Workers continue to fight, despite the obstacles raised by trade unions and decomposing capitalism

Since the turn of the year, strikes by UK workers have continued to confront the ruling class and its governing Labour Party. Sectors affected include transport (London Underground, bus and train services around the country), education (university lecturers, teaching assistants, library assistants, administrators, IT workers and other support staff, plus some teachers) and the health sector (critical care nurses in Manchester, ‘resident’ doctors nationwide and health visitors in south Wales). ‘Industrial action’ also affected the construction industry (crane drivers), refuse services (‘bin-men’) and even the ‘defence’ sector (Royal Fleet Auxiliary service seafarers[1] and Atomic Weapons Establishment workers at Aldermaston and Burghfield[2]).

These current struggles of the working class are primarily driven by a profound fall in purchasing power (inflation devaluing wages) plus an increase in the rate of exploitation (fewer workers taking on more responsibilities and tasks over longer hours). Despite their modest size and impact on national life, they go to the heart of the existence of the proletariat as the exploited producer class of society, its history under capitalism and its future perspectives. In this sense, they are still in continuity with the much larger-scale movements of the class in Great Britain in the summer of 2022 and the winter 2023, which reverberated around the globe.

The meaning of the ‘rupture’ with the years of apathy

The ‘Summer of Anger’ which swept the UK in 2022, and which continued into the following winter, characterised by its slogan of “enough is enough”, marked a radical departure with the decades which preceded it. Following the defeat of the miners’ strike in mid-80s Britain, and cemented by a vast ideological campaign about ‘the death of communism’ and ‘the victory of democracy’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, a whole epoch of world-wide workers’ struggles which began in May ’68, France, was brought to an abrupt halt. Despite certain important exceptions, the decades that followed witnessed a retreat in working class combativity and a much deeper retreat in class consciousness, even leading to a loss of the proletariat’s class identity.

What gave the 2022/2023 movement in Great Britain its significance was precisely the fact that it broke the years of apparent quiescence and acceptance of spiralling attacks by the ruling class. It had echoes up and down the country; it affected different industries simultaneously, and as it unfolded, the proletariat began to rediscover its voice and unity - “we are the working class” as banners proclaimed.

They were not only a reaction to the “cost of living crisis”, they were also the product of a long and mostly hidden process of questioning, of overcoming hesitation and doubt, of what Marx called the “work of the old mole” and what the ICC describes as a process of a “subterranean maturation of class consciousness.”

Moreover, the strikes in GB inspired those in other countries, which made direct reference to them and echoed their slogans: in France, in Belgium, in the United States… This is why the ICC called the movement and those which followed in other countries a ‘rupture’ with the previous period:

“The essential achievement of the struggle of the workers in Britain is to stand up and fight because the worst defeat is to suffer impoverishment without a fight. It is on this basis that lessons can be learned and the struggle can move forward. In this perspective, the strikes represent a qualitative change and herald a change in the situation of the working class vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie: they mark a development of combativity on a class terrain which can be the beginning of a new episode of the struggle, because it is through its massive economic struggles that the working class will be able to progressively recover its class identity, eroded by the pressure of 40 years of decomposition, by the ebb of struggles and consciousness, by the sirens of interclassist movements, populism and environmental campaigns. It is on this basis that the working class will be able to open up a perspective for the whole of society. From this point of view, there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ to the summer of 2022.”[3]

The barriers to developing the struggle remain

Thus the present strikes fall within the global and historic dynamic of this ‘rupture’. They share its promise of a massive struggle against austerity and war. They also share many of the weaknesses of the 2022 movement and confront the same barriers to effectively combatting the ruling class and to developing a perspective of getting rid of it altogether!

Of the strikes so far this year, two in particular have drawn greater attention.

The first are those of the ‘resident’ doctors working in hospitals run by the National Health Service, the UK’s largest employer. These strikes in fact began in March 2023 and the 6-day stoppages after Easter 2026 were the 15th such action. At root is the issue of pay – the doctors claim their salaries are today worth 29% less compared to 2008 – and of the lack of advancement prospects leading to both career stagnation and, more importantly, an absence amounting to tens of thousands of clinical specialists which impacts on the health, lives and livelihood of the working class as a whole. (cf: the hundreds of deaths attributed to ‘failings’ in maternity care.[4])

So this is not just an issue for the ‘junior’ doctors or even other sectors within the NHS such as porters, cleaners, nurses, technical and admin staff, etc, who are also under the same cosh as and are often in struggle at the same time. The trade unions proclaim that “Unity is Strength” but any common struggle is buried by their divisive strategy, an historical product of the development of capital but one which is rigorously enforced by these very same unions which have an historic strength in the UK, despite, or more accurately, because of being in the service of the capitalist state for over a century. 

The division of workers by trade, by sector, by seniority, by geography, sometimes even within the same building, leads to a fragmentation of struggles!  In the absence of workers creating their own mass meetings and assemblies, with delegates charged with extending the fight and revocable at any time, the planning and execution of strikes is left the hands of the trade unions who strictly enforce all the state’s rules and regulations (like those prohibiting ‘secondary picketing’).  

The effectiveness, dynamic and possibilities of real unity and self-organisation are severely curtailed when they are not sabotaged in the name of ‘negotiations’ before strike movements have even taken off. Workers are effectively carved up by the state, robbed of the active support of their comrades; and the trade unions are the instruments used to achieve this. It’s illustrative that workers employed by the British Medical Association, the trade union ‘representing’ the doctors, have themselves been obliged to launch strike action over pay – a struggle that ‘their own’ union has kept strictly separate from that of the doctors!

This wholly intentional isolation of workers in struggle is highlighted by a second movement in GB which has stood out from the rest - that of the 14-month long struggle (with all-out strike action for over a year) by 400 or so bin-men, refuse workers, in the ‘second city’ of the country, Birmingham, governed by what is said to be the largest local authority in Europe. The Labour Party-controlled council has gone to extraordinary lengths (including at one point declaring itself bankrupt, and at another calling in military planners while firing and rehiring staff at lower wages, using the courts to criminalise the strike and hiring scab labour) to spearhead an attack on its workers in a manner that can be replicated throughout the country. This includes speed-ups, job losses and wage cuts up to the value of £8000 a year.

The Birmingham drivers and loaders have militantly tried to oppose these further degradations of wages and conditions but have come up against not just the frontal attacks of the bosses but the ‘solidarity’ proposed by ‘their’ union, Unite, which has maintained a rigid ‘cordon sanitaire’ around them, refusing to extend the strike by involving any of its other 1.2 million members. Instead, Unite has staged three, day-long ‘mega-pickets’ at which various unions and politicians declared their purely verbal and verbose support and has announced the strike (now in effect a lock-out) is to be extended to September. [5]

Workers who have placed the organisation of the struggle in the hands of ‘their’ unions have bitter experience of the isolation and defeat that results: the 1984/85 miners’ strike demonstrated that long, drawn-out, isolated strikes, with workers who suffer the same attacks separated from each other by police outside and unions inside the movement, are a means the exhaust the workers’ fighting spirit. 100 years since the trade unions sabotaged the UK General Strike, these are lessons that must be widely appropriated: the organisation and extension of the struggle - crucial to push back the attacks - is absolutely the task the workers can absolutely not left in the hands of the unions.

Capitalism offers only lies, austerity and war –the working class can offer another world

But workers in Britain, facing struggles right here, right now, are not on their own.

Crucially, there’s the reality that they are part of a class – a world working class – with nothing to lose but its chains and a world to win. And this working class has a history rich in hard-won lessons as well as the unique perspective of a cooperative, classless future which is both possible and absolutely necessary. Throughout its history, as well as facing up to immediate problems, the proletariat has also and always produced political minorities – sometimes in the form of parties, sometimes as fractions, intransigently internationalist and with the task of lighting “the general line of march” using the marxist method.

  But time isn’t on the side of the workers. Already, many of our children can’t find jobs; our health, transport, water and other ‘services’ are crumbling. Already the talk of conscription and sacrifice is on the agenda. Already inflation erodes our meagre benefits and pay - and the worst of capitalism’s insoluble economic crisis is ahead of us. The inflationary consequences of the global increase in arms spending and the wars bleeding the populations of Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Sudan can only produce further massive lay-offs and shortages of all kinds in GB, the US and in the rest of Europe.

As well as attacks on its living standards, the working class is being faced with a seemingly bewildering barrage of political ‘choices’: for or against ‘immigration’; for or against Reform or Labour, Greens or Tories, woke or anti-woke; Palestine or Israel… the ideological divisions are presented as problems to be solved by workers, as individuals, as sides to be joined or fought against, according to which hucksters hog the media microphones and megaphones, always with the idea of waving the Union Jack, ‘saving the country’, of pursuing ‘what’s best for Britain’. But what’s best for the country always implies the worst for the working class.

There’s a pressing need for the working class to rediscover its real traditions and the lessons of previous defeats and to reappropriate and develop its organisational as well as its political abilities: the economic struggle is a political matter! But acknowledging the reality that the workers are one class, a revolutionary class which holds the future in its hands, can be a source of immeasurable strength faced with immediate issues as well as illuminating the path beyond them.

 

KT 28/4/2026

 

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[1] A Merchant Navy organisation of civilian-crewed ships providing vital logistic and operational support to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines.

[2] Workers (who are public servants) focus on safety and security in Aldermaston and Burghfield.

[3]“The return of the combativity of the world proletariat”, International Review 169, Winter 2023

[4] Key issues were failings to listen to women, particularly women of colour, overworked staff, inadequate training, and serious safety incidents, resulting in preventable deaths and trauma.

[5] On April 27, some 11 days before local council elections, Birmingham Authority (Council) and the Unite Union announced a ‘deal’ to settle the strike on which the workers would be voting.