Disenchantment and disillusion with the political system are widespread. Banks and big business set the agenda of politicians. There is little difference between the major parties, which submit slavishly to the whims of the market. With no real choice, people feel disenfranchised and disinclined to participate in bourgeois elections. Mistrust of politicians is commonplace and not just confined to the MPs’ expenses scandal.
We live amid sophisticated technology and amazing scientific breakthroughs but our political system is archaic and outmoded. Its instinct is to stifle, thwart and deny the involvement of the people in running and controlling society even though the working class is the vast majority. Yet political life cannot stop evolving. To claim that mankind’s ideological evolution has reached an end-point with the emergence of bourgeois parliaments and universal suffrage is mere wishful thinking and completely unhistorical.
People’s strivings for a better way of arranging society are far from exhausted. History has not ended; it’s somewhere in the middle. Though it’s pointless to speculate and impossible to predict the exact arrangements needed to run socialist society, revolution will generate new forms of governance. There must be new methods of mass participation and involvement, to link and root the exercise of power and the shaping of national policy within the burgeoning networks of working class control – inside the actual workings of the whole economy.
Revolution will rescue politics from bourgeois models which restrict and reduce people’s role to that of an “electorate” casting a vote every few years for “political representatives” then having no further involvement or role beyond passive and powerless observers of events set in train by a caste of professional politicians. Failing Westminster or EU-type parliaments will not suffice.
There will be no need for a breed of separate politicians – workers will assume and discharge the role of governance themselves. Revolutionary governance will be embedded inside and through an active working class, inside its permanent networks and through its levers of power. Compared with the slim pickings capitalism has offered, there will be a great expansion of democracy combined with a massive increase in responsibility. Workers will be obliged to determine how our country develops. Plans for the development and rebuilding of Britain will be discussed and set by a working class across industries and sectors.
Our class is so extensive that it has every skill and talent needed to run society within it. We have all the requirements to manage society. Revolutionary politics will harness them for the greater benefit of everyone within a growing economy.
Workers still have a world not only to win but also to shape.