The cooperation of dockworkers from various European countries with the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Greece supports the disputes and strikes of dockworkers and seafarers internationally. In recent years in particular, the strikes of transport workers, railway workers and dockworkers - as a significant part of the international industrial proletariat – have clearly revived. In a review of the period 1870-1996, 35% of all recorded industrial action was taken by transport workers, shipping and port workers, railway workers and aviation workers.

Lenin's 1899 treatise ‘On Strikes’ is still an important guide 125 years later. With the emergence of large corporations and cartels and monopolisation, the working class also came onto the scene with countless strikes. Lenin's treatise deals with the significance of strikes, the methods for leading strikes and the tasks of socialists in this context.

We want to summarise this in six points and put them up for discussion:

1. Strikes, according to Lenin's analysis, signify the beginning of the struggle of the working class against the capitalist social order. Workers who put forward their demands together and refuse to submit to whoever ‘has a big bag of money’ cease to be slaves, they become human beings. This is also the reason why we advocate the inclusion and active participation of all colleagues in strikes for higher wages, shorter working hours, against labour agitation and premature wear and tear of the human commodity labour power.

2. Lenin writes: ‘Every strike reminds the capitalists that it is the workers and not they who are the real masters — the workers who are more and more loudly proclaiming their rights.’ This is also the reason why port capitalists and shipping companies do everything they can to prevent strikes, to deny workers the right to strike and to stifle strikes that have broken out. It is not entirely unjustified when the capitalist governments and masters on the corporate floors express the fear: behind every strike lurks the hydra [monster] of revolution…

3. Every strike teaches workers to understand where their strength lies: in their numbers, unity and organisation! In 2022, 12,000 North German dockworkers went on strike for higher wages - within a union framework with numerous independent elements. And they carried a banner: ‘We 12,000 dockers can handle you Pfeffersäcke without a problem’. (Pfeffersäcke is a North German term for capitalists). Here it is the task of all class-conscious workers, socialists and communist freedom fighters to carry out educational work: the enemy of the workers is not just the individual capitalist, but an entire class of capitalists. The workers must understand that the whole class of workers can and must develop its power beyond their own workforce.

4. With every strike, the workers begin to realise that the laws of capitalist society are only enacted in the interests of the rich. That the respective governments, organs of the state, representatives of bourgeois parties are on the side of the corporations and their profit interests. Original statement by a dock worker during a strike meeting at the independent strike during four shifts in the port of Hamburg in November 2023: ‘Yes. Surely we have to think about if anything still goes with that rabble up there. Of course we have to think about alternatives. That's becoming increasingly important.’

In today's world, this also includes the role of the bourgeois media, which often portray labour struggles with a mixture of disinformation, half-truths and lies. Especially when they have an independent character!

5. In recent years, especially in the USA, Italy, Greece and France, the first strikes have been organised, for political demands, such as the struggle against imperialist wars, reactionary governments, arms deliveries to Israel and against the barbaric war against the Palestinian people. Strike movements and mass struggles for the right to strike developed in numerous European countries. Lenin explicitly emphasised the necessity that ‘the working class must win for itself the right to strike, the right to publish workers’ newspapers, the right to participate in a national assembly’. This is an important debate in the labour movement against both reformist and revisionist influences, that want to restrict workers' strikes unrealistically to economic and daily political demands.

6. Lenin developed the very important idea that strikes are a school of war, but not yet war itself. It is an important experience from countless strike movements that strikes can be conducted all the more successfully if they are conducted with the mindset that this is a school of class struggle. That it is a school means that the working class learns in the strikes that and how the struggle for its liberation and for socialist revolution can be developed. With great foresight, Lenin warns in his writing against the idea that ‘by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its condition or even its emancipation’. This, too, is a highly topical debate when left-reformist leaders in the trade unions in particular, but also representatives from the Trotskyist camp, propagate strike as the highest means of struggle. As necessary as each individual strike, as necessary as industry-wide strikes and transnationally coordinated strike movements, the general strike as weapons in the hands of the labour force are: they must be led and understood as harbingers of actual revolutionary social change.

7. Our co-operation in the international exchange of experience of dockworkers was founded 15 years ago deliberately on a militant, anti-fascist, non-partisan level and thus with the inclusion of revolutionaries, Marxists - Leninists and communists. Our whole experience is that every strike in the ports - but also in other areas - always means a glimpse into freedom for the workers. A glimpse into a society where capitalist exploitation and oppression come to an end!

Lenin's writing ends with the call: ‘From individual strikes the workers can and must go over, as indeed they are actually doing in all countries, to a struggle of the entire working class for the emancipation of all who labour’. Lenin's writing is a fiery and convincing call for us to spare no effort to prepare, initiate and lead strikes, to develop them from individual struggles to mass struggles, to link them with the political struggle and to establish always and everywhere the necessity of a socialist liberation. But also to organise the workers in a revolutionary party and together make the struggle for socialist revolution their own. Under today's conditions, this is in particular a mass struggle for the mode of thinking in the labour movement, to take the proletarian path of the workers' offensive and for a perspective of socialist revolution. Today it is important - not only for the dockers - to combine the struggle for social issues with the political struggle and strikes against the preparations for world war, the environmental catastrophe and the threat of fascism.

In the spirit of the last sentence of Lenin's pamphlet:

‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’