Leaflet distributed by the CWO at the University of Leicester.⁽¹⁾

We have (probably) lost this battle. Are we content to lose the war?

Of course, the strike is not over just yet. But barring a last-minute reversal of fortune, we seem to have lost. The year is almost over, and the university bosses show no signs of stopping. Staff and student energy to resist seems to be sputtering out. History has folded to voluntary severance. The glassblowing workshop is closed. Film Studies and Modern Languages are being closed, and will not receive any new students in 2026. We’re only waiting for the dreaded announcements to come out about the other departments.

This is certainly not the last strike that will break the forced silence of class peace with our cry for freedom. Most of us have already been on strike on-and-off for years. The downward spiral of our conditions has become unbearable. It will not be long before the bosses have to make yet more cuts, nor will it be long before we are strong enough again to shout, "fight back!" at them. Perhaps even within months. The bosses certainly aren't done: the UoL ones are due to announce yet more redundancies over summer, and so are other unis.

If we want to give them a stronger challenge when the next battlelines are drawn, we have lessons to learn.

1. All the bosses have to offer us is cuts, exploitation, and militarisation.

This is the most obvious one. As mentioned, the cuts facing UoL are drastic. This is not long after the last series of cuts (charmingly named ‘Shaping for Excellence’) – and the next are already being planned! At the University of Nottingham, a plan has been leaked to cut 600 jobs, and 42 courses have seen recruitment suspended. In fact, the story is the same in pretty much all sectors, from binmen to bar staff. Even without cuts, the life we’re promised is grim: wasting away our best hours doing inane, stressful work for others’ profits. You can’t even escape it outside the workplace, where we face unemployment (students, look forward to this after you graduate! 16.1% of Brits aged 16-24 can’t find work, the highest in a decade), decaying public services, and increasing prices and rent. The enforcement of this means harsher treatment from managers, the police, and their pals in the far-right.

This is partly a direct product of the capitalist crisis, which is driving governments to cut social spending as it presents as a drain on profits. And it’s partly an indirect one, as the falling rate of profit is driving imperialist competition over markets for raw materials and capital export hotter and hotter, including unprecedented open warfare in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Thus, social spending is being cut to fund increases in military spending across the globe – in the UK, the government has promised to raise this to 2.5% of GDP by 2027.

The bosses’ continued rule over us, in which their vast profits are squeezed from us in exchange for eking out our lives on a dwindling wage at best – what we call capitalism – can only mean more of this. It doesn’t matter who’s running the system, running it means attacking us. Even the Greens’ record (so far only in local government) is the imposition and defence of brutal austerity schemes.

2. We cannot fight alone, especially while facing redundancy.

In this strike, the bosses guessed that they could simply wait and starve us out until we went back to work or took voluntary severance. And they were right.

This can’t be because our strike was too short (a frequent problem in other strikes): at 29 days (31 after next week), we have had the longest strike of any university. No, the problem is that the strike did not expand to other sectors on campus – students, security, cleaners, professional services, etc. Even the sizeable minority of students who supported the strike were unable to take substantial action. This was partly due to their small numbers, but also an apathetic attitude that fighting as a class is unnecessary (even ‘too radical’), and they could leave the struggle to others – maybe staff, maybe SU officers – to be fought in bureaucratic channels. Even many sectors of academic staff didn’t participate.

Through other sectors’ active participation, we could've shut down the entire campus, made a significant dent in the management’s cashflow, and advanced the struggle towards confronting the real roots of our situation. Now they too will experience the consequences of our defeat in due course.

Similarly, the delaying deals accepted by many universities have only weakened our movement. Instead of striking all at once, we’ve been picked off one by one, and many universities (such as Nottingham, Sheffield, and Sheffield Hallam) that accepted deals are now finding that they have little time left in the year to strike.

Sectoral and single-workplace battles are doomed from the start. This is especially true when the bosses want to sack us anyway: when they no longer see our employment as profitable, they care much less about us refusing to work. We must generalise our strikes as far as possible.

3. We cannot allow our strikes to be mediated by the bosses, or even the trade unions. Our fight is against the whole system.

Though our clash might seem to be with our individual employers, over the terms of our employment, it is really with all employers, over the system of wage-slavery, our exploitation by capital.

This is fairly obvious when we look at universities. The state is implementing austerity cuts on education to raise the general rate of profit, and this policy (fees, funding cuts, sackings, line management, etc.) is just being carried out by pampered bagmen like Sir Nishan. In order to really challenge the crisis in universities, we ultimately need to bring the fight to the government (the central executive organ of the capitalist class), not just its overseers.

In other places, the state might not be giving the initial orders, and the employer might be owner as well as overseer, but the direction remains the same. To raise the general rate of profit, the conditions of all workers must be pushed down. No matter how much they squabble – at the ballot box, in the market, or even on the imperialist battlefield – against us, all of the bosses are forming one unified offensive.

Our strikes must challenge the whole capitalist class, as much as they do our individual employers. Whenever we make economic demands we can’t help but think about the question of power, confronting the state itself. In fact this may not be our choice: if threatened enough by a big, strong, united strike, the last resort of an employer is always to scamper away to Westminster and beg the government to send in its thugs, as we saw in bloody detail during the Miners’ Strike (a detail all too often ‘forgotten’ by that other key organ of capitalist rule, the press).

We cannot settle for slightly better terms of wage-slavery, except as a necessary tactical pause before the next battle – not least because these ‘gains’ will inevitably be temporary until the bosses feel safe enough to cut them again. We must never lose sight of the final offensive – breaking free from their rule altogether! The alternative is a society based on the principle, ‘to each according to their need, from each according to their ability’ – where education isn’t a shit job or a commodity, but a way for humanity to freely enrich itself.

This is the real meaning of socialism – not a neat parliamentary scheme of reforms and nationalisation, illusions that do nothing to change the real slavery of our lives. And this isn’t a pipe-dream. What is a pipe-dream is to think there is any alternative. Every strike proves that another world is possible.

4. In this context, unions are not serving our purposes. They can only offer us managed decline.

It might seem weird, given that our conditions are objectively getting worse, that the union’s communication channels are celebrating a victory. In fact, this is fitting. Defeat is what a trade union ‘victory’ looks like.

Challenging the system is not the approach of the trade union, the official negotiator in the sale of wage-labour. No matter how much the trade unions and bosses seem to clash, they stand united when it comes to sending workers back to work with some deal. In this period of crisis, when the bosses have nothing else to offer, this means enforcing cuts on us. They are not with us against the bosses, but in the middle, preventing us from confronting them directly. They have been integrated into the state itself.

The trade union’s approach is avoiding strikes, preventing their "dangerous" expansion to other sectors or illegal activity (the law having been written by the bosses beforehand to prevent any risk to themselves); dividing the workforce; and generally keeping the system running, lubricated by our sweat and blood, by mediating between us and our exploiters. This auspicious year gives us a good example. It’s the centenary of the 1926 British general strike, which the unions are organising celebrations for so they can neutralise it into fossilised memorialdom and leach clout from it. What they won’t tell you is how it ended: with the TUC calling off the strike at the request of the government!⁽²⁾

It’s not a simple matter of electing ‘good’ leadership, opposing ‘bureaucratic leadership’ to the rank-and-file, or any other formula leftists often say. Our UCU branch has the honour of being led by a national leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), one of these aforementioned leftist groups. This didn’t stop him from resisting the unification of students and staff or negotiating behind our backs. This isn’t a personal criticism; this is the essential job of a union negotiator, and we have no doubt he did his job with distinction.

Nor is there any point trying to make unions more ‘democratic’, or in projects to set up new unions without a bureaucracy (like the UVW and IWGB in the UK, or SiCobas in Italy). The bureaucracy is just a symptom. Going from a proletarian body in the service of the struggle, to a permanent body in the service of negotiation, a new union always follows the same managerial path of the big trade unions.

Even on a practical level, unions aren’t working for us. In the West, the days when all the employees of a company worked in one factory for an extended period are long gone. Instead, workplaces are small, and workers are employed on an extremely precarious basis. Unions rarely even function in these workplaces. In the remaining big workplaces, it becomes blatantly obvious how competing unions divide the working class. UoL’s workforce is split between three unions (Unite, Unison, and UCU), and many universities have four or more! Even for the most elementary struggle, we need new forms of organisation that allow a strike to spread from one workplace or sector to the next.

5. Self-organisation/initiative is our strength – let’s get stronger!

When we criticise unions, it’s never because we don’t see the importance of the daily struggle. On the contrary, it’s because the daily struggle to defend our conditions is the essential starting point in our struggle against capitalism, and the unions do not serve this struggle’s needs.

Trade union officials work tirelessly to promote the idea that it’s unions which ‘do’ the class struggle; that strikes are something they organise for the convenience of their subordinate members, who only need to have faith in them to represent their interests. Now we can all see that this isn’t the case. The strike is our front-line weapon against the bosses’ attacks. Even when the strike is being managed by a trade union, it's our energy which truly drives it forward. (This is also a message to bring back to those colleagues who thought they could leave the strike to others while they continued working.) Our strength comes from acting as a class. This necessarily involves organising our own struggle – not leaving it to union officials or politicians (even leftist ones!), whose job it is to impose capitalist crisis on us.

In our strike, we have had a good amount of self-initiative – no doubt because it was demanded by the desperation of the situation. Organising the picket line schedule; the strike committee meetings after the picket line every week; volunteering to give teach-outs; organising marches and rallies; the mass assembly on 25 February. This is a good start, but we can do even better.

Meetings like the strike committee should be transformed into our main form of decision-taking, and opened to all workers, not just UCU members. Open mass assemblies and strike committees are the form that corresponds to modern class struggle, from Iranian sugar plants to North Sea oil platforms.⁽³⁾ Eventually, they need to be connected (and thus connect us) across workplaces and geographical areas. Only then, when we have a cross-sector class movement, will we be able to challenge the root cause of our predicament.

6. The class struggle is never over (until we end it!)

The current strike in Sheffield has only just begun. Sheffield Hallam has had possibly the most success of any university in uniting students and academic staff behind the strike, and now shows signs of bringing catering staff into class unity as well. We can only offer them our unbending support as they take up the torch. Across the sea, nurses in New York hospitals and garment factory workers in Delhi, amongst so many more, are still on strike.

A national conference of staff and students involved in university strikes has been proposed (likely in Sheffield over this summer). This is our opportunity to make sure our experience wasn’t wasted, but instead helps inform our struggle going forward, through discussion and fraternisation. For those of us leaving higher education, we can bring the lessons we’ve learned into the sectors we move onto.

Whatever way you decide to do it, we have a duty to clarify ourselves politically and share that with our fellow workers.

Notes:

(1) For background about the strike, see: Two Speeches From the University of Leicester Picket Line

(2) 1926 General Strike: Ten Days that Failed to Shake the World

(3) See Workers' Strikes in Iran: A New Wave of Struggle and North Sea Oil and Gas Fields: The Struggle Continues!