The TUC and the Last Resort
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “No-one is talking about a general strike, but of course these attacks on our members could well give rise to industrial action around specific disputes. Today’s meeting showed a clear determination for unions to work together on industrial issues including, as a last resort, industrial action when members support it.”
There is a need, of course there is a need, to rub the scent glands of one’s propagandistic impulses against the lamp posts and street corners of the general public’s indifference – such is the nature of subjectivity. We are all preparing our literature of public intervention. We want them to agree with us, to add their quantities to the qualities of our demands. That is to say, there are some of us, who once prepared such materials, but who are doing so no longer. On the contrary, it seems that ‘some of us’ are stirring an off-menu and unappetising gruel that is to be served up only at the most unsalubrious soup kitchen in town.
How is the non-intervention of pro-communists in a situation where popular protest is spreading across the world even conceivable?
There seem to be three bowls for understanding the porridge of such quietism: the first, most hostile interpretation, is that this self-styled group ‘some of us’ are too hoity toity to get involved in real world struggles, they perversely define themselves against that which they are dependent on, and anyway have nothing of substance to contribute; secondly, and more charitably, our Hegel observed that whilst every object reflects its conditions, it falls to each object to articulate only a fraction of what the world is, thus it is the historic role of ‘some of us’ to twist the concept of ‘last resort’ to mean that ‘some of us’ may speak effectively only at the end, that is only after the first, second and third ladlings of protest-borne subjectivities have cooled and congealed; thirdly, the goldilocks planet of analysis which the group, ‘some of us’ now inhabit has caused them to perceive that their intervention at this moment would make no difference to the ongoing cosmic-scale events, neither adding nor subtracting anything that makes a cosmic difference.
The last resort, for ‘some of us’, as an intervention, amounts to this observation which might gain meaning only at the end of the cycle and then perhaps not at all: all the emotions, all the analyses, all the causes, all the immediacy of struggles within which subjects are being created (on their own initial analysis, in opposition to the way of things), the totality of the entirety of this cycle of subject-formation, will pass. That is it. It is at this point, today, that ‘some of us’ suggest the non-identity of the subject in immediate struggle, and foresee how it will discover its internal contradictions and its dissatisfaction in its own politics at the end of its viability, the very loss of energy, the drifting of the crowds from the central square, the temporal far limit of protest which protest must always encounter after its euphoric expansion… the end of a cycle, the failure of the subject as a last resort, the belonging of the subject to what it protests against… that is, all of the phenomena belonging to the end of things which ‘some of us’ are introducing, and ever so quietly, at the very outset, like a pinch of salt into the porridge pot.
