Sunday’s Postal Rank and File online meeting was one of the most important for two reasons. Firstly, it comprehensively nailed the lie that Falconer Review has delivered “justice” for reps and members victimised during the year-long dispute at Royal Mail.
The Communication Workers
Union(CWU) has openly lied to its membership. As a victimized CWU rep has said
on the wsws.org, the union has trampled on the time-honoured principle “an
injury to one is an injury to all.”
The second reason is
that it discussed the question of leadership. Leadership is an art and takes
time to develop. It will not happen overnight. It is clear from the meeting and
the numerous articles on wsws.org that the CWU is now an arm of corporate management.
The betrayal carried out by the CWU is unprecedented in the postal worker's
history. It will undoubtedly become a template for other union bureaucracies to
carry out similar betrayals. The question posed in the meeting is what can postal
workers do about it.
Again, as was raised in
the meeting, it is not a question of lack of fight. The numerous votes for official
and unofficial strike action proved that postal workers were itching to prosecute
a fight against Royal Mail but were saddled with leadership from day one that
worked to betray the strike.
This brings me to the
point raised by Simon that postal workers were “sheep” unthinkingly following their
leadership. Leadership is a complex matter. As the great Russian revolutionary Leon
Trotsky wrote, “Our author substitutes mechanistic determinism for the
dialectic conditioning of the historical process. Hence the cheap jibes about
the role of individuals, good and bad. History is a process of class struggle.
But classes do not bring their full weight to bear automatically and
simultaneously. In the process of struggle, the classes create various organs
which play an important and independent role and are subject to deformations.
This also provides the
basis for the role of personalities in history. There are naturally great
objective causes that created the autocratic rule of Hitler, but only
dull-witted pedants of “determinism” could deny today the enormous historical
role of Hitler. The arrival of Lenin in Petrograd on April 3, 1917, turned the
Bolshevik party in time and enabled the party to lead the revolution to
victory. Our sages might say that had Lenin died abroad at the beginning of
1917, the October Revolution would have taken place “just the same.” But that
is not so. Lenin represented one of the living elements of the historical
process.
He personified the
experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of the proletariat.
His timely appearance in the arena of the revolution was necessary to mobilise
the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity to rally the working class and
the peasant masses. Political leadership in the crucial moments of historical
turns can become just as decisive a factor as the role of the chief command
during the critical moments of war. History is not an automatic process.
Otherwise, why leaders? Why parties? Why programs? Why theoretical struggles?[1]
To conclude, Postal workers
work extremely hard and are a very disciplined bunch of workers. They have not
always followed their leaders and have on numerous occasion sought to break
the strangled hold of the bureaucracy but to no avail. The meeting posed the
question of a new type of leadership. The CWU is dead. It is just that nobody
has buried it yet. It is down to the most politically conscious workers to
create a new leadership. Those in attendance in the meeting must now give that
lead.
[1] The Class, the Party-and the
Leadership-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm
