Capitalism’s crisis: do students have the answer?

by Dave Sewell on 22.03.09

Tricky one to write about, the recession. Things can just change so fast. I’ll think I’ve got it down and then the day before we go to print either the Moon will go bankrupt and apply for an IMF bailout of astronomical proportions or the Pacific Ocean will go into administration, closing 20 major rivers and laying off over 1000 blue whales.

Whatever I say about the gangrene of the markets and robust health of the dole queue today, tomorrow it will have become redundant.

What I will talk about is how we can fight back against a crisis of capitalism, ‘cos recent events leave me thinking that we could definitely use a few pointers.
It’s all been getting a bit depressing, ever since the staff of Woolworths left their livelihoods behind in Conga formation.

Woollies having been around forever, its closure came as a shock to everyone, and the stupid sheep and sheepdog puppets in their adverts were surely calculated in advance to inspire nothing but pity.

If they’d taken a stand, the Woollies workers could have counted on the sympathy of the nation – we’d probably have collected more in donations for their fighting fund than the shop was actually making in profits.

Whereas, while I’m sure their decision to go home dancing will be celebrated in the more clueless sections of the press as “a very British type of rebellion” or some such nonsense, it’s hardly an inspiration.

By late January, though, the defiance-through-the-medium-of-dance of December was starting to look like a lost Golden Age, as an old National Front slogan exploded onto every front page: “British Jobs for British Workers”.

Never mind, for the moment, the philosophical debate on what terms like “British job” and “British worker” even mean in a nation built over the centuries by wave after wave immigrants. That’s a whole nother column I can’t be bothered writing. Let’s just look at the effect that BJ4BW has had in the real world.

At the Lindsey oil refinery, a militant response to management’s attack on union organisation was derailed as the workers were set against each other. British and Italian workers could have been organising together against the bosses, but not while they’re spitting at each other on the picket lines.

The dispute sent shockwaves far beyond one workplace: across the country, Socialist Worker’s “We won’t pay for the bosses’ crisis” posters now have to compete with the Daily Star’s “BJ4BW” union jacks. All very depressing.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and we don’t have to look very far for real inspiration. In Ireland, receivers moved in to close down the Waterford Crystal factory in January. The factory is the region’s main employer, and its loss would have been devastating to countless families and indeed whole towns. But the workers didn’t accept it, and nor did they shift the blame onto their hapless Polish colleagues. Instead, they took over the factory.

When there’s a strike, workers show themselves and their bosses who really has the power to halt production; in Waterford, they showed who has the power to keep production going, and in defiance of capitalist misery they organised to run the factory themselves.

I don’t really blame the Woollies workers for their passivity, or the Lindsey lot for being taken in by a racist explanation for the crisis. To fight back requires confidence, the abiding memory of class conflict for most people is still that of the miners’ strike being crushed by Maggie Thatcher.

The legacy of the Iron Lady doesn’t make it easy to consider our power to change the world. But – speaking not just as a revolutionary, but as someone who was too busy gestating in the womb to be paying any attention to that particular defeat – it’s about time we got over it.

As a post-Thatcher generation, we can do better from building on our experience in the antiwar movement. 2 million of us came together in the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq; just imagine if that many of us came together to resist the closure of our workplaces!

More recently still, people too young to have been paying attention in 2003, let alone in 1984, have been taking over their universities in a refusal to accept a world of catastrophe. In Manchester, we have been the umpteenth set of students to occupy their university and, a world away from Woolworths, we’ve been refusing to leave for over three weeks now.

A world away from “British studies for British students” too, our demands have been in solidarity with the people of Palestine, whose oppression at the hands of Israeli apartheid have been ignored for decades. And, radical as they may sound, demands like ours have been met by universities from London to Glasgow in the last few weeks, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t win here as well.

I’m not saying that the battle for a better world will be fought on university campuses, ‘cos it won’t. But these things have got to start somewhere. Students up and down the country have shown that it is possible to take collective action to make a difference, that it is possible to stand shoulder to shoulder with our fellow human beings around the world.

I just hope that everyone whose shop, factory or office is threatened with closure has been paying attention – ‘cos if so, we can eat the Credit Crunch for breakfast!

Dave is generally either working behind a bar, standing behind a campaign stall, or trying not to fall behind in a lecture.