And further into the darkness we go. Not the liberating darkness of Black Power Socialism / black liberation and ‘race-class’ struggle resistance, but of the darkness of an on-going victorious leading colonial state. It doesn’t have to be like this. But it is. And it’s tough and difficult for us. Someone shared with me a comment from someone on social media which said: “You were at carnival and two weeks later posting your condolences to the very head of the system that the Rebellion and Revolution was born out of.
History was not yesterday, you are living in it. Zombies.” History is not ‘back then’. History is now, back then is today and today is tomorrow, there’s no actual separation but that which we make as wage slaves internalising the system of wage slavery. There’s only two directions, anti-colonial or colonial. The colonial side of our existence bears upon us in a million ways everyday, the anti-colonial side of us has to be a very hard-working conscious activity that needs to inform every thought, every movement, every reaction and reflection we make. It has to be in all our lives. Otherwise, you end up succumbing to the world and culture of the oppressor.
As stated before, this last week was strange enough, but things can always get worse and stranger. Queen Elizabeth II dies, the state goes into its pre-planned frenzied project to deepen its control and hold on the people in a historic context where the people are increasingly suffering due to the system in which the Queen is the leading symbol. “Since bourgeois monarchy was first established in 1660 the pattern has been clear: when the capitalist order is under threat the royals – as the ultimate counter-revolutionary backstop and ‘legitimising’ force for the rule by decree – increases. When the order is secure, it declines”*. And the power of the monarchy hasn’t seen a decline as it sees itself / the state in greater crises so acts accordingly. The unelected dictatorial power is considerable and operates in its open official form and its illegal covert form largely hidden from the masses with a British left that has never campaigned against the monarchy and seldom even understands its role.
But those with relative power DO understand the leading role of the queen and monarchy, and that’s why the CWU / Chris Ward and Co and the RMT / Mick Lynch and Co have soldout their entire membership and the hopes of many more in collapsing at the feet of the Queen and King (literally) while phrasemongering about James Connolly to assuade their own colonial guilt and to treat the rest of us like fools. Lenin called these types ‘labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”, more like: labour lieutenants of the British monarchy! Someone on twitter called ‘average postie’ said about the CWU sellout of the strike: “This is the lowest I have ever seen the delivery office, half of posties have not turned up. The other half are silent in anger and disappointment. We have lost money, we have lost the battle, we have lost faith in the CWU.” This guy seems to have children and needs the strikes to win to be able to live with less pressure and to ensure his children eat better and enjoy life a little bit more.
It’s a kick in the teeth to us all that the TU leadership have sold-out like this, it’s going to be very hard, perhaps even impossible to get the momentum going again like we have had this past several months. This last strike wave (which has been brought to a sudden collapse by this sellout) was a very delicate and fragile turn towards what looked like a working-class fight-back. But as was suspected all along, these TU leaders were going to sellout things and one-day strikes, while we could argue are a step in the right direction, are actually quite pathetic and don’t win anything. Some might argue we can get the momentum up again in the near future and one hopes they are right. However, one shouldn’t underestimate the vicious far-right mass reaction coordinated by the British state that seeks to further demolish any chance of workers conducting collective actions.
The speed at which the sellout happened yesterday perhaps indicates that Lynch, Ward, etc were excplicitly discussing how to actually sellout the strikes and that they possibly agreed in the advent of the death of the queen to call the sellout. Whatever the case, the trade union members should seek to destroy their leadership by any means necessary and replace the trade union leadership with the poorer working class members and especially with a new Black and Brown, migrant and women leadership and a new trade union structure that ensure leaders get an average workers pay for the positions on the execs.
The ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign initiated and controlled by Ward and Lynch now clearly comes across for what it always was, a corrupt manipulation to feed the narrow sellout interests of Ward, Lynch and Co. Enough is enough of this colonial sellout!
Actually what defines this country this last week is the shoot-to-kill by police of 23yr old Chris Kaba in south London. Another police lynching similar to that what happened to Mark Duggan in August 2011. The country is defined by this state crime, and also defined by the relative militant class consciousness of the black working classes that are incensed by this racist killing and who have been gathering at Brixton police station since yesterday despite no-one calling for a presence there and even the mother and father of Chris requesting people wait for their call to protest. You can’t hold back the Black working class. And they are coming out. However, they have no strategic grassroots organisations that can turn their sharp black resistance consciousness into an actual force that can push-back the state and conduct ‘serve the people’ work on the council estates. The challenge is to build exactly that.
The next reply to the ‘average postie’ was: “Cancelling strikes is catering to the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed. The only way to ensure the media don’t attack you is to never try and change anything.” You have to stand your ground. Period. People will respect you for it even if they don’t fully agree, and more people will be attracted to a cause that has a solid leadership and is loyal to its base. Standing ground also means doing it in an actual struggle and not on the virtual space which is social media, or arguably is a capitalist-controlled space of anti social media as it skews reality and as such disables people from taking action on the streets and forming real-life organisations that can be active and mobilise our communities. Radical grassroots mass work which is fundamental to developing an actual socialist struggle has never been a part of the British left. The state propaganda creating mass far-right hysteria around the death of the queen and the takeover of the king will be extremely alienating, people must reach-out to each other and the justice campaign for Chris Kaba (and the general struggle against the racist state and police brutality) is a really good place to put our efforts into something that is primarily important in our class struggle / black-led resistance movement.
Further reading:
Serve the People Programs of the Black Panther Party for Self Defence: https://caringlabor.files.word
*The role of the monarchy in Britain: https://danglazebrook.com/2022
The role of the monarchy in the Middle East: https://danglazebrook.com/2022
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