The picture may seem bleak, but don’t be disheartened! Across the planet, the working class are proving that just as we face the same attacks and conditions everywhere, our struggle is the force that can fight them everywhere. Workers are relearning how to fight, developing an arsenal that can be turned against the capitalist system itself.

Workers are Fighting Back in the UK…

Though days lost to strike action this year are a fraction of the 2022-3 strike wave, the embers of class struggle are still glowing across Britain. You’d be forgiven for missing it, since, in the hands of the unions, so far the strikes have remained limited to single sectors, single workplaces, and single days – carefully timed to prevent them crossing over. Nonetheless, more and more sectors are joining the wave. Cleaners, tube workers, and TEFL teachers in London; bin workers in Birmingham and Sheffield; healthcare workers in Blackpool; power plant workers in Cumbria and Somerset; museum staff in Wakefield; hospitality workers in Glasgow, London, and Nottingham; bus drivers in Manchester and Bristol; Lindsey oil refinery; and resident doctors and university lecturers around the country.

In many cases, unions have been in the awkward situation of leading strikes against their own Labour chums in local and national government. On the other hand, this also makes it much easier for them when the time comes to negotiate a deal with them behind closed doors, after which the strikes are abruptly suspended before they can expand (or even before they start, as with bus drivers in Manchester). Do we want their goal – to manage our own decline – or to end the system behind it?

…and in Europe…

If Britain’s sluggishness is getting you down, across the Channel the fire is burning brighter. General strikes have involved large parts of the workforce (particularly transport, healthcare, and education).

In Greece, a 24-hour general strike was called after a law was passed allowing 13-hour work days, a year after 6-day working weeks were allowed (Greece already has the longest average work week in the EU, at 39.8 hours). The Belgian general strike was called as both federal and regional authorities announced austerity measures and longer workdays, bringing the second-largest port in Europe to a standstill. In France, workers responded to the Bayrou government’s 2026 budget, proposing €43.8 billion in social spending cuts, with strikes and demonstrations under the slogan bloquons tout (‘let’s block everything’). Protesters reinforced pickets, and a general assembly of rail workers and protestors was even held outside Paris Gare du Nord to discuss courses of action – an example of the independent self-organisation which is essential if we ever want to take the steering wheel from the bosses’ cronies in union offices. In Italy, a mix of mainstream and ‘base’ unions called general strikes in protest against Italian participation in the Gaza War, after the Global Sumud Flotilla was seized by Israeli authorities.

In all these cases, the Capitalist Left (the trade unions, the social democrats, the leftist parties) has kept a hand around these movements’ necks. They work tirelessly to hide the reality that these attacks cannot be ended without ending capitalism – instead, they dream of putting their politicians in charge of managing them! This is particularly evident in Italy. Although the strike is the key weapon of the working class against the wars that massacre us, in the hands of the unions and the left – with their pacifism, support for capitalist democracy (i.e. the ‘democratic’ rule of the bosses currently viciously assaulting workers), and national solutions – they are impotent to change a world whose essence is imperialist butchery and constant attacks on our conditions. Their humanitarian sympathy for Palestinian workers is no substitute for real proletarian internationalism: the recognition that all workers share the same class condition and class interest, world revolution. Even though the leftist trap must be fought at every step, the strike wave shows that more and more workers are unwilling to accept the situation.

…and All Around the Globe!

Nor is the fire limited to Europe. Workers have taken to nationwide protests in Togo, Timor-Leste, Mongolia, Serbia, Nepal, Morocco, Peru, Madagascar, Paraguay, and Indonesia. In the mainstream press, some of these have been dubbed ‘Gen Z protests’. In fact, these are revolts that cannot be limited to generational or national boundaries. From one side of the world to the other, they all have similar complaints: high unemployment and no job security; corruption and inequality; low pay and high prices; cuts and underfunding of social services (especially healthcare and education), and the needless deaths they cause. The protestors have persevered as the state responds with tear gas, beatings, kidnappings, mass arrests, and killings.

In Nepal, the protests – involving not just students, but informal economy workers, gig workers, and unemployed graduates – even seemed to actually topple the government. The spark that lit a powderkeg of frustration with daily working class drudgery was a wide shutdown of major social media platforms, announced on 4 September by the Oli government, led by the ‘Communist’ Party of Nepal (UML) – which has been in government in some form or another since 1990 – and their social-democratic coalition partner the Nepali Congress. Officially, this was to compel the platforms to pay a new VAT: however, it also conveniently silenced a trend criticising rampant corruption and aching economic conditions (similarly, social media bans have been used against protests in many countries). On 9 September, protesters set fire to the parliament building, the government palace, and the prime minister’s house. PM Oli promptly resigned and hid in an army barracks. Two days later the finance minister was chased half-naked through the street.

Unfortunately, Nepal also shows exactly what happens if workers, without their own independent class organs to coordinate the struggle and without a political organisation able to put forward a distinct revolutionary programme, are not able to seize power for themselves. This is no easy task in a country like Nepal, suffocated by a Stalinist/Maoist legacy. Although the democratic facades were toppled, the movement in Nepal also showed where power really lies in a bourgeois ‘democracy’. The rest of the capitalist state was left intact, and the army was easily able to step in. They allowed protest leaders the honour of picking a new interim prime minister, who might pass a few paltry reforms, only to be rolled back once ‘law and order’ is restored. The bosses found a similar solution in Madagascar, where the elite military unit CAPSAT installed their own commander as president and started posing as friends of the protesters – the same CAPSAT which installed the previous president in 2009!

So far, the capitalist system has been able to absorb these revolts. In no small part this is thanks to the valiant efforts of its cronies on the left and right. But we also need to realise that demonstrations without strikes are just street parties, and strikes without taking control of society’s production are just begging. It’s still up to us as workers to transform strikes back into a weapon of our class against the bosses and the state; to take control of our own struggle through strike committees set up by mass meetings of the whole workforce. More than this, we have to organise politically and internationally to decide that we no longer want to beg for scraps from this capitalist world but replace it with a new one. We aim to be a part of that struggle. If you want to join in, get in touch.

The above article is taken from the current edition (No. 73) of Aurora, bulletin of the Communist Workers’ Organisation.

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Image: हिमाल सुवेदी (CC BY-SA 4.0), commons.wikimedia.org