TUC National Demonstration

February 2011 www.counterfire.org

Why we must all marchOn 26 March, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people will march through the streets of London to proclaim an alternative to the cuts. We will demand investment, job creation, a green transition, and a society that caters for the needs of the many, not the profit of the few.

The student revolt at the end of last year has inspired resistance. But a fight limited to fee increases – or any oth-er single issue – is likely to fail. The Con-Dem Coalition is attacking everyone, and it wants ordinary people bicker-ing over who gets cut.

The 26 March demonstration has to unite the largest possible number of people in defence of the welfare state and in rejection of the millionaire mantra ‘there is no al-ternative’. It must bring together people from all sections of society – unionised and non-unionised workers; the unemployed and the disabled; racial and religious minori-ties; school, FE, and university students; climate activists and anti-cuts campaigners; anyone and everyone who opposes the Con-Dem plan to ‘transform’ Britain in the interests of the rich.

Building a mass movementThe trade unions still have the potential to organise the biggest and the broadest demonstrations, mobilising large sections of society. They have the resources and the net-works to reach millions of people in a way that activists working alone cannot.

The biggest single student protest at the end of 2010 was that called by the National Union of Students. In re-cent times, the NUS has consistently stood to the right of other mainstream unions, last year declaring that ‘stu-dents need industrial action like they need a hole in the head’. If a call by leaders who say things like that can pro-duce a militant demonstration of 50,000, imagine the po-tential in a call by the TUC. For all its failings, it represents virtually every unionised worker in the country, and this

means a monster demonstration on 26 March is possible.But no demonstration builds itself. The bigger it is,

the greater the surge of confidence and hope it transmits across working-class Britain. The bigger it is, the greater the chance it will prove the launch-pad for a wave of pro-tests, occupations, and strikes powerful enough to defeat the regime. That means every activist – in the unions, among students, and in the campaigns – has to go all out over the next month to build for 26 March.

The Arab world is offering a dramatic illustration of the kind of popular power we need in Britain. Mass demon-strations and strikes have brought down Ben Ali in Tu-nisia and threaten Mubarak in Egypt. The shock waves are being felt across the region. The relationship between street protests and the confidence of workers to take strike action could not be clearer.

Demonstrations matterRadical change will require mass strikes and workplace occupations. The working class is the majority of society, and, because it is concentrated in the workplaces and cre-ates the wealth of society, it has the potential to paralyse the economy, take over the running of society, and bring down a right-wing government.

But to take this kind of action, workers must feel them-selves part of a mass movement. They will have the con-fidence to strike when they sense they have clear backing from large sections of society. Mass demonstrations with broad and diverse support provide this backing. That is

The TUC demonstration on 26 March must unite workers, students, and anti-cuts campaigners in a monster show of defiance, as Elly Badcock explains.

Dougal W

allace

No cuts... No fees... No sackings... Make the bankers pay!26 MARCHAssemble 11.00am, Victoria Embankment, Central London,

for march and rally at Hyde Park

one reason demonstrations matter. Another is that they can give a firm push to vacillating and half-hearted union leaders. Only mass pressure from below will stop them backing down.

A third reason for building 26 March is that the cuts are a national issue. They are being imposed on millions of people by central government. Numerous and disparate local protests are necessary to build the movement and resist specific cuts, but they cannot stop the government-driven ‘austerity’ programme as a whole. To win, the resistance must be organised, national, and united. It is crucial that, as the anti-cuts movement gathers momen-tum, it concentrates all its forces in one place, at one time, to challenge head-on the entire cuts programme.

The Coalition of ResistanceTo help make it happen, we need a national, co- ordinated campaign to oppose all government spending cuts. That is what the Coalition of Resistance aims to be. Launched in November last year at a 1300-strong found-ing conference with the aim of uniting local anti-cuts groups in a national framework, CoR’s Week of Resist-ance from 14 to 19 February is designed as a stepping-stone towards the 26 March demonstration. The planned culmination is a day of street stalls and other activity on Saturday 19 February.

The Con-Dem Coalition of millionaires has all of us in its sights. It is aiming at nothing less than the destruction of the welfare state and the eventual complete privatisa-tion of all our public services. None of us can beat them on our own. We have to build a mass movement of resist-ance from below. We are going to need a wave of strikes, occupations, and direct action to make Con-Dem Britain ungovernable. The TUC demonstration on 26 March is the next key stage in the struggle to bring down Cameron and Clegg.

To win, the resistance must be organised, national, and united

The Arab revolutionThe revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are the biggest popular movements in the Arab world in decades. They could change the face of the Middle East, argues Peter Stäuber, and they can be a model of resistance for the rest of the world.

Just before Christmas, deep splits were seen inside the Con-Dem Coalition government. Business Secretary Vince Cable bragged to two undercover journalists that he could bring down the government if he chose. Hot on the heels of this revelation came a series of other re-ports of off-message outbursts by Lib-Dem ministers. Perhaps the most forthright was that of Scottish Sec-retary Michael Moore, who declared that raising stu-dent tuition-fees was ‘the biggest, ugliest, most horrific thing in all this … a car crash, a train wreck’.

What brought on this rash of political angst? It cer-tainly was not pressure from the New Labour ‘opposi-tion’. Ed Miliband – whose slogan seems to be ‘vote La-bour for slightly slower cuts’ – is the proverbial dog that does not bark.

Something more fundamental lies behind the tension inside the government than ‘opposition’ in a Parliament whose democratic substance has been hollowed out by identikit neoliberal politics. The fact is that the elector-ate voted left-of-centre in May 2010, but got a hard-right government. Even Tory voters did not endorse the biggest package of cuts since the 1920s. In contrast to Thatcher, who famously declared that there is no such thing as society, Cameron bangs on about ‘the big soci-ety’; however vacuous, it is not hard-right rhetoric.

But the case of Lib-Dem voters is far more extreme: their votes were cast for a left-of-centre programme of moderate reform. Participation in the Con-Dem Coa-lition has involved the wholesale abandonment of Lib-Dem commitments, including, of course, the flagship pledge to oppose tuition-fee rises and to work for their eventual abolition.

It is for this reason that the parliamentary fault-line runs through the middle of the Lib-Dem Party. How-ever eager the party’s millionaire politicians may be to get their legs under the cabinet table, they need to re-tain their parliamentary seats. Since they garner votes by appearing to be other than what they are, they risk electoral meltdown when exposed in office as liars and careerists. Once recent poll showed a drop from 21% at the time of the general election to 8% today.

What brought the crisis to the surface just before Christmas was the student revolt. This acted as a prism of the democratic deficit. Everyone has a vague sense that politicians are self-interested and hypocritical. But the student revolt focused intense attention on one of the biggest betrayals of recent times.

But if 50,000 on the streets and a few broken windows can provoke a minor governmental crisis, what might the impact be of 500,000 later this year? Just how vulner-able is the Con-Dem Coalition?

A weak and vicious governmentThe vicious right-wing character of the regime should not be mistaken for strength. British capitalism is in long-term decline, faces growing competitive pressure, and is heavily distorted by reliance on finance, property, and speculation. The worst global economic crisis since the 1930s confronts Britain’s rulers with greater chal-lenges than most.

The British ruling class has become so dependent on bank profits that it is prepared to take the political risks inherent in selling off the welfare state in order to pro-vide the state finance to underwrite the City. This is not

strength, but weakness. It is the policy of a political and business elite threatened by financial meltdown and cut-throat competition.

Otherwise, it is impossible to explain their decision to launch a full-scale frontal assault on the entire post-war welfare settlement. Thatcher in the 1980s, in a much stronger economic, political, and ideological position, chose a drip-drip-drip approach, pushing through one privatisation at a time, taking on one group of workers at a time, avoiding advancing on several fronts at once and triggering generalised resistance.

When she became overconfident and abandoned this policy, she was brought down. The poll tax was an at-tempt to shift the burden of local taxation from the top 20% (the rich and the middle class) to the bottom 80% (the working class broadly defined). It provoked mass resistance from below, with up to seven million refusing to pay, and hundreds of thousands on the streets.

Demonstrations, strikes, and direct actionDuring 1972, mass strikes smashed a Tory government’s programme of wage cuts and union busting. Two years later, the Tories lost the general election. In 1989, mass direct action defeated the poll tax, and the following year Thatcher was given the push by her own party. In April 2003, between a million and two million people demonstrated against Blair’s war on Iraq. The decision to go ahead in the face of such opposition was a narrow one, and Blair never recovered from the political infamy he incurred as a warmonger.

The British working-class movement has a long his-tory of resistance and a record of major victories over re-actionary governments. If we build an inclusive, united, mass campaign against the cuts, and if we stoke a wave of militant demonstrations, mass strikes, and wide-spread civil disobedience, we can defeat the Con-Dem Coalition.

The TUC demonstration on 26 March is the next key stage on that road.

www.counterfire.org www.counterfire.org

The spirit of revolution sweeps through the Arab world. What we have been wit-nessing in Tunisia and Egypt are not military coups, but popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes. Events are still unfolding, but it is already clear that this series of mass demonstrations rep-resents the biggest upheaval in the Arab world in decades.

In Tunisia, the protesters succeeded in forcing President Ben Ali from power. After a month of peaceful demonstration, starting in December, they finally over-threw a 23-year-old dictatorship. But the gains so far are limited. The interim gov-ernment formed in mid-January still in-cludes several members of the ruling party, and protesters continue to demand a full break with the old regime. The revolution is not over.

Egypt in revoltInspired by the success of the Tunisian movement, Egyptians also took to the streets at the end of January. Day after day, thousands of people marched through the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and oth-er cities. The ruling party headquarters was burnt down and thousands defied curfews to battle riot police and state security.

As in Tunisia, where the protest move-ment is led by students and workers, the uprising in Egypt is supported by large sec-tions of society. For too long – 30 years – the people have suffered under the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, who has been clinging on to power through sheer force and terror.

The people’s grievances are similar in both countries: unemployment is high, corruption endemic, and freedom of speech severely restricted. Especially in Egypt, protesters are demanding an end to police brutality, to which the wider world

was alerted last year, when the website Wikileaks published thousands of secret US diplomatic cables.

The way the pro-Mubarak forces have responded to the protests – with savage vi-olence – has further alienated the Egyptian people from the regime. As one protester said, ‘The psychological barrier between us and our president has been broken by tear-gas. The government created this uprising, and now they will face the consequences.’

Revolution and counter-revolutionMubarak tried to ease the pressure on him by dismissing his government and appoint-ing his intelligence chief as vice president. This failed to satisfy the protesters. He then announced he would not stand for re-election in the autumn. This, too, was not enough. So he then unleashed his thugs on the demonstrators.

The regime’s supporters – the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt – want a breath-ing-space to engineer a fake ‘transition’ that changes nothing except a handful of faces at the top. The Egyptian people need thoroughgoing democracy and complete social transformation. This is the vital issue now at stake.

Because Egypt plays such an impor-tant role in the region – with 85 million inhabitants, it is the biggest country in the Arab world – a successful revolution could reshape the whole of the Middle East. It could bring democracy to a region which has suffered under dictatorship and imperialism for too long. That would be a massive blow to the power of the US, the oil

corporations, and Zionist Israel.Until now, the US has been a staunch

ally of Mubarak. While banging on about ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, it is the US that has funded and armed the Egyp-tian regime’s half-million-strong military. The fall of Mubarak would be the greatest setback for Washington since the toppling of the Shah of Iran in 1979. No wonder they are scaremongering about an ‘Islamic’ takeover. But in fact, something far more radical, and certainly far more desirable, is possible.

Democratic and social revolutionThe way this revolution unfolds in the immediate future is likely to be crucial. In order to achieve full and lasting democracy, not only must power be taken from the regime, but wealth must be taken from the rich and the cor-porations that dominate Egyp-tian society. Power and wealth are linked. Mubarak and his cronies, encouraged by their Western al-lies, have adopted neoliberal ‘free market’ policies wholesale. The gap between rich and poor has widened massively. Grotesque wealth at the top of society con-trasts with unemployment and poverty for tens of millions at the bottom.

Egypt needs both democracy and social transformation, and the possibility exists that as work-ers and students push forwards the struggle for political free-dom, their revolt will grow over into a wider struggle for popular power, workers’ control, and radical social reform.

The revolution also needs to

spread. The wider it goes, the harder it gets for the US, the Zionists, and the Arab dic-tators to reverse the tide. Already, there are mass demonstrations in Yemen and Jordan against their pro-Western governments. Most Arab regimes are like those in Tu-nisia and Egypt – authoritarian, corrupt, undemocratic, and presiding over socie-ties afflicted with high unemployment, not least among graduates, high living costs, and a ‘social wage’ eroded by decades of neoliberalism and IMF-backed cuts.

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A Tunisian protester calls for the withdrawal of the RCD, Ben Ali’s old party, from the transitional government.

Can we bring down the Con-Dem Coalition?

With the biggest cuts since the 1920s now unrolling, the very survival of the postwar welfare state is at stake. Just how weak is the government, and what will it take to stop them? Neil Faulkner analyses the balance of forces in Britain today.

The Con-Dem attacks on education and on libraries are of a kind. They do not want ordinary people to think about the world around them and to try and change it. They do not need workers who think critically. So libraries are expendable.

Hundreds of libraries across the country are threatened with closure. New Labour floated planned library closures; the ConDems have picked up the baton and are running with it.

Doncaster, a working class area still reeling from Thatcherism and pit closures, is one of the places where the cuts will hit deepest: there are plans to shut down over half its libraries. Severe library cuts are also tabled for Brent, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Leeds, Lewisham, Oxfordshire, and many other places; nowhere, it seems, will altogether escape the Con-Dem hatchet.

The government whines that library use is falling anyway, and claims that eager volunteers are available to staff any that are really needed. But in the Age of Austerity only a small minority will have the time and money to work for free.

Doncaster-based Counterfire activist John Westmoreland has described the projected library cuts as a ‘declaration of war’, saying, ‘It’s the most sickening thought to see Cameron and Clegg, millionaire public schoolboys and Oxford graduates with plenty of access to books and computers, cutting off opportunities to

working class communities. They despise us and know that they are adding cultural to economic deprivation.’

He reports that people have been queueing up in the street to sign petitions, and read-ins have been staged to illustrate that education belongs to ordinary people – not just the rich. A major national campaign against library cuts is a serious possibility. Just weeks after writer and campaigner Alan Gibbons put out a call for a day of action in defence of libraries on 5 February 2011, at least 80 events were organised up and down the country. Protests have already taken place in Newport, Milton Keynes, Taunton, Oxford, and elsewhere.

On the day of action, hundreds of people demonstrated, held read-ins, and occupied libraries to resist the Con-Dem cuts. Billy Bragg made the link between civil liberties and public access to information and learning. Acclaimed author Phillip Pullman criticised what he described as the ‘market fundamentalism’ to which the Con-Dems subscribe, and New Cross library was occupied into the night.

Students did not hesitate to occupy their universities in response to crippling fee hikes. Nor should we hesitate to organise read-ins, protests, petitions, and direct action in defence of our libraries, the communities they serve, and the workers whose livelihoods are at stake.

Library campaign throws the book at Con-Dem cutsDan Poulton reports on one of the front-line services facing cuts and fighting back.

Power and wealth are linked. Egypt needs both

democracy and social transformation.

Dougal W

allace

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What is Counterfire and what does it do?Counterfire is an organisation of revolutionary socialists. We work in the trade unions, student movement, and protest campaigns to link together different struggles, push them forwards, and build resistance to the system.

Counterfire members have played a key role in the Coalition of Resistance, Stop the War, and the student revolt.

A world system in crisisWorld capitalism today faces an intractable crisis. The financial crash is tipping Europe into depression and the Third World into starvation. The militarisation of relations between states is a clear and present danger to world peace. Uncontrolled global warming threatens climate catastrophe.

These threats to the lives and wellbeing of the great majority of humanity are rooted in a system geared to production for profit and the enrichment of the few. Instead of the chaos, exploitation, and violence of competitive capital accumulation, we need

a system based on democracy, equality, planning, and human need.

Change from below Real change has to be fought for through action from below. We cannot rely on either politicians or bureaucrats to change things for us. We have to build broad, democratic organisations of mass resistance among workers, students, and the poor. We have to use the weapons of class struggle – demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and other direct action – to make real gains.

The power of the banks, the corporations, and the state are ranged against us. To make permanent gains and bring about radical social transformation, revolution will be necessary, in which the repressive state, with its police, prisons, and armed forces, is replaced with a new order based on mass democratic assemblies.

United mass resistanceTo prevent effective resistance, our rulers and their media

attempt to divide us. We must stand together in solidarity. We must reject all forms of prejudice based on race, religion, gender, age, disability, or sexual orientation. We must unite all working people in a single struggle against the rich and powerful. And we must build links between working people here in Britain and those fighting back around the world.

A revolutionary organisation To do these things effectively, we need an organisation of revolutionary socialist activists committed to building and shaping mass organisations of struggle like the trade unions, the anti-war movement, and the Coalition of Resistance.

Counterfire is such an organisation. Our aim is to build local groups rooted in workplaces, colleges, and communities across Britain.

The historical stakes have never been higher. We have a world to win. We have a world we must win. Counterfire is at the heart of the resistance. Join us.

Capitalism and Class Consciousness: the ideas of Georg LukácsBy Chris Nineham

Eleven Reasons to Resist the Con-Dem CutsBy Neil Faulkner

Strategy and Tactics: how the left can organise to transform societyBy John Rees

Counterfire, c/o 69a Lakeside Road, London, N13 4PS. www.counterfire.org

Counterfire lectures

Counterfire publications

These will be held at the Marchmont Community Centre, 62 Marchmont Street, London, WC1N 1AB (nearest tube: Russell Square). Everyone welcome. Plenty of time for questions, contributions, and discussion.Lectures start at 6.30pm on Thursday as follows:

24 FebruaryClimate crisis: capitalism and environmental catastropheSpeaker: Elaine Graham-Leigh

10 MarchChina rising: understanding the shifting global economySpeaker: James Meadway

24 MarchGramsci and us: building socialist hegemony todaySpeaker: Peter Thomas

7 AprilHow history works: a Marxist approach to understanding the pastSpeaker: Neil Faulkner

20 AprilUnderstanding the shape of modern revolutionsSpeaker: Feyzi Ismail

These publications are available from www.counterfire.org

To contact Counterfire, phone or text Sam on 07872 481769, or Jo on 07730 612105, or email either on sam@counterfire.org or jo@counterfire.orgWe have activists and local groups in many colleges and towns, including Belfast, Bristol, Doncaster, Kings Lynn, Liverpool, London East, London North, London South, London West, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Pontefract, St Albans, Scunthorpe, and York.

Contacting us