Though Cowards Flinch

What’s getting my goat

There are bleeding millions of words floating about the leftie blogosphere and media telling us how terrible the cuts are going to be. 

There are not quite as many words, but still bleeding loads, telling us how we should resist the cuts because they are really, really bad for a) public services b) the economy.

With notable exceptions, these articles don’t tell us anything about what we might actually do. 

Take this lead article, just for example, in the most recent Red Pepper (chosen simply because I am now their favourite writer and want to advertise the fact shamelessly).   It’s fine in its own way, but it does go through the all too common ritual of a) giving us a headline to tell us we’re going to be told how to resist the cuts b) setting out the case against cuts c) spending a couple of paragraphs at the end telling us how important/possible it is to resist cuts.

So let’s try to move on.  Let’s have a crack at taking as a given that the cuts need resisting, and then setting out how we might actually do the resisting. 

This attempt to do so is, not least, further to my attendance today at Sunny’s Blognation event in London, which was exceedingly enjoyable but which, understandably enough, failed to provide its own concrete answer (or at least consensus) to its principle ‘Where now for the Left [on Political Economy]?’.

What’s to come

In the four posts to come, I’ll identify and assess four areas of potentially effective resistance work: 1) resisting the narrative of necessity; 2) resisting specific cuts 3) resisting through civil (and civic) disobedience; and 4) resisting attacks on workers.

There is an overlap here, and effectiveness will be enhanced by connecting up these areas of resistance, but for simplicity of presentation I will take them one by one. 

In the rest of this introductory post, though, I’ll cover the kinds of resistance action which I think are less effective, and should be sidelined in view of their call on resources which might be devoted elsewhere.

In summary, I contend that the mainstream left should consciously sideline a) resistance by mass organised demonstration; and b) resistance by defence of the ideal of the public sector.

Resistance by mass demonstration: the time is not right

I contend that we need to accept that, at this stage at least, banner-waving demonstrations, while they may be good for the soul on occasion (I have my doubts), do not have a significant impact on the struggle against cuts. 

Their organisation and conduct tends to be isolated from the rest of the resistance, taking up organisational energy and resources that might be better spent elsewhere.

More importantly, the era when they were interpreted by the ruling powers as a legitimate expression of dissent, and an overt threat of more revolutionary tactics, is long since gone.

In France, when the CGT union mobilises for one of its huge ‘manifs’ (‘demos’) in protest at plans to increase the retirement age, there is an acceptance on all sides that the scale of the turn out actually means something.  The press reports in detail on the size of the demonstration in comparative terms, and the government responds in kind to dispute both number on demonstrations and percentages of the workforce on strike:

 Quelque 395.000 personnes ont manifesté en France pour la défense des retraites, dont 22.000 à Paris, selon le ministère de l’Intérieur, tandis que la CGT a fait état d’un million de manifestants…..

Ces taux sont moins importants que ceux de la journée d’action du 23 mars, date de la dernière journée de mobilisation, note le ministère dans son communiqué. La mobilisation avait été de 18,9% dans la Fonction publique d’Etat, 11,1% dans la Fonction publique territoriale, et 7,9% dans la Fonction publique hospitalière.

The lower turnout for the anti-retirement age rise demos in May – about half the size of March – was widely accepted as being the end of the line for the 60 years retirement concession.  The threat of an increase in solidarity, and the implicit risk of the action spreading into strikes and violence were recognised as low, so the government was empowered then to act on its plans.

Nevertheless, the fact that both side measured the ‘strength of feeling’ by counting the number of demonstrators and associated strikers gives an indication of the hegemonic validity, rooted deeply in French political tradition, of the demonstration as proxy (even potent symbol) for what may come next.  It remains enough to have the ruling Parisian classes discussing the potential for working class foment over a soiree au 15ème, and to ensure that the appropriate ‘coups de téléphone’ are made the next morning.

There is no such tacit agreement – to allow demonstration to stand as proxy to revolution – in Britain.  We are kidding ourselves if we think that demos will spontaneously develop into wider actions, or that the government will think they might.

This is most certainly not to say that, as some kind of (ill-defined) organisational left, we should not support demonstration activity as it crops us locally at sites of resistance.  The repertoire of leftwing resistance is limited, and the banner-waving demonstration is a part of it, with potential for a good deal more effect on local ‘bosses’ reporting back into their ‘superiors’ than it does at the level of nationally organised demonstration. 

I remember from my own formative years of trade union militancy (I make no claim to have tactical expertise now) that a spontaneous march down Tooting High Street and the friendly hijacking of a Double Decker and its pleased and compliant driver, scared the wits out of regional union officials (we’re talking 1988 nurses’strikes here) but was an awful lot more effective both in terms of morale and effect than an ‘organised’ march might have been. 

Twenty odd years on, with much less spontaneity about my person, I’d want to be the scared witless moderate organiser, taken over by the events of the day to the extent that it’s not me in court the next day.   In other words I’m happy to follow Hannah Arendt’s view that violence (in its very widest sense here) does not in itself create power, but that is understandable in the context of spontaneous social movement.

Resistance by defence of the ideal of the public sector: the ideal is not right

Resistance through some kind if popular appeal to the ideal of the public sector and its servants is pointless. 

Firstly, it’s often difficult to see what this kind of resistance actually entails, other than the circularity of talking about how important it is to defend the public sector. 

Secondly, I agree totally with Sunny’s ‘tactical view’ that the population at large has no sympathy with the plight of the public sector because the anti-public sector argument of ‘waster’, ‘diversity officer non-jobs’ and ‘PC gone maaaad’ has been conclusively won by the right, and statements in support of the public sector in general only reinforce those prejudices.  If you don’t believe it, just read the papers and – as Sunny also point out – the opinion polls.

That is not to say that specific cuts to specific services should not be resisted both on the ground and through popular appeal to the need for that service, but it is to follow Sunny’s point that much of the rhetoric from Labour in support of the public sector has been self-defeating.  

This failure is, in turn, associated with the reality that the public sector as it is currently constituted is not something that the left should be defending in its entirety anyway; by all means defend worker rights, but defending an overall status quo of a public sector which remains massively managerialist and inflexible to the needs of those who need state support most is neither the right way to defend againt cuts tactically, or right in itself.  

Lots of people know from personal experience that the public sector didn’t help them when they needed it – whether it was because the tick-box culture in Sure Start stigmatised them as a parent so much that they preferred to remain lonely and depressed rather than plead guilty to their lack of educational opportunity, or because their old mum did actually get crap care in hospital and died a sad and lonely death because the resources weren’t in the place alienated and bureaucratized hospital staff knew, in their heart of hearts, they should be.

The left should be defending the right of workers to militate for a better public service, not pretending that all in the garden would be rosy if the Tories and their LibDem traitor-mates weren’t in power.

I’ll see you soon for part two of this series of five, in which Ill try to answer: ‘So if demonstrating and defending the public sector ideal are not effective as resistance, what should we do?’