Sean Thompson of Green Left offers his perspective on how we need to fight back.

We are in a period of crisis and opportunity during which you can almost feel the earth move beneath your feet. Three such periods have occurred in my lifetime: 1945-48, with the nationalisation of key sectors of the economy and the creation of the modern welfare state; 1968, with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the May Events in France and the invasion of Czechoslovakia; 1984/5, with the miners’ strike and its defeat. This is the fourth, and possibly the most critical. The crisis we face has moved from an acute to a chronic phase, but it is no less profound and its nature precludes the status quo from being an option for its resolution – either for us or the ruling class.

The Green Party and the cuts

In September 2008, the Green Party adopted a left neo-Keynesian approach to the financial crisis with its support for the Green New Deal document, calling for broadly the same policies as the People’s Charter and now the Coalition of Resistance: placing the banks under democratic control, increasing tax for the rich, plugging tax loopholes, withdrawing from Afghanistan, and cancelling the Trident replacement, along with massive investment in renewable energy and wider environmental transformation in Britain, leading to the creation of thousands of new green collar jobs, along with a public spending programme to invest in new homes, schools, and hospitals and public transport.

In August this year, Caroline Lucas was one of the signatories to the letter to the Guardian that launched the Coalition of Resistance. At its national conference in September, the Green Party passed a Green Left resolution calling for the building of ‘the broadest possible popular campaign against all moves to cut and/or privatise our public services, at both national and local levels, on a scale not seen since the anti Poll Tax campaign which fatally wounded Margaret Thatcher.’ The resolution went on to call on the whole party, including its national executive and elected members to put that central strategy into practical effect.

The limitations of green Keynesianism

It seems to me that apart from the existential problem at the heart of Keynesianism – that essentially it has always been about trying to stabilise a fundamentally unstable system – there are two major weaknesses in the Green Party’s position, and by extension that of much of the left, particularly the trade union leaderships.

First, while there is a wide popular consensus that those in the financial sector who accumulated vast personal and corporate wealth in the process of creating the crisis we now face should be held more to account and should pay a greater share of the costs they incurred, this needs to be transformed into a understanding that there is an urgent need to redistribute wealth away from corporate profits and towards wages and income; not only because justice demands it but also because it makes sound economic sense. As John Bellamy Foster and Harry Magdoff put it ‘it is the well-to-do who should foot the bill – not only for reasons of elementary justice, but also because they collectively and their system constitute the reason that things are as bad as they are; and because the best way to help both the economy and those at the bottom is to address the needs of the latter directly.’ But, they say: ‘capitalism takes advantage of social inertia, using its power to rob outright when it can’t just rely on “normal” exploitation. Without resistance from below the burden will simply be imposed on those at the bottom.’

The British ruling class is unable to react to the current world crisis by the orthodox methods of simultaneously destroying redundant capital and expanding its way out of recession. So it has little option – the scale of the crisis means that not only direct labour costs but the social wage has to come under the knife. Thus the government is seeking to undermine the foundations of the main institutions of the post war settlement; the National Health Service, comprehensive local authority education and social welfare provision and the benefits and pensions system, by a combination of savage cuts and progressive privatisation.

In order to do so it will have to effectively destroy the public sector unions. Therefore, the defence of trade union organisation becomes a central element of the campaign against the cuts and in this situation the only possible form of defence is attack. If it is to survive, the trade union movement has to be prepared to take on the state.

Therefore, within the anti-cuts movement we should be campaigning for both an alternative economic and political strategy, which incorporates not only a programme for economic reconstruction but also for the redistribution of both wealth and power.

Secondly, we have to develop a realistic industrial strategy. In last year’s Green Left pamphlet, Countering the Crisis, I wrote that ‘If our aim is to build a whole new low-carbon energy system, along with a totally renewed public transport system, a sustainable water supply system and an insulation retrofit programme for every home in the country, we are going to need nothing less than a new industrial revolution.’ The left has done virtually nothing about the idea of socially useful production since the work of Mike Cooley and the activists behind the Lucas Plan thirty years ago. Putting flesh on the bones of the concept of a sustainable industrial base is vital in this period, even though if at the moment we can offer only a cardboard model and an artist’s impression. This work has to begin again and as a result, members of Green Left will be drawing together a group from both within the Green Party and the broader movement over the next couple of months to start to build that model.

Building communities of resistance

Obviously, we have to campaign at a number of levels. In particular, of course, the role of the public service trade unions is crucial. It is their members who are going to be thrown out of work and their organisations that will – or at least should be – our strongest bulwark against the Government. Therefore we have to both attempt to build rank and file opposition and to demand of the union leaderships that they pull out all the stops in this fight – but we know that they won’t; indeed, given their class role, they can’t.

We have a model of a successful popular anti government campaign – the anti poll tax movement. However, throughout that campaign, while there was an amount of rhetorical opposition to the tax from the leadership of NALGO, not only did it do nothing to organise effective rank and file action to sabotage it, it strenuously opposed any such moves.

We have to recognise that the real opposition to the cuts will come from those directly affected by them and that it will manifest itself in thousands of small local struggles. Thus our key audience should be, in addition to rank and file trade unionists whose jobs and/or conditions are under threat, local groups of elderly or disabled people, patients facing the closure and/or privatisation of their hospitals, health centres and clinics, parents facing the closure or contraction of local education, and so on. The establishment of a popular political movement in Wyre Forest in reaction to the closure of a local hospital, which successfully fought two general elections and the sometimes enormous local marches against hospital closures up and down the country are examples of what can be achieved locally. Such local initiatives extended and co-ordinated on a national scale could shake the government and destabilise the coalition.

So rather than waste our breath making demands of the trade union leaderships that they call general strikes or take illegal action that we know they are not going to do, we should be making demands that they may find more difficult to oppose and which would make a real difference in developing a popular movement of local resistance. We should be demanding that the unions start giving practical support to community based opposition. Keep our NHS Public, for example, is struggling to maintain an excellent campaign with no full time staff and virtually no money. The health service unions should be pumping in funds and seconding staff to assist the campaign. We should be demanding that all unions with a political fund should be spending at least as much as they donate to the Labour Party on providing practical support to the grass roots community based campaigns and that all unions organise anti-cuts levies and fighting funds amongst their members.

We must ensure that the Coalition of Resistance is based on such local and popular campaigns rather than the usual faces and small left groups along with the paper support of TU executives. We should aim to be the catalyst of those local community campaigns, while the trade union leaders provide the fuel.