Up to 38,000 junior doctors, bar those working in emergency care, are striking for 24 hours. Two-thirds of the public back the junior doctor strike, poll has revealed. Pickets will be held at around 100 hospitals throughout England, in the most significant strike by medical staff in 40 years.
How do you reconcile this with SPGB in Questions and Answers on Socialism etc and what they call a democratic PEACEFUL transition to Socialism ? ! :-) ....
ReplyDeleteNot sure about your comment but the junior doctor are not out on strike for socialism but are in a dispute with their employers and are with-holding their labour legally, according to the law, as it stands now. I'm not inclined to judge their actions as violent. But perhaps you can explain the point you re trying to make a bit more.
ReplyDeleteStrike action has a disruptive effect, depending on amount, so this is classified has force or whatever you may call it ? !
ReplyDeleteI don't think i agree with you. It can be seen as a self-inflicted wound if you wish to give a strike a negative connotation, negative in the sense that loss of wages and putting your job on the line is also involved in a strike and a more positive spin is that it is a sacrifice made for the common good, in this case rewarding skilled labour to retain them.
ReplyDeleteCan the actions of a group of workers be compared with a capitalist strike - the hoarding and refusal to invest capital and the closing down of whole industries.
"...Strikes are necessary if workers are to prevent themselves from being driven into the ground by the never-satisfied demands of profit: as workers we must organise to defend and improve our wages and conditions of work. The strike is one of the workers’ weapons and, within the confines of the profit system, is a weapon that can limit the capitalists’ aims. Those who tell us not to strike ‘for the good of the nation’ are, whether they know it or not, mouthpieces for the good of the bosses. The wages system is an institutionalised assault on the creators of the world’s wealth and we use our trade unions to defend ourselves...It is our job as socialists, then, to stand with our fellow workers in their necessary battles to defend themselves"
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/strike-weapon-lessons-miners%E2%80%99-strike
A union is only as strong as its members. For without their participation at the place of work, and without their willingness to go on strike or take some other form of industrial action, a union would be in a weakened position with regard to the employer...Strikes in recent years have demonstrated how workers who are not directly concerned with production, e.g. firemen, hospital workers, dustmen, teachers, social workers and postmen, find they are handicapped in their militant action by their indirect connection with the productive process. Although their strikes can cause great public inconvenience it is the effect on trade and profit that ultimately determines the length of a strike and the success of the strike weapon...A great wave of strikes early in 1979, which involved lorry drivers, teachers, health service and other local government workers, raised another issue as also did the earlier strike of firemen. In the nineteenth century the suffering incidental to strikes was largely confined to the strikers and their families. In our own day the hardship and disruption increasingly extends to the whole working class...
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/trade-unions#ch1
Capitalism is a society based on social conflict and until its overthrow there will continue to be a struggle in a class war.The SPGB has taken sides in this class war but our aim is to end it with the victory of the working class over the employing class.
It is not as if the doctors are bombing Syria is it? They are just withdrawing their labour, like I have done in the past. The employers in some firms I worked in withdrew the jobs.
ReplyDelete