‘Class struggle’ to ‘build a new working class movement’: the constitutive rhetoric of Mick Lynch (General Secretary, RMT)

‘The working class is back now and we're gonna fight for our rights’ (Enough is Enough, 16 January 2023). The pivotal role of Trade Union leadership in resisting and rebalancing hegemony is well acknowledged (Kelly, 1988; McAlevey, 2016). However, for social movements to be sustainable in times of change and challenge, unions must address market, class and social justice concerns altogether (Hyman, 2001). Yet in our ‘civil society’ (Gramsci, 1971) as neoliberal subjects continue to internalise the reality of being an ideal economic actor (Foucault, 1980), does the working class even believe in its own existence anymore? ‘I use that term “working class” cause it’s gone out of fashion, so many people in my position including the TUC and the Labour Party don’t like using it, but there is a class’ (Mick Lynch, BBC Political Thinking Podcast, 28 May 2022). Here, Lynch asks us to engage in frame-breaking: something a charismatic leader does to empower their followers for self-actualisation and radical change (Foil et al., 1999). If solidarity is a dormant potential waiting to be activated (Atzeni, 2009), individual Trade Union leaders can be the critical catalysts resisting challenges to frame identities and actions as illegitimate (Darlington, 2018) and thus legitimising collective and social action against perceived injustice. Against the grain in a post-Thatcher world, Mick Lynch, General Secretary for the RMT, has become a public figure in his attempts to mobilise collective identity and action across the RMT and working communities. This study sets out to investigate some of the ways he has tried to achieve this. Focusing on the role of communication strategy and speech imagery by charismatic leaders (Foil et al., 1999), and the significance of language, narrative and rhetoric in enacting solidarity (Morgan and Pulignano, 2019), this study collates and thematically analyse the writings, speeches and interviews of Mick Lynch since he became General Secretary in May 2021 to ascertain how he uses rhetoric as an exercise in power to affect identity construction, resistance and change. Findings indicate he demonstrates features of transformational leadership (Bass, 1990), framing (Kelly, 1998; McAlevey, 2016), frame-breaking (Foil et al., 1999), and constitutive rhetoric (Charland, 1987; Seitz and Tennant, 2017). In utilising constitutive rhetoric, lynch calls a collective identity - ‘the working class’ - into being, addressing audiences as though they were one community. He consciously attempts to bridge over audiences’ multiple and seemingly disparate social, ethnic, religious and economic identities for the purpose of organising a new inclusive social movement against structural inequality. Consequently, this study seeks to reawaken academic interest in the subjective agency of activist leadership (Darlington, 2018), enlightening potential avenues contemporary Trade Union leaders can take to catalyse resistance against neoliberalist ideology and hegemony over workers, who are the community (Ikeler and Crocker, 2018) in modern capitalist societies.