The Summit of Resistance is due to assemble in London on Saturday 29 March. The Socialist Workers Party, one of the main organisers, bills it as ‘bringing together all those who believe’ in fighting for ‘an alternative to austerity, wars, climate denial and racism’.
It should be a forum to thrash out a strategy based on common action against the bosses and the right wing, from Kemi Badenoch to Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. It should also take on Labour in power under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeve. But many activists will arrive sceptical that it will achieve any such thing.
The summit is based on a familiar model, essentially a rally where a few ‘left’ union leaders, MPs, journalists and celebrities give rousing speeches, with a smattering of strikers or floor contributions, and then everyone goes home.
What we need right now is a conference which debates motions and decides on action.
Counterfire and the SWP are past masters of organising the former and obstructing the latter. Their rank & file conference and workers’ summit two years ago led to nothing. In 18 months of the mass Gaza solidarity movement, neither has attempted to bring the movement together in an inclusive national assembly.
Workers Power is approaching left groups and radical campaigns to join forces so that this time the national gathering really takes the movement forward on a democratic and fighting basis, with local organisations open to everyone who wants to fight the dangers that lie ahead.
Battles ahead
On that front there is much to discuss—the fact that despite the 2023 strike wave, real wages have not recovered from the losses of the ‘savage austerity’, the covid recession or the double digit inflation that spurred the strikes. And now Rachel Reeves, caught between the rock of raising taxes on the rich and the hard place of her self-imposed fiscal rule, faces her with a return to austerity, i.e. cuts in real terms.
Clearly public sector union members—in health, education, local and central government—need a strategy of combined action to resist the slashing of jobs and services. Council workers too need to act when the local authorities on the verge of bankruptcy do the same. The jobs-services nexus makes this into not simply an economic struggle but a political and social one too, requiring combined mobilisations to prevent sacking and closures and advancing the demand to make the rich pay.
Vitally connected to all these struggles is the issue of the Employment Rights Bill Labour has promised. This was slated to include repealing the anti-union legislation from 2016 and 2024 with the minefield of restrictions that prevent workers speedily reaching a simple majority decision to strike and the minimum service level rules that allowed bosses to order strikers to scab.
But worker militants need to demand all the Tories’ anti-union laws, going back to Thatcher’s Employment Act of 1980, are put in the bin. This will take a real mass campaign not just to demand their repeal, but to defy them.
If we want to truly build a force capable of seeing off the attacks aimed at weakening and disrupting all our struggles we have to fightback against the anti-immigrant and refugee hysteria formatted by the Tories and Reform and shamefully conceded to by Labour boasting of its mass deportations.
We have to show that housing shortages, the waiting lists in the NHS, low wages are not caused by immigrants but by repeated government cuts and the bosses’ desperation for their profits. We have to defend refugees against deportation raids and win our fellow workers to opposing the poisonous racist propaganda of Farage and Badenoch, and resisting Yvette Cooper tacking behind them.
Closely linked to this is the international situation of mounting rivalry between the imperialist alliances. Trump is attempting to ‘Make America Great Again’ at the expense of allies and enemies alike, while encouraging Israel to ethnic cleanse Palestinians. Putin’s Russia has devastated Ukraine and looks to colonise four of its provinces. China, America’s main rival, is manoeuvring in the Pacific. And a weak and divided European Union is marching to the right, fearful of the racist demagogues the neoliberal ‘centre’ has created.
Starmer’s’ Britain plainly does not wish to choose, holding out its invest-in-us begging bowl to Trump, Xi and the EU leaders, and offering to be an ‘honest broker’ between them. A man—and party—that ditched all their principles to attain office look weak and pliable. Who would trust this former lawyer to stand up for truth and justice in the face of bullies?
The working class must, as Karl Marx said back in 1864, ‘master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power’.
None of the imperialist states or alliances represent a ‘camp’ more peaceful or progressive than the others. Each and every one will, sooner or later, turn on those who put their trust in them, like the unfortunate Volodymyr Zelensky. If Trump weakens or even breaks up Nato, there is no reason to support calls for rearmament whether by Britain alone or by joining a European military alliance. We must revive the slogan, ‘Not a penny nor a person for the defence of the system!’
Last but not least, we have to recognise that the climate movement is in a crisis. Mass school strikes and civil disobedience have given way to smaller splinter groups, which while radical have alienated many and now face heavy repression.
A new approach is needed, one that links the struggle to protect the planet with workers’ action to control industrial production and take social ownership of energy generation, transport systems and infrastructure projects. With a climate denier in the White House and global temperatures soaring, this task is urgent.
All of these issues point to one conclusion: the working class and the oppressed needs to struggle not just for this or that major concession from our rulers and exploiters, but to replace their power with our power, the rule of the working class with its own armed power (state) and its own planned economy (socialism).
For that a fundamentally different party than Starmer’s—or even Corbyn’s Labour Party—is needed. The party we really need is one made up of thousands of rank and file militants in the unions, in the communities of the socially oppressed, in the multitude of campaigns. Along with this we need an International organisation of similar parties in every country, on every continent.
On 29 March Workers Power will be arguing on these issues and campaigning for a clear commitment from organisers and participants to take concrete actions for clear demands. We urge all workers, activists and socialists who want to go beyond merely talking a good fight to help us turn the summit of resistance into a real council of war.
