a politic made in britain
WORKERS, JUNE 2004 ISSUE
| This article is based on a speech given at the May Day rally organised by the CPBML on 1 May at Conway Hall, London — an evening of celebration which also saw the launch of Bellman Books' Reg Birch: Engineer, Trade Unionist, Communist. |
Reg Birch's politics were made in Britain, and always focused on what the British working class — all those who have to go out to work to earn a living — needed to win a decent life, to win our class rights — the right to work and create in Britain, the rights to health, education, skill and housing, the right to sovereignty, the right to run our own affairs. Similarly, all workers across the world have class rights. We can only achieve these with peace and independence, when we no longer allow capitalism to rule.
All his life, Reg was proud to be a member of the engineers' union; he was a skilled worker, good at his trade. Our trade defines our trade union. If all IT workers were in one union, instead of scattered across fifty, they could hold all the employers to ransom. Some wrongly say, 'pay all equally', qualified and unqualified, skilled and unskilled alike. Some oppose unions and skill, and use the old discredited notion of "labour aristocracy", not a phrase Karl Marx ever used, and if he had, he'd have been wrong.
Picture a Muslim woman from Bangladesh who works in a Spitalfields sweatshop. Should she see herself as a member of a doubly oppressed minority, or as part of the vast majority, the British working class? Progress for her means she joins her union, she opposes her employer, even if he too is a Muslim from Bangladesh. Religion divides, an exclusive stress on gender divides; our unions unite the vast majority.
In Britain today, the capitalist class, that tiny minority of exploiters, is the root of all our problems. They gain when we do not produce what we want, when we buy it, on tick. They gain from record pay rises, bonuses, dividends, £15 million payoffs, tax havens and tax avoidance scams for top directors. They have built more prisons than schools, and sold off school playing fields and council houses. They are responsible for the premature deaths of Steve Thoburn, the metric martyr, and Des Warren, the Shrewsbury building worker. They are to blame for our long hours, low wages, the most restrictive trade union laws in the developed world and low investment. They gain from the free movement of capital and from the free movement of labour, both enshrined in the EU Constitution and which lead to a modern slavery.
Reg Birch (back row, second from left) with fellow members of the AEU's 1948 London North District Committee, which he had joined six years earlier while still in his 20s.
This May Day is also the day when ten countries join the EU. The Polish doctors' union and the Czech doctors already protest against the start of emigration of their doctors to Western Europe. The USA has "guest worker" programmes, so that big firms can recruit foreign, non-unionised workers, to compete with other countries' low wages. Some workers suffered 50% wage cuts. The greater the supply of workers, the lower the wage.
Capitalism means war
What could be more fascist than to attack another country then occupy it by force? Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, said, "Economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." Bush tries to hold Iraq, against a national resistance. Britain's senior diplomats call it an "illegal and brutal occupation... doomed to failure". Why reinforce failure? Capitalism has not brought independence and peace to Iraq, Haiti or anywhere else.
Capitalism means terrorism. The US built up the mujehadin, to attack workers and peasants in Afghanistan. Now the US state holds captive in Guantanamo Bay those it captured in Afghanistan, so it is nearly impossible to charge and try any of them fairly in a court of law. Workers oppose terrorism, because workers are those who suffer its effects. But the government uses the terrorists to take away all our freedoms, it rams through ID cards, ends the right to trial by jury, ends habeas corpus. People are being held in British jails, without charge or trial.
Those who think that they have to tell the British working class what to do, or how to think, or how to vote, patronise the class. The "left", the Labour Party, and the Conservative Party, all tell the class not to vote for the BNP. But they attack the wrong target, just as Bush and Blair attacked Iraq not al-Qa'eda. The BNP, whatever else it does, does not blow up large numbers of workers.
There are Christian fascists, Jewish fascists, Muslim fascists, Hindu fascists — every religion has the germs of fascism in it, a reactionary hatred and contempt for life. Class unites: religion divides and demeans. Belief in gods and spirits, pie in the sky when we die, and reaction, all go together. Italy's government, under Signor Berlusconi, has just banned the teaching of Darwin in schools. Materialism banishes gods and spirits; science and progress go together. Fascism is anti-worker, anti-union, anti-women, anti-progress, anti-communist, anti-Britain.
The European Union imposes the notions of devolved regional government and regional elections, to break down local government democracy, the unity of our unions, our labour movement and of Britain. Low turnouts for EU elections prove how all the peoples of the EU oppose the EU, especially the British working class.
EU vs US?
Some, for instance the French government, say build the EU to oppose the USA. Yet President Chirac joined with Bush to oust Haiti's elected government and impose their choice. The EU is not a lesser evil than the USA; it is the same thing - capitalist through and through.
Our Party has always opposed the social democratic trap of backing the lesser evil. The Viennese writer Karl Kraus said the "s upreme principle of creative integrity" was "If I must choose the lesser of two evils, I will choose neither." The French novelist Henri Barbusse said, "minimalism (which is also called the "least evil") is really conservatism." Why choose this evil or that evil, when we could choose the good?
Forty years ago we got a new Labour government, surfing a wave of new technology, promising it would be progressive and modern. But it brought incomes policies, spending cuts and tied us to a US war of aggression. We have moved on — we had the giant demonstrations against war, swift exposure of all the government's lies, but we haven't moved far enough to link workplace struggles to the fight against war and capitalism.
Conventional wisdom says that foreign affairs don't win elections. But they can lose them! The Liberal Party took us into the First World War, and never won another election on its own. A Conservative government to ok us into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and hasn't won an election since. Blair took us into Iraq, which has at least wrecked his career. Each party betrayed British sovereignty by tying us to a doomed venture imposed by others. Each broke on the rocks of the British working class's independence of mind, our refusal to be dragged into something that was not in our interests.
Over the last year, we have had struggles by airport staff , car workers, transport workers, journalists, postal workers, youth workers, university lecturers, students, tenants in Camden, BBC workers, nursery nurses and civil servants, but it's not just those who have had to go on strike who have made progress. Teachers, firefighters, health workers, musicians and ambulance workers for example organise against government schemes to divide and destroy.
A world of workers
Most of the world's people now are workers. In February, 50 million workers struck in India. Workers in Spain, Cyprus, Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, Turkey, Palestine, Iraq and North Korea all refuse to kowtow to capitalism.
Reg always said that his greatest achievement was founding this Party, a democratic centralist party. This simply means that after free and open discussion, the party takes a decision, and its members carry out that decision.
The strength of our Party is that we are rooted in the material needs and real interests of the British working class; we oppose what the class opposes — the EU and its constitution, capital, foreign wars. We want what the class wants — the NHS, education, jobs, industry, to rebuild Britain.
We cannot rely on anybody else to do the job for us; we cannot devolve our responsibilities to MPs; we are not looking for pie in the sky. There is always a way forward — not in parliament, but in workplace and trade union: assert our class demands, peace and independence, no war, no capitalism!