How do we counter capitalism’s relentless and absolute decline? How do we gather together our power (recently often left dormant) and commence our absolute rise?
Though our class has considerably less material strength than it used to have, we should not doubt its role or underestimate its potential. The only force capable of challenging and removing capitalism is the working class. The fact that so far it has chosen not to go down that revolutionary route does not negate the stark truth: whilst capitalism cannot do without workers, a working class can live without capitalists.
Experience over centuries has proved that there will be no salvation for workers by pledging allegiance to bourgeois parties or placing faith in bourgeois institutions, both of which are utterly wedded to the ways of capitalism.
Only by re-building our class strength, by regenerating our networks of class power, can we challenge capitalist decline and fashion our own agenda. Our starting point must always be – how do we create a collective response to the issues and problems facing us? How do we unite the many against the few? How do we assert and press our needs? Gradually, in this way, we can change the balance of forces between the exploiting and exploited classes in our favour and transform Britain into a nation fit for workers.
Yet inside too many of our trade union structures there prevail many trendy, harmful notions that are completely at odds with this necessary approach.
The most pernicious is the assertion that activists are essential to conduct and mobilise “campaigns”. This arrogant “elite” impedes natural class organisation. All that is needed is the mass involvement of members in their unions pursuing their class interests and out of struggle will be thrown up their leaders as well as appropriate forms of organisation.
Another debilitating obsession is the pathetic squabble over the “left” dominating the “right” (and vice versa) instead of a desire to unite the class wherever it may be. Everyone knows that the “left” can’t agree on who is its “best representative” and spends most of its time in unproductive bickering while Rome burns.
It needs the whole range of the working class, not an introspective sect, to develop correct thinking, distilled and refined in action and through dialogue. Once a particular section of the class truly gets involved in their trade union, then these diversions of left and right reliably disappear, replaced by a true preoccupation on the things that actually matter. There is a working class discipline.
We are of and for the supremacy of the working class.