Category: Fascism

VICTORY TO THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE

By any means necessary, end the Israeli genocidal invasion and occupation of Gaza

For massive international humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza now. 

Condemn all US, European, and Chinese imperialist support for Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza – including phoney, “pacifist”, look-the-other-way policies.

The people of Gaza have the right to stay in their homes and defend the right of existence of a Palestinian state

Egypt must open its border with Gaza NOW 

Stop the genocide: bombing, starving, invading Gaza is ethnic-cleansing and a war crime 

The Biden administration and every government in the world should demand Israel withdraw all its military forces and stop the invasion of Gaza now

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The aim of the Netanyahu regime is the suppression of all Palestinian rights in Gaza and the West Bank and the suppression of democracy in Israel for the Arab and Jewish population of Israel opposed to Netanyahu’s authoritarianism, racism, and genocidal policies-in reality, the majority of the people of Israel.

Because there can be no democracy in Israel and no peace in the Middle East as long as the Netanyahu regime remains in power:

  • Bring down the Netanyahu government or any other government like it by any means necessary! 
  • For the alliance of the progressive workers and oppressed of the Middle East 
  • For the alliance of the mass Israeli Jewish movement defending democracy and peace with the Palestinian struggle against Netanyahu’s neo-fascist coalition and its attack on democracy and all human rights 
  • Condemn and end all the Israeli government’s genocidal policies in the name of Zionism
  • Condemn and end all genocidal, racist, and authoritarian policies wrapped up in the slogan and symbols of Zionism 
  • Condemn and end all use of Zionism to defend the oppressors against the oppressed
  • Zionists must either stand with the oppressed and defenders of democracy, or be recognized as oppressors and enemies of democracy

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Renew the Palestinian intifada! 

Victory to the Palestinian youth fighting West Bank ethnic-cleansing and the Israeli settler movement

For a new Arab Spring to overthrow the Arab and Middle Eastern allies of US imperialism and the Netanyahu regime

For a new, international, independent movement of the progressive forces of the workers, oppressed, and youth against imperialism, genocide, and war to defeat the global rise of fascism and the united front of the capitalist powers against socialism, equality, and democracy

15 October 2023

The alarm bells are ringing louder and the warning lights are flashing. War criminals are on the loose and committing genocide in Gaza. An unstable world has become even more dangerous – the result of the cynical, racist divide-and-conquer policies that American and the Western imperialists played historically to divide and dominate the Middle East and the Arab world.

This is the State of Israel’s deepest crisis since its foundation in 1948. It is a crisis within Israeli Jewish society and it’s an intensified crisis in the oppression and subjugation of the Palestinian Arab population by the Zionist state. Israel was facing that crisis BEFORE the military forces of Hamas broke out of the Gaza Strip on 7th October. The attacks by Hamas were a response to that crisis – an essentially defensive reaction, in part based on past experience, against the growing Israeli attacks on Palestinians wherever they were, and the all too clear threat that the consolidation of a fascist dictatorship in Israel posed to a continued Arab presence in Palestine. 

The imperialists, who are the world’s greatest oppressors and exploiters, did not create and arm Israel out of sympathy for Jewish victims of anti-semitism – Britain in particular had denied entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. They exploited the plight of the Jews and exploited the horror of the Holocaust to trap one oppressed people (the Jews) in the role of oppressing another (the Palestinian Arabs). The Arab population has an absolute right to resist that oppression and to call on the Arab people across the Middle East and North Africa to rise up in their support. 

The imperialists’ cynical policy is unravelling. That is the cause of the crisis in Palestine/Israel and it is a crisis for the imperialists themselves, one which they can’t resolve. Without a solution Biden, Sunak, Starmer, the leaders of the EU and the Pope can only repeat the mantra “Israel has a right to defend itself” – regardless of Israel’s 75 year history of US & British backed repression, dispossession, and slaughter of Palestinians, and despite the obvious fact that if prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the dictator of some poor country in Africa or South America, Britain or the EU would have got an international arrest warrant out by now and he would be on his way to the Hague to be put on trial for war crimes. 

The roots of Israel’s crisis 

From the time Israel was created, there were two different Zionist visions of what Israel should be that seemed not to be mutually exclusive. Progressive Zionists believed that Israel should be based on socialist principles and could be a vanguard of democracy in the Middle East. Right-wing Zionists believed that Israel should be a colonial settler state dependent on the US for its survival and therefore prepared to be the consistent supporter and agent of US domination of the Middle East. The Zionist supporters of building a socialist society believed they should and could live in peace with their Arab neighbors. The Zionists tied to US imperialism preferred the expansion of Israel at the expense of their Arab neighbors and an Israeli policy of exploiting  the workers and resources of the Arab peoples around them. For a time, Israel had elements of both visions. But inevitably it could not be both. Today the survival of Israel as a settler state require the crushing of democracy in Israel and the genocide of the Palestinian people. 

Right-wing Israeli Zionist leaders are facing mounting problems to maintain the goal of a Jewish state on the land of Palestine and thereby maintain their usefulness to Western imperialism. The State of Israel was established with an ostensible right of return for all Jews who wanted to settle there. Following World War II, Israel saw a continuing increase in its Jewish population, driven mainly by a desperate hope for safety more than by Zionist ideology. Over the following period, there have been periodic waves of Jewish immigration from other countries including countries in the Middle east and North Africa, and later a wave of Jewish refugees  from the collapsing Soviet Union.

In reality, however, there has always been a problem of sustaining a relatively large Jewish population in Israel, while the Israeli capitalist economy has required maintaining an ever-growing, second-class, underpaid and super-exploited Palestinian Arab labor force. Since the establishment of the Palestinian authorities on the West Bank and in Gaza, the Israeli capitalist economy has treated the Palestinian Arab populations of those territories as a constant source of low paid labor, in reality, essential to the profitability of Israeli capitalism. 

Since the 1990s, however, Jewish right-of-return migration to Israel has declined and remains at a very low level. There are no likely sources for a significant wave of new Jewish immigrants, while the political and military situation in the Middle East makes that an unattractive prospect for all but the most zealous Zionists.

At the same time the Arab population is increasing, not just in Gaza and the occupied West Bank but within the borders of Israel. Palestinian Arabs who have Israeli citizenship under a 1950 law now amount to 25% of the citizen population and, despite their second-class status, still have the right to vote. 

Moreover, recently the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish economy for the Jewish state has led to a policy of attempting to drastically reduce the use of Arab labor, but without more Jewish immigration, that means relying on short-term migrant labor from non-Arab & non-Muslim countries. In addition, Israel’s geographic position has made it a natural route for growing numbers of refugees, mostly from Africa. Like most countries in today’s world, Israel is becoming increasingly multi-national. Under the circumstances, of course, right-wing Zionism has become more and more openly racist.

Fascist rule in Palestine/Israel

Fascism is a response to the growing contradictions that Zionism faces, which have led to a general move to the right, increased divisions in Israeli Jewish society and greater political instability. There were five general elections in the four years 2019 to 2022. Netanyahu returned to power following the last general  election in November 2022. He created a government essentially  dominated by its most fascistic elements, including certain of the most fanatical parties of the ‘religious right.’ Many of Netanyahu’s current ministers are disciples of the notorious fascist Rabbi Kahane, whose Kach party was actually banned by the Israeli government in 1988.

We describe the present Israeli government as fascist for objective reasons, not as empty name-calling or just because of the background of its members but based on its policies and actions. 

1. Netanyahu’s current government has used its control of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) to change the constitution and take control of the law courts, ending the independence of judges who not infrequently had been a restraining influence on the extreme policies of governments. Netanyahu imposed this policy despite massive protests by Israeli Jews who believe that their state should be a democracy. 

2. The government is intensifying the current state of war. Netanyahu has even issued a ‘declaration of war’ against Hamas. They are using this to complete the creation of their dictatorship and silence any Jewish dissent. They have brought Benny Gantz (a former general who leads the ‘opposition’ National Unity alliance) into the ‘war cabinet.’ That move strengthens the fascists’ hold on power and undermines Gantz’s independence. 

3. The current Israeli government holds that Palestinian Arabs – including those who currently have Israeli citizenship – have no place in Israel and should have no right to vote. They have stated that the whole historic land of Palestine from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan (and perhaps beyond) must be part of Israel and exclude Arabs. 

4. The principal base of these Israeli fascists is the huge armed force of Israeli citizens living in the settlements in the occupied West Bank region. These settlements have repeatedly been declared illegal in international law but successive Israeli governments have continued to support them, and successive US, British, and EU governments have done nothing to stop them. This armed force is the agent of genocide and expulsion on the West Bank, launching increasing attacks on the Arab populations, destroying homes, communities, farms, businesses etc. It is officially separate from the state and the actual army, though it is inextricably connected to them.

The most important, extensive and effective Palestinian resistance to this fascist regime is precisely there, in the Israeli occupied West Bank. The so-called ‘Palestinian Authority’ of Mahmoud Abbas has no authority and no democratic mandate – Abbas lost the last election, in 2006, but Israel and the Western powers ignored that and there hasn’t been another one since. It is hated and despised by the great majority of Palestinians as a corrupt tool of the Israeli government. It is the Palestinian youth who are acting independently to organize fighting units in towns and villages, to defend their communities from Zionist settler attacks and take the fight to the enemy. 

Defending democracy 

Liberal Zionists in Israel and their supporters in Europe and North America like to describe that state as the only democracy in the Middle East. They can’t say that now, but the liberal Zionists declare that is their aim and demonstrated their commitment on the streets, in mass protests against the dictatorship’s control of the courts. 

The Kahanists say bluntly that a Jewish state in Palestine cannot be democratic. Israel’s history indicates that is true in the existing context, though not entirely for their reasons. The ‘social-democratic’ reputation of Israel in the 1950s could only be maintained once the Zionist militias had used very undemocratic methods to take the Palestinian population and their destroyed homes out of the picture.

In 1993 and 1995,  the Oslo Accords 1 and 2 were entered into by the Israeli government, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the US. A United Nations resolution accompanied those Accords calling for Israel to withdraw back to the 1967 borders. Those Accords led to the creation of Gaza and the West Bank as an independent Palestinian mini-state. Today, the Palestinian people are defending their right to maintain and build on that supposedly guaranteed promise. We support the struggle of the Palestinians to defend their fundamental right to self-determination. That right should be defended. 

Every progressive force in the world should support the Palestinian struggle to defend the Palestinian state. The Palestinian leadership in both Gaza and the West Bank, together with the Palestinians living in Israel should declare the independence of the Palestinian state and demand the recognition of this Palestinian state by every government in the Middle East and every other government in the world, placing a demand on the international community to keep its promises to the Palestinian people made at the time of the original Oslo Accords. For the Biden Administration, the European governments, China, and the other governments of the world, to either support the current Israeli actions or to do nothing to reverse them is for the entire international community to break their promise to the Palestinian people, and in reality , to the entire peoples of the Middle East. That is, and should be, universally regarded as a profound moral and political crisis of the entire international community and a de facto declaration by the US and other governments that they have no capacity to keep even their most important and “sacred” promises.

We call for the  Israeli Jewish movement in defense of democracy and peace to defend the full implementation of the promises made to the Palestinian people to defend their right to create a nation. It is only on this basis that it is possible for a perspective of democracy and peace in the Middle East to survive. It is only on this basis for any notion that Zionism is anything other than a force for oppression to survive this moment in history.

Bitter conflicts fostered by the imperialists’ divide-and-rule strategy over the last 75 years have inevitably built up deep, dehumanizing animosities. We are seeing with the Netanyahu regime how quickly that can become genocidal. It is, in fact, essential to oppose the genocidal messages sent out by certain extremist leaderships on both sides. 

Bitter conflicts are not easily erased. Nevertheless, the only feasible road to democracy and equality starts with the defeat and removal of Israel’s fascist regime. Then the promise to the Palestinian people of an independent state of their own must be kept, and the right of the Palestinian people to defend and build that state must be recognized. This is only a first step in the direction of a solution to the historic crisis of  the Middle East. But it is essential for a movement uniting the two peoples to fight for the full victory of this limited first step for there to be any real hope of a genuine solution to that crisis. 

On the basis of this historic alliance and its determination to fight to win, the struggle for a genuine solution would become a real possibility. The two peoples would then be in a position to create, on the basis of mutual respect, a single bi-national state with freedom of religion, equal political and economic rights, equal language status and guaranteed protections for both communities. The necessity of genuine economic rights and opportunities in that state would require a government of the workers and oppressed and the transition to a socialist economy. 

A previous draft in this leaflet contained important political mistakes which have been corrected in this 15 October 2023 final statement. As this text says, the organizations  issuing this leaflet unequivocally reject and condemn all messages expressing or implying racism or genocide coming from any side.

15 October 2023

Movement for Justice by any means necessary – Twitter & IG: @followmfj
TikTok: @joinmfj FB: movementforjustice
contact@movementforjustice.co.uk

BAMN – Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (United States) (855) ASK–BAMN [855.275.2266] nationalbamn@gmail.com – bamn.com – IG: @joinbamn Tiktok: @joinbamn

International Trotskyist Committee for the Political
Regeneration of the Fourth International (ITC)
Revolutionary Workers League (U.S.)
Revolutionary Internationalist League (U.K.)
http://www.itc4.org

STRIKE TO DEFEAT THE TORY GOVERNMENT

07.02.2023 – Picket line at St Georges’ Hospital

Save the NHS

Defend Public Education: end the hated SATS system

Fight for art, music, and drama and extra-curricular programs

Reverse Brexit

End all racist police brutality and fascist attacks against our black, Asian, Muslim, and immigrant communities 

All-out indefinite strike action

Strike to Win 

On 1 February, 500,000 strikers led by the teachers’ unions and joined by tens of thousands of other striking workers, took to the streets of major cities and small towns. The teachers call for a national day of strike action to win a pay raise, to stop the government’s Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, and to save education was joined by students and community supporters eager to join what felt more like a celebration of the power of Britain’s working class and oppressed and less like another day of union strike actions. This was a rare day in the maelstrom of huge strikes that began in the late summer of 2022, because it was one of the tiny number of strikes in which strikers from a single sector of public workers were unified and fighting together. 300,000 teachers from every level of education starting with primary schools and continuing up to  university teachers from 150 universities across Britain were acting on the founding principles of trade unions: unity, solidarity and power in numbers. 

The wall-to-wall teachers’ strike was joined by 100,000 public sector workers, rail and transport workers, and other strikers. There were special rallies embedded in the day of strike action to protest the government’s union-busting Strike (Minimum Staffing) Bill written specifically to stop the strike wave that is electrifying the UK. 

In London, a spirited and defiant demonstration of 40,000 people led by teachers started their rally at Portland Place and then marched to Downing Street. Throughout the day, professionally made union banners and flags including a lead banner saying “Save Our Schools, Children Deserve Better” could be seen flying high and proud. Students of all ages and community supporters carried tens of thousands of homemade placards in support of all the strikes. The overwhelming popular support for the strikes is based on the common understanding that the government is responsible for the hyperinflation that is instituting pay cuts, and its attacks on the NHS, Education, the Rails and all public sector jobs must stop now.

Less than a week after the February 1 Day of Action, nurses and other NHS workers in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland held the biggest days of strike action in the 75-year history of the NHS. These strikes were just as euphoric, exhilarating, powerful, and popular as the teachers’ national day of strike action. In the next few months there will be an array of new strike action. The six-month strike-wave that has been sweeping the country has the potential to unite and change Britain forever. We are speaking for the great majority of people who hate the Tories and want to see them defeated.

The government’s declaration of war against our strikes

Our strikes are not typical trade union struggles. Despite the claims of our top union leaders, the government, and the press that our strikes are only about winning a pay increase, our strikes are inherently a political challenge to the program of the government.

Every one of our strikes is objectively both an economic and political fight. Every victory for our side is a defeat of the government’s austerity and privatization policies. Every wage increase we win that keeps us ahead of inflation makes it possible for the 47,000 openings for NHS nurses and the tens of thousands teacher vacancies to be filled. Winning pay increases and increased staffing levels for striking NHS workers, teachers, and other public sector workers will be a blow to the government’s austerity and privatization efforts. Winning safe working conditions and pay increases for rail workers, ambulance drivers, firefighters, bus drivers, refuse workers and all other striking workers whose lives are being placed in jeopardy every day, will make clear that government’s murderous COVID-19, immigration, and policing policies will no longer be tolerated and must end now. 

Our strikes are strong, but to beat the government we need to create a broader movement that gets our passive supporters and other activists into the streets fighting with us.We have broad public support that can be mobilized and strengthen our strikes. We are fighting for our patients, students, passengers, and anyone who benefits from the public sector. Right now, as a matter of fact, our union struggles for health workers are struggles to save the NHS and the healthcare of the overwhelming majority of the people of the UK, which the current government is attacking. Right now, as a matter of fact, the struggle to win a better contract for fire brigades is a struggle to prevent entire blocks of houses from  burning down. However, those broader political and social demands are being left implicit. In a situation in which the stakes are so high, these demands must be made explicit. 

Women demonstrate against closure at South London Women’s Hospital (1984-85)

This means that under these conditions, the current demands of our strikes are too narrow. We need to place demands on the government that go beyond contract demands and present our struggles explicitly for what they really are: struggles to save the NHS and  the other essential public institutions we are defending. If we start fighting for the reforms we need to win to assure the survival of the NHS and to improve education, our strikes will be transformed into a bigger, stronger movement that can defeat the government’s plans to privatize the public sector or chop away services from the NHS and the other public institutions whose services are essential for the majority of the people of the UK to lead a decent human life. 

We can draw students and youth into our movement if we include the demands to improve education that young people are passionate about. Ending SATS and creating more academic and extracurricular programs are two demands that students will fight for and can be won through our teachers’ strikes. Students organized their own strikes prior to the pandemic to fight for policies to stop global heating. A joint struggle of all the education unions and student unions would scare the pants off of many government MP’s. All of modern history has shown that a fundamental rule of thumb for any serious mass struggle is that the role of youth is essential to the possibility of victory.

We have already marched to defeat the government’s new Strike Bill. But that is not enough to kill the bill. All of the striking unions should make the government withdraw its new pending Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill. In reality, it is part and parcel of a whole series of new laws designed to attack the whole range of the democratic rights of the whole working class. All of these reactionary, anti-democratic, proto-fascist laws that are now before Parliament or have already been passed by Parliament are being fought against by community members who support our strike. These attacks on basic human rights range from giving police unlimited powers to commit crimes, including murder, without suffering any consequences, to locking refugees in new detention centers/concentration camps. 

If we stand together and fight jointly, our strike will be much more difficult to defeat, and we will be able to defeat some or all of the government’s repressive and dangerous laws. If we take up the demands of campaigns against police brutality and defending the rights of immigrant communities and asylum seekers and the whole Tory integrated and intertwined proposals to foster racism and anti immigrant bigotry we can build a united movement committed to winning equality, respect, dignity, and justice for the working class, the poor, and the oppressed. 

Defeating one or more of the Tories’ policies will inspire more people to join our fight. We can defeat the ability of the government to institute any aspects of their plan to privatize the public sector. Every victory we score against the government will literally preserve human lives. We know how ruthless and indifferent to life this government is. We have witnessed and are still witnessing the needless deaths of thousands of people because of the government’s put-profits-before-people COVID-19 policy. 

Our strikes and the movement we help build are the fight for a future that is far better than what exists today. Our union members and the students, patients, commuters and communities we serve are the lifeblood of this society. Our lives are intimately intertwined with the different communities we serve. We know we are fighting for so much more than pay raises. We just need to make that explicit by placing demands on the government that must be met for us to settle our strikes.

The sooner we take the steps we need to win, the better. Time is a friend of the government and an enemy of ours. The longer, more drawn out our strikes become, the greater the chance of demoralization and scabbing on our strike. If the support of the community is based on building a movement together, our support will stay strong for longer. If community support is based solely on supporting our contract fight, it will tend to wane more if it feels to some people it is taking too much time for us to make headway. We have taken on a big responsibility. We need a winning battle plan that ends in victory. We have the power to win. Our problem is we have too many leaders afraid of our power. Therefore, in order to win, we are going to need some new leaders to step forward who are not afraid of winning. 

Strike to Win

In the coming weeks, there will be many national, regional and local strike days, and although these struggles are important to maintain our movement, in their current limited form, they will lose in immediate terms. The strikes are too short, sporadic, infrequent, drawn-out, fragmented and uncoordinated. The on-again-off-again strike dates, the local and regional schedule of partial one day actions of different teachers, NHS, rail, and other union strikes, make it impossible to follow which union is on strike on any given day and to know what services will be affected. The Guardian, The Scotsman and other media sources regularly publish strike calendar spreadsheets to explain who, where, and which workers are on strike. These strike calendars are constantly revised. The strikes that do take place are primarily used to get the government to return to the bargaining table. In most cases, as soon as bargaining begins again, strike action is indefinitely suspended. This means that the government, not the unions, is controlling who, when, and where strike actions will take place. The policy of one-day rolling strikes that divides strikers in the same union into small and weak brigades of an army that could win fighting as one is, to put it mildly, crazy and stupid.

We cannot continue to engage in these losing tactics. The basic premise of trade unions is that there is strength in numbers. The two principles that every union is built on are unity and solidarity. But now when we need to be acting on those founding principles, our union tops are rejecting them for no good reason.

We need to use our numeric strength to win. We need all-out indefinite strikes by each of the unions to win. We need to demand that every one of our union leaders call for all-out strikes of each of their unions. We need to remove the roadblocks that our union tops, who are managers of each of their respective union’s bureaucracies and privately empathize more with our bosses than they do with us, are putting in the way of our strikes. We need to demand that TUC leader Nowak, who is the dutiful lapdog of the Labour Party, which is opposed to our strikes, step down now. Anyone who supports Nowak’s anti-labour, pro-government strategy to our strike action is our enemy. The last thing we need is a traitor leading the TUC. 

The strikes of education workers led by the teachers and teaching assistants provide an example of how to squander our power and passion to win. We know that the teachers’ strikes are popular and well-organized, but are achieving next to nothing because of their flawed tactics. Teachers in Scotland just finished sixteen days of continuous rolling strikes which ended without a better contract settlement. University teachers have already carried out strike actions. They want to wage a national all-out strike but are being prevented from doing so by General Secretary Jo Grady. The union is 70,000 strong and represents teachers at 150 universities throughout the UK. There are 2.6 million university students. In November, the National Union Of Students (NUS) endorsed the University teachers’ strike. The NUS is campaigning for free education, available to all, including every community member regardless of age, formal qualifications and availability to take classes in person. It is seeking larger student stipends so that working-class, poor, black, immigrant, and asylum seeker students can get a university education without the mental health problems these students face because of their economic status.

The university teachers’ strikes are planned for three days a week during the month of February. The university teachers’ strikes, which are the largest strikes in the history of higher education, provide students with the vehicle they need to win their demands. Both university teachers and students have the same goals and meet the economic demands needed for both teachers and students to flourish and improve and broaden access to higher education. If they unite and strike together in an all-out indefinite strike, everyone could win. Right now, the limited demands, intermittent character of and needlessly enforced isolation of the University teachers’ strike, are diminishing the power of the strike and setting it up to fail.

The strike strategy of our union leaders makes us look weak and scared. We can not win if we continue to follow the agreed-upon, losing tactics of leaders of each and every union. Obviously, if  our aim is to win quickly, every union should be participating in coordinated strikes, so we shut down Britain and keep it shut down until every union wins.

We have been given two reasons for the intermittent, fractured tactics for conducting our strikes. The first is that we should believe in the infantile Christmas Eve strategy. If we are good, respectful workers, then we will wake up and see that the government has collapsed and granted our demands. This is about as likely to happen as Father Christmas shimmying down a chimney with a sack full of gifts. The second is that patients, parents, commuters will continue to support us if our strikes cause minimal disruptions. This makes no sense, first because anyone that relies on one of our striking institutions would prefer that we have settled on all-out strike dates, and that teachers, nurses or rail workers will take indefinite strike action together throughout the UK to win quickly. It is much easier to arrange collective babysitters and/or teacher-run strike schools in libraries or churches than it is to scramble for childcare on a strike day that may not occur. 

The NHS is the beloved crown jewel of the British social welfare state.The aim of our strikes is to strengthen and preserve it. In the 1980’s when the government was carrying out a series of hospital closings and other attacks on the NHS, nurses led hospital occupations and, with the help of doctors and other staff, ran the facilities themselves. The workers escorted managers out the door, fortified the entrances to the hospitals so that the police could not break their occupation/ strike. Ambulance workers and other hospitals coordinated services with the occupied hospitals to assure that patients were kept safe and received the care they needed. The attacks we are facing now are much larger and more dangerous. We have an answer to the government’s anti-union Strike Bill: keep the hospitals open under worker control. Our strikes that are walkouts have a great deal of public support. If our strikes become occupations, they will galvanize and inspire the nation. The rank and file NHS workers who know how to run health care must take charge of our strikes so that we can implement a winning strategy for our strikes.

We must elect rank-and-file workers’ leaders to negotiate our contracts

Our current bargaining process is a charade. Our union bosses set new strike dates every month to initiate more bargaining sessions with the government. The government negotiators are intransigent. Our so-called leaders drop our demands the moment they sit at the bargaining table. They are always prepared to capitulate.

Days or weeks go by and nothing is accomplished. At some point, the government decides to shut down the free-lunch- joint-management-banter-sessions and demands that union members revote on a reshuffled version of the contract offer which they already rejected. This  preposterous charade ends with the union managers stating that they are “disappointed” that the government is so insensitive and did not offer more and then they usually try to shove the contract down their members’ throats. Like every other boss, the union managers expect workers to never question management decisions and do what they are told. On occasion, the union managers do not make a recommendation on the settlement, especially when they know that they lose their authority and influence with their members if they try to orchestrate a yes vote that has no chance of winning. During the time period that union members are voting, a government minister/ blowhard bully lies, claiming he/she will not return to the bargaining table. This theatrical production, sponsored by the government, which we have seen too many times already, can be easily defeated.

The NHS struggle in Scotland shows how to beat the blustering government ministers. The last round of NHS negotiations in Scotland, which began last summer, and continued into late November and early December, involved a number of NHS unions bargaining together. However, these unions did not strike together. The unity they shared at the bargaining table was undercut by their leaderships’ obsequious posture before the government. Unison and Unite’s poorly paid unskilled NHS workers voted for the contract, which allegedly will give them a 7.5% raise.  

Three unions, the RCN, the GMB and the RCM (midwives union) members overwhelmingly rejected the contract. SNP Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, Humza Yousaf, responded to the no vote of nurses, ambulance drivers, and midwives by puffing out his chest and publicly declaring that he would impose the new contract on all the NHS workers. His dictatorial declaration was quickly defeated by the nurses and ambulance drivers and midwives, who refused to accept his sweeping anti-union pronouncement. The RNC and GMB simply set new dates for strike action in January. This was a victory for the unions.

Unfortunately, this victory was squandered when the RCN canceled the January strike dates because Yousaf backed off his threat and returned to bargaining.

The bus drivers showed how it was possible to resist the strong-arm tactics of their union managers and make sure their bargaining charade ended. After their union bosses tried every scurrilous trick they could think of to engineer a yes vote on a bad contract, the bus drivers turned down the contract twice.

There are only so many times that anyone can watch a bad play. We need the rank and file members of every union to take the bold step the Abellio bus drivers took. Our strikes are about winning wage increases, but they are about so much more. Every one of the ongoing strikes poses the same question: who will decide what the UK looks like a year from now. We can not let the Tories win. We need our strike movement to humiliate them and force them to back off their policies and resign in shame.

Save Britain from the rising tide of fascism

We are in a fight for our lives and for the promise of hope we owe to the next generation.

Our movement must use its power to shift the balance of power now and take control over determining and implementing the political policies we know will save Britain. If our strikes lose and our movement has no other plans to keep the struggle moving forward, then the Tories will move quickly to implement the laws they are passing to crush union rights, to eviscerate democracy and diversity, and to give the police unlimited powers needed to create an authoritarian one-party government in Britain. If the Tories succeed, war is on our national agenda.

The Tories’plan to exploit their control of Parliament now to do what Mussolini’s fascists did in Italy and the Nazis did in Germany and Italy, manipulate ostensibly democratic processes and institutions to create a fascist government. Mussolini and Hitler did not come to power through a coup. They assumed positions of power on the basis of the supposedly democratic constitutions of Italy and Germany, and then used those positions to create “legal” dictatorships. On the basis of these “constitutional” processes, they used their parties’ domination of Parliament to empower police, the military, the SS, border patrol, intelligence, and secret service agents etc. to crush all dissent and opposition. The fascists never could have won in Italy or Germany if the mass actions of workers and other oppressed people had crushed them when they were weak and unpopular. If months of mass actions fail to resolve the hyperinflation and economic crisis because they have lost because of bad leadership, the ideology of racism, immigrant-bashing, sexism, anti-LGBT+ and white nationalism can triumph. We are in a position to stop this from happening now while the Tories are divided amongst themselves and hated by the majority or people of the UK. 

Our union misleaders have a different policy for defeating the government. Their aim is to replace the current government with a Labour government. This means in all likelihood waiting for the next elections in 2025. They assume that every victory for the current government increases the chances of a Labour parliamentary victory in the next election. But if we wait until 2025 to defeat this government, it will be too late. If the Tories have the next two years to establish a fascist regime, then it is highly unlikely that new elections will take place. 

The other road to a new quick election would hypothetically be a general strike. The Labour Party opposes our strikes and our union managers are so scared of the power we possess that they are fighting to lose – not win. If we take control of our strikes, then we can force the Tories to accept a partial or total defeat, which could lead to the resignation of the government. Everything rests on what the movement can win. And that in turn means we need new leaders to take control of our strikes and to lead our movement to victory.

Join Movement for Justice

The aim of the Movement for Justice is to develop new leaders.

The working class and oppressed must win and win quickly. But that means we need new leaders to come forward. For most of us, becoming a leader is not a choice, it is a necessity. We lead because there is no other way to win. Being a leader is nothing more than the task someone assumes as a part of the division of labor that is required to make it possible for our organizations and movement to win. 

07.02.2023

From Minneapolis to London, mass action led by black, Asian & immigrant youth defeats the racists & fascists.

Each weekend and most days since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA, we’ve had huge marches through central London and around the country. We risked coronavirus because we knew history wouldn’t wait. At times when the state goes too far and exposes its racism it creates a turning point. It is imperative that leaders emerge in action on the side of the oppressed to win. It means overcoming mis-leadership and fears of our own power in action. MFJ is an organisation building leaders in action, speaking the truth about racism. We know that to overthrow oppression, the oppressed must strike the blow.

On Saturday 6th June from Parliament Square we marched for miles – to the US embassy, to Home Office Headquarters, Parliament Square and Whitehall. It was an outpouring of anger by young people taking to the streets, to reckon with time-worn British racism. The speed of the escalation is testament to the line being drawn against all the ways we are being killed and sacrificed to the profit, political opportunism or convenience of a few – deaths at police hands; deaths in detention centres; being left to die from Covid-19; left in Grenfell Tower; left to drown in the Mediterranean sea; deported to countries we don’t know; losing everything to a bloodsucking immigration policy; Windrush generations humiliated; young people and immigrants scapegoated for the failures of a system that for ten years has bailed out banks not communities.

A reckoning has been a long time coming.

A struggle for power

A dynamic youth-lead anti-racist movement asserting its power in the streets is the most serious threat to the government’s racist policies and practices; racist Brexit, the hostile environment for immigrants, health, education and work inequalities and racist policing. It is also the strongest hope of the exploited and oppressed as we face a world in crisis desperate for revolutionary change.

That power – on the streets – has incensed racists and fascists across the country and led assorted far right groupings to call a counter demo against the BLM protest on 13th June, under the pretence of “protect the statues”. Their ‘defending statues’ was really about defending their racism against the awakening of a movement that could come to challenge the politics of nationalism and racism that gave them Brexit, and which most divides and weakens the working class as a whole. Their answer is to put black people back in ‘their place’.

Wherever the fascists march or demonstrate, their goals are simple: brutal racist intimidation; physical attacks on black people, Asian people, LGBT people and anti-fascists; recruiting more racists to their ranks. They want us weakened, afraid to act, and really afraid to fight back. Fascism has to be defeated; it cannot be negotiated. The past four years since the Brexit vote has seen racism and racist attacks increase, some of the largest fascist mobilisations including in London and Manchester since the 1970 ‘Keep Britain White’ marches. With the election of the most far right government since Thatcher, under Boris Johnson, and his rallying cry to racists everywhere of ‘Get Brexit Done,’ fascists have been emboldened. The timidity of Labour who turned a blind eye to Brexit racism allowed a weak Tory government to stay standing. It is no accident that bigoted racist and anti-Muslim attacks increased; Brexit gave licence to racists to act.

Overcoming the misleaders

The march BLM LDN called for Saturday 13th June would have outnumbered the fascists and easily driven away any right-wing racists trying to disrupt it. Turning back the fascists with their tails between their legs from the start would have cemented the power of the anti-racist movement. Instead BLM LDN announced they would ‘give’ the fascists Saturday, by moving to Friday instead. They lined up alongside everyone from the police, media, Akala and Boris Johnson, telling black people to clear out of the fascist’s way. That betrayal was a comfort to the far right, who may well have increased their attendance as a result. It is always a mistake to give ground to fascists to organise and grow; it leads to racist attacks on the day and in the aftermath. It treats black people as though we are weak, when it is precisely our strength that has brought about this critical point in history.

A distraction rally was held in Hyde Park, called by Stand up to Racism, which should have marched straight to Trafalgar Square, but the leaders of that rally also told people to go home after a few speeches. Thankfully hundreds ignored that advice and came to Trafalgar Square. London Black Revs and Malcom X Movement had called on protestors to go to Trafalgar Square from the start, and not back down to fascists.

The decision of the 200 or so, to stand ground in Trafalgar Square against all racist provocation and abuse, getting the word out as far and wide so others would come and join us, turned a near defeat into a major victory. The day ended with mass action lead by overwhelming black, working class young people, driving the fascists out streets by street, and taught them a hard lesson. It was a truly historic defeat for fascism.

An MFJ account of Saturday 13th June – Trafalgar Square to Waterloo

“It was known the racists and fascists came in largely through Victoria on coaches and trains to head to Parliament Square. They always start drinking early. Altercations with police began quickly, they attacked journalists and gradually fought through police lines to get to Trafalgar Square. These were the groups looking to attack any BLM / anti-fascists and do damage. They had glass bottles and fireworks as weapons.

“In Trafalgar Square the anti-racist demonstrators were overwhelmingly black, young and working-class, a lot of women. Everyone knew why we were there: we had to defend the growing movement by holding the ground to stop the fascists taking advantage of the day, and not clearing ourselves out of the way.

“We were only around 200, if that. There were police nominally separating the sides. The fascists (all men, some EDL, some violent groups connected through football) were gathered around the south west of the square shouting racists and misogynistic taunts, ‘go back to Africa,’ being provoking, and some in berets like ex-army gathered on Nelson’s Column. They carried on until they felt confident enough in their numbers to attack physically. At that point they moved like a flock around from the south end of the square, then up the east side to the higher ground along the top. They used the higher ground to lob glass bottles and fireworks into the crowd of black people, while making monkey noises and chanting. At the same time there were other racists milling around allied with the racist mobilisation.

Some police moved in, but a lot of the time the police stood back. The police caught up some fascists around Charing Cross, and later with police dogs stopped another breakaway group of fascists near Haymarket. There were fascists on side streets around Trafalgar Square.

Despite the mis-leaders who stayed away, everyone who stayed showed boldness greater than any of those fascists and racists. Our cause meant more – we are making history.

After an hour or so another big group of anti-racist protestors (some marched from Hyde Park, probably picking up others on the way) got to Trafalgar Square. Then our numbers were closer to a thousand, as it should have been. There were still confident fascists and racists verbally abusing black people around the square like it were a sport. They quickly found Trafalgar Square was no longer a space where you could be openly racist.  Emboldened and our numbers growing the racists and fascists got shut down.

We got moving down the side streets around the square. Fascists spotted in Leicester Square were chased out. Back in Trafalgar Square some of the earlier fascists who had been so confident and bold before were caught up with. Everyone who had aligned with the racist abuse found themselves questioned and confronted.

We marched down The Strand to Waterloo Bridge, widening the field where the fascists could no longer operate. Over the bridge at Waterloo station a group of fascists in the train station had presumably left behind a couple of their fascist friends. By now the numbers of anti-racists was still growing, still overwhelmingly black and working class. Some of the crowd managed to chase the fascists into the station.

Our side’s goal was clear, we wanted to defend our city, our people from the fascist threat and we wanted to ensure that any fascist or potential fascist thinks twice before returning to attack us. We ended up as thousands, and we took the streets back from them, from Waterloo to Trafalgar Square to Whitehall, to Vauxhall – we chased those fascists out, any who thought to challenge us, any who sought to spew their racism or attack us got taught a lesson in the power of working class black, white and Asian people fighting in unison to defend our communities”

A historic victory against fascism

It is impossible to overstate the enormous victory over fascism which took place on Saturday 13th June, for the first time ever a mass black led, working class mobilisation in central London managed to beat back the fascists, force them out of our city in tears. There have been victories like this in our local communities such as Tower Hamlets when the EDL were defeated by masses of Asian youth and anti-fascists determined to defend their community, but in central London the fascists have been able to hold increasingly large demonstrations freely – they see central London as their space. The victory was confirmed when the Democratic Football Lads Alliance put out a statement afterwards saying they would be withdrawing from future mobilisations to ‘defend statues’.

Fear of this expression of the power of a black-led struggle, and the great significance of our victory, has meant that much of the left, and the leaders who use the ‘BLM’ name, are refusing to tell the truth about what happened. Most people who were not there will just have seen the footage from earlier in the day when the fascists had the upper hand and the photo of a fascist being carried to safety. Neither of these things tells the true story of what happened, the scale of the physical, emotional, political defeat for fascism – something that only happened because thousands defied the call to ‘stay at home’.

Movement for Justice by any means necessary exists to mobilise that power, to make the power of exploited and oppressed communities a social force that will defeat the racism of the state, abolish its brutal system of oppression, and smash the fascists. That movement will give new hope to youth, to the poor and working class, and to everyone suffering discrimination and prejudice.

MFJ is a movement of leaders, most of us immigrants and asylum seekers who have fought to be in Britain and fought to stay here. We fight to abolish the anti-immigrant system that is central to racism in Britain: – to end the racist scapegoating of immigrants and the government’s ‘Hostile Environment’ policy; to shut down all detention centres and stop deportations and immigration raids; to win the right of ALL descendants & family members of the Windrush Generation to stay in the UK; and to extend the Settled Status for EU citizens in Britain to EVERYONE, from any country, who is living here without secure immigration status.

MFJ does not rely on politicians, judges or any institutions of the state. To secure our rights and futures we must build an independent, integrated mass movement, led by youth, immigrants and the black & Asian communities, and fight by any means necessary for civil rights,  immigrant rights, and equality for all.

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