Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the Pentagon’s repeated failures to pass audits and various alarming policies, 81 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives voted with 200 Republicans…to advance a $883.7 billion annual defense package. 

(Common Dreams)

In Iran, the mandatory hijab law has been a contentious point of resistance ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1978. But it has become much more widespread in the past two years after the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing a hijab correctly, and died in custody. Women have been at the forefront of this resistance, engaging in protests as part of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It has called for the abolition of compulsory hijab laws and an end to gender-based oppression. But rather than acknowledging these acts as legitimate political protests, the Iranian state has increasingly sought to frame them as symptoms of individual mental illness. 

(The Conversation)

Yet another gruesome gang horror has played out in Haiti, as at least 184 people — most of them elderly — were variously slashed, hacked or shot to death on the orders of a warlord who’d been advised that aging slum residents had used sorcery to give his son a severe illness. Interim Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé called it ‘a barbaric act of unbearable cruelty’. The brutality was reportedly ordered by Monel ‘Mikano’ Felix, who leads the Wharf Jeremie gang. The carnage took place on Friday and Saturday in the densely populated seaside slum of Cité Soleil, a neighborhood in the capital city of Port-au-Prince which The Guardian has called Haiti’s ‘most notorious slum… Much of the slum is an open sewer…infant children bathe in water contaminated with sewage. The stench is unbearable’. 

(Zero Hedge)

As temperatures rise because of global warming Arctic areas that were previously frozen may become navigable, and natural resources more easily exploited, setting off competing claims. Blair said: ‘This growing access is already enticing nations to the region, heightening security challenges and geopolitical competition’. China and Russia are working together to gain control over the region, say analysts. 

(Financial Times)

The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village.

(Penguin Random House)

Malaria killed almost 600,000 people in 2023, as cases rose for the fifth consecutive year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO). Biological threats…climate and humanitarian disasters continue to hamper control efforts…Officials said a $4.3 billion annual funding shortfall was among further challenges. 

(Mother Jones)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Halo Halo! (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Camille Paglia is an American academic, brought up Catholic, later atheist. She described an early experience where she learnt the lesson which is one that all religions and cults teach – don’t ask questions, we know better, do as you’re told!

‘The Catholic Church in the Fifties was at its most dogmatic and censorious, and I struggled restlessly against its rules. As we were being drilled for Confirmation, I asked the nun in our catechism class, “If God is all-forgiving, will he ever forgive Satan?” This innocent and it seems to me, interesting question produced a violent response. The nun turned beet-red and began screaming at me – odd, I thought, since we were sitting in the pews of the church. My question, needless to say, was not answered. That was when I knew there was no place in the American Church of that time for an enquiring mind.’

The experience appears not to have dampened Paglia’s ardour for asking awkward questions. There are still no places within religion for enquiring minds.

* * *

Creationism adherents are throwing their toys out of their prams. Wikipedia is biased against religion, they cry. Wikipedia states that there are over ten thousand distinct religions in the world. Those seeking elucidation from within its pages shouldn’t take everything found there to be gospel. Creationists have taken umbrage with Wiki because it lists ‘Creationism,’ aka ‘intelligent design,’ as a pseudoscience. They’ve resorted to ‘statistics’ which allegedly show how many Creationists there are in the world. We all know what is said about statistics. We think Wikipedia is being overly generous in using even that term (World Religious News).

* * *

As if the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas don’t have enough to contend with, the BBC reported that criminal gangs had taken ‘control of a group of five favelas in the north of the city – now known as the Israel Complex – after one of their leaders had what he believed was a revelation from God . . . gangsters see themselves as “soldiers of crime”, with Jesus as “the owner” of the territory they dominate’. The report says that ‘the gang selling these branded drugs is the Pure Third Command, one of Rio’s most powerful criminal groups, with a reputation both for making its opponents disappear, and for fanatical evangelical Christianity. Controversially, some have dubbed them “Narco-Pentecostals”’.

* * *

What does a hundred thousand dollars buy you these days? Two tickets to the ‘One America, One Light Sunday Service’. This was an ‘interfaith prayer service’ which took place the day before Trump’s inauguration as US president. Seems like the only faith on display was that of devotion to the mighty buck rather than the Almighty. Whoever organised this is an amateur compared to the Evangelists who pull in millions of dollars yearly. Did the participants offer up prayers to the Omnipotent One? What are the chances He, or his team, answered them? A bargain though if they got to meet the Holy Trinity, Trump, Vance and Musk.

DC

Proper Gander: All over the shop (2025)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Netflix released Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy just before the Black Friday spending bonanza, since when we’ve also had the pre-Christmas push to shop and the post-Christmas sales aligning with retailers starting to stock up for Easter. While the documentary engagingly describes how capitalism turns us into hungry customers and consumers of short-lived commodities, predictably it’s not as subversive as it wants to appear.

As is the norm, the programme starts with a quick-fire round-up of what’s to come, which is largely interviews and clips of stock footage, archive news and content from vloggers. Between these are CGI scenes of panoramas of piles of rubbish (an idea recycled from the 2008 film Wall-E) and billboards displaying words like ‘buy’ and ‘consume’ (an idea recycled from the 1988 film They Live). AI is also invoked with the presenter being Sasha, apparently a disembodied expert on ‘how to succeed in business’. Sasha outlines ‘the five most important lessons in profit maximisation’, which provide a framework for the documentary, although ‘her’ presence quickly becomes annoying, perhaps deliberately.

The first of these lessons is ‘Sell More’, in which we’re introduced to the people interviewed throughout the programme, including ex-employees of corporations who became disillusioned after realising what the brands they were promoting really represent. Some particularly interesting contributions are made by Maren Costa, previously a ‘User Experience Designer’ with Amazon. She talks about her initial excitement at creating new ways to make products tempting (right down to the most effective font colour) and easier to buy (with ‘one click’), until she realised she was working within ‘an intentional, complex, highly refined science to get you to buy stuff’. Although the focus was on selling Amazon’s stock, Maren says ‘I don’t think we were ever thinking about where does all this stuff go?’ Buying tech or clothes tends to involve getting rid of whatever has been replaced, as described in the second section ‘Waste More’. Producers have known for a long time that shortening the lifespan of a commodity means that a new one will be bought sooner, increasing sales further. The most notorious example of this planned obsolescence was when the durability of incandescent lightbulbs was set by a cartel of companies in the 1920s. Another approach is to make it impossible to mend broken appliances, such as when the fixings on the cases of Apple iPhones changed so their backs couldn’t be unscrewed. Gadget manufacturers have even filed lawsuits against organisations such as iFixit to prevent their devices from being repaired. Items are often thrown away before they’re even used, as shown in footage of Amazon employees destroying serviceable goods because it’s cheaper to do this than redistribute them.

The third lesson ‘Lie More’ covers how we’re encouraged to believe that products are or can be recycled to distract us from their real environmental impact, not only how they end up adding to piles of waste, but also the CO2 emissions caused by their manufacture. If we have the impression that a brand has green credentials, we’re more likely to buy its merchandise. The practice of ‘greenwashing’ – pretending to be eco-friendly – is, according to Maren, a ‘double evil’ as companies are not only harming the environment, but also pacifying people. In the fourth section ‘Hide More’ we’re told about how the amount of waste generated by commodity production is disguised through the irresponsible ways it’s dealt with. Discarded items are moved across the planet to where it’s cheaper for them to be disposed of, such as countries without much legislation about handling hazardous scrap. Unfortunately, around this point the documentary loses momentum. The fifth section ‘Control More’ is very brief, despite it hinting at explaining the word ‘conspiracy’ in the show’s title. Maren says that staff at the highest level have to commit to ‘backing the company no matter what’, so after she spoke out about Amazon’s carbon emissions, she lost her job. ‘They don’t want anyone disrupting that story’ which presents a company as admirable even though it reinforces the damaging normality of pushing out more and more shoddy products which often end up littering beaches in Africa.

After over an hour of vividly highlighting problems, Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy doesn’t have much to say about solutions. It winds down with each of the interviewees giving glib optimistic lines which brush over the detail of what they previously described. The views of the writer and director Nic Stacey don’t seem to be any more thorough. When asked about how the problem of waste could be resolved, he said ‘companies need to creatively think about ways that they can extend the lives of the products they make. And we need policy change; governments can help put legislation in place to manage the end of life of a product’ (tinyurl.com/3fsuuenh). This hasn’t happened because it hasn’t been in the interests of the capitalist class which owns the companies, although their role isn’t explored in the documentary. There is little explanation of the overriding need for production to accumulate profit for those capitalists, which leads to practices such as manipulative advertising, planned obsolescence, greenwashing and making more refuse than can be handled. Nor is the wider economic context of the global commodity market sketched out, even though this underpins how companies have to operate. Two of those prominently criticised in the show are Apple and Amazon, and their Siri and Alexa virtual assistants sound similar to the dislikeable virtual presenter Sasha. Both companies are rivals of Netflix, who stream the documentary: Apple TV and Amazon’s Prime Video division compete with Netflix for subscribers, even though for many years, Netflix has relied on its data being hosted by the Amazon Web Services cloud. As Netflix is part of the same media market, it also has to follow ‘the five most important lessons in profit maximisation’ outlined by Sasha. So, it isn’t going to broadcast anything which delves too deeply into why.

Mike Foster

Awakened, not Woke (2025)

Book Review from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Going Mainstream: Why Extreme Ideas are Spreading, and What We Can Do About It. By Julia Ebner. Ithaka £10.99.

The basis for this book is that far-right ideas have become mainstream and so more widely accepted. The author investigated a variety of movements, on-line and in person, to find out what made people accept the views in question. She also spoke to opponents of such positions and, for instance, presents arguments for the reality of climate change. She also says that trans rights and feminism are not mutually exclusive.

The groups dealt with here are incels (involuntary celibate women-hating men), climate change deniers, transphobics, white nationalists, anti-vaxxers and sympathisers with Putin’s Russia (among other things, Russia’s state propaganda machine fuels conspiracy myths). The internet is a fruitful recruiting ground for such groups, especially messaging apps such as Telegram. Online harassment of people they disagree with is common, and some Extinction Rebellion supporters have received death threats.

One point made is that adopting one conspiracy theory makes a person more likely to accept others too, and there are plenty of people who belong to more than one group. For instance, there is a sizeable overlap between white nationalists and climate change deniers, and also with anti-vaxxers. Many of those who support conspiracy theories see themselves as ‘awakened’, having seen through the lies of the establishment and the traditional media. Online groups in particular foster a feeling of belonging among people who are alienated and perhaps lack social skills. Vested interests and right-wing organisations provide sizeable funding for those who attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

One of the nastiest organisations examined here is in the UK, Patriotic Alternative, where practically everything is seen as ‘white genocide’. By 2066, supposedly, ‘indigenous people’ will be a minority in Britain (the date is presumably not a coincidence). White Lives Matter sees white people as being victimised, while All Lives Matter fails to acknowledge discrimination against black people, and has only evolved as a movement since the rise of Black Lives Matter.

The final chapter deals with what can be done to fight against the spread of extreme ideas. It includes such suggestions as dealing with the sources of discontent, not just symptoms, and ‘prebunking’ disinformation (empowering people to spot factual distortions before they occur). The interesting part of the book, though, is the exploration of extremist views and why people are attracted to them.

Paul Bennett

Sting in the Tail: A sick society (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sick society

Dr. Ian Burns is Glasgow’s public health director. He has recently been commenting on the relationship between health and poverty in Glasgow. What he has to say applies to all cities:

“If we are going to do something about Glasgow's ill-health you have to confront the poverty. The Government have acknowledged there is a link between ill-health and poverty but they have always said we don't know if the one is caused by the other, ” he said.

"We are saying it is, the link is empowerment. If you are unemployed, have no educational background, and don't know where your children‘s next meat is coming from, you have the sense of the system doing things to you" (The Herald, 21 December).

The sad truth is that medical care is a commodity. If you can afford it you can get the most modern treatment immediately, but if you are poor you can join the waiting list to get treatment from underfunded overworked NHS staff.

Hard core

The term “hard-core” is popular with the press. We have read of “hard-core pornography” and “hard-core criminality”. Now the Government have found “hard-core rough sleepers”:

“In a statement. Environment Minister Robert Jones said the Government's winter shelter programme, with up to 350 places in Central London, made it unnecessary for anyone . . . to have to sleep on the streets this winter'. ”

"It is clear, ” the Minister added, "that street level agencies are finding themselves trying to help a hard core of rough sleepers ” (Observer, 18 December)

However, Homeless Network, an umbrella group of 30 charities, report that 288 people were sleeping rough in late November, a seven percent increase compared with May and estimate that during the past year 3,000 spent part or all of their time sleeping in the streets in the survey area alone.

Government ministers climbing out of their chauffeur-driven cars for a night out at the Covent Garden Opera may console themselves that the street-sleepers strewn around are “hard-core rough sleepers”, but socialists know that not only has capitalism a hard-core but that it is an extremely bitter fruit for the poor, disabled and homeless.

What a wally!

The shallowness and double standards of politicians were epitomised by John Major’s insistence that schools should conduct daily “acts of worship” on a broadly Christian basis.

"Mr. Major said daily worship for all pupils allowed them to explore their own beliefs and helped build community spirit and shared values, and reinforced positive attitudes" (BBC2 Ceefax, 17 December).

What that bit about acts of worship (ugh) allowing pupils to “explore their own beliefs” really amounts to is the attempted indoctrination of young minds, or what was called “brainwashing” when Nazis and the so-called communists did it.

And just how do these acts of worship build “community spirit and shared values” in, say, Northern Ireland? Mind you. Major will hear plenty of “positive attitudes” being reinforced by the hangers, floggers, xenophobes and other Christian worshippers at Tory conferences.

Whether Major thought up such rubbish by himself or merely parroted what some Tory hack told him, doesn’t matter, because he is damned either way.

A sorry sight

On BBC News (22 December) an entire workforce marched arm-in-arm through Liverpool streets singing “Here We Go”. So full of patriotic fervour were they that they waved and even wore the Union Jack. This was obviously a big celebration.

And what was it all about? Only that Bryant and.May, Britain’s last match factory, had closed down and this was the workers' way of marking the occasion.

Perhaps these workers will reflect on what good their patriotism did them when they signed-on the following day.

The sporting life

According to the dictionary definition, sport is “pleasant pastime; amusement, diversion”. So what are we to make of newspaper headlines that scream “Doping Ban”, “Bribery allegations”, and “Football Manager Took Bungs”?

Just as the financial pages are concerned with Insider Dealing, Dirty Tricks Takeover Bids and all the other skulduggery' of the City, so athletics, cricket and football reporters are as much concerned with cheating, doping and bribery as with reporting sporting events.

The truth is that capitalism is a social system based on profit, greed and deceit. Sport inside capitalism is big business, so it is no wonder that it reflects the chicanery of the system.

In a socialist society human beings would be able to enjoy sport as a “pleasant pastime”; amusement; diversion". That is impossible inside the present production-for-profit system.

Canadian capers

Some Canadian students have invited Tommy Sheridan of Scottish Militant Labour to Canada to speak about socialism.

At the Euro-elections last June Sheridan’s manifesto, besides being full of pictures of himself and claims that he is “the people's champion”, “hammer of the Tories”, etc., carried an article entitled “What Is Socialism?”.

According to this, production will still be for sale on the market and money, banks and finance will remain. What it all added up to is capitalism’s buying and selling system along with the usual idealist’s illusion that it can be “planned and run for the benefit of everybody”.

If those Canadian students want to know about socialism then Sheridan is the last one to tell them.

The Unions ten years after the miners’ defeat (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 1984-85 miners’ strike baton-wielding police officers were a vivid warning of things to come as various anti-union laws promoted by the then Thatcher government have since stripped the unions in general of most of their powers — and a lot of their members.

It is now ten years since the miners marched back to work behind their banners following a 51-week strike that began in March 1984; sixteen years since the Tories began their overt assault on the working class; and seventeen years since the Economist leaked the “Ridley Plan” — an internal 'Tory Party document which was to be the blueprint for Thatcher’s assault on trade unions.

It is common now for trade unionists, assessing where they stand, to take their bearings from the 1984-5 strike and the defeat of the miners. When the strike ended, the NUM boasted 180,000 members. They now represent 8,000 miners at 17 pits. The impact of the miners’ defeat was phenomenal. “The wreckage of defeat,” wrote Steve Platt in a recent special trade union edition of the New Statesman and Society (18 November), “is still scattered around the national labour movement landscape like the relics of war on some recent battlefield”

For the Tories, the war didn’t end there. Since they came to power in 1979 they have implemented eight anti-union Acts, confining trade unions in a straitjacket of legislation and they have stooped to anti-union tactics not witnessed in Britain for ninety years.

Unions boast no victories these days, only the pyrrhic sort — that they still receive dues from 7 million members (12 million in 1979), that they still exist, surviving day-to-day like death-row inmates. They no longer call mass strikes and gain the support that the pickets at Saltley Gate Cokeworks secured when 10,000 Birmingham engineering workers downed tools and marched to their aid behind piper and banners in 1972. Their victories now are minuscule — fighting for individual rights, winning propitious tribunal hearings, and securing damages for members. Unions like the TGWIJ no longer call one-day strikes. Instead, they set up 24-hours legal advice helplines.

The roots of the present-day assault on trade unions go back two decades. Tories, like elephants, never forget. When they came to power in 1979 following the “Winter of Discontent”, it was with having endured two humiliating defeats at the hands of the miners in 1972 and 1974 that they placed the NUM so clearly in their sights. 'The Tories had long since accepted the fact that the miners, with their tradition of militancy, were the backbone of the trade-union movement — break the spine and the body crumbles, paralysed. Indeed, the Ridley Plan had carved the name on the bullet that killed miners’ solidarity five years before it was fired.

The Ridley Plan, like some Maoist strategy for guerrilla war, suggested where and when the Tories might win another show-down with the miners. It suggested the preparation of contingency plans - the building-up of coal stockpiles, the securing of overseas supplies, and it put on the agenda the recruitment of non-unionised haulage companies prepared to cross picket lines, the reduction of benefits to the families of striking miners and the rapid mobilisation of a huge paramilitary-like police force. When the Tories came to power, they only needed to bide their time and provoke a strike at a time favourable to themselves. They did this by announcing the closure of the Cortonwood Pit in March 1984. The rest is trade-union legend.

Anti-trade-union laws

Anti-trade-union legislation has been a major fetter on working-class unity over the last 16 years, and it is necessary to pin-point a few Acts before we can even take the temperature of the climate unions now operate in.

The 1980 Employment Act, for instance, made secondary picketing illegal and stole from unions the right to claim recognition from employers. It also made union members embroiled in sympathy strikes liable for damages should employers lose sufficient profits.

The 1982 Employment Act introduced periodic ballots on the closed shop, slimmed down the definition of an industrial dispute, outlawed industrial action against non-unionised firms and took away from striking workers the right to appeal should their action lead to their dismissal.

Such Acts were camouflaged as enhancing the freedom of the individual, of “improving the operation of the labour market by providing a balanced framework of industrial laws” as Norman Tebbitt went on record as saying in 1982.

David Coates sees the gulf between the “reality and rhetoric”, pointing out that:

“the freedom enhanced by those laws has been the freedom of capital, not labour. and the balance has been in reality the imbalance of class power ” (The Crisis of Labour, 1989, p. 123).

Under John Major the attack on unions has continued, keeping up the average since 1979 of one anti-union law every 20 months. The 1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act, for instance, permitted firms to entice their employees away from their unions with various inducements.

Files can be filled with examples of companies that have made use of such laws - laws aimed at pushing trade unions and collective bargaining arrangements out of the door.

In April 1993 over 120 workers at J.W. Arrowsmiths, a Bristol printing company, found themselves dismissed when they decided not to abandon a work-to-rule and overtime ban in support of their pay claim. They were eventually locked out and given two weeks to denounce the GPMU and to accept a two-year pay freeze with lower shift and overtime rates. Only three workers signed the new bond.

Eleven months later and Caterpillar UK de-recognised MSF and GMB (APEX). They then offered workers a two percent pay rise and a £500 lump sum, along with health/legal benefits, if they denounced their unions and signed individual employment contracts.

“Human Resource Management” is now taking over from unions in many workplaces. Legislative constraints have prevented unions from operating inside many companies and workers now find they have to take on their capitalist paymasters single-handedly, denied the support of collective strength, being forced by circumstances to accept individualised employment contracts, performance and profit-related pay schemes, de-skilliing and their induction into the “flexible workforce”.

Class collaboration

The future appears bleak for workers, with employers looking to have it all their own way. Robert Taylor in his TUC-commissioned book, The Future of the Trade Unions, believes:

“unions . . . need to encourage employee share-ownership schemes . . . they are becoming institutions invaluable to employers, because they provide the stability that companies need as they carry through necessary change ” (chapter 9).

If unions are invaluable to employers it is only because they pose no threat to capitalism and help provide stability for them to amass huge profits, rather than fighting to improve the lot of the workers they are supposed to represent.

Apathy and sixteen years of disillusionment at the hands of a Tory government has soured the outlook of trade unionists and the leadership has done little to boost morale. When Arthur Scargill said that the “unions have not been marginalised by the Tories but by our own unwillingness to fight back”, it was John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who retorted that Scargill's brand of defiance “was not a practical option” (Guardian, 7 September).

So long as leaders like Monks continue to rule the TUC, bowing to the whims and dictates of capitalism, the longer unions will remain a puppet of capitalism. Monks is all for reform. He promises a “mutually reinforcing package of reforms of the tax and benefit system”. He argues for “targeted public investment for rebuilding the industrial base” and believes “the conversion of individual unemployment benefits into a subsidy to the employer can benefit both employer, employee and the exchequer" (New Statesman and Society). Thus, capitalism prospers, becoming even more profitable at the expense of workers. Reform in reality becomes class collaboration.

Useless Labour Party

Neither can unions depend on the labour Party for support, if they ever could in the past. Indeed, the Labour Party has an outstanding historical record of betraying unions and deserting them in their hour of need. While Tony Blair had “considerable sympathy for the signal workers” during last year’s RMT strike, he argued that “this dispute is costing the country a great deal of money . . . people are entitled to take strike action, but it is not the function of politicians to start barging into industrial disputes” (Guardian, 7 September). Perhaps Blair is unaware that the Tories have been provoking strikes since they entered office and sending in their paramilitaries to crush resistance to their onslaught against working-class unity.

Conservative mentality

Blair later went further by saying that unions "do not want, nor will they get support from a Labour government", and declared that “at their best, unions represent in the workplace the values that Labour shares with the British people” (New Statesman and Society, 18 September). Certainly both Labour and the TUC have imbibed a conservative mentality, but what values labour shares with the working class is open to serious contention — certainly no commitment to end the profit system that ruins millions of lives every year.

For John Pilger, in the same trade union edition of the New Statesman and Society:

“Labour differs from the official conservatives only in tone . . . it would be hard to slip a cigarette paper between their views and those of the Tories . .  the trade unions have by default become the political opposition. ”

Insofar as Labour has acknowledged the inevitability of unemployment and refuses to support strikers, that would appear to be the case. As far back as 1984 the Labour Party was seeing trade unions as a hot potato and that supporting strikes would be an electoral liability. This is why the miners were given only tepid support and why RMT was ignored by Blair. Big union defeats would have reverberated through Walworth Road like the shock waves from an earthquake.

But the 1990s appear to have heralded the demise of trade unions as mobilisers of mass discontent born of workplace injustices. Just as Labour failed to harness the frustration and anger generated by the 1984-5 miners’ strike, so too have the unions failed to capitalise on sixteen years of Tory mayhem at the expense of their membership. In 1979, working days lost through strike action stood at 30 million. By 1993 it had dropped to 649,000 — a figure actually higher than the previous year — 528,000 — the lowest in 100 years!

There is indeed the potential for a real trade-union movement. Workers the length and breadth of the nation are crying out for representation. Some 800,000 workers every year take their employer-related grievances to the Citizens’ Advance Bureau. A recent survey found that only 6 percent of respondents felt secure at work. The 1992-3 pit closures brought more people out on the streets in protest that at any time during the 1984-5 strike. Research recently carried out by the Industrial Relations Unit of the University of Warwick, conducted with the co-operation of 12 unions, found that 72 percent of respondents joined a union for support. Some 31.2 percent sought out a union themselves.

There are many reasons why trade-union membership has fallen by 5 million in sixteen years — anti-union laws, Thatcher's premeditated attack on the traditionally strongly unionised manufacturing base, recession, unemployment, apathy and general disillusionment to name just a few.

Struggle for socialism

Trade unions have adopted a bunker mentality, afraid to pop their heads up in case they’re blown off. This is nothing new. Unions have always fought from a position of weakness. But it does not have to be this way. So long as unions continue to sec victories in securing crumbs from our masters’ tables, as long as they continue to acquiesce in and help perpetuate the capitalist system of production for profit, not use, and the exploitation of their members in the process, the longer and more futile will be their struggle.

Unions need broader objectives — long-term macro goals, not immediate micro victories. They need to harness their struggle to the movement for world socialism, to a system of society whose establishment will end the whole employer-employee relationship. Micro struggles can only be a rearguard action. In their efforts to coexist with capitalism unions will always fail, in theory and practice.

For Marx, they fail because they generally limit “themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system” (Value, Price and Profit).

John Bissett