Socialist Resistance Forum: The General Election & the Left

Socialist Resistance Forum: The General Election & the Left

Speaker: Alan Thornett – Respect National Council and Socialist Resistance

Tuesday 17th November, 7.30pm, Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre

Despite the collapse of the thirty year neo-liberal project, the three main parties are promising more of the same. No matter how much the right wing crusade has fallen into discredit, they have on offer; war, destruction, unemployment, public service cuts, wage cuts, privatisation, racism, repression and surveillance and a lack of affordable housing for working people. The differences between these parties are of degree, not of substance. Labour are putting in (inadequate) fiscal stimuli, whereas the Tories would let the market rip. But all three are united on the cuts and making the working class pay for the crisis . . . .

Don’t worry, here comes the New Labour Titanic to save us from Global Warming! If they are allowed to get away with it, the damage and chaos they create will cause even greater misery and provide more opportunities for the far right. But this is by no means inevitable. The capitalist onslaught can, and must be, stopped by mass opposition. Strikes, rallies, demonstrations and occupations need to become the order of the day. It is not a question of going back to the seventies, it is a question of going forward towards a new society; one based on public need and not on private profit. We will not get there because of the actions of great leaders, we will get there by the kind of mobilisations that almost brought Blair down in 2003, that broke the Poll Tax in 1990, that won the recent college dispute in London and that challenged the right of factory owners to do as they please at Visteon and Vestas.

Organisation

When in struggle, working people normally have numbers and militancy on their side, but what is often lacking is organisation, solidarity and leadership. This forum will concentrate on one aspect of all this, the need for a new political party of the oppressed.

The General Election

It is important that there is a viable left challenge at the General Election. While there are a small number of left Labour candidates worth backing, a vote for them is also a vote for the Brown (or whoever replaces him) leadership. If you have a right wing Labour candidate, you get the worst of both worlds. And while no one wants to see the Tories win, it is totally insufficient to have a strategy of just voting

Labour

It is now very late for the whole of the left to construct a united team of candidates, but even now any moves towards unity will be welcome. One such opportunity will be at the conference to be hosted by the RMT in London on November 7th. The backing of one of the country’s strongest unions would be a real spur towards unity against New Labour. On November 14th, there will be the Respect conference in Birmingham. It has the biggest electoral footprint on the left, and has the possibility of doing very well, or even winning, in three Westminster seats.

(Socialist Resistance will be backing these challenges). Then there is Dave Nellist in Coventry, Caroline Lucas in Brighton, and a few other areas where the left could do well.

The forum will discuss the outcome of the two conferences mentioned above and other developments towards left unity before the election, and how we can most aid the success of the candidates already in the field.

Latin America has swung left over recent years. Can we do likewise over here?

Socialist Resistance at 0777 594 2841
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or visit http://birminghamresist.wordpress.com/ for Birmingham Socialist Resistance
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Birmingham Socialist Resistance open letter to the Birmingham Socialist Left

• No to a massive assault on jobs, wages, pensions and welfare!
• For a joint socialist left General Election Campaign in Birmingham!
• Support the Respect Candidate in the Sparkbrook by – election!

A government commission in the Irish republic has recommended cutting 17,500 public sector jobs (equivalent to a cut of 300,000 in Britain), cuts in wages, pensions and a 20% cut in child benefit. These measures are supported by all the mainstream parties including the Greens.

David Davis, former shadow Home Secretary writing in the Sunday Times 26.7.09  proposed axing “middle class welfare” including child benefit and the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance – starving the kids and freezing the pensioners!!

These policies will be implemented with a vengeance by a future Tory or Tory/Liberal coalition government or even by a New Labour government in the extreme unlikelihood of it being elected.

The capitalist politicians have really no alternative since they accept the existing distribution of wealth and income which is inherent in the British capitalist system. They will not propose a real distribution of wealth and power but will allow the bankers and big capitalists to get fat bonus and enormous dividend payments as usual.

There have been various moves towards left unity in the past; from the Socialist Alliance to Respect, the call from the Socialist Party and more recently from the Socialist Workers Party and the unity shown during the recent No2EU campaign. This had the vital backing of the most militant trade union, the RMT, as well as other left forces. Yet it must be recognised that Respect still has the largest electoral footprint, with one MP and 10 councillors nationally, and is a serious electoral force in this city.

We think it is urgent the socialist left come together to mount a serious challenge to the consensus for the need for drastic public expenditure cuts at the next general election. Even a campaign standing in 20 -50 constituencies, stating opposition to these cuts and promoting workers’ action such as the Vestas occupation, will encourage resistance to these austerity measures when they are introduced by a future Tory government.

The main themes of the socialist election campaign should be as follows;

1. Opposition to the planned austerity measures; cutting jobs, wages, pensions and social benefits. Support     for workers action, legal and illegal strikes and occupations.

2. Defence of the environment; urgent and radical action to combat global warming.

3. Troops out of Afghanistan and Justice for the Palestinian people.

4. Opposition to racism, fascism and Islamophobia.

5.   For a proportional system for the election of MPs.

We also are making two specific proposals;

1.     Mobilise now to support the Respect candidate, Shokat Ali, in the by- election in  Sparkbrook due in September. Match words with action! Ring  0781 217 2885 to help.

2.     A meeting should be called between all organisations and individuals who support a    joint socialist electoral challenge in Birmingham at the General Election. If progress is   made with this, a launch rally featuring national speakers from the organisations and individuals involved could be held.

Socialist Resistance Forum: Crisis in the Irish Economy and Worker’s Resistance

Speaker: Raynor Lysaght of Socialist Democracy in Ireland

Tuesday 25th August, 7.30pm, Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre

Summary: The Irish Economic Crisis and the potential  resistance

When the 26 counties freed themselves politically from Britain they formed an under-developed agricultural state. With limited resources of coal and none of iron ore, Ireland could not have been a player among the North Atlantic industrial economies that controlled the world. Centuries of foreign domination and landlordism aborted an economy based on agricultural production. Most capitalists developed as small scale usurious traders or gombeenmen. The most enterprising followed the example of the disappearing landlords to make their fortune abroad.

Northern Ireland was different: there local capital had been able to build and maintain an intensive, if localized industrial economy dependent on Scottish coal and the use of religious sectarianism as a productive force. In 1921 it had reached the height of its development and has been declining steadily ever since, becoming essentially a client economy of the British state.

The new Free Sate’s chief product was live cattle. Its first government accepted this, concentrating on agriculture, with little consideration of the possibilities of its side products. Then, from 1932, for a quarter of a century, general industrial neglect was replaced by blanket protection. Obviously, by 1957, this was not maintaining employment levels and tariffs were dropped as casually as they had been adopted. The protected industries disappeared, replaced by foreign firms attracted by generous bounties and, above all, by low wages.

It became clear that, to continue, this low wage economy had to pay still lower wages. Then the northern struggle exploded. After Bloody Sunday, 1971, workers began to occupy British factories. They were diverted into burning the British Embassy, but the situation did not allow successive governments to use capitalist methods to save the economy. Instead they tried to buy off the revolution. Only after ten years had shown that the Republican movement would not, and no other force could turn the national struggle into social revolution, did twenty-six county governments face a much deteriorated problem and try to solve it at the expense of the workers.

From 1987, the economy was rebuilt as a partner in international finance capitalism, aided by grants from what is now the European Union and an open doors policy to unorganised workers from Eastern Europe. Corporation tax was cut and health and education cut even more. From 1997, personal tax was cut further. Unemployment fell. However, by 2001, it was clear that this could not continue. Foreign investment was going to Eastern Europe. The government turned again to priming the pump and financed the building boom that collapsed last year. Now unemployment is 400,000 and projected to be 500,000 in 2010, while state debt is E10 billion and rising. New welfare cuts have been imposed and more are promised.

Overcoming this will be posed in the remainder of the talk.

Videos of the meeting:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Socialist Resistance Forum: Socialists and the Capitalist Recession

Speaker: Andy Kilmister

Tuesday 16th June 7.30pm, Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre

“…..the commercial crises….. by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production.”

Karl Marx 1848

The last few weeks have seen an increasing number of media reports of the `green shoots of economic recovery’ coupled with statements by financial analysts that the worst of the recession may soon be over – or may indeed already have passed.

Socialist Resistance has never taken the view that the current crisis is just about the weaknesses of the banks following the sub-prime debacle in the USA.

The financial turbulence that became apparent in August 2007 and then worsened dramatically in the autumn of 2008 is just one aspect of a broader process. This process involves the unravelling of many of the institutional frame-works that have governed the international economy since the mid -1980s and have laid the basis for neo-liberal politics. Economic growth in the last three decades has depended not just on rising debt but also on cheap commodity prices and ecological devastation within a context of global capital flows and imperialist exploitation. All of this is now thrown into question.

But the retreat of the most immediate threats of financial collapse and the temporary stabilisation of the banking sector does mark the end of a particular phase of the crisis and provides an opportunity for socialists to analyse the turmoil of the last year and to discuss likely developments in the future. We hope our new book Socialists and the Capitalist Recession will be a good basis for doing this.

In understanding what is happening to the economy at present Marx’s theories of crisis provide an invaluable starting point. The key dilemmas and tensions which lie at the centre of the current recession can be traced back to the themes highlighted by Marx over a century ago. This talk will look at three of them:

• Where will the demand come from to ensure economic growth and prevent mass unemployment, after the collapse of the housing bubble and debt-fuelled consumption? In societies like the USA and Britain, with massive inequalities and stagnating wages, how can ordinary people continue to afford to maintain consumption? What will be the impact of the current rise in government borrowing and the threat of higher taxes and public expenditure cuts to come?

• Are we heading for an era of global economic instability? Will increased demand from countries like China and India make up for slower growth in the USA and Europe? Will the dollar and euro maintain their values? What lies behind the fall in the pound?

• What is happening to profitability both in the financial and industrial sectors? Who is gaining and who is losing from the crisis and who will bear the future costs? How can capitalism deal with the mass of speculative investment left over from the boom?

Of course the outcome of the current crisis will not depend only on the background of global economic developments or on the strategies of employers and governments. More important than these will be the responses of workers and ordinary people to the attacks on living standards which the recession will bring. But in building campaigns and struggles to withstand these attacks we need to analyse what is happening in the economy and make predictions about what is coming next. This talk is intended to contribute to just such a discussion.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Socialist Resistance Forum – A Workers Alternative to the Crisis

Speaker – Jerry Hicks – UNITE and RESPECT member

Tuesday 21st April 7.30pm at Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre.

The election campaign for the General Secretary of UNITE was able to reach out and touch and win the hearts and minds of tens thousands of union members who returned a magnificent vote. It was absolutely a left campaign calling for people before profit, public ownership not privatisation, and a green campaign. As a grassroots rank and file member with no access to the union’s resources, and pressing the case single-handed for an election to take place, coming second with nearly 40,000 votes, well ahead of the other two candidates, both full time officials, was a magnificent achievement. Jerry’s message was clearly and proudly taken into workplaces and homes, across every industry and in every part of the country and inspired, motivated and gave hope to the many thousands who heard it and responded to it. The result is a clear vindication of the relevance of the election and appeal of left policies.

New Labour

Amongst the many questions during the election, one that kept being screamed out was “Why does UNITE keep throwing tens of £millions at the Labour Party?”.

Lindsey

During the election the rumbling volcano of anger in the construction industry erupted, with the unofficial strikes at the Lindsey oil refinery; a very clear example of the frustration within the membership. As the construction workers ratcheted up their demands for action, the inadequacy of the union leaders became even more obvious. The Lindsey strike was unofficial – because after three terms of a Labour government the Tory anti-union laws are still in place: but within five days, the members achieved more than they had in five months of delaying tactics from national leaders.

Cowley

And at Cowley’s BMW plant, the management sacked four shifts, 850 temporary staff – at an hour’s notice, with no redundancy pay. When the management left the building after making the announcement, furious members pelted the union reps with tomatoes, seeing the union as part of the problem instead of the solution. How could it get to this? How is it that after three terms of a Labour government, workers, some who had worked for BMW for 4 years, can still be treated like that? Everyone who was a part of this campaign got something positive from it. We were all so close to making history. It has given us a glimpse of what is possible. Apart from the disappointment of not actually winning the election, a great disappointment has been the failure of sections of the left to recognise and grasp this opportunity for what undoubtedly would have been an historic breakthrough.

Fighting Unions Needed

Now, more than ever before, we don’t just need a “campaigning union” we need a fighting union, one that instils a confidence in members to resist employers’ attacks. The bureaucracy will hang on in there until we build a movement strong enough to move them. But if you fight hard enough, with enough confidence, all things are possible.

A Workers’ Alternative

Jerry’s campaign has highlighted the need for a trade union movement that breaks from the priorities of big business, so beloved by New Labour and the other main parties. Policies championed by RESPECT, and now the “People’s Charter” offer a different way forwards. Socialist Resistance would put it more succinctly; we need a complete break from capitalism itself and start pioneering a similar road as that chosen by several Latin American countries; a move towards socialism.

The video of the meeting:

Part 1:

Part 2: