It’s been a busy week in the ongoing fight against the blacklisting of unionists: I’ve not been able to find a definite update on the case of sacked IWW bus driver Oscar Alvarez, but the case is definitely worth keeping an eye on and supporting if possible, and retired electrician George Tapp was knocked down by a car at a protest against blacklisting in Manchester a few days ago. He’ll require reconstructive surgery on his legs, but is reported to be in good spirits. If you want to help keep up the fight and you live in London, then you might want to show up to support Frank Morris, a blacklisted electrician who’s going to an employment tribunal on Tuesday morning, or if you live in Glasgow the Blacklist Support Group have called a protest there next Saturday.

Finally, what sounds like a victory: management at Birmingham University, who’d been threatening 361 support staff with redundancy or pay cuts, have backed down after campaigners at the university responded with a call for a national demonstration similar to the one that rocked Sussex recently. While these kinds of victories are rarely complete or clear-cut, they do demonstrate the power of direct action to change a situation for the better, and challenge the idea that there’s nothing we can do. The last word should go to Birmingham Defend Education themselves: “Calling off this action is not the end of the campaign. Both staff and students will resume organisation in the next academic year when we are stronger, and we can continue to build a sustained campaign rather than just one big action… When we become involved in organising, we are constantly told that protests don’t change anything, but the actions of this group and the national student movement have shown management that we’re capable of defending ourselves if they try attack the conditions of staff and students.”

I was going to try and do a round-up of interesting May Day events, but there’s not much to add to Bristol AF’s excellent summary. The only thing I’d add is that, if you have the time, this report from the May Day clashes in Istanbul is worth a read. On an international note, this Bangladeshi anarchist page doesn’t have much original content on it yet, but it might be worth keeping an eye on for ongoing developments in the region. The ongoing bitter dispute on the docks on the USA’s west coast has heated up again with a lock-out in Portland, and, while the Pacific North-West Grand Jury resisters are currently all free, Jerry Koch, a New York anarchist, is currently facing another Grand Jury trying to coerce him into giving information on his comrades. The Black Scare is far from over.

Back in the UK, the big story of late has been the Brighton bin wildcat, but there’s a few other stories worth taking note of: the IWW are currently fighting for the reinstatement of sacked bus driver Oscar Alvarez (see here for some information on how you can support him), and two new worthwhile-sounding initiatives are being launched in London, South London Welfare Action and Angry Workers of the World. Finally, the case of the four dancers accused of kidnapping their boss over unpaid wages is an interesting one: just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, one alleged bossnapping doesn’t necessarily mean the coming summer’s going to be a hot one, but it does bear noticeable similarities to a number of incidents that happened in France in the early years of this crisis. When talking about the alleged bossnapping in Cheltenham, it’s worth remembering that it’s a product of a “grey market” workplace, and so the conditions it came from don’t necessarily generalise to the rest of the economy; but on the other hand, to say that it came out of a semi-legal workplace isn’t necessarily to say that it’s irrelevant. In the coming months and years, as the formal economy continues to slump, jobs at the hyper-exploitative edges of the legal labour market are likely to expand, and so we might well see an increase in these kinds of uncontrollable conflicts taking place in areas where the old mechanisms for containing class conflict have no presence. Only time will tell.

Finally, and this really is a brief round-up because I’m tired, the inspiring grassroots campaign against the bedroom tax on Merseyside continues, and this week they occupied the offices of a bailiff company that’d been looking to make money out of welfare reform.

That’s all for now, I hope to find the time to write more soon. Happy May Day, anyway.

To tell the truth, I don’t even really properly hate Thatcher. I certainly dislike the idea of her, but that’s all it is, an idea: I was a young child when she left office, and so I can’t really summon up the kind of visceral loathing that I feel for the likes of Tony Blair or Iain Duncan Smith. But, even if I don’t take that much personal satisfaction from the news, a lot of my friends – at the risk of sounding terribly drippy, both the friends I already know and the ones I have yet to meet – are happy about it, and that does make me happy.

Of course, it’s true that a confused old woman dying of a stroke doesn’t take us any closer to the end of neoliberalism. But then it’s also true that there was never a magic man born to a virgin on the 25th December, and that doesn’t change the fact that Christmas parties can be quite fun. We spend enough of our lives feeling unhappy, stressed and anxious as it is, and not enough time celebrating. When opportunities to enjoy ourselves come our way, we shouldn’t squander them.

Most revolutionaries use some variation of the economic two-class distinction – for instance, my own “about” section on this website starts off by stressing this. But not all of them do – for instance, Class War defined the middle class as a separate group with interests opposed to those of the working class, a position which sometimes expressed itself as sneering at teachers and the like, and the now-defunct group Openly Classist argued that “the real enemy of working class people-the enemy that keeps them suppressed-is not capitalism, not the State, not the never defined “Ruling Class”, but this dominating class, the middle class.” It’s fairly obvious that any ideology that sees teachers and Michael Gove as having the same class interests is rubbish, but I think that other groups can be a bit too hasty to write off anything outside the basic economic class division. Worst of all is the sadly common hypocrisy where people jump from one definition to the other according to the situation, so your mate who went to Oxford but you think is sound and agrees with you about most things is objectively proletarian if you look at their relationship to the means of production, but those Trots/anarchists/feminists/environmentalists/liberals/whatever over there are a bunch of middle-class idiots who you don’t have to take seriously because everyone knows half of them are students*. I don’t think anyone’s really immune from this habit, I’d guess that anarchists probably call Trots middle-class about as often as the other way around.

Revolutionaries who rely on the economic class division often tend to see the sociological distinction of working and middle class as a social construct that’s used by the system to divide and rule, which I think is largely true, and then conclude from that that it’s not really worth bothering with. This conclusion is a lot more problematic, as social constructs aren’t just imaginary, they have real effects – nationalism is another system that’s used to divide and rule the working class by making people fight against each other instead of for our shared class interests, but that doesn’t mean that all we need to do is point this out and then Israelis and Palestinians will suddenly start holding hands and singing the Internationale. Similarly, we may all belong to the same economic class, but that doesn’t mean that someone who is identifiably culturally middle-class won’t feel out of place at an anti-bedroom tax meeting held on a housing estate, or that someone in trackie bottoms and an England shirt will feel at home at a meeting of the lecturers’ union UCU.

If anyone doubts the importance of these divisions, it’s worth thinking about the experiences of 2011, when two completely separate revolts took place, the public sector strikes of “middle class” and “working class” trade unionists and the riots of “underclass” youth, but no contact was made between these two groups. The economic working class certainly exists in the sense that some of us have to sell our labour in order to survive, while others profit off it, and which category you’re in has a major effect on your life, but it doesn’t exist in the sense of being a single unified group.

Rather than sharing a single experience of what it’s like to be working class, wage labourers are fragmented up into many different sections – as well as the obvious dividing lines of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and sociological class, there’s a number of important and overlapping divisions like private sector workers versus public sector workers versus claimants, unionised versus un-unionised workers, and those in stable, permanent employment versus those in temp jobs. These divisions matter, and the tensions between workers and claimants won’t just go away if we close our eyes, click our heels together and repeat “we’re all proles together”, any more than patriarchy will. We need a strategy to attack them, and that requires a full, open and honest discussion of them, without getting defensive about our own backgrounds or trying to pretend they don’t exist.

Privilege theory comes in for a lot of criticism, but I think it can be a useful tool for some areas. When thinking about the sociological categories that get labelled as “working class” and “middle class” I don’t think it makes sense to see them as totally separate categories with opposed interests – again, thinking back to the big public sector strikes of 2011, that’d mean that the sociologically middle class professionals striking had opposing class interests to the cleaners and other manual workers who also took to the picket lines that day – but I also don’t think we can write them off altogether, so viewing them as different groups within the economic working class with varying amounts of privilege makes sense to me.  This means that it’s not a bad thing, or an inherent contradiction, for sociologically middle class people to be involved in groups based around the economic working class, any more than it’s a problem for men or white people to be involved in these groups, but if an organisation’s overwhelmingly dominated by any one of these categories, then that is a problem, and it’s worth thinking about why that is. For instance, someone who’s been to university, and received systematic training in forming and expressing their ideas, will tend to have an advantage when it comes to discussing ideas, and so will find it easier to get attention and respect in groups, like most political organisations, where these skills are highly prized. The more a group is made up of a people who share a single cultural background, the more they’ll lack knowledge of other experiences of working-class life, and it’s worth being aware of this, as well as the fact that any organisation dominated by people from one background is going to be offputting to people from other backgrounds.

The many different groups that make up the working class are continually being brought together – examples of this include the way that some ethnic groups, like Jews, Irish Catholics or Afro-Caribbeans, experience less racism than they used to, or students at Sussex University are making better links with workers on their campus, and the Pop-Up Union is bringing workers from different trade unions and job backgrounds together – and driven apart, as with the increasing demonisation of claimants, or the way that mass redundancies mean that shared workplace cultures are destroyed and replaced with the forced isolation imposed by the welfare system. This means that, for revolutionaries, our task is not to place ourselves at the head of some mythical united working-class movement, as some on the left still fondly imagine, but to try and do what we can to encourage the processes that bring people together, and resist the ones that divide them. This can take an endless number of different forms, from arguing that union meetings should be opened up to other workers, to bashing racists in the street, to challenging lefties who deny the existence of patriarchy, to spending half your lunchtime arguing with that person at your work who’s always talking shite about people on benefits. It’s a huge task, and one that’s not helped by simplistic positions that downplay the extent of the problem, whether they take the form of wishing patriarchy away by viewing sexism as just about individual attitudes, or viewing sociological class categories as irrelevant because they’re not the same thing as economic class. We can only begin to work towards solutions once we’ve recognised the problems.

Post-script: Kill the team leader in your head.

This post is now quite long and gloomy enough, but while I’m on the subject I just wanted to quickly bring up a related problem, which is the extent to which, as individuals, we’re all forced to collaborate with capital against each other. This individual collaboration is another problem that’ll need to be worked through before we can ever arrive at a straightforward class struggle of workers versus bosses.

On one hand, anarchists recognise that we don’t have a free choice over what we do with our lives, and we’re all forced to compromise to some extent in order to earn a living, and even people engaged in some of the most harmful jobs, like weapons manufacturing, can take impressively radical actions when they start to collectively challenge their conditions. On the other hand, we recognise that there are some things you just don’t do, no matter how much you need the money: strikebreaking being one, becoming a cop being another fairly uncontroversial example. But it’s not just coppers and scabs who make their money by fucking people over – what about bailiffs? Or supermarket security guards? Or jobcentre workers who sanction people? UKBA staff who carry out raids and remove immigrants might be completely beyond the pale, but what about the thousands of staff employed to make sure the Home Office’s murderous bureaucracy runs smoothly, or the cleaners and catering staff in detention centers, or the people who schedule appointments for ATOS?

Industries like debt collection and Welfare to Work provision are likely to carry on growing and growing, so it’s likely that in the future we’ll see more struggles by workers in these industries, simultaneously fighting back against capital’s attacks on their own standard of living while helping to ruin other people’s lives in the interests of the economy, as with the Prison Officer’s Association. And in our own lives, a lot of people are desperate to get into paid employment and out of the collapsing welfare system, so it’d be good to have some kind of shared clarity on what compromises are acceptable and unacceptable in order to earn a living.

As well as the fact that many jobs require you to fuck over other working-class people for your employer, there’s the related problem that, rather than just having one bloke with a monocle and top hat giving everyone else orders, modern workplaces often require all the workers to enforce work discipline on each other. Team leaders and shift supervisors who do most of the same work and earn a tiny bit more in return for pushing everyone else to work harder, but even workers at the very bottom of the ladder are often forced into driving our co-workers onwards and helping our bosses keep an eye on performance, as with work teams that are collectively rewarded and punished according to results, so it’s in everyone’s individual interests to discourage each other from slacking off. None of this changes the essential antagonism between those of us who have to sell our lives in order to survive and those who get rich off our backs, but it does highlight, once again, the vastness of the challenges that we’ll have to find our way through if we ever want to be able to face our enemies openly and directly, as one class against another.

* no-one ever looks good doing this, and that includes the many anarchists who do it, but, as with so many other kinds of depressing lefty behaviour, it reached a new low during the SWP crisis, when loyal supporters of the Central Committee led by Professor Alex Callinicos, a man who has literally spent his entire adult life in academia, tried to suggest that a party member who had spoken out against covering up rape must have been led astray by the “pull of petty-bourgeois thinking” because he was doing a PhD. Seriously.

The most obvious problem with the article is this genuinely terrible passage: “We are seen as masked, dangerous and armed with firebombs. I do not deny that there is an element of truth in this and that there are some among us who believe violence is justified to bring about change. However, we cannot forget the hundreds, maybe even thousands of pacifist anarchists whose aims are not so different to those of socialists.” This plays right into the old myth of “good peaceful protesters vs. bad violent anarchists” that’s been used to divide and undermine any social movement that threatens to get out of control, as can be seen in Sussex University management’s response to the recent student protest; anyone who repeats this narrative is essentially going along with the agenda of people like Eoin Clarke, Aaron Porter, Chris Hedges, Tommy Sheridan, and all the other professional managers of struggle who want to isolate and demonise militants, so it’s quite shocking to see a self-described anarchist doing so.

But, even ignoring that particularly objectionable statement, there’s a wider problem with the idea of bringing anarchists into “left unity” projects. Discussions of “left unity” rarely seem to include much in the way of practical content about what actual activity would be useful, but there’s a heavy electoral subtext to the current round of articles, summed up by all the references to “the Spirit of 45”. This immediately brings up one of the major problems with left unity: people have different ideas about what counts as useful activity, and if you actually intend to do anything, it’s not really possible to gloss over those differences. This means that, with the best intentions in the world, it’s not really possible to include anarchists, who have a structural critique of parliamentary politics focused on the way that, as members of the ruling class, politicians have different material interests to the rest of us, in a project that aims to elect nicer politicians based on the fairly idealist hope that, if we can just get the right people into the role, they’ll then be able to benevolently run the economy in our interests, as if a new left party would be able to avoid the structural forces that have shaped the history of not just the Labour Party, but pretty much every one of its sister social democratic parties across the world. Similarly, we have no desire to be included in futile lobbying campaigns asking union leaders to do things that they can’t and won’t do, or many of the other activities that leftists are keen on.

Being hostile to the idea of “left unity” doesn’t mean I’ll never co-operate with anyone who isn’t an anarchist: I’ll happily work with anyone when it comes to practical class struggle activity. Visiting the PCS picket lines last week meant standing alongside, and chatting to, a number of union militants who subscribe to various stripes of lefty ideology, and the ongoing fight against blacklisting and the victimisation of workplace activists means it’s important to show solidarity to our fellow workers even if they’re supporters of creepy Leninist sects. Similarly, being involved in local struggles against the bedroom tax has meant leafleting estates with Trotskyists; we may, and almost certainly will, argue about all kinds of things once the campaign starts to take off, but at the moment the important thing is to just get people affected by the tax who live in the same area together in a room so they can start working out some kind of a collective response, and that’s an aim basic enough that a lot of people from different backgrounds can agree on it. If people want to call this sort of thing “left unity”, then it’s not a term I’d use myself, since I see these things as being more about class solidarity, but I don’t have any particular desire to argue about it. Either way, this kind of low-level grassroots co-operation is a long way away from the broader “left unity” ideal of a new mass left parliamentary party.

The upcoming “People’s Assembly” is another example of why it’s not possible for anarchists to be unproblematically “included” in left unity projects in their current state. Most anarchists I know have no intention of going to it. A well-meaning advocate of left unity might try and change this by suggesting that a few anarchists, perhaps Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Stuart Christie or Ian Bone, could be added to the list of speakers, but this would do absolutely nothing to fix the essential problems with this top-down attempt to call a movement into existence by gathering a few well-known figures to lecture a crowd about the need to fight austerity. Anarchists would only be attracted to this event if it was a genuine assembly, an open participatory event like the gatherings that organised Occupy and similar social movements – and that, I suspect, is a long way off from what John Rees and his mates at Counterfire/Coalition of Resistance have planned.

Feminism and class unity

Thinking about the relationship between anarchists and the socialist left, and in particular the promise that “hey, anarchists are just as welcome as anyone else to get involved in building our top-down, hierarchical, electorally focused campaign!”, a number of other parallels suggest themselves. One is with the situation of claimants and workers in non-unionised, usually private sector, workplaces: the left have got a bit better about talking about claimants lately thanks to the prominence of the bedroom tax, but there’s still an overwhelming focus on the TUC – and, within that, the unions, like the PCS, UCU and NUT, that have the most visible contingents of lefties. If anarchists are unexcited by the idea of uniting to build a new social democratic electoral vehicle, it’s equally understandable for claimants, or the majority of the working class who are in unorganised workplaces, to be skeptical of a left whose strategy revolves around lobbying the TUC to call a general strike.

But unionised public sector workers certainly aren’t the only group to be over-represented on the left. It’s quite uncomfortable to admit, but a lot of the time revolutionary groups – and I don’t think there’s any particular tendency that’s immune from this – have nothing more to offer women than “hey, join our male-dominated, patriarchal, and potentially unsafe movement!” In all three cases, “unity” is impossible, and not even that desirable, if it only takes place on terms dictated by one side. When talking about the disparity between unionised workers and claimants/workers in non-unionised jobs, and the left’s tendency to focus exclusively on the former, the answer is not to give up on the idea of solidarity, or to tell claimants and unorganised workers to just act purely as a support group for union struggles; unity between all three sectors is vital, but it has to be real unity between equals, which means that it can only come about once claimants and workers in workplaces that’re currently unorganised have built their own autonomous organisations, and so are able to talk to organised workers on their own terms. I think the same is true of women and male-dominated revolutionary organisations: I don’t think that any gender is capable of making the revolution on their own, but I also don’t think the answer to male domination of revolutionary groups is just for individual women to join, which feels a bit too much like inviting anarchists to listen to Tony Benn or telling claimants that their main role in the class struggle is padding out a PCS picket line.

Instead of trying to build unity on the basis of those who currently hold the most power telling everyone else to sign up to their agenda, unity has to be the product of different sections of the class, particularly those who are currently most oppressed – and I apologise if I’m getting repetitive now, but I think this is an important point, and one that’s not made often enough – talking to each other on equal terms. The practical conclusion I draw from this is that autonomous women’s organisations are necessary, and that advocating them doesn’t make you a separatist any more than those who concentrate on building rank-and-file organisation among cleaners are “cleaner separatists” who oppose any joint action between cleaners and other workers. We all need to learn how to work together, but we also need to fight our own battles, and those struggles need to be led by those most directly affected.

In case I haven’t spelled it out clearly enough, this means that feminism isn’t divisive, it’s a prerequisite for the class unity that would be needed for the emergence of a real communist movement. Those on the left who implicitly defend male privilege and patriarchy by opposing feminism – even those who put forward in its place a mealy-mouthed commitment to “women’s liberation” that in practice boils down to making a lot of noise around those issues, like equal pay and abortion rights, that can be blamed on nasty external enemies like bosses and politicians, while remaining resolutely silent around our own complicity in fucked-up patriarchal behaviour* – are opposing the forces that could help to make class unity possible. However good their politics might be in other areas, those who oppose feminism are essentially defenders of this society, and should be seen as such.

I have no desire for “unity” with the left wing of the ruling class, or the most progressive administrators of austerity. I want class unity, and I can’t see any other way to get there than through autonomous organisations of every section of the working class that feel the need for them.

* “patriarchal behaviour” is a bit of a mouthful, but I think it’s a term that’s worth using; to me, at least, “sexism” and “misogyny” sound like they’re describing a conscious ideology, and tend to make people very defensive, whereas in reality you don’t need to believe in male superiority to display patriarchal behaviour any more than you need to be a supporter of capitalism to reproduce capital by engaging in wage labour. The man who talks more than anyone else in the room may not be a sexist, and the woman who sits at the back not saying anything may not be either, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not both acting out patriarchal standards of behaviour. These problems are structural, and we need a language that talks about them as such; structural analysis is supposed to be one of the things that Marxists are good at, so it’s a shame that so many of them duck the question entirely.

And a glimpse at what the left end of the union bureaucracy have planned: national strike action by the teachers’ unions at the end of June (sound familiar?) and then further action planned “in the autumn term”. If I was a gambling man, I’d say that means late November. To be fair, the PCS are pledging an ongoing campaign of further action, including a half-day walkout in early April, but we’ve been here before, so I’ll believe in that further action when I see it, and not before.

Other than that, the union leaderships – by which I mean the most militant ones, Unison are far too busy making adverts selling themselves as a financial services provider to worry about anything like collective action – seem determined to play out the same old script as in 2011: a Big Day Out in March (TUC march then, PCS strike now). Fuck-all in April. Fuck-all in May. A Big Day Out in June (NUT and whoever else wants to go along with them both times). And then fuck-all again until we get one more Big Day Out in the autumn, swiftly followed by total capitulation.

Oh, and just to top off the retro vibe, I got given a leftist leaflet with the slogan “all unions should strike together against the cuts – TUC should name the date for 24 hour general strike!”, which really could have been recycled from March 2011.

The unions can be trusted to fight austerity about as much as the Labour Party can be trusted to oppose workfare. Luckily, it’s looking like the big issue for this year will be the bedroom tax, which has the potential for independent community campaigns of non-payment similar to those that brought down Thatcher. Those of us who are serious about wanting to fight austerity should make supporting these campaigns a big priority, and where necessary we should challenge Labour’s attempts to co-opt them. There are other struggles that deserve support, such as the ongoing week of action against workfare, which has already been successful in forcing Superdrug to pull out, and local campaigns against the victimisation of union activists – for instance, the successful campaign for the reinstatement of three unionists at London Metropolitan Uni, or the ongoing fights against the victimisation of three PCS reps across the country. But whatever we do, it’s vital that we have to be as independent as possible from the lumbering bureaucracies of “the labour movement”, otherwise we’ll just end up with yet more replays of the same old scene, as the union officials march their ever-dwindling armies out for a day and then back again.

I’ve not written anything on here for a while now. There’s a few different reasons for this, not least that I’ve just been a lot busier as a result of the upsurge of community campaigning in the last few weeks, especially around the bedroom tax.
But another big reason is that, as someone who often talks about the left, I didn’t really feel able to write anything without mentioning the ongoing SWP crisis, and I also didn’t know what I could say about it: it wouldn’t be possible to talk about it without discussing how utterly fucked the SWP’s organisational structures are, but I also really didn’t want to add my voice to all those trying to turn a discussion that has to be about patriarchy and sexual violence into a dry discussion of organisational forms. To talk about the SWP crisis without ever mentioning Leninism, or to reduce it to just being about Leninism, would be equally unhelpful. In particular, I felt really uncomfortable with the way that so much of the coverage consisted of equally anti-feminist rivals gloating over the demise of one of their competitors. As vile as the SWP leadership have shown themselves to be, I don’t think the Galloway fanboys who hosted that leaked transcript are much better, and the publication that carried Tom Walker’s brave and important letter of resignation also gave space to an unspeakably awful article arguing that “rape is not the problem”, and concluding that “far from being insufficiently feminist, the SWP has been too soft on feminism”. To write anything about the political situation on the left in the UK at the moment without mentioning the SWP would be to ignore the elephant in the room, but I felt like if I wrote anything substantial on the topic, I might accidentally say something that would give even the slightest bit of comfort to either the loyalists still defending the indefensible, or the Newman/Demarty misogynist boys’ club eagerly celebrating the fact that a rape had led to some difficulties for a political organisation that they disagree with.
Luckily, Mark Steel’s written a really good article on the subject, which manages to avoid the pitfalls of apologism on one side or gloating on the other, and addresses the fact that no-one’s hands are entirely clean when it comes to creating unhealthy political cultures. I can’t entirely endorse his political conclusions – in particular, I strongly suspect that the People’s Assembly he gets so enthusiastic about will just be another pointless exercise in getting people together in Central London to listen to some speeches by Tony Benn and Tariq Ali, then going home without making any meaningful contribution to ongoing local organising – but his central point is that “We can’t ensure that no one in our ranks will behave appallingly, but we can ensure that everyone is accountable, so that no one is allowed special protection because they have a place on a committee…
That movement will be the product of all who take part in it, and won’t be an end in itself to be protected no matter how it behaves, but a means to an end, which is a world less cruel, more exhilarating, less bullying and more fun, that it was when we found it.”
Which I think is a good enough point that I can’t really add anything to it.
Anyway, having got that out of the way, I don’t have much substantial to say today, but I just wanted to share this article from the recent uprising against police brutality and racism in New York. It’s worth a read, not just because the rebellion as a whole has been subjected to a bit of a media blackout, but also because it contains a serious attempt to think through the idea of “outside agitators”. The situation faced by radicals in the UK at the moment might seem a long way from riots against police murder in New York, but as the attempts by Labour to gain control of the Bedroom Tax revolt have shown, anyone arguing for effective tactics will be branded as an outside agitator by politicians and other professional managers of struggle in exactly the same way, so it’s worth thinking about how we’ll deal with these problems before they arise.

Matthew Pfeiffer #42421-086
FDC SeaTac
P.O. Box 13900
Seattle, WA 98198

In other positive news, the blockade of Birmingham Council House earlier this week was another welcome sign of the fight against cuts heating up, and the Department for Work and Pensions is obviously getting really upset about the number of employers pulling out of workfare due to protests. Hopefully they’ll get even more upset after the upcoming week of action against workfare from the 18th-24th of March.

So, to sum up, if your advisor tries to change your agreement, you don’t have to agree to sign, and they don’t have the right to sanction you right away. They have to refer the new agreement to a Decision Maker who’ll decide if it’s “reasonable” or not. Since they work for the DWP, they’ll almost certainly find that it is, but your old agreement will remain in effect until the new agreement is sent off to the Decision Maker, the Decision Maker reaches a decision, and then they send it back to your advisor. At this point, once it’s been approved by the Decision Maker, you probably will have to sign it, but you still have the right to appeal to an independent tribunal, who may be more likely to take your side. At the very least, it should buy you a few weeks, and as Universal Jobmatch and the recent workfare ruling have both shown, a few weeks is a long time at the jobcentre, so it’s possible that by the next time you see your advisor, they’ll have dumped their new scheme, or at least given up on making it compulsory due to fears of bad publicity. And the more people send their agreements off to the Decision Maker, the more the machinery will get clogged up, so the longer the process will take, and the headache for the DWP will get bigger. Apart from anything else, it makes it more likely that your advisor will give up on trying to get you to sign any more new agreements, purely as a way of minimising the hassle caused to them.
Not everyone will always feel confident to refuse to sign new agreements – apart from anything else, if your advisor’s relatively sound, then you might want to give ground on these issues from time to time in order to keep a good relationship with them. But in general, if the information given by the DWP is correct, refusing to sign new agreements until they’ve been inspected by the decision maker can’t get you sanctioned, and it might have some benefits, both in terms of minimising the hassle individual claimants get from the jobcentre and more broadly as a way of obstructing new “welfare reform” schemes.
Of course, when dealing with an institution as complex, secretive and confusing as the benefits system, it’s dangerous to rely too much on information coming from the head office; the only way to be sure is to share our experiences on the ground and let each other know what works and what doesn’t. If your advisor tries to change your agreement, and you refuse to sign up to the new one, share your experience of how it goes in the comments here, or at other sites like the Void, Intensive Activity or consent.me.uk. Sharing our stories is the best way to break down the isolation that the jobcentre tries to enforce, and to start creating the kind of collective movement that claimants need to defend ourselves.