James Turley calls for a powerful workers’ movement needs to offer a real political lead in challenging the power of the capitalists

As the last party conference season before the general election gets into full swing, all corners of bourgeois politics are singing from the same hymn sheet. And the music is troubling to the ears of all those hit by the economic crisis – ‘Cuts, cuts, cuts,’ runs the refrain – and the politicians seem only to be competing over the most convincing rendition.

The Tories, of course, were first to arrive at this particular public spending conclusion. Not only do they currently more or less monopolise the political initiative: slashing the budget is perfectly well amenable to their core support – particularly since the Thatcher era and the ascendancy of the new right. This week, however, we have seen first Gordon Brown and then Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats stake their claim.

Brown, after dodging the issue for what seemed like an age, finally conceded that the next Labour government would have to cut public spending, in an address to the Trades Union Congress. “Frontline services” would escape the axe, apparently, but since then schools minister and long-time Brown ally Ed Balls has come out for £2 billion-worth of cuts to the education budget. These, of course, are billed as “savings” on efficiency and so on – as all cuts will be until they are actually made, but they actually amount to teachers out of work and schools run down or even closed. Balls already concedes that senior school staff will face the chopping block – to the consternation of the unions.

Meanwhile, at the Liberal Democrats’ annual conference in Bournemouth, Clegg advised his party in advance of his controversial intentions, declaring in an interview with The Guardian that cuts would have to be “savage” to deal with the public finance deficit (September 19). This, perhaps, was tactically inept on his part – he certainly had to spend the conference trying to claw back support from a membership deeply divided along neoliberal/social-liberal lines. A notable concession to recalcitrant Lib Dem ‘lefts’ is the ‘mansion tax’, proposed by treasury spokesman Vince Cable, which would charge owners of homes worth £1 million or more an average of £4,000, in order to fund tax breaks for lower- and middle-income families (though this faced an ambivalent reception itself).

Clegg has also since called Balls’ plans “absolute madness” – though, as a man extremely unlikely to actually form a government, he has the luxury of not having to lay out exactly what he would cut. We should not forget that, for all Clegg’s crocodile tears over the present state of the public debt, both he and Cable have form in this area dating back many years. Both contributed to the infamous Orange book, a tome which laid out ‘liberal’ (read neoliberal) ‘solutions’ to various social problems and which became the flagship document of the party’s right wing. It is still in print.

As for New Labour, what we have is more evidence of that project’s death throes. Bereft of anything resembling a bright idea, Brown has been outmanoeuvred by David Cameron on the least likely of terrains; he once more looks indecisive and reactive. That Peter Mandelson has yet again been wheeled out to package the message (in an interview with The Economist) has raised further questions about Brown’s apparently total reliance on that paradigmatic (and deeply unpopular) machine politician.

Reactions from the TUC are, incredibly, mixed – testament to the total lack of independence the unions enjoy from the far right of the Labour Party. Known ‘awkward squad’ voices have raised protests – Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union frets that his members are to be targeted, Mark Serwotka threatened both industrial and legal action, and Bob Crow called the speech “a missed opportunity on a massive scale”.

On the other hand, apparently in the throes of delusional psychosis, Derek Simpson of Unite declared: “In off the bar in the last minute of the game. We are now in extra time – we can beat the Tories. Gordon’s put clear water between Labour and the Tories by focusing on jobs, homes, equality and fairness at work” (The Guardian September 15). A remarkable statement – not just for its hyped up football analogy, but for its total lack of resemblance to the truth.

The obvious question, then, is – why? How have we come to this cross-party consensus? After all, for many years, official New Labour dogma has been for an upward curve in public investment, with the national health service budget in particular having grown significantly. New Labour’s reputation as Thatcherites stems not from slashing and burning, but from handing over billions of pounds to private companies in lucrative contracts – PFI hospitals and so on.

Thatcher, of course, did not shrink the state budget either, privatisations actually being quite expensive, and so, while the ideological basis for massive cuts is strong in the Tory Party, the track record in the technical sense is not actually there. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, have long flirted with posing to the left of Labour, with flagship commitments on increasing the top tax rate and abolishing tuition fees (the latter has now been downgraded to an “aspiration”, NUS-style).

On the other side of the equation is the objective situation. We remain in a period of recession. Many economists and commentators (including, of all people, Peter Mandelson) have warned that the apparent stabilisation of the economy could be a false dawn, and with the wrong policy could lurch back into free-fall – a so-called ‘double dip’ recession.

Imposing cuts – forget all this sub-utopian bluster about ‘efficiency savings’ – necessarily means cutting the standard of living for the workers (particularly at a time of mass unemployment) and lower-middle classes. It means throwing public sector workers out of their jobs. There will thus be a sizeable hit to tax takings, and the public deficit will be no better off than before; meanwhile, any switch back to Keynesian stimulus strategies will be that much harder, as the initial aggregate demand will be lower. The wider this ecstasy of cuts takes hold internationally, the more likely that another crisis will set in. From the system’s point of view, it makes sense to ‘spend your way out’ – with public works projects, with a war …

Yet – apart from the awkward pussyfooting of Mandelson and other New Labour types – this perspective is utterly absent from bourgeois politics in this country. Part of it, no doubt, is due to contingent ideological commitments (or, for that matter, individual corruption). But the worrying truth is: cuts sell. A poll in The Sunday Times found that only 20% of respondents preferred tax rises to cuts as a way of balancing the budget (September 13). Another poll, commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), partly contradicts that assessment, suggesting broad support for ‘efficiency savings’, but not much else (www.thersa.org/_data/assets/pdf_file/0018/220059/Ipsos-RSA-press-notice-210909.pdf).

There are many contradictory impulses at play here – certainly those who have escaped the brunt of the crisis will worry about tax increases sending them over the edge (particularly acutely among the petty bourgeoisie). Employees of struggling companies will worry that the public sector is saving itself at the expense of stimulating recovery in the private sector, and should ‘take one for the team’, as the saying goes. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, has never suffered public spending gladly: the construction of the European welfare states and the American ‘new deal’ before that were both in capitalism’s interests but had to be politically forced on the ruling class, which has always had a rather childish and petulant approach to taking its medicine.

The fundamental problem is the dire weakness, political and organisational, of the workers’ movement. Statements such as Derek Simpson’s quoted above testify to the total control over the unions of a philistine bureaucracy – the critical voices – Serwotka, Crow, Wrack, etc – are fresh out of political alternatives as well (we can discount the idea that Crow’s No2EU front has anything resembling a future). The political formations of the far left, meanwhile, are tiny, and wedded to failed strategies that subordinate the Marxist programme to that of Labourism.

So when groups of workers fight back against the cuts, they face an uphill battle. Struggles have already broken out – notably, the ongoing dispute in Leeds over the pay of rubbish collectors. These workers have embarked on sustained industrial action after the Lib Dem-led council slashed wages by £6,000 a year. Large sections of other workers are in the process of balloting for their own actions.

Yet last time a broad trade union offensive of this kind erupted, what we got was Thatcher. A powerful workers’ movement needs to offer a real political lead in challenging the power of the capitalists – otherwise not only will we be defeated, but the defeat will be brutal and lasting. Communists support the defensive actions of sections of the working class – and of the class as a whole. Yet we must also fight to arm the masses with a programme that can meet these challenges effectively, one unencumbered by Labourism and other tools of the bourgeoisie.