Tactics to beat the ConDem cuts

The ConDem Cuts are part of an international offensive against working people. But how we can turn the tables on the bosses? Around what tactics and slogans should we unite and what action do we need to take? In this resolution Workers Power outline how we think the resistance should organise to defeat the new government’s attacks.

A class wide attack

1. As part of an international offensive on workers’ rights across the globe, the coalition government in Britain has declared its overriding aim to halve the £156 billion budget deficit by 2013. Despite its rhetoric that “We are all in this together”, the government has targeted the working and popular classes for the cuts, while boosting profits through massive privatisation and a phased 4% cut in the already low corporation tax. No attempt is being made to recover the estimated £70 billion plus lost in tax avoidance and evasion, yet VAT is raised from January 2011 by 2.5 points to 20%. There is a renewed drive to punish so-called “benefit fraud”, even though the £1.5 billion the government claims is swindled amounts to 0.7% of the total budget and is dwarfed by the £16 billion of benefits unclaimed. The banking sector makes £15 billion profits in the last six months thanks to the £1.2 trillion state bailout, while housing, child, unemployment, incapacity and excess heating benefits are being cut.
2. The class bias of the cuts is evident to millions. The Coalition approval rating is already down to 51%, while Labour’s support has risen to 37%, more than the Tories won in the election three months ago, despite not having a leader. This can be explained by two reasons: these cuts are ‘historic’ in the sense that they are greater (potentially) than Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s, the biggest since the rationing of the 1940s; and Labour is now repositioning itself, despite its record and cuts it is implementing at council level, as an anti-cuts party. While Cameron has launched a political offensive against Labour for “overspending on public services we could not afford”, the fact is neither the Tories nor Liberal Democrats went to the polls promising anything like the present level of cuts. After the Comprehensive Spending Review and as the cuts are implemented, millions more will recognise this.
3. But more than this, the Coalition is mounting these cuts all at once. Thatcher did not attack the vast majority of the people in one swoop until 1988-90 with the poll tax; David Cameron and Nick Clegg threaten to attack children and pensioners, public service providers, private sector workers and the unemployed, council house tenants, NHS patients and every tax payer in the country. While the government will separate out these onslaughts ideologically and temporally, the need for united resistance and for strike action as an essential, key weapon is already felt by tens of thousands: who can play a role in leading the struggle in the coming period.
4. Despite this, the Tory and Lib Dem leaders have a strategy. It is that the big trade union leaders and Labour will prevent a mass strike movement from emerging, isolating the more militant union bureaucrats. It will use the threat of smashing the unions, sequestrating their funds and fining them to bring them to heel. Cameron, Clegg and their advisers believe that, once they have weathered the storm, the effect of the cuts and experience of the unions failing to protect them will eventually cow the working class into submission, while they will take the credit for the recovery when it arrives – eventually but in time for the 2015 election.
5. The emergency budget of July 2010, on top of Alastair Darling’s March budget, signalled more than £100 billion of cuts (6.3% of GDP) and Chancellor George Osborne has demanded all departments, apart from the Departments for Health and International Development, submit draft budgets based on a 25% cut and a 40% cut, in preparation for the Comprehensive Spending Review on 20 October. Osborne aims to halve the budget deficit by £20bn, eliminating it within the lifetime of this parliament.
6. So far the cuts, tax rises and privatisations announced so far include:
   • Raising VAT by 2.5% to 20% from 1 January 2011
   • Forcing 1.5 million people off incapacity benefit
   • Capping housing benefit at a level which will force an estimated 750,000 claimants to move home
   • Raising housing benefit in line with CPI rather than RPI rate of inflation (i.e. removing housing costs from the rate of inflation)
   • Reducing housing benefit for those unemployed for a year or more by 10%
   • A threat to council tenancies, looking to make them reviewable every few years and to evict those who have escaped the poverty trap
   • Introducing a 2-3 year pay freeze for 8 million public sector workers
   • An unspecified but planned attack on public sector pensions
   • Raising the retirement age to 66 in 2016 (a few years later for women)
   • Raising tuition fees and/or introducing a graduate tax (being discussed)
   • Privatisation of Royal Mail
   • Encouraging ‘outstanding’ schools – and later all schools – to become academies and parents and/or teachers to set up free schools, both of which will massively increase privatisation – all with minimum consultation
   • Cuts in further and higher education budgets as the colleges and universities face financial crises after years of underfunding
   • Devolving primary care budgets (80% of NHS spending) to GPs, which will increase role of private health care administrators and, along with the cumulative effect of private treatment centres and the taking of hospitals out of the NHS, private health care providers
   • Slashing the £2.1 billion legal aid budget, starting with taking the axe to the training of solicitors in legal aid work, the closure of over 100 courts and the sacking of up to 15,000 civil servants
   • Launching four pilot ‘Big Society’ councils, which will replace public sector workers with volunteers and remove local authority control over certain services
   • Passing on cuts to local councils cuts of up to 25%, as the central government grant is cut by £1.2 billion and as councils cut spending to ‘pay’ for council tax freezes promised in the run up to May’s election
   • The overall affect of the cuts will, according to a leaked Treasury document, be 600,000 public sector and 750,000 private sector job cuts.
7. These cuts are part of an international situation, where the imperialist bourgeoisie is attempting to transfer an enormous amount of wealth from the working class to themselves. For them this is an essential precondition for the eventual emergence of a stable environment for profit. We reject reformist and Keynesian prognoses that these cuts could be made more humanely, over a longer period of time and while maintaining jobs and domestic spending levels. On the contrary, only unified resistance – on an international scale, so far as is possible – can protect working class gains and make the bosses pay for their own crisis.

Principles of resistance

1. The first principle of resisting this attack is to resist every single cut: no job cuts – be they compulsory, voluntary, recruitment freezes or terminating agency workers; no cuts in services; no cuts to pensions or pay. Acceptance of any cuts will weaken the opposition and strengthen the bosses. Ideologically, it would ‘accept’ the need for/validity of the cuts. In practice, it would abandon those workers who rely on certain services, those who provide certain services or endure less secure contracts or have to cover the work left over by vacated/unfilled posts.
2. Secondly, we need to insist on the need for class wide resistance, not just a trade union struggle. The unemployed, people with disabilities, pensioners, NHS patients, school students and their parents, students, benefit claimants, black, ethnic minority and women workers, who will be disproportionately hit by the cuts, migrant workers facing renewed attacks… all these vulnerable sections of the working class – not to mention non-unionised workforces – will need to be drawn into the opposition. The most democratic, inclusive and dynamic way to achieve this is through local anti-cuts committees, linked together into a national anti-cuts movement. Labour MPs and Councillors, as well as trade union officials should join the movement, unite and fight the cuts.
3. However, we also recognise the leading role that the trade unions, as the mass, base organisations of the working class, will have to play in the resistance, precisely because they are in the position to stop the cuts through mass, working class action: strikes and occupations.
4. We recognise that the British working class faces these cuts with the worst anti-union laws in the developed world ready to be used against them. Indeed the Tories, bosses and judges – linked together by class loyalty and often school ties – have already started to extend their usage and lobby for more. We need to fight to abolish of all the anti-union laws and argue that trade union leaders and workers in struggle should break them when necessary.
5. Class independence will be essential in the coming period. At the base, this means the development of a cross-union rank and file movement, rooted in the workplaces and committed to transforming the unions into fighting, democratic organisations, where all officials serve the movement, not the other way round. On the political level, it must translate into a fight to build a consistently socialist alternative to Labour inside the movement: a revolutionary party. This can be built through addressing the most advanced sections of the working class with the need for a revolutionary programme of action against the cuts, to take steps to unity around such a programme inside the mass movement, and to fight for a revolutionary tendency in the Labour Party.
6. Finally, we call for fighting unity at every level: local, national and international. Support every struggle through joint meetings and demonstrations, all-out and coordinated strikes, financial and physical support for those in struggle, up to and including strike action, national strikes, a general strike against the cuts and international strikes.

Tactics (1): strikes

1. It is down to a crisis of leadership in the working class movement that there has not yet been massive strikes against the cuts. While the moving of the Labour Party into opposition will lead to a degree of thaw in the big trade union leaders (i.e. of Unite, Unison and GMB) when it comes to approving or instigating strike ballots, the recent words of Derek Simpson against a ‘winter of discontent’ should serve as a warning. These misleaders will need to be forced into calling action – through rank and file lobbying, agitation and leadership election challenges right through even to protests against the leaders and wildcat strike action.
2. In every workplace and union branch directly affected by the cuts, there should be union meetings to decide on how to oppose the cuts. Petitions and lobbies of the local authority or the bosses, drawing in service users and calling for support from trades councils and other unions, can be organised alongside taking steps towards strike action. If the workplace, e.g. a library, is set to close, then the tactic of occupation should be considered, since this could draw service users into the action, act as a beacon of struggle for the wider movement and prevent the bosses from locking out the workforce and emptying the property. Given the intention of the government and bosses to ban strikes for the most miniscule of technical breaches of the law, occupations may in fact be easier to win than strikes.
3. All public sector union branches should call for national strikes against the cuts, especially over pay and pensions, which are nationally negotiated.
4. If national strikes against cuts or privatisation are deemed unlawful or the courts are used to ban strikes, then the rank and file should demand their union leaders break the law rather than let the law break the poor. Whenever the anti-union laws are used, workers have the right to call on the rest of their union – and the whole movement – to organise solidarity action, up to and including strike action. The Tories have threatened to introduce new laws to ban workers in “essential services” from taking industrial action; if they do, we will need a general strike to stop them.
5. To launch successful strikes and occupations, rank and file workers need to hold regular mass meetings and elect their own accountable and instantly recallable leaderships – strike committees. This is necessary, not just because of the amount of work to do in mobilising for the action, passing information across the workforce, countering management lies and so on, but also because union leaders have a track record and a material incentive arising from their position as trade union bureaucrats of betraying struggles, selling them out or selling them short. Strike committees should have full control of their disputes – from forming demands and determining the duration of the action, including when and if to call it off, through to negotiating with management and recommending or not offers to the workforce. We should call on union leaders to recognise the unique position of strike committees to have this authority, directly and constantly renewed by the workers in dispute. Where necessary, strike committees should try and take action without the officials.
6. We support protest strikes and fighting strikes; both have a role to play in the movement. Protest or demonstration strike or one or two day duration can test our own strength and fire a warning shot over the bows of the bosses. But if the strike movement persists in this tactic and fails to move forward, then momentum is lost, participation will inevitably fall in the absence of a credible alternative strategy and the movement will drop off. The fighting strike is most effective if it is an all-out indefinite strike. Even the FBU’s 8-day strikes in 2000-01, the CWU strikes of 2007 and 2009 and the 5-day Bassa strikes of this year allowed the bureaucracy to retain control and prevented the workers from launching a campaign for solidarity strike action. By going all-out, they could have electrified the movement. Agitation for all-out strikes and coordinated strikes will be key in the coming period.
7. The overall situation objectively calls for national strikes, public sector strikes and the general strike slogan. But these slogans should not be used to dampen down enthusiasm for immediate local or sectional action or as an excuse for calling off lesser strikes. On the contrary, the more local strikes there are and the more determinedly they are fought, the more pressure will pile on the officials to call wider action. The leaders of local strikes should consciously link up with each other in order to spread the action. We will link the call for a general strike and national action to the building of anti-cuts committees and strike committees to both force the union leaders to call national and general action and to ensure it wins – with or without the officials.

Tactics (2): anti-cuts committees

1. In every borough, town and city, we call for anti-cuts committees. Whatever their name and origin, we fight for these local coalitions of resistance to include representatives or, where possible, elected delegates from every union branch, workplace, socialist societies, campaign group and community organisation that is opposed to the cuts. Their aim is to build a mass movement against the cuts based on action: leafleting and petitioning town centres, job centres and workplaces, organising demos and lobbies, holding public meetings, supporting and coordinating strikes and occupations. The anti-cuts committees aim to achieve the highest level of working class unity, while excluding any reconciliation with bourgeois forces, including the Liberal Democrats.
2. Where there is more than one initiative for such a committee, we call for unity based on the direct workers’ democracy outlined above. While union and Labour Party officials should be invited to join such committees, they cannot be allowed to hold a veto over the proposals or anti-cuts actions of other delegates/participants. Likewise, whilst Labour Party wards, constituencies, MP, and councillors should support the committees, the movement should not keep quiet on the cuts being carried out by Labour councils or initiated by the previous Labour administration. Our motto is “The needs of the struggle make up the highest good” – we won’t flinch from saying what needs to be said, even though this may make certain union leaders, MPs and Councillors feel uncomfortable.
3. On the contrary, we will use their participation to argue for them to take the necessary steps to stop the cuts. We will criticise them if they break workers’ unity. In particular, we call on Labour MPs and Councillors to vote against all cuts – even if this means breaking the party whip – and to disrupt the business of the government and Tory or Lib Dem councils in order to prevent reactionary legislation being enacted. Labour controlled authorities should immediately draw up their own emergency budgets – growth budgets that set out the case for housing, environmental, educational, healthcare and cultural needs of the local population and start to implement the reforms. The local party should make it clear that it will have to fight central government for the funds to complete its programme and that it will call on the unions and the working class as a whole to take mass action, including civil disobedience and strike action, to secure these funds. The experience of the 1980s – Lambeth, Lothian, Liverpool – shows that such a strategy is possible, even though the Labour and centrist leaders bottled it in the end.
4. To maximise the participation in and impact of the anti-cuts committees, they should organise local conferences to discuss and debate how to fight the cuts. The aim of these conferences is to map out a programme of action for the struggle ahead and forge an unbreakable, fighting unity across the working class. But also local conferences can and should be used to force the leaders of national anti-cuts movements to open themselves up to democratic debate and decision making. The setting of 27 November for the national organising conference of the Coalition of Resistance is ideal for getting these local conferences off the ground and for agitating for delegate based committees. We will sign the Call and attend the organising meeting on 2 September, where we will fight for our positions.

Tactics (3): towards a national movement

1. The cuts can only be defeated in their large measure, let alone their entirety, on a national scale – i.e. by bringing down the government. It is this fact that has divided the official leaders. On the one side stand David Miliband, who has effectively acknowledged the need to slash the welfare state, and Dereck Simpson, who warns against a Greek-style movement and supports the same cuts over a longer timescale. On the other stand Tony Benn, Dianne Abbott and the left TUC leaders, who have signed up to the Coalition of Resistance: Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay.
2. The Coalition of Resistance is the most important of the national initiatives against the cuts, both in terms of its broad support among leaders of the labour movement and in terms of its willingness to call a conference. We will support the coalition and sign its declaration. We call on all other national anti-cuts organisations – the National Shop Stewards Network, Right To Work, the Convention of the Left, etc. – to also support it. Likewise we call on all these movements to support and build for each other’s initiatives. Groups that try to break unity by ignoring or sabotaging other initiatives, or trying to exclude others as “splitters” need to be strongly condemned. Those small socialist groups, who persist in building their own campaigns as the supposed basis for a mass movement – rather than building the mass movement, within which rank and file initiatives and socialist societies can and should be strengthened – will be punished for their sectarianism. We are moving into a period of mass struggle – and neither the SWP nor the SP are sufficiently implanted in the fighting working class organisations to summon the masses to RTW or the NSSN.
3. The CoR and the local committees will not only offer forums to discuss united action, but also forums to combat false reformist solutions to the crisis. Unlike the SWP, SP, etc. we see the united front as an arena for class struggle on all levels, ideological, political and industrial.
4. The Coalition of Resistance should open up its conference to delegates from union bodies, political and campaigning groups and most importantly anti-cuts committees, and for it to take resolutions at its national conference on 27 November. The last thing we want or need is a repeat of the post-miners’ strike ‘Chesterfield movement’, which descended into a talking shop. Even in the more recent examples of campaigns, like Stop the War and Unite Against Fascism, left-wing organsations have shielded official leaders from demands for action or even criticism for the lack of it. For our part, Workers Power believe the national conference should agree a fighting programme of strikes, occupations, demonstrations and civil disobedience.
5. Last but not least, we call on the Coalition of Resistance to link up with and take its place in an international movement against the bosses’ austerity drive. In the first instance, this should be marked by strikes, demonstrations and meetings on the European TUC’s Day of Action on 29 September.

Conclusion

The class struggle in Britain stands at a pivotal point: one, where defeat at the hands of a Tory government, especially one that is inflicted without a real fight, could set back the working class movement for a whole period, while successful resistance would not only rebuild working class organisation and militant tradition at every level, but also threaten to bring down the government.
Because the stakes are so high – on both sides – we place the building of a revolutionary party as the most important task of the day. However, this has nothing in common with the sectarian manoeuvrings of the centrists. On the contrary, a revolutionary organisation can only be built within the movement and as part of the movement against the cuts. Through our agitation for strikes and occupations, for rank and file organisation and anti-cuts committees, to defy the anti-union laws and to implement local growth budgets, we will patiently explain to activists the anticapitalist logic of our policies and the need for a revolutionary party and new International, and recruit the best to our cause.
Revolutionary unity will not be achieved without a struggle against those centrists and reformists, who advocate false solutions – for example scapegoating migrant workers for shortages – or who fail to warn workers and prepare them against sell-outs. Nor will it be won piecemeal, by the recruitment of activists on an individual basis, though we will certainly win as many adherents as possible on this basis.
No, revolutionary unity will be actively achieved by fighting for a revolutionary action programme, which links today’s struggles to the conquest of power and forms a bridge from the anti-Tory consciousness of workers today to an understanding of their historic task as a revolutionary class. It will involve the use of the united front in the unions, anti-cuts committees and a national movement – but also inside the Labour Party, where we will encourage the formation of a revolutionary tendency. The New Workers Party slogan no longer has the immediate appeal that it did when Labour was in office. However over the coming years there will be no shortage of opportunities for socialists to address the working class with the need for a revolutionary party.