An action programme for Left Unity
The situation we face
The effects of the Great 2008 Recession still blight Britain. One in ten workers and one in five young people are out of work. Real wages have been in decline since 2007. Public sector wages have been frozen for two years.
Cameron and Clegg’s cabinet of 23 millionaires continues with its slump policies even whilst Osborne is claiming a recovery.
The National Health Service, public education, the entire post-1945 welfare state are under attack.
Benefits for the disabled and the long-term sick have been cut. The degrading fit-for-work tests conducted by Atos have driven people to suicide.
50,000 people face eviction from their homes thanks to the bedroom tax.
Claimants are forced onto work-for-dole schemes to massage the unemployment figures.
Students in higher education face the £9,000 tuition fees.
They have raised our pension funds and raised our retirement age.
They have sabotaged the fight against climate catastrophe by cutting investment in renewable energy and clean technologies by 70 per cent.
But austerity is not just a series of cruel and immoral attacks on the most vulnerable in our communities; it is the capitalist solution to the crisis this system itself has caused.
The bosses’ believe recession and stagnation can be solved only by boosting profit rates and cutting “unnecessary overheads” – i.e. spending on health, welfare and education.
This means sacking hundreds of thousands of workers, freezing wages, pushing millions into temporary and insecure employment (the rise of zero hours contracts).
That is why their “recovery” will be a jobless one, with continued austerity, precarious low wage conditions, and mounting inequality. Put simply it means making the working class pay for their crisis.
Politicians of all parties say there is no alternative; that is a lie. There is a solution but it is the direct opposite of their solution.
IT IS MAKING THEM PAY.
How can we make the capitalists pay?
Obviously this starts from resistance to all these attacks. It means strengthening, increasing and uniting the fightback to the extent that it makes it impossible for Cameron and his cabinet to govern.
To wait for an election in 2015 is to accept another historic defeat for the working class like that Thatcher imposed on us in the 1980s. She destroyed or privatised the industries where the unions were strong. Cameron wants to destroy the welfare state – the remaining bastion of strong trade unionism. But the Tory wreckers and their Lib-Dem hangers on can be stopped.
Around the world we have seen massive protests against the effects of the crisis and the governments, dictatorial or “democratic”, who unload it onto the backs of ordinary peoples. In Greece we have witnessed a long series of one-day and then multi-day general strikes.
The Occupy Movement in the USA and the Indignados in Spain, the square occupations of the Arab Spring and in Greece were copied in many countries. They inspired calls for equality (we are the 99%), direct democracy, the fall of authoritarian regimes and social justice. In the Middle East they fed into full-scale revolutions, as the people demanded the fall of the regimes.
In Britain too we had the school and uni student protests of November-December 2010, the summer riots in 2011, direct action by UK Uncut, local campaigns against hospital closures and the bedroom tax, the strikes by electricians, and most recently the Hovis workers strikes.
These struggles show we do have the capacity to mount an effective fightback. If we are bold enough in our vision and unite our forces we can kick out this government before it is too late.
What’s holding us back?
The reason we have not done this so far lies in the actions, or rather the lack of them, of the official leaders of the union movement. The biggest scandal is that two years after the Coalition announced its intention to break up the National Health Service, only in September 2013, did the TUC or the principal health unions call a mass national demonstration.
For all the their talk of coordinated action they have failed to coordinate and unite our resistance. The pensions struggle of 2011 was sold out after only one day of mass action. Union leaders right and left have tamely allowed the anti-union laws to prevent a class-wide response to a political attack on the entire welfare state.
To prevent such sell-outs or sabotage we need to build a rank and file movement in the unions to take control of all disputes and negotiations, to make officials fully accountable and recallable, and employed on the average pay of their members. Our watchword should be: with the union leaders where possible, without them where necessary.
We need the local People’s Assemblies, trades councils and union branches to create delegate-based action councils which are organising centres against the cuts and provide active solidarity for all those fighting them. They must be bodies made up of delegates sent by workplaces, campaigns, housing estates, schools and colleges.
With such grassroots organisation – building up to a national focus – we can increase and coordinate our struggles all the way to an all-out, indefinite general strike. This cannot be left in the hands of the union leaders – it needs to be controlled and directed locally and nationally by councils of action.
But to ‘coordinate the coordinations’ we need a new type of political party – democratic not bureaucratic, armed with a democratically agreed and developed strategy, a programme. That is what Left Unity is setting out to do.
A programme for resistance
Over the year ahead we will campaign for:
• The TUC and the unions to organise the midweek day of action they promised in Bournemouth and make it a full-scale one-day general strike, to use this mass mobilisation to initiate industrial and direct action up to and including an all-out political mass strike to force the abandonment and reversal all the cuts and the privatisations.
• Solidarity with all wages struggles in the private and public sectors, for an increase in pay to compensate fully for the loss of real wages over the past year, fully indexed against inflation. Stand against zero hours contracts. Raise the minimum wage, pension and social security payments to a level everyone can decently live on.
• A programme of essential public works – including a huge building programme of socially-owned housing, schools, nurseries and local health clinics, providing accessibility for the disabled, phasing out nuclear power and laying the foundations of a sustainable energy and transport policy. No one should be denied work while such crying needs confront us. This programme must be carried through under workers and users’ control and funded by taxing the wealth and the profits of the banks and big corporations.
• Halt and reverse the cuts and privatisations in health, education and welfare. Repeal Lansley’s Act; bring all foundation hospitals back into a fully nationally controlled system. Abolish the academies and free schools, nationalise the public schools, restore EMA at a living level, abolish tuition fees, reinstitute maintenance grants and cancel the student loan debt.
• Halt the attacks on women’s jobs, services and rights; defend and extend high quality childcare provision for all; fight for access to jobs, pay and conditions fully equal to men; strengthen zero tolerance of domestic violence and rape.
• Fight all expressions of homophobia, transphobia, and the bullying, physical and mental violence, it leads to; illegalise all discrimination and grant full and equal civil rights, including marriage.
• End police harassment against ethnic minorities. End stop and search. For the right of all refugees and migrant workers to come, live and work here with full citizenship rights.
• Solidarity with Muslims and other ethnic minorities against abuse and violence; stop the marches of the EDL and other fascist groups by mass mobilisations and by organising militant self-defence of communities and meeting places.
• Make our struggle international – for solidarity actions with those in other countries, like Greece, fighting austerity, unemployment and racism. • Oppose all attempts to take Britain into new wars and invasions on false humanitarian or human rights pretexts; but mobilise material support for all those fighting for freedom in Syria, Egypt, Palestine, etc.
• Fight for the defiance and repeal of all the anti-union laws, and the restoration of legal aid.
• Fight for the right of the Scottish people to decide for independence or not, free from any threats or intimidation, and should they do so the immediate recognition and implementation of their decision.
Beyond Labour
Despite Ed Miliband’s 2013 conference pledges to abolish the bedroom tax, freeze fuel bills and build 200,000 affordable homes a year by 2020, over the past three years the Labour Party has:
• Backed the Tories’ public sector pay freeze
• Denounced the 30 November 2011 pensions strike
• Said it would not reverse the coalition’s cuts and keep to its spending levels for two years
• Supported the Tories’ benefits cap
• Attacked unions who demanded policies in their members’ interest in return for the millions they contribute to Labour.
The Old Labour “socialism” of reducing social inequality has disappeared without a trace; the identification with the unions and the working class has been abandoned; the domination of nakedly pro-capitalist ideas in Labour is total. The representation of the Labour left in parliament, in local government, in the constituencies has shrunk to an all time low.
Labour cannot be converted into an instrument of socialist transition. That is why we need a new party of the working class, a party of struggle against capitalism, based on those fighting in the here, and now. A party that can win working people to the only real solution that is in their interests – a socialist solution.
That solution starts today from making the rich pay for saving our services, for creating jobs and a future for the young and a decent retirement for the old. But it goes on to the socialist transformation of society: organising production on a rational basis, planned democratically by us, to meet social need not private greed.
Putting a socialist solution back on the agenda is not mainly a question of elections – it must be a do-it-yourself solution – carried out by the direct action of millions not just voted for. In the words of Karl Marx, “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself”. That is the foundation of what Left Unity is fighting for. Join us.
This motion is backed by all the signatories to the Class Struggle Platform.
6 comments
6 responses to “An action programme for Left Unity”
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To have any meaning any new party needs to show not only what it will campaign for [after all, we can and do campaign for all the things mentioned in the above statement now already] but to show what needs to be done and hence what it will actually do. Otherwise we are just one more banner in the demo.
For example, this statement states that “the solution starts today from making the rich pay…..” How on earth do we do that? What are the steps towards a “socialist transformation of society”? Accepting that a socialist solution must be a do-it-yourself solution, is there any role at all for parliament and local councils – or can they be dispensed with? If they can, where do we go from here? If they can’t, how do we make use of the limited, partial, distorted loose threads of representative ‘democracy’ that still exist to further our aims, bring reforms and win millions to our cause?
We need the elements of a programme or policy. LU needs a goal and a method of getting there. [Obviously this cannot be laid out in advance in too precise terms but there has to be some manifest awareness of the outlines of a transition].
This means more thought, openness and honesty e.g. for a start, not hiding what we understand the nature of the crisis to be. Why do nearly all of the governments of the world, ‘left’ and right, carry out the same policy of ‘austerity’/cuts/privatisation etc.?
We know that Capitalism is in crisis. The system could not survive a day without enormous subsidies of all sorts and especially without seizing and ‘monetising’ public property and everything that humans have created outside of market relations.
Austerity is based on a lie: that there is no money. But it is 200 years since the start of the ‘industrial revolution’. this revolution was financed by borrowing and investing. What happened to the profits? In the UK £770 billion lies clogging up the system uninvested, while every one of the 1000 super-rich wakes up £1oo,ooo richer every morning. There is more money than capitalism can deal with. There is a huge surplus of capital which is increasingly unusable – almost impossible to be invested for a profit.
Hence ever new and more aggressive intensive non-stop sales attacks, families students driven into a lifetime of debt, marketing gimmicks, shoddy products: a culture whereby capitalists engage in an unparalleled orgy cheating workers, governments, customers and one another – where CEOs cheat their bosses and bosses the shareholders etc. ‘Austerity’ is not a symptom of the crisis, it is the only way the rulers know to get out of it. It is the systematic reduction of wage-costs and living standards in an ultimately vain attempt to restore profitability at our expense.
They can create ‘healthy’ ‘growth’ only inn a frenzy of gambling and speculation – which, because nothing new is actually created only ends up in huge over-valuations and new crashes.
[$3 -4 trillion changes hands every day in 24/7 faster than thought automated Foreign Exchange deals in the City of London’].
The system is malfunctioning – hence a continuous wave of new wars for cheap labour and raw materials and for control of the market – putting a quick end to ancient civilisations and hijacking whole continents. Hence the depletion of the soil, the pollution of the air and the poisoning of the seas.
At a time when new developments in genetics, computing and generally in science, and technology could transform our lives and bring creativity and productive power to the entire human race, global capitalism has created world institutions with no other goal than privatising the information and making sure the secrets are not released. This has been called the biggest wave of privatisation since the enclosures of the Middle Ages. It deprives countless millions of water, medicines and the means of survival.
Big business has not only bought governments: it has literally merged with government. What was regarded as corruption has become the norm. There is a basic contradiction between monopoly capitalism and any form of democracy. As increasing wealth passes into ever fewer hands the super-rich have to prevent all effective opposition at all costs. This means effective liars. As each political leader’s credibility fails one after another they will back a new one. The result of the crisis in finance and the economy is a crisis in representational democracy itself. There is virtually no political party anywhere in the world which adequately represents the interests of the majority of the population.
Sport, art, culture and entertainment have become little more than branches of marketing/gambling. Big business has merged with government. There is no institution which is not based on lying, cheating and corruption. Every day sees a new scandal. The Royal Family and the Lords and aristocracy living off huge land subsidies etc. [In the UK, 0.7% of the population still own 2/3rds of the land] the press. the police, the secret services, the internet, the media, the politicians, the judges, the bankers, the tax-fraud top companies, football tycoons, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, supermarkets etc. etc. grow ever more shameless and gross in their immoral self-aggrandisement. There is no government institution, local, national or supra-national which is not at war with its citizens. And everywhere citizens are rising up and demanding real direct immediate and practical control of their lives and of society.
Left Unity recognises that societies can run their own affairs without the need for a special class of parasites. The war on welfare, health services, social care, the old, the young, the sick, museums, libraries, public service broadcasting and the arts is a war on our future In defending what is ours we are making a future possible where the world’s resources and human capacities are the property of all of us to be used for our benefit. We are on the edge of a new technological /information revolution of sustainable energy, unparalleled individual creative possibilities and
real effective democracy. All of this is being consciously blocked by the present global regime.
We will struggle on all fronts We will take part in all local anti-cuts etc. protests on a fight-to-win basis. We will endeavour to be no more and no less than that part of the citizen’s movement which puts forward clear political solutions on each level at each stage -on a local, national and international basis: In this effort we will cooperate with all those individuals and parties which share our general aims – including Labour dissidents and other Left parties.
We will take part in local elections. There are cases where we might win seats. We will not use elections as an excuse to draw up unrealisable wish-lists or empty promises. We will show what even as individual councillors we can achieve by way of setting up citizen shadow governments and negotiating against gross misuse of council funds and for ways of raising new funds to finance extensions, improvements and democratisation of council services etc.
We will take part in national and international [e.g. EU] elections, not with any great expectation of speedy success but in order to build up support for a clear programme for taking the major commercial and financial institutions and land into public ownership and for bringing workplace and local representatives together to draw up and implement plans for investment and the economy, for health, social care and welfare, the law, education the media etc.
Thanks a well considered piece, I am concerned at the lack of focus on being part of an international change in the relationship between the majority and the rest
I am also diss appointed st he lack of understanding of the eu/ uk/ USA new trading deal being pushed through on the qt,
Hi
I would like to propose Left Unity change is name to adopt the above at its Founding Conference.
I believe any labelling using the language of left wing within its founding is a mistake.
We seek to unite the left but surely we fight the corrupt system more.
This name will dfine our moment of conception.
It will also resonate with the public and reinforces our opposition to current politics and all currwnt parties duplicity in the continuing targetting of the old, the sick and disabled, benefits claimants, the poor, social housing tenants and the use of divisive, discriminatory policies by a tiny, rich, elite in their ivory towers, divoced from ordinary people and society, believing thmselves born to rule, knowing what is best for the mindless, stupid masses.
The Anti Austerity Alliance can connect with the unions, with the protestors, with the activists and avoid the type of labelling which leads to arguments on ideology which miss the point of what we are trying to achieve. The electorate still have a natural resistance to the left or left wing IMO due to the rhetoric and mass media campaigns against the so called looney left and memories of the winter of discontent.
Our name would remind everyone of why we stood up and took action, why we came into being and what we represent. Voting against us would mean a return to the old ways of corrupt, lying, career politicians putting their rich mates, lobbyists and donors ahead of the best interests of the people they were elected to serve and represent.
Dear All,
I too am filled with unease about adopting the name Left Unity at our forthcoming conference. Like Fossn I believe there to be too much ‘baggage’ attached to the words ‘left’ or ‘socialism’. I am not sure what the alternative name you are proposing is though. Could you clarify? In our local group, in the true tradition of the ‘left’, we had seven people and about twelve different suggestions, none of which had a wide appeal. Consequently we could not put forward any alternative suggestion.
How abou ukpp, United Kingdom progressive party,
The following paragraph has much to comment it but as is often the case does not go far enough unless within its text it also means to remove state funding from schools focused upon any particular religious sect
“• Halt and reverse the cuts and privatisations in health, education and welfare. Repeal Lansley’s Act; bring all foundation hospitals back into a fully nationally controlled system. Abolish the academies and free schools, nationalise the public schools, restore EMA at a living level, abolish tuition fees, reinstitute maintenance grants and cancel the student loan debt.”
I was also hoping to find a paragraph that would include • Halt and reverse the cuts and privatisations in transport and power., perhaps I have just missed that. The profits that we allow power companies to amass is the rent we are paying to the Thatcher years who spent her profits to keep in office.
Somehow there needs to be a process to ensure that we avoid the current ‘short term dictatorships’ of parliament that have destroyed the country.