THERE can be only one demand for next week’s one-day strike by public sector workers and that must be for the TUC to call every trade union out on that day in a general strike against this coalition government.
There can be no doubt that the strike on November 30 has gone far beyond any one-day protest against the Tory/LibDem plans to cut public sector workers pensions to the bone.
It has become the focus of all the hatred felt by the working class and middle class against the destruction of the welfare state, the privatisation of the health service and the policy of wage cuts and job losses.
All these attacks have the same aim – to dump the crisis of the bankers and bosses fairly and squarely on the backs of working people, their families and especially their children.
Such is the depth of the banking collapse of capitalism that this burden would break the backs of the working class and propel an entire generation back to conditions of poverty not seen in over one hundred years.
Workers quite simply will not, and cannot, accept that this is the price to pay for keeping the bankers, speculators and billionaire businessmen in the luxury they assume as a god-given right.
On the contrary, they are driven to fight and have shown they are more than willing to confront the government in an all-out struggle using the enormous power that they have.
The government has responded to this with the usual array of threats to make striking illegal and the call for an army of scabs to break the strike.
Threats and intimidation, however, have proved useless as several events in the past few days have proved conclusively.
On Thursday, the normally staid and conservative leadership of the BMA was forced to drop its long held position on the government’s health bill.
This bill, that paves the way for hospital closures and the complete privatisation of the NHS, has been opposed in words by the BMA ruling national council whilst at the same time they have proceeded with negotiations to make it somehow acceptable to their members.
This treacherous ‘two pronged’ approach was abruptly halted when the council voted for all-out opposition to the bill, striking a huge blow to the right-wing trade union bureaucracy and the government.
On Friday, the news was dominated by the revolt by 800 UK Border Agency Staff, many of them middle managers, who are refusing to take part in a mass scabbing on strike day, at a stroke destroying plans to keep ports and airports open.
The government is learning quickly that, unlike in 1926, there is no army of middle-class scabs who are ready and waiting to be called in to break strikes.
Instead, they are experiencing the huge strength of the working class which is refusing to back down and accept poverty as the price for keeping this bankrupt capitalist system going.
The issue now is to use this strength and not allow it to be dissipated in futile protest aimed at persuading the government and the bankers to ease up on their attacks.
This means calling for everyone to come out on November 30 and turning this day into a stepping stone for the preparation and calling of an all-out general strike that has as its aim the bringing down of this coalition and going forward to a workers government.
This means building a new, revolutionary leadership that is prepared to use the overwhelming power of the working class to smash capitalism for good and advance to a socialist society.
Only the Workers Revolutionary Party is building this leadership, join us today.
