PUBLIC and Commercial Services Union leader Mark Serwotka said yesterday, just before the massive vote for strike action on June 30th by his PCS members was announced, that industrial action will grow over the coming months unless the government changes tack.
Everybody knows that there is not the slightest chance that the Tory-led coalition will ‘change tack’, and that, on the contrary, they intend to loot the pensions of the public sector in order to boost the survival chances of the bosses and the bankers as the capitalist crisis deepens.
The Coalition is in fact threatening to bring in new, even harsher, anti-union laws to prevent legal strike actions taking place, and effectively getting rid of the historic right to strike that was won by the working class in great struggles, at the cost of much blood, over very many years.
So a first class, historic collision of the two major classes, the working class and the ruling capitalist class, is on the agenda in the UK, for this year, throughout the summer and into the autumn.
This is a battle that will be fought to a finish, to a conclusion.
On June 30th more than a million workers are set to stop for the day, civil servants, teachers, lecturers and many other sections of the public sector.
This is then to be followed by more strike actions over pensions by the Unison trade union and even by the BMA doctors (who are going to be forced to pay an additional £7,000 a year for their pensions) in the autumn.
However, as the Greek experience proves, repeated, sporadic strike actions even if they are supported by hundreds of thousands, do not do the job, they remain very large protests that the bosses and the ruling class think that they will be able to ride out, or in the case of Greece resolve through bringing back a regime of colonels.
A serious defence of public sector pensions and jobs, a defence that will aid every worker and youth, including the private sector workers and the unemployed, is what is required.
This means serious action. Such serious action requires that June 30th be turned into a one-day general strike, where everybody stops on that day – students, school youth, transport workers, and all public sector and private sector workers.
This would be a serious action.
Even more serious for the ruling class would be the fact that such a mass general strike action was only a rehearsal, a massing of forces, for an indefinite general strike in the autumn, one that would have the capacity to bring the coalition down, whether or not it was declared to be legal or illegal, and would also have the capacity to bring in a workers government, not just another treacherous Labour government that would carry on from where the Tories left off.
A workers government will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in socialism.
Fabian simpletons will no doubt say that such action is extreme and what is required is a big protest, followed by another big protest in the autumn, that will give Labour a chance to win an election in five years time, by which time the NHS and the public sector will be privatised and the basic rights of the working class destroyed, regardless of what the policies of such a Labour government would be.
The capitalist crisis has brought forward a situation where the capitalist class cannot afford a Welfare State, an NHS or a public sector.
They intend to privatise them and leave health care up to charities and volunteer groups, just like the ‘good old days’.
Only a socialist revolution can defend these historic gains of the working class, and on June 30th this revolution must begin with a one-day general strike.
