Socialist Party Scotland Cheer-leading to the
Grangemouth Abyss
LEN McCluskey and Unite have
delivered us glorious disaster in their handling of the Grangemouth dispute
last weekend. Last Friday on Any
Questions on Radio Four Bob Crow of the RMT said that this would not mean the end of trade
unionism as we know it. On the 29th,
October after a long silence the Socialist Party Scotland issued a long-winded
rationalisation for the delivery of a serious disaster for the British trade union
movement – perhaps the most significant defeat since the collapse of the miners
strike in 1985.
Could it have been
different? Will this be a turning point
for trade union rights? Will Len
McCluskey become another dishevelled Arthur Scargill figure in the 21st
century – a tired and forlorn politics?
The Grangemouth débâcle
beautifully underlines the hopeless reactionary rhetoric of British trade
unionism and what has come to called the left in Britain. Practically the whole of the left in this country
and particularly the British trade unions are ruled by a reactionary
instinct. Analysing the Grangemouth
failure the Socialist Party Scotland declares [29th, Oct. 2013]:
'In the absence of a
fighting strategy by Unite to save the plant, including the occupation of the
site and the building of a mass campaign across Scotland to demand that the
Scottish/ UK governments nationalise Grangemouth, the pressure proved too great
for the shop stewards to resist.'
The left in Britain, as
represented by the trade unions, protest movements and left parties, has long
been a reactionary force in so far as it has always tended to react to an
agenda set by the establishment, the government or the employers. It does not have an agenda or serious
strategy of its own. Thus when the
current coalition government enforced cuts the left because it has no plan of
its own is forced to go on the defensive and fight the cuts with umpteen
fragmented organisations – this Pavlovian Dog reaction by the Socialist Party
resulted in the disintegration of the National Shop Stewards Network [NSSN] in
2011. This automatic and mechanical
quality of the British left stems from something special detected in some of
the north European organised working class by such writers as Ignazio Silone
and George Orwell: Silone in his book
'School for Dictators' links it to 'Zumarcherien' (a marching together approach
to class war) – a kind of mechanical politics of the German and British worker
founded in the kind of work in big factories – Silone uses this concept of the
north European worker as automaton to explain the better performance of the
Spanish and Catalan workers in resisting the imposition of Fascism in
1936: the Spaniards with their different
cultural and political background rooted in the peasant and the artisan were
better able to use their initiative and trade unions to challenge authoritarian
regimes than those left-wing parties and trade unions with a more Prussian and
Germanic mentality in north Europe.
Today, the Socialist Party Scotland
explanation to what went wrong at Grangemouth is to blame the Labour Party and Ed Miliband personally:
'This shows yet again that
today Labour does not support workers in struggle and that Unite should come
out clearly in favour of a new mass workers' party, public ownership and a real
political alternative to the austerity agenda.'
This statement is an example,
yet again, of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the British left and our
national trade unions. The Socialist Party
Scotland is reassuring:
'Socialist Party
Scotland completely rejects the idea put about by the crowing capitalist media
that the union has been smashed at Grangemouth.
Unite has made a big mistake in singing up to a three-year no-strike deal
at Grangemouth... Against the backdrop of a no-strike agreement it is vital
that Unite rebuilds its strength and its membership at Grangemouth...'
This is voice of despair, the
voice of the politics of the automaton of the unthinking 'mass-party man'
steeped in a kind of Prussian totalitarian mind-set to which Orwell and Silone
often referred. These people have yet to
learn the lessons of Arthur Scargill and the defeat of the miners in 1985: Thatcher then had a transformation strategy
then in the Ridley plan, and Scargill and the miners were fighting to defend
the pits and save the status quo, essentially a conservative position which
Scargill fought tactically. Today the
battle at Grangemouth was a tactical from the beginning and it was one that
Unite couldn't win. Wee must wait to see
if the Socialist Party continues to back Len McCluskey in future. Over two years ago Bob Crow the RMT leader and a political crony of the Social Party was treated to a fish and chip lunch by the Financial Times famous 'Lunch with the FT' column and he declared that the flat fish 'haliburt is good for your brains', well the British left is desparately short on brains so perhaps the Socialist Party and McCluskey should stuff themselves with haliburt in future.
2 comments:
I am reminded of the scene in the 1952 Marlon Brando film "Viva Zapata" where a group of downtrodden peons optimistically say "A leader will come again". This produces an angry response from a former Zapatista "No! Lead yourselves!"
Leaderless Resistance perhaps?
The English and the left are reasonably good at moaning, protests, and socalled resistance to proposals or the agenda set by the government, establishment or bosses. What they are not so good at is putting up alternatives or planning a strategy to confront the present regime.
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