I DON’T know what the late Ralph Miliband read to his offspring by way of bedtime stories. But if Ed’s reluctance to back today’s public sector stoppage is anything to go by, Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘The Mass Strike’ did not feature strongly in his upbringing.

For my generation of the far left, which came to political awareness against a backdrop of the Winter of Discontent and the miners’ strike, this slim pamphlet from 1906 formed some sort of blueprint for what we were trying to achieve.

I’m not exactly sure what difference my presence as a skinny Trot student made on picket lines from Warrington to Wapping, but it was a point of honour to be there.

Real class conflict took place at the point of production, and was largely a male manual worker thing. White collar stoppages were all very well, albeit largely in an ancillary capacity.

The theory was, to use a period catchphrase, that ‘workers learn through struggle’. In other words, the very act of participation in industrial action was seen as in and of itself emancipatory and radicalising.

Backward ideas such as racism, sexism and – worst of all! – support for the Labour Party would evaporate as the proletariat inevitably gravitated towards [insert name of sect here].

This was all a long time ago, of course. Despite the comparisons to the past routinely on offer from some quarters, there is an enormous difference between the potential economic impact of an all-out indefinite strike by, say, steelworkers and a 24-hour walkout by, say, school teachers.

It’s just that in deindustrialised Britain, the former doesn’t happen anymore. And as the experience of recent decades underlines, prolonged series of one-day strikes sooner or later peter out, as members become demoralised at the loss of pay for no obvious gain.

Whatever the Daily Telegraph purports to think, such gestures are manifestly not designed to extract concessions by militancy or ‘bullying’. Their purpose is rather to strengthen the weak hand of union officials at the negotiating table, even as they accept terms that invariably concede almost everything the employers want.

The perspective really is as restricted as that, and once the bluster is stripped away, both sides are well aware this is the case.

In other words, Dave Prentis’s overblown insistence that he is about to take the labour movement through a more successful rerun of 1984-85 under his wise guidance is a mark of either incredible conceit or an astonishing degree of detachment from reality.

None of this means that ‘there is no point in striking’, or that socialist trade unionists should confine their politics to tabling all or nothing ultimatums. But in plain English, either they succeed in using J30 as a springboard towards a strategy that has some chance of success, or the fight is going down to certain defeat.