Fighting the cuts

Millions of public sector workers face losing automatic annual pay increases as part of an £11.5bn cuts package unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne. They will also suffer a 1% cap on pay. The loss of a further 144,000 public sector jobs. Public sector workers must be wondering why they, and not the bankers, are paying the price of the financial crisis. The big challenge for public sector unions will be to demonstrate to the mass of employees who don’t work for the state that they can, and should, support those who are state employees in opposing public spending cuts.

Spending by government is the perennial problem of the capitalist class. All of the wealth that the workers produce is the property of the employing class. When the employers have succeeded in selling the goods produced by the workers they employ, and after they have paid wages and met all other expenses of production, they still have to meet the demands of the local and central government for rates and taxes of various kinds. All of the employing class have an interest—as they continually show—in trying to reduce the cost of government. As far as is politically practicable and militarily safe they try to reduce the amount the government raises as taxation and spends on civil service, military service, prisons, police, etc. If they succeed in getting taxation reduced it is in the hope of benefiting themselves; certainly not with the intention of passing on the benefit to the workers. The state, or government as it is more familiarly termed, exists for the purpose of maintaining the authority of the capitalist. It costs money to run a government. The capitalists do not like to pay taxes, but they must surround themselves and their property holdings with an extensive and expensive machinery. The complexity and functions of the state machine has grown enormously throughout the history of capitalism, so has the government spending. Banks and corporations on the brink of collapse were everywhere saved with cash from central government and temporary nationalizations by it. The ruling classes are now trying to do their best to solve the economic problems at the expense of the workers, at the expense of the wage earners. Austerity policies, anti-crisis measures, "cost saving" reforms aimed at dismantling the welfare state.

The attacks on our earnings and employment  rights are so blatant, aren't they? One could hardly come up with a better test of the revolutionary potential of the masses of workers. Arguing with the Left is not always a useful way for members of the Socialist Party  to spend their time, "We've got the wrong leadership" is the perpetual cry of Leftists so they choose new ones, and , of course many political groups fancy themselves as those "leaders" of the working-class. We do not. We say that workers should spurn these would-be vanguards and organise democratically, without leaders.

It’s easy to dismiss demonstrations, especially peaceful ones, as futile. Back in 2003, over a million people marched against the Iraq invasion in the biggest popular demonstration London had ever witnessed. It didn’t stop Blair launching a war on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. In 2005, a quarter of a million people dressed entirely in white encircled Edinburgh in a largely peaceful attempt to Make Poverty History. It didn’t. World poverty is still with us. Protests, even peaceful ones, are a kind of surrogate warfare – a physical show of strength on the streets, and that is why they are so powerful. You can have any number of petition campaigns but it lacks the impact of actually getting out there and marching on the streets.

 Direct action, even non-violent civil disobedience, is a threat to public order, and the threat is generally met by a show of force. Kettling is, after all, a form of summary punishment where the police form a kind of impromptu prison to contain the demonstrators for up to seven hours and is the equivalent of thrown in the cells for a few hours. Many will be  radicalised on the spot, realising for the first time the reality of the state power.

Because of the crisis people are actually questioning capitalism, because they’re being forced to. Capitalist "truths" are being  delegitimatised by experience on the ground. People  are educating themselves but to paraphrase Marx; “It is not enough that theory seeks people, people need to seek theory”.  People need to use that education intelligently. If they do not become part of the solution, they may well become part of the problem. So-called ‘experts’ offer solutions to  the economic woes of capitalism. But many of the remedies and supposed cures are throw-backs to earlier populist movements during previous depressions. Why is it happening? Because those protesting make no attempt at challenging the basic  principles of the system and are quite satisfied with capitalism, and all they want is to have capitalism with a "human face". That means their protest is purely defensive (and even conservative where it comes to preserving the vanishing welfare state under capitalism), they think in terms of conformism and reformism.

It is highly demonstrative that the contemporary Left have failed to offer strategies for the struggle other than reformist ones aimed at improving capitalism partially not at destroying it. And certainly all this, does not pose any threat to the rule of capital. A socialist revolution, which can only be worldwide and which will not run in the same pattern common for the previous bourgeois and state-capitalist revolutions is not a matter of the distant future. The  Left, at best, talk of the need to "transcend" capitalism in general, in some distant future but do not call for immediate struggle for social revolution. There are those (although few in number and weak in influence) who do but somehow their calls fail to ring the bell with wide, and even narrow, masses of the workers. When the ruling classes are forced to take such a measures against the workers that will inevitably blow up the class peace, i.e. to terminate the benefits system, to actually eliminate the social infrastructure of the welfare state, or to crack down on protests, these circumstances may lead to the class organisations of workers (such as trade unions) radicalising, to the capitalist society betraying its class nature, to the general public opening up to the revolutionary propaganda, and consequently, to the class struggle reviving and then to a social revolution.