There are many examples where the withdrawal of workers’ labour power has won them concessions from the capitalist class. However, any concessions won are followed by the necessity to resume the industrial struggle as the capitalist class resumes its class war in the battle to increase profits at the expense of the majority working class.

‘Air Canada flights will resume on Sunday after the government ordered cabin crew to end a strike that led to hundreds of cancellations, the airline has said…Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu ordered binding arbitration to end the dispute, after more than 10,000 Air Canada flight attendants walked earlier on causing 700 cancellations.’

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyex8489gno?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

‘On August 3, 1981, approximately 13,000 air traffic controllers from the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike, demanding better pay, a 32-hour work week, and improved working conditions, which they argued were necessary due to high stress and fatigue from heavy workloads. The strike was declared illegal under federal law, which prohibits strikes by federal employees, and President Ronald Reagan responded by ordering the strikers to return to work within 48 hours or lose their jobs. When most controllers did not return, Reagan fired 11,345 of them on August 5, 1981, and imposed a lifetime ban on their rehiring by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The government swiftly managed air traffic by utilising non-striking controllers, military personnel, and supervisors, which allowed it to handle about 80% of the prior workload, although air travel was significantly slowed for months. The strike’s failure marked a turning point in American labour relations, weakening the power of unions and signalling a more aggressive anti-union stance by the federal government and private sector.’ Internet.

‘Hundreds of Thousands of Israelis Join Nationwide Strike for Gaza Hostage Deal ‘

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-17/ty-article-live/netanyahu-says-he-would-agree-only-to-an-all-in-one-hostage-deal-all-our-conditions/00000198-b5a5-d4ef-a399-ffe77a6a0000

Families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza have called for a nationwide labour strike on Sunday, August 17, 2025, to demand a cease-fire agreement with Hamas to free their relatives, even as Israel’s government continues to expand its military campaign in the enclave. This call comes amid ongoing tensions over the government’s approach to negotiations for the release of the remaining hostages.

Recent Strike Call (August 17, 2025): The strike is being organized by groups representing families of the victims of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The appeal urges universities, municipalities, and high-tech companies to shut down, with other employers allowing their workers to participate. However, Israel’s largest labour coalition, Histadrut, is not participating, stating that a strike is unlikely to influence the course of the war or result in the return of the 50 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Histadrut chair Arnon Bar-David expressed sympathy but noted the strike would have no practical impact. Internet.

Histradut has a membership of around 700,000. The Histradut Chair is correct in his assessment that a political strike would not have any impact on the Executive Committee of Israel’s capitalists.

From the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Dear Dave,

I see from the News of the World for November 15th that you are the editor of the Trotskyist magazine ‘Mineworkers Internationale’, and that you have published articles addressing the miners on union policy.

You appear to have upset the editor of the News of the World, and the officials of the Communist Party, who say that you are getting the “sane militants” (the C.P.) a bad name.

You wrote (apparently) in one issue of your magazine

“The only long-term justice for the workers will be under a system which they themselves control—a Socialist system.”

and

“Launch the General Strike immediately and occupy the factories, docks, railways without charging, capture the supermarkets and food wholesalers and distribute the food free.”

Hard Enough

And you claim to work for the overthrow of Capitalism.

One can sympathise with your indignation with your exploitation and the fact, as you say, “that Capitalists are making a fortune out of my sweat, discomfort and forfeiture of human dignity”. Fair enough!

But, Dave boy, indignation is not enough! In this business (the class struggle) brains are more important than heart, because our enemy, the Capitalist, is immensely powerful, and helped by a large staff of cunning labour leaders and T.U. Officials.

And I’m going to tell you straight out, that your stuff is doing more harm than good.

First “seize the pits” or “the Supermarkets”, or “the railways”, is rubbish. The workers have a difficult enough job trying seize half-a-pound of steak on a Friday night, without you try to feed them this baloney.

You must begin to learn that the control of the public apparatus of production and distribution is political, not industrial. It is maintained by the Government of the day, if necessary by armed force, although the workers don’t show much evidence of doing any “seizing”, do they? Could it be they’ve too much sense?

The Wrong Interests

Neither are you doing any good trying to cod the miners into taking action for “workers’ control”. The workers will never control Capitalism. What determines class control is ownership, and that ownership is legalised and maintained through Parliament, by the Government of the day, backed by an electoral majority.

It is no business of trade unions to try to usurp the job of a political party. Control of the whole of industry is a political matter concerning the whole capitalist class. The strongest, most militant trade union in the world can do nothing about it and won’t want to, anyway, because people join unions to look after the trade interests, not class interests.

Dave, I’m sorry, but your other stuff urging the miners on strike last year to do as much damage as possible is nonsense too. This is a hang-over from early Russian days when the isolated Bolsheviks sought to create as much dissension abroad as possible, for political propaganda materials.

Strike What For?

I now come to what, for me, is the most stupid and ridiculous nonsense of all. “Launch the General Strike and occupy the factories”. Are you really in your right mind, mate? Don’t you know that whenever the workers have occupied factories, after a few weeks with the wives bringing meals and drinks, they have unoccupied them again?

The capitalists will always beat you at this game; they own everything; they can retire to the Hilton or the country, and starve you out. In fact, the French authorities have said they approve of the strikers occupying the factory because “It keeps the place clean”.

And lastly, the General Strike! What stupid bloody rubbish. First of all, General Strikes for industrial ends are difficult enough, because workers’ action on such a scale concerns the whole capitalist class who have shown repeatedly, all over the world, that they will not hesitate if necessary, to crush strikes by armed force.

But even worse, you are urging a General Strike for “Workers’ Control”, which because you are not clear about it, you call a “Socialist system”.

A Socialist system will and must abolish classes! What are you on about? Will there be wage-workers under Trotskyist “Socialism” then ?

But, worst of all, you are trying to control trade unionists in General Strikes for political purposes — and this is disastrous.

If you claim that all the workers (or a lot of them) are militants, anxious to overthrow Capitalism, why have they got to lose their wages (and some of them, their personal freedom) in General Strikes?

Consciousness Wanted

If they want a General Strike why do they vote for Tory and Labour parties?

If the workers are Socialists, they have a perfectly safe and sane method of abolishing Capitalism, which also happens (as time will show) to be the only possible method — the ballot box.

It is for this reason that the Socialist Party of Great Britain will never support calls for General Strikes for political purposes. People like you, Dave, may feel very strongly, but you haven’t thought very much.

Socialists, in their capacity as trade unionists, because we are exploited like you, and have to join them, say to their fellow workers : Political action is for political parties! Trade union political independence at all costs!

Socialism will be established by a class political party, not the T.U.C., or any trade union.

It Can be Done

Let trade unions mind their own business, the interests of their members.

Let the affairs of the union be run democratically, by the rank-and-file vote, make strikes short and sharp. Procrastination is the death of strikes.

And, lastly, some advice to you, by one who has been right through the Leninist mill himself.

Forget all your Trotskyist dreamworld; it never was right. Look where the Leninist “boring from within” the trade unions has landed the C.P. The very nominees the Communist factions have got “elected” as officials have at times been the first to kick out Communists.

Study Socialism! Get clear on the necessity of conscious political actions by the workers, organised in a political party to take political power, to abolish capitalist control; and replace it by “democratic control”.

This is the road of Success, to Victory.

What you are doing now will only spread apathy as a result of bitter disappointment.

Forget Trotsky, and remember Marx!

Yours for Socialism,

Horatio

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-dave-douglass-1972.html

 Do we need leaders? Most people think we do. Even the Green Party, reputed to be one of the most ‘horizontal’ in their organisation, are currently locked in a leadership struggle between different candidates. This is a symptom of the almost universal notion that positive change can only happen if certain exceptional individuals hold power – even though reality has shown us time and time again that this is an illusion.

The kind of society the Socialist Party works for is borderless, wageless and moneyless – and entirely leaderless. It will come about when most people’s sense of powerlessness has given way to a recognition of the need for a society of entirely democratic organisation and decision-making – with no leaders and no followers.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

 Do we need leaders? Most people think we do. Even the Green Party, reputed to be one of the most ‘horizontal’ in their organisation, are currently locked in a leadership struggle between different candidates. This is a symptom of the almost universal notion that positive change can only happen if certain exceptional individuals hold power – even though reality has shown us time and time again that this is an illusion.

The kind of society the Socialist Party works for is borderless, wageless and moneyless – and entirely leaderless. It will come about when most people’s sense of powerlessness has given way to a recognition of the need for a society of entirely democratic organisation and decision-making – with no leaders and no followers.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

On 13 August 1961 the German Democratic Republic began construction of the Berlin Wall.

The below is from the Socialist Standard February 2011

How much longer are you willing to sit around and let a tiny minority divide us?

According to the Bible, 1400 years before our saviour arrived on Earth, the walls of Jericho came tumbling down; demolished by the buglers of the Israelite army marching around the city walls blowing their trumpets. No mention is made of any aural damage.

[Socialists eschew religion This first paragraph is intended as fantastical irony.]



Walls, have had several roles in society since their inception. Several thousand years ago our ancestors would have built rudimentary walls for shelter against the elements, and these eventually evolved in to the walls of communal living spaces.



With the emergence of private property walls began to assume a new role in society: the defence of landed property. Kings, queens, emperors and a motley assortment of nobles laid claim to the land through divine approbation and conquest. What had once been held in common ownership gradually came to belong to a tiny minority that enforced their ownership through coercion.



Fortress and City walls were not enough for some rulers. The threat of losing the property that had been stolen from the majority led to the construction of fortifications of immense proportions. The Great Wall of China was under construction from the 5th century BC up until the 16th century to protect the Chinese Emperors from a northern threat to their borders. Nowadays, it is a major tourist trap. However, it is doubtful whether the tourist guides reveal that ‘it is estimated that over one million workers died building the wall’ [wikipedia.org].



Medieval walled cities had become commonplace, but walls also served another purpose for those in power, and that was for imprisonment. Dungeons were often used to hold prisoners prior to execution or transportation. And, there was also debtors’ prison, where the debtor was imprisoned until the debt was repaid. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that the modern prison system took root, beginning in Britain, when incarceration was viewed as a punishment in its own right. Walls could now be seen to confine members of society as well as repel them.



The Berlin Wall demonstrates how capitalist states can contain and control their populations. The construction of the ‘Wall of shame’, as the West Berlin state dubbed it, began on the 13th of August 1961. The state capitalist élite of East Germany declared that it was erected as a defence against fascists who were conspiring to impede the ‘will of the people’ from the building of a socialist state – which is a contradiction in terms. Its real function was to prevent the mass emigration of East German workers to the private capitalist workshops of the West. However, by 1989 the economic decline of the Russian empire led to a change in policy by their ruling élite, and access to Russian coercion was to be denied to the puppet states. It was this that brought about the tumbling of the Berlin Wall.



Amid the rejoicing some people in power were not as jubilant as the East Berliners, and millions elsewhere. Margaret Thatcher, wary of a united Germany, was reported to have pleaded with President Gorbachev ‘not to let the Berlin Wall fall’, and to ‘do what he could to prevent it happening’ (The Hindu, Sep 15 2009). Similarly, the French President, François Mitterand warned Mrs Thatcher that a unification of Germany could lead to them making ‘more ground than Adolf Hitler had’, and ‘that Europe would have to bear the consequences’ (London Times, 10 September 2009). Both quotes offer an insight into how the competitive nature of capitalism affects the thinking of its leaders, and directly works against the overwhelming majorities’ hopes, dreams and desires of living in a humane world.



Israel’s ruling élite ordered the construction of their wall in 1994, and duly baptised it the ‘Separation Barrier’. You would have thought that the Israeli’s might have recalled the wall that the Nazi’s imprisoned 400,000 Jews behind in what became known as the ‘Warsaw Ghetto’ prior to their elimination, but evidently memories are short, and propaganda long. The justification for its construction is that it has been built to protect Israeli’s from Palestinian suicide bomb attacks. Opponents regard the wall as a means to further annex Palestinian land, and that security is just a subterfuge. The wall also violates international law as laid down by the International Court of Justice. However, ‘justice’ under capitalism inevitably pans out as ‘might is right’, especially when the US is your Godfather.



The establishment of an Israeli state was the goal of Zionism and its founder Theodor Herzl’s entry in his 1895 diary reveals the thoughts of a ‘righteous’ man:

“We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly” (Righteous victims, p. 21-22).

The Israeli ‘settlers’, are also opposed to the barrier, but their opposition is because it appears to relinquish the Jewish claim to the ‘Land of Israel’. This is the land that God promised to the descendants of Abraham. This is a biblical deal struck between God and the Jewish ‘people’ some 3500 years ago. It is also the ideological engine of Zionism, and the Likud party’s rationale for the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.



Voltaire once wrote that ‘if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’, and like the ancient mariner, Jonah, who was supposedly swallowed by a whale, millions of people swallow the Bible’s fairy tales as literal truths. And this suits the powerful; if it didn’t the Bible, and all of the other ‘holy books’ would have been consigned to the fiction shelf of the Children’s Library a long, long time ago. Within the Bible’s pages we have a superman walking on water, and feeding four thousand people with a shopping bag of groceries. The Red Sea opening up to allow the ‘chosen people’ to cross, but the ‘all loving’ God deciding in his infinite wisdom to drown the pursuing Egyptians. There’s a man whose hair is the secret of his immense strength. A midget slaying a giant. Talking snakes, talking bushes, a dead man coming to life, and the useful trick of turning water into wine. Pages and pages of fantasy. But, in the hands of religious fanatics, and conniving élites these tall tales create intense misery for millions of people. And the ‘Separation Barrier’ is a symbol of that suffering.



Another ‘separation barrier’ has been constructed in the ‘land of the free’. This 1951 mile long wall acts as a ragged border between the United States and Mexico. The justification from the US side about why they have erected this wall is that it is to deter drug smugglers and prevent illegal immigration. On neither count can the US authorities claim any success. The US is awash with drugs, as is the rest of capitalist society, and the answer to drug abuse does not reside in the construction of a wall.



The US Border Patrol in 2005 apprehended 1.2 million people trying to cross over from Mexico, and by their own estimates they only catch 1 in 4. In a country where it is estimated that 40 percent of the population live below the poverty line, it does not take a George Bush to understand what it is that drives these people to leave their homes and families for an uncertain future in a hostile country.



The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), like every other trade agreement is always constructed to benefit the few to the detriment of the many. Contrary to the rhetoric of the capitalist media, NAFTA had a predictable effect on the Mexican people. The peso crashed soon after the NAFTA was passed, and those already struggling were pushed further in to penury. Economic migration became inevitable as this Oxfam report underscores:

“NAFTA has created dramatic economic dislocations in Mexico. These economic impacts, among other factors, are leading Mexicans to migrate…For example; imports of U.S. corn have severely affected the local Mexican agricultural sector. NAFTA arrangements have helped increase the imports from 3 million metric tons in 1994 to more than 5 million metric tons in 2002. Also, the brief rise in outsourced U.S. manufacturing that helped the Mexican economy has ceased as these factories have now moved to Asia” (OXFAM; USDA, Nadal, 2002).

Even the walls that once gave us a feeling of security is undermined by capitalism as the debt incurred on the commodity that people have been persuaded to call their homes, has been transformed in to four walls of anxiety through the threat of unemployment, or just a few upward ticks in interest rates. The question is how much longer are you willing to sit around and watch a tiny minority dominate your life? Why not help us to bring the walls of capitalism tumbling down? We are asking you, as Shelley, once did to:

“Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you.

Ye are many. They are few.”

Andy Matthews

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/search?q=Berlin+wall

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.

On 9 August 1945 the USA dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan on the city of Nagasaki. Seventy four thousand immediately perished and then, as at Hiroshima, many more died as the effects of radiation destroyed their bodies.

‘Survivors are frustrated by a growing nuclear threat and support among international leaders for developing or possessing nuclear weapons for deterrence. They criticize the Japanese government’s refusal to sign or even participate in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons because Japan, as an American ally, needs U.S. nuclear possession as deterrence. ‘

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/nagasaki-marks-80th-bomb-anniversary-rcna224013

The mayor of Nagasaki said, “Conflicts around the world are intensifying in a vicious cycle of confrontation and fragmentation, If we continue on this trajectory, we will end up thrusting ourselves into a nuclear war.”

Up to a point Lord Copper. If we continue to allow capitalism and its obsession with competitive advantage to continue then the odds on the advantages and profits that capitalism perceives as the benefits of wars will be fatal for the whole human race.

No War But Class War

‘ A modest little tale about Cuban snails offers a fine comment on how the capitalist money system values everything in terms of prices, often with disastrous results. Polymita tree snails have spectacular shells like painted artworks. This attracts collectors who then make money by selling the shells. The trade reduces the snail population, and as they become rarer, their price goes up, which makes them even more collectible. This accelerator effect is driving them to the edge of extinction, like so many other hunted animals.

The BBC describes them as ‘threatened by their own beauty’. What really threatens them is capitalism, a profit-hungry beast which won’t stop until it devours everything. Or until we abolish it.’

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/