties and protest mass executions.

Despite having helped to create the regime, and being a senior and respected part of it until his downfall, Montazeri sought using his religious influence as an Ayatollah to strip from the regime the one cloak which it continued to use to cover its abuses: it’s claim to be an Islamic state. It reminds me of the way in which religion was wielded by all sides during the English Revolution in the 1640s: scripture was a bludgeon with which to kill and damn one’s enemies to Hell.

Not with any hint of mental reservation either, but with the full strength and fervour that human belief and faith can muster.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read Melanie Phillips’ latest blunder into the realms of extreme bigotry:

Pajamas TV features two interviews with former US security people, one described merely as having been given some kind of intel-gathering assignment by the ‘joint chiefs’ and the other described as a ‘former FBI special agent’. The first describes how, when he discovered to his alarm that there was not only no evidence that Islamic radicals were wrong in Islamic law but that there were no counter-arguments to them in that law, the US intel/law enforcement community that had instructed him just didn’t want to know.

The political point which Mad Mel is trying to make through quoting this guy, subtly as ever, is that the US and UK state organisations are hopelessly compromised in their fight against Islam by their failure to understand that there can never be negotiation with any Muslim, simply because they are Muslims. Following Islamic law means being a ‘radical Islamist’ – a basic, virulently bigotted equation.

She hedges, of course, by referring specifically to the deals between the UK and US governments and the Muslim Brotherhood. The second chap interviewed suggests how worrying it is that the counter-terrorist establishment of the US are going to ‘radical Islamists’ (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood and other organisations alleged to be MB ‘fronts’) to ask for help in combatting…radical Islam.

Yet radical Islam is hardly a unitary phenomenon, any more than the Catholicism of Bishop Gustavo Gutierrez and that of the then-Cardinal Ratzinger are one and the same thing. But when one is prepared to repeat the allegation that unspecified Islamic radicals (presumably the ones we’re supposed to be fighting the War on Terror against) have the correct, the only, interpretation of Islamic law, well, we’re hardly in the realms of nuanced commentary and great learning.

Even the Muslim Brotherhood is reputed to represent many different trends in Islamic thought, not to mention being a Sunni organisation – rather than Shi’a, which is the largest religion in Iraq and Iran, two of our putative enemies. The very existence of someone like Montazeri throws such blanket assumptions as Phillips’ offers, about any given religion, into doubt.

Sure, Montazeri may have been a radical Islamist, and he may have supported plenty of illiberal measures, but he also spoke up about a great many and opposed the increasing tyranny of a religious faction run amok.

Additionally, though my history is not what it could be in the sphere of the Iranian Revolution, one man at the top in plush surroundings advocating a lily-livered liberalism always means there are many more on the ground, in prison awaiting execution or among the masses, advocating stiff necked, uncompromising, all out resistance, and a better lot for mankind.

Even if their views are couched in religious terminology. In fact, for precisely this reason, we can’t denude elements from within Christianity, Islam, Judaism or the other faiths of the egalitarian and revolutionary edge that can be located within each of those faiths. This is why it is so utterly preposterous for Melanie Phillips to talk as she does.

For every dictator, sanhedrin of saints and their persecutions, there is a James Naylor, a Winstanley, a Lilburne and a Trapnel. Their analogies in Catholicism would be the supporters of Gutierrez, people like Tissa Balasuriya, and those who used the Ecclesial Base Communities as organisation fractions with which to fight back against oppressive states, rather than as a means to impose theological interpretations as law against their fellow man.

Which is more than can be said for the designs of Melanie Phillips, who, were the shoe on the other foot and her brand of Christian fundamentalism in the ascendant, would probably like to make the rest of us pay the jizya to the Christian theocratic state. Perhaps this is precisely why she repeats the accusation that only the radical Islamists have the correct interpretation of Islam. Their fundamentalism is the key threat by which she justifies her own.

Entering the New Year, there was a mini-flood of blog posts about where centre-left leftwing blogging is going.  Some of it was of little value, as it sees the blogosphere in terms than that initially ironic nomenclature suggests: a self-enclosed world where the height of attainment is a large readership and a large number of links back from other blogs with large readerships. 

While Left Foot Forward (LFF) at least tried to make the link between blogging and the electoral fate of the Labour party, it seemed a little over-optimistic about the effects its meticulous and well-researched attacks on the Tories.  Perversely, it fell to Guido Fawkes to point this out:

LFF is, and most of the right-wing blogosphere gives you credit for this, the best new offering from the left. But what do you think you will achieve electorally? My estimate is slightly more than zero.

Electoral achievement, in the context of the general election, was the subject of my preceding article on left blogging.  In essence, the view I expressed in that is that in such a short time span there can only ever be a marginal effect, notwithstanding some of the short-term success that Will Straw quite understandably refers to in his comments.  To a great extent I agree with Luke Akehurst:

Blogs, tweets and Facebook are actually more likely to be what loses a party the election than what wins it. Because as the Damian McBride affair showed, one ill-considered email or tweet or blogpost or Facebook status upset by a candidate or campaigner can provide a lot of ammo for the old-fashioned media to shred a party’s campaign with.

The link between blogging and more general activism, though, is a quite different matter. 

My view is that there is huge and untapped potential for a casual link between internet and real world political activism on the left.  The challenge is to work out what that causal link might be, and ensure that it works.    I don’t think that’s been well enough done just yet, and this is what the rest of this post is about.

Even a decent analysis like that of Phil at AVPS drifts towards the easy assumption that building the left blogopshere will somehow, almost magically, translate into widened political activism, even though it is perfectly clear that current blog readers makes up a tiny, tiny percentage of the number of actual or possible activists, and even multiplying that readership tenfold is not going to make the percentage anything other than still very small. 

It was good to see, then, our very own Dave Semple give proper attention given to how, if at all, blogging can positively influence socialist activism.

Dave first sets out his belief that “on the internet there exists, in one form or another, everything that could make blogging relevant for the Left”, before going on to assess the extent of the gap between what is still largely national politics-focused blogging and  local action.  He hits the nail firmly on the head when he says:

Framing the debate and setting the narrative are good aims, but activism must take place once we’ve established that narrative, or it will be for nothing. This needs to be done on a local level, because it’s of no use me knowing what’s going on in Liverpool or Edinburgh and wanting to help out if I can’t afford to travel the distance to be active on the ground.

In my view, this is a much more important step for leftwing blogging   than anything to do with what is now  being term ‘link love’ between existing bloggers. 

The right control both local and national institutions, not least through the massive policy centralisation of almost all that is local, so they don’t need to develop locally independent action; their blogging job is simply to support the institutional structures already in place; for the left, the ONLY realistic way to create socialist momentum is via grassroots activism, independent but increasingly co-ordinated towards common targets through a process of incremental democratic centralism, designed to support rather than stymie local action.

All that sounds lovely, of course.  But if it was all so straightforward, it’d be happening a bit more than it is now.  Dave is right to point out nascent attempts at local activist blogging, such as took place around Visteon or Vesta, and likewise Phil’s ‘discovery’ of a local blog linked to activism in Newcastle, ‘Grey Matters’ is enough to encourage us that people recognise the potential of blogging as a means to stir up leftwing activity, but it doesn’t mean it will work. 

As Phil says, the jury is out on the Newcastle blog, which hasn’t posted recently, and which in places looks like a nationally focused blog with local contributors (rather as my own Bickerstaffe Record was somewhat vaingloriously becoming little by little till I sought to bring a halt to the drift by moving to TCF with my wider burblings).

But in general, local leftist blogs linked to activism are not being developed.  Any local stuff that there is out there is largely pretty sterile stuff, dedicated either to reflecting the worthiness of a local councillor or MP or to towing a party line, and is not there to encourage action; indeed, it can be argued that the ‘if there’s a problem contact me because I’m great’ approach, while understandable, actually militates against local activism except in terms of dragging out supporters at election time.

So if local left blog activity is not happening in the way many of us like it to, it behoves to ask why, and what can be done about it.

In my view, there is one big barrier to progress on good activist-focused blogging, and again Dave hits the nail on the head:

It may seem contradictory, but the more local one tries to focus, the more resource- and personnel-intensive the endeavour will be…… Obviously a knotty problem. Some of the measures outlined above require skills that are not in abundance to be provided by all activists, such as coding, and are expensive….. I do not think efforts like the above can be made in isolation, except under the exceptional circumstances of people with a great deal of time (and money) on their hands, or the sheer will to engage – like Kate Belgrave does with her pieces on Skelmersdale and other topics.

I agree entirely, and  I agree entirely with Dave’s closing words to that post ‘More thought  necessary’.  That’s the reason for this post.

What is needed to get local activism-focused left blogging going properly can be summed up under the following sub-headings:

1          Costs, funding and content

We need a clear and ‘here is what we do on day one’ plan to get the right number of the right kind of people with the right kind of people on the right kind of living wage, working from pilot phase towards an ambitious but manageable target of national coverage. 

My initial workings suggest that a local blog covering a population of 30-40,000 people might be able to survive on turnover of around £80,000 per year inclusive of a living wage for two staff and operational costs, but exclusive of delivery costs (see below) which will need to remain volunteer based in the short term. (As a comparator, this article suggests that Left Foot Forard is operating on a budget of about £100,000 per year.)

Initially, although I agree that in the longer term these costs should as far as possible be covered by worker organisations like trade unions (and thereafter a Labour party more open to wider left engagement), the reality is that funds may need to be raised friom charitable/employment creation sources (see, for example, this kind of opportunity coming along in Wales), and from very local advertising. 

At the heart of all of this is the idea that a local left blog needs to attract a wide enough readership to make it sustainable, and underpinning this will need to be a coherent strategy for making leftwing approaches to news accessible and ‘newsworthy’ while retaining the overall commitment to an identifiable leftwing cause.  It will be all to easy to slip into an easy but ultimately self-defeating populism in order to attract readership (I know, I’ve done it), and a reflexive editorial hand and, perhaps even more important, an openness to critique and comment of the type to which blogs like Though Cowards Flinch aspires.

2          Legal form

We need a discussion and agreement on the best legal form for local blog set-ups and for an accompanying national network; the legal status should allow both maximum opportunity for fundraising while at the same time guarding ensuring worker control of the overall direction (an Industrial Provident Society is possibly the best form, but may incur  larger set-up legal costs than an ‘off the shelf’ Community Interest Company)

3          Blog targeting

A clear, replicable methodology for the development of local blogs of the appropriate size and reach is essential, but with the right level of flexiblity built in to suit local circumstances (e.g. blogs in small towns with two or three major employers will have a different approach to ones in ‘dormitory’ suburbs on the edge of cities.

4          Beyond the blog medium

There needs to be a commitment to move beyond the web-based confines of the blog and expand into suitably adapted, regularly distributed hard copy versions of blogs for specific ‘awareness raising’ periods of time at the end of which might follow a blog ‘opt in’ campaign in order to maintain the direction and energy.

There also needs to be a commitment to getting blog-generated information and propaganda into areas which are or have become depoliticised; that is, there should be a move beyond house-to-house coverage, with the inevitable coverage dominance of local ‘community’ issues and towards workplaces and other environments in which class relations and rightwing hegemonies can be highlighted (e.g. benefits offices).   This, naturally, may mean some confrontation with authority.

To an extent, such a move should look to reverse decisions made by political parties made in the 1970s/80s to focus their literature and campaign efforts on the household rather than the work unit (e.g. the SWP changed its branch structure  from workplace to geographic  in the early 1980s), while still recognising the changes in the way the economy runs in the early 21^st century.

5          Integration with other media

We need a method for blog development which takes into account the different strengths of existing local and regional media across the country so that impact is maximised.  For example,  in Liverpool, where the Echo retains a per capita  readership and ‘opinion dominance’ far above many other cities of the same size or bigger (cf. the fading Manchester Evening News), there will be a case for influencing and feeding that paper, whereas in other places blogs should simply seek to fill a political comment vacuum.

Secondly, once the initial pilot blogs are set up, there needs to be an engagement with the NUJ about union membership for these paid bloggers, so that they can benefit from the solidarity, support, and access to training available to members.

Finally, there needs to be at least some thought about how this collection of new local left blogs might relate to existing leftwing publishing ventures e.g, Red Pepper, not just in terms of cross fertilisation of writings so that journalistic skills and grassroots experienced are exchanged, but also in terms of possibilities for joint financing for expansion of depth and reach through additional paid staff.

In many ways, what I set out above is the bones of a social business plan, and if I were to sit down for a day with these notes I’d have a fully costed, well-laid out plan which would form the basis of initial applications for start-up costs.  The only slight drawback is that no-one would read it.

What’s needed as a step prior to this is for a group of blogger activists and sympathetic journalists to come together, in much as the same way as the failed (but useful in terms of learning) attempt in late 2008/2009 to set up LeftNewMedia, but with a specific aim of agreeing the basic of a business plan, identifying areas for initial pilot work, and getting on with the fundraising work to make it happen within a realistic timescale.

All of this is possible.  I’ve set up and battered into initial shape more social enterprise ideas now than I’m comfortable remembering (I’m a great kick-starter – just don’t ask me to complete and finish stuff), and I know there’s a model which will work in here, though I also know it won’t come without big methodological, financial and most of all political challenges when circulation needs dictate one line, but political integrity demands another.

You want to join in?  If so, I’m happy to meet up (in London if need be) at a weekend towards the end of February.  I’ll need a room, some flipcharts and a bumch of committed activists willing to do what they agree to try and do according to a timetable they’ve agreed to.  I’ll take it from there. 

Yes, of course it’s ambitious. Of course I’m going out on a limb.  Of course it may come to nothing again.  But it might not.  Sign up in the comments box below.  Or argue.

So apparently, via Fark.com (see also these from Journeyman and Liberal Conspiracy), Pat Robertson has been saying nasty things in his usual vein, about how absolutely everything bad that happens to anyone is a direct result of what they’ve done wrong with their lives. Even if it’s just a case of being the wrong religion (or, one might sometimes surmise, the way Robertson says this shit every time something bad happens to black people, the wrong colour). This time it’s Haiti.

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so the devil said Ok it’s a deal, and they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor.

That island of Hispaniola is one island cut down the middle – on one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. and Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy, I’m optimistic something good may come, but right now we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.

It’s the ‘true story’ quip which really makes it art, I think. But enough of my (hitherto unexplained) derision.

1. Haiti was held in slavery until Napoleon I. Independence was declared on January 1st 1804, several years before Napoleon III was actually born. A minor point, I know, but still. If you’re going to denounce a whole people for satanic, one idea might be to at least get the facts right beforehand.

2. Consider the possibility that the Haitians did indeed swear a pact with the Devil. He then gives them victory in battle and, possibly more importantly, cripples the French with Yellow Fever, even killing General Leclerc the leader of the last expedition. Except, the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, were Catholic – and indeed Catholicism was made, for a brief while, the official state religion.

I’m not saying it’s beyond the realms of possibility that Robertson would declare Catholics to be satan-lovers. Yet the widespread existence of Christianity on the island surely makes it a little less likely that the appeal to the Devil was what secured victory, regardless of the native vodou. It may as well be that back then, the Haitian leaders appealed to God, and poverty and this earthquake are the Devil’s revenge.

Except that might not sit well with Pat Robertson’s view of America as God’s chosen nation,* since America has played an active part in ensuring that poverty was a long term visitor to Haiti.

3. If indeed it was vodou which secured the freedom of Haiti, why haven’t the repercussions affected the Dominican Republic as well? Robertson may not know that vodou exists there as well, and at the time of the Haitian Revolution, the two territories were one, both controlled by the French, the Spanish having surrendered their separate colony in 1795. Many slaves from ‘Santo Domingo’ participated in the revolutionary armies that fought the French, Spanish and British.

I’m pleased that Robertson and his gay-bashing moronic cult are sending aid to Haiti. Yet I find using yet another natural disaster as an excuse to wax lyrical about the sins of a whole people – none of whom were alive at the time of the Haitian Revolution, the vast majority of whom are Christian – is just obscene. But it’s par for the course with Pat Robertson. Read more…

Alex Snowdon has an interesting article up at his place, discussing the actions of Lenin and the views of Lukacs as formulated in the shadow of the ‘actuality of the revolution’. This is in contrast to theorists such as Kautsky and Bernstein who, in the eyes of Lukacs, attempt to suggest that “the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat can quite easily be left to the future – to a very distant future.”

Lukacs answers such critics, “[R]evolution is already on [the working class] agenda.” Alex then draws out what Lukacs meant. “[S]udden twists and leaps are possible, however superficially stable things may seem. To make the most of new opportunities, revolutionaries require dynamism and flair in giving coherence and leadership (where possible) to the struggles that emerge.”

In the context of their time, these words represent the restatement of a revolutionary platform against the reformist currents of the Second International. Considered today, they need not refer to an imminent period of upheaval in which the proletariat will be constituted as a class-for-itself and will seize power, but simply the need to consciously relate our ultimate goal back to our day-to-day actions.*

This is what we activists need to do, and likewise we need to consider that sudden twists and leaps are possible. The initial line that the Socialist Worker took, for example, over the Lindsey Oil Refinery Strike sticks out in my head as being singularly unimaginative. Instead of calling for complete support for the strikers and concomitant engagement on the picket lines, there was a cursory denouncement.

Whatever the slogan involved, the wildcat strike was a qualitative leap beyond the innumerable ‘days of action’ beloved by the TU bureaucracy. And, as so often, it was what the working class was doing, rather than what was being openly said, that was crucial to the strike. Evicting BNP members who came knocking and appealing to the Portuguese and Italian workers are examples of class struggle in action.

In the end, the victory of the strike secured better terms and conditions for the migrant workers by including them in the NAECI agreement – and creating the conditions for future co-operation: liaisons between the unionised workforce and the migrant workforce. The key thing, however, was that this strike came out of the blue; no one really expected a militant wildcat action of such intensity.

Keeping the goal of knitting together the working class in view orientated multiple socialist organisations towards the correct view – to support the demands of workers, and to organise cells of communists at the scene to that end. This construction of grassroots networks between socialist parties and groups of workers is part of the creation of the proletarian class-for-itself out of the objective reality of a class-in-itself.

Bearing in mind that what we might call the visible parts of the revolution are not imminent, this type of organisational work takes on a huge importance. It’s not simply playing with numbers, which is what the Labour Party and other reformist one-time social democratic parties devolved into, in the days of mass parties. It is the creation of links, for education and action, each link being two-way.

By creating these links, we build the revolutionary party (i.e. the class will gather together in an overtly political organisation, with the capability and influence to organise – i.e. to lead – action). This is how we make ourselves responsive to the sudden twists and leaps. Far from being a purely organisational question, it is, as Gramsci asserted**, a political one, if we have the ‘end’ in view, i.e. the question of how the working class will organize and seize power, and re-arrange factory by factory the means and relations of production.

Startlingly, these links are largely absent today! Here is the key point for the activist. Most socialist groups accept the need for the creation of such links (those that don’t do so in practice, whether or not they do so in theory, will have a particularly lonely life) – but yet the links do not exist. In fact, I would go so far as to say that a fair amount of our activities – such as street stalls – tend to address political campaigns as exactly that game of “numbers through the gate” which Lukacs and Gramsci opposed.

A huge proportion of the workforce is un-unionised; by virtue of being un-unionised and thus unfamiliar with the traditions of the labour movement, it is more likely to perceive capitalism as ‘normal’, as here to stay. So the average stall about the Wars in Iraq or Afghanistan will pull people in, many of whom will donate or go on marches, and not relate the experience back to the other spheres of their life, preserving the artificial distinction between the individual’s ‘political’ and ‘economic’ existences, which capitalist hegemony creates.

Our activity has not adapted to this, and so a lot of the Left seems to me to ebb and flow with popular sentiment, rather than with the vicissitudes and requirements of actual class struggle, which, from a Marxist perspective, cannot but take place in the shadow of the actuality of the revolution.

I don’t speak of any particular groupuscule – I think all are guilty of this to some extent. We seem to wait around a lot, almost, in the impressionistic words of George Dangerfield, waiting for the working class to pick up and bodily hurl the trades union apparatus against the political and economic establishments. When a flicker of activity occurs, we flock around it, create links that may or may not be continuous from then on, and then we wait around some more.

One answer along the road, I think, is to be more pro-active in our industrial policy.

Lenin’s Twenty-One Conditions for Admission to the International, quoted by Gramsci, stated that revolutionaries “must conduct systematic and unflagging communist activity within the unions, the workers’ councils, the factory councils, the co-operative societies and all other workers organisations.” There’s no question about this, but it leaves out a vast number of workers who are the victims of the atomisation of our society, which appears to me all the greater in the so-called Information Age.

If the nature of the dialectic is grasping something in motion, i.e. a process, then Lenin refers to the activities of revolutionaries while the revolution waxes into its visible stage. We still fight the same battle, the battle with the Left-reformists, for control of the organisations of the working class, and the higher consciousness across the working class that comes with a victory there.

However in conditions where the Left-reformists have ceased the basic activities of unionisation, then the revolutionary party must take them on, and integrate them into the fight for control of the workers organisations. Recruiting workers to a union goes hand in hand with fighting and winning victories for workers as part of the organised labour movement. Lots gets done on this as regards migrant workers or out-sourced workers in London, for example. Yet vast tracts of every High St. in outer areas wouldn’t know a union if it bit them.

Winning symbolic victories is merely one part of the argument, when it comes to class consciousness. There is a lot of mundane work as well – and except for things we’ve done for decades, namely street stalls and campus meetings, we revolutionaries as a group don’t always seem as dynamic as Alex would like us to be, as I would like us to be. And if we wish to be dynamic, rather than adopt, for example, the reformist Left approach of a big, colourful conference with high flying speakers, we should be guided by Lenin and Lukacs, and the actuality of the revolution. Read more…

My seven year old has asked me to publish his new comic book creation ‘Banana Ninja and Evil Orange: Episode 1′.  Fair enough.  I understand Episode 2 is due out next week.  Please let me know if you’d like the follow up published here. 

To my mind episode 1 does not  sufficiently develop its analysis of class as the key factor in the struggle between the two (perhaps metaphoric) superheroes, and it is consequently somewhat shallow in its agency-based explanation for the support of the Infeari army in support of Evil Orange in his fruit- based struggle against his nemesis (and brother) Banana Ninja.  But perhaps I’m a bit picky.  Here it is:

(This is a straight cross-post from my local site Bickerstaffe Record, which explains its slightly different style.  I thought it might be of interest to a wider audience, given the likelihood that many Tory councils will be looking to places like Lancashire County Council as well as to Essex’s already high profile sell off to IBM for their model.   Future posts here on this matter are likely to focus more around union reaction etc., not least in light of Dave’s call to arms.)

When Thatcher was elected, it was widely understood that there would be a conflict with the unions. In 1981, a miners’ strike successfully deflected the intentions of the government. Cue special legislation and months of stockpiling coal to fight the next battle. When the time came, Thatcher’s government was well and truly ready to take on the miners and win, disheartening the entire labour movement at a stroke.

News that the Court of Appeal has granted an injunction against Unite’s planned industrial action against FirstBus in London makes me think it’s time the labour movement reversed the strategy of the Thatcher government. Every government, over the past thirty years, has handed down a string of anti-union legislation, and in the case of FirstBus, it was New Labour’s little additions which proved key to stopping the strike.

This makes it more evident than ever that a straightforwardly political approach to getting rid of the legislation is not going to work. New Labour has largely ignored the so-called “Warwick Agreement”. Waiting for another Labour government, even should it win through on a pledge to change union legislation and armed with MPs deeply rooted in the traditions of the labour movement, will mean waiting years in which unions continue to seem pointless, since they are stymied by the State and the law.

Law, I might add, which is being interpreted very liberally, even within the anti-union agenda of the Major and Blair governments.

I’ve already spoken about the British Airways strike, and how it was prevented. A couple of employment lawyers have been in touch – via the comments section, via twitter and via email – arguing about what legislation was responsible and why the union should have been more savvy in applying the rules, to ensure that their strike could go ahead. Having reviewed the legislation they point to, I reject this viewpoint.

Section 227 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 stipulates:

(1) Entitlement to vote in the ballot must be accorded equally to all the members of the trade union who it is reasonable at the time of the ballot for the union to believe will be induced to take part or, as the case may be, to continue to take part in the industrial action in question, and to no others.

(2) The requirement in subsection (1) shall be taken not to have been satisfied if any person who was a member of the trade union at the time when the ballot was held and was denied entitlement to vote in the ballot is induced by the union to take part or, as the case may be, to continue to take part in the industrial action.

The actions of Unite fall properly foul of neither of these regulations. Only if one reads the inverse of 227.1 is a law broken. That is, 227.1 expects that all members who are to be involved in the strike get a vote. The law is only broken is one expects that the text also implies the inverse of this, that the union must exclude from the vote anyone who is not liable to be engaged in industrial action.

Even if that is a fair expectation, Unite attempted to defend itself on the grounds that it took reasonable steps to exclude people bearing in mind 227.2, whereby if even one person had been excluded who was entitled to vote, the industrial action could also have been stopped by the courts, or the union rendered liable for damages and loss of earnings incurred by the employer.

Legislation like this is arcane, hardly allowing for simple human error (note that 227.2 does not contain a ‘reasonable’ clause, which persuades me that it is the exclusion of people rather than the inclusion of people against which this legislation is purely aimed). This shouldn’t surprise us; the goal of Thatcher and her successors wasn’t to make the playing field fair, it was to tie the hands of unions using the powers of the State.

In the case of MetroBus vs Unite, in July last year, sections 226, 231 and 234 of the same act were used. One of the key judgments passed down was that Unite the Union did not report to bosses with sufficient precision the occupational grades of the workers who were due to take industrial action. The purpose of such a measure is simply to permit bosses to prepare for strike action, which rather defeats the point of the endeavour.

The result was that even bus strikes where the courts had ruled that bosses’ legal challenges were spurious (and these days, every strike provokes a legal challenge of some degree, justified or not) were called off, as in South Yorkshire. Unite feared that the judgment handed down, which rendered them liable for losses in the event of a successful legal challenge to the procedure of the strike, would be subsequently applied elsewhere.

Now a new strike, by FirstLondon bus workers, has been halted by the courts. This strike is much lower profile than the British Airways strike, so I await details being released – the court judgment was only handed down recently. This is what Martin Mayer, Chair of United Left within Unite the Union had to say on the subject, however:

“In the case of First London, Firstgroup has actually tried to use a number of legal reasons to stop the strike, most of which failed because they were totally invalid.

“But one succeeded.

“Unite balloted its members for strike action and action short of a strike and a majority was returned in favour of both. The union scheduled action short of a strike within the first 28 days and then discontinuous strike action in the second month.

“The employer argued that the two questions on the ballot paper constituted two different ballots and the one for strike action was not activated within 28 days. It argued the strike action planned for January 6 [2010] was therefore illegal.

“The judge accepted that there was a legal argument here and issued the employer an injunction.

“Unite and other unions dispute that by asking two questions this represents two separate ballots – they see it as one ballot with two different questions, allowing the union some flexibility in the type of action it takes.”

“In this case Unite used the mandate to start action within 28 days with an action short of a strike and step up the action in the second month when that failed. Unite has never had any legal advice to say that this is not valid and nor has any other union.

It should be fairly obvious that, whether they initially used action short of a strike, or an all-out strike, the mandate was resoundingly agreed upon by workers and was promptly activated – in the first instance by action short of a strike. Again, arcane legislation, which passed itself off, once upon a time, as being in the interest of workers, so that they weren’t being used as a political hobbyhorse by Union leaders, is directly interfering with the clearly expressed will of those workers.

The nature of the law regarding trades unions and industrial action now means that it is in the interest of every employer to do their level best, in a courtroom, to have action declared invalid. No doubt in some cases, due diligence by a trades union would prevent this working. But simple human error, and errors which in no way have a wider bearing on the rights of members of unions to have their say, are now being used to stop strikes. These laws have, as Mayer asserts, become an Employer’s Charter.

Every single strike that is stopped represents a blow to the credibility of unions. Every blow to the credibility of a union means less members, less organisation and ultimately declining terms and conditions for the workforce. It must therefore be in the interest of unions and workers to organise against the legislation that is forming such a barrier to industrial action, even when there are no grounds for imagining that the ballot was undemocratic, or, having fulfilled the minutiae of the law, that it might have gone some other way.

To reverse Thatcher’s strategy, and the laws laid down by her government and her successors, the unions must pick a fight with the government. If they want secondary striking laws repealed, if they want clear, fair rules to protect the interests of members – not the interests of employers – then they must be prepared to break the law. Strikes must be balloted for, and multiple unions must come out in support. Civil disobedience must be organised and the State must be bullied into relinquishing its powers.

The strikes, the mass occupations of Parliament Square, the sporadic disruption of the national business must continue until Parliament votes to repeal these laws, and the other laws which represent a gross overreach as regards the diminishing rights of the individual. And make no mistake, the issues are totally connected; the organised labour movement – even in its atrophied state – remains the only consistent means whereby to control our political caste, even if that control remains moderated by the confines of capitalism.

If groups such as participated in the Convention on Modern Liberty really wish to see things done differently, then they should use their media profiles to support such direct action, use their lawyers to help us out when we get arrested and use their funds to cover every town in Britain with slogans and banners. This type of thing must be prepared long in advance, the battleground must be favourable to workers and the battle fought at a time of our choosing. Thatcher obviously knew her Sun Tzu.

Judging by the last thirteen years of a Labour government, one march of millions is not enough. Only continuous action on this scale will get the job done. A pipe dream this may sound, but a new war – this time in Yemen – is not out of the question. The next government will continue with actions against which the common sense of the British working class will rebel. If we can harness that energy against the war on Iraq, however dissipated it may have ended up, we can do it again for subjects even more crucial to our everyday lives.

Encouragingly, building blocks for such a comprehensive approach are slowly being laid. The last period has seen advances by Broad Lefts within various national unions. Anger, particularly by younger workers and the young unemployed, is quite evident – whether it’s in the clear shift in the 18-24 demographic away from the Labour Party, or in the strident chanting of a thousand marchers worried that they can’t get jobs. Even Labour centrists, stymied by their own leadership, seem suddenly more open to working outside narrowly sectarian channels on key issues.

Issues don’t get more key than this.

Yesterday, I made reference to Len Williams, a post-war Labour party General Secretary, with whom a longstanding CLP comrade of mine had contrasted a more recent General Secretary, Peter Watt. 

The said longstanding CLP comrade has been in touch to say his mind was playing tricks, and that in fact he meant Bert Williams, a post-war National Agent for the Labour party.  This is the only web reference (quick search) I can find to said Bert (scroll down to reference to his membership of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War).  He’s probably not pictured.

This is what my CLP comrade had to say about Bert Williams, and his  power relationship with the Parliamentary Labour Party:

I did know the ‘armless’ [Bert]  Williams.

Back in the late fifties, in my Midlands sojourn,  I was torn between teaching and becoming a full time Labour Party organiser. Thank God, I stuck to teaching.

I won the Harold Laski scholarship by submitting an essay and went off to Beatrice Webb House in Dorking for a two week training programme. The course was stuffed with wannabe councillors and MPs but only six of us chose the organisation option run by Williams.

He was crude but brilliant and totally contemptuous of most MPs. Like squaddies who regard the majority of officers as public school jessies. He knew that it was the front line infantry that delivered in the end.

These guys don`t exist any more. The current lot who govern us just talk management shite and have degrees in Insincerity and Self Interest (First Class).

Aah, traditional Labour values…..