The Commissar and The Beloved Leader

THE REGIONAL ORGANISER OF the Rail Maritime and Transport Union (RMT), Steve Hedley has been detained by British Transport Police following an incident on an RMT picket line, involving an attempt by Commissar Hedley to prevent Tube workers from going to work.

            It seems that the Commissar (as my moniker suggests) is an old-fashioned and unabashed Marxist who talks of class consciousness and of his members being a “formidable fighting force”, as if they were a ready-made army doing his and Bob Crows bidding. Like Arthur Scargill, who was the last trade union leader to send his “troops” to the trenches with its inevitable outcome, both the Commissar and the Beloved Leader, comrade Crow, are about to embark on another attempt at bringing down a government (sorry, Coalition).

            When characters such as these two are involved in industrial action, it is not about any perceived injustice (which they assume to represent) inflicted on the members by an evil employer; although the members themselves believe they are being treated unjustly and to them this is the one and only issue involved in their action.

            But Hedley and Crow have, as all Marxists have, a hidden political agenda which is as far away from what their members are after as the sun is from the earth. I do not believe for one moment that the membership of the RMT share their leaders dreams of a socialist state. They have seen how such a venture has failed throughout that part of the world that was once communist, bringing only rationing, cruelty and censorship.

            Even today we hear from Cuba that employees of the state can no longer depend upon a job for life, as the island bows to the inevitable and seeks to join the modern world. But the likes of Hedley and Crow still believe in jobs for life for their members.

            The RMT members, because of the age old electoral apathy among union members, have sadly been landed with the likes of Bob Crow as their leader and spokesman. Indeed they probably see him as a figure who is prepared to go the last mile on their behalf without realising that he has a hidden agenda.

THE FACT IS, LIKE THE CUBANS, those working in any sector of the economy, but particularly those working in the public sector cannot expect a job for life. The private sector in this country began adapting to this over 20 years ago. Now the public sector has also to adapt to technological advances as well as the economic cut-backs needed to reduce our dangerous economic deficit.

            As far as the RMT  are concerned, they want to hang on to some 800 ticket office and station staff , when, according to the employers’ technology, would be more efficient and save the system money.

            This is a dilemma as old as industrialisation itself.  I assume both the Commissar and The Beloved Leader Crow, would be familiar with Historical Materialism, Marx’s philosophy of  the dialectical process of economic development.

            Marx believed himself not only a revolutionary but a modernist. He admired capitalism’s technological advance, but sought, on behalf of the industrial working class, to remove the profit motive that drove its development but left poverty in its wake in the 19^th century. A measure he believed that would require nothing less than an assault on human nature through revolution.

            How wrong he proved to be; and how wrong he would have admitted to have been if he lived today. Removing the profit motive in the 19^th century, seeing what it had done to human kind then, would have led any rational human being concerned with society to either bless Marx or the kind of social democracy, that materialised with the Labour Party.

            As  it turned out the revolutionary road that was to have been orchestrated by the Marxian dialectic has proved false. I think that if the old man came back and saw what Capitalism, tempered by social democracy has achieved without the need for the likes of Commissar Hedley and The Beloved Leader Crow, then I think Marx would have had the grace to admit he fell short of the mark - and shoot himself.

THE RMT MEMBERS who are striking cannot turn back the tide of technological development. To succeed in doing so would only retard development itself: not all change turns out to have been beneficial; but change, nevertheless has to occur regardless of its impact. The RMT was after all an amalgamation of three unions, all of whom were losing members fast.

            If Castro’s Cuba can at last understand this process, then why on earth cannot the RMT? The answer appears to be that the union is being lead by a man who believes, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, that the state is the best overlord of the economy. He hates private wealth and profit, despite the fact of his six figure salary and gold plated pension surpasses anything his members can accumulate in a lifetime of work.

            While hating all the works of the City of London, he no doubt relies upon its alchemy to secure his retirement. Hypocrisy springs to mind when The Beloved Leader Crow speaks of  working class values.

            The RMT cannot and should not win this strike. If they do succeed then it will be due to weak management of the type that nearly helped reduce our country’s status to that of a third world economy during the 1970s.