ResoluteReader: Mark L Thomas, Jessica Walsh & Charlie Kimber - The Revival of Resistance: The 2022-3 strikes and the battles still to come

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Mark L Thomas, Jessica Walsh & Charlie Kimber - The Revival of Resistance: The 2022-3 strikes and the battles still to come

In the year to June 2023 Britain saw around 4.1 million strike days. Traditionally these days are described by the media and the government as "lost", but for the trade unionists taking them, and the socialist movement these days represented a revival of the workers movement. This represented the highest level of strike action since the 1980s and a chance for trade unionists to turn back decades of pay freezes, attacks on workers' conditions and austerity. That year saw impressive strikes and pickets lines and huge demonstrations. Like many other socialists engaged in active solidarity I visited more pickets in this year than I had in my previous three decades of activism. The vast majority of those picket lines were exciting, inspiring and big - with a new young generation of workers engaged in strikes, many for the first time.

But the size of the strikes and the celebratory mood on them sometimes hide a problem. In few of the strikes was there a serious strategy to win, and too many disputes have ended with deals that are best described as "poor". With inflation in the UK hitting record levels, many groups of workers settled for deals that were less than inflation and certainly, as this book argues, below what could have been won.

The authors of this book are all leading members of the British Socialist Workers' Party. Their short book is an attempt to analyse the strikes and offer "a sharp challenge to the union bureaucracy and lays out a strategy for the way forward". Thus the book is more than an analysis of the moment, but an attempt to learn lessons and develop workers' struggle. The authors identify a number of problems with the struggle as it stands. The first is the episodic nature of the strikes with unions calling strikes that lasted one or two, sometimes a few days. The second is a failure to coordinate - a reluctance on behalf of the union leadership to strike together with other unions. When this did happen, such as the days that saw the Civil Service union PCS strike with the teachers in the NEU - the joint events, such as the demonstration in Manchester that I was part of, were joyous celebrations of workers' power.

The authors write:

A central less from these experiences is that resisting poor deals is connected to the argument for escalation, which is a break from the limited pressure of episodic strikes. The question of how more can be won, how real victories can be best achieved needs to be raised constantly. This in turn need s to be combined with rebuilding activist networks that understand they cannot rely on the trade union leaderships to fight effectively and consistently.

This critical position on the trade union leadership is often at odds with the initial experience of many strikers. As the authors point out:

For more than 30 years, the near universal experience of working class activists, even the most militant, has been one of relying on and operating within a framework set from above - by the trade union bureaucracy, and acting independently of them has been a rare exception. So it is not surprising that many activists entered the recent strikes with illusions both about the scale of the confrontation needed to achieve decisive victories... but also, and correspondingly the scale of the challenge with their own officials that this would require.

The authors draw on the SWP's analysis, first developed by Tony Cliff, that argues that the trade union apparatus, forms a "separate social layer with its own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other". The bureaucrats and union leaders have a material interest in maintaining their position and not fighting too hard - not least their high salaries, as a rather shocking and useful salary table in this book shows.

The strikes could, and should, win more - and the barrier is the inherent conservatism of the trade union bureaucracy. The counter to this is the development of rank and file organisation that can lead the struggle from below, in defiance of the leadership if and when needed. The authors demonstrate this with historical accounts and several examples from contemporary struggles in Britain. But most excitingly there is a really inspiring chapter on the movement in France that is on a much bigger scale than in Britain. There the movement "shook" the country and demonstrated the potential to win so much more. There are plenty of useful lessons for British trade unions. The inclusion of this material and linking it to the British struggle is a real strength of the book.

The authors' caution though. The potential for developing these movements is not the immediate victory of socialism, but rather a process by which

workers would start to see alternative sources of power and decision-making that could destroy and replace the capitalist state. Everything that diverts and delays that process is fatal. It creates opening s for the bureaucrats to squeeze life from the struggle.

In conclusion then the authors are hopeful that we can build on the movements of 2022/3 to win real change. But there is a struggle - we need a bigger, stronger rank and file within the trade unions and a bigger revolutionary socialist movement. With these tools the movement can grow and expand its horizons. There has never been a greater need for workers' victory and this short, but inspiring and accessible book should be read by every worker who is sick of the system and wants to fight back.