“As trade unionists, we must combine our workplace struggles with a massive movement for change on the streets, linking unions, community organisations and progressive campaigns to demand a different future.”
By Gawain Little, GFTU
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
It would be difficult to find a more accurate description of Britain today than these words, taken from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist and anti-fascist imprisoned and ultimately killed by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Although written some 90 years ago, it sums up the state of our economy and society today.
Economically, we never fully recovered from the financial crisis of 2007-9, with profitability stagnating over the past 15 years, the rise of zombie companies and household debt ratios through the roof. COVID and the subsequent cost of living crisis simply added further damage to a broken system.
For the vast majority of people, this has been experienced in the form of declining wages, increasing bills, lack of access to public services, and precarious, casualised work, with few if any employment rights. Coming on the back of 45 years of destruction of public space and community by a neoliberalism perfectly captured by Thatcher’s statement that “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families”, this economic crisis is combined with a social and political crisis – often manifesting as a crisis of identity.
In response, we have seen the rise of far-right street violence and its counterpart in the racist politics of Reform UK. These charlatans try to paint themselves as a solution for working people, even trying to steal our clothes over policies such as reindustrialisation, all wrapped up in dog-whistle racism and an attempt to divide our communities and pit worker against worker. Their real agenda is clear every time they vote against improving rights at work, and in favour of further deregulation and privatisation.
Meanwhile, our broken system lurches towards militarism and the drive to war. Increases in defence spending take money from vital public services while the return of US nuclear weapons to British soil for the first time since the 1980s makes Britain a real target in US and NATO wars of the future.
In the 1930s, Gramsci argued that militant industrial struggle was necessary, but not sufficient, to face the challenges of a system in crisis, awaiting the birth of a new society. Now, as then, working people must combine industrial, political and cultural struggle in order to take back our country from the neoliberal warmongers and the far-right racists.
As trade unionists, we must combine our workplace struggles with a massive movement for change on the streets, linking unions, community organisations and progressive campaigns to demand a different future. We must engage politically, as the solutions to the problems faced by working people go beyond industrial issues in the workplace, but we must do so on our own terms. Political struggle is not synonymous with parliamentary politics. Our politics must be the politics of mass engagement and mobilisation, of collective political action, including where possible the use of political strike action.
We must also be careful not to neglect the importance of rebuilding progressive working class culture. Cultural engagement lies at the heart – the emotional centre – of what binds us together in our communities. It is the basic building block of the solidarity on which our movement rests. If we want to reclaim that sense of identity which has been weakened by decades of fragmentation and privatisation, we need to acknowledge the crucial role played by culture and invest in strengthening those bonds, rebuilding our communities through what we hold in common.
- Gawain Little is General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU): you can follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X, and the GFTU on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Bluesky and YouTube.
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