The Liverpool dockers and their wives and families insist that theirs has been a “very modern” struggle, refuting the smug neoliberal dismissal of dock labor as an atavistic throwback to an earlier mercantile age. Postmodernists, who fantasize a world of purely electronic and instanenous contacts, blind to the slow movement of heavy and necessary things, may indeed find this insistence on mere modernity quaint. (How did your tennis shoes get here from Indonesia, Mr. and Ms. Jogger?) But against the pernicious idealist abstraction termed “globalism”, dockers enact an international solidarity based on intricate physical, intellectual and above all social relationships to the flow of material goods. The dockers’ line of contact extends outwards from what is immediately at hand, to be lifted or stowed, and crosses the horizon to another space with similar immediacies. To sustain this solidarity, based on work, when work has been cravenly stolen away, is all the more admirable, sustaining hope for a future distinct from that fantasized by the engineers of a new world of wealth without workers. The dockers recognize this fantasy, and knowing full well that there can be no fully automated future, fathom its ugly secret motto: Everyone a Scab.

Allan Sekula, Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool), 2000

One of the final scenes of Ken Loach’s 1996 documentary The Flickering Flame ¹ captures a moment of shattering vulnerability in a portrayal of the Liverpool dockers’ dispute which otherwise focuses on its characteristic defiance. A year into the conflict, Sue Mitchell, a member of the Women of the Waterfront support group, breaks down as she relays the weight of the dispute’s financial toll and the unyielding stance of Bernard Bradley, whose impulsive actions on 25 September 1995 ignited the whole saga. Composing herself through tear-soaked eyes, she says:

It’s just the injustice of it, the social injustice. And it isn’t just the dockers. It’s happening everywhere. And I’m always aware of that. It’s not feeling sorry for you, it’s feeling sorry for the future generations. You try to tell your children, do well in school, do this, do that. And what’s going to be at the end of it? A casual job with low pay, ill health, no future for their children. Yer know, that’s what it’s all about.

The dockers’ struggle, which lasted from September 1995 to January 1998, over two years and four months, was, among many other things, a fight over the future of working class life and politics in Britain. More than just an industrial dispute over 500 jobs and the future of dock work on the Mersey, it was a direct challenge to the newly entrenched neoliberal order, one that the Labour Party not only embraced but actively extended. This order, fundamentally accommodationist to the harshest forces of globalisation, sought to achieve its vision of modernisation through the complete erasure of proletarian culture and institutions. If Mitchell’s sympathies for future generations speak so penetratingly to our present, this is testament both to the scope of this struggle, and the foresight afforded to those on the sharpest end of capital’s transformations.

Mike Carden, shop steward and organic intellectual of the Liverpool dockers’ dspute, has left us with the most authoritative record of events in his posthumously published Liverpool Dockers A History of Rebellion and Betrayal. The book opens with a reflection on the competing visions of modernisation and retrogression which framed the dispute:

The Liverpool dockers’ dispute was portrayed as being from another time; one which had been discarded by New Labour in the early 1980s, as it strived to modernise at the dawning of a new age of politics. As such, this ‘strike,’ as it was so often wrongly referred to, was cast as a relic from a monochrome past, of men once more reduced to unskilled beasts of burden, easily identified by their flat caps and mufflers. They contradicted the New Labour world view of modernity in an era designated as marking the end of conflict, as the Blairite soundbites of a ‘third way’ mirrored the rise of neo-liberalism. ²

To this, Carden contrasts the renovation of working class politics achieved by the dockers’ dispute. Its confrontation with the TUC and the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), over their alignment with the politics of New Labour, found allies in what would emerge as the new face of Britain’s working class. This alliance comprised low-paid migrant workers resisting yellow unions and the creeping privatisation of the public sector, along with the vestiges of Britain’s long deindustrialisation. Through its coordinated challenge to the emerging model of lean production in the global economy, the movement also resonated with dock workers around the world and the anti-roads anarchist group Reclaim the Streets. This international red-green coalition anticipated the alter-globalisation upsurge leading up to the millennium, providing tactical precedents for the eco-activism that would follow in the 21st century. The campaign also began to erode gender divisions entrenched in the male dominated tradition of dockworker struggles. The wives and partners of dockers came together to form the Women of the Waterfront support group. This initiative would play a leading role in the dispute at both national and international levels.

The struggle additionally marked a turning point in rank and file internationalism, giving rise to the International Dockworkers Council (IDC). To this day, the IDC remains one of the most significant organisational counter-offensives to global capital, resisting automation and fragmentation in maritime labour across the globe. On the inventiveness and expansiveness which came to define the movement, Carden gives the final word to one of the lead characters of Bill Anderson’s 1999 film Dockers: “This is not some antwacky [Liverpool slang for ‘old-fashioned’] labour force sticking to some antwacky principle. This is the most modern dispute imaginable.” ³

Behind these competing claims of whether the working class might survive the new century lay a much older conflict - the cleavage between the principles of the workers’ movement and those of labourism. If the Liverpool dockers were backward looking, they did not, as neoliberals so often claim about insubordinate workers, look to a past when ‘trade union bosses held too much power’. In fact, they turned their eyes to a time when workers, much to the united disdain of capital and its allies within the official labour movement, were beginning to build power for themselves. This was the moment of the rank and file politics preached by New Unionism (1880-92) and the Shop Stewards Movement (1915-20), which prized above all the ingenuity and power of activated workers on the shopfloor. It was in the mould of these examples that the Liverpool dockers took responsibility for their own fight. They forged durable democratic structures that drew on the political power and enrichment of diverse allies, and confronted the repressive arm of their own movement. But they also looked to the era of labour casualisation on the docks in the early twentieth century, when men were herded into damp pens, hoping for a day’s work from a benevolent employer. Beyond the meritocratic hype of the knowledge economy, public-private partnerships, and flexibility, the Liverpool dockers and their families saw in New Labour only a return to the indignities and violences of precarious and unprotected employment.

If New Labour too was guilty of looking backwards, it was to the origins of the parliamentary Party, and the fudged expression of its socialist aspirations in the founding constitution. ⁴ In a 1995 lecture to the Fabian Society, Blair laid claim to the truly Liberal origins of the Party, condemning the inflated status of a doctrinal socialism in the Party’s history. His decision to revoke Clause IV from the Party’s constitution and replace it with a clause prioritising ‘the enterprise of the market and the rigours of competition’ was presented as a corrective to the notion that Labour existed as a vehicle to achieve the common ownership of the means of production. In Blair’s view, though the values of Labour remained unchanged, it had outlived compromises made along the way to suit historical circumstances. Chief among these was the place of trade unions in the party’s decision-making structures, and the nature of its social base - namely the working class. ⁵

Leaning on the contradictory premise that the trade union movement equates to its leaders, and the decline of trade union members equates to the disappearance of the working class, Blair sought to exorcise the spirit of the workers’ movement from Labour’s past once and for all. This reassertion of labourism took as its legitimising discourse sociological trends in the professional make-up of the British economy. Gregory Elliott summarises the compositional bedrock of New Labour’s political reorientation:

Distilled into a sound bite, Britain comprised a ‘two-thirds society’, encompassing a ‘new’ working class of owner-occupiers, living in the South, working in the service economy, oriented to the private sector (in transport, health and education); and set against the ‘one-third society’, including a ‘traditional’ working class of council tenants, those living in the North, unionized heavy industry or public sector workers, the unemployed, and dependents of the welfare state. The cumulative impact of such social transformation was the drastic decline of ‘labour’ as a unified and conscious political constituency: a reality attested by the atrophy of the Labour Party. ⁶

This would be the scaffold for the Party’s historic electoral realignment. It would also form the backdrop to its ‘return on investment’ politics. This was a policy framework modelled explicitly on the figure of the shareholder, where it was understood that what the ‘two-thirds society’ wanted was taxpayers’ money ‘to work’ - not a politics of economic redistribution. In this context, the major industrial disputes of the period were cast as pitiable remnants of class conflict that made no sense whatsoever in a modern, global, financialised economy.

At the same time, the TUC and its affiliates, seeking to gain policy scraps from an incoming Labour government, played an active role in engineering the realities that Blair professed about the modern world. As the 1997 General Election loomed, they starved industrial disputes of resources and attempted to shuffle off stage all remaining vestiges of worker militancy. This was also pursued through the formalisation of service-based trade unionism: a model engineered to convert members into clients purchasing individualised services from specialised experts.

With trade union officialdom confirming Blair’s diagnosis that partnership was the new spirit of the economy, and permanent mass unemployment lingering as a legacy of Thatcherism, conditions were ripe for an electoral project that cast class decomposition as an opportunity for national renewal. Yet the fragility of this project would become evident almost as soon as New Labour took office. The Party was quickly compelled to fabricate a series of scapegoats to distract from its failure to deliver on its loudly proclaimed promises of economic rejuvenation. Welfare claimants, terrorists, undocumented migrants, single mothers, disaffected youths and many others, were all framed as the principal culprits holding the country back from fulfilling its potential. But it was the eventual unravelling of the ‘two-thirds society’ myth which would ultimately push New Labourism into terminal crisis.

Yet the political composition which emerged out of the Liverpool dockers dispute had already mounted a powerful challenge to the post-political consensus of the period. It provided a vision of how the new modalities of class conflict in the global economy might line up against hallucinations of a classless society. It forged solidarities that crossed borders, uniting workers from both the service and industrial sectors, alongside the youth and unemployed. It practised a diversity of tactics, from occupations and mass-blockade street parties, to coordinated disruption of global supply chains. It spoke the language of rank and file insubordination, social movement subversion, and proletarian internationalism, and gave leverage and momentum to broadbased social, political, and economic demands. Its radicalisation of the organisational and political dimensions of the workers’ movement had made clear, to anyone who cared to look, that it was New Labour, not the remnants of worker militancy, that represented a “monochrome pragmatism” in its narrow fixation on what was electorally possible. ⁷

But just as it had encountered the full weight of the trade union bureaucracy in its efforts to raise the profile of the dispute nationally, the campaign also faced a concerted blackout across the media establishment. With few notable exceptions, such as John Pilger, the mainstream press largely ignored the events unfolding in Liverpool. As the general election loomed, the media classes closed ranks around the forces propelling New Labour into power. The rare moments when the dispute broke into the mainstream were often instances of unexpected subversion - as in the case of Liverpool football player Robbie Fowler famously revealing the detoured Calvin Klein solidarity t-shirt while celebrating a goal during a European Cup Winners’ Cup match in 1997, or when anarcho-punk band Chumbawumba celebrated their mega-hit ‘Tubthumping’ by dumping a bucket of ice over Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at the 1998 Brit Awards in solidarity with the dockers.

The silence of the press on industrial activity in the mid-1990s, coupled with a broader cultural acceptance of the decomposition of the working class across academia, the far left, and the official labour movement, would profoundly shape historical understandings of the workers’ movement in Britain. The dominant story cast Thatcher’s assault on the miners as the great culmination of 20th-century labour struggles, followed only by scattered disputes of diminishing scale and significance, unfolding against a backdrop of steadily declining union membership. However, read from the perspective of our current moment, amidst an international reorientation toward rank and file class struggle, and mass anti-imperialist and ecological movements seeking ways to channel worker power toward urgent political aims, the Liverpool Dockers Dispute has many lessons to teach.

To look back on the struggles that shaped the technical and legal frameworks securing international supply chains is to historicise, and therefore politicise, the constraints and possibilities facing Palestine solidarity actions today. The securitisation and flexibilisation of global transport infrastructure is one of the key conditions shaping the terrain of contemporary anti-imperialist resistance. Historic international workers’ struggles, which punctuated the formation of this global infrastructure, form the real foundation of the organisational power now being mobilised to disrupt the Israeli war machine. For example, the late Björn Borg - chair of the Swedish Dockworkers Union (SDU), founding president of the International Dockworkers Council, and a central figure in the coordination of international solidarity actions during the Liverpool dispute - was instrumental in cementing the SDU’s pro-Palestine politics. These politics were forged through years of anti-apartheid activism, particularly in solidarity with South Africa and Zambia. Together with Erik Helgeson, Borg led a week-long blockade of Israeli ships in 2010, alongside dockworkers around the world, following the IDF’s massacre of civilians aboard the Freedom Flotilla. This history of coordinated solidarity boycotts across international shipping routes formed the backdrop to the SDU’s recent official refusal to handle Israeli military cargo, a stance for which Helgeson was punitively dismissed by his employer, Gothenburg Roro Terminal.

Thirty years after the Liverpool dockers’ dispute, New Labour is back in power. This time its rhetoric of modernisation rings hollow, its class denialism and xenophobic scapegoating is expediting a far-right resurgence, and its unwavering deference to the Special Relationship draws it into evermore blatant acts of barbarism on the world stage. Slick marketing may have once disguised the regressiveness of New Labour politics. Today, however, it’s impossible to escape the feeling of being victim to a kind of political recidivism.

Returning to the Liverpool dockers dispute in this context, we find many of the same questions which face the workers’ movement today. What organisational forms can coordinate actions capable of disabling global supply chains for political ends? How do we bridge the gap between local and national realities and global solidarities in working class resistance? How can we build sustainable rank and file organisation that can defy the stranglehold of repressive trade union bureaucracies? How do we mount offensive and expansive struggles over job cuts under conditions of economic restructuring? How do we create a workers’ movement that is politically alert to the changing technical composition of the class? What concrete points of political convergence could constitute an effective ecological workers’ movement? And how do we forge lasting, insurgent alliances between workers and broader social movements that go beyond symbolic solidarity to shared revolutionary purpose?

This collection of archival writings has been assembled to mark the 30th anniversary of the Liverpool dockers’ dispute. Much of the material is drawn from Labournet , the website used by the dockers as an organising platform for coordinating national and international solidarity actions, counteracting the media blackout imposed on the dispute, and as a living archive of the movement. This early and strategic use of digital media stands as another testament to the movement’s dynamism. The pieces included in this book prioritise the voices of those workers and supporters who were directly involved in the struggle, and give a strong impression of the passions, creativity and yearnings which nourished this movement. In revisiting one of the last great upsurges of rank and file activity in Britain, which emerged in the dying days of the official labour movement and contested a political ideology that continues to dominate our trade unions and government, we hope that this material can serve more than historical curiosity.