The class struggle and tax credits

This is not a simple and straightforward issue as tax credits are, and were intended to be, a subsidy to low-paying employers. They can pay below market wage rates knowing that the government will top up this. The trouble is that the reduction in tax credits won't lead to the employers compensating for this. From a trade union point of view, it was probably better not to have gone down this route but tried instead to negotiate higher wages. Easier said than done of course, especially as the workers affected are notoriously hard to organise.

Not necessarilly, the main factor is the absence of a Tory majority in the House of Lords, and the Lib-Dem contention that they are not bound by the Salisbury convention (added to the fact that the tax-credit cut was not specifically in the Tory manifesto).  Any Labour leadership would have used the opportunity to make trouble, especially a right-facing one that wanted to throw the membership a bone.

Yes. Of course every single worker is involved in the class struggle every day whether they realise it or not, but as this is a constant it could be invoked to explain everything or nothing. I thought you had in mind something more conscious and organised than this such as strikes. As even the Trotskyists are lamenting, unfortunately there is no organised industrial struggle going on against austerity. Most workers seem to accept the capitalist necessity for austerity at the present time or don't think there's much they can do about it.If there had have been "workers struggles" against it the government might not have tried to cut these payments in the first place, let alone later modify them (and it remains to be seen how, probably some transitional arrangement for those already getting them with new claimants getting less as originally envisaged).And of course enough workers voted Tory in the general election a few months ago, including at least one on tax credits who protested on Question Time the other day and said she had, to return a Tory government with a mandate for further austerity. I think it was Eugene Debs who said that the sound of a policeman's truncheon on the head of a striking worker was an echo of their vote for one or other capitalist party.To be credible we need to respect the facts and reason logically..

It's not that clear cut.  If tax credits are a means of partly administering the wages system through the state, then it is also a way in which low labour (and 'high productivity') sectors are made to subsidise labour intensive sectors (while at the same time trying to ensure that the working class only get just enough for their needs, smoothing out the costs of childcare so they don't enter into the general wage calculation and thus go to childless workers.Undoubtedly, removing the tax credits will impoverish some of the worst off famillies, and coupled with attempts to restrict union activity it is certainly part of a general push to lower wages and increase exploitation, but the remedy is not to join the Labour party in supporting the redistribution of poverty, but standing by unions.

Absolute piffle; they're slogans of reformists.  And we don't want the Tories out merely for them to be supplanted by Labour or another party committed to running capitalism and imposing austerity which is virtually inevitable when the economy is in a downturn.