Bernie Sanders, an eighty-year-old US senator and the de facto leader of the American left, has thrown his considerable political weight behind a new campaign – ‘Enough Is Enough’ – launched to combat the growing cost of living crisis. in Britain, which was founded in part by Leeds and the RMT.
At a recent rally in Clapham, south London, many of those who had queued around the square were turned away due to lack of space.
The phrase “Enough Is Enough” reflects the fact that people are tired of often working longer hours for low wages, tired of their children having a lower standard of living than they are, and tired of billionaires getting richer and richer while they they stay behind.
Don’t people see an improved standard of living? Why isn’t there more equality, instead of less equality? Why is the standard of living getting worse instead of better? Leeds asks this, Enough Is Enough asks this and sees the world rise up.
At a recent Enough Is Enough rally, Lynch proclaimed: “The working class is back” – but it has long been seen as alien to an America that peddled the myth of social classlessness.
The goal of the “Enough Is Enough” Movement
Labor movements in the US and Britain are significantly weaker than most of their Western counterparts.
In the US, unions had long been sidelined by “red scares” and anti-union laws called “right to work,” but were severely weakened under Ronald Reagan, whose administration, in 1981, fired more than 11,000 strikers air traffic controllers, for other workers to learn “their lesson”. Today, just over one in 10 US workers are unionized.
British trade unionism has not suffered such a total collapse, but the number of organized workers – around a quarter of the workforce – is at half the level of its peak in 1979.
The main goal of the movement is rather to unite the struggles of the labor movement of the USA and Britain.
The barriers
In 2021, 68% of Americans told pollsters they approved of unions, the highest level since 1965, while UK polls showed most working-age Britons support the current wave of strikes. However, this has not translated into union membership for most. Why;
In the US, companies make it very difficult for workers to exercise their constitutional right to form a union. There is massive corporate backlash against workers forming unions in the country (eg Amazon, Starbucks etc).
A second obstacle is that the media is not friendly to unions, which in the media will very rarely discuss the benefits of unions, such as better working conditions, wages, pensions, etc. The media is apparently owned by a handful of big corporations, they don’t talk about class issues, economic issues. All of this contributes to making it more difficult for workers to organize.
The split of the Democratic Party
The union of the labor movement with the political movement will create the necessary progressive pole in the political scene of the USA and the UK, which at this moment, at least in the USA, cannot be expressed by the Democratic Party, despite the efforts of Bernie Sanders. The disappointment of the American left came with the Presidency of Barack Obama in which the representatives of the American left were completely disappointed.
The most likely scenario is that in January 2023, politically, there will be a stronger progressive presence in Parliament than at any other time in modern history. Working class people are becoming more and more alienated from the political process with the result that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party offer them nothing and of course do not represent them.
The Democratic Party is unlikely to choose them from the political, business and social elite in general that it represents. The split of the Democratic party, through its reduced percentages and the emergence of a new political pole that will include all these disappointed and angry citizens is the most likely scenario.
Bernie Sanders has accomplished the unachievable: to bring together otherwise fragmented and frustrated pockets of discontent into a highly visible and articulate movement, confident in its demands.
If he succeeds in uniting the increasingly dynamic labor movements on both sides of the Atlantic (US and UK), then we would be talking about a contemporary Anglo-Saxon “Gandhi” type politician.
