Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne's plea for equality of sacrifice - "we're all in this together" - unravels when the real impact of his pension proposals becomes clear.
For working people, with only little or no access to a company pension, the state retirement pension is a wholly inadequate income - but it's one that Labour and Tories alike feel happy to steal.
By bringing forward by ten years Labour's plans to raise the age at which the state retirement pension could be claimed for men from 65 to 66 (and slightly later for women as well), Osborne was trying to give the impression that here was a sacrifice to help restore the market economy which would affect everyone equally.
When fully in place the government would 'save' £13 billion a year by not having to pay a year's state pension (worth just under £5,000 to each person) and by increased tax revenues from those forced to work an extra year. But the proposal does not affect everyone equally.
In the area I represent in Coventry, St Michael's, the average age at which men die is 65; in the next-door ward, Earlsdon, represented by the Tories, it is over 77. Raising the state retirement age to 66 is saying to the 'average man' in St Michael's: 'work until you drop'.
And pensions are just one area of public services under threat. Many local councils are already planning swingeing cuts. For example, on 20 October Coventry councillors will decide on plans to cut £72 million from council spending over the next three years.
At almost 9% of the city's budget there is no way that our essential local services, and the jobs of hundreds of council workers, will not be affected. But it could get even worse...
Whoever wins the next general election is planning more cuts in local services; the only argument between the big three parties is about who can be the most "bold" or "savage" in cutting public spending. Those cuts are designed to make working people and our families pay the costs of the crisis in the economic system. But that crisis was caused by bankers, with their bonuses, playing casino economics - working people should not have to pay their price.
The Tories may talk about us 'all being in it together' facing this crisis, but they and their rich friends will be all right. £72 million of cuts will bring real hardship and pain to ordinary people in Coventry.
If they can get away with it similar pain will be exacted in all local authorities. Council workers will have to fight for their jobs, but all trades unionists and our families rely on the services that council workers provide; we must build a joint campaign to defend public services.
Help build the campaign for a socialist alternative and for a trade union based electoral challenge to cuts and unemployment.
In a national ballot, 76% of postal workers have voted to strike. This is whilst hundreds of local strikes continue throughout Britain, from the Isle of Wight to the highlands of Scotland. These strikes are a result of the most sustained attack on postal workers for decades.
This flows from the unsatisfactory outcome of the last national strike in 2007, against management's imposition of new working arrangements and low pay.
Postal workers now are fighting against the same thing. But with the added twist that Royal Mail management, with the full backing of the Labour government, are out to break the CWU as a fighting union.
In 2007 the strikes ended with a deal where the union allowed the bosses to begin the process of 'modernisation'. But this gave the bosses the opportunity to impose more and more work on fewer and fewer shoulders.
As we go to press, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) have announced that they are not taking a decision about strike action until 15 October. The union leadership is obviously worried by Royal Mail's threats of legal action if they call for a national strike.
But it would be fatal for a leadership to vacillate at this time. What is required to defeat the bosses is decisive action.
A 24 hour national strike of all the CWU members who work for Royal Mail is the way forward now. If the union is challenged in the courts then they should defy the law and call upon the whole trade union movement to support the CWU - not only in their fight against the bosses but also the anti-trade union laws.
Mandelson in the Labour cabinet has been encouraging the bosses to smash the union. He was frustrated that his plans for privatisation earlier this year failed.
But what we have now is all the worst aspects of a privatised Royal Mail anyway.
The post bosses want to make the industry attractive to the private profiteers. What stands in their way is the CWU with its layer of activists.
It is not an accident that the management has singled out the activists for attack.
The union leadership has a duty to ensure that, with the backing of the members, they take the fight to the employer. The CWU should call for maximum unity of all unions against the government proposed cuts in jobs and pay in the public sector.
Editorial
"WE ARE in the midst of the worst recession most people alive have ever experienced, or will probably ever experience. It is already worse than the 1980s and it isn't over yet."
This statement by David Blanchflower, (The Guardian 9 October, 2009) until recently a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, is unfortunately accurate. A year ago - when the world's finance sector was in meltdown and Britain's ATMs were within 24 hours of stopping paying out - capitalism faced a crisis even worse than the 1930s Great Depression.
This was prevented - at least in the short term - by huge state bailouts of the banking and finance sectors combined with stimulus packages. A brutal recession, however, has not been avoided.
The majority of the capitalist media spends its time desperately searching for 'green shoots' of recovery, whether it is a slight increase in house prices or an increase in the number of people buying 'finest' products from Tesco.
In reality, any recovery is extremely patchy, existing only in certain parts of the service sector and manufacturing. The car industry, for example, has had limited growth based on the short term effects of the 'cash for bangers' scheme, combined with the effects of the running down of inventories in the previous months.
However, overall British manufacturing contracted again in August, following a few months of stuttering, anaemic growth. According to the OECD, Britain's economy will not show overall growth in a single quarter of 2009.
Worldwide it is perhaps most likely that the economy will suffer a 'double-dip' recession. With a shrinking industrial base and dominated by the City, Britain's economy is in a particularly weak position, and may not even experience growth before the 'second dip' begins.
What is more, the recovery, when it comes, will not be a return to 'normality'. For the working class, this will be a jobless, joyless recovery. There will be no return to easy credit. On the contrary Britain's population is still burdened with an unprecedented 'debt overhang' from the boom years.
Youth unemployment will pass the one million mark this month or next. Overall, unemployment will pass three million and could reach four or beyond. As Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, declared it is not a question of growth but "of the levels, stupid". The government figures show that an estimated 5% of production has been destroyed; as Will Hutton put it "lost forever".
It is not the bankers, but working- and middle-class people, who are expected to pay the price for this economic destruction. This is both in terms of job losses and cuts in hours, and in the devastating attacks that are planned on public services.
The bailout of the banks and finance sector in Britain has been underwritten by an estimated £1.2 trillion of taxpayers' money, more than five times the annual wage bill of the entire public sector, yet, in a massive con-trick, it is public sector workers who are being held responsible for the growth in the budget deficit.
The proposed cuts announced by Osborne at the Tory party conference offer, as Tory grandee Ken Clarke put it, "only a sample" of the devastating cuts in public spending promised by the Tories. David Blanchflower declared that: "The Tories economic proposals have the potential to push the British economy into a death spiral of decline that would be almost impossible to reverse for a generation."
The fear of Blanchflower, along with other serious economic commentators, is that the stimulus packages are reversed too early. This happened with the stalling of the New Deal during the Great Depression in the US in 1936/37 resulting in a sharp deepening of the economic crisis.
Blanchflower is right to point out that the Tories' policies, which if implemented would put 700,000 public sector workers on the dole, could lead to a severe deepening of the crisis. However, any government which accepts the logic of the capitalist market also accepts that it is necessary to cut the size of the public deficit at some point. The debate between the capitalists is not about if, but when and how the working class pays for the crisis.
We do not accept that workers should have to pay. It seems that the majority of Britain's short-sighted ruling class have come behind the Tory party and its policies of massive cuts and privatisation.
New Labour, in the meantime, is taking fundamentally the same approach. Alistair Darling's response to George Osborne's proposal to freeze the pay of 80% of public sector workers was to propose his own version of the pay freeze. The vast majority of the Tories' proposed cuts are also put forward by New Labour, albeit sometimes in a slightly different form.
Gordon Brown's latest stunt to try and cut the size of the public deficit is another indication of New Labour's pro-big business, privatising policies. A whole swathe of public assets is to be put up for sale, including large amounts of council property, uranium enrichment and student loans.
If they can find a buyer for the student loan book, for example, these proposals will inevitably mean greater pressure on hard-pressed graduates to repay their enormous debts more quickly than they can afford.
Even the Financial Times dismissed these proposals as a "car boot sale" and, in contrast to their normal ultra-free market approach, declared that "it is madness to assume that private ownership is always best."
The working class needs to prepare to oppose the onslaught it will face from the next government, as the representatives of capitalism present the working class with the bill for their system's crisis. Philip Hammond, Tory shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has suggested that there will not be a "winter of discontent" after a Tory government is elected. He bases this on the "cordial relations" he feels he has established with union leaders behind the scenes.
As the trade union movement discovered under Thatcher, and has also been true under New Labour, "cordial relations" at the top will not stop a single attack on trade unionists' rights and conditions.
However, the Tories are making a big mistake if they mistake the 'reasonable' approach of the majority of trade union leaders for the burning anger of the rank and file. What will be needed is determined, militant action of the kind that CWU members have voted overwhelmingly for - and will be disappointed in their leadership if they do not deliver.
Alongside this a political alternative will need to be built that puts forward a clear, socialist alternative.
PARTY LEADER David Cameron's conference speech attempted to overturn the (correct) perception of them as a party of business and the rich: Labour "has made the poorest poorer, so it falls to the Tories to help them," he said. But the truth of a Tory government was revealed in the 'slash and burn' speech of shadow chancellor George Osborne. Osborne predicted he would be the most unpopular chancellor ever, and he is right!
The proposals in Osborne's speech are just a fraction of the attacks they would like to carry out, but they are bad enough. £23 billion cuts over five years. All public sector workers earning above £18,000 would have their pay frozen - nurses, teachers, civil servants, binmen, cooks, and so on.
"Big government" would be cut by a third over five years. Civil servants are presented as faceless mandarins, "a huge army of regulators, inspectors and central planners." What the Tories mean is slashing essential services and farming out what is left to the private sector. 700,000 public sector workers could lose their jobs.
Within the first week 100 schools would be removed from democratic accountability and handed over to businesses in a rapid expansion of academies.
Like New Labour, the Tories plan to raise the state pension age and undermine the final salary pensions of all public sector workers. They mirror Labour's attack on incapacity benefit claimants, demonising and impoverishing claimants and coercing them into work.
Controversially amongst their membership, Cameron and Osborne refuse to say they will reverse Labour's new 50% top income tax rate. In reality both main parties are likely to increase taxes, mainly affecting working- and middle-class people.
The bankers, whose reckless greed contributed to the historic scale of this economic crisis, got a mild rap on the knuckles. Osborne threatened taxes on bonuses if they failed to be responsible: "For I believe in the free market, not a free ride." This approach is necessary if they are to win public support, but does not sit easily with the Tory faithful. Boris Johnson directly attacked the "banker bashers".
The Tories are gambling that "being honest" will make them look more serious on the economy. In fact, the cuts proposed would not make much of a dent in the government's predicted £175 billion budget deficit, so deeper cuts are likely. But even going this far is a big risk. Laying out before the electorate the attacks that are to come could be an own goal.
New Labour has been the chosen party of big business for the last decade but they are now so unpopular that a more reliable party is needed. Big business has, in the main, jumped ship to the Tories.
Most commentators agree their policies are mostly repeats of ideas from Labour, just to be implemented earlier or more strongly. However, the unpopularity of New Labour means that the Tories appear to have a better chance of implementing a pro-big business programme of attacking the public sector. However, there are fears among some business leaders of the Tories ending the stimulus too soon, and thus plunging the economy back into recession.
The Tories' electoral support is fragile. Before both main party conferences, polls had Labour on 23 percentage points and Tories on 38. After the conferences' support for both parties increased but the Tory lead remained at 14 points.
But this is primarily a mood against New Labour, not positive pro-Tory. A poll for The Times showed that 68% do think the party has not changed and is only doing better due to Labour's unpopularity. If the Tories traditional right wing cannot be kept in check, that support could falter.
Labour will portray the Tories as destroyers of the public sector. This is true, but so it will be under Labour. For example, Alistair Darling met the Tories plans for pay restraint with his own, proposing a pay freeze for senior public servants, and a less than 1% rise for everyone else.
But Labour also proposed free NHS car parking, and free care for elderly people. These are small measures but they could be enough for people to hang on to in the desperate hope that Labour is worth voting for - a "lesser evil". While for many young people there is no class allegiance to New Labour, there is still a memory amongst older working class voters of what a Tory government is like.
What is certain is that a Tory government would be a government of crisis, with ferocious attacks on the working class. This should be met with equally ferocious resistance, and the forging of a party that will fight in the interests of working-class people.
LAST WEEK'S announcement that US president Obama has been awarded the Nobel peace prize is astonishing considering his intentions to continue the war in Afghanistan.
After eight years of the war, with growing numbers of deaths of occupying troops as well as the slaughter of Afghan civilians, there is no 'solution' in sight. Obama is now considering whether to massively escalate troop levels. This is over and above the increase to 69,000 already planned by the end of this year.
Obama risks being compared to another famous Nobel Peace prize winner - Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state under president Nixon, who was associated with the Vietnam war and the bombing of Cambodia!
US General McChrystal has submitted a report saying that their mission will fail within a year without 20,000 to 40,000 more troops and a long term commitment to stay. Gordon Brown is apparently sending at least another 500 troops after a telephone conversation with Obama.
Yet this option would mean sinking further into the quagmire that is Afghanistan. It would mean even more deaths, and raises again the memories of the US defeat in Vietnam. The latest number of US military deaths in Afghanistan is 792; the UK death toll has reached 221.
A new survey has shown that the British death rates per thousand troops doubled over the summer and are as high as those suffered by the Russians who were defeated in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
There are no reliable figures for the deaths of Afghan civilians but estimates say at least 1,500 have died so far this year alone.
Alternative proposals from vice president Joe Biden are for an emphasis on "counter-terrorism" and strikes on pro- al-Qa'ida groups inside Pakistan. He does not see the Afghan Taliban as a "direct threat" to the US. However, even he does not propose troop reductions.
56% of British people oppose the war according to the latest BBC survey. People are asking: 'What is this war achieving?' If it was really to build a "stable nation" and democracy, then it is clearly a long way from that goal.
The recent presidential elections in Afghanistan have shown the corruption of the Karzai government with widespread ballot fraud. European Union observers said a quarter of the votes cast could be fraudulent, including some areas where the turnouts were apparently over 100%! The country is being ruled by a combination of warlords, the occupying forces and a corrupt government.
For the vast majority of the population the huge levels of poverty, unemployment and hunger are on the rise. Clean water, sanitation, power and services are not available for most people. The promises the western powers made to them have not been delivered.
The occupation has not got rid of groups like al-Qa'ida on a world scale, nor eliminated terrorism. In fact it has fuelled the Taliban insurgency and religious extremist groups across the region.
It has not been in the interests of the Afghan people, or in the interests of ordinary people in Britain or any of the Nato countries. Despite the enormous cuts in public services being threatened by all the main political parties in this country after the election, they would all continue to pour vast amounts of money on top of the billions already spent on this war.
We call for the troops to be withdrawn. The solution lies with the mass struggle of the workers and poor of the region, for a socialist solution to the problems of poverty and violent conflict.
Called by Stop the war Coalition, CND and BMI.
Attempts to divide the working class were ratcheted up a notch at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton last week. David Cameron spoke of the Tories' "big, bold, radical scheme to get millions of people back to work" as "the centrepiece of the Tory conference".
These headline announcements were designed to catch the ear of those youth and workers worrying for their jobs or in desperate search of work as unemployment continues its steep climb. For young people Cameron and Osborne are promising that a Conservative government would create an additional 100,000 apprenticeships, an extra 50,000 training places at colleges, and 50,000 work pairing places.
The Tories presided over mass youth unemployment in the 1980s, which was deliberately brought about by their brutal pro-big business economic policies. The hypocrisy on display last week as Cameron tried to re-brand the Tories as the 'party of jobs' was nauseating. Youth Fight for Jobs would welcome any genuine policies that would help young people in this recession - but not at any price!
campaigns such as Youth Fight for Jobs and The Socialist have been calling for 'bold' schemes to tackle the developing mass youth unemployment for many months. However we have already resisted and criticised one potentially divisive policy from the New Labour government - the Future Jobs Fund which could see unemployed youth on 'work placements' undercutting existing workers (covered in previous issues of The Socialist).
However the Tories take attempts to divide us to dizzying new heights! Any future funding for the expansion of apprenticeships and college places for young people is posed point blank as dependent on cutting the benefits of 500,000 individuals on incapacity benefit. To try and play the young off against the sick and disabled is an absolutely disgusting move that must be fought.
The fight for work, the fight for work that pays a living wage and the fight for decent benefits are all part of the same fight. The Tories, like Labour and all the parties that support the market, will try and divide those in work from those out of work, will try to divide young from old, and will try to divide those receiving benefits from those not.
The big-business politicians want to drive these wedges between us to make it easier to make us pay for the economic crisis created by them and the city bankers.
None of the mainstream parties speak for young people, so young people need to organise themselves to make their voices heard. We need to build strong links with workers and all groups being attacked as a consequence of this recession.
We urge all those who want to resist the Tories' divisive agenda to join the Youth Fight for Jobs demonstration on Saturday 28 November. We will fight for real jobs and for real education for all - not just for some at the expense of others!
AROUND 200 thugs of the far right English Defence League (EDL) came to Manchester last Saturday to stir up racial conflict in the city. This number grew during the day, to up to 600, as police escorted more EDL members into Piccadilly Gardens in the city centre. This gave confidence to the EDL and they acted in a more militant fashion as the day went on.
At least 1,500 anti-fascists, including members of the Socialist Party, opposed them. Among those against the EDL were college and university students and working class young people, part of which was an important mobilisation from Salford.
There were also anti-racist football fans, including a contingent of FC United supporters, (the fans' owned club that was set up as a protest against Malcolm Glazer's private takeover of Manchester United in 2005). More local working class people turned out to confront the EDL than participate in their racist march.
An active minority of Asian youth participated in the protests. However, many felt that it was a lower turnout from the Asian community than expected. This is at least partly the responsibility of Muslim elders who told their youth to stay away from any protests.
But it also reflects an element of a siege mentality now felt in Muslim communities. One Asian youth who did not go to the protest said earlier in the day: "If we turn up we will only be portrayed as terrorists and we do not want that."
The police were hell bent on ensuring the EDL could have their protest. Horses, dogs and riot police were used against peaceful demonstrators. A number of protesters got bitten by police dogs. The police did not care about the safety of innocent bystanders either, at times putting parents with children at risk from being trampled by a horse.
An anti-racist football fan raised a legitimate question: "We know how fast the police can act against football fans, how they can shut down entire towns if they want, how they can keep hundreds of people from entering a town in the first place. Why have they not done so with the EDL?" Some anti-fascists also support the idea of state bans against groups like the EDL.
However, the Socialist Party believes that this measure would also be used by the state to stop working class people, trade unionists, etc, from organising protests against government policies, etc.
EDL were the outsiders that day, having clearly no local roots apart from a tiny number of confused hooligans. However, there were signs that militant far-right groups have started targeting the football match-going youth for recruitment again.
The EDL claim that they are not a racist and far right organisation. Their Manchester appearance proved different. Many in the EDL contingent repeatedly gave Nazi salutes.
The openly far-right appearance of the EDL disgusted many working class people. An angry group of women shoppers chasing a group of EDL members, shopping bags in hand, will remain one of the more memorable pictures of the day!
The day showed both the potential and the current inadequacies of the anti-fascist movement. There is a new generation of youth who want to go out and actively confront any racist threat. However, the current official anti-fascist organisations are not equipped to build on this potential. This is due to their reliance on the police and the pro-capitalist parties, including Labour.
Many youth that day were clearly anti-capitalist. A discussion has started among sections of those who were there about how to move things forward and how to build organisational structures that can both counter the growth of the far right but also take up the issues that concern working class people such as jobs, homes and services.
THE RESIDENTS Against Pollution campaign was started in February 2008 as there was a threat of a new pollutant waste facility on Blackhorse Lane in Walthamstow, north east London.
The North London Waste Plan (NLWP) proposed new sites for north London's waste - mostly in the poorer working-class areas along the Lea Valley - with the potential for new incinerators in residential areas.
But we organised a campaign of local residents. After participating in the official consultations, leafleting our streets and the tube station, holding big public meetings and protesting at the town hall, we are pleased to announce that we have won!
The latest stage of the consultation has been published - the "preferred options" report. In this report Blackhorse Lane has been excluded from the plans - there will be no new waste facility in our area.
We demanded: "No to incineration". It is clear that the planners have moved away from incinerators, which we explained are dangerous to health and the environment, towards a policy of waste re-use, recycling and other methods of disposal such as composting.
We also demanded: "Give us a real say" and we made sure our voices were heard.
However, we still have concerns and we still urge all North London residents to take part in this stage of the consultation process.
We want to raise these issues so the planners know we are looking over their shoulders, but at the same time we are happy to repeat: Victory for Blackhorse Lane residents!
More than a dozen workers at Brighton Housing Trust (BHT) staged a 12 hour 'sleep over' outside their offices on 8 October. In light of the continuing refusal of management to even negotiate, workers felt they needed to send a clear message that they would not be ignored.
BHT is a charity employed by Brighton and Hove council to advise and represent people with housing, welfare, debt and other legal problems. There are glowing reports all over the internet of the good work that BHT workers do for their clients.
As reported previously, 100 workers at BHT are facing cuts in pay of up to 25%, forced increases in working hours and a 50% cut in their pensions - a brutal attack. Any workers not accepting this will be dismissed! However, as so often, management underestimated the determination of working people to organise and fightback.
Amongst those sleeping out, morale was high, even into the eleventh hour. One worker speaking to The Socialist said: "It's important for management to listen to their staff. We are making the point that we are passionate about the services we provide and we know this attack on us will hurt our clients too. This is about defending services as much as our own pay and conditions."
Unison branch secretary Alex Knutsen explained how a day of strike action had been called off as a gesture of goodwill to open negotiations and that Unison had put forward an offer to management. This offer was thrown back in their faces by chief executive Andy Winters at the council, on the spurious grounds that he would not negotiate 'with preconditions'.
This is obvious nonsense and a further indication that management are out of touch.
The local Unison branch has endorsed the idea of all-out strike action. This is being taken to Unison's national industrial action committee for approval. We will report on the outcome of these discussions in future issues. Solidarity with the BHT workers!
How the mighty suffer! Having enjoyed nearly three months off on holiday, MPs returned to the House of Commons and were asked to repay some of their outrageous parliamentary expenses.
While MPs were away sunning themselves, an inquiry going back over five years of their expenses claims was carried out by retired civil servant, Sir Thomas Legg. Money-grubbing MPs are now squealing over the repayments.
However, MPs' constituents - struggling to pay their winter fuel bills, rents and mortgages, etc, - will be wanting to know why MPs are being asked to repay only some of their 'John Lewis' list expenses and only some of their 'second-home' allowances. As far as most people are concerned, MPs' fiddled expenses' amounts to fraud - and they should be punished accordingly.
Having ratcheted-up the national debt by hundreds of billions of pounds in order to save the hides of the fat cat bankers, the government has decided on a giant car boot sale of £16 billion of national assets in the forlorn hope of plugging the deficit.
Up for auction, in an initial £3 billion tranche, are items such as the horse racing Tote, the Dartford Crossing (of the Thames) the student loan book and "non-financial" local authority assets.
As with previous privatisations, the likelihood is that these government assets will be sold to the private sector for a song.
It was the Labour government in 2001 who part privatised the ministry of defence research firm DERA to form QinetiQ. This turned the ten most senior managers of QinetiQ into millionaires overnight, making an almost 20,000% return at the taxpayer's expense.
Moreover, this privatisation plan - supported by the Tories - is simply a short-term measure designed to make the government's balance sheet look better but which will diminish government revenue in the long term.
And will the sale of more local authorities' assets include important community resources such as school playing fields and libraries, etc?
School students asked to bring in their own toilet paper is one result of public service spending cuts in Ireland.
The request was made in a letter by the principal sent to parents of pupils of St John's Girls National School in Carrigaline, County Cork. The school's 'cost containment' programme also means ending the free-book scheme for low-income students, the school library grant and a special grant for Traveller children.
In April 2009 the ruling Fianna Fail/Green Party coalition government in Ireland passed a brutal austerity emergency budget (the second in six months) in a blatant attempt to make the working and middle classes pay for the country's economic crisis while continuing to bail out the banks.
Firefighters across the country are facing a plethora of attacks on jobs, services, conditions and pay. These attacks are being carried out by bullying management, who seem to show little interest in how they will affect the fire service's ability to protect the public. But Fire Brigade Union (FBU) members are determined to fight back and the union is currently involved in a number of regional struggles.
In South Yorkshire and London, fire authority management are attempting to impose changes to contracted hours. This would both weaken the fire service's ability to effectively respond to call-outs and have a hugely detrimental effect on firefighters' home lives. FBU members have been involved in work-to-rule action against these impositions.
At the same time, in South Yorkshire the union drew up alternative proposals for a change to a ten-hour day shift. Rather than effectively engage with this attempt at conciliation, management have issued redundancy notices to 744 firefighters which will be implemented if they do not sign up to new contracts by January 1 2010!
South Yorkshire FBU members have voted 83% in favour of strike action against these redundancies and were buoyed by a rally of over 2,000 FBU activists a few weeks back. FBU members across the country realise that the struggle taking place in South Yorkshire is a struggle for all firefighters - the way that management attempted to dismiss the FBU's proposals and now the draconian sackings that are threatened could set a dangerous precedent. 24-hour strikes have now been announced for 19 and 23 October.
In other regions fire authorities are lining up cutbacks that could see services slashed and the public burn! Warwickshire fire service plans to cut a third of all fire appliances, closing seven fire stations. This could see the loss of around 100 retained firefighters.
In Essex, cuts will mean fire stations don't have enough staff for the number of fire vehicles that they have! Management justify this by claiming that 'statistically' it is rare for all vehicles to be called out at once.
Management are also attacking and vicitmising union activists. But FBU members won't stand for this. The sacking of a union activist in Merseyside has resulted in a successful ballot for strike action demanding reinstatement.
In the face of the biggest economic crisis for generations, the establishment parties are all attempting to outbid each other on who will cut public services the most. The fire service will not be exempt from these swinging attacks.
This crisis was not of our making and we should not pay the price! How many firefighters were on the board of directors at the Royal Bank of Scotland?
Fire authorities and the government know that their attacks will provoke a response from trade unionists. They are lining up an army of scabs. AssettCo, which already holds PFI contracts on fire service vehicles worth tens of millions of pounds, has been awarded a contract to supply strike coverage.
Rather than putting millions into private hands for under-trained scabs, this money should be used to provide a fully publicly owned and funded fire service, where FBU members don't feel forced to take action.
But if fire authorities continue as they are, nationally coordinated action will be vital in defending jobs, pay, conditions and services. These are struggles that all trade unionists must back to the hilt.
British Airways (BA) have announced that 1,700 jobs will go amongst cabin crew. 1,000 workers will take voluntary redundancy and a further 3,000 will move to part time work. This is due to take effect in November.
BA has informed staff that additional cabin crew will be employed on terms and conditions inferior to those who will lose their jobs. It is clear BA is attempting to push through a restructuring campaign, first through cabin crew and later to the rest of the company by reducing staff, increasing workload and driving down wages and conditions. Unite, the union which represents the bulk of cabin crew at BA, has called on management to withdraw the proposals and return to talks or "risk a serious, drawn-out confrontation".
BA has pleaded that it is in the middle of a financial crisis and that the airline industry is showing no sign of recovery. This March they claimed they had lost £401 million over the previous year. However sources within BA have informed The Socialist that BA is in fact sitting on a £1 billion cash reserve.
This is not counted as an asset by a simple accounting trick. BA claims this money must be reserved in case the company goes bust overnight and is thereby liable for some arbitrarily selected number of potential customers it would have to pay back.
But BA is angling to buy BMI, Japan Airlines and merge with Iberia to create the largest global airline operator. These are not the actions of a company one day from crisis and liquidation.
BA's main aim is to come out of the industry crisis as a super profitable global giant through mergers and attacking wages and conditions.
Historically BA workers have been one of the best organised workforces in the country. Union density is very high with a long tradition of militant struggle. This has meant BA workers have managed to hold on to many of the concessions workers wrung from employers and government in the period of 1945-1972.
The centrepiece of this is the 1948 agreement. Under this agreement there can be no compulsory redundancies. If a job is abolished, then a worker has the right to be transferred to another job on the same pay with the same pay progression as his or her original job.
What this means in practice is that a worker's pay, and therefore their pensions, can only go up. Workers at Ryanair or Easyjet can only dream of such conditions. Naturally BA management hate this agreement and view the union activists who defend it much the same way a snake views a mongoose.
Since BA was privatised in 1987 the over-riding mission of BA management has been to smash the 1948 agreement and bring the unions to heel.
Tearing up the agreement is one thing, enforcing it on the workforce quite another. Unfortunately BA management have used the crisis in the industry to force national union leaders into accepting fundamental change in the way BA conducts industrial relations.
Three unions are present at BA - Unite (divided into T&G and Amicus sections), Balpa (representing pilots) and GMB. For industrial relations purposes the workforce is divided into six National Sectional Panels or NSPs. These are loading/ramp, administration, cabin crew, engineering, pilots and management. Each union nominates reps, in proportion to their strength among the workforce in an NSP, to negotiate with management of their section.
BA would find it very difficult to face down sustained united action by all the unions together. Management's strategy therefore is to carry out isolated attacks on different sections of the workforce. They try to probe for weakness among one section and use whatever inferior terms are enforced as a tool to drive down conditions in the rest of the company. So the attack on cabin crew is a provocation in a wider war against the 1948 agreement.
Cabin crew should not be left to face this attack alone. The national officers of all the BA unions should issue a joint statement opposing any change to the 1948 agreement and pledging mutual support for any action taken to defend it. But BA workers should not simply rely on action by national union leaders. It will be their willingness to get organised and fight that will decide the future of the 1948 agreement.
There is an urgent need to set up a joint shop stewards committee of the most senior reps to co-ordinate united resistance to any attacks by management on the agreement.
A member of staff in the Art, Media and Design Department of London Met University spoke to The Socialist about the campaign of strike action against cuts they are involved in:
"The unions have tried to get management to sit down and listen to rational arguments but time and again meetings are suddenly cancelled - a prime example of that was today (12 October). You would think that three days before an all-out strike, management would want to sit down and talk but they cancelled a meeting with the unions this afternoon. The unions have even proposed taking the dispute over job cuts to ACAS which management have rejected. I think that speaks volumes about the 'attitude' of this management.
"Staff do not want to strike - it is the last thing we want to do, especially after the bad press our university has suffered over the last few months but we really do feel we have no other option. Unison has also had an overwhelming 71% vote in favour of taking strike action.
"We appreciate the massive disruption this will cause to our students but we are trying to save their university and strike action seems to be the only thing this management will listen to."
It seems the witch-hunt of lefts in Unison is failing to silence their voices on the union's national executive council (NEC), so at the NEC meeting on 7 October the right wing majority launched a further organisational attack on them.
This time they proposed that NEC members should be banned at the full NEC, from opposing decisions of committees of which they are members! (Usually it is only left wing members who do this, as the vast majority of right wingers remain silent and do as they are told!) Any member falling foul of this rule would risk being removed from the committee.
In their desperation to silence the left, the ruling right wing clique apparently forgot what they had supported in the past. It was pointed out to them that the current NEC handbook makes it clear that "collective responsibility" does not apply to NEC committees, and that the NEC had previously been given legal advice that NEC members should have the "unfettered right" to vote as they wish at the NEC!
All six Socialist Party members on the NEC opposed this move, and spoke against it. This measure opens the door to minority rule on the NEC, since the committees are large bodies. A committee with 23 members could approve a measure by twelve votes to eleven. As there are 69 NEC members, if these 11 were forced to abstain, there would be 58 voting NEC members, requiring a minimum of 30 votes to carry a motion.
In this circumstance the 28 voting against the motion, plus the 11 who opposed it at committee but forced to abstain (39), would outnumber the voting "majority"(30). That's democracy right-wing style!
Socialist Party members on the NEC are clear, we are accountable to the rank and file members that elect us, not to the NEC or to its committees.
We will continue to support policies that are in line with our election addresses, to promote militant trade unionism, to call for an end to the £ millions wasted on the Labour Party and to fight for a democratic union, accountable to its members.
He told The Socialist: "Job and pay cuts, attacks on pensions, increasing workloads, more classes without qualified teachers, the dismantling of comprehensive education through academies and trusts - this could be the future for teachers whoever wins the general election. But not if we organise behind an effective strategy to defend education - that's why I'm standing in this election."
The election starts on 28 October.
The Sri Lankan government's war on Tamil people's basic rights continues. Around 300,000 men, women and children remain incarcerated in camps under the most horrific conditions, months after the official ending of the war. The internally displaced people (IDP) in Sri Lanka are being treated horrifically by the chauvinist government of president Mahinda Rajapakse.
The decades-long war between the government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ended on 18 May, with over 20,000 people massacred in the last weeks alone.
The British government, which has blood on its hands for its role in Iraq and Afghanistan, gave support to Rajapakse's war. Trade links with Sri Lanka have been prioritised over the lives and rights of hundreds of thousands of people.
On 6 October 2009 Mike Foster, New Labour's development minister, said: "Conditions in the camps have improved since my last visit". Now he has announced that Britain will be cutting its aid to Sri Lanka. So far no effort has been made to ensure that the aid is given to the IDPs - instead it has been reported to be in the pockets of corrupt government officials.
Following this announcement the Sri Lankan government has also announced that they will be cutting spending in the area. Yet it has approved a 20% budget increase for the country's military for the remainder of this year. Surely it can improve the lives of these people by investing a fraction of the millions they spent on war on reconstruction?
We cannot rely on the New Labour government to come to the assistance of the suffering Tamils. The Tories and Liberals are no better. In May Des Browne, New Labour's special envoy, said: "We visited the IDP camps in Vavuniya. We saw the considerable efforts the government is making to accommodate and assist IDPs who have left the conflict zone." But in the same month the BBC described the conditions in the so-called 'welfare camps' as a "vision of hell".
Since then the situation has deteriorated. More than 15,000 people are reported to be missing from the camps. The majority are probably held in interrogation camps elsewhere. At least 40 people die every day. There is no reason to keep these innocent people in the camps, the majority of whom are children, women and elderly people. Over 35% of the imprisoned children under the age of five are said to be suffering from malnutrition.
The government is still refusing entry to any independent organisations, reporters or individuals. Meanwhile, government officials and military commanders make millions from the suffering. Recently, a leading military commander was accused of profiteering from the sale of brass scrap from military shells.
The Sri Lankan Times reported that a group of MPs is making millions from smuggling out the IDPs, at a reported cost of 600,000 to 900,000 Sri Lankan rupees per person released.
Anyone raising dissent in the country is either attacked, imprisoned or killed. More than 12 journalists have been killed in Sri Lanka since 2006. Many more have been attacked and imprisoned.
If it was not for the brave action of Tamil youth and activists protesting on the streets around the world this massacre would have gone unnoticed. We must not stop campaigning. Despite the government boasting about 'victory' and 'saving the people', they suffered a defeat in Vavuniya, the site of one of the largest camps, in the last election. It was a clear signal from the people about what they think of the government.
Despite the horrific conditions and constant fear, there were reports of riots in the camps. It is more important than ever that we continue the fight against the brutal regime in Sri Lanka and the British capitalist parties who will never stand up for the poor here or anywhere in the world.
Lessons have been learnt during the brave demonstrations and activities and it is time now to discuss the right way to continue. We should not rely on rotten international organisations such as the United Nations (UN) who will just be a stooge to the oppressing governments. Despite overwhelming evidence and the condemnation from almost all the humanitarian agencies, the UN refuses to take any action. In fact it passed a resolution clearing Sri Lanka from any human rights violations! The UN will never represent the interests of the poor and oppressed Tamil people.
Western governments, including Britain, have done nothing meaningful. The fight for our rights is a fight against the capitalist class in Sri Lanka and around the world. Tamil Solidarity is organising the fight against this oppressive class. We are working with the Socialist Party of England and Wales and its sister organisation in Sri Lanka, the United Socialist Party.
Both parties fight to change society for the benefit of all. The United Socialist Party (USP) is the only party in Sri Lanka now standing for the right of self determination, up to and including a separate country, if it is what the Tamil-speaking people in Sri Lanka want. And the USP is the only alternative force in Sri Lanka that stands for the rights of minorities, and continues to fight despite the intimidation and death threats from Rajapakse's thugs.
The New Democracy (ND) government of Kostas Karamanlis was delivered a shattering blow in these elections. Its vote collapsed to 33.34%, its worst showing ever. This led to the immediate resignation of Karamanlis, as the scale of his party's defeat surpassed all expectations.
The collapse of the ND vote is, first and foremost, a crushing verdict on the policies implemented by the government over the last period. It represents a damning condemnation of the neo-liberal, austerity policies which have led to the development of the profound crisis facing Greek society today.
The Pasok [social democratic] leadership have portrayed the election results as a "huge victory" for the party. However, although Pasok has won an overall majority in parliament, with nearly 44% of the vote, their election was not based on any real enthusiasm among workers and young people towards the party or its policies.
The main reason for Pasok's victory was the absolute hatred of the ND government which exists among the vast majority of the population.
Many people hope that they will put an end to the anti-working class policies of the last government. This however will not be the case. During their election campaign, Pasok spoke in vague terms about a "fairer" Greece, with a fairer taxation system, a new foreign policy and better wages. However, absolutely no details were given about how they would be achieved.
Their vague promise to implement wage increases above the rate of inflation has provoked much amusement in Greek society. With inflation currently at about 0.8%, many have observed that under Pasok, one would need five days' "wage increases" to buy a pack of chewing gum!
They have not put forward any answers to the economic crisis, refusing to speak about nationalisation to put an end to the orgy of greed in the financial sector.
They have not even proposed to reverse the highly unpopular privatisations implemented by the ND government, most recently that of Olympic Airlines, or put forward any solutions to mass unemployment.
The actions of Pasok in government will lead workers and youth to the realisation that struggle is necessary to defend living standards against attack and combat the problems of unemployment and poverty.
Pasok has been responsible for decades of anti-working class policies, since the mid 1980s. It governed the country from 1981 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 2001. During the 1990s, Pasok carried through major privatisation schemes, passed a raft of anti-working class legislation which still stands today and attacked pensions and public services, such as health and public education.
These policies represent a glimpse of what workers and youth can expect from a Pasok government in the face of capitalism's worst crisis since the 1930s.
Two additional features of these elections were the rise in abstentions (close to 30%, up 3% compared to the 2007 elections) on the one hand, and on the other hand the rise of Laos, a populist far-right party, from 3.8% in 2007 to 5.6% (386,000 votes) now.
The rise of Laos, which bases itself on anti-immigrant agitation represents a serious danger, and will assist neo-Nazi organisations in building their forces and encourage them to become more provocative.
These factors indicate that despite the crisis and the acute situation facing people, a significant section of the population feel disillusioned with the existing parties, including those of the left. This represents a failure both by the Communist Party (KKE) and Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left, in which Xekinima participates) to capitalise on the situation.
The votes for both these parties went down slightly in these elections. KKE went down from about 8% to 7.5%, 584,000 to 517,000, a failure which will increase tensions and discontent within that party. Syriza experienced a similar drop from around 5% to 4.6%, 361,000 to 316,000.
The KKE's election campaign was full of anti-capitalist rhetoric, even raising the need for socialism on some of its posters, unlike Syriza. However, the KKE's sectarian method, such as their policy of splitting rallies and demonstrations, organising 'pure' 'Communist' alternative events, serves to isolate them from many workers and youth in struggle, limiting their potential.
Expectations were extremely high for Syriza, which was on as much as 18.5% in the polls at certain stages in 2008. Syriza's election campaign focussed more on the real issues facing workers and youth, such as workers' rights and conditions and public services.
However, the leadership failed to present Syriza to the electorate as a radical alternative. Demands for nationalisation and the need for socialism were not put forward in a bold, coherent manner and only mentioned by most candidates when asked directly. This undoubtedly had an effect on Syriza's failure to make a breakthrough.
The results of the European elections in June, in which Syriza's vote dropped to 4.7%, caused a severe crisis inside Syriza, which took on a distorted non-political, personal character, with a struggle between the previous and current leader of Synaspismos, the biggest party in the coalition.
Only five weeks ago, the future of Syriza was entirely uncertain, as the coalition was threatened with a split and dissolution. Syriza was able to survive this crisis and in this context, the last weekend's result of 4.6% of the vote and the fact that Syriza managed to maintain a presence in parliament (for which at least 3% is required) has been seen as a success. It has led to a feeling of relief among many rank and file Syriza voters and activists.
However, the failure of the majority of Syriza's leadership to capitalise on the enthusiasm which surrounded the formation of the coalition (particularly last year), by putting forward a clear alternative to the capitalist policies of the main parties, and by building Syriza as a fighting party with individual members, more democratic structures, (through which rank and file members can have a decisive say in the policies and running of Syriza), is still apparent.
We are extremely happy with the outcome of our electoral campaign. This was the first time Xekinima has stood candidates in a general election, so it was a new and interesting experience for us.
Our candidates all received very good votes. In two of the areas where we stood - Corfu and Volos - Syriza's vote actually rose, in both relative and absolute terms, contrary to the national trend. Undoubtedly, the strength of our campaign played a role in this.
The campaigns of our candidates centred on social class issues and demands and raised the need for a clear socialist alternative to the crisis, as opposed to the capitalist policies of ND and Pasok.
We found that such socialist policies can receive an excellent response from workers and youth. We had many experiences when people approached us to tell us that they intended to abstain from voting, but after the announcement of our participation, had changed their minds.
Some of them, including some excellent rank and file fighters in social and trade union movements, took a very active part in the campaign calling for a vote for our candidates.
We have come out of this campaign significantly strengthened. We will go on to build on this experience in the future, in order to strengthen our forces and to build Syriza as a fighting socialist party.
Syriza will be presented with an opportunity to make a decisive breakthrough as disappointment with the results of the new Pasok government develops.
However this will only be possible on the basis of combative socialist policies which present a real alternative to the nightmare of capitalist crisis for Greek workers and youth, not on the basis of watering down our anti-capitalist ideas.
The idea of fighting for the socialist transformation of society will gain much wider support in Greece.
We base ourselves on this perspective and will struggle (together with others) to push Syriza further to the left, as this is the only way it can become a vehicle for major political and social change.
Above - Part one: Peter Taaffe answers Robert Service, who appears in five Hoover Institute videos posted on youtube. Trotsky as a young revolutionary - what makes a revolutionary? Below, parts two to five
This book is very thick - running to 600 pages - but is very thin when it comes to an honest political examination and analysis of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, the subject of Service's tome. His justification? That this book is, allegedly, the first "full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist". He grants that Isaac Deutscher, who wrote a trilogy on Trotsky and Pierre Broué, who produced a single volume, 1,000 page study in 1989, wrote with "brio" (liveliness). As for Trotsky's own account of his life, My Life, this is dismissed as "self-serving and an example of self-aggrandisement"!
Part two - Peter Taaffe answers the Hoover institute video on Robert Service's book. How do we approach Trotsky's ideas?
This is a mild example of the epithets Service flings at Trotsky. He presented "serious inaccuracies" in his writings, he was an "intellectual bully"; he was "vain and self-centred". Two lines after making this charge Service says that Trotsky "disliked boasting"! He is accused of base motives in allegedly "abandoning his first wife" and his two daughters, who Service nevertheless concedes urged him to escape from Siberia in order to link up with Lenin and the RSDLP leaders who were producing Iskra (The Spark), the revolutionary paper of the time. On virtually every page there is at least one distortion, and often more, of Trotsky's ideas, his personal life, etc.
Part three - Peter Taaffe answers the Hoover institute video on Robert Service's book: Trotsky's battle against Stalin
There is not one relevant new fact which adds to our picture of Trotsky in this book... apart from learning that Trotsky's children acquired a "Viennese accent", surprise, surprise, when they were living in that city. There is, however, an abundance of repeated pro-capitalist and Stalinist calumnies against Trotsky's ideas and actions from the moment he became active in Russian revolutionary underground circles till the day he was assassinated. Service, egged on by Andrew Marr - for a time in his 'misguided' youth a Trotskyist of the most timid variety, it must be added - on BBC Radio's Start the Week of 12 October, attempted yet another 'assassination' of Trotsky, this time of the literary kind.
Part four - Peter Taaffe answers the Hoover institute video on Robert Service's book: Trotsky's analysis of the rise of Stalinism in his book, Revolution Betrayed
Incredibly, we learn, for instance, that prior to 1914, Trotsky was not a "Marxist theoretician"! Unfortunately for Service's "self-serving" account, there is the small, 'unfortunate' detail of Trotsky as the chairman of the Petrograd soviet during the 1905 revolution, at the time the greatest event for workers and the oppressed worldwide since the Paris Commune of 1871. During this revolution he also edited and wrote for a daily paper and a Marxist theoretical magazine.
Part five - Peter Taaffe answers the Hoover institute video on Robert Service's book: Trotsky's life in retrospect
Moreover, before 1914 Trotsky formulated his famous theory of the 'permanent revolution'. This explained that the capitalist-democratic revolution - land reform, unification, the end of feudalism and tsarist dictatorship - in an 'underdeveloped' country like Russia could not be completed by the capitalists themselves. With this idea he was at one with Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the time. But Trotsky went further and showed that only the working class - with its special dynamic characteristics in Russia - was capable of playing the leading role in an alliance with the peasantry in completing the capitalist-democratic revolution. This in turn would be an overture to an international socialist revolution. It was a magnificent outline of what actually happened in 1917: a workers and peasants' socialist government and the ten days that shook the world.
Service goes on to argue that Trotsky was "not original"; this theory was really the intellectual property of Alexander Helfand, better known as Parvus, who collaborated with Trotsky. Unfortunately for Service, we have the admission by Trotsky himself that Parvus contributed the "lion's share" of this theory. But Parvus stopped short of drawing the bold revolutionary conclusion advanced by Trotsky.
Parvus argued that the outcome of an alliance of the working class and the peasantry would limit itself to the framework of capitalism, possibly setting up a government like the then 'Labour' governments in Australia. Trotsky, on the contrary, argued that once having carried through the capitalist-democratic revolution, a worker and peasants' government would come to power, which would then be forced to go over to the tasks of the socialist revolution, in turn leading to a movement internationally.
Service's attempts to rubbish Trotsky's original theoretical contribution in the earlier part of the book is then cancelled out when, through gritted teeth, he is forced to concede later that Lenin admitted in private conversations with Joffe - one of Trotsky's friends - that Trotsky had been right about perspectives for the Russian revolution. Trotsky's theory is relevant today in all those societies, in the 'underdeveloped' world who have yet to fully complete the capitalist-democratic revolution.
All of Service's acerbic comments about Trotsky are merely warmed-up ideas served up by previous critics, going back to Stalinism itself, capitalist commentators, jaundiced social democrats and reformists. We find the same accusations against Trotsky over terrorism, the Kronstadt revolt, on "authoritarianism", without a shred of new evidence to back this up.
Trotsky, for instance, is accused of "omitting" in My Life any mention of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921. Trotsky himself explained when he replied to the "hue and cry over Kronstadt" in the 1930s that this was for the simple reason that this was not considered to be a major event until resurrected by latter-day critics such as anarchists and, unfortunately, by Victor Serge in the 1930s. Trotsky was accused of "suppressing" the Kronstadt sailors", the "same ones" who participated in the October revolution.
In a forensic analysis, he showed that this was not the case - he played no direct role in the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt but accepted full "moral responsibility" for the actions that were taken. The Kronstadt 'rebels' demanded "soviets without the Bolsheviks", which was applauded by the counter-revolutionaries in Russian and worldwide. Service just repeats falsehoods - without any evidence whatsoever - to try and convince us that the sailors of 1921 were the same as the heroic insurrectionists of the October revolution, which they were not. The vast majority of Petrograd workers supported the action taken against them.
Using independent sources Trotsky showed that the leaders of the revolt, for their own selfish ends - during the civil war - demanded special privileges. They even threatened to take over the Red Fleet which, with the thawing of the ice between Russia and Finland, would have opened the gates to an imperialist attack at the very heart of the Russian state. Reluctantly, therefore, the Russian workers' government, after the mutineers refused to negotiate and withdraw, quelled the revolt.
An equally dubious approach - not outlining the sequence of events as they actually happened - is employed by Service over the Russian revolution itself. It was "a coup" - and the charges of "terrorism" are resurrected against Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. In fact, the Russian revolution took place on the basis of a democratic vote of the Congress of Soviets - the most representative institution in history - expressing as it did the direct views of the workers, the soldiers and peasants in Russia at that stage. The Winter Palace was taken with the minimum of victims - certainly nowhere near the scale of the five million Russians who were killed and horribly injured in the First World War. Service "forgets" to mention that the revolution brought the carnage of this war to an end. Weighed on the scales of history, which was more progressive: the relatively bloodless Russian revolution or the world war ended by the revolution?
The author accuses Trotsky and Lenin of totalitarianism and dictatorship because parties other than the Bolsheviks were "outlawed". In the first period after the revolution, all parties - including the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, and only excluding the reactionary Black Hundreds - were allowed to exist. That only changed when each one of them systematically took up arms with the armies of the Whites - the counter-revolutionary landlords and capitalists - in an attempt to forcibly overthrow the revolution. In fact, in an overindulgent act, the arrested General Krasnov - who had organised a counter-revolutionary uprising - was freed by the Bolsheviks only for him to immediately organise a White army that killed thousands of workers and peasants.
As with all slanderers of revolutions - back to the English and French revolutions - the charges of "terrorism" sit uneasily on the lips of those like Service. He complains about the "lack of democracy" after the revolution. Did the North and Abraham Lincoln permit the Southern slave owners to act with impunity in the North during the American Civil War? Did Oliver Cromwell let the royalists operate freely in areas controlled by the Parliamentarians during the English civil war? Russia's terrible civil war, which ensued from the intervention of imperialism's 21 armies backed up by the White armies, resulted in widespread destruction of life with a terrible famine in parts of Russia. The entire responsibility for this rests on the shoulders of imperialism, which tried to crush the revolution.
The fairy story of Bolshevik unpopularity at the time when they were in power and of those like Lenin and Trotsky is even countered by Service himself. He points out, for instance, that the revolution at one stage was reduced to the old province of Muscovy and the two major cities of Petrograd and Moscow. Why then did the revolution endure and triumph, defeat the Whites and drive the imperialist armies out of Russia? It was because the mass of the population saw the advantages of the workers and peasants' government and their actions in giving land to the peasants, freedom from tsarist oppression and bread. Workers worldwide also supported Russia's working class.
But it is on Trotsky's struggle against Stalin and the bureaucracy that the shallowness of Service's method is displayed. He sets out his stall - the real reason for writing this book - from the outset in his introduction. First, there is the touching defence of Stalin, who was "no mediocrity but rather had an impressive range of skills as well as talent for decisive leadership". But on the other hand, Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin "shared more than they disagreed about". The implied conclusion - spelt out in his subsequent analysis - is that Stalin's regime was, in effect, an "outgrowth" of the bolshevism of Lenin and the "acquired" bolshevism of Trotsky.
In reality, between the regime of Lenin and Trotsky, of revolution, which involved the participation of the masses and of workers' democracy at the beginning of the revolution, and that of Stalin, was a "river of blood". The purge trials of the 1930s - which Service scandalously mentions only in passing - represented a one-sided civil war against the remnants of the Bolshevik party. He actually compares Stalin's monstrous purge trials to the alleged "show trials" of the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) in 1921. In real terrorist acts, the SRs had put two bullets into Lenin's body and killed two Bolsheviks Uritsky and Volodarsky.
Trotsky never committed a terrorist act against Stalin or his regime. Moreover, the Bolsheviks allowed two prominent social democrats from the Second International into Russia in 1921 to defend the accused. They were not executed even though they were found guilty. Stalin allowed no such latitude to the accused in the Moscow trials.
Stalinism was not a "natural development" of Leninism but its negation. This, the author is incapable of seeing. He is firmly in the camp of those capitalist commentators and other opponents of Marxism - of which Trotskyism is only the modern manifestation - who wish to wipe out any memory of the real lessons of the revolution and of Trotsky's struggle.
Service writes that "once Trotsky was a frequent topic of public discussion, at least outside the USSR. Those days are gone." Wishful thinking! 'Trotskyism' has become for the capitalists and their media the new swear word - replacing 'commie' - in their lexicon. In a period of massive social upheaval, following on from the present devastating economic crisis of world capitalism, the new generation is looking for ideas on how to go forward in a challenge to the capitalist system. That inevitably means looking back to the past examples of struggle.
The most determined and conscientious of the young workers, women, black and Asian fighters, in seeking a method of struggle today, will rediscover Leon Trotsky. He fought for a new world of workers' democracy and socialist collaboration, free from exploitation. His 'modern' biographer seeks to prop up a system sick unto death. He therefore engages in this book in a massive distortion of Trotsky's ideas.
Service is wrong when he alleges that Trotsky was identified as a 'Menshevik' when he accuses him of not being scientific. Equally, he has not the slightest understanding of Trotsky's attitude towards the German revolution of 1923. He says that Trotsky took no position on this earth-shaking event. Yet the leader of the German Communist Party at the time, Brandler, wanted him to go to Germany to assist the working class to take power. It would take a much bigger book than Service's to refute all his errors.
Commented on but not really understood by Service is why Trotsky - with the silent acquiescence of world capitalism at that stage - saw both his daughters and both his sons, himself and virtually his whole family murdered by Stalin. Stalin thought he could wipe out an idea and a method. He did not succeed - Trotsky and his ideas live on. If the mighty Stalinist machine, its lies and distortions, could not succeed, what chance of Service achieving success?
The most nauseating aspect of this book is the highly personalised attack on Trotsky. "Attack a man or woman's ideas but leave the man himself." This is not a maxim to which the author adheres. It is not a question of 'idealising' Trotsky, adhering to a cult of the personality, etc. but of learning from Trotsky his method of Marxist analysis which allows us to develop the political tools that can prepare for a socialist world. You will not find this in Service's book; read it but also go to Trotsky's My Life, even to Deutscher's trilogy - which if not perfect and certainly not 'Trotskyist' at least tries to present a recognisable picture of Trotsky's life and what it represented. Read also the material produced by the Socialist Party on Trotsky's life and its relevance for today.
This book is clearly intended as a platform for a political offensive against the future 'danger' of Trotsky's ideas gaining a wide audience, especially for a new generation awakening to political life, as they will.
We challenge Robert Service to debate with representatives of the Socialist Party on the ideas he sets out in this book, either at our forthcoming 'Socialism' event, Socialism 2009, or at any other venue of his choosing!
Unfortunately, Robert Service declined, with the message:
"Sorry but I'm going to refuse. From past experience with party-political occasions of this type, I reckon more heat than light is going to be generated. Trotsky for me is a serious political figure and I like and want to debate him; but I doubt that this is possible with an organisation which takes Peter Taaffe seriously as a leader and thinker. I might as well be frank.
Yours, Bob Service".
"We are 'frankly' amazed that you have turned down the opportunity to debate the role of Leon Trotsky at our forthcoming 'Socialism' event.
Is this the sophisticated, confident, urbane, professorial intellectual giant who has recently toured radio stations freely commenting on Trotsky and who turns down our invitation to 'debate' Trotsky by resorting to personal insults?
This is surely an uncharacteristic ill-tempered outburst on your part, perhaps brought on by reading my review, which I must admit is not at all favourable to your book. Why not 'debate' with me or any other representative of the Socialist Party and allow us to display in the process our 'lack of leadership' and deficiency of intelligence?
We would ask you to reconsider your initial response to our request for a debate, which I assure you will have much more 'light' than 'heat', and perhaps less heat than was revealed in your treatment of Trotsky.
You are unwilling to speak at this event, perhaps because you fear that the attendance will probably be weighted in favour of those who follow Trotsky's ideas today. If so, we are prepared to debate Trotsky's ideas with you anywhere - including in your own 'backyard' of Oxford perhaps - either with myself or, if you prefer, a more acceptable representative of the Socialist Party.
We would appreciate a response to this as soon as possible so we can make arrangements to accommodate a debate and discussion on Trotsky with you at the earliest opportunity.
Yours faithfully, Peter Taaffe"
To hear an audio version of this document click here.
What the Socialist Party stands for
The Socialist Party fights for socialism – a democratic society run for the needs of all and not the profits of a few. We also oppose every cut, fighting in our day-to-day campaigning for every possible improvement for working class people.
The organised working class has the potential power to stop the cuts and transform society.
As capitalism dominates the globe, the struggle for genuine socialism must be international.
The Socialist Party is part of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI), a socialist international that organises in many countries.
To hear an audio version of this document click here.
http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/8244