Red Tuesday - 28th March

Thought I'd add:

Devrim said

Yeah, when i joined them in the 1980's the SWP taught me to see this as a 'downturn' in class struggle. But this was too linear a perspective. A downturn suggests to expect that one day there will be a simple 'upturn', a return to the syndicalist and sectionalist certainties of the seventies. Of course, what we have seen over the interviening 20 years was instread a total global restructuring of the working class. Therefore the 'rules of the game' might have changed somewhat!

One of these changes is what Catch refers to:

Catch:

.

The increased (illusion of) MOBILITY is one of the keys to the new (temporary) ruling class hegemony. New labour call it "life long learning" - the role of education and aspiration in diffusing working class resistance. "Move on up"- Once upon a time this motown dance tune invoked us on the dance floor to try to perform this manouvre , but now it is merely a nauseating neo-liberal joke.

Instead of collective resistance, they promised that the education system would increase class mobility. - but only at the individual level. Now a whole generation of my younger friends try to ignore the cataclysmic student debts they owe. But still, the dominant idae for young people in Britain is this: "In a shit job?" -dont organise, just: 'Move on up'.

Under thisn scheme, education is not to be an intellectual liberation, but merely an instrument for the further commodification of life and the standardization and immobilisation of a new order of capitalist hegemony.

So strikes are only a tool of the old and the loosers,m who are seen to fear for their pensions or being ill and needing a health service. This is just one of multi-facited veil of illusions that currently maintains the dominance of capital.

But it is only a brittle veil, which we hope is easily shattered, as has happened accross the channel. In the next months, new sites of struggle will be discovered in the UK that I cannot yet anticipate.

If on this website, we together can forge new weapons to liberate ourselves from such snares and instensify the class war, then all our virtual verbiage will be worthwhile!

Now, where isn that second bottle of Rioja?

XXX

just thought, before I crash out, Id say this:

Our struggles were built through incredidible sectional strength in the 60's and 70's. (sectional strength means working class militant loyalty to a particular workplace, trade or local group of their workmates). Under the generalised ruling class assaults in the 70's and 80's this then generalised into a 'class war' perspective of sorts amongst many miltant trades unionists.

However, under the dominat strategy and dead hand of our union bosses in the 1980's and 90's, we remained confined within this sectional and defensive outlook. We lost, heavily, bitterly, being picked off one by one. This was in the face of a generalised ruling class offensive. We lost. big time.

Out of these depths of defeats, a new consciousness has been born. This did not start as a pure class consciousness. Rather it was a generalised (thus bourgouse influenced) general political consciousness. It first really showed itself amongst a tiny minority of students and intellectuals in the so called 'anti-capitalist' movements marked by Seattle and Genoa.

It then expanded to embrace millions with the movement against the Iraq war. Now it is taking up the 'social question', most notibly for us in the great anti-CPE manifestations in France and the Pensions strike in Britain.

Thus todays class strength is not built through sectional or localised battles as it was in the '60's and '70's. Rather it is built by connecting each group of workers with this generalising poilitical outlook.

Thus todays workers in Britain understandably will show more confidence in coming out against the war and other big issues like pensions ,rather than over sectional issues where they stand alone. At this current moment It is now through a general and politcal trades unionsim that working class strenhgth will be rebuilt.