1968

bit more on your mag?

interesting choice of topics.

There was a british section to the SI (was it king mob?) I'm sure they'll be claiming responsibility for everything that went down.

We're sending it to a few social centres and bookshops and sell though the website and at events. Not getting rid of many that way though.

Nice link thanks cantdo!

We were on strike in the beer factory I worked in in 68 over a pay rise. About two hundred of us went on strike and organised a strike committee. The management called in the union to sign us up.
We were on strike again 2 or 3 times in 72, one a "political" strike against proposed anti-worker legislation. There were millions on strike that day (five million as I remember) for the same cause.
Barry's right about the international quality of 68 and the whole movement.
During the late 60s in GB there were many local, sectional wildcats mostly in the car industry and these wage demands were generally quickly acceded to. But generally, the sixties were a period of social calm, the slogan of the bourgeosie being "You've never had it so good".
1972 was the year of the contribution of the working class in Britain to the wave of international struggles. It was the year of the miners' strike, the Building workers' strike, car workers and engineering strikes, and the London Dockers' strike, the latter which exploded into what could be described as an "unofficial general strike". The British bourgeoisie was in a state of near panic.
There were flying pickets en masse, occupations, unofficial strike committees and a great of deal of antagonisms between clear expressions of workers self-organisation and the trade unions. Wildcats, unofficial action and a tendency to overflow the unions (who as part of the state were totally unprepared for it) were all strong characteristics of class struggle in Britain 1972.
It is important to look at the wider aspects of the movement as mentioned above:
It was the end of the post-WWII reconstruction. Towards the end of the 60s, Germany and Japan stopped importing products from the USA, Britain, France, etc, and started to not just export, but to export products made from highly tooled factories that had been built from scratch, with all the latest technology' on the hecatombs of the ruins of both countries. Their rivals couldn't compete and the main three above, especially France and the UK, plundered what was left of German machinery. Early in my working life I came across many examples of such, Dolmen engines dating back to the 20s and 30s for example. The economic crisis was international (it was the first of the major recessions - the present one, potentially the deepest, is about the 5th since then) and its effects immediately felt by workers in all the major economies.
The other major characteristic of the "68 wave", was the re-emergence of the working class as a fighting force coming out of the dark days of counter-revolution. It was something that the bourgeoisie (and not a few "revolutionaries") thought it wouldn't see again.

Qwertz above makes the interesting observation about the London dockers' strike in support of Enoch Powell, his racist views and anti-immigration marches. The were certainly marches and short lived strikes. So too were there marches by Smithfield meat porters in support of Enoch Powell and his views. Both the docks and Smithfield were "closed shop" (ie, no union card, no job - no job, no union card), vritually run by the unions and heavily influenced by Stalinist full timers and officials. Similar for the print unions in London, which I was in from the mid-60s.
The point about the dockers though, is that while there was this expression of a racist, backward element, which at times was a majority, they were able to transcend this and move to the cutting edge of class struggle in 1972. Without making too much of a comparison, to see them as simply racist, to take that snapshot, would be like seeing Russian workers in 1905 as God-fearing, icon-carrying servile subjects of the Tsar. Again, without making too much of a comparison, the whole wave of struggle from 1968 contained many of the elements of the mass strike, culminating in its most open expression, where we can most definitely draw a comparison with the mass strike, Poland 1980.

For the umpteenth time Baboon presents speculation as fact - you were asked to provide evidence and proof for this claim on an earlier thread; http://libcom.org/forums/history/fall-thatcher-regime-and-history - and were totally unable to do so. (Similar inaccuracies by Baboon & co occurred here; http://libcom.org/forums/history/collapse-eastern-bloc-imperialism-1992-balkan-war-13122007). You also failed to refute alternative interpretations. Stop being dishonest by pretending this is definitely true. You first say "it's true..." then say "I'm convinced" - sorry, but they don't mean the same thing. Your pet theory might need it to be true, that doesn't make it so.

My thoughts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring_fallacy

Well, someone else is reading this thread after all. It was stupid of me to include the point about Thatcher and the secret services (what next, a US president coming from the CIA, or a Russian president coming the KGB to represent their national and international interests?) so I withdraw the issue from this discussion totally.
Mikus and Ret have jumped in with their venom, let's hear what they've got to say about how in the 1970s and early 80s, the British bourgeoisie used the left and the trade unions to set up and defeat the working class.

You were content to leave the false premise in the way the argument was initially presented unchallenged, Alf - until Mikus called you on it. I don't reply to 99% of ICC posts - (it takes a particularly crass example to prompt me) so your persecution complex is unnecessary paranoia.

And there's no 'just for once' about it - despite what you imply, if you read those earlier threads you'll find my opinions there - alongside criticism (not only by me) of Baboon & co's inaccuracies. And whether or not we have any interest in discussing the W of D, it doesn't negate the validity of the criticism.

But the claim that the 60's in the UK were "a period of social calm" and that "the bourgeoisie ... were completely surprised and disorientated by the outbursts of struggle" of the late 60s is not true; e.g., there were slightly more strikes in 1956-57-58 than 1966-67-68. But it is true that the character of strikes changed from around 68, with more militant, violent and longer struggles occurring. And Macmillan's ""Indeed let us be frank about it - most of our people have never had it so good." was said in July 1957, not the 60s. In the same speech he also felt obliged to appeal for social peace; "Mr Macmillan painted a rosy picture of Britain's economy while urging wage restraint and warning inflation was the country's most important problem of the post-war era." There were also other cultural, political and social factors that rattled sections of the ruling class and made the 60s something more than "a period of social calm".

Fwiw, I think it's simplistic to talk about 'anti-union struggles' in this context - unions are effective for the bosses precisely because they function with the participation of workers. The majority of 60s-70s strikes were initially wildcats - but a wildcat is not always anti-union (we saw that only recently in the Royal Mail strikes). Shop stewards then and now led most wildcats, often against the union leadership, but always kept one foot in the union form. There never was a decisive break with the union form in the UK.

To imply that unions are something external to workers and something 'done' to them is misleading. As if workers are only held back by the unions - they are an obstacle to radical development, but unions are not something completely external/separate to all workers - they are partly an organisational manifestation of the immediate limits of workers' own aspirations, values and confidence (and, under normal circumstances, usually the limits of the actual realistic possibilities in a given situation - workers do want a deal negotiated). Often stewards are the most militant and pro-strike of the workforce. By their participation workers animate unions. So the unions are not simply an external 'weapon of the bourgoisie' used against the w/c - they are also a manifestation of what the class has to overcome within itself, i.e, its own limitations that must be overcome in order to radicalise. Similarly, talking of the bourgeoisie 'radicalising the left'...etc makes the same error, as if workers didn't join the left cos they were sometimes genuine leftists (or ultra-leftists) themselves. To posit the notion that workers are held back simply by external Machiavellian opposing forces is to imply a passivity in the working class and deny a reformist self-activity/participation in the maintenance of labour relations (work to rules are sometimes an example of a partial withdrawal of this participation), as if they are victims and would otherwise be straining at the leash to make revolution; but most of the time most workers don't want revolution and/or realise it's not imminently on the cards. One can 'explain' this by saying the Machiavellain unions, state, intelligence services etc cleverly impose this - but there are myriad other more mundane and visible reasons - the ideological and material forces that perpetuate the ruling class are hardly all secrets, and they are visible because they exist as a presence in working class life. Conspiracy is an aspect of class rule - but class rule is not a mere conspiracy.

Where did that happen, and what's your source?

As for the Winter of Discontent era, the ruling class was worried; that's why it's still often invoked by the ruling class as their bogeyman - the 'bad old days' when they were last threatened and to which we must never return. And we suffer the consequences of that defeat still today.

Grunwicks, just prior to W of D, was a struggle for unionisation that the union bureaucracy gave reluctant half-hearted support to - prob. cos it didn't want to win it. It knew Grunwicks' more flexible, casualised labour relations was a business model of the future; as were the state's policing methods employed at Grunwick's mass pickets. It ended with the mainly Asian strikers on hunger strike outside TUC HQ, protesting the fact they'd been shafted by the unions.

The preceding Labour govt really began the project that became known as Thatcherism, austerity measures etc; the miners in 72 and 74 had opened up the gates for wage claims - 30% or more rises were being won, money was being printed like there's no tomorrow, inflation, the Social Contract (aka "the Social Con-trick") IMF loans to bail out the economy etc.

The W of D was the culmination of post war struggles - the limits of the forms of struggle and of ruling class concessions were reached. But, at the end of the day, why could Thatcher garner substantial working class support? Only 20% of workers, iirc, were ever on strike during the period - perhaps the larger more silent majority were weary of the disruptions, insecurity, and many were fearful of the radical implications of a continued development of the social movement.

The question is posed by baboon almost purely from the point of view of what the workers are having done to them, as a passive mass, rather than a questioning from a working class view of asking how did we fail? There is no discussion of workers as an active subject, with their own subjectivity.

But then to deal with subjectivity requires acknowledging the limits of your own; baboon is only repeating the stock phraseology of the pre-existing group line - which is a substitute for any real theoretical investigation or thought processes - that would entail stepping outside the comfort zone of the familiar sermonising about 'the Machiavellian bourgeoisie' etc. Consequently, http://libcom.org/library/winter-discontent-introduction
is a far more interesting appraisal of those times than anything your approach is likely to come up with.

I think this is a bit more complex than these apparently polarised positions might suggest. I think Alf's response underestimates the penetration of union ideology into workers' consciousness. When workers begin to confront the bosses, especially in un-unioned workplaces, the first thing many often say is "maybe we should have a union". In unionised workplaces, after long periods of passivity workers still think in turns of "strengthening" the union. Usually it's only after a period of confrontation with the unions that workers begin to think about their real role. In this respect, Ret is partially right about the unions being an organised expression of the limits of workers consciousness at a particular moment.

Nonetheless, the question remains why this ideology is so persistent. Two explanations are possible - (a) unions represent a viable form of class struggle and workers form them naturally, or (b) the pressure of bourgeois ideology on this question is so extreme that only an extreme radicalisation of struggles can break it.

The fact that unions, whatever their beginnings, always act as a brake on their class even when they've sprung from very powerful struggles (e.g. Solidarity in Poland) indicates (a) is false. The fact that when struggles are radicalised, the first confrontation is usually between workers and "their" union underlines this.

So, turning back to Ret's phrase "partly an organisational manifestation of the immediate limits of workers' own aspirations" we have to ask organised by who. Again, there are two possibilities (which are not mutually exclusive): (a) they are organised by the bourgeoisie (which certainly includes the hierarchies of the established unions or (b) they are organised by workers but workers who are still under the grip of bourgeois ideology. The ultimate results of either the same: unions are fundamentally bourgeois organs that cannot do anything other than serve a bourgeois function.

I am in complete agreement with Alf concerning the participation of revolutionaries in union structures.

There can be semi-insurrectionary struggles even in a period of profound defeat for the working class, as at the end of the second world war. So there's no contradiction to seeing militant struggles in the 40s and 50s in Britain and recognising the overall period as being one of proletarian retreat. The essential reason why the period after 68 was different was that a major shift in the balance between the classes took place on an international scale.

Of course this change didn't come out of nowhere, and previous movements of the class also contributed to it.

The problem with Ret's formulation about the unions is that it's saying something more than the fact that workers have deep illusions in the unions, participate in the union structure, give their money to it, try repeatedly to use it, etc. The formulation implies that unions are still in some sense an organic expression of the class, "manifestations" of its immediate consciousness. If this were the case, what difference in class nature would there be between a trade union and a workers' strike committee that has been created outside the unions (but which will inevitably still have many trade unionist type confusions)?

It's a question of methodology.
Any analysis of periods of class struggle, of periods and epochs, ennervates some of the contributors on these boards. We've seen it many times and there's a good, rather a bad, reason for it. The basis of the argument is, nothing changes, there's always been crises, always been strikes, wars, always exploitation and oppression; there's a timelessness about the world, nothing really changes and, if revolution could happen, it could be any time - a question of will or an act of God.
It's essential for some to maintain this position as a matter of faith because if they didn't they would have to make concessions to the fact that the world is not a timeless continuum. They would have to recognise that societies and economic systems change, have a rise and a fall. They would have to recognise that something that could be positive in one epoch could be negative in another and, and this is the point, they would have to begin to recognise that capitalism could undergo a rising, ascendent phase and, it follows, a negative, decadent one. Capitalism is a man-made construction, limited in time, space and capacity whose contradictions carry the seeds of its own destruction. Its decadence opens up the verification of a materialist, marxist analysis the ramifications of which are revolutionary.
Far better to avoid such major questions altogether and stick to a timelessness, a world where history making epochs and defining events just don't exist and revolution remains a pipe dream. But, 1968 was such a defining moment both in relation to the economic crisis and the struggle of the working class. It is positive that elements in this discussion make an attempt to define the period in relation to the class struggle.
The "shorthand", May 68, contains a wealth of lessons and information to be analysed that are global and historic for the working class and not least amongst these is the question of the trade unions. A "decisive break" with the trade unions would mean a decisive step towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that's not going to happen soon. But that's all the more reason to draw clear lessons about them now for the class struggle of the future.

Ret doesn't reply to 99% of ICC posts and I've got 2 here. I feel both humbled and grateful.
The ICC, its sympathisers, can't be responsible for the incoherence and bittiness of the anti-decadence positions expressed on here by various shades of anarchism and libertarianism.
Address the issues Ret and stop hiding behind your childish abuse.

At the risk of sounding all wimpish, can I suggest that we cool things down a bit and try to get back to the discussion? I agree with Baboon that there is a problem of method here and that not seeing the fundamental changes that take place in the life of capitalism is somewhat integral to the anarchist way of looking at history which tends, not surprisingly, to predominate on a libertarian discussion forum. However just asserting this is not enough - it does have to be backed up with argument. We could spend a lot of time looking for evidence of this but I don't think that would take this particular discussion forward.

With regard to this discussion, the issue is not the change from ascendance to decadence but a crucial shift in the balance of class forces within the epoch of decadence, a shift that was marked by the massive strikes of 1968 and the subsequent international wave of struggles. In the ICC's opinion, this signified the end of a period of counter-revolution and defeat and the opening up of a new period of rising class struggle. This is obviously open to discussion and is in fact a key question (in our view, the key question) raised in this thread.