What is Initiative?

Something happened at work and everyone’s pissed off. People would probably join in if there was a strike, or at least a joint complaint. But nobody does anything. People grumble to each other in ones and twos but that’s all it is – no-one knows how to initiate action. How many of us have seen this happen? Probably everyone reading this article. What’s missing is initiative, and what’s missing on the left is an understanding of what initiative is and how to nurture it.

Initiative is something that board gamers talk about a lot, especially in Chess and Wei Chi. It means making moves that force your opponent to respond, like threatening one of their pieces. This means they spend all their moves reacting to yours, rather than putting their own plans into action. Even if you are losing, having the initiative means you have some control over the game.

Outside of games, the word also means more than that. It means getting up and doing something. If you’re the first one who says “hey, who wants to go to the pub after work today?”, that’s taking initiative. This concept is a big “missing piece” in the Left’s ideas – it explains why we are losing the class war and what’s wrong with our organisations.

The left has lots of ideas on how to convince people that they want a better world. But nothing to say about a situation where most people would join a mass movement, if it existed (or a strike, or a union). This is the bigger barrier right now: while most people oppose the cuts, there is not a mass movement that looks likely to do anything about it. So we are stuck trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps – people want to put a stop to austerity, but we have no idea how to go from individually hating it to fighting against it all together.

Initiative vs Reaction

The workers’ movement in the UK has lost the initiative. Instead of asking for things that we’ve never had before (like we did in the old 8-hour day campaign), we spend most of our time reacting to things that the rich have imposed on us. “Fight the latest Tory cut!” “Stop casualisation!” “Save our jobs!”

This is exhausting. We need to feel hope but instead, even if we win every fight, things will be as bad as they were before. We’re fighting a constant battle just to stop things getting worse, when we should be trying to make things better. Always reacting is strategical suicide, because the rich and powerful choose which battles are fought, and where and when. How can we expect to succeed at all in these conditions? To win, we need to push them in ways they’re not prepared for.

The government are very clever in the way they cut services. They started with the school students EMA (*) and university grants, so that protesting students wouldn’t join up with people trying to stop public sector pay cuts. Only after years of austerity that exhausted anyone protesting the cuts have they started really going after the hospitals and doctors – something that affects everyone. Even that is only happening region by region, and works locally by playing towns against each other. They always start by threatening the worst, then make a few “concessions” that were really planned from the very beginning. So we’re left feeling “at least it’s not as bad as it could have been”, and they get what they wanted all along.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying we should never defend what we have. I am saying that right now that’s all we ever do, so we need drastic changes to break the pattern. For example, take the 2010 student movement. This started off as a reaction against tuition fees and EMA (*) cuts, and was no worse for that. The reason it died was that it stayed as only a reaction and never became anything more. As soon as the vote for tuition fees passed through parliament the movement collapsed. For all our disruption and civil disobedience, all the government had to do was weather the storm until the night of the vote. If the radical left had pushed the movement to add to their demands, and set less hope in stopping the government vote, we could have kept going until they gave in. The current movement to save the NHS has the chance to learn this lesson.

Most unions are in the same situation. It’s easier to mobilise people against a change in their working conditions, than it is to fight for something new and better. Change naturally makes people angry, and it’s easy to imagine changing it back. Demanding something new needs work to get people thinking that it’s possible. So we’ve got lazy and only organise against new and obvious injustices which make people angry, instead of doing the harder job: convincing fellow workers that we can better ourselves. Most people have forgotten that unions ever did this and don’t even think it’s possible.

What we need is to take back the initiative! How about an extra week’s holiday every year? The 30-hour week? Or an NHS better than the one we had before? These are demands that everyone would appreciate, and winning any of them would give us the confidence to really start building up the unions again. If this sounds unrealistic – it’s no worse than reacting again and again expecting a different result each time. And think – what negotiator ever started bargaining by offering a price that was realistic? The way to get the best for ourselves is to ask for more than what’s possible, and have them meet us halfway, giving us what we hoped for in the first place. Making good demands will push the rich and powerful into making real concessions, because it puts them in a position where they have something to loose. If we only ever react then the worst possible outcome for them is that everything stays the same – hardly a threat. Demanding more, whether it seems impossible or not, is how to really scare them into backing down.

UPDATE: since this article was written the TUC has made it their policy to aim for a 4 day week (albeit very slowly and very politely) – https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/future-works-working-people . A victory for insurrectionary syndicalist politics?? 😀 😛

(* for any non-UK readers, Education Maintenance Allowance was a payment made to school students over 16 to help with the cost of studying, so that no-one would leave just because they had to get a job)

This is the first part of a series of articles on initiative. Part 2, “Initiative and Class Consciousness”, coming soon!