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.

The paper is free: click the image above to download the PDF. See below for a list of articles as they are posted online.

news

cops back bosses bullying cleaners - Siobhan Breathnach reports on Guildhall cleaners standing up against management bullying

wukan peasant victory sets stage for chinese turmoil - Adam Ford reports on the Wukan rebellion and asks what it means for the future of social struggles in China

reza shahabi must be free! - Omid Rezai looks at the case of a jailed militant on hunger strike in Iran

the woolf that didn’t bark: the LSE-libya inquiry - Jack Staunton, a student at the London School of Economics (LSE) looks at Lord Woolf’s inquiry into the School’s ties to the Gaddafi régime

thatcher and liverpool thirty years on - Adam Ford writes on revelations that the Thatcher Government discussed a ‘managed decline’ of Liverpool.

news in brief… – suicide threat at foxconn; la senza occupation; G4S asylum-seeker homes deal

anti-cuts

the n30 strike and a 2012 of struggle - Steve Ryan, a PCS activist in Wrexham, looks at the aftermath of the 30th November national pensions strike and the opportunities for struggle in 2012

faith in the government or unity on strike? - Clifford Biddulph comments on the GMB union’s announcement on the Government’s pensions deal in the wake of the 30th November strike

unions not up to the challenge - A Unison branch secretary replies to Clifford’s article

taking control of our struggle – A college worker who struck on 30th November reports on the mood in her workplace six weeks later

an alternative for the here and now – the editorial argues that communism isn’t just some dream for the future: it’s about how we organise today

working life

death by a thousand (paper) cuts - Taimour Lay reports on the crisis in the print-media from a journalist’s perspective

workers’ control in the health-care system - Mike Levine discusses how we can go beyond the hierarchical form of the National Health Service. 

self-managed socialism: possible, urgent, necessary - Henrique T. Novaes looks at advantages and limitations of the Latin American experience of workers trying to overcome capitalist work relations through their control of their workplaces

distribution

This paper is free, and we’re always looking to expand our distribution network. Would you like to share these ideas with friends or colleagues? Leave a few in your local library or café? Contact us at uncaptiveminds@gmail.com

To get our communist message out there, we also need money. If you enjoy the paper, the price of a couple of pints a month would be of great use to us. Email us, or set up a standing order to The Commune, Co-op sc. 089299 ac. 65317440. You can also send cheques, addressed to ‘The Commune’, to The Commune, Freedom Bookshop, Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High St, London, E1 7QX

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.

The most obvious reason why this portrayal of her idealism rings hollow is that she was not at all a fighter for people of her background or gender, most of whom did not have a similar experience of the 1980s. Her legacy of mass unemployment, the destruction of working-class communities, and austerity clearly heaped far more burden onto most working-class women: hence the protests by former miners and miners’ wives which greeted the film’s appearance. Moreover, this itself points to the sham of today’s liberal inclusiveness: the mere fact that individuals can transcend their class background and be included in the establishment does not stop class from existing. This is not to deny that Thatcher did provide opportunity for some limited number of working-class people: divide-and-rule, a tactic as old as colonialism.

But there is a further problem, more damaging to the fate of this film. It constantly venerates her sense of purpose and determination, her sureness in her principles. In a conversation with her doctor, when he asks how she feels, she complains that people always talk about their inner feelings, not about what they think, or what action is necessary. In contrast to such behaviour, she wears her politics on her sleeve. So the film makes a strange kind of tribute to Thatcher: how can you champion someone’s sureness that their principles are right and indeed necessary, regardless of any judgement on whether they are indeed correct? If a politician takes their beliefs seriously, surely they would want others to take them seriously too, rather than merely celebrate the fact that these beliefs exist?

While I am not suggesting that the film ought to have included some Ken Loach-style set-piece debate of Thatcher’s legacy, this contradiction does mean that The Iron Lady fails in its attempt to arouse admiration, or even interest, in its hero. While didactic political films often come off poorly, series such as A Very British Coup or The House of Cards do at least explore the interaction between personality and raw power. The Iron Lady lacks any sense of power, particularly due to its structure: the memories of a Baroness Thatcher now struck by dementia. So there is little tragedy, here: her hallucinations of her long-dead husband are as dull as what they are (the rather sad longing of an ill old woman), and moreover, since this fate is not self-imposed, it doesn’t really succeed in counter-balancing her hubris in her years in power.

Thus half of The Iron Lady asks us to admire Thatcher simply because of her firm beliefs (no matter what those principles were) and determination in action, and yet the other half suggests we should pity her as just another mentally-ill old lady, who we ought to feel sorry for no matter what she did and believed, simply because she has dementia… If you will excuse the unintended hyperbole of the comparison, a film about hubris like Downfall (with Hitler raving as his empire collapses around him) is far more successful because it doesn’t invite us to valorise his courage in his convictions, but rather, shows how his beliefs interact with the consequences of his actions.

Truth be told, despite my avid interest even in Westminster politics, and although Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Thatcher is certainly very believable, I actually found the film quite boring, and the scenes of the dementia-struck Thatcher pottering around are tiresome and overlong. For an inspiring tale of obstinate courage against all odds, I suggest you instead go and see War Horse. This is particularly the case if you have kids, since The Iron Lady is a 12a, and is thus unsuitable for miners (sorry.)

The villagers of Wukan in south-east China appear to have won a victory over the misnamed Communist Party regime, and prevented the sale of some communal land. This triumph is the result of direct action, direct democracy, and the community’s ability to get the word out, in spite of government censorship. These factors will be crucial in 2012, as factory workers come into conflict with multinational corporations in the cities.

Xue Jinbao addressing a meeting before his death at the hands of the state

The struggle began in September, when Wukan residents became suspicious that the local government was in the process of selling common farming land to Country Garden - a company which builds residences for the rich. The 21st sawhundreds of villagers gathered at nearby Communist Party offices, to nonviolently protest against the sale. But as crowds grew and grew in numbers, so too did their confidence. Protesters began blocking roads and attacking buildings in an industrial park.
Three villagers were arrested at the Communist HQ demonstrations, and the next day hundreds laid siege to the police station, demanding their release. The state responded to this challenge with unrestrained ferocity, with police and mercenaries beating villagers apparently without discrimination – men and women, children and the elderly.

Cops were eventually called back to their posts, and the government struck a conciliatory tone, even asking villagers to elect delegates who could air their grievances. In retrospect, this seems to have been a ploy to uncover the ‘leadership’. One of these – respected village butcher Xue Jinbo – died in police custody, apparently the victim of a state killing. The state news agency claimed that Xue was the victim of a heart attack, but the bruised knees, bloodied nostrils and broken thumbsreported by his son in law indicate this took place under torture.

What happened next stunned Beijing authorities, and sent shockwaves around the world in mid-December. The furious Wukan villagers banded together and drove the police and Communist Party officials out of town. They then set about running things for themselves. Meanwhile, cops maintained a blockade a few miles away. At this point, the central government’s strategy appeared to be one of containment. They shied away from a violent restoration of ‘order’, perhaps wary of inflaming tensions nationwide. But if they could successfully stop the story from getting out to the wider world, Wukan residents would soon be faced with a choice – surrender or starvation.

However, that is not how the story ended. Despite the blocking of Wukan-related internet searches within China itself, some international media were in town to spread the word, and villagers even set up their own press office. People from nearby villages managed to smuggle food in - their solidarity directly fuelling the resistance. There was also some wealth redistribution from the wealthiest to the poorest, ensuring that everyone would survive the blockade.

Frustrated, the Communist leadership eventually cut a deal. Though details are scarce and unreliable, the provincial government has reportedly agreed to buy back land it had seized, and allow the peasants to collectivise it once more. Detained villagers have been released, and an ‘investigation’ into the death of Xue Jinbao has been announced. It appears as if there was some indication that Wukan peasant delegates would be allowed to stand in local elections, because villagers are now complaining that officials have gone back on their word. This week it was also being reported that Chinese citizens who had expressed sympathy with the uprising were being called in “to drink tea” with police.

But central government are unlikely to pick a significant fight in Wukan any time soon. From their perspective, it would be preferable to let things cool down, and allow the story to die a death. However, there are growing indications that the national export-led economy is being dragged down by rising recessionary tides in the western world. Factory bosses have already been compelled to attack jobs, wages and conditions across the country, and a strike movement seems to be gathering pace. During the first recession of this global depression, Chinese leaders threw money at the problem, and seemed to have headed off a broad revolt. But that money has now been spent, and indeed led to more problems, as a property bubble seems fit to burst.

We are in unchartered territory here, so the future develoment of Chinese struggles is difficult to predict. But we can be sure that turmoil in China will have a huge impact around the world, due to the country’s pivotal role in commodity production. It it now possible to envisage a largescale uprising of the Chinese industrial proletariat, which would no doubt find support in peasant villages like Wukan. To paraphrase the supposed Chinese curse, we may live in very interesting times
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Having graduated from university on to the dole and then working on a short-term Community Enterprise Programme, which I tried to organise into the NUPE union with little success, I was back signing on. One day the counter clerk at the Unemployment Benefit Office asked: “How would you like to come and work for us?” The “us” was the local DHSS office in Lewisham. After a literacy test, I started work on a Monday morning as part of the lowest grade – clerical assistant.

The work consisted of linking letters to claimants’ files which were never where they were meant to be often being buried under piles created by overworked Clerical Officers. It was boring and the pay lousy, but better than the dole!

I joined the union on my first day. This was the Civil and Public Services Association, nowadays the PCS, and was then under the control of the right. In a little while the existing union rep was promoted to Executive Officer, this grade and above had its own union –the Society of Civil Servants. There was an election for a job most people didn’t want to do and I won.

I got a day a week facility time which was spent working on individual cases of which there were many and distributing union literature. I was also on the branch executive which was dominated by Militant (nowadays the Socialist Party) and the SWP who were part of the Broad Left. Within the Broad Left there was also the Socialist Caucus:  this was the AWL and independent socialists. It was obvious none of these factions were interested in raising the political consciousness of members and helping run and win disputes for themselves. It was about control freakery and recruiting paper sellers. I felt very isolated. Later the SWP sent a member into my office, but he couldn’t cope and spent lunchtimes in the park getting stoned!  Eventually he went sick and vanished.

Most of the union activists had degrees while most of the management had hardly an o level. This was the cause of much conflict and resentment. At one point the acting manager told me to fuck off out of his office. I replied that the next day I’d call a meeting and recommend strike action. He came in very early next day, apologised and told me how his family, like mine, were miners and had been in the Communist Party. My answer was “it doesn’t seem to run in families!”

Management would often lie to union reps about what was in the staff code even when the union rep had it under his arm!

Even with national disputes over pay, beyond the odd leaflet, little effort was made to win rank and file support. Picket lines would be very thin: once six bedraggled pickets had a van load of police each!

One dispute that did have widespread support was a strike against the employment at the neighbouring Hither Green office of BNP activist Malcolm Skeggs, who had been sacked by Lewisham council for using their photocopiers to produce BNP material.

Also popular was refusal to co-operate with the Poll Tax.

Hardest of all was trying to build solidarity between the staff and the claimants. Many staff saw the claimants as stereotypical scrounging scum and the claimants saw the staff as potential recruits to the SS. Any information I had about crack downs on claimants I passed on to the Catford and Woolwich Unemployed Centres.

Having been promoted to Clerical Officer I was sent to work on the fraud section! Management claimed this gave union reps greater leeway but I suspect the real aim was to break them. I discovered one fraud officer had been in the Young Communist League and another chaired a constituency Labour Party: but they were still steeped in the ‘claimants are scum’ attitude. I was often told I was ‘a social security officer not a fucking social worker!’

Eventually the DHSS reorganised much of the work being removed from local offices to large centres in areas of high unemployment like Glasgow. I moved on too becoming the welfare rights worker at Pensioners’ Link in Deptford. Some of those involved in it were veteran Communists and we had many interesting discussions. Some still supported Stalin’s tyranny! Pensioners Link then had offices scattered over London and I became steward for Deptford and then joint shops convenor. Management was corrupt to the core and accused the staff of being racists. The Victorian view of lady bountiful distributing improving tracts to the deserving poor persisted, and we were expected to tolerate poor conditions. The office where I worked didn’t even have a gents’ toilet!   The full time TGWU official had no idea about the voluntary sector, he had worked in a power station.

After a bitter dispute about the willingness of colleagues to take a pay cut to save jobs I left. After suffering a near fatal heart attack, I am sure work-related stress was a major factor, I have ended up as a benefit claimant myself.

Ah, the summer of 1981! The spectacle of a ‘fairytale’ royal wedding was a distraction for some as a Conservative PM led a ruling class offensive and unemployment skyrocketed, while riots shook the inner cities. ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’, some have commented today, as government documents from those days are released under the thirty year rule.

toxteth riots, 1981

Amongst revelations that the government lied about negotiations with the IRA during the hunger strikes and that Thatcher – shock! horror! - paid for her own Prime Ministerial ironing board, we are given a glimpse of the Thatcher cabinet’s reaction to rioting in London, Bristol and – in particular - Liverpool. It turns out that Thatcher played referee in a policy battle between then Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and then Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine.

Heseltine believed the riots showed that something needed to be done in Liverpool. Of course, he didn’t advocate a redistribution of wealth from the top to the bottom. Still, his It Took A Riot report argued for significant resources to be dedicated to regenerating the areas in which some of the poorest lived. This was a product of his ‘one nation conservatism‘ – a philosophy based on fear that the poorest will rise to challenge capitalism as usual if they are left to rot.

But even then, one nation conservatism was on the wane, as speeding globalisation and a falling rate of profit compelled the ruling class to break with the social democratic consensus which had been part of the post-war settlement with the working class.

“I fear that Merseyside is going to be much the hardest nut to crack,” he said. “We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East. It would be even more regrettable if some of the brighter ideas for renewing economic activity were to be sown only on relatively stony ground on the banks of the Mersey. I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill.”Thatcher had been put in power to make that seismic break with social democracy, and she wasn’t about to let a few nights of insurrection shake her will. Something close to her position was articulated by Howe, when he warned her “not to over commit scarce resources to Liverpool”.

In short, for Howe and much of the ruling class, Liverpool’s wounds were largely “self-inflicted”. Of course, by Liverpool they meant the Liverpudlian working class, and by “self-inflicted” they meant that it was historically characterised by industrial militancy. Minutes of a key meeting show it was believed that: “The Liverpool dockers had caused the docks to decline by their appalling record of strikes and over-manning. Likewise, many companies had been forced to run-down their plants because of labour problems.” This was unforgivable from a bourgeois perspective, and the city’s population should not be encouraged by having “limited” cash squandered on them just because the people of Liverpool 8 had – to use a favourite local term – ‘kicked off’.

Liverpool people know that Howe and Thatcher prevailed. Heseltine was made unofficial ‘Minister for Merseyside’, but his impact was generally limited to the garden festival of 1984, the commercialisation of the Albert Dock and the planting of new trees down Princes Avenue, as the government took on the local Militant tendency and ultimately won. Meanwhile, heavy industry was allowed to decline, culminating in the shutdown of the docks in the 1990s. Commercialism and culture were billed as rescues, but these waves began to recede in 2009, once the recession hit and the ‘Capital of Culture’ festivities were over. Liverpool’s population continues to shrink, and “managed decline” would indeed be a fitting description of the last thirty years.

As I wrote following the riots of August this year, which again lit up the streets of Toxteth: ”Liverpool of 2011 is very different to the Liverpool of 1981. Back then we’d only had six years of the neoliberal assault. Now it’s thirty-six. The latest crises of capitalism have created a generation of ghetto children with even less to lose.”