Communist Party of Britain invitation to Workers, Trades Unionists and Socialists to Discuss Labour Party Policies

Ed Miliband has continued Labour’s efforts to win back credibility on the economy by echoing a statement from Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, that Labour cannot promise to reverse any coalition spending cuts.

Robert Griffiths, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain has invited workers, trades unionists, and socialists to discuss an open letter addressed to them regarding the policies being advocated by the Labour Party leadership.

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At the beginning of 2012, the Communist Party published the first edition of its Open Letter, rejecting the statements from Labour Party leaders on public spending cuts, public sector wages and pensions and on welfare benefits.

Those statements broadly confirmed the Labour leadership’s support for the rationale and approach of the Tory-led government towards these issues.

This wrong approach has not changed fundamentally. Arguing that the cuts should be a little less deep and a little more prolonged is still to accept the logic of the blue and orange Tories, City of London bankers and speculators and the EU. Nor is it an approach that has either cut the public spending deficit or stimulated a private sector-led economic recovery.

That is because it was designed to do neither.

The real intention of Tory strategy, dictated by the City and backed by the EU, is to prepare the public sector for wholesale privatisation. In that sense, the strategy has not failed. It is on course to deliver privatised services to big business, while also undermining trade unionism and cutting wage and pension bills and taxes on the wealthy. Regionalised pay is intended to accelerate the drive. The austerity and privatisation programme is working—for the ruling class.

The questions therefore remain:

• what is the labour movement going to do about this ruling class offensive?
• what are the trade unions going to do about the Labour Party leadership’s refusal to resist it?
• in its efforts to promote a broad, inclusive and intensive discussion in the labour movement, the Communist Party is issuing the following updated statement of its own views.

Below is the joint statement issued by 16 communist and workers’ parties in Europe in May 2012, which places Britain’s economic and financial crisis—and responses to it—in a wider international context. Please read and discuss these statements with friends, workmates, trade union colleagues and comrades. We urge you to raise these issues in your trade union and political organisations.

Comments received in response to the first edition of the Open Letter can now be found online at www.communist-party.org.uk. Further comments on this new edition can be sent to openletter@communist-party.org.uk.

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The Crisis of Political Representation in The British Labour Movement

The Communist Party rejects:

• the analysis peddled by the banks, hedge funds and Tory-led government that past levels of public expenditure were the main cause of the economic and financial crisis
• the remedy dictated by City of London financial institutions and the EU Commission and European Central Bank, namely, that massive public spending cuts and a savage attack on the wages and pensions of public sector workers are necessary to reduce the public sector financial deficit.

The policy of the Labour Party leadership to align itself with this analysis and these remedies is a betrayal of the millions of workers and their families who should be able to look to Labour for support and solidarity. Statements by Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and other Labour shadow ministers in support of deep cuts in public sector wages and pension entitlements, and in welfare benefits, represent a shameful capitulation to the banks, the Tory-led regime, the right-wing mass media and the EU.

The refusal of the Labour Party leadership to fight for policies to defend public services, jobs, wages and pensions and so revive economic growth highlights the extent to which the interests of the labour movement—which are also those of the people of Britain generally—go largely unrepresented in the House of Commons.

The leaders of Labour-affiliated trade unions know that their members need a Labour Party that defends their members’ interests. In addition to the widest possible mass movement, it should stand up for public services, oppose the whole rotten set-up in corrupt, big business Britain, and renounce an imperialist foreign policy that mires us in aggressive war, the mass slaughter of civilians, international kidnapping and torture and a new generation of nuclear weapons.

This raises the need for the affiliated unions to campaign in a more determined, planned and coordinated way to change the policies and, when, necessary the composition of the Labour Party leadership. The duty of the affiliated unions to fight for socialist and internationalist values in the Labour Party could not be clearer.

At the same time, this is part of an important, even bigger question:

• how can the labour movement best ensure that its collective views and interests are represented in the Westminster parliament?

This challenge must be faced by the whole movement, including those unions not affiliated to the Labour Party.

The Labour Party was founded by the trade union movement. It still receives the support of over one-third of voters. But this support is not guaranteed and could quickly disintegrate if the party’s right-wing course is maintained. The trade union movement, and its members locally, have a duty to intervene to reclaim the party as an essential voice and vehicle for the interests of working people. Affiliated unions should:

• step up the fight for a fundamental change of economic and social policy in the Labour Party in favour of public services, productive industry, wages, benefits, pensions, trade union rights, public ownership and progressive taxation
• respond to demands from their members and consider withholding financial donations to the Labour Party centrally until its leaders and MPs oppose cuts in public sector wages, pensions, services and benefits and express solidarity with workers taking action to defend them.

Affiliation fees should be maintained to step up the challenge to the Labour leadership’s current policies from inside the party as well as from outside. We believe that these kind of initiatives, combined with mass popular campaigning and action across Britain, are the most realistic and effective steps that can be taken towards achieving real representation of working people’s interests inside the Westminster parliament.

However, should the Labour Party continue on a right-wing course up to and during the next General Election, the trade union movement and the left will have a duty to consider what further steps may be necessary to ensure that the labour movement has its own mass party, one capable of winning elections, forming a government and enacting policies in the interests of workers and their families.

The perspective may need to change from one of the labour movement struggling to reclaim the Labour Party to that of re-establishing a mass party of labour. Affiliated trade unions may need to convene an all-Britain conference to discuss the crisis of political representation for workers and their families. The TUC will have to resume its historic responsibility and convene a special conference of all labour movement organisations to discuss the political representation of the labour movement in the House of Commons.

In the meantime, the labour movement must fully recognise the scale of the threat now being posed by the current ruling class offensive—fronted by the Tory-led regime—to working class rights and living standards. United mass, popular resistance still needs to be built to this government, based on a clear understanding of the class forces and interests that stand behind Tory policies.

In the Communist Party’s view, it is vital that the resistance to this offensive also projects a bold and unifying alternative economic and social strategy. This is where the People’s Charter can play an invaluable role, setting out the policies to rebuild Britain’s productive economy, enhance our public services, secure greater social justice and protect our environment. Pointing a way forward in the immediate battles will help create more favourable conditions in which to resolve the labour movement’s current crisis of political representation.

For its part, the Communist Party will continue to develop its Marxist analysis, project an alternative economic and political strategy for the working class and its allies and strengthen non-sectarian left unity.

Statement authorised by the Communist Party political committee September 5, 2012.

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Statement of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Europe, May 1, 2012
For Maximum Opposition to the EU Treaties

The European Union and the ruling classes of the member states are determined to make working people pay a very heavy price for the deepening crisis of the system. We Communist and Workers’ parties of the member states of the European Union call on workers across the EU to resist and oppose the adoption of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union and the revised Treaty on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

These two treaties would make “Eurozone” member states and practically all other countries signing these agreements into permanent regimes of economic austerity involving deeper and deeper cuts in public expenditure, rises in indirect taxes, reductions in wages, sustained liberalisation of markets and privatisation of public enterprises, services and vital national assets.

The strategy is to have low wages, low public spending, mass poverty and workers having few rights. The treaties are designed to make these measures into a permanent feature of the EU that are impossible to reverse.

The impact of these treaties will not be confined to the member states of the Eurozone. They will provide the bench-mark for further attacks on workers’ rights and conditions across the whole of the EU. The ruling classes have declared open warfare on workers in a generalised offensive.

These treaties are designed to neutralise the potential of national working class formations to influence or change national economic and social policy. They, along with previous treaties, are about blocking any avenues for the working class to defend itself or to promote policies of social progress and a socialist alternative.

They will make austerity permanent by continuous external interference of EU institutions in the affairs of member states in relation to economic and social policy, in the interests of monopoly capitalism.

In this they have the active collaboration of the ruling class and its political representatives in each country. These treaties will further negate and deeply undermine national and sovereign rights. Any policies that the ruling classes across the European Union can deliver will inevitably make the people pay for this crisis of capitalism. Promoting the interests of the working class is only possible by confronting and breaking with this destructive system.

We, Communist and Workers’ Parties value and salute the mass response from the workers and other social strata affected by the measures and policies of big capital, in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy and call upon workers and their trade unions, and people’s mass organisations, to resist these renewed attacks and to mobilise and assert a working class response to the crisis of state monopoly capitalism.

In the immediate battles of today our parties will present the vision of Socialism as the answer to the crisis of the capitalist system.

Signed:

1. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
2. Workers’ Party of Belgium
3. Communist Party of Britain
4. Portuguese Communist Party
5. Communist Party of Finland
6. Communist Party in Denmark
7. Communist Party of Luxembourg
8. Communist Party of Ireland
9. Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
10. Communist Party of Greece
11. Party of Italian Communists
12. Communist Party of Malta
13. Communist Party of Poland
14. Communist Party of Spain
15. Communist Party of Sweden
16. German Communist Party

What Makes Working People Happier? Labor Unions!

In the UK the latest fraudster to head the government is keen to find out what makes us happy, while doing his utmost to make us unhappy by destroying the services we treasure like the National Health Service, free schooling, and a fairly neutral but certainly professional civil service. Maybe David Cameron wants to know what makes people happy so that he can all the more effectively make them miserable.

An associated project which he laughingly calls the “Big Society” while dramatically making society considerably smaller, for many of us at least, would be more appropriated called “Yet Another Big Lie” (YABL), Cameron doing his utmost, it seems, to out-Blair the Great Liar Himself, Tony Blair.

Social Psychologists know a lot about social happiness, but Cameron pretends no one knows anything about it, in an attempt to give himself kudos. One thing is certain, and that is that happiness is a relative emotion. It is popularly said that “money cannot bring you happiness, but it helps”, and that is about the gist of it.

People can be unhappy because they yearn for something, and may feel ecstatic to get it, but the pleasure quite quickly wears off, and lack of some new object or experience kicks in to make people again feel unhappy. Being wealthy removes a lot of the fears that the poor have to endure through lack of sufficient cash, but having it just leaves people open to a new desire and new unhappiness. The greedy rich simply set themselves new targets of wealth. If a media mogul owns two newspapers, he will not be happy till he has three and a TV station. Then he wants Three TV stations, and so on.

These very rich people will unquestionably be very unhappy that the ordinary Joe and Jane often want to organize into trades unions to try to safeguard the pay and conditions that they have. Good pay and conditions cost money to the corporation boss, so they are much happier, for a while, when the unions are weak, or in their pocket, or when their lackeys in Washington and London are bringing in anti-union laws. That has been the situiation recently in Wisconsin where Governor Walker suddenly realized he meant to campaign over union power, but conveniently forgot while he conned the voters, so he has just reminded himself and the electorate that he aims to trash the unions as much as he can.

University of Notre Dame political scientist, Benjamin Radcliff, calls it “a perennial ideological debate in American politics—whether labor unions are good or bad for society”. You don’t need to be a professor of poliutics to know that effective unions are good for the members and bad for the members’ employers.

Are they good for society, though? Well, if, ultimately, the unions disappeared and bargaining was entirely at the whim of the boss, most people would be far worse off, and bosses would be therefore better off, at least initially. Unfortunately for the bosses, and this is something that oddly doesn’t make many of them unhappy, when the people do not have much cash to spend, they cannot buy things and industry collapses. That ought to make the bosses very unhappy one would imagine, but too few of them are intelligent enough to realize. Only the intelligent bosses do realize this, and they are very unpopular in their own circles for being wishy washy liberals or even hard nosed socialists.

Anyway, the general upper crust view is that Joe and Jane get too much, and should have less, so that is the message of the right wing media and the right wing puppets called politicians. Most academics too go along with the popular orthodoxy, however insane it is, but not all. Some academics warned against the 2008 crash, not many, but a few, but the rest, the bosses and the politicos, ignored them as Weary Willys.

Now, according to a study co-authored by Radcliff, people who live in countries with strong labor unions were happier, regardless of whether or not they belonged to a labor union themselves. Data from several European countries as well as Japan, Australia and the US, showed that happiness in life meant happiness at work. And the dominating factor that made people happier at work was the security they felt through having a strong union to help them. Happiness relates to the density of unions in a given country. Denmark ranks near the top in both categories, but the US ranks near the bottom for happiness in all the countries studied.

Radcliff found there was a direct effect and an indirect effect of strong labor unions. Members have obvious benefits—job security, fair wages, benefits and decent hours. But for those who are not members, there is the “indirect effect”.

People who have unionized jobs like their jobs better. And that puts pressure on other employers to extend the same benefits and wages to compete with the union shops.

Not surprisngly, lower paid labor union members found more contentment through organized labor than union members on the highest salaries. It’s no coincidence that American workers have never been more dissatisfied with their jobs.

Clever employers, those interested in long term stability rather than short term greed, would encourage trades union membership. They might have to lose some excessive short term profits, but would enjoy the benefits of stability over the long term. As it is, they should look on the Middle East in fear, and wonder what they might be stirring up at home by their unshackled greed, unjust treatment of the ordinary person, and bogus democracy. That goes in the UK for Cameron’s Conservative and Liberal democratic (or ConDem) coalition. People will only put up with so much, notably when they can see that the system is blatantly unfair.

Radcliff specializes in comparative and American politics. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the study of politics and happiness, having published articles on it in scholarly journals including the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Forces, and the Journal of Politics. He is author of the book Happiness, Economics and Politics.

Promises, Promises: Return to Principle Labour!

Industry and its employees are paying the price for a crisis brought on by the bankers. A loan to save 900 skilled workers from the dole cost a mere £4m, a single banker’s bonus! If taxpayers’ money can be used to bail out the banks, it should also be available to help vital industries. Yet the government persists in enforcing its old dogmas, as if nothing had changed.

Why try to force people who are ill or disabled or workshy and old people over 65 to work when there is not enough work for those who are able bodied and want to work? If there is not enough work for everyone, why not reduce the working week? If there is not enough work to go round, why did Labour help fix 48 hours as the minimum working week by refusing any amendment to the Brussels Working Time Directive. In doing this, the Labour government ignored its own party conference and the policy of both the trades unions democratically and publicly agreed through the TUC. It also defied the stance of most Labour and Socialist members of the European Parliament in an earlier vote in Strasbourg.

The Labour Party was founded by the trades union movement, and reduction in working hours was the aim of the first trades unions. Long hours and abject working conditions meant an early death for working people, including children. Strike pay was the only benefit that the first union offered, and reducing the hours of labour was, “the whole aim and intention of the union”, Will Thorne said. The eight hour day became a basic principle of trades unionism. The primary cause of trades unionism was not higher wages but shorter hours.

The first victory of British trades unionism was at the Beckton Gas Works in London’s East End—the replacement of a twelve hour day by eight hour shifts with no loss of pay. Since then the struggle to humanize work and change the economy has been long and arduous. For a century, the trades unions won significant reductions in hours through their struggles and sacrifices. By the seventies, the demand was for a 35 hour week. But the subsequent victory of the Thatcherite Tories and Blair’s Thatcherite New Labour—just when people thought they were voting for the rejection of Thatcherism—paved the way for the working week to rise from the 1980s onwards.

If the first British trades unionists knew shorter hours helped in the struggle against unemployment, the sons and daughters of clergymen, pseudes and shopkeepers constituting Blair’s and now Brown’s New Labour party simply do not get it still. Its decision to stick with a 48 hour week is a goad to all those who think the UK Labour government’s neoconservative, nineteenth century policies need to be fought with a campaign to reduce working hours in the face of rising unemployment.

Their slogan should be, “Shorter hours for better life”. Long hours preclude a good quality of life, cut down family time, erode away leisure time. And long hours of work are a health and safety issue. Health and safety at work should not be left up to arbitrary local negotiations between trade unions and employers, any more than burglary should be left up to the burgled and the burglar, to use Richard Leonard’s words. Both are matters of public interest, and so are a government responsibility in a civilized democratic society.

Paying workers dole money because they have no work at all for months or years makes no sense. What is required are loans for businesses that cut the working hours of their staff to avoid short time working, or going to the wall. Industry needs money, so credit from the banks has to be forced, if banks are determined to stay divorced from their prime purpose. Their prime purpose is not to devise pyramid selling schemes that allow dealers to get rich quick through the bonuses they pay each other. It is to lend deposited money at modest interest to entrepreneurs.

The nation has put cash into the banks to save them from their own folly. It is time to see it coming out again, in loans to industry. Workers are footing the bill for bankers’ blunders, but the money extracted from ordinary people’s pay should not be a long time commitment. The banks must be made to pay back what they have so far been given apparently unconditionally. They can only do it without stimulating an identical crisis, by returning to prudent business methods.

Too many Labour ministers have no knowledge or interest in the history of the party they represent. They are ignorant of any of the principles that motivated the party, and have opted instead for self gratification, and ingratiating themselves with US plutocrats and Russian oligarchs. They have forgotten that they were elected to serve working people, those who create wealth, not those who own the means of doing it, and certainly not themselves for personal gain.

Labour must return to principles, but since it lost all pretence of democracy in the Blair years, it has to be doggedly pushed and even threatened by the unions, which now represent not only blue collar workers but large numbers of middle class white collar workers, technicians, teachers and civil servants. This great trades union Leviathan has to get rolling again. It means members have to snap out of the lethargy induced by the borrowing boom of the Blair years. It was not a golden age but a tinsel age. Like Blair himself, it was all false.