An essential part of the Communist world outlook is the materialist conception of history. We do not study history from a sense of nostalgia or to advance our academic careers. In the here and now we study our past so that today we might struggle for a new tomorrow, a communist tomorrow in which capitalism is itself history
This is a fascinating glimpse into the socialist and radical politics of the 1860s which of course have a meaning for the 21st century. On the one hand there is Karl Marx, a Communist and political exile in London. On the other Charles Bradlaugh who rose from humble origins to become the leading 19th century advocate of Secularism and a MP for Northampton. Both were political giants. In his day Bradlaugh was far better known than Marx. Although the National Secular Society, which Bradlaugh founded in 1866, is still going there is nothing of his prolific writings in print. Marx is still very much in print and in the light of the current economic crisis, his theories are hotly debated.

The First International, albeit short-lived – it lasted less than a decade, was the first attempt by the working class to organise on an international scale. Marx joined almost by accident, being invited to join as a delegate from Germany by Victor Le Lubez, a French political exile and close friend of Bradlaugh who was an active secularist both in Greenwich and nationally. Marx quickly became a leading figure in the International.

Ms Lavin is an undoubted protagonist of Marx and seeks to undermine Bradlaugh as an heroic figure. She shows that Bradlaugh’s role in the trial of himself and Annie Besant under the Obscene Publications Act for publishing and distributing the birth control pamphlet The Fruits of Philosophy was far less heroic than his been depicted Besant was related to the Liberal Lord Chancellor Lord Hatherley and Ms Levin alleges that he used his influence to ensure that Mrs Besant, and Bradlaugh, were not imprisoned. On the other hand Edward Truelove, a former Chartist and the International’s printer, got four months for distributing the pamphlet.

Ms Lavin decries Bradlaugh and Besants’ neomalthusianism which sees the sole cause of working class poverty as their being profligate in their reproduction. We hear its echo today in talk of a broken society, chavs and feral kids. She accuses Besant of giving incorrect information in her birth control pamphlet The Population Question. She does not mention Dan Chatterton, a one man revolt against gin and gospel, the monarchy and capitalism who while working with the rather puritanical Malthusian League, advocated sex for pleasure.

Ms Lavin depicts Bradlaugh’s role in the struggle over the oaths question, he wanted to affirm his loyalty to Victoria, her heirs and successors rather than swear a religious oath, as more accidentally than deliberately heroic. Bradlaugh was a leading Reublican but Ms Lavin doesn’t address the conflict been Bradlaugh and John De Morgan, a former member of the Cork Branch of the International, in the Republican movement of the 1870s.

Ms Lavin writes that Marx’s daughter Laura says that Marx went to hear Bradlaugh speak in the 1850s then seeing him as a muddleheaded radical possibly capable of reform. In any event Marx did his utmost to keep professional atheists out of the International, in particular the Holyoake brothers who were opponents of Bradlaugh. Here I think he was wrong. George Holyoake was a pioneer co-operator, when he died some nearly 400 co-operative societies subscribed to erect a building in his memory. He could have brought many co-operators and secularists into the International.

Bradalugh was a leading member of the Reform League which had been formed in 1866 to advocate the extension of the franchise to more working class males. It staged some of the most militant demonstrations since Chartist times Ms Lavin compares these to the anti-Poll Tax demonstrations of the 1990s and more recent student demonstrations against rises in tuition fees.. During one demonstrators tore down the railings in Hyde Park and used them to defend themselves from police baton charges. Ms Levin shows how the leaders of the Reform League were bought by the Liberals to mobilise newly enfranchised workers behind Gladstone and keep independent working class candidates out of the contest. Although initially opposed by the Liberals, Bradlaugh eventually became an official Liberal Party candidate. Nowadays he wouldn’t even get into New Labour.

The first International was wrought with conflict between Marx’s Communism, English trade unionists who in essence remained Liberals, followers of the French anarchist Proudhon and supporters of the Russian anarchist Bakunin. All of these came together to support the Paris Commune of 1871, which was drowned in blood by the forces of reaction. Although Bradlaugh was a Freemason and the French masons supported the commune, he opposed it. This lead to a fierce clash between Marx and Bradlaugh in the pages of the Eastern Post.

Marx’s first battle in the International was against the followers of the Italian nationalist Mazzini. Although Mazzini was religious, he had the support of secularists including Le Lubez and Bradlaugh. The supporters of Mazzini only left the International after Bradlaugh’s application to join had been rejected.

Ms Lavin writes that Bradlaugh was strangely drawn to anyone opposed to Marx, including the French exile Felix Pyat, described by Marx as a fourth rate author of melodramas.

The International soon fell apart and was in a bad way, by 1872 it was in effect dead. At its Hague conference its general council was moved from London to New York. Bradlaugh now tried to form his own International. From 1877 this was muted in Bradlaugh’s weekly The National Reformer. Bradlaugh had wanted to call the new body The International Workingman’s Association, the original name of the International, but it was decided to call it the International Labour Union. Among its supporters were the Rev. S.Headlam, and the anti-socialist trade unionist Edith Simcox, one of the first female delegates to the TUC. The ILU began to slip out of Bradlaugh’s control. It supported cotton workers striking against a pay cut and when George Howell attacked Marx, Harriet Law, who had been involved in the original International, offered Marx space to reply in her Secular Chronicle. Law and Hales, who had been involved in the original International proposed a lecturing circuit to peach socialism and Bradlaugh withdrew his support. After that the ILU faded out of existence.
Marx died in 1883 and the following year Henry Hyndman formed the Democratic Federation, which soon became the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s first Marxist organization. He debated with Bradlaugh and many seem to think Bradlaugh won. But within months two of the triumvirate which led the NSS, Annie Besant and Edward Aveling, had become socialists.

Today we live in a world of growing religious fundamentalism and crisis ridden capitalism. When kids with no stake in society riot against poverty, hopelessness and exclusion the first thing the ruling class does apart from filling the prison is call in the peddlers of religion. But there is no answer in prayer!
Revolutionaries are as much in crisis as that which they are revolting against. But can a new communist movement, which is militantly anti-capitalist atheist and based on the material and mental self-emancipation of the working class emerge? What can we learn from the past to aid this process?

Anti-cuts demonstration in Sheffield

Julie Dore and the Labour group who run Sheffield Council will make council workers and some of the most vulnerable people, who depend on council services, pay for the financial crisis. While Julie Dore sneers in public at protesters with placards, she tells Sheffield Star readers and trade union meetings that she has protected the most vulnerable. This is a dishonest attempt to justify choosing to make cuts, rather than organise to fight the government. The image of the dented sheild only makes sense if you have taken part in a battle, not surrendered before the fight has begun.

As a trade unionist who works in the child care sector told her at a recent trade union meeting, Labour’s cuts last year have already had a detrimental effect on care of children. There are more to follow. 29 jobs for people who escort vulnerable people on transport have been axed, 35 staff who support people with complex mental health problems are to loose their jobs. Another 25 jobs for night support for vulnerable people will go, 42 care resource beds and 45 jobs will be shed, 11 asylum support jobs will be axed, 10 social service mini buses and 7 staff are for the chop. If this is what Julie Dore calls protecting the most vulnerable, what is the future for the Sheffield working class with £30 million more cuts next year?

The detail of Labour plans to impliment coalition cuts is taken from the Sheffield Star of February 8th 2012 and their very well informed political editor Richard Marsden. Some trade union activists know, not only from their own experience, but from witnessing at first hand how Richard obtains his accurate information. These plans are straight from the Labour group leadership’s mouths. Following a meeting of Sheffield Homes staff to discuss council plans to bring Sheffield Homes back to the council, to streamline jobs and services, some union activists in a famous Sheffield bar were rather suprised to hear the deputy Labour leader informing Richard, in public, about the exact location of Labour’s planned cuts in Sheffield Homes. At the staff meeting the Labour councillor responsible for housing had told the meeting that they had no such plans.

The response of Unison and the GMB main local leaders have been muted. With the exception of one or two outspoken stewards and lay officials, the attitude is one of a resigned, wait and see approach, rather than preperation for a fight back. The main officials have been facilitating, or at least side stepping, as each new attack on terms and conditions is mounted. If there is any pocket of opposition then the managers approach the union leaders for a solution. The local anti cuts group is under the control of the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party who have the members to vote through their proposals. Both these groups have the old CPGB position of pressure on the official movement not independent grass roots opposition. Even the Alliance for Workers Liberty, the official opposition in the anti cuts group calls for Labour to ‘fight’, repeating mindlessly the old political formula from the early Comintern in the 1920s. A grass roots organisation is still desperately required. The Commune still calls for it.

The rise of capitalists and their taking power from the nobility was a reflection of the changing economic conditions as manufacturing became more important than agriculture. Looking back, it’s quite easy to understand how the increasingly economically powerful capitalists seized power. The case for the workers taking power isn’t so obvious though. Many seem to think that capitalism will continue forever unless a political party can persuade working people of a better alternative. Such a subjectivist position shows a lack of understanding of how capitalism works and what Marx was getting at in Volume III of Das Kapital.

‘The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit’ is part three of Volume III. To understand the importance of this requires a good understanding of how capitalism works, what value is and in particular, the difference between absolute and relative surplus value. Value is essentially labour time. Not necessarily the sum of all actual labour time that has gone into all commodities produced, but the market-determined ‘socially necessarily’ labour time; not all commodities taken to market are bought at prices that cover their costs and return a profit because the capitalist has to anticipate demand. (Don’t worry if you don’t fully grasp ‘socially necessary’ labour time, the key point is values (prices) reflect labour time).

The capitalist buys labour and means of production with money. Because money is that commodity that acts as the universal equivalent, money is a measure of labour time. With the labour and means of production, commodities are produced that are then sold for more money (M-C-M’). This means for the capitalist economy as a whole, as time passes, the amount of labour time must grow. More labour time must be worked, which means more labourers. The economic cake is growing and absolute profits are increasing even if the rate of profit is constant.

However, part three of Volume III is only concerned with relative surplus value. In this sense the economic cake isn’t growing – there is not an increase in labour time for the economy as a whole. Under such conditions how can capitalists achieve profits (M-C-M’)? The simple answer is that can do so by taking an increasing share of the economic cake at the expense of the workers. This is what Marx is exploring. Because more labour cannot be bought the capitalists look to more machinery (constant capital), so as production expands without a growing work force so the ratio of machinery to labour increases. Marx referred to this as an increase in the organic composition of capital. This increase may or may not reduce the rate of profit. It depends upon its effect on productivity in the production of means of production relative to the productivity in the means of subsistence (what goes to the workers so the supply of labour can be reproduced). Increases in the productivity of the means of subsistence mean that capitalists can reduce wages easier as the price of means of subsistence also fall (less labour time required to produce them). Hence more can go to the capitalist. But if the productivity in the production of means of production increases more, or the productivity increases for the economy as a whole do not materialise, it is much harder to reduce the workers share of the economic cake (their wages) because it means a cut in their standard of living. This is where we get the conflict between class interests appear so sharply.

The capitalist class with its control of the media can try and hide this class conflict. They can blame greedy bankers as industrial capitalists attack finance capitalists. Or they can blame other nations, as American capitalists attack Chinese state-capitalists. Or we have the blaming of minorities, e.g. ‘illegal’ immigrants. But none of these attacks are focused on the problem and cannot resolve the problem, for the problem is the historical limits of capitalism and the consequent downward pressure on the rate of profit and the subsequent attacks on worker’s lives. Eventually, whether fully conscious or not of what’s happening, the workers will end up taking direct control of the means of production to ensure their needs are met and so end the profit system. It’s not a question of if but when.

Solidarity is illegal. Thatcher said so. She only permits us to strike if we have a specific and identifiable common complaint – we are not allowed to strike together in recognition of the general horror. In 2011, submissive as ever, the unions found the only thing that the public sector can legally unite around – pensions – and conveniently forgot that everyone is angry about a lot more than that. Their speeches, placards and leaflets were all about pensions. As if we had given up on anything but retirement.

As if pensions were isolatable from the stress and drudgery of work. And as if work was not stress and drudgery at all. As if it was something to be celebrated, defended. The TUC anthem for the strike, ‘Let’s Work Together’ shows a lot of happy public sector workers winking at each other while they dance through their jobs. The strike was in defence of work as it is. And it was bounded by work: it began when work began and was over when work ended. The strikers were meant to stay at the work door until the pre-planned marches through city centres. We were not meant to move beyond these boundaries, to strike out in other ways, with other people, in other places, and into the night.

As if pensions were isolatable from everything else – increasing rents, prices, repression. The unions try to separate the strikers from the broader causes of their anger, and from the rest of the population. The day, as we were reminded by a Unison rep on one picket line, was a focus on ‘her’ members. It wasn’t about anyone else, anything else, it was about pensions and the public sector’s patronised heroes. Those who don’t have a job, let alone a pension, who couldn’t strike legally even if they wanted to, should do nothing but go home and reflect on the ‘important work that the public sector do’.

Of course thousands rely on the welfare state in order to survive, but, as public sector workers know only too well, any real reflection on state-run services reveals their contradictions, reminds us what else they are important for. It is unlikely that many of those forced to use the state’s services – people claiming job seekers allowance, people on probation, school children – were weeping into their cornflakes over the temporary loss of the public sector, distraught at the thought of being able to go back to bed. It’s much more likely that they enjoyed the short taste of freedom, would like to strike out too.

It is no surprise that a call for solidarity from people who had no right to strike was ignored by local union leaders. A demonstration in Hackney which had used the rupture provided by the strike to block the bus depot and roads as it marched from picket line to picket line, which had met with support from strikers, bus drivers, car drivers, passers-by, was now being kettled by the police at the picket line outside the CLR James Library in Dalston. Two people had been violently arrested and more than thirty were about to be arrested. At the rally for the strike at Hackney Town Hall, a call was made to come to the library to support. The people listening were interested, asked questions.

But standing on the steps above, the local union leaders just blew their horns louder, made speeches more frantically, and told everyone to go to Homerton Hospital – where those who had been kettled would have gone if they hadn’t been stopped. There was no question that people might be offered other options. It was Homerton Hospital or home. ‘You have your tactics, we have ours’. ‘We don’t even know who you are.’ Solidarity is illegal.

Of course there were a few people who disobeyed the megaphone, a noisy crowd of ten who joined the passers-by who had gathered around the kettle. And later that evening, a demonstration outside Stoke Newington Police Station in support of those arrested was much larger: people from the local Kurdish community who earlier that week had been protesting in front of the same police station over the brutal arrests of some of their members; passers-by who had their own reasons to hate the police; and many more who had been striking that day, gathered together in support. Now the strike was over, everyone could show their solidarity as they wished, free from the dictates of the megaphone.

But we don’t need to wait until the union leaders have gone home – we can refuse them even while they stand over us: electricians have shown how this is done – defying legal strikes and dead-end marches with wildcat strikes, road blocks and occupations.  When things become more desperate, it will become increasingly clear that we need to break free from union control – that our anger can no longer be channelled into sectors and causes, damned up in slogans and negotiations, locked into laws and stewarded through marches.

As more and more people adopt and expand the tactics of the electricians, we will start to present a much greater threat to the way things are, and the police will be a much larger presence. We will be caught in many more unpredictable situations, in which we will need to fight together whether or not we know each other and whether or not we planned to. It is this sort of solidarity that will frighten the police. It is this, also, that frightens the union leaders.

Owen Jones describes how hatred of the working class finds expression in discourse, in negative images and gross exaggerations and distortions of working class experience in the media. The myth that we are all middle class except the chavs. We are all familiar with anti working class stereotypes, such as Vicky Pollard, the comic creation of the posh Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who come from a privileged background. Owen explains how the mockery of the working class demonstrates their social inferiority for their tormentors and superiors. It’s a culture which blames the victims rather than social injustice or structured social inequality in capitalism. It’s the way the “working class rump” lives that’s seen as the problem. But what is Owen’s alternative?

Owen argues that it all begins with Thatcherism. Contempt for working class people build up under Thatcher. The lingering demise of the working class started with Thatcher. The real culprit is not the life style of the workers, but the industrial collapse, first unleashed by Thatcherism. The destruction of industry left the economy dangerously reliant on the financial institutions of the city of London. But deindustrialisation also destroyed working class communities. Working class pride, community spirit, and collective values were dismantled. Local working class identity which formed around factories and pits where workers families were rooted for generations disintegrated. But this process did not end with Thatcher, it was continued by New Labour. This is the idea that the interests of the wealthiest are essential for the well being of society as a whole. But old Labour were different.

Owen laments the lack of old Labour parliamentarians and the lack of opportunities for working people to rise through parliament from the pit, dock and factory to represent the working class. Parliament has become a closed shop to Labour politicians from a working class background. Owen asks where are the Herbert Morrisons, Ernest Bevins and Nye Bevans. Why do we not have these old Labour statesmen anymore? His answer is that the idea that Labour gave a voice to the working class and championed their interests and needs was weakened during the 1980’s. Yes, in Owens view, old Labour remained committed to the idea of raising the conditions of the working class. But Owen seems to be aware of the history of the Labour party since he immediately adds a significant qualification : even if this sometimes amounts to lip service. But parliamentary old Labour can rise again, because unless working class people can be properly represented, Britain faces the prospect of an angry right wing populism. This is not an endorsement of working class self activity and the ability of the working class to transform itself and capitalism.

This grim Labourite perspective of a right wing popular reactionary movement or workers entering parliament to represent the lived experience of the working class glosses over the history of the parliamentary Labour party. If we look back to the origins of parliamentary Labour Party over a hundred years ago, it was Keir Hardie who set the mould of the Labour Party by winning the argument that the Labour Party should not be a socialist party or class party since the working people in Britain are not a class, but a nation, and Labour should not stand for class war anyway since this was unchristian. This left working men in parliament with conservative and liberal views to be lead by parliamentary reactionaries. Many of Labour’s politicians such as Phillip Snowdon, the first Labour chancellor, in the first Labour government were profoundly conformist. Snowdon was an economic liberal who kept to the gold standard which destroyed working class living standards communities and jobs long before Thatcherism. There is an historical continuity here since Dennis Healy, the Labour government’s chancellor, in 1976, returned to economic liberalism, blazing the way for Thatcherism. James Callaghan, given by Owen, as an example of good old Labourism, announced at the party conference in 1976, that the Keynesian era was over and the nation could not spend its way out of recession. Another pioneer for monetarism from the old Labour tradition.

His history of working class communities is suspect as well. Owen stresses geographical community as the bonds of working class solidarity which he associates with manual workers mainly in the old pit communities. But historically the working class has been recomposed many times in terms of local community and workplace. He offers his experience of Stockport, as his home town, as typical of a rooted community. But in Stockport, again like Owen, speaking from experience, there was deindustrialisation or factory closures long before Thatcherism. The Cotton mills such as Broadstone Mill closed in the late fifties and early sixties. Engineering factories like Cravens closed in the late sixties and early seventies. In any case his talk of roots going back to grandfathers is largely a myth. There was a movement of workers in and out of Stockport and other industrial areas as jobs and community changed complexion. Working class identity is also about exploitation and oppression in the workplace, whether this is a call centre or a local authority council office. But the old parliamentary Labour tradition does not speak about alienation in the workplace or replacing it with workers’ control and self management.

Owen asserts that the idea that Labour gave a voice to working class people, that it championed their interests and needs was weakened during the 1980′s. But striking miners in Wales during the great strike of 1984/5 had a more historically accurate view of what the Labour party stands for when in a strike meeting they hung a noose from the ceiling of the meeting room with the words ‘RamseyMckinnock’. This linked two Labour Party leaders, Ramsey Macdonald, from the interwar years and Neil Kinnock from the 1980s. Both had left the miners to fight alone and go down to defeat. Old Labour union bosses and the TUC sided with the state or refused to provide solidarity for the striking miners in both these periods. Owen’s nostalgia for old Labour is very selective. Where are the old Labour statesmen today of the stature of Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin and Nye Bevan, he asks. But Owen’s working class heroes of the post war Labour government all opposed strikes and supported the use of troops against striking dockers and other transport workers. All three were committed to administrating and modernising capitalism without giving power to the workers in their workplace. Nationalisation was a form of bureacratic state capitalism applied to those public utilities and industries which were deemed to be inefficient: mines, railways and electricity and gas providers. Despite Nye Bevan’s parliamentary rhetoric, he was in favour of leaving 80% of industry in the hands of private capitalists.

Trade union bosses and Labour party leaders still believe the interests of the wealthy are essential for the well being of society. This explains the facts Owen presents. Why nearly a quarter of workers earning less than £7 an hour can be found in the public sector, and why modest public sector pensions, on average a little over £5,000 can be seen as excessive and unaffordable, while 100 chief executives earn 200 times the wage of an average worker. It also explains why Ed Miliband can support a pay freeze for public sector workers and refuse to oppose the cuts or promise to reverse them. Union bosses such as Brian Strutton of the GMB and Dave Prentis of Unison have sided with the state in the pension dispute or are leaders the government can do business with. Business interests come first, way above the interests of workers in the public or private sector. It is not enough to describe the demonization of the working class particularly, if like Owen, you support a political tradition, Labourism, which has been responsible for maintaining capitalism and the inequality, exploitation and oppression that goes with it. Old Labour is not an alternative to capitalism, but an alternative way of managing capitalism.

The destruction of the welfare state in Europe and the continuation of the state of social ills in the rest of the world are the consequences of an irrational society. In Spain, Portugal and Greece 40% of young people are unemployed and the state has unpayable debts. After riots in England’s capital city the Government insisted on calling the youth “vandals without a cause”, dismissing out of hand the obvious social causes of the revolt. Stratospheric public debts, neo-fascism, unemployment, underemployment, the return of hunger and poverty to Europe: words which keep appearing in a region which managed to create a restrained, partly nationalised – but capitalist nonetheless – capitalism in the 1945-73 period.

Capitalism under the hegemony of finance, turbo-marketisation and the return of primitive accumulation can only survive with increasing repression and the criminalisation of social movements. To cite a Latin-American example, Argentinian society reacted to the process of financialisation of its economy in 2001, a financialisation which gained strength after the military coup of 1976, throwing the country’s popular movements into the dust. In 2001 they did fight back, saying “Enough! Out with the lot of you!”: it was a symptom of the tiredness of neoliberal reforms and the neocolonisation of Argentinian society. However, the popular revolt of 2001 rapidly transformed into a new politics of ‘development’ under President Kirchner.

Capital’s irrational response to this global crisis – if not a catastrophe – once again pose us the challenge of building a self-managed socialism. History has already shown that self-management is possible. Marx showed us in numerous works of his that it is possible to build a society without classes or bosses, overcoming the wage-system and the state. Innumerable examples in Latin America in the twentieth century allow us to say that a DIY kind of unalienated work is possible and necessary. Similarly, an uncommodified kind of leisure and decent transport such as is not allowed by the demands of making profits. In other words, the activity of work can have a social meaning, with growing degrees of social control of production and the reproduction of material life. Equally, overcoming workplace hierarchy and the urgent necessity of global coordination of production by freely-associated producers are important themes for this millennium.

The collapse of “actually-existing socialism” in Eastern Europe must also be understood. Even if there were substantial advances at first, the experience degenerated. For Mészáros, the USSR created a society that was “post-capitalist but not post-capital”. The workers challenged for control of the means of production, but a body separate from the workers made the strategic decisions for society: how and what to produce and for whom, reproducing capital under a new cloak.

Equality

Indeed, I believe that self-management is necessary as an all-encompassing principle. Such counter-systemic struggles, unlike those for immediate improvements, can contest the pillars of capital and in some form embody in embryo the future society, beyond capital. To give an example, the Mulheres Camponesas (Peasant-Women) in the Rio Grande do Sul collectives contest the family hierarchy, insofar as these women “don’t want to have to wash our husbands’ pants any more” and avoid the re-establishment of patriarchy in their co-operatives. However, as Maria Orlanda Pinassi has shown, the struggles of these working-class women engage with, but also go beyond feminism: they also address environmental concerns, but go beyond this; and address the question of class, but also go beyond this.

In some workplaces taken over by the workers, there has been an overcoming of the capitalist division of labour, insofar as knowledge, previously in the hands of the few, can itself be socialised. Dependence on technicians’ expertise and the – complex – work they do can be overcome in some degree. Here, again, it is important to remember how in the 1974 Portuguese Revolution technicians helped go beyond the Taylorist planned organisation of work as a life-philosophy.

In the most advanced cases, it even results in going beyond the wage-system, through the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. In other cases there is a narrowing of wage-differences and the creation of funds either to support the struggles of other workers, or to allow some workers funds to go to university, to pass on end-of-year surpluses, etc.

Indeed, it is important to point to the example of one Argentinian factory taken over by workers where they created a fund to improve the wages of workers who faced greater costs because of their kids. This reminds us of the principle of “substantive equality” developed by Mészáros based on the writings of Marx and the French socialist Babeuf. To express his argument, Mészáros turns to this paragraph from Babeuf: “Equality must be determined according to the capacity of the worker and the needs of the consumer, not by the intensity of work or the pure quantity of goods to be consumed. A man with a certain strength, when he lifts a weight of ten pounds, works as much as another man with five times his strength who lifts fifty. Just as he who satisfies a desperate thirst with a jug of water is enjoying no more than his less-thirsty friend who drinks barely a glass. The objective of communism in question is the equality of labour and pleasure, not of wages and consumption”.

I believe that this principle can also help orient the struggles of the most advanced feminist working-class women’s movements, along with other social movements which try to introduce the principle of substantive equality. On this point, I will recall an example given by the members of the Coletivo Usina (a group of social scientists and planners who gave advice and help to social movements). They said that in one project they wanted to divide their work equally amongst all of them. Then they realised that since they had elderly and disabled members and workers with other problems, they could not all offer the “same” labour output. Hence Babeuf’s example.

Equally, in the most advanced cases of workplaces taken over by their workers, the co-operative members do everything to avoid unequal conditions for agency staff, or indeed, fight for them to become co-operativists too. It is important to note this phenomenon insofar as a reasonable number of worker-controlled enterprises do take on agency staff: for me, a symptom of their degeneration.

Pillars of anti-capitalism

struggles at the Zanón and Flaskô self-managed factories embody class struggle, a fight against trade-union partnership with the state, and the possibilities of building class struggle in today’s Argentina and Brazil. In the case of Zanón, they take as points of principle countless pillars of anti-capitalism: rotating any positions of responsibility amongst themselves and making officials recallable; uniting and internationalising working-class struggles; changing gender relations in the factory; starting a new relationship with intellectuals and academics; the need for the demarketisation of production and overcoming Taylorist or Toyotist models of organising work. Ultimately, it is a matter of confronting alienated work, even if within the strict confines of today’s capitalist-crisis barbarism, and with countless contradictions.

More cautiously – and here we stand on more difficult ground – we can say that some social movements challenge the commodity-production system and are creating solutions to achieve demarketisation. For example, the schools run by Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) show how people want an education system that is beyond capital, overcoming the intellectual poverty promoted by the country’s education policies. Such community schools daily challenge us to think of ideas of pedagogy which bring schooling itself into working-class struggle, building for the idea of collective work and not separating theory from practice in the production of healthy, non-marketised food, as well as the development of a culture of self-management and an understanding of social reality in all its complexity. The struggles at Flaskô – providing demarketised food; the struggles for free oil; the struggles of some of the worker-occupied workplaces of Latin America to control the labour process and establish shop-floor workers assemblies; and the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement’s challenge to ownership of the means of production; all touch on vital questions for social movements against capital in the twenty-first century.

The “expropriation of the expropriators” (Marx) or the “Return of the snail to its shell” (title of a recent book) is an urgent task, but beware: it could leave the alienation of work unchallenged. Equally, there is a great need to bring together all struggles against capital. They must combine and articulate their most immediate needs together with the need to overcome the capitalist move of production, completely transcending the orbit of capital. To this end, the coming-together of workers of different sectors and serious critique is vital. It is this which the Zanón and Flaskô are in some measure bringing about.

Julio Mella, a young Cuban Marxist who helped the struggle to revolutionise universities in his country, once said that “Win, or serve in the trenches for others. Even after we die we are useful: none of our work is lost”. Mella, even after his brutal murder, is still useful to us in this twenty-first century. He is still alive. He helps us to renew the development and creation of the camp of self-managed socialism, again grasping hold of the classic argument to advance revolutionary theory and practice. Self-managed socialism is a possible, necessary and urgent task.

Reza Shahabi, an Iranian labour activist, has been in held in Block 209 of Tehran’s notorious Evin jail, for months without conviction or even proper charge. Paying attention to the reality of his case shows that the situation for workers and working-class movements in Iran is different to that in Europe only in degree; bureaucratic and bourgeois-legalist excuses manufactured ad hoc to justify his continuing political incarceration, his alleged second trial remaining always just around a corner, since he was found to have no case to answer to on 25th May.

The authorities have attacked him still further. He has been subjected to aggression and intimidation, pressured to cut even his scheduled fortnightly telephone conversation with his family. In response, Reza began a hunger strike, demanding his immediate and unconditional release. Beginning on 1^st November, his hunger strike led to the formation of a committee for his defence which attracted hundreds of signatories from across the Iranian labour movement. Mahmoud Salehi, himself recently released from jail, has become the spokesperson for the group. The authorities increased their attacks on Reza, at one point using his weaknesses as an excuse to stop him from talking to his family, telling them that he would not see them.

On the twenty-first day of his hunger strike Reza’s move began. When he was transferred to Block 305, Behram Ebrahimzadeh, another imprisoned labour activist began a hunger strike in solidarity with Reza’s. By now, Reza was very weak and both his supporters and jailers worried that his health would be damaged permanently, and that he would have to stand trial disabled, the prison authorities having claimed that a date had definitely fixed for his trial: sometime in January. As Reza’s condition worsened, trade unionists from all over the world sought to intervene through sending letters to Evin prison, demanding his immediate and unconditional release. Reza Shahabi’s name is already known internationally because of his role in organising the Vahed bus workers’ union, one of the first sparks of the increasing wave of strikes and militancy amongst the Iranian working class: so many of those who had supported him last time spoke up again for him again.

Unlike the case of Sakineh Ashtiani, a woman condemned to death for ‘adultery’ (see issue 19 of The Commune) his name barely appeared in the English language media. The difference between the cases is striking; whereas Ashtiani had been, legally, “legitimately” convicted, Shahabi had not. So Reza Shahabi, on hunger strike for unconditional and immediate release, a working-class activist with a network of support of militant Iranian workers, does not fit the imperialist narrative: its colonial ideology of human rights. His story does not sit easily with the usual story about the backwards patriarchy in Iran, and the need to supplant it with a modern, colonial-liberal one.

When his family visited Reza told them that it would make him proud to die for the worker’s movement. “We are the 99% of society”, he told them. “But wealth remains in the hands of 1%. We have to give from our lives at work, but can not even afford to take our children on a holiday for a few days. We can’t send them to schools to learn anything. I have fought for our rights, justice for workers. I will continue to do so to the end of my innocent life, standing on my demand; immediate and unconditional release. I do not want release on compassionate grounds. Nor do I want a pardon. I have not committed any crime for the punishment to be cancelled, and no accusation has been made for me to be pardoned from. They have taken half my life. I have to be vindicated and released unconditionally and immediately.”

Reza was ultimately taken to hospital.  After thirty days and the promise of an immediate and unconditional release, Reza Shahabi stopped his hunger strike.  Ten days later he, like Bahram Embrahimzadeh, Ali Nejati and countless other radical workers, is still in jail.

His defence committee have called for supporters to take all possible courses of action to secure his release.

For more info, contact the Defence Committee: k.d.shahabi@gmail.com

International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran: info@workers-iran.org

Coordinating Committee to help form Workers Organisations: http://khamahangy.com/English.htm

Most of you reading this article won’t be regular buyers of a newspaper. You might not have the time or the inclination. You might be rightly hacked off with the tabloids or fed up with the ideological biases of the broadsheets. You might think most papers most of the time won’t cover what you want in the way you want it. That’s probably why you picked up The Commune (plus, like Metro, we’re free.) Or you’re reading all you need online, including this paragraph…

In a spin: newspaper circulation is falling rapidly

For those of us who work in newspapers, it’s obvious we’re part of an industry in crisis. And it’s not just a slump, it’s an existential panic, a growing realisation that we’re the last generation who will have worked in print. A whole language and culture of work will go – the backbench, downtable, going off stone, the four-star, the slip, the runner, top and tailing – it will all be history, along with the final edition.

And none of us can blame you. I don’t even buy a newspaper anymore, so why I should expect anyone else to? This sense of being on a sinking ship affects how we fight (or don’t fight) job cuts and bad working practices in the industry. Without the hope we can survive long-term, people take the redundancies and the restructurings because the alternative – closure – isn’t just a fanciful management threat. Day to day over the last few years, whether you work in writing or production, we have all had our workloads intensified, in many cases doubled, alongside real-terms pay cuts and the ongoing casualisation of staff.

Changes in technology and social habits threaten workers in all sorts of industries, of course. But when the factory or the pit or the office closes, a worker can still usually see how it might have been different: the mistakes made by management, the profits wasted, the deliberate running-down of assets. In the 1980s, newspapers underwent major restructuring alongside the crushing of the unions, but the industry’s strength and relevance was never in doubt.

Now we feel more powerless: there’s no way print can survive because the Internet has proved, at least in this economy in this part of the world, transformative. We are in a dying industry and maybe we ‘deserve’ to go. When a manager says ‘our sales are down 30% on last year and only 66,000 people in the UK bought the edition yesterday’, what do you reply? Well, you might say that people would pay for a good paper that hadn’t been savaged by editorial cuts. But the Guardian’s experience suggests that isn’t necessarily the case. The future of paying for news will, if anything, be digital.

Could the online paper do all the things the printed word does now? Perhaps. But we still work for newspapers because we still love them: how they look off the presses, how we bring them together to deadline every night against the odds, in small teams where cooperation and solidarity and a collective ethic all make for a better paper, the sight of your team’s words in the newsagent the next morning, the sense that if you’re at places like the Independent or the Guardian you still feel proud of an institution (however flawed) that does some good, because investigative journalism and honest reportage are worthwhile and necessary.

And at other papers which have been eroded and corroded by cynical owners – the Mirror, the Express, News International’s titles – papers we often hate – the public seems to forget that real people are losing their jobs, that workers would love to be at better papers but the practices and aims of the trade have long been subverted.

When the latest round of job cuts hit at the end of 2011, newsrooms reacted in a kind of empty ritual of letters to management and the threat of strikes. There were even moments in ‘chapel’ (union) meetings where I felt like we were really going to fight back.

Don’t get me wrong: it helps to be unionised. Where the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has recognition, pay and conditions are better. There is more consultation. And journalists tend to communicate and cooperate (and strike) more. But neither the NUJ nor workers as a collective currently have the belief that we can stop the sackings. Demands remain limited: we try to increase the redundancy pay, for example. And strike action doesn’t mean shutting the paper down for the day – in December where I work, it was merely a 30-minute walk-out.

Newspapers no longer make money and therefore the economic fundamentals dictate that the drift to closure continues. And it won’t help to have a billionaire owner ‘subsiding’ you. My ‘boss’ is worth $3bn but he’s cutting as hard as the rest. It won’t even help if your paper actually makes money. ‘Free’ papers like Metro are posting profits in the millions by using the ‘editorial’ as cover for mass advertising to commuters. That hasn’t stopped a squeeze as shareholders seek a higher margin.

What’s the alternative? Trust ownership, like at the Guardian? Community newspapers on an entirely different model? An acceptance that online journalism is the future, with production and print jobs gone as a result? Would you mourn that loss? Maybe not, but we still feel the right to be sad and angry about it. Journalists identify with their work as a trade and a whole set of valuable social relations and skills are being cast aside. Our industry is dying in slow motion in a way that the workers who fought Rupert Murdoch at Wapping would never have been able to predict.

In my workplace both the admin staff and the teaching staff were out on strike together for the first time in years, which made the strike a very different experience. Normally, although we talk to each other every day in the course of work, we don’t organise together or support each other much in the face of redundancy, restructuring, disciplinaries etc. The teaching staff are better organised than the admin staff and usually have better working conditions, and haven’t tended to pay much attention to the problems faced by the other workers.

Unions struck on the same day, but they aren’t necessarily well linked up with each other, still less the non-unionised majority

In the buildup to the strike we had some joint meetings, both informal canteen meetings and one formal union meeting, and we did some activities together, such as leafleting. It bought it home how separated we are in the two unions, UCU and Unison, and how unnecessary it is – I had never even met most of the Unison people, and yet we work in the same building. This is not only because of the union bureaucracies. We could easily talk informally to each other but we don’t, due to inertia and inward looking attitudes.

In the borough the three biggest employers are the council, the hospital and the college, and all three of them were on strike, so locally it had a big impact. Leafleting the hospital the positive comments from people outnumbered the negative ones about two to one. On the day turnout on picket lines was very high, and, when I went taking food to picket lines, going from the maintenance workers on one side of the road to the social workers on the other brought home what a wide range of people were on strike.

Although 30th November was pretty successful for us, management intimidation, debt and lack of class consciousness meant a lot of people still crossed the picket line. We are being called out and sent back by the union leadership but we are not in control of the struggle, although we do nearly all the work. The grassroots do the leafleting, the flyposting, the going round talking to people, the fundraising (this is my sixth strike with no strike pay) the banner painting and the picketing, but we don’t get to make any of the important decisions. We’ve rowed with workmates, gone to work early and stayed late to leaflet the gate or talk to people working in the evening. Now if the union executive accept a deal that doesn’t offer us any real improvement, all those people who weren’t happy about losing a day’s pay will see the whole strike as a total waste of time and won’t listen to anything we say next time.

Where next?

As I’m writing this there are negotiations with deals being made, while we are at home hearing one or other union announce a deal on the radio. Apart from checking websites and asking friends for news, we don’t know what is going on, and we may or may not be on strike again soon. Our fragile unity in action built up on the ground with other unions, involving lots of hard work, can all be rendered null and void with a decision made over our heads, that we won’t be on strike together next time. My union has decided that the final decision on pensions will be put to the membership, but a lot of unions don’t even have that.

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. In my workplace we have trouble even sending a delegate to the trades council, as the people who would like to go have to work that evening. People in more difficult workplaces need to be able to get support from people in strong workplaces, and backed up if they suffer victimisation.

Seventy five per cent of the workforce isn’t in a union anyway, and unemployment locally is at about thirty per cent, so as the active rank and file we are a minority within a minority. The majority of the working class and poor population are not striking and don’t have any obvious way to do so. Subjectively it seems to me that there is a lot of support around: the day after the strike a total stranger stopped me in the street wearing a union tee-shirt and said well done. People outside London are saying when their strike demo got to the town centre, crowds of people shopping burst into applause. Those things aren’t normal so 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.

The Guildhall cleaners started organising in the summer against bad conditions and non-payment of wages. They have joined the cleaners’ branch of the Industrial Workers of the World and fought for the London Living Wage and against bullying and harassment. The company, Sodexo, have responded to this by trying to force the organised cleaners to leave. They have suspended a union rep, who is still waiting for the resolution of his case after months.

Recently, the employer’s tactics of intimidation have got worse and some cleaners held a sit-in to protest, which started on 22nd December. They had been subject to all kinds of abuse, including one woman being locked in an area for two hours, and another being taken into the basement and threatened. Some of us from The Commune and SolFed went down to support them just after Christmas.

We arrived to see police in anti-stab vests standing over the cleaners and shouting at them. One of us, who arrived just after the rest, was thrown straight out by the security guard. The police were threatening to drag the cleaners out by force if they didn’t leave the building, and were coming out with some impressively offensive arguments, even by their usual standards. “When you are at work you have to do what you are told” was a pretty typical example. When the cleaners protested that the way the company was treating them was also against the law, the police said that they “were not here to discuss the details of your dispute.” The cleaners finally decided to leave in the face of the police threats.

That the company are acting like this shows how much they want to get rid of the organised workers. It also shows how confident they are that they will get away with this behaviour, which is clearly illegal as well as disgusting. Let’s hope they’re proved wrong.