Now, after the huge London protest in March, the Con Dems are showing a lot less confidence. That march already showed that a lot of workers saw the need join ranks and take collective action against government cuts and attacks by the bosses.
So Cameron and his government are starting to worry that their plans may backfire, by sparking off a wave of strikes, sooner or later. And they should worry. What other possible response is there for us, against the wholesale axing of jobs and services which is taking place, and to the current attacks on our pensions and living standards, than to use our collective strength, in order to defend our collective interests?
We won't be taken hostage!
Already several Tory grandees have made threats against today's, much reduced, right to strike. On Monday last week, Cameron sent his Lib-Dem sidekick, trade secretary Vince Cable, to convey the same message to the GMB union conference in Brighton.
Of course, Cable knows better than to make a direct threat. He just said that, for now, there was no reason to change the law. But, he added, "should strikes impose serious damage to our economic and social fabric, the pressure on us to act would ratchet up".
Since then, teachers in the NUT voted 9 to 1 for strike. Results of a similar ballot held by the civil servants' union, the PCS, will be announced this week. And other unions, such as Unison and the GMB, among others, are considering holding strike ballots as well.
So now, Downing Street is relaying the same threat against the right to strike through the media, floating all sorts of possible options, from imposing a "minimum service" during a strike or facilitating the recruitment of strike breakers by employers.
But who imposes "serious damage to the economy" if not the capitalists with their greed, and this government with its policies, like the cutting of corporation tax to line shareholders' pockets instead of putting its resources into useful public investment? And who imposes "serious damage to the social fabric" if not the same capitalists and their ministers, by destroying jobs left, right and centre, shrinking pension provisions, cutting welfare payments and threatening the poorest with even worse poverty?
Whenever the working class dares to defend its interests, we are accused of "taking the public hostage". But who is "the public", if not us? Who is taken hostage, if not the working class, when the services on which it depends are cut? And aren't NHS workers (who have lost 50,000 jobs since the coalition came into office), local government workers (who lost 123,000) and postal workers (who have just learnt they are to loose another 22,000 jobs after losing 65,000 over the past 3 years), also hostages of this government - that is, unless they fight to oppose its policies?
A right which is denied must be imposed
We can't allow the capitalist class and its government to go on slaughtering jobs, reducing services and cutting our living standards. Fighting back is not just vitally necessary, it is vitally urgent.
We will have to put an stop to the on-going job cuts, compulsory or not, by imposing our own law, so that all job cuts become illegal - in private and public sectors. As for the social damage caused by unemployment, it will have to be stopped by sharing out all available work between all of us, to provide everyone with the means to make a decent living. We will have to stop the downward slide in wages and pensions by ensuring they are upgraded, as required, according to price increases which we measure ourselves, rather than using some unverifiable "official index". And finally, we will have to stop the reckless behaviour of the capitalist parasites and their state by imposing our control and that of the population as a whole, over the way they manage their businesses and public services.
And yes, to impose these common-sense ways of limiting the social catastrophe resulting from the capitalists' crisis, we will have to take strike action and express our demands in the streets, as massively as possible!
They will try to stifle us? Of course! They will bring in more laws to curtail strikes? Maybe. But, whatever they try, they will be impotent the day that hundreds of thousands, millions of us, defy their laws and decide that enough is enough. They will call us "wreckers"? Sure, but we would only be wreckers of their mad system, since we will have to take society out of the hands of this minority of parasitic capitalists to bring it under the control of the majority of the working population!