They represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what politics is. The first one can just as easily be turned around. If you vote, whoever you vote for, you can’t complain because you’ve validated the system that selects people to represent you for a fixed term. These people armed with the legitimacy you’ve given them can go on to spend that time doing whatever they like, no mechanism exists to recall them, to hold them to account. You’re stuck with them.  Left leaning people with a sense of social justice committed to such things as free university tuition who voted Libdem in 2010 know this only too well.  They can’t do anything about it until 2015 and even then the only option the system provides is to go into a booth and tick a box next to the name of some other politician who promises to do something different. And so the cycle continues.

The second pro voter platitude – You’ll get some extremist like the BNP if you don’t turn up and vote Labour (or some other mainstream party). Is this really an argument?  Representative democracy reduced to voting for someone less bad than the extremist or that’s what you’ll get?  Put another way – Support the status quo because the best (electorally) organised alternative is fascist.

Election day isn’t the day to combat fascism, to try to head off the change that they represent. It’s far too late by then. The question is how the hell have fascists been in a position to organise openly, to canvass for electoral support in your community in the first place? What’s going on there? What were you doing before election day about this?

Do you live surrounded by people with a natural affinity for fascism or are there people in your community so disillusioned with mainstream politics that a significant number are prepared to vote for fascists because they are the only alternative on offer and even then, an alternative wrapped up with the existing system of box ticking every four years we call electoral politics?

Voting? It’s a mugs game.

There was a piece I wanted to reference, a piece which I believe to be the most important comment on anti-fascism and working class politics written in my lifetime. Filling the Vacuum. It was originally published in issue 12 of AFA’s magazine Fighting Talk , and marks the intellectual beginning of the IWCA. The link on the IWCA’s own site is broken and the only place I could find it is in a pdf of a scan of the original issue on Libcom’s site.

I was going to write about my belief that the ideas in that article are as relevant now as they were in 1995. I don’t think that’s necessary though. It speaks for itself and of our current situation as though it was written yesterday. I’ve re-typed it from that scanned copy and posted it here so it’s searchable and easily copied – post it to your own blog.

FILLING THE VACUUM

In Novemer 1990, at a public meeting in east London, AFA declared that the “working class is the natural constituency of socialism, not fascism. Racism and socialism are incompatible. One only exists at the expense of the other. The success of the Far-Right is due to the fact that the Left are not seen as a credible option. AFA are committed to creating the space in which on [a credible alternative] can develop”

Three years later, addressing a meeting in south-east London, an AFA spokesperson returned to the them: “While the initial aim must be to root out the organised racists/fascists – the motive force behind the attacks – and thrown down a challenge to those that provide them with facilities, the long term solution must be to create communities of resistance. By creating some space, perhaps in time a real working class alternative to the lying bullshit that now passes for politics in this country can emerge. The entire Left has failed the working class, black and white alike, though many prefer to believe that the working class has failed the Left. We are here today, not only because they [the Left] are bad socialists but more specifically because they are bad anti-fascists”.

In 1994 in a widely distributed expose of the Anti-Nazi League [Don't believe the Hype], AFA was even more specific. “The BNP can be stopped and on many occasions up and down the country AFA has physically stopped them. However we are not blind to the fact that the fight is political and accept that the resurgence of support for the Far-Right is a symptom of a deeper malaise. We do not see is as our job to campaign for Labour. It is not AFA’s role to argue that change is not needed. The function of anti-fascism is not to see the electoral threat from the Far-Right beaten back so that Labour and the middle-class Left can, as happened between 1982-92, turn their backs on both the social causes and their own collaboration in the political betrayal that gave rise to the NF and the BNP in the first place.”

The ambition of militant anti-fascism is not simply to see the Far-Right defeated and removed from working class areas: the ultimate solution is to see them replaced there. The BNP’s attack on Labour is from the Right and is racist, ultra-conservative and anti-working class. Our primary role is to guarantee that a successful challenge to Labour comes only from the Left. Furthermore, and purely from an anti-fascist point of view, as the best insurance against any nazi renaissance, it would be the duty of militants to offer protection and encouragement to any genuine [anti-Labour] working class revolt.

When AFA was relaunched in London in September 1989 it was accepted that while AFA was still organised around the single issue of anti-fascism, “AFA propaganda must contain a class message” in order “to negate the efforts by the fascists to present AFA as a bunch of middle-class outsiders, part and parcel of the Establishment, working in the long term interests of the status quo”.

Much has changed since 1989, not least the fact that AFA is now a national organisation with over forty branches organised in four main regions each with the physical ability to forcefully implement AFA’s founding statement on the streets. In addition other organisations such as ANL, ARA and YRE have jumped on – and off – the bandwagon. The early nineties also saw the return to electoral prominence of the Far-Right not just in Britain but throughout Europe. The success of AFA on the streets also led to the birth of the wannabe paramilitary grouping C18.

In another tribute to AFA’s militant strategy the BNP declared in April 1994 that there would be “…no more marches, meetings, punch-ups…” A year on, this declaration must now be regarded as serious change of strategy, something other than a temporary electoral ploy or an effort to court respectability. There appear to be at least two crucial reasons for the change of strategy. One undoubtedly, is that since their resurgence to national prominence, AFA have fought the BNP to a standstill. In 1991 Scotland was regarded by the BNP leadership as its highest growth area and the area possibly with the greatest potential. Today the BNP no longer visibly exists. Literally beaten into the ground by anti-fascist militants.

In the North West the BNP organisation and morale has all but been destroyed. A similar pattern is emerging in the Midlands. In the South East the fascists have been constantly harassed. Apart from the east and possibly south east they are practically invisible in London.

In many of these areas the politics of the BNP undoubtedly have a resonance, but they are unable to take advantage of the latent support due to the logistical problems caused by the constant possibility of attack and their own profile as a “party of strength”. One way to resolve the problem would be to recruit, but they cannot have open recruitment for fear of infiltration. In addition the fear of physical violence means that they are unable to bring their more articulate middle class supporters onto the streets for fear of losing them entirely.

The situation in Europe would also have played an influence. Here the fascists, particularly in Austria and Italy, have recognised that with the demise of the support for the communist parties there is no need for a visibly menacing counter-threat. If there is no physical danger, fascists do not need to hide behind a sinister private army. The battle for control of the streets need not be fought if control is not being contested. If the end can be achieved without the traditional means there is no need for the rough stuff. In Britain, with the absence of any tangible political threat to their adopted working class constituency the argument for a physical force movement to contest the streets becomes not only void but instead represents a serious impediment to their own political ambitions -only!

Since their meteoric climb in 1990 in not one area of the country, despite significant sympathy on the ground, have they for more than one day at a time been able to control the streets; Bermondsley, Bloody Sunday and the Isle of Dogs being the exceptions. More often than not in regard to the large set pieces they have been humiliated. And even when they have won, the victory has gained them nothing except a confirmation of what already sustains them; that Labour and the Left are increasingly alien to working class people. So in a sense for them simply to continue with the strategy of “marches, meetings, punch ups” only provides an enemy that has already lost the fundamental arguments -Labour/ANL/Trotskyism, etc. (or in the case of AFA which has failed to put an argument) – with a legitimate political excuse/focus, ie: anti-BNP. The BNP policy of open swaggering aggression also affords an organisation like AFA a legitimate opportunity to answer in kind, and in doing so physically destroy the BNP’s political prospects by crippling its infra-structure. With AFA having no political prospects of its own they are on a hiding to nothing.

It takes two to tango, so what of AFA’s reason for being if the BNP decide that they don’t want to play anymore? Certainly in London, AFA has only been able to seriously damage the Far-Right once recently. If this is a permanent change of plan there is a serious danger that AFA, without the physical challenge for which it was designed, will itself begin to lose direction and begin to atrophy.

The flip side of the coin is that C18, who have no electoral ambitions either, don’t do anything but ‘play’. The ideal solution for both the State and the Far-Right would be for AFA to get locked into a clandestine gang war with C18, thereby allowing the State to select candidates of their own choosing for lengthy incarceration. That done, the now entirely legal BNP could go about their business like their European counter-parts, articulating ‘genuine racial concerns’ unhindered.

Furthermore, if the BNP operation is made entirely legal and if AFA physically opposes them, then our operation is de facto illegal. The BNP then might reasonably expect, in return for their collaboration with the forces of law and order, that the tactic of summary arrest be employed against AFA on a consistent basis. Circumstances are changing and AFA needs to adapt.

Fascism is the vanguard of reaction. It is at once the manifestation, the contributory cause and the principle beneficiary of society’s decomposition. Unlike the rest of the anti-racist Left, AFA’s emphasis has always been on the political danger represented by fascism., while others such as Searchlight and the ANL have laid the emphasis on their violent and criminal tendencies. In addition they refuse or are unwilling to recognise that anti-fascism is by definition a rearguard action and that fascism is the consequence, rather than the cause, of the Left’s failure. Inevitably the strategies adopted to combat fascism carry with them the germs of the strategies that caused fascism, invariably leading to compound failure. So while it cannot be denied that the ANL’s media campaign focused public attention on the problem, it also proved to be a distraction in regard to the solution.

One of AFA’s strengths in its formative years was its limited platform; the ‘single issue’. This concentration weeded out or repelled the sectarians, the ‘tough talkers’ and the dilettantes. However, during the Isle of Dogs campaign, the ‘single issue’ exposed AFA’s limitations. AFA had nothing to say on the principle business.

AFA has long recognised that once the Far-Right is allowed to mobilise, is the allowed the set the agenda, and has passed a certain point, they begin to control their own destinies – and opponent’s. Once that point is reached it would be useless and possibly counter-productive to rely upon a purely anti-fascist stance, primarily because people look to politics for solutions. It might be clear what you stand against, though their understanding of what you stand for will effectively determine their overall response.

As the activities of the ANL on the Isle of Dogs demonstrated (despite blanket canvassing the BNP vote actually rose by 30%), an anti-fascist message on its own would find little favour with working class people, even those repelled by the BNP, if they suspected that it was simply a spoiling tactic, carried out by the allies of the local Labour establishment in an effort to maintain the status quo. AFA has ever fought to maintain the status quo, but, even at their most effective, anti-fascist militants can never hope to achieve anything more than to maintain that vacuum. There is little doubt that the vacuum has been successfully maintained but now, in the absence of any other suitable candidates, it is incumbent on the anti-fascist militants to help fill the vacuum themselves.

The working class is increasingly alienated from Labour, the BNP’s strategy is entirely reliant upon this alienation: ‘they really hate Labour’ etc. The total ineptitude and the tangible contempt that exists in some areas between Labour and its former constituency has locally and nationally begat the BNP. And fascism begat anti-fascism. In straight-forward language, it is the politics of the Labour Party that has created the BNP. So by acting as campaign managers for Labour, the ANL/YRE are prostituting anti-fascism, and instead of being identified with a radical, pro-working class position, anti-fascism is seen to be defending the status quo, thereby practically forcing people who who want change to vote BNP, out of sheer desperation. They are literally driving people into the arms of the fascists. Up to now it is entirely due to the cutting edge of AFA that the passive support has remained just that. But it is unrealistic to expect that vacuum to be maintained indefinitely.

Nor as working class militant anti-fascists can we stand on the sidelines, wringing our hands hopelessly. We have to take that stand against Labour. Not simply in a theoretical sense, but in an organisational sense. It is vital that the working class on the estates, seriously alienated from Labour, are provided with an alternative to the BNP. The election of a Labour government will be a massive shot in the arm for the Far-Right. It is also very possible that in the subsequent local elections the Isle of Dogs scenario could be repeated on a national scale, and all our good work in the last decade would be undone at a stroke.

What is needed is a new organisation. In all probability the impetus of the Clause Four controversy will cause a realignment of the Left that will give it birth. It is not being suggested that AFA disband and becomes the organisation. It is as vital as ever that AFA maintains its own structures and agenda. Nor is it being suggested that AFA create this new organisation. This would hardly be possible in any case. What must be recognised is that it will happen with or without AFA. AFA contains the best working class militants in the country. It is absolutely vital that in order to shape the organisation in its own image, AFA is in from the very beginning. To shape it in AFA’s own image would mean stipulating from the outset: a) a democratic structure, built from the bottom up rather than from the top down; b) rather than appeal to a mythical ‘labour movement’ the strategy requires and orientation to, and accommodation of, the working class proper; c) non-sectarian. This does not mean being forced to work with everybody; it means working alongside others towards a common goal, not making no apology for a refusal to collaborate on any project for which you have no enthusiasm, or with those with whom you fundamentally disagree.

In any case it must be obvious that to stand aloof would be an unmitigated disaster. That would allow the middle classes once again to set the agenda. AFA has been dealing with the consequences of their agenda for over a decade. It would be criminally negligent to allow our adversaries to fill the space we have created and maintained in that time. This is an opportunity to add a string to AFA’s bow. It will be a compliment to, rather than a deviation from, vigorous anti-fascist activity.

Even on a limited tactical basis the benefits of an independent working class organisation operating alongside AFA would be immediate and widespread. AFA could, for the first time, campaign for something instead of merely campaigning against something – and campaign legally.

AFA could be pro-active as well as reactive. There would be no breathing space for the likes of the BNP. And, for as much as an embryonic association might welcome AFA’s physical presence, the situation demands that AFA avails itself of a wider political platform than was hitherto considered either necessary or available. For the first time since the thirties militant anti-fascism would be associated with solutions rather than simply violent actions and threats. For the first time, too, involved with setting the agenda rather than clearing up the political mess left by someone else’s.

Ultimately the challenge for AFA is not only to destroy the BNP in working class areas but to replace them there. So the political message, to have resonance, will have to be deeper and more comprehensive. A straight forward anti-fascist parable, a simple refutation of the ‘radical’ in nationalism will, on its own prove unsatisfactory.

If AFA’s efforts are to culminate in victory we must seek to replace them, but to replace them we must not only out-violence them, we must also out radicalise them.

The implications of this were summed up brilliantly by Paul Mason the day after Osborne’s statement.

What the right learned yesterday is there is no swift route to this; what the left learned is the size of the fiscal overhang it will inherit should it ever get back into power. For yesterday will shape Labour’s future as much as it will the Coalition’s: markets are already pencilling in an attack of the vapours in late 2014 if it becomes possible that a Labour government committed to missing Osborne’s new fiscal target will be elected.

And don’t kid yourself that Britain is somehow immune, either, from the “government by technocrat” virus sweeping Europe. We saw last night the Lib Dems forced to effectively write their manifesto on the set of Newsnight; Labour too will now be wrenched from the leisurely world of blue-skies thinking, by boxfresh young frontbenchers in as yet unwrinkled suits. It will see its core electoral base – the public sector workforce and low-income families – subjected to four more years of demands for givebacks, job losses, service cuts, tax-credit cuts. But it cannot publicly support their protest actions. Those of us who’ve reported from the streets of Athens, and know what a leaderless mass of angry people looks like, know how disorienting a fiscal crisis can be for social democrats.

In the Autumn statement Labour had the rug pulled out from under them. They can no longer provide lip service resistance to the cuts while the Tories remove the fiscal deficit then ride into government on a wave of support for their anti cuts stance. If they win in 2015 they’re going to be cutting themselves and they’ll get no support from the markets and big business if they commit to the kind of Keynesian policies that many leading  economists  claim could fix the economy.

The reason that the markets, why capital favours a policy of deficit reduction rather than economic stimulation is simple – cuts shrink the state and the real wages and pensions of those in the private sector. When growth returns and so tax takes rise don’t expect to DLA come back or pensions to be restored. Expect tax cuts, in particular corporate tax cuts. These tax cuts along with a cheaper workforce are a win for capital.

You might not like this, I hope you don’t because unless you’re sitting on pile of capital that you’re waiting to deploy what I’ve described is you being screwed over in a big way. The important thing to remember is that you can’t vote not to be screwed. Even if there was a party that wasn’t beholden to the markets to vote for you’re not going to be asked to vote until 2015 anyway by which time it’s all too late.  We have to fight to maintain what we have now, to push the pain of this crisis to where it belongs – capital.

Over the last few days Union bosses have blasted Milliband for his U-turn. This has raised hope of the unions disaffiliating from the party and leading a fight back. It’s a very thin hope and one that will need to be fought hard for by grass roots member if it’s going to stand a snowballs chance in hell of happening. The link between the Labour party and the unions is about more than money, the parliamentary obsession of the party is shared by union hierarchy. It’s no coincidence that it was Alan Johnson who warned union leaders not to become a delusional left. Johnson, a former  UCW General Secretary was reminding union leaders of the link, the revolving door and their own future.

Even if the unions split from Labour the laws governing them makes it very difficult for them to mount any more than symbolic action. A one day strike is a symbol, it sends a message. November 30th told Osborne loud and clear that the public sector workers aren’t enjoying their shit sandwich one little bit. Trust me, he knew that anyway and I suspect he enjoyed the pantomime of doom and gloom predictions before the action and then when the chaos predicted failed to materialise he laughed like a drain when his boss called the strike a “damp squib”. The unions can’t easily step outside of the law, they risk having their assets frozen or even seized by the state. The unions have been effectively sterilised by the state over a number of decades by successive governments, Tory and Labour.

Bear in mind that as the union hierarchies have been hamstrung by legislation so many of us have been hamstrung by debt. Those mortgages Thatcher made available by deregulation so we could by our council houses have made striking off work for any length of time an impossible prospect for many. Werner Bonefeld’s essay The Politics of Debt: Social Discipline and Control is worth reading in light of the current situation.

What we need to do if we’re to effectively resits the cost of the crisis being born by us is to find our own effective methods of resistance. Methods which don’t rely on a party to save us or a union hierarchy to sacrifice its privileged position.

So far in this latest crisis we’ve had UK Uncut and the occupy movements which have stepped outside the existing conventions.

We need more and we need to link to the idea that we’re not in the grips of a natural disaster. Lehman’s went bust, the world financial system ground to a halt but this is a system failure. All the productive capacity that was there the day before Lehman’s was still there the day after, it’s not been destroyed by a hurricane. We might have lost our jobs or seen our incomes squeezed by pay freezes and inflation but as any one who got a new TV in the August riots can tell you, the stuff is all still there, we’ve just been told we can’t have it.

The system is broken and years of austerity for us is simply not an acceptable way to repair it.

Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic – not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system.

Empirical and flexible about all else, its leaders have always made devotion to that system their fixed point of reference and the conditioning factor of their political behaviour. This is not simply to say that the Labour Party has never been a party of revolution: such parties have normally been quite willing to use the opportunities the parliamentary system offered as one means of furthering their aims. It is rather that the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of political action (such as industrial action for political purposes) which fell, or which appeared to them to fall, outside the framework and conventions of the parliamentary system. The Labour Party has not only been a parliamentary party; it has been a party deeply imbued by parliamentarism. And in this respect, there is no distinction to be made between Labour’s political and its industrial leaders. Both have been equally determined that the Labour Party should not stray from the narrow path of parliamentary politics.

The Labour Party remains, in practice, what it has always been- a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is ever more firmly and by now irrevocably rooted.

The above quote is from the introduction to Ralph Milliband’s Parliamentary Socialism: A Study of the Politics of Labour published in 1961.  The reality is that the Labour party has been beyond the control of it’s rank and file  members and unions since it first gained MP’s in the 1920′s. The latest move is no more of a surprise today than  Neil Kinnock’s failure to support the miners in 1984 or to even attempt to effectively resist  the de-industrualisation of Britian, the smashing of communities and the financialisation of the economy that was Thatcherism.

Ed Milliband and the Labour party are (re)abandoning the working class now at a time of open conflict. They’ve chosen the parliamentary system, the law of the rich and the bosses. It’s who they are, as Ed’s father said in 1961 – everything is flexible except for the goal  parliamentary power.

This time though things are different, it’s not the 1980′s. In the 1980′s the Tories reinvented Britain, created the conditions by liberalising capital markets to allow capital to redeploy production to countries with cheap ununionised labour and attacked the working class organisations at home. They also sold a vision. A vision of home ownership for all, a stake in the corporations they sold off. It was pure deceit, there’s nothing empowering about a mortgage and being able to buy shares in a business you already owned as a citizen before it was sold off by the state is willingly participating in your own robbery. It worked though, 18 years of power and the completion of a project that lasted 10 more years under Labour. In 1998 John Major said of Blair’s government “they have good policies, they’re our policies”.

There’s no vision today though, it’s a straight up fight. They can’t sell  council houses off cheap because they’ve already sold them. There’s no BT share issue for us to get excited over or  British Gas shares to tell Sid about because they’ve already sold them. The vision of the Tories today is “The Big Society” which translates to “We’re not taking tax off the rich to pay for services so do it yourself”.

Unlike the 80′s the Labour party have got out of the way early doors. Less than 2 years in and they’re hand is nakedly declared. There’s no handwringing over whether a miners ballot was quite as it should be to excuse not providing unequivocal support for working class people fighting for their jobs. Ed Milliband isn’t even pretending to be on your side.

The unions are crying about this, as though this is some kind of revelation to them. It’s not. It might be the time they turn, when Unite along with Unison and the GMB etc. follows the RMT and disaffiliates from Labour  That’s up to you though. If you’re a member, fight for it and for love of sanity make sure you opt out of your unions political fund and make it clear you’re doing so because of Labour Party affiliation.

The fight now is who pays for the disaster of the 1980′s de-industrialisation and the fiancialisation of the economy. Do we as the working class pay for it though redundancy and pay cuts? Do the disabled and vulnerable pay for it through service and benefit cuts? If you think that’s what should happen, you don’t need to do anything. Vote Labour in 2015.

It’s up to us, it’s never been more clear that all we have is each other. The Labour Party aren’t going to help us, forget them.

We do some stuff for free, we printed t-shirts for the antifascist prisoners, both the ones we sold on here and gave to Leeds ABC to sell at benefits. We were happy to do it. When we got an email from someone organising a benefit gig in South End to raise money for the prisoners asking for a price we gave them details of a supplier to get the garments from, told them to have delivery made to us and we’d send the shirts down to them printed, for free and that’s what we did. We were happy to do it. That stuff matters.

In exactly the same way as we provide a website for the IWW to sell merch, host and maintain Leeds ABC site and are helping the Hereford Heckler by hosting and maintaining a site for them. This stuff matters. It’s socially useful, none of these people we’ve helped are doing what they do for themselves. They’re providing their time and money to do something important for their communities, for prisoners, generally doing what they can to make the world a better place. We like them and we like helping them. If you’re reading this and you’re involved in something similar we might be able to help with, drop us an email.

We don’t care about your band though. Sure, we’ll print t-shirts for you, we’ve printed t-shirts for lots of bands and sure, we’ll give you a good deal. We will make money from it though, it’s impossible to exist if we don’t make some money. Maybe one day soon we can march on the town halls and record offices of this land, burn all property deeds, declare all property common and abolish money.

Until then we have to make a living. Until then you’re not going to get a polite answer from us if you tell us you want 50 t-shirts for a band you’re managing but you’re not sure if you can sell them so can you have them for less than the price of the blank t-shirt and a credit on the album.

We have sympathy with fact that there’s a risk you might be out of pocket if your project doesn’t go as planned but we’re not going to fund it for you because the only people who benefit from your success should you achieve any are you. We have no sympathy with the fact that can easily afford to fund your project but would rather we lost money and not you. This makes us quite angry in fact.

Really, we don’t care about your band. Please stop emailing and phoning us.

There’s been some uproar on twitter in the last few days about a blog post by Lisa Ansell. The general tone of this has taken is that she is pro scab. I don’t think that she is, I think that she raises some important issues that whether we agree with them wholeheartedly or not they need to be considered.

The best way to outline those issues is to write a little about where I’m coming from. I’m 36, I remember the miners strike. I grew up in a place called Chasetown, a place that only exists because of mining. By the time of the 1984 strike mining was important but not the major source of employment, my own dad was a welder at a drive shaft manufacturer in Aldridge, the BRD. I remember lots of my friends dads worked there as well, in fact my girlfriends dad, two uncles and granddad worked there. I’m not from a mining family. We lived next door to a man called Jim, he was a miner and a scab. I used to spend time with them when I was young, this ended when the strike began and Jim kept going to work.  He lost a lot of friends over that decision, miners and non miners alike.  Scabs are bad, I’ve known it since I was 9 even if I didn’t understand it at the time.

I understand it now, and I feel more animosity to Jim and his ilk than I was capable of as a child. He’s a broken old man these days, paralysed down one side by a stroke and clinging to independence with a mobility scooter but I can’t get past the part he played in the destruction of the industry of the West Midlands and the country as a whole.  The defeat that was the miners strike had implications way beyond the mines. The de-industrialisation of Britain would have gone down very differently if the miners had won. Put simply, the miners lost and the whole working class lost with them.

So as a class we’ve got what we’ve got now. Precarious employment for most, no employment at all for a significant minority, especially the young and little prospect of that changing for the better any time soon. In fact things look likely to get a whole lot worse. The security that public sector workers once enjoyed has evaporated, the pensions they get are under attack. The mainstream media portrays them as lazy and overpaid and screams furiously that  public sector pensions are better than those private sector workers get. It’s seldom mentioned that they get paid less and contribute more and never mentioned that if the aim was justice the call would be for better private sector pension provision, not the dragging down of every worker to the bare minimum level for survival. If they’re lucky.

The response to these attacks? Strike action from public sector workers. Action that should be supported by every worker, whether they’re in the public sector or not. The inescapable fact now, just as in 1984 is that the fate of every single member of the working class is tied to the fate of every other member of the working class. Solidarity. Not a word, a weapon as the saying goes. It’s more than that though – All we have is each other.

That’s the constant, true in 1984, true now. Lots of other things have changed though. The patterns of our lives are very different. Few of us turn up to work through a gate with 2000 other people each shift change, some of us don’t even go to the same place each day to work.  How many children are at school with friends whose parents work with their parents? The community workplace connection is gone. It went with the industry.

It’s in the context of 2011 and November 30th that I read Lisa Ansell’s blog post. I recognise a lot of sense in it. The support networks that existed in 1984 have largely gone, families spread over around the country as a consequence of battles long since lost. Shouting “scab” now is not what it was. The issue of personal debt means that the sad fact is there isn’t a union in this country that could strike off for the best part of a year. Some people genuinely couldn’t afford to lose a single days pay without incurring serious hardship. And yes, I’m well aware that they’ll lose more if the action is lost. Solidarity. We need to build it and it won’t be built by shouting at those that aren’t playing the game the we way we think it should be played or by abandoning the weak and vulnerable. It’ll be built by reconnecting with each other. By understanding each other and framing the fight in a way that we can win it. That’s not to say that I don’t think anyone should ever be called a scab, they exist but Lisa Ansell isn’t one, and she doesn’t seem to me to be their friend.

I think she’s wrong about the relevance of the left.  I think  we belong to a tradition that comes with an insight and value set that can be central to maintaining and improving the lives of ordinary people. Our lives. How we apply that insight and those values is what’s important.  We aren’t apart from the working class with a magic blue print that would save the world if only people would listen.  We need to recognise the limitations we and others have, overcome them where we can and work around them where we can’t.

Scab isn’t a desperately useful word for achieving that in 2011 and the fight that’s been started with Lisa Ansell by some to my mind is an example of how not to do it.

We went to a gig on Saturday. “Rage against Racism” – An all day Event at “The Well” (Chorley Street, Leeds) with ‘The Oppressed’ headlining.

It was attacked around 2.30pm by a group Claiming to be The EDL.  During the week leading up to the event, posts were made on the Rage Against Racism Facebook page regarding turning up to the gig.

Several Blog/News posts have appeared on the internet regarding the Attack – some embellished with rumors/uncertain facts  and  sensationalized – at the time of the Attack hardly anyone besides Organizers, Stallholders and Bar Staff were there.

In a nutshell this is what happened..

The EDL turned up, they were prevented from gaining entry by four people who stood their ground at the Venue entrance, refusing to be intimidated. The EDL then threw bottles/cans/bricks breaking some windows – one brick/bottle/can hit a person in the face. A number of the EDL idiots were subsequently arrested.

The Police and Venue Boss allowed the gig to continue.  The broken windows were swiftly boarded up and all the debris removed.

Gig Goers were not deterred by the mindless attack and a great Day was had – The Oppressed were awesome – as were the other bands and DJs.  The Bar was very nearly drunk dry

Big Respect to the Guys who risked their personal safety – they doubtlessly prevented more injuries and damage by the Mindless Mob.

I’m not going to go into the background of the dispute beyond that. It doesn’t matter, I’m not in the RMT so I didn’t vote in the strike ballot. The facts that matter to me and all non RMT members are these – The RMT is going on strike or put another way workers are fighting for their rights and conditions. My support for them and their action is unconditional.

I recognise their right to choose their course of action for themselves.   They don’t need me to tell them what to do, which is good because I’m not going to tell them what to do.

What they need is the support of other workers, they need all of us to recognise that old IWW slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” and to understand what it means.

The best way to explain what it means is to put it in its opposite “A victory for one is a victory for all”.  We’re told there’s a job market, and there is. The Tories love it, the Labour party spent 13 years in government making that market more flexible. What we don’t get told enough but what we should recognise is how that market works is something we as people who are forced to sell our labour in it can decide. The employers want the competition within that market to be between workers – work longer, harder and faster for less than the next person. Each worker trying to make themselves more attractive to employers of than the next worker. In short they want us to cut our own throats.   That’s what they want but we don’t have to give it to them.  The truth is, they need us, we don’t need them. What the RMT are doing is making their workplace a more attractive place to be.  When the RMT win a dispute, when conditions within that workplace improve workers want to be there instead of a workplace with lower pay and poorer conditions.

When the RMT or any other union improve conditions for themselves they improve the lot of us all. This is what we need to recognise, this is something we need to shout about at every opportunity.
Sunny Hundal the self styled left wing writer doesn’t recognise any of this . In a blog post this morning on his Liberal Conspiracy site Hundal is trying to tell the RMT what’s really going on. He’s offering criticism in a live dispute with a straight face. He does however say that “I’m not against strike action in this case” as though the RMT need his approval for action and they’re lucky to get it.

He ends his post with this.

All I’m saying is this: when it comes to Tube strikes, unions are almost always the losers in the media and public opinion battle. That matters because the likely outcome is more anti-union legislation. It doesn’t always have to be that way, if only there was more coordination and discussion with allies elsewhere.

Sunny’s right. There is a fight for public opinion, there is a chance of further attacks on union rights. what Sunny can’t get his head around is that he’s on the wrong side. What the RMT and every other worker needs is solidarity. Not a mealy mouthed part time scab.

Of course, not everyone wants an incredibly tasteful Glow in the Dark PC Simon Harwood T-Shirt.

So i knocked up this Quick easy to make Stencil so you can spray it wherever you like.

PC Simon Harwood "Born to Kill"

Right Click image below – Save Link as.

Some of us on the left  have been vocal supporters of AV,  some of us haven’t. Look at it this way, the system used to elect the government is less important than what the government get up to.

AV is over, the most concerted attack on the working class in a generation is live and ongoing.  The coalition government is our enemy.

All we have is each other.