In a land swamped by doubt and diffidence, we declare there is “a way through” the gloom. There is “a way out” of relentless harassment, encirclement, and destruction of all we hold dear. It is not to wait for capitalism’s next disaster, but to plan for a future for our country and our class.
2009: There is a future, and it begins here…
WORKERS, JANUARY 2009 ISSUE
In a land swamped by doubt and diffidence, we declare there is “a way through” the gloom. There is “a way out” of relentless harassment, encirclement, and destruction of all we hold dear.
Doubt and disillusion come when people cannot detect hope or chance of progress within the system. And they are absolutely right. And in a sense, temporary self-doubt and despair are a necessary stage in the process of learning. But to stop at this juncture, imprisoned by disillusionment, is to close our eyes to the whole picture. Progress will have to come from us, the working class, acting together. We are the only force seeking advance; all other institutions set out to diminish or destroy us.
Knowing it’s going to have to come from us, we need to be sure about, to reflect on, the best way forward. In other words, we must plan. In particular, we must make certain that our strategy and tactics are sound.
To be able to plan we have to know where we have come from, where we are now and where we ought to be. We can’t plan in the abstract, in a detached way. Neither can we be dreamers: we must be realists.
Certainly, our working class is nowhere near as strong as it once was. The post-World War II high in terms of organisation and influence, which lasted for several decades, has been dissipated and replaced by a new low caused by a succession of external, aggressive ruling class tactics such as deindustrialisation, mass unemployment, privatisation, mass immigration, and so on.
A word of caution: the highs were never as glamorous nor as profound as sometimes imagined. Our 40th anniversary celebratory articles in Workers throughout 2008 re-published the warnings our Party gave in 1968 of the weaknesses apparent even then in our labour movement during a dispute in engineering. As early as 1976, our chairman, Reg Birch, was alerting everyone to the dangerous consequences of a perceptible withdrawal by workers from trade union activity. Without doubt, it was not just external attacks but also internal weaknesses, particularly of outlook, that have led to the ceding of our strength.
But, for all our travails, we are still a class and the only force for progress.
Action and ideas
Action changes ideas, quite quickly. Well conducted class struggle has a huge stimulating effect on the realm of ideas. This was brought home forcibly in last year’s NUT strike action over pay, unsuccessful though it may have been in the end. It has been the custom in recent years to talk of the younger generation as “Thatcher’s children”, but the sudden, eager participation of young teachers in schools which was also evident on the march and rally in central London showed the young to be very readily involved, indeed willing participants in this outburst of trade union action.
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| Workers can change the world, but we must fight for our liberation. |
Political understanding does not proceed in a simple, upward, linear fashion. Working class history records progress being more in waves: with ups and downs in organisation and thinking. Thinking and action go hand in hand and sharpen each other, as is evident whenever collective action occurs.
Our working class is not going to survive if we continue to think in the same stale, passive way; we need to think according to the ways of nature, dialectically. Dialectics regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence. And that is how workers ought to view capitalist Britain in absolute decline.
British workers need to examine, understand and exploit to their advantage all the prevailing contradictions here and in the world in order to transform all the class potential into a qualitatively new approach.
Not only was dialectics the cornerstone of Marx, but also in the maelstrom and madness of the First World War carnage, Lenin studied it and then reintroduced all his learning and knowledge to the Bolshevik Party. It is largely because of this painstaking work that in Russia the workers and communists transformed the imperialist war into a civil war for the establishment of workers’ power – the only country where such an earth-shattering event happened. The mental outlook was right. Elsewhere the people continued to be slaughtered as cannon fodder.
The economic is the political
British workers have long accepted a sorry separation between their economic and political interests. To re-establish the influence of our class and our unions, workers will have to square up to a weakness in their operation that has existed for over a century.
We can no longer afford to cede our politics to a social democratic Labour Party that was always prepared to work with the capitalist system and has always betrayed our class. Our class organisations need to advance our economic and political aspirations jointly; there is no separation. Workers can handle both simultaneously because the political usually emanates from the economic anyway. We need a politically conscious working class, capable of actively reshaping society, not a Labour Party.
In its old age, capitalism has an ever-increasing tendency to dictatorial methods of rule and a diminishing tolerance of any semblance of democracy. Latter-day capitalism is inimical to democracy, often down to the last detail.
One London Borough’s town hall was a wonderful late Victorian rabbit warren of a building that was full of different sized meeting rooms, which unions or community groups or local people could hire for their gatherings according to their need and specification. When the Council built new buildings on the other side of the borough in the late 1980s, surprise, surprise, no provision was made for people to meet. That attitude is replicated throughout the land: fear, mistrust, hatred of the people.
One feature of this anti-democratic tendency is the vast apparatus of CCTV cameras and general surveillance of the populace, installed to intimidate. How can it be countered? Surely, the only answer is in numbers, in the scale of class activity.
Remember first, moments during the English Civil War in the 17th century and particularly the army’s Putney debates in 1647 (the army then was essentially the people in arms); and second, during World War II where the whole direction of post-war society was hammered out in national debate by conscripted soldiers and civilians. In the coming years, the class has to take tentative, then full-blown steps, to becoming a permanent, self-acting collective dictating the direction of the country.
A feature of capitalism is its never-ending ability to revolutionise the means of production in search of profit combined with its minimal, antiquated mechanisms for political expression. The class cannot avoid the practical question: how do power and change best accrue?
Somehow society has ossified into an unquestioning acceptance of universal suffrage in a representative bourgeois parliament, as if this is the best and only way to progress political matters and as if this method and institution is somehow the quintessence of human political decision-making, never to be superseded. But really, has the idea of how to run a society come to a halt with the establishment of parliamentary representative assemblies? These were first invented by feudal nobles to restrain the overweening powers of medieval kings. We shouldn’t be browbeaten into thinking ours is a holy cow.
Bourgeois parliaments involve the people handing over responsibility for politics to others once every four or five years. Surely a proper political arrangement ought to be based on the active involvement of the people and demand their permanent participation in the denouement of decisions and lines.
In the early years of our party, we studied at great length the political and organisational structure of the nineteenth century Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Those skilled workers had constructed a body in which the power of the collective working in their trade would be protected and allowed its expression: the supreme body was an elected lay national committee who met to take decisions about the direction of their union and instructed their national executive officers. Not only did our Party study this working class practice, so too did Lenin when deciding how best to organise the Bolshevik Party.
War and liberation
Workers must foresee where world capitalism is heading. At a time of economic depression, it appears to be dividing into competing blocs and powers – USA, EU, Russia, Japan, India, China – fighting over markets, commodities and resources. Workers need to look deeply into the concept of war again, not just accept prevailing views. In the past often discussion has been limited to whether it is “a just war, or an unjust war”.
But oughtn’t we to propose an altogether different approach: it is capitalism that fights wars and enlists workers to sacrifice their interests and often themselves in the greater good of the rulers. Workers do not want war, workers need only to engage in fights for liberation, for emancipation. There is a world of difference.
Recent massive levels of immigration into Britain on a scale hitherto unknown are deliberate attempts on the part of the ruling class to weaken, disrupt and nullify our class. They want to drive down wages and worsen conditions and let the employers be able to crack the whip over us. All immigrants must decide whether they for advance and progress as part of a British working class. If they are, then they must become part of our class culture and struggle for what everyone desires: work, pay, better conditions, employment, health, education, etc. If they are not, then like those blacklegs and scabs in our past they will have to be opposed and confronted so as not to undermine our budding power. Scabs can be of British descent or of a new background, but they remain the same thing. Together we are strong, divided we are weak.
To workers, capitalism is like a foreign body, an occupying force, distorting our land and the productive process. It attempts to make us aliens in our own realm, to denude us of our natural strength. In turn, we should aim to make our outlook the one that predominates throughout all the sectors of life; capitalists should feel they are the outsiders. Workers should create their own agenda, their own future, which will some day move centre stage.
In particular we must struggle to retain society’s culture as secular and scientific. As a result of a long sequence of events in British history, popes, clerics, church courts have long ago been put firmly in their place, so that religion was pushed to the margins of society, a materialistic outlook was commonplace and people were free to form their views and live their lives free from their control. But now a worrying equation that says religion equals good has re-formed. Our traditions need to be maintained if we are to establish a unity across our class. There should be no more toleration of religious schools, which will only become ghettos, increasing bigotry and mutual distrust.
The way forward
When deciding on our future direction, the first step to be taken is: stop looking for an escape route – there is none. We don’t have to make the same mistakes again; in particular, we do not need to be enslaved to a Labour Party or a son of Labour Party because social democracy and the political sects have always seen workers as passive, an electorate, a force to be harnessed, whose lot would be improved by “politicians” doling out reforms on their behalf.
To change the direction of industries, services and sectors across the whole of our society, our class needs to be strong in the workplaces of Britain. The strength of unions lies in there, not in the minds of a few general secretaries or national executives. A culture has to be revived.
And in the years ahead a guiding rule to any class struggle must be: it’s a protracted campaign; it needs to have a guerrilla perspective – fight where we are strong and they are weak, use flexible tactics, and aim to build our strength, organisational and political. Always, always, we must preserve our class force.
With long working hours, inflation rocketing, prices and interest rates and utility bills soaring, workers need to reinvolve themselves in their defensive organisations. But the tactics and strategy have to be sound – there must be no grand gestures or posturing and action has to be well prepared and supported.
A plan for a future cannot emerge from a few minds, a cabal. To succeed, it has to involve a greater mass, evolve out of a never-ending exchange inside our class. This battle of ideas will throw up a programme to ensure our survival. Workers must start to plan how to tackle the practical problems we face within each sector of society and incorporate these ideas in struggle.
Consider water. Let’s demand a national grid for water: an integrated system of tunnels, pipelines, aqueducts, reservoirs, whatever is needed, to move water – a staple of life – across the whole of Britain. We can shift water from the wetter areas to the dry ones. Crucially, water needs to be re-nationalised because it is not safe in the hands of profit-making, foreign water companies. Take energy and power. We need an integrated approach combining nuclear, coal, gas, oil and renewable forms of energy. Otherwise, there is literally the danger of the lights going out. Each sector of industry and the economy should be rethought.
Our Party has achieved much in 40 years. The outfits that mushroomed in 1968 have disappeared, most of them quite quickly. Only we have stayed the course. We have contributed and learned a lot. In our early years, valuable tenets of our Party’s outlook were established: workers think for themselves; they are not misled; they are the only force for progress; we will not have a party of full time professionals; the two class line.
We do not seek power for our Party. We seek power for the working class. We share weal and woe with the people and do not seek advantage.
We are a new type of party, and must see that our traditions are handed down to the coming generations.
Workers are active, self-reliant, able to think, speak and act for themselves, and thus capable of changing the world. We have belief in the working class, in its ability even when it has voluntarily not exercised such powers for a while. The skill, the sheer professionalism, the creative potential in workers must now be tapped to design a programme for survival.