PRC-UTE
26th August 2009, 07:06
I posted this in this forum because this article from the Guardian, Has the Left blown its big chance of success touches on the fortunes of the Left / Marxism being intertwined with workers struggles. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/17/left-politics-capitalism-recession) I don't just mean the left as in the various groups and people of the left, but the cultural/social and intellectual impact and influence of leftist theory as well
First the article starts off with a tolerably accurate, although somewhat questionable assessment of the Left's general ideological retreat. The article claims this is partially brought on by a focus that has moved from class to identity politics, and also the fall of the socialist governments and social democracy in the west. It notes, and I agree that there is less understanding of economic theory than there used to be amongst the left and those calling themselves Marxists.
The article seems fairly shallow at first, but gets more interesting further down. There the piece details some interesting changes in attitudes amongst some workers. They now have a bit of appreciation for socialist ideas after their own struggles they were abruptly plunged into:
At Marxism 2009 there is the occasional reminder that leftwing politics still has potential. In the conference bookshop, for the most part a well-visited mausoleum of nostalgic volumes – Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972 – there is a brief, more forward-looking pamphlet on sale for Ł1. Visteon: How Workers Occupied and Won is an SWP account of the factory occupations in Northern Ireland and England this spring at the car component manufacturer Visteon. It is written in the usual overdone party style – "Now we have the template for resistance" – but suggests that the left's response to the global slump may not be completely toothless.
In March, with the motor industry in free-fall, Visteon, a spin-off of Ford, abruptly closed its UK plants and sacked all its workers. Staff reportedly received "six minutes" to clear their lockers, and redundancy terms far inferior to those they had been promised when Ford created the company nine years earlier. Kevin Nolan, a Unite union official at the Visteon factory in Enfield in north London, was one of those fired.
"I've always been a middle-of-the-road working man," he says. "I always voted Labour but I wouldn't say I was too leftwing." Yet the mass sackings radicalised him almost instantly. "I started thinking, we've got to come up with something. This was a corporation which had decided to use the recession to walk away. The initial plan was to ram a car through the main gates. Then we found a gate round the back of the factory open – no one knows the plant better than the worker – and we could just walk in." Once inside, Nolan and between a third and two-thirds of the Enfield workforce (accounts vary) blocked up the entrances to the plant with plastic crates, climbed on to the roof and fire escape, and announced that they would occupy the premises until they were offered satisfactory redundancy terms.
Nolan and many of his colleagues had never been on strike, but they made beds out of cardboard on the chilly shopfloor and dug in. Local people, some with no connection to the plant, brought them food and blankets. Members of the SWP arrived. "I said to them, 'I used to think you were a bunch of nutcases,'" says Nolan. "But they were very, very helpful." The Enfield occupation acquired a revolutionary tinge: "Don't Need Politicians, Don't Need Bosses, Workers Take Control," read one placard prominent in the TV and web coverage.
The Visteon sit-ins led to pickets of Ford dealerships and the threat of walkouts at Ford factories. In May, after less than five weeks' campaigning, the Visteon workers were granted redundancy payments close to what they had originally demanded.
Other British factory occupations have followed, most recently at the Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight. But the ability of such well-publicised local episodes to restore a lasting momentum to the left is far from obvious. Over the last 20 years, there have been intermittent waves of leftwing militancy – the huge and vivid anti-globalisation protests of the 90s, for example – while the underlying political assumptions of Britain and similar western countries have continued to move rightwards. The modern left, its internal critics say, has become too fragmented, too utopian and divorced from how most people live. do the increase around the world in occupations and workers struggles mean a new beginning for us? Or will the left continue to fail at adequately put forward an alternate vision? I hear this regularly from most people, that the left is generally short on alternatives.
First the article starts off with a tolerably accurate, although somewhat questionable assessment of the Left's general ideological retreat. The article claims this is partially brought on by a focus that has moved from class to identity politics, and also the fall of the socialist governments and social democracy in the west. It notes, and I agree that there is less understanding of economic theory than there used to be amongst the left and those calling themselves Marxists.
The article seems fairly shallow at first, but gets more interesting further down. There the piece details some interesting changes in attitudes amongst some workers. They now have a bit of appreciation for socialist ideas after their own struggles they were abruptly plunged into:
At Marxism 2009 there is the occasional reminder that leftwing politics still has potential. In the conference bookshop, for the most part a well-visited mausoleum of nostalgic volumes – Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972 – there is a brief, more forward-looking pamphlet on sale for Ł1. Visteon: How Workers Occupied and Won is an SWP account of the factory occupations in Northern Ireland and England this spring at the car component manufacturer Visteon. It is written in the usual overdone party style – "Now we have the template for resistance" – but suggests that the left's response to the global slump may not be completely toothless.
In March, with the motor industry in free-fall, Visteon, a spin-off of Ford, abruptly closed its UK plants and sacked all its workers. Staff reportedly received "six minutes" to clear their lockers, and redundancy terms far inferior to those they had been promised when Ford created the company nine years earlier. Kevin Nolan, a Unite union official at the Visteon factory in Enfield in north London, was one of those fired.
"I've always been a middle-of-the-road working man," he says. "I always voted Labour but I wouldn't say I was too leftwing." Yet the mass sackings radicalised him almost instantly. "I started thinking, we've got to come up with something. This was a corporation which had decided to use the recession to walk away. The initial plan was to ram a car through the main gates. Then we found a gate round the back of the factory open – no one knows the plant better than the worker – and we could just walk in." Once inside, Nolan and between a third and two-thirds of the Enfield workforce (accounts vary) blocked up the entrances to the plant with plastic crates, climbed on to the roof and fire escape, and announced that they would occupy the premises until they were offered satisfactory redundancy terms.
Nolan and many of his colleagues had never been on strike, but they made beds out of cardboard on the chilly shopfloor and dug in. Local people, some with no connection to the plant, brought them food and blankets. Members of the SWP arrived. "I said to them, 'I used to think you were a bunch of nutcases,'" says Nolan. "But they were very, very helpful." The Enfield occupation acquired a revolutionary tinge: "Don't Need Politicians, Don't Need Bosses, Workers Take Control," read one placard prominent in the TV and web coverage.
The Visteon sit-ins led to pickets of Ford dealerships and the threat of walkouts at Ford factories. In May, after less than five weeks' campaigning, the Visteon workers were granted redundancy payments close to what they had originally demanded.
Other British factory occupations have followed, most recently at the Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight. But the ability of such well-publicised local episodes to restore a lasting momentum to the left is far from obvious. Over the last 20 years, there have been intermittent waves of leftwing militancy – the huge and vivid anti-globalisation protests of the 90s, for example – while the underlying political assumptions of Britain and similar western countries have continued to move rightwards. The modern left, its internal critics say, has become too fragmented, too utopian and divorced from how most people live. do the increase around the world in occupations and workers struggles mean a new beginning for us? Or will the left continue to fail at adequately put forward an alternate vision? I hear this regularly from most people, that the left is generally short on alternatives.