The Crisis Confronting the Working Class

(Text of a leaflet distributed to a demonstration of unemployed workers)

After many years of talk about the advantages of technological revolution, and the ’leisure revolution’ which would follow, today we are all suffering from the advances of capitalism. The present attacks against the working class, started by the last Labour Government, has been to bring the working class into line with the requirements of the capitalist system. And what has been the result: more than three million unemployed, short-time work, temporary contracts, increased poverty and so on. The entire strategy of the so-called Labour Movement is in tatters.

The Labour Party and the Trade Unions believe that the working class can co-exist with capitalism – that such ’reforms’ as have been ’won’ in the past that led to the creation of the welfare state, and perhaps some Keynesian type management of the economy, can make up for the failure of the market system. It is now obvious for all to see that such reforms are merely temporary, that the price of maintaining the market system and wage labour is increasing unemployment and the waste of lives it entails, coupled with relentless pressure on those still in work for ever more ”flexible” methods of working and all the other disciplines of the market. Because the Labour Party and the Trade Unions wish at all costs to preserve the market system and wage labour (indeed negotiating the ’price’ of wage labour is the union’s sole function for capitalist society) they cannot, and will not, confront the problems we face.

Workers today, who cannot fail to see the problems which we all face, find no strategy at all coming from the existing organisations in which many still have faith. That is why so many are disorientated. It is in this situation that other forms of reformism are being advocated – the reform of the market system itself. Now there is all sorts of talk about ’social markets’, how the functioning of capitalism can be modified to minimise the effects for the working class. The previous ideas of nationalisation, public services and full employment have now been abandoned. Now the so-called Labour Movement has accepted that unemployment is here to stay and that the working class will just have to put up with it. Whether better unemployment pay (or full maintenance, whatever that means) indicates that the unemployed will still be ’surplus to requirements’, the reserve army of labour to repress the wage levels of those still at work.

Today, all the advocates of the market system claim that socialism/communism is unrealistic and Utopian. In fact it is these same advocates of the market system who are the Utopians – nothing worthwhile for the working class can come out of the market system! For instance, the condemnation of VAT on fuel is formally correct – but should we defend the selling of gas and electricity to the working class, spending precious wages in repaying the costs of the exploiting of power workers, and repaying investments made in the power stations, etc., tax free?!

Today it is only the socialist/communist perspective which has answers for our problems – for those who can only exist by selling our wage labour, we can have the prospect of abolishing capitalism altogether. Nobody can set us free except ourselves. But to do this means breaking out of all the old sectional interests which keep the working class divided.

Communists today, as in the past, ”express in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes” (Marx, Communist Manifesto)

It is the impossibility of any meaningful, or even temporary, reforms which means new forms of struggle needs to be understood (this sentence needs review). Only by workers coming together into class-wide organisations can any real fight be waged against capitalism. Once again, for the class struggle, for the emancipation of our class.

WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS! WE HAVE A WORLD TO WIN!