new issue of the commune

The January issue of The Commune is now available. It features articles on the state of the anti-cuts movement after the 30th November pensions strikes, a plan for the NHS beyond both market and state, the uprising in Wukan, China, and much else besides. You can download a free copy of the PDF by clicking the image below.

An article I particularly liked appears on page 6, with a college worker writing on what people in her workplace have been thinking over the course of the pensions dispute and parallel concerns over restructuring and redundancies. This probably tells us more about the fate of the anti-cuts movement than only discussing what union leaders are doing, however important that may be. She writes:

“We can complain as much as we want about our unions disempowering us and selling us out, but how do we get control over strikes back in our hands? We need networks and local strike committees so we can support each other and start building up an independent culture outside the official bureaucracy, but our attempts haven’t got very far in this borough. Often the people who might be interested are already very busy, long working hours make it difficult to meet, and we are too inclined to stay in our own little corners instead of reaching out to other workplaces [...] It looks like people feel more positive about big strikes than they usually do. However we need to fight for more grassroots control, and work out how to organise meaningfully with the non-unionised majority, or we won’t win.”

 

can the sparks light a prairie fire?

This morning some of us Communards headed down to London’s Blackfriars station for the latest protest by the ‘Sparks’, electricians on construction sites mounting a fight against massive pay cuts of up to 35%. The five-month struggle has been notable for the degree of initiative ‘from below’, including the 7th December wildcat strike action, as well as the mere fact that it is a rare example of private-sector resistance to austerity.

Indeed, the campaign began with Sparks creating their own rank-and-file committee, not from the initiative of the Unite union. Actions such as the occupation of Network Rail’s offices in London; invading BBC offices in Glasgow to protest the lack of media coverage of the dispute; and today’s road blockade at Ratcliffe-on-Soar; attest to many workers’ willingness to take direct action to resist the savage new BESNA industry agreement. 

the iron lady: not the war horse she’s cracked up to be

I went to see The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep starring as Margaret Thatcher

After the adverts for the merits of cinema advertising, and the adverts for the cinema itself, came a trailer for War Horse. Based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel, this is a film about a horse from a humble farm who is deployed for use in World War I, runs around a lot through battlefields as carnage rages all around him, and ultimately saves the day and warms all our hearts. This plot is more-or-less identical to about half of The Iron Lady, although seeing Maggie Thatcher rise from grocer’s daughter to Prime Minister and obstinately press ahead with austerity as rioting and mass unemployment wreak havoc on all around her… it’s just not as uplifting

Indeed, the message of The Iron Lady is rather curious. Structured as a series of flashbacks by the now seriously mentally ill Baroness Thatcher,  she repeatedly recalls people giving her saccharine nuggets of advice: ‘Be yourself’, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you what to do’, ‘You can achieve anything’, and so on. Thatcher’s children Mark and Carol apparently considered the film a ‘Left-wing fantasy’; while they are wrong insofar as the film portrays its hero largely sympathetically, it is nonetheless a sort of liberal mystification of who Thatcher was: her fight against class and gender prejudice is pushed to the fore, and through her determination she manages to overcome these barriers and thus forces the establishment to accept her.

swimming against the tide: trotskyists in german occupied france

I have a book coming out, a translation of Yvan Craipeau’s study of Trotskyists in German-occupied France in World War II. The title is ‘Swimming Against the Tide’, which isn’t quite the same as the original Contre vents et marées. As well as the text and my introduction and notes it features a translation of all the newspapers the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste produced for the Wehrmacht troops, spreading a message of international working-class solidarity against all the imperialist powers.

I believe this is important not only in telling a little-known history of brave struggle, but also doing something to challenge mainstream ideas as to the democratic character of the Allied war effort. It is just a first stepping stone in a wider project of writing a class-struggle history of World War II: indeed, it was the story in this book which first interested me in the subject. The book will be out in March, or so Amazon says. There will be a launch and so on announced in due course. See below for the advert by publisher Merlin Press.