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Class
Sept 2, 2013 6:02:04 GMT
Post by dodger on Sept 2, 2013 6:02:04 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/thinking/collective.htmlCollective Organisation
WORKERS, OCT 2011 ISSUE
Existence under early industrial capitalism was harsh and brutal for our fledgling working class. Unwilling to accept their lot, workers sought improvements to their working conditions and gradually their quality of life was raised. Following World War Two, gains endured but illusions grew, as improvements were taken for permanent fixtures. There was a dwindling acknowledgement of why the improvements were there. Many forgot how they had actually been won, assuming the gains and reforms had capitalism’s blessing. We lulled ourselves into thinking that these gains were secure “rights”, incapable of suffering erosion or being overthrown. As capitalism’s absolute decline proceeds, we now know that reversal and setback are possible as the system attempts to diminish the power of our class.
So how did previous working class gains materialise? Improvements and reforms came out of past struggle and campaigns by organised workers. Enhanced working conditions such as increased rates of pay, better holiday entitlement, implementation of pension schemes, reduced working hours, etc. were extracted and won in the face of opposition from employers and government. Equally, reforms such as free national health provision and free state education were struggled for over many generations, not arising from government benevolence. Collective need actively challenged private profit.
Recent decades have seen too many in the class freewheeling, exploiting an impetus set going long before, enjoying advances that had really been earned with difficulty by preceding generations of workers, who had fought hard to establish them. Because these gains were not protected by our organised vigilance, because our defences – mainly our organisation in trade unions – had become neglected, weak, and used for other purposes, everything we should have held dear was more vulnerable to capitalism’s eventual assault.
If destruction and retreat are to be halted, if the prospect of progress is to rise again, then we must put right the central weakness, the lessening organisation and collective instinct of our class. We must painstakingly put our class together again. We must stop depending on others, banishing reliance on false politicians or scheming activists. When there is a self-reliant mass of workers spiritedly wanting reconstruction in Britain, then progress will return. To that end, workplaces are key. We must rebuild collective union strength in workplaces and, as soon as it is feasible, link them up as networks of power. Our class will have to shape the trade unions in the best fit and form to do its bidding. If well-planned action is conducted in tactically sound ways, then confidence will reappear.
But initially our steps may have to be small. Sometimes the greatest step is to speak out: from good ideas, other things will flow.
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Class
Sept 2, 2013 6:09:29 GMT
Post by dodger on Sept 2, 2013 6:09:29 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/thinking/skill.htmlSkill - Why it matters
WORKERS, JULY 2009 ISSUE
Transforming nature through labour is the source of all wealth.
Skilled labour combines comprehension with technique. Animals survive mainly through the use of habit and instinct; humans must above all use intelligence and learning. Without the ability to develop the knowledge and practice that is essential to production, humanity would perish.
In pre-industrial times, skill was essential to survival: often quite high level skill, yet survival for many was harsh.
In contrast, modern civilisation depends upon socially organised production, sophisticated technology and high levels of human skill. As an industrial people we are a vast organism of skills and knowledge in which each part is of vital importance to the whole. We have the capacity to create great wealth.
Capitalism despises skill but it cannot do without it. Instead it seeks to restrict it, abuse it, distort it and tailor it purely to make a profit. Hence capitalism’s encouragement of the “free” movement of labour, allowing employers to cherry pick from a rootless, unorganised workforce with no regard to the destructive impact that this has on the skill base of the countries of origin or destination.
Capitalism wishes skill to be instantly available without paying for its development or maintenance. Instead of providing apprenticeships, it prefers to import skilled labour, and is always reluctant to pay a higher rate for skilled labour.
Workers, on the other hand, are for skill, fighting for its recognition, development, and maintenance. We’ve recently seen oil refinery workers take a stand against the deliberate destruction of their skills. The British working class has always fought for its skills. The skilled rate was established and protected through bitter struggle. Our forebears fought for universal education, proper training and apprenticeship. Skill leads to power at the workplace and strengthens class-consciousness.
Skill has moved from being a tool for survival to one of liberation. The industrial revolution unlocked the way to the defeat of misery, ignorance and disease and also the way to the advancement of science and potential abundance. Capitalism now stands in the way.
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Class
Sept 20, 2013 17:04:32 GMT
Post by dodger on Sept 20, 2013 17:04:32 GMT
Fine study of class hatred in Britain, August 5, 2011
By William Podmore
This review is from: Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (Paperback)
This brilliant book examines the rise of ruling class hatred of the British working class. Rubbishing the working class goes hand in hand with worship of capital and capitalists.
Who are the working class? Those who have to sell their labour power to live - the vast majority of the British people. We are not defined by our level of income, education or housing.
Jones writes, "At the root of the demonization of working class people is the legacy of a very British class war." Thatcher attacked the working class, trying to destroy our industry, our services, our trade unions, communities and values. As Sir Alan Budd, then the Treasury's chief economist, said, "unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes."
Thatcher said, "Class is a Communist concept", "Morality is personal" and "poverty is not material but behavioural." The Labour Party and the media have embraced these themes.
Britain has vast and growing inequality. In 2010, the richest 1,000 got a record 30 per cent richer in just one year. Manufacturing jobs are being destroyed, and only part-time and/or service jobs are offered instead. In 2008, the median manufacturing wage was £24,343, in services the median was £20,000. Poverty already affects 13.5 million of us, more than 20 per cent of the population. British workers now work longer hours, 41.4 a week, than workers in any other EU member countries save Rumania and Bulgaria.
Under Labour the number of sports and social clubs fell by 55 per cent, post offices by 39 per cent, swimming pools by 21 per cent and libraries by 7 per cent; the number of betting shops rose by 39 per cent and casinos by 27 per cent.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development predicts that the government cuts will add 1.6 million to the unemployed. Conservative minister Bob Neill has admitted, "Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt" and "Those in most need will bear the burden of cuts."
More than 80 per cent of the jobs created in Britain since 1997 have gone to foreign-born workers. A 10 per cent rise in the proportion of immigrants cuts pay for service workers by 5 per cent. No wonder Labour MP Jon Cruddas called immigration a `wages policy'.
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Class
Nov 30, 2013 13:46:59 GMT
Post by dodger on Nov 30, 2013 13:46:59 GMT
"There's class warfare alright. It's my class, the rich, who are making war, and we're winning." - Warren Buffet, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway
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Class
Jan 4, 2014 0:13:04 GMT
Post by dodger on Jan 4, 2014 0:13:04 GMT
If yer ain;t at da table....?? Maybe yer on da menu...!!
Anon David Cameron at the Lord Mayor's banquet, London, on 11 November
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Class
Jan 28, 2014 17:57:02 GMT
Post by dodger on Jan 28, 2014 17:57:02 GMT
www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_0214/race.htmlThe word “race”, as applied to variation among human beings, never had any scientific justification. Now it has become an indiscriminate label to cover ignorance...
Race: a way out of confusion and distortion
WORKERS, FEB 2014 ISSUE It is hard to go a week without hearing of an attack on someone because of their racial origin. And there are frequent accusations of racism because of comments about immigration, national origin, or religious customs and observances. But it’s race, however you define it.
Worse, the labelling of legitimate debate as “racist” closes down discussion from the start. Jack Wilshere, an England footballer, commented on the qualifications for representing the country at football saying that players should be English. He was condemned in some quarters for being “racist”. His accusers in their own mind took that to mean “English-born” and not about recent passport qualification – a debate in many sports.
Similarly, any proposal to restrict immigration runs the risk of being branded “racist”. Opposition to open-door, unrestricted immigration is frequently conflated with racism.
A few years ago in Southwark, south London, 30 per cent of youth were without work, the majority of them black. Later Czech, Russian and Polish white workers settled in the borough in rapidly increasing numbers, taking many jobs that were available.
Self-styled “anti-racists” welcomed migration with enthusiasm matching that of gangmasters and the London hospitality trade. But here were black workers out of work because of cheaper foreign, but mainly white, workers. Local (true) racists who had always opposed migrants on account of colour now found the majority of new migrants were white. Ideology based on race left both “racists” and “anti-racists” alike confused about the stance to take, regardless of how they styled themselves.
At times the term “race” is supplanted by “community”. What a hateful, divisive concept that is – as if everyone can be defined in this way as having a common world view and attitudes. This is applied to immigrant “communities” in the main; as if they all behave in the same way and somehow don’t really belong to Britain.
Until recently, most parliamentarians thought this was ok. We have the “Asian” community – or Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Roma – the list is nearly endless. In the run-up to the separatist referendum will we start to hear more about the Scottish “community”? And what a diverse part of Britain Scotland is anyway: the subdivision would not stop with the creation of a border.
Community?
“Community” means you don’t really belong to the country and you’re not expected or encouraged to belong either: “stick to your old ways, don’t become British workers”; “stay rooted in the past and your own ghetto”.
The furore in Sheffield over the behaviour of recently-arrived Slovakian Gypsies is a good example. Some definitely don’t fit with the understanding of many people in Sheffield. But, they’re not homogenous any more than the people living in Park Gate before they came. David Blunkett may not be right to predict riots but he is, somewhat belatedly and hypocritically, right to say what he did about adapting to life in Britain. Now on the one hand he’s condemned as racist, and on the other real racists have a new target group.
As workers, we have to sort out some clarity on race, on racism, on immigration and communalism. “Outsiders” are almost always endowed by other human societies with negative or positive attributes depending on the conditions at the time. However in the 18th and 19th centuries the expansion of capitalism meant that imperial conquests and exploitation of material and human resources required ideological underpinning.
Slaves and the imposition of slavery were best served by a description of the human condition that allowed for different “grades” of humanity and the de-humanising of many. It is easier to treat people as slaves if their skin colour, hair and other superficial characteristics enable them to be typified as sub-human. That developed into the mid-20th century Nazi ideology of “Untermensch” and is evident in many current conflicts.
New characteristics are now ascribed to Russians, Chinese, Afghans and just about everyone in the Middle East; the better to reduce opposition to the next “honourable” attack on behalf of this corporation or that. So we go back to the future with the ideology of the East India Company of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In 1998, the Archaeological Institute of America [AIA] published a statement on race. It helps any worker engaging in advancing class interests against those who say we’re not all human in the same way: “In the United States both scholars and the general public have become conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this country, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics indicates that most physical variation, about 94 per cent, lies within so-called racial groups.” And following the sequencing of the human genome, it is now clear, as the US National Institutes of Health explains, that (apart from identical twins) between any two humans “the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about 0.1 per cent”. Science shows there is only one race – the human race.
Muddle
The AIA statement goes on to explain how we’ve ended up with the muddle on race and on the dangers that it brings. It exposes the idiocy of racists and the inherent mendacity of its obverse, multi-racism. If racial differences are minimal to the point of insignificance, why do some workers wed themselves to the notion that there are a multitude of races that should be lionised and “celebrated” in their differences? Such ideas underpinned apartheid.
In a speech in Cuba on 26 July 1991, Nelson Mandela excoriated those who thought they could continue to maintain the apartheid system. He quoted from the South African Congress Alliance Freedom Charter of 1955: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.”
Mandela explained, “This was an unambiguous rejection of the racist state that had existed and an affirmation of the only alternative that we find acceptable, one where racism and its structures are finally liquidated...There is reason to believe that we have not yet succeeded in bringing this home to the [South African apartheid] government, and we warn them that if they do not listen we will have to use our power to convince them. That power is the power of the people, and ultimately we know that the masses will not only demand but win full rights in a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic South Africa.”
The AIA came up with a working class view on race and racism through study and scientific analysis. South Africans through the practice of class struggle, led by the SACP and ANC, saw their way through to victory over the apartheid state. In Britain it behoves us to similarly base our views in class struggle and science.
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Class
Jan 28, 2014 18:20:33 GMT
Post by dodger on Jan 28, 2014 18:20:33 GMT
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Class
Feb 5, 2014 11:49:51 GMT
Post by dodger on Feb 5, 2014 11:49:51 GMT
imarxman.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/introducing-marxism/
INTRODUCING MARXISM
Posted on February 5, 2014 by imarxman
This is one of a series of short articles introducing some key Marxist concepts.
Class Society
Many thousands of years ago, human society became more and more organised, more complex. Social classes began to evolve, defined by their role in any given society. A ruling class would emerge centred around a chieftain, later a king, occupying a privileged position.This ruling class depended on its ability to assume control over the work done by others: hunters giving up part of their catch, farmers some of their produce. In effect the ruling class owned the hunters’ catch and the farmers’ crops because the land, the means of production, belonged to them.Essentially the nature of class society has not altered over millennia, even though technology and the means of production have changed radically. As to who constitutes the ruling class is determined by a person’s relationship to those means of production, the means of livelihood.The chief who “owns” the forest, the king who rules the land, the industrialist who possesses the factories and the machines in them, the financier who controls society’s capital, belong to their respective ruling classes.The rest of society, the vast majority, supplies the work, the labour required to utilise the productive potential of the means owned by the ruling class. The chief needs hunters, the king requires peasant farmers, factory owners look to workers.Actual wealth, the production and supply of commodities for use depends on the supply of labour. Machines don’t make wealth, they are only the means by which labour creates value, creates wealthTherefore, class society is the organisation of that society to enable the few, the ruling class, to appropriate the labour of the many, the class of workers. The majority only gain access to means of livelihood by agreeing, willingly or not, to supplying more labour than they are paid for.In other words, workers create more value (wealth) through their labour than they receive. Whether that is in terms of the amount of food peasants are allowed to keep from their farming or wages paid to workers.Put simply, class society is the organisational form enabling the ruling few to exploit the labouring many.
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Class
Feb 11, 2014 20:30:18 GMT
Post by dodger on Feb 11, 2014 20:30:18 GMT
imarxman.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/introducing-marxism-2/INTRODUCING MARXISM 2
Posted on February 11, 2014 by imarxman
This is the second in a series of short articles introducing some key Marxist concepts.
Capitalist Society
Societies have always reflected the relationship between the ruling or exploiting class and the ruled, the wealth producers who are exploited. Slave society is self explanatory example. Feudal society was a ruling aristocracy gathered around the king who owned the land, the main means of producing wealth. The land produced wealth through the labour of the exploited class, the peasants.
Feudalism was the dominant form of society from the Norman Conquest in 1066. However, within that society developed a class of merchants and small scale manufacturers, a middle class richer than peasants but without the power of the aristocracy.
This middle or mercantile class accumulated wealth to the point where it could challenge the king and his class who had become increasingly dependent on accessing that middle class wealth either through taxation or borrowing.
What is termed the “English Civil War” was actually a revolutionary confrontation between the mercantile class and its feudal overlords. Although the monarchy was restored, feudal power had been broken and the middle class asserted itself.
Another revolution completed this process, one not of firearms, but of industry. Rapid technological developments during the Industrial revolution transformed society economically and, subsequently, politically and socially.
Factories and machines became the dominant means of production, making all manner of items known collectively as commodities. These developments depended on capital investment and so capitalism was born.
Just as the dominant class in the feudal agrarian society was the landowning aristocracy, so the dominant class in industrial society was that which owned capital, the capitalist class. The middle class became the ruling class through its economic power.
Feudalism had given rise to the mercantile class through economic necessity, the growing importance of trade. Likewise, capitalism produced a new class to meet its economic needs, the working class.
Wealth is created by transforming raw materials into commodities. Machines and processes are developed to this end, but they are themselves commodities, all produced by the labour power of the working class.
Labour power is the source of value creation. Coal in the ground is valueless. Coal dug from the ground by the labour of miners has value. It’s not the pick and shovel the miner uses, it is his labour power that imparts value to the coal.
The most sophisticated, hi-tech computerised system is a complex of commodities all created through labour power no matter how automated processes appear. A cob of coal or a micro-chip has value due to working class labour power.
Profit comes from capitalists taking some of the value created through labour power. In essence, a worker’s wage only returns to him or her part of the value created.
For example, if it takes 4 hours work to create value enough to cover the worker’s wage, then by keeping that worker working for another 4 hours a second lot of value, surplus to the requirement to pay the worker, is created.
This surplus value is the source of capitalisms’ profits: workers are exploited because a percentage of the value created by their labour power is taken by capitalists.
It is not a moral question of whether capitalists are good or bad, it has to be this way for capitalism to operate. The slogan, “A fair day’s work for a fair days pay” is meaningless, because fairness does not and cannot come into it.
Society is complex and capitalism has developed ways of obscuring the essence of its operation. However, as long as capitalism exists the ruling capitalist class will continue to exploit the vast majority, the working class.
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Class
Nov 10, 2014 23:01:08 GMT
Post by dodger on Nov 10, 2014 23:01:08 GMT
In a two-part analysis of class in the 21st century, Workers dismisses the notion that class is dead. The idea of class is central to making sense both out of our day-to-day experiences and of the world at large, and argues that action as a class can end the disastrous economic, political and social system of capitalism...
Which class wants supremacy?
WORKERS, JULY 2014 ISSUE We begin with a simple snapshot of Britain and the world in the 21st century. Here, we find mounting problems of survival grow more severe for working people. In an effort to prolong itself, capitalism in decline turns on workers, its normal ploy. It bogs us down in a quagmire of problems, while those in control enjoy the fruits and maximise the spoils, relying on the opposition being distracted by crises.
 Photo: Andrew Wiard/www.andrew-wiard.com
Growing impoverishment and oppression is reserved for workers in or out of work. Gargantuan amounts of wealth are amassed by capitalists on a scale never witnessed before, particularly by finance capitalists, who prosper inside an economic depression that is entirely of their own making.
The smokescreen of “We’re in it together” is trotted out with repetitive hypocrisy – a whopping falsehood believed only by the gullible, certainly never entertained by aggrandising capitalists. The enemies of working people are actually very few, either in Britain or across the world – just tens of thousands – with an estimated 7 billion people in the world, most of whom are workers dependent on selling their labour power to survive. And yet it is the interests of the minority that dominate.
How do we account for the recent loss of class identity and consciousness? In the 1970s – just a few decades ago – chatter was about “Who Rules Britain?” Nowadays, few commentators even bother with our class or credit it with any influence. Both of these attitudes are flawed, the first a gross over-inflation, the second a result of media fascination with wealth and glamour.
Among other factors, how our class interpreted and experienced the post-war decades is highly significant. Due to the military and political successes of the Soviet Union in the victory over fascism in the Second World War and working class advance elsewhere, the rulers could not rule in the old way and were forced to run society with full employment, a free National Health and education service that went against the grain of capitalism. Instead of keeping to the traditional culture of our class, complacency set in. When the assault of the ruling class was renewed from about 1970, our class was not in the best state of health to respond.
Although there are only two classes in Britain, not everyone in the working class admits (or welcomes) their class position. Some prefer to cling to illusions that they are middle class or superior professionals or special individuals distanced and apart from a working class even though the vast majority are only a salary payment away from difficulty and a few payments away from destitution. These illusions lessen people’s willingness to organise collectively yet surely making or growing things or providing essential services or culture – real value creation – is better than being an investment banker or a hedge fund manager who produces nothing for the betterment of society as a whole.
Clarifying class
Class is not decided subjectively but determined by your relation to the means of production. Either you own them as a capitalist, or you do not – and have to sell your labour power to those that do.
If you seek a perceptive theory of class, then you have to explore the writings of Marx, as he is far-and-away the pre-eminent thinker on the matter. We can admire the prescient sweep of these two observations in the Communist Manifesto written in the 19th century:
“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.”
and:
“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.”
Growth of working class
Over the last 300 to 400 years there has been a stupendous growth in the size of the working class, as capitalism has gradually spread over most of the world. Marx’s observation in 1848 that the world was splitting more and more into two classes was very prophetic. While others perceived only mutually exclusive social groups, he discerned a vital trend and projected its potential.
A transformative process that started in Britain with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries has fanned out almost everywhere.
Where Britain led, others have followed. The world’s peasantry are fast disappearing, as more and more of agriculture is run along capitalist lines. In terms of size the working class of the world is now the predominant class, set in future decades to grow globally even bigger. A wholesale shift of population from living in overwhelmingly rural societies to urban, wage-earning ones has occurred throughout the world. Inexorably, the trend continues.
A class for itself
Though the working class of the world grows in leaps and bounds, so far there is perplexingly little sign in recent decades of corresponding ideological development to accompany the numerical growth. There has even been a noticeable lessening, or even collapse, of working class consciousness in recent decades; not just in Britain but elsewhere. If the world is to be saved from the misrule of capitalism, this worrying withdrawal from organisation and identity has to be confronted and reversed.
While a reactionary class operates across the world according to similar strategies and is conscious of its class interests, our revolutionary class does not act yet as a class-for-itself, conscious of its destiny. In Britain and the world, there is a glaring disparity between our limitless potential and the crippling, self-imposed limitations of our current thinking.
Why then are workers so reluctant to bury capitalism, which ought by now to be as faded a relic as rule by landed aristocracy? Why do we tolerate such an outmoded, anachronistic, anti-democratic system? If the ruling classes of the world and of Britain are clear about their class and strategic interests, why can’t workers in Britain and elsewhere be clear too? If the rulers, who have to overcome innate competition, can identify and act on their essential interests, why can’t we? As a conundrum it’s easily stated, but lack of a solution so far to this quandary remains the fundamental stumbling block that curbs humanity’s progress. ■
• Can conclusions be drawn from our development as a working class? Are there pitfalls to avoid and advantages to maintain within our chequered past? In the next issue of Workers, in the second part of this analysis of class in the 21st century, we will study how the promise and despair of the rich experience of the first working class can help chart our way out of absolute decline. |
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Class
Nov 12, 2014 12:02:05 GMT
Post by dodger on Nov 12, 2014 12:02:05 GMT
Part 1 of our feature on class, published in July, showed that the concept is central to making sense out of both our day-to-day experiences and in the world at large. In Part 2, we argue that action as a class rings the death knell of the disastrous economic, political and social system of capitalism...
Who will claim this century?
WORKERS, SEPTEMBER 2014 ISSUE
Go back six centuries and you find that our origins as a class and the development of our country were distinct and different to that of Europe. By the 15th century feudal obligations and relationships had broken down here, rejected by English peasants eager to exploit the labour shortages brought on by the catastrophic loss of life in the Black Death.
 Workers on the TUC march, 20 October 2012 – for “A Future that Works”, said the march’s slogan. Photo: Workers Wage labour and capitalist practices became the norm in English agriculture centuries earlier than elsewhere. This prevalence of wage labour in the countryside was a vital precursor of the industrial revolution and probably a key trigger for it.
The British working class was the first in the world to emerge off the land. Already by the 1850s workers in Britain constituted the majority, subsequently developing even further in scale as our country became overwhelmingly proletarian in character.
Being the first to form into a class, with no other experience to copy, we had to work things out independently, devising our own method and philosophy of defence against the ravages of early capitalism that threatened to completely exhaust or annihilate us.
The method found was collective: combine in trade unions or combinations, as they were known. The objectives were practical, dictated by a need to survive and repel the assault upon us. So the questions were: how to raise starvation levels of pay; how to reduce incredibly long hours of work (up to 14 hours a day or more); and how to improve appalling conditions.
Trade unions
Of necessity, our fledgling trade unions began locally – in parish, village, mine and town – with deep roots enabling them to endure and flourish. Not imposed from outside or bestowed by condescending do-gooders, they were forged by working people alone, responding to need. Never artificially created by external political organisations or religious groups (as happened much later in other countries to the great detriment of unity and power), they enjoyed strong commitment and bred fierce loyalty.
Typically they resided on the fusing factor of a common trade or skill that brought incredible strength as everyone involved had a common identity and shared similar concerns.
Because capitalism feared trade unions, it tried to destroy them, notably with the 1799 and 1800 Combination Acts. As a result, early unions were often born in conspiracy, defying the rulers’ law, and survived only because of the stubborn, unstinting allegiance of many generations of working people.
Later in the 19th century trade unions had to grow nationally to better combat the opposing class. There was an absolute suspicion of building unions of those who did not work at the trade, best illustrated by the practice of the leading craft union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Its rules required that workers control and run the union. Its decision making structures confirmed the leading role of the lay membership with a sovereign national committee composed of elected workers who had to be working at the engineering trade. As unions prosper again they will need to consider control and initiative in the hands of workers not just participation.
At some point, rather than striving for revolution in a direct route to supremacy and fashioning society in its own image, our class opted for survival with dignity but within the confines of capitalism, consciously rejecting the abolition of capitalism. There was no hoodwinking, no misleading.
Eventually, trade unions endorsed the formation of a Labour Party in 1900, our most retrograde act, a turning away from our origins and traditions, a political and philosophical denial of the working class as deciding force. This backward step has constricted and side-tracked us for over a century. We surrendered ultimate control of our politics to a separate caste of outsider politicians, inextricably intertwined with the bourgeois political system.
An occupying force
Capitalism straddles the economy, suffocating society like the alien occupying force it is. There is nothing natural about a market’s over-lording control; only capitalism’s relative longevity gives it a false respectable veneer. Capitalism distorts how production, institutions and services are run and operated, foisting irksome management techniques and unnatural methods over everyone, intending to confuse and undermine worker professionalism.
For instance, in education the distortion is produced by schools competing against each other in league table results, obsessions about data, manic management, constant inspections and monitoring, an Ofsted regime pitted against teachers’ professionalism, and so on.
Class change
Only the widespread organised network of an extensive working class can break the economic fetters and dispel the political oppression that constrains everyone. The combined skills and talents of our class will challenge capitalism and also be the means of reconstruction under socialism. Because we can, our class must effect a change and move history on to new ground.
Capitalism in its dotage signifies an unsatisfactory past and a declining future. The working class wants a productive economy whilst capitalists can only spawn speculative booms and busts. That is why at the 16th Congress of our Party we made the call for a regeneration of industry in Britain.
Though capitalism is utterly dependent on workers’ labour power to generate profits, a working class is not similarly reliant on capitalism. It can branch out on its own as proven by the October Revolution in 1917 and other revolutions since.
Think of our potential if we organise and cooperate together as a class. We are vast in number, all-embracing in terms of occupation, talented in every expertise. A capitalist class can only survive and govern a modern economy by employing mercenaries for certain managerial or executive functions. Among our working class ranks we possess all the requisite skills and talents necessary to run a whole society, deliver a complete economy and assume managerial tasks. We can prosper without capitalists, without finance capitalists, even most probably without a separate category of politicians.
Aggregate together all our skills and economic activities into a combination of political power and you have more than sufficient resources to not only oust capitalism but also construct a productive, sophisticated socialism.
Others may accommodate and adjust to a declining capitalism. The Party does not, for our stance is different. History is not the preserve of the forces of Mammon whose absolute decline – if it is not halted – brings impoverishment and threatens subjugation of our class if it is not halted. An awakening class is vital if we want to be working, educated and healthy. Our absolute rise is essential here and throughout the world.
If our class wants to be supreme and govern, then we will have to:
Cast aside any sense of inadequacy.
Rid ourselves of crippling fear.
Act as “the solution” to every problem, or opportunity.
Be the master of our destiny.
Amid the adverse conditions of capitalism, somehow we have to change our mind-set, gradually shed softness of thinking or deference and master the art and technique of struggle. From a class-in-itself, we must apprentice ourselves through a journey of practice and learning where we train ourselves to become a class-for-itself seeking absolute control over economic and political life.
Who will claim this century?
The 21st century should be remembered as the time when an ascendant working class took charge. By then the working class in Britain, and hopefully in other countries too, will have become at long last the supreme, governing class. ■ |
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