This baseball batting rule, and punitive US incarceration policy against the poor under successive Republican administrations, could well be applied to the now flailing and failing strike movement of the last 18 months.
Beginning primarily in construction and the transport sector, those sections of the RMT and Aslef still involved in action have recently been joined by hospital consultants joining junior doctors as the most recent sector to back their demands with strike action.
Instead of bracketing a mass movement whose momentum has built to a crescendo to these latest actions, the current strikes appear more like bookends on an empty shelf where a wave once broke and dissipated.
The largest strike wave since the days Thatcherism relentlessly assaulted our class appeared at one point to achieve the improbable if not impossible.
Anti-labour and anti-strike laws have raised the bar high to limit the possibility of strikes ever taking place, demanding not just majorities but a 50% turnout in a voting process rigged by methodology – secret ballots by post, not collectively, in person nor electronically unlike other voting processes in the UK from an X on a card in local elections to the X-Factor. Valid for only six months, any action has to begin with two weeks’ notice to enable bosses’ preparations to limit our impact.
Despite these hurdles, almost every working sector in the UK met the bar. Over the last 18 months this has included road and rail transport; health: midwives, physios, nurses, doctors, radiographers and ambulance services; fire and highway services; border security and civil service; schools and higher education; postal and communications workers; airports and ports, construction and power.
At its peak in February ‘23, more than half a million workers were out culminating in 4 million lost working days. The achievement was seismic but squandered. What an earth has happened?
Despite an inflationary peak driven by war profiteering of 11% In October ‘22 (19% on food, on top of the cumulative increases previously and since), combined with a restorative pay gap of 30-40% since the 2008 banking collapse, most strikes have ended with an average settlement of 6.5%.
A humiliating defeat by any measure, and, one might argue that, with how the strikes were conducted, virtually no shots being fired. Our enemies inside and outside the Government and Trade Union bureaucratic establishments have played a blinder of delay and deceit, enabling a contrasting bosses pay rise of 17%, averaging 110 times the salary of an average worker.
This is no reflection on the workers who have taken action, they, despite a generation without engaging in industrial disputes and being far from the militant traditions of their parents and grandparents, took the courageous decisions to risk all to resist the assault of austerity.
Would, could they do it again? Why, when they have seen their energy and commitment wasted in penny-packets, losing them as much as they’ve gained in outcomes. Months of a day here, two days there, has bled their resources, morale, commitment and patience.
Class struggle is by no means over, certainly not for the bosses who are increasing the precariousness of our survival through increased inflation and indebtedness to frighten us off the streets. But not for us either, aware of this travesty and our brooding resentment. It is not however too early for an obituary for the lost promise of this current strike wave.
The loyal opposition Labour Party ‘government in waiting’ is breathing a sigh of relief, as the challenge to its reputation as the ‘party of the working class’ recedes. No need to continue embarrassing bans of its members from picket lines.
The loyal opposition to the Labour Party, the left-wing of capitalism in the form of social democrats and Leninists like the SWP will soon be trotting out the usual mantras on the lessons we should be learning from them on this.
They will tell us the problem is the wrong kind of leadership (they will say it should be them). They will say we shouldn’t forget that the Labour Party is not a friend of the workers (though we should still vote for them). They will say the Trade Union bureaucrats cannot be trusted (though you should still try to be one). They will say that the TUC is a spineless ally of establishment legalism (while still insisting we should demand they call a general strike). They will say what they have said after every strike. Ultimately, they will criticise while supporting the institutions that shut us out preserving the systems status quo
The slogan ‘Enough is Enough!’ was meant to be that of a movement of social resistance and solidarity that was growing. It should instead be turned against those whose alliances or weaknesses have actively derailed this movement. These include not just the government and establishment parties. It should include those who claim to oppose while objectively supporting the status quo.
That status quo includes the mindset of Trade Unionism as the labour-management arm of the state, the fantasy that capitalism can be reformed and that we should be patient for those better to lead us to bring that about. That status quo includes the paralysing legalism and passivity sold to us as reasonableness that ultimately puts a target on our back.
Anyone who has been involved in committed rolling strike action, community defence and mobilisation, collective struggle in solidarity knows what lessons will endure.
Striking is our break with capitalist normality where we glimpse our autonomy and the absurdities we had accepted as normal.
Breaking with normality lets us imagine an alternative and share new horizons with our class peers.
The struggle against that normality is where we experience solidarity, often for the first time with people and communities we had been encouraged to see as strangers and different to us. The community it creates has little in common with capitalist normality and where we as individuals discover we have power and strength in numbers.
Whether by design or incompetence, even the opportunity to experience these dynamics on a minimal level were unavailable to most strikers. A movement without the living experience of their previous generation of militancy was exposed to little more than a couple of hours of tooting horns – encouraging diversion before returning to the isolation of domestic tasks and resuming working normality for another few weeks.
On many pickets those on strike were told when to turn up and those who wanted to support them to turn up later for an hour – so much for building solidarity. Even the Enough is Enough campaign issued such instructions to its members.
The Trade Union bureaucrats were not the naive failures here. They are long-standing institutions with deep historic memory, and jobs and salaries and professional futures they wish to preserve.
They knew full well the legal limitations and they chose to follow those liability limiting instructions. They are risk averse corporations of the establishment and pursued this minimum strategy with eyes wide open. Ultimately defeat in the form of the minimal outcomes suited their purpose and design.
But even historically, the memory of that sense of liberation through struggle is more than just a fuzzy feeling. It is the learning, the evolving and the implementation of an expanding strategy of escalation and coordination.
To a significant extent the learning from strikes of previous generations have been gerrymandered to stay there. Those lessons however remain as significant now and for the future of strike action and success as they were then.
When such opportunity for defending and advancing our needs is taken by or presents itself to us, we must consciously challenge and counter the power of Trade Union sectionalism to divide and control our struggle.
We must not be hamstrung in our first steps by the self-preserving legalism of Trade Union bureaucracy nor it’s rigged electoralism that seeks to set our agenda.
To empower this, we need to go beyond the artificial divisions of us as workers by industry and trade, indeed beyond work, to connect to all communities of action and struggle.
To protect our autonomy from their limitations and sabotage we need to develop the mechanisms of mass and direct decision making through our own assemblies and councils.
Place our confidence and resources in direct action built on cross-sector coordination where our strength and numbers lie. Nothing short of this will threaten the capitalist social peace that they need to make war on our class at home and abroad.
Capitalism never delivers, it can’t, it’s greed and our need are not compatible. It’s State always represses us and cannot be reformed. We only ever have the power of our labour and the solidarity of class war, not to change, but to overthrow their wretched apparatus of oppression.
The lesson for us is that the choice lies between the death of capitalism and its exploitation of us that sustains it, or its vengeance and our ruin should we fail.
This is what we mean when we say no war but the class war!
AnarCom Network 