TODAY’S meeting of the TUC general council must get off the fence and call for an immediate all-out, indefinite general strike to bring down this coalition government and replace it with a workers government.
Nothing short of this action can match the urgency of the situation facing the working class today as the coalition government launches an all-out war aimed at the destruction of every single right won by workers in over one hundred years of struggle.
Driving forward an increasingly desperate bourgeoisie is the historic crisis of capitalism that since 2008 has expressed itself in the collapse of the banking system, plunging country after country into state bankruptcy.
Along with the collapse of the world’s banks has been the decimation of manufacturing industry – far from being able to ‘grow itself’ out of slump and recession, the economies of Europe, America and Japan are contracting at an accelerating pace.
The response of the capitalist class throughout the world has been the same – to try and dump the full effect of the crisis on the backs of workers through pay cuts, massive unemployment, attacks on pensions and the wholesale destruction of welfare provision.
In Britain, this unelected Tory-led coalition is intent on the complete destruction of the NHS, the privatisation of remaining public services such as Royal Mail and the fire service, imposing savage cuts in benefits to the unemployed and driving people out of their homes through measures like the bedroom tax.
This unprecedented declaration of war against workers, and especially young people, cannot be defeated by appeals aimed at changing the mind of this government, it is driven by the objective requirements of a bankrupt capitalist system that can only survive if it manages to make the working class pay for the crisis with its very blood.
It is under these conditions of class war that the TUC general council is meeting and will be discussing the call from Unite and other major unions to consider the question of a general strike.
The whole issue of a general strike has been forced onto the agenda by the determination of workers not to sit back and see their lives destroyed in order to save the banks.
The question of a general strike has taken hold of the working class and cannot any longer be ignored by the TUC.
The danger now is that there is clearly an all-out attempt to transform the demand for a general strike into the call for a 24 hour stoppage – to turn it into just a bigger form of protest designed to put pressure on the government to ease up on its attacks.
Already it is becoming clear that the trade union leaders are beginning to hedge their bets over the call even for a 24-hours general strike with endless talk about its legality.
This prevarication reveals that this leadership is not serious about leading a real fight.
A 24-hours general strike will not change the mind of this government – it represents a diversion from what is really required, namely an all-out general strike that has as its aim throwing out the coalition and going forward, not to a Labour government that is in complete agreement with the Tories that workers must pay for the crisis, but to a workers government that will advance to a socialist society.
The TUC must be told that it either calls the indefinite general strike or that it will be removed and replaced by a leadership prepared to do what is necessary for the working class to win.
This means building a new leadership in the unions, a leadership prepared to lead not just a strike but a revolution.
Only the WRP is fighting to build this leadership and we call upon every worker and youth to join us today.
