[Debate] British Trotskyist on the New Anti-Capitalism (and Networking)
LFC Scally
lfcscally at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 18 19:36:23 BST 2012
Brilliant Peter-I love the way you call for plurality, openess etc etc and then cant resist the urge to forwarn lmfao and I dont want to hog the debate list so am happy to chat off-list but I have never in my 19 years in the SWP heard anyone say we are a marxist-Leninst party. Indeed, that is a term we use to refer to (and so distance ourselves from) what is also called Stalinism of the various Communist Parties of the world. Peter MarXisT-LeNNONIsts R Not Us.
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:37:43 +0200
From: peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com
To: debate-list at fahamu.org
Subject: [Debate] British Trotskyist on the New Anti-Capitalism (and Networking)
Peter sez:
Yup I know it's long, and I know it is Marxist-Leninist, but it is serious and thought-provoking. It's from the current International Socialist Journal.
Now read on...
The shock of the new: anti-capitalism and the crisis
Issue: 134
Posted: 27 March 12
Jonny Jones
In February of this year the Tory employment minister, Chris
Grayling, launched an astonishing attack on the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP) while live on national radio. Responding to a campaign against a
government “workfare” scheme which puts unemployed people to work for no
pay, Grayling claimed that the SWP were “part of a broader
anti-capitalist trend on our society. Campaign groups are waging war
very deliberately against big business”.1
The fact that the government were spooked enough by the campaign
against workfare to say such a thing indicates that anti-capitalism is
indeed back on the agenda.
The past 18 months have seen the transformation of anti-capitalist
politics across the world. The period has given rise to a multiplicity
of struggles: from the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa
(MENA) to the movement of the indignados in Spain and the
similar protests in Greece; from the student revolt in Britain to the
rise of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to the global explosion of occupations
that took place after the 15 October day of action. Across the world
battle lines were drawn in the popular consciousness of millions, in the
terms first popularised at the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York,
between, on the one hand, the “1 percent of the population [who] have
ended up with all the benefits of the last ten years of economic growth,
control the wealth, own the politicians”, and, on the other, everybody
else: the 99 percent.2
The events of 15 October could easily lead to talk of the rebirth of
the anti-capitalist movement. But it would be more accurate to see what
has happened as the emergence of a new form of anti-capitalism. For
while there are striking similarities with the movement that unfolded
after the Battle of Seattle in 1999, there are also clear differences
which have led to significant differences in practice. As Seumas Milne
pointed out after 15 October, when occupations spread around the world:
these occupations echo both the spirit and organisation of the
anti-corporate movement that erupted in Seattle in 1999. The tactic of
occupying a symbolic public space (as opposed to strikes, sit-ins and
marches) can be traced back to Greenham Common in the 1980s through a
string of often dubious “colour revolutions” over the past decade.
But it’s this year’s drama in Tahrir Square (acknowledged with an
Egyptian flag at the London camp) that has given it such evocative
power. And while the 1990s anti-capitalist globalisation protests took
place at a time of boom and speculative frenzy, today’s occupations are
targeting a global capitalism in the deepest crisis.3
The new anti-capitalism, then, has emerged hand in hand with the
return of revolution to the stage of history and in the midst of an
economic crisis that has exposed capitalism as not merely a nasty system
but an unstable one.
While the 15 October protests announced the arrival of the new
movement to the world, it would be a mistake to limit this new
anti-capitalism simply to the Occupy movement. It is more accurate to
think of the various national manifestations of revolt against the
crisis as being part of a movement of the 99 percent, and the spirit of
this movement touching upon almost every campaign and mobilisation that
occurs. This polarisation between top and bottom, between rich and poor,
has struck a chord with those resisting austerity or struggling for
democracy. For the radical left, and especially the US left, the concept
of the 99 percent has been an enormous step forwards in terms of class
consciousness: “The Occupy movement, in its opposition of the 99 percent
to the 1 percent, creates, in highly popularised form, a class analysis
that is consistent with Marxism”.4
The new movements have also given rise to a flurry of writing,
journalism and theorising, both in print and online, on their nature and
their direction. The volume and breadth of this output show the huge
levels of involvement in the protests and the eclectic nature of their
ideological underpinnings. Familiar reference points for the
anti-capitalist movement, such as Guy Debord and Michel Foucault, nestle
alongside the likes of Clay Shirky, the New York University professor
and theorist of the social effects of new media technology. The
movements have also seen the re-emergence of variants of Marxist thought
as a touchstone. Sometimes this has been directly through Marx’s own
writings, but more often through the works of the likes of Slavoj Zizek
and Alain Badiou, writers who will be familiar to many of the
participants in the last wave of anti-capitalist struggle, or new
theorists such as Nina Power and Mark Fisher, who have themselves been
participants in the new movements.
The eclecticism and urgency of much of this writing are perhaps best
distilled in a book from an unlikely source. Paul Mason, the economics
editor of the BBC current affairs programme Newsnight, posted a blog on 5 February 2011 called “Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere”.5
Writing less than a week before the fall of Mubarak, Mason put together
a list of observations which he thought explained the dynamic of
protest that was spreading round the world. A year later he published Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions,
a book in which he refined his list and attempted to expand his
observations. While Mason insists that “the book makes no claim to be a
‘theory of everything’”, and that readers “don’t file it under ‘social
science’: it’s journalism”,6
he goes on to attempt to present a systematic account of why the new
movements have emerged: “Why is it happening now? Ultimately, the
explanation lies in three big social changes: in the demographics of
revolt, in technology and in human behaviour itself”.7
Mason’s “demographics of revolt” refer to the interplay between
three sections of society: the “graduate with no future”, the urban poor
and the organised working class. His technological changes are the rise
of the internet and social media, and the ubiquity of new technologies,
such as laptops and smartphones, on which to access them.8
His most extensive claim is that these technological changes have led
to significant changes in human behaviour patterns and to the
possibility of developing “a new model of human freedom” called
“networked individualism”.9
These claims express some of the most widespread, commonsense ideas in
the new movements. In this article I want to take issue with some of
these claims, to unpick them and to try to show what in them is of worth
and what must be discarded if we are to properly understand the
situation and to develop a strategy for the 99 percent.
That being said, this article will only be able to touch on elements
of what has happened and what has been written. I will, in the main,
limit myself to discussing the movements in Europe and the US. While
some of the biggest movements of the past year have been found in Latin
America and, of course, the MENA region, it would be outside the scope
of my experience to delve too deeply into them.10
Similarly, I do not seek to duplicate previous analyses of the events
of the past 18 months which have been covered in this journal;11
nor do I seek to unnecessarily restate the substantial body of analysis
of the post-Seattle anti-capitalist movement built up especially by
Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman.12
Rather I want to explore what is new about the movements that have
arisen and what opportunities and challenges they provide for
revolutionaries who seek to participate and intervene in them.
What’s past is prologue
The anti-capitalist movement that emerged in the wake of the Battle
of Seattle in 1999 provided a new lease of life for radical critique of
the capitalist system. This was despite developing out of relatively
small beginnings. As Chris Harman wrote in the wake of events:
Sometimes the symbolism of events gives them an importance out of
all proportion to the numbers of people directly involved in them. Such
was the case with the protests outside the Seattle meeting of the World
Trade Organisation on 30 November 1999. The demonstrations themselves
were not particularly large compared with many since. There were perhaps
30,000 demonstrators at the height of the protests.
But they signalled something of enormous importance. Almost exactly
ten years earlier the fall of the Berlin Wall had been presented as the
end of socialism, leaving capitalism in apparently unchallenged control
of the world for the rest of humanity’s existence. Seattle was the
eruption of a new challenge.13
The development of the new anti-capitalist movements was quite
different. The demonstrations of 15 October 2011, which heralded the
return of a truly global anti-capitalism, were enormous: well over 1.5
million people protested in 950 cities around the world. The biggest
mobilisations were in Spain, where the indignados of the 15-M
movement, who had initially called the day of action, brought over a
million people out. In New York, home of the OWS camp that had provided
the impetus for the global demonstrations, around 100,000 gathered.14
In Britain the mobilisations were much smaller, but still involved over
3,000 people. In every case the spirit of the Arab Revolutions and the
subsequent mobilisations in Spain and Syntagma Square in Athens had
enthused and radicalised those taking part in the protests. The
contribution of OWS, posing its challenge at the heart of global
capitalism and calling on the 99 percent to join it, was seismic.
Occupations sprang up around the world, from South Carolina to South
Korea.
But behind each sizeable protest was a process of development. Most
had been initiated by activists who had been building against austerity
since at least the outbreak of the crisis—though after 15 October many
became the property of huge numbers of totally new activists. In
Britain, for example, there had been a long series of events leading up
to the day.
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 there had been a
series of anti-systemic protests around the world. The SWP in Britain
had initiated anti-capitalist protests in the City of London on 10
October and in Canary Wharf on 31 October at which hundreds of mainly
young activists had run through the streets. This kind of protest was
still, at this stage, an idea whose time had not yet come. Its arrival
was hastened by the launch of the Israeli government’s “Operation Cast
Lead” in December 2008, a savage assault on the population of Gaza,
which led to enormous protests around the world. In London a
demonstration called by the Stop the War Coalition, the British Muslim
Initiative and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign saw up to 150,000 march
on the Israeli Embassy. Police fought protesters who attempted to lay
siege to the embassy.15
Alongside the protests there was a wave of student occupations
calling on institutions to cut ties with Israel and adopt “Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions” policies. In the main these occupations were
led by the radical left in coalition with anti-war and pro-Palestine
students. But the occupations spread further than the usual bases of the
left. This wave of occupations laid important groundwork for the events
to come.
The first significant anti-capitalist protest in Britain during the
crisis was the one held against the meeting of the G20 in London in
April 2009. The demonstration took place just days after a trade union
and NGO backed march of 40,000 people, but was of a very different
character. Called by a coalition of anarchists and autonomists under the
name G20 Meltdown, the protest gave many of the 4,000 or so in
attendance their first taste of tactics which would become all too
familiar: “kettling” and police violence. These tactics led to the death
of a bystander named Ian Tomlinson at the hands of one officer, and saw
a peaceful Climate Camp protest beaten out of the area by riot police
as activists chanted in unison “This is not a riot!” and “The whole
world is watching”.16
Climate Camp itself had been one of the main areas for
anti-capitalists and autonomists to organise in Britain. However, after
the demoralisation that swept the climate movement in the wake of the
Copenhagen talks, Climate Camp found itself facing diminishing numbers.
Despite orientating around the financial crisis by targeting the Royal
Bank of Scotland headquarters in Edinburgh, it only managed to attract a
few hundred to the camp. Debates in the camp were fascinating. As I
reported at the time, some “explicitly referred to Climate Camp as a
white, middle class organisation and discussed ways involve more working
class people”.17
By 2011, the camp had wound itself up, putting out a statement saying,
“Now is a chance to team up with the anti-cuts and anti-austerity
movements and play a crucial role in the revolutionary times ahead.
Anything but coordinated action is doomed to fail”.18
By this point the student movement had already shaken British society,
and the Arab Revolutions were shaking the world. Many of the leading
figures of Climate Camp—and, as in any “leaderless” movement, there were
leading figures—were already involved in UK Uncut and would go on to
play a key role in initiating the Occupy movement in London.
Similarly in the US there was a backdrop to the mobilisations for
OWS: “Too easily overlooked in discussions of digital tactics is that
the general assemblies of Occupy Wall Street had been preceded earlier
in the summer by those of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, a coalition
of trade unions and community groups against Mayor Bloomberg’s austerity
measures. Many of the occupiers were members of this alliance”.19
One clear similarity between the movements of 2011 and the
post-Seattle movement has been the question of whether or not they are,
in themselves, “anti-capitalist”. Many at the London Occupy camp, which
was forced to set up camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral after access to
the adjacent London Stock Exchange was blocked by the police, have made a
point of insisting that the camp is not about “anti-capitalism”, going
so far as to remove the “Capitalism Is Crisis” banner that it inherited
from Climate Camp. Similarly, the 15-M movement in Spain, while
containing many activists who define themselves as anti-capitalist, was
best known for its demand for “real democracy now”. For revolutionaries,
however, it is important to be clear on the content of these protests.
They are, like the post-Seattle movement, “anti-systemic” in that they
“do not simply campaign over specific grievances—say, to do with free
trade or the environment or Third World debt—but [are] motivated by a
sense of the inter-connection between an immense variety of different
injustices and dangers”.20
By these criteria, we should understand the movements as
anti-capitalist, even when their opposition is couched in moralistic
terms, or in the language of radical reform—there were, after all,
significant reformist currents in the post-Seattle movement.21
One major difference between the post-Seattle movement and today is
evident from the nature of their geneses. As Harman stated in the wake
of Seattle, “A decade and more of frustration and disillusionment, of
resignation and despair, had suddenly found a focus. Out of Seattle a
new international movement began to coalesce”.22
The international character of the movement was more than just a sense
of international solidarity: the movement coalesced around international
mobilisations, most importantly the World Social Forum and its regional
offshoots. While the movement had bases in different countries, its
main activities were far more connected, both organisationally and
temporally, on an international level. At the level of the nation state,
many campaigns would sometimes find very few occasions on which to
unite as a movement.
The new anti-capitalism is very different. Despite the extraordinary
levels of internationalism that imbue the movements—in part because
they are everywhere, in part because of the practical links through the
internet and social media, in part because of the crucial role of the
Arab Revolutions in forming them—there is, in practice, far less
international coordination. Some might argue that, in fact, the lack of
significant international coordination is an illusion and that there is
tremendous “decentralised” international coordination. But any
coordination that is happening is at a much lower level than previously.
In part this can be attributed to the more informal nature of the
networks that make up today’s protests, in comparison to the
organisations and parties (Attac France, Rifondazione Comunista in
Italy, etc) that formed the backbone of coordination last time around.
Most important, though, is that each of the local movements finds itself
locked into the fight of its life with its own national government,
which is pushing through austerity and cuts on an unprecedented level.
This means that the tempo of struggle in each country is different: the
defeats and victories, retreats and advances cannot be measured on an
international terrain so easily—though it is certainly the case that a
victory or defeat in any one country will be keenly felt by those
involved overseas.
The role of states in bailing out the banks and keeping the system
afloat means that, unlike at the time of the post-Seattle movement,
there can be no illusion that the state is not a crucially important
actor in the struggle. No longer are they just deploying the
police—though they are doing that, and with increasing ferocity—but they
are also imposing the cuts that are generating the bitterness and anger
that has given rise to the protests in the first place. These movements
are not simply a moral rejection of the worst impacts of neoliberalism,
but a fight for the future of all involved.
The end of “the end of history”?
In a chapter entitled “Nobody Saw it Coming: How the World’s
Collective Imagination Failed”, Paul Mason argues that the outbreak of
revolt against the effects of the economic crisis marked the end of the
period of “capitalist realism”. Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?,
describes this concept as “the widespread sense that not only is
capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that
it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”.23
Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or
to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is
more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the
production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and
acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action…
Neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in
the ethical sense. Over the past 30 years, capitalist realism has
successfully installed a “business ontology” in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.24
Fisher’s concept has been very influential among many involved in
the new movements, and provides a useful antidote to those who see the
world as shaped by a “media conspiracy”. The strength of his concept is
that, while he locates the origins of this malaise in the turn to
neoliberalism, he sees the dominance of capitalist realism as having
been “fought for and established” in the 1980s, a period which witnessed
the collapse of Stalinism and the defeat of the Great Miners’ Strike of
1984-85. The fact that the “closure of the pits was defended precisely
on the grounds that keeping them open was not ‘economically realistic’”
was itself a reflection of that notion, that everything should be run as
a business, no matter the human cost.25
Fisher’s capitalist realism is not simply reducible to
neoliberalism. Indeed, he argues of the bailouts which followed the
collapse of Lehman Brothers:
It quickly became clear that, far from constituting the end of
capitalism, the bank bailouts were a massive reassertion of the
capitalist realist insistence that there is no alternative. Allowing the
banking system to disintegrate was held to be unthinkable, and
what ensued was a vast haemorrhaging of public money into private
hands. Nevertheless, what did happen in 2008 was the collapse of the
framework which has provided ideological cover for capitalist
accumulation since the 1970s. After the bank bail-outs neoliberalism
has, in every sense, been discredited. That is not to say that
neoliberalism has disappeared overnight; on the contrary, its
assumptions continue to dominate political economy, but they do so now
no longer as part of an ideological project that has a confident forward
momentum, but as inertial, undead defaults.26
So the collapse of the banking system both reinforced capitalist
realism and also undermined it. This opened up the possibility of a
“relaxing of a certain kind of mental paralysis”. Combined with the
effects of the bailouts and the crisis—particularly the attacks by
states on public sector provision and a leap in unemployment—the
conditions for the emergence of a serious “anti-systemic” protest
movement were very much in place.
Fisher’s arguments, grounded in a Marxist critique of capitalism,
provide a healthy counterweight to those who would argue that the
neoliberal period saw the transformation of capitalism into something
fundamentally different. This could be seen by the increasing dominance
of the “network” metaphor to understand both capitalist production and
the relationships between those subordinated by capital. Paul Mason
draws on the work of Richard Sennett and argues that changes in
capitalism have led to the emergence of a new ideal type of employee: “a
person with weak institutional loyalty, low levels of informal trust
and high levels of anxiety about their own competence” and who needs “’a
thick network of social contacts’: their ideal habitat is the global
city, at whose bars, coffee shops, Apple stores, dance clubs and speed
dating events they can meet lots of equally rootless people… The revolts
of 2010-11 have shown, quite simply, what this workforce looks like
when it becomes collectively disillusioned”.27
Mason connects this new type of person with a new way of doing things
through the prism of Manuel Castells’s idea of “the network society”,
arguing that “the combined impact of the social network and the
individualistic self would facilitate a clear break with the old forms
of organisation, including parties, unions and permanent campaigns”.28
The problem with this line of argument is that, far from breaking
with the conceptual framework of capitalist realism which Mason argues
was destroyed by the new movements, it internalises and reifies it. As
Kevin Doogan argues in his New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work,
the works of Sennett and Castells belong very much to the wave of
theory that accompanied neoliberalism and in which “market forces appear
naturalised”:
Whereas discussion of “old capitalism” might invite consideration
of social classes as agencies and the distribution of income as
outcomes, new capitalism is a confluence of narratives that captures and
represents the world in terms of abstract, self-sustaining social
processes. In the absence of strategic actors such as governments,
corporations or classes, social processes appear disembodied, “all
motion no matter”... Little wonder then that this mode of representation
finds such appeal in neoliberal circles.29
The reduction of analysis of society to abstract processes, then, is
one that is fundamental to much of the talk of a “network society”.
Doogan suggests that if there were a similar shift in medicine, “it
might lead to a ‘new haematology’ exclusively concerned with the flow of
blood round the body, yet remaining wholly uninterested in the heart”.30
It is possible to see the flipside of this tendency in some of the
modes of organising that have been thrown up by the new movements. In
the Occupy London camp, for example, there has been an overwhelming
obsession with “process” as opposed to “ideology”. This often means in
practice that a lot of time is spent discussing how decisions are made
rather than making decisions.
The concern is that by asserting these concepts as matter of fact
truths, boosters of the network society who argue there has been a
fundamental transformation of class relations become “left wing
harmonies in the neoliberal chorus”31 at just the point at which the neoliberal chorus has been shown to be very much out of tune.
The network sobriety
The fall of Stalinism, the rightward drift of social democracy and
the decline of the revolutionary left during the period of capitalist
realism has meant that many new activists eschew both traditional
reformist organisations and revolutionary socialism in favour of new
“commonsense” forms of activity that seek alternative solutions to the
problem of organisation. The elevation of the tactic of occupation to a
strategic imperative partly stems from an attempt to overcome the need
for a political party with the occupation of physical space—an
organising centre where “organisation” remains informal and consensual.
Similarly, the concept of the network is one that arises time and time
again in the new movements. Often it is used to suggest that “old” forms
of organisation are unnecessary. However, this is usually achieved by
airbrushing the role of organisations out of the story altogether.
Throughout Mason’s book there are references to individual members
of organisations without ever pointing out their membership. This serves
to obfuscate the real range of social actors in the protest movements.
In his discussion of the British movement, for example, one would come
away thinking that the radical left had played no role in the student
movement. In fact, it was the radical left who had led students into
Millbank, initiating the now legendary siege; it was the radical left
who initiated the “Day X” protests that saw 130,000 students walk out in
protest two weeks later. Mason does not even mention organisations such
as the Education Activist Network or the National Campaign against Fees
and Cuts, while the role of university occupations in generalising the
movement is greatly overstated. In the discussion of UK Uncut its growth
from a single protest to 15 protests three days later is not explored
at all. You are left with the impression that this was another
Twitter-generated movement. In reality, organisations like the SWP (who
were on the first UK Uncut protest) called on their members to organise
and join protests wherever they could. This is not to downplay the
energy and ingenuity of those who devised the UK Uncut campaign in the
slightest—one of the most inspiring things about the events of the past
year has been the extent to which the radical left and many anarchists
and autonomists have been able to cooperate fruitfully around many
issues. Nor does it suggest that social media have not played an
important role in UK Uncut and other campaigns. It does, however,
suggest that abstract discussion of networks and social media will not
get us very far in understanding how the new movements grew and
developed.
One of the fundamental incongruities in Mason’s arguments about
networks is on the question of strategy. Despite his repeated assertion
that “the network defeats the hierarchy”, the picture of the movement in
Britain that Mason leaves us with is bleak. The “horizontalist”
movement which grew out of the student occupations is left in “a crisis
of direction that it is still struggling to recover from”,32
the reason being that there was a “problem which youthful, socially
networked horizontalist movements would have everywhere when things got
serious: the absence of strategy”.33
In a previous article on the role of social media in social movements, I
argued that this very problem would emerge and that online networks
would not be a solution to strategic questions:
Mason argues that “ideas arise, are very quickly market-tested and
then either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves into the
mainstream culture or, if they are no good, disappear”. But what does
Paul mean by good or bad? Does this have any bearing on how effective
they are in bringing about fundamental social change?... The danger of
deciding tactics by waiting to see what catches on opens the possibility
that activism that is very rewarding in the short term is taken up at
the expense of strategic thinking about the long-term goals.34
The tendency to reify networks fundamentally leads us up a blind
alley when trying to understand the movements or to develop strategy. In
fact, it is quite unnecessary to polarise between “network” and
“organisation”:
Networks are not an alternative to organisations—a network is just
an analytical device that sociologists (and computer scientists) use to
understand relations between actors (or nodes). Networks may contain
organisations, and organisations may contain networks, both formal and
hierarchical and informal and non-hierarchical, as well as everything in
between.35
So in posing a network as an alternative form of political action to
organisation, the real arguments and differences between activists tend
to be mystified. In fact, what is happening is the rejection of
centralisation in favour of decentralised decision making. Given the
problems that decentralised networks of activists have had in
formulating effective strategy, it becomes necessary to conceive of a
method of activity which employs a level of centralisation. However, one
of the objections offered by proponents of networks is that centralism,
and the political organisation that it implies, tends towards the
development of leadership elites. For example, Aaron Peters and Guy
Aitchison, two activists who were heavily involved in the student
movement of 2010, argue that:
those who back the power of networks are content for the movement
to remain precisely that, a social movement, held together by on and
offline networks, and formulating a shared identity and set of political
goals in an organic process of bottom-up deliberation, whereas those
who want central organisation…argue for the effectiveness of hierarchy, a
form of organisation which is any case inescapable, as de facto
leaderships emerge in a process described by Robert Michels at the
beginning of the 20th century as the “iron law of oligarchy”.36
Colin Barker summarises Michels’s view as “organisation engenders both oligarchy, the emergence of leaders who can prevent challenges to their rule, and conservatism, the diversion of democratic movements from their original goals”,37
which Michels believes stems in part from “the incompetence of the
masses [which] is almost universal throughout the domains of political
life”.38
Michels is undoubtedly pointing towards real tendencies within
political organisations but he does so from a reactionary and elitist
starting point and without a material explanation of where such
tendencies might arise from, accepting what Duncan Hallas described as
“a secularised version of the original sin myth”.39 But, as John Molyneux points out:
In opposition to Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” there exists, in
any party or organisation whose leadership does not wield the combined
sticks and carrots of state power, an almost universal “law of
democracy”. In any voluntary organisation where membership does not
itself confer material privilege…there is an element of democracy in
that the leadership requires the consent of the rank and file in the
form of its continuing membership and support.40
If we can move away from both the false dichotomy between network
and organisation, as well as the fatalism that assumes that all
political organisation is destined to slide into a hierarchical and
anti-democratic organisation, it becomes possible to conceive of
organisational forms which have the ability to resolve strategic and
tactical questions in a necessarily democratic manner.
In this sense, one can understand the revolutionary party as a network: one that is not hierarchical but centralised,
in order to most effectively develop strategy and implement tactical
decisions. The strength of the party form in this respect is that it
allows for a method which is both centralist and democratic, which
allows for both swift action and an inclusive method of decision making
that does not simply give power to those with the time, skills and
energy to be absorbed in “process”. This network of revolutionaries will
in turn be part of other networks, such as networks of activists in the
anti-cuts movement, rank and file networks in the trade unions, student
left networks, etc. It is the very fact of this cross-cutting nature of
political activity that allows members of the party to maintain an
understanding of the levels and unevenness of class consciousness among
workers and other activists. They will learn from the advanced layers of
the class with whom they are engaged in campaigns and activity, but
they will also be able to gain an understanding of the views of less
politically conscious workmates. This network is then able to feed the
experience of the class to a democratic forum that can centralise it and
attempt to formulate strategic outlooks and implement tactical
decisions. This is necessarily a two-way relationship and one which
relies on deep political trust among the leading activists of the
organisation at national and local levels, as well as between them and
those workers they seek both to learn from and influence. Socialist
organisation has historically taken a number of forms, but in order to
be effective against capital it must be made up of a well-rooted network
of revolutionaries who are at the heart of the struggle.41
The youth are revolting!
An undeniable feature of the wave of the new movements has been the presence of young people and students at its forefront.42
It is not difficult to understand why this would be the case. On top of
the attacks on higher education which have accompanied austerity
programmes across the world, there has been a huge and disproportionate
growth of unemployment among young people:
Our generation has produced the largest-ever cohort of unemployed
youth, according to the International Labour Organisation. The ILO’s
data show that youth unemployment spiked in an unprecedented way over
the past four years—by 50 percent more than in previous recessions.
The epicentre of this crisis is located in the Arab world. In a
region where two out of three people are under the age of 30, some
estimates put the youth unemployment rate as high as 40 percent. In
Europe, the overall rate tops 20 percent. In Spain and Greece, nearly 45
percent of young people have no job. In the United States, the Labor
Department pegs youth unemployment at 18 percent, which is almost
certainly an underestimation.43
In Britain, “Unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds has risen
sharply. In 2004 the figure stood at 12 percent. By the onset of the
recession in 2008 it had risen to 15 percent, and by 2010 one in five
was unemployed… In London the figure stood at 22 percent in 2011”.44
Paul Mason identifies “a new sociological type: the graduate with no future” as central to the movements:
The financial crisis of 2008—which would bankrupt states as well as
banks—created a generation of twenty-somethings whose projected
life-arc had switched, quite suddenly, from an upward curve to a
downward one. The promise was: “Get a degree, get a job in the corporate
system and eventually you’ll achieve a better living standard than your
parents.” This abruptly turned into: “Tough, you’ll be poorer than your
parents”.45
Mason blurs the distinction between graduates and students who have
not yet graduated, but the point stands: a sense of having one’s future
snatched away has been a strong motivating force behind the emergence of
such large numbers of young people on protests across the world.46
However, while the immediate motivations of graduates and students
entering struggle might be different from those of previous generations,
it is questionable whether their response has been qualitatively
different to those we have witnessed in the past. In 1987 Chris Harman
wrote:
The student population is not a homogeneous class within
capitalism, but a heterogeneous grouping of young people who come from
different classes and who are destined to enter different classes on
completing their studies. Their situation structures them in such a way
as to rule out stabilised, continuing forms of organisation, similar to
the trade union organisations of wage labour.
This situation as a transitory grouping between the major classes
also means they are very sensitive to elements of social crisis in
society as a whole. They often react to these before other groups in
society. The student population suddenly erupts in an explosive fashion.
Protests develop out of nowhere to involve thousands of students in a
matter of days.47
This seems to be an accurate reflection of the way in which students
fit into the system and have reacted to the crisis this time around. It
reflects the continuing fact that “students are not tied eight hours a
day to a workbench or office desk. They can get together to discuss and
mobilise in a way that those who work full time can rarely do.” The
dynamic also applies to unemployed youth, since “young people…can show a
level of verve, imagination and fighting spirit that has often been
knocked out of their elders by the daily grind of the existing system”.48
The massive increase in the number of people going to university has
meant that the dividing lines between students, young workers and
unemployed youth have been increasingly blurred. New graduates often
remain friends with people who are still at university. For the
unemployed graduate living in the city, hanging around the old college
and going out to student club nights often provide both a welcoming and
cheap social environment. So significant layers of non-students remain
part of that milieu which can rush into struggle, yet they are
unencumbered by having to attend lectures or keep a regular timetable.
These people have been key to sparking the Occupy movement, the indignados
protests in Spain and the similar occupations of squares in Greece. So
the emergence of students and unemployed youth at the forefront of
struggle this time around in many ways fits with previous patterns of
revolt.
Mason suggests that the lines between the graduates, urban poor and
organised working class are increasingly blurred. However, in his
account, he seems determined to shoehorn various groups of people he
encounters on his travels into seemingly quite inappropriate categories.
Simon Basketter argues, “Too often Mason’s categorisation relies upon a
superficial sociological view. For instance, striking tax collectors in
Greece become part of Mason’s new graduate class rather than being
treated as part of the labour movement”.49
Mason’s tendency to generalise from anecdotal experiences on his
travels leads to a lack of clarity on the important questions of class.
Much of the media is concerned with drawing a “generational gap”
between young protesters and their elders. Mason suggests that before
the outbreak of struggle in 2011 “those in power comforted themselves”
with the thought that there might be “an ‘age war’ between the baby
boomers and the iPod generation”.50 So Martin Wolf writes in the Financial Times
that the “reason the world’s youth is in a revolting state of mind” is
that they are at a disadvantage to the older generation—locked out of
the job market but doomed to look after the ageing generation of “baby
boomers” when they retire. His solution: in countries with a young
population, his asinine suggestion is “to create a dynamic economy that
brings hope of gainful employment”; in higher-income countries with
older populations, however, “older people must work longer than they
expected, without making the young believe their opportunities are
blocked for what must seem like an eternity”.51 A New York Times
column written shortly afterwards opined: “Spending on education will
be cut while mortgage subsidies and entitlements for the elderly are
untouchable”.52
These arguments blur the real divides in society. The gap is not
between young and old but between rich and poor, the 1 percent and the
99 percent, the boss and the worker. Making workers retire later or
cutting pensions is of no use to the younger generation who will at some
point want to retire and enjoy a decent pension, confounding those who
hoped for a generation gap to blunt the radicalism of the movements.
Perhaps the most important of the developments in the new
anti-capitalist movements, then, has been the speed at which new and
younger protesters have linked up with the labour movement. In part,
this can be seen as a reflection of the fact that “the increased numbers
of students in work…means students are more likely be sympathetic to
workers’ struggle. Arguments for solidarity with workers have gained a
lot of traction in the movement. Conversely, most working class families
will have a child in either further or higher education”.53
So it should not be a surprise that students and school children in
France should strike, occupy and protest against raises to the pension
age; that students in Britain should join picket lines with their
lecturers; or that Occupy movements on both sides of the Atlantic should
reach out to the labour movement. However, it should not be assumed
that these links are automatic or indefinite. In many cases, the
intervention of socialists and other radicals has played an important
part in winning arguments and solidarity.
Who are the 99 percent?
In an article “Revolutionary Organisation and the ‘Occupy Movement’”
Paul Le Blanc makes the important point that Occupy has popularised a
class analysis that is consistent with Marxism:
The modern-day system of corporate rule and exploitation overseen
by the wealthy 1 percent (and their servants in the upper fringe of the
99 percent) is what we mean by capitalism. The heart and soul, and great majority, of the 99 percent are the working class
(blue collar, white collar, unemployed, etc). The goal of establishing
the democratic control of the 99 percent over our economic and political
life is what we understand as socialism.54
The class analysis that Marxists can offer is of great strategic
importance. One of the positions that socialists must fight for in the
movement is that class is about more than just your identity, what you
think you are. As the Marxist historian Geoffrey de Ste Croix explained:
Class…is the collective social expression of the fact of
exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social
structure. Class is essentially a relationship—just as capital [is] “a social relation of production”. And a class (a particular
class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their
position in the whole system of social production, defined above all
according to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of control)
to the conditions of production (that is to say, to the means and
labour of production) and to other classes. The individuals constituting
a given class may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of their own
identity and common interests as a class, and they may or may not feel
antagonism towards members of other classes as such. Class conflict...is essentially the fundamental relationship between classes, involving exploitation and resistance to it, but not necessarily
either class consciousness or collective activity in common, political
or otherwise, although these features are likely to supervene when a
class has reached a certain stage of development and become what Marx
once…called “a class for itself”.55
This sums up the complexity of Marx’s conception of class and helps
to explain many of the objections we encounter in discussions about the
working class. None of this is to suggest that changes in the
composition of the class are not constantly occurring, or that there are
not differences across the class. But as Paul Blackledge argues, Marx’s
conception of class:
showed how capitalism’s complex process of exploitation creates not
only a myriad of differences across the labour force, but also common
relations that cut across differences of income, occupation, status,
etc. It is these common relations that make a class a class. Marx’s
model of exploitation does not lead Marxists to dismiss differences
within the working class. Rather it points to a material basis for
solidarity across these divisions.56
Many involved in the movements will be sympathetic to arguments that
the working class is no longer important; that it has been outsourced
to the developing world; that it is just one among a number of equally
important actors in struggle. Many of those involved in the movements
will identify themselves as “precarious”—unemployed, underemployed, on a
temporary contract or even simply in fear of falling into one of those
categories. Guy Standing has written of a “precariat”, described as a
“new, dangerous class” which has developed interests quite apart from
those of the working class.57
This idea has been excellently criticised by Richard Seymour in a
recent article, in which he points out that “precarity cannot be the
basis for political strategy in itself” but can be part of “forming a
new, radical majoritarian politics with an anti-capitalist core” and
with the working class at its heart.58
The political implications of the theory of the precariat have been
exemplified in the Occupy Oakland movement. Todd Chretien and Jessie
Muldoon summarise an article under the name “Oakland Commune”, in which:
After a ludicrous distinction between “the working class” and
“proletarians”, Oakland Commune asserts that “the strike no longer
appears only as the voluntary withdrawal of labour from a workplace by
those employed there, but as the blockade, suppression (or even sabotage
or destruction) of that workplace by proletarians who are alien to it”.
From this internal logic, although completely divorced from the
logic of the class struggle, the author continues: “The coming
intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will
find no success in attempting to revitalise the moribund unions”.59
Chretien and Muldoon, both socialists who have been closely involved
in Occupy Oakland, argue that “these types of ideas are currently
voiced by the majority (or at least a very large portion) of the General
Assembly in Oakland” and that notions of a “precarious proletariat”
that “counsel hostility to existing unions and make no attempt to reach
out to the tens of thousands of sympathetic workers in Oakland, lead
directly to adventurous political practice”.60 Indeed, similar ideas pervaded sections of the Italian left in the 1970s and led to disastrous consequences.61
With this in mind, it is particularly unfortunate that Slavoj Zizek,
a popular figure among anti-capitalists attracted to Marxism, has
advanced a very confused conception of class in a recent article for the
London Review of Books. In “The Revolt of the Salaried
Bourgeoisie”, Zizek claims that “the bourgeoisie in the classic
sense…tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried
workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their
competence” and that this group “extends to all sorts of experts,
administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists,
intellectuals and artists”.62
Zizek is trotting out an old argument. Almost 20 years ago, Alex
Callinicos wrote an analysis of the development of a “new middle class”
in which he pointed out that the categories which Zizek lumps together
as the “salaried bourgeoisie” actually consist of “distinct class
positions”, at the extremes of which there are:
on the one hand, those senior managers and administrators who are
effectively salaried members of the capitalist class, and, on the other,
there are those white-collar employees who are actually members of the
working class. The latter embraces not only the mass of clerical
workers, but also the majority of those in what are called the “lower
professions”—school teachers, nurses, draughtsmen, lab technicians,
social welfare workers.63
If anything, after decades of neoliberalism and the marketisation of
public services such as health and education, wider layers of this
group now identify themselves as workers and look to working class
methods of resistance to counter the government’s attacks. Zizek seems
to have missed this, and suggests that his reading of the situation
“throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times
of crisis the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower
levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only
recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat”.64
Zizek’s position is based on a fundamental misreading of the way in
which, as Ste Croix wrote, “exploitation is embodied in a social
structure”. Far from being part of a “salaried bourgeoisie”, those
protesting about the attacks on their living standards form part of what
Marx described as “the collective worker”. As Kevin Doogan explains,
“Many of the compositional changes in the workforce and adjustments in
employment patterns [are due to] the growth of jobs in education, health
and social service provision…since a large component of labour power is
allocated to ‘its own’ welfare and reproduction”.65
Rather than protesting to avoid joining the proletariat, the enormous
mass strikes of public sector workers in Britain and across Europe have
been of crucial importance in re-establishing a powerful sense of class
consciousness. The 30 November strike of 2.5 million people, the biggest
strike in Britain since 1926, was imbued with the spirit of the 99
percent.
The return of working class action on a global scale has meant that
the new anti-capitalism is developing alongside the labour movement. The
most impressive example of this is in the US, where the Occupy
movement, particularly in New York and Oakland, made tremendous links
with organised labour and gave the working class movement a new lease of
life. Union outreach groups were among the first formed on the camp, by
activists including socialists and class-struggle anarchists. As Nick
Dyer-Witheford explains:
After 17 September action, and before the 15 October day of global
action, crucial moments for Occupy Wall Street were the marches between
27 September and 5 October, when occupiers were joined by Communication
Workers of America, on strike against communications giant Verizon; the
Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), protesting the amalgamation of
Continental and United airlines; the New York City Transport Workers
Union (TWU), which went to court to prevent police from ordering union
drivers to bus arrested demonstrators to jail; and other unions of
teachers, construction workers and the public sector. Occupiers in turn
sallied out to support Teamsters on strike at Sotheby’s art auction
house.66
In Oakland protesters issued a call for a general strike in the
city, which saw 15,000 people march and shut down the port as dock
workers from the historically militant branch of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union refused to cross picket lines. In a
country where the left has been marginalised for decades, this emergence
of anti-capitalist politics closely allied with sections of the working
class has been of extreme importance. The left find themselves involved
in a debate about the way forward for Occupy now that the camps
themselves have been dismantled.67
But the impact that the movement has had already can be summed up by
one lecturer who, when asked for her highlight of Occupy, replied, “The
highlight for me hasn’t been a moment, and it hasn’t been down in
Zuccotti Park itself exactly, but is a direct effect of their actions
there and around the city. They’ve shifted the discussion to where it
belongs. And I think they’ve given people—certainly me—a sense of hope
and inspiration”.68
In Britain, despite the Occupy movement being much smaller, the
effect that it had on wider society was profound. Two senior clergy from
the Church of England were forced to resign over the handling of the
encampment, and the leaders of the political parties had to start
discussing “capitalism” and how it could be made more “responsible”,
more “popular” and less “predatory”. The issue of bankers’ bonuses
became a political hot potato as millions were disgusted at the enormous
amounts offered to those running banks that just three years earlier
had been bailed out at workers’ expense.
More concretely, the St Paul’s camp was visited by thousands of
people before it was dismantled by bailiffs in the early hours of 28
February. Workers attended trade union days that were called by
socialists through the outreach working group. Occupy London had a
highly visible contingent on the 30 November demonstration in London.
Crucially, electricians who were engaged in a long-running dispute with
eight corporations visited the camp on a number of occasions, and
occupiers attended their pickets. This campaign was led by rank and file
activists in the face of opposition from the union bureaucracy. But
electricians pushed the union to ballot for strike action which finally
forced the bosses to retreat. The companies that employed the
electricians knew that strike action would shut off the taps of profit
upon which they depend and also bring about fines for the late
completion of building projects.
The dismantling of the camps (which could only be a temporary
feature in the face of the organised power of the state) and the impasse
of horizontalism means that many involved in the movements will be
grappling with questions of organisation and agency: how do the 99
percent win? Simultaneously, there is a sense in which all the struggles
socialists find themselves at the heart of at the moment feed into one
another. The events of the crisis on a global stage, the attacks workers
are facing around the world, mean that people are generalising quickly
and that the movements are alive with a sense of internationalism and
radicalism. The fact that the mask of democracy has slipped from
capitalism so easily in Greece and Italy, as bankers are installed to
carry out cuts, means that the connections between the fight against
austerity and the revolutions against dictatorship in the Arab world
seem far from abstract. And on the streets and in the workplaces of
Greece we can see a working class movement in Europe where rank and file
workers have seized the initiative in many areas, seizing control of
workplaces, bringing the country to a standstill and preventing the
troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF
from imposing its “solutions” on the economy. This raises the spectre
of genuine democratic control by the masses over their lives: of socialism.
The fact that the exploitation of wage labour is central to the
capitalist system means the position of the working class within it
remains unique. The implications of the “collective worker” are that
there is a basis for solidarity across the class and that the ability to
disrupt the flow of profit is generalised to disrupting the
reproduction of the system as a whole. It is for this reason that Marxists stress the centrality of the working class for any anti-capitalist project.
Workers have not only a material interest in organising collectively to
combat the ravages of capitalism but also the strategic power to bring
it down and replace it.
Of course, this is not an automatic process. Both rank and file and
revolutionary organisations need to grow, strengthen and deepen their
roots. But the links between anti-capitalism, the power of the working
class and revolution have not been so clearly seen for decades. This
offers socialists a real opportunity to not only build the movements,
but to build a working class, revolutionary spine within them.
Notes
1: Chapman and Gysin, 2012.
2: Graeber, 2011.
3: Milne, 2011.
4: Le Blanc, 2012.
5: www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html
6: Mason, 2012, p2.
7: Mason, 2012, p66.
8: See my article “Social media and social movements” for an analysis of the role of the internet in protests-Jones, 2011a.
9: Mason, 2012, p142.
10: Jeffery
Webber has provided excellent analysis of the movements in Latin
America. For his discussion of the Chilean student movement, see Webber,
2011; and on the TIPNIS revolt in Bolivia, Webber, 2012. This journal
has extensively covered the revolutions in the MENA region.
11: This
journal has examined many of the movements referred to in this piece.
See particularly: Callinicos and Jones, 2011; Swain, 2011; Durgan and
Sans, 2011; Trudell, 2012.
12: See Harman, 2000; Callinicos, 2003; Harman, 2004; Callinicos and Nineham, 2007.
13: Harman, 2004, p3.
14: Bhattacharyya, 2011.
15: See Assaf, 2009.
16: A short film depicting the violent treatment of Climate Camp protesters can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssLxYFJauGM
17: Jones, 2010.
18:
” target=”_blank”>http://climatecamp.org.uk/2011-statement
19: Dyer-Witheford, 2012.
20: Callinicos, 2003, p15.
21: For more on reformist anti-capitalism, see Callinicos, 2003, pp76-80, and Harman, 2004, pp5-7, 11-12.
22: Harman, 2004, p3.
23: Fisher, 2009, p2.
24: Fisher, 2009, pp16-17.
25: Fisher, 2009, pp7-8.
26: Fisher, 2009, p78.
27: Mason, 2012, p68.
28: Mason, 2012, p138.
29: Doogan, 2008, p44.
30: Doogan, 2008, p45.
31: Doogan, 2008, p11.
32: Mason, 2012, p57.
33: Mason, 2012, p63.
34: Jones, 2011a, pp91-92.
35: Jeewa, 2011.
36: Aitchison and Peters, 2011.
37: Barker, 2001, p25.
38: Michels, cited in Barker, 2001, p25.
39: Hallas, 1971.
40: Molyneux, 2009, p153.
41: For an excellent brief defence of democratic centralism, see Harman, 1978.
42: For an extended discussion of the “Global Youth Revolt”, see Zill, 2012.
43: Zill, 2012, p18.
44: Jones, 2011b, p40.
45: Mason, 2012, pp66-67.
46: In
an earlier issue of this journal, I argued that the riots which broke
out in London in August 2011 could be seen to “embody a revolt against
the diminished prospects of receiving things that a group felt they were
entitled to or likely to acquire”, such as employment, Education
Maintenance Allowance and higher education, and that “this affront to a
sense of entitlement is more relevant than absolute poverty”-Jones,
2011b, p45.
47: Harman, 1987.
48: Harman, 2009.
49: Basketter, 2012.
50: Mason, 2012, p39.
51: Wolf, 2011.
52: Klein, 2011.
53: Swain, 2011, p103.
54: Le Blanc, 2012.
55: Ste Croix, 1984, p100.
56: Blackledge, 2011.
57: Standing, 2011.
58: Seymour, 2012.
59: Chretien and Muldoon, 2012.
60: Chretien
and Muldoon, 2012. Their article is an excellent summary of the danger
which this form of ultra-leftism poses to the movement.
61: See Callinicos, 2001, for more on the theoretical background and the political implications of such ideas.
62: Zizek, 2012.
63: Callinicos, 1983, pp85-87.
64: Zizek, 2012.
65: Doogan, 2008, p8.
66: Dyer-Witheford, 2012.
67: For more on the debates in the Occupy movement, see the US Socialist Worker’s online pamphlet: http://socialistworker.org/featured/occupy
68: International Socialist Review, 2011, p12.
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Seymour, Richard, 2012, “We Are All Precarious—On the Concept of the
‘Precariat’ and its Misuses”, New Left Project website (10 February), www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_precarious_on_the_concept_of_the_precariat_and_its_misuses
Standing, Guy, 2011, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury).
Ste Croix, Geoffrey, 1984, “Class in Marx’s Conception of History, Ancient and Modern”, New Left Review, I/146.
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Trudell, Megan, 2012, The Occupy Movement and Class Politics in the US”, International Socialism 133 (winter), www.isj.org.uk/?id=775
Webber, Jeffery, 2011, “More than a Student Movement”, International Socialist Review, number 80
(November-December), www.isreview.org/issues/80/feat-chilesnewleft.shtml
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Zizek, Slavoj, 2012, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie”, London Review of Books, volume 34, number 2 (26 January), www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/slavoj-zizek/the-revolt-of-the-salaried-bourgeoisie
--
1. Invitation: May 1, 2012! Contribute to 'New Worker Movements'!
2. Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman
3. EBook 2011, 'Under, Against, Beyond - Essays 1980s- 1990s'shttp://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/
4. WorkingPaper 2012: 'Emancipatory Labour Studies': 5. Draft EBook 2012: 'Recovering Internationalism - Essays 2000-10' (draft):
http://www.scribd.com/doc/82125289/ReCovIntComp-A-2 http://www.scribd.com/doc/82129474/ReCovtIntComp-B-2
6. Essay 2012: 'The 2nd Coming of the World Federation of Trade Unions':
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