Workers have the power. Nurses fighting for their own conditions and the future of the NHS, London, January 2023. Photo Workers.
May Day is a time to celebrate the power of workers and the working class. But we can and must do more than march and carry banners once a year.
Every day, everywhere in Britain and across the world workers produce the necessities of life and all that makes up civilisation. Yet in Britain and elsewhere workers are not in control.
Workers fight to defend working and living conditions, increasingly so over the past three years. Sometimes that’s successful, sometimes not. But the need to fight and to resist greater exploitation does not disappear; victory is only temporary. Employers, the capitalists, and their government will sooner or later come back for more.
When it comes to issues beyond the workplace, we are too often spectators or passive victims in decisions that affect our lives and existence. It need not be so. The working class as a political force has a power that we underestimate.
Capitalists don’t – which is why they take every opportunity to encourage workers to turn on each other. In this they are shamefully aided by poisonous “progressives” in our number who mistake workers’ tolerance for indifference and workers’ desire to put Britain’s needs first as harmful stupidity or worse.
It doesn’t take much for capitalism to go haywire, sending markets and governments into panic mode. The imposition of US tariffs and the economic reaction underline the importance of an independent national economy, which we can control, or at least exercise influence over through government.
And to some extent there are positive developments. After continuing the decades-long policy of undermining British industry and British workers, Keir Starmer seems to have suddenly discovered that industry matters and that’s there’s something important about protecting Britain after all.
It doesn’t matter that for this to happen, it took an incipient trade war triggered by the US and a Chinese company’s attempt to eliminate production here for economic advantage. What matters is that workers press home the point and allow no turning back.
Real support for Britain, our industries and services, requires control of our borders and an end to massive immigration, legal and illegal. That means an end to employers relying on cheap migrant labour and not training skilled workers here.
It means an end to allowing key companies to be sold off or controlled from abroad. It means an end to closing key industries like steel. It means an end to relying on imports of things that can be made or grown here. It means preference for British companies in infrastructure projects – railways, roads, schools, hospitals and so on.
Above all it means an end to the destructive, backwards and negative net zero policy. Britain needs energy. We have energy if we choose, by exploiting oil and gas and by developing nuclear power.
Over decades British industry has been outsourced to China or to wherever labour was cheapest – with government support and connivance. Capitalists focused on finance capital – making more capital by buying and selling companies, whether or not anything useful was produced.
And to justify this shift, we were told that Britain was now “post-industrial” and we could live on a service economy. To an extent, the working class has been complicit in this thinking. Certainly too many workers accepted the lie, exposed by a crisis over trade in manufactured goods!
Starmer’s wish to embrace the EU again won’t survive these demands – not that there’s any sign they are willing to act nice. So workers might do best to step aside from reruns of the Brexit debate and get back to the basics.
What matters is that we talk about what we need as a class and what Britain needs as a nation – and set about holding to account those who for the moment hold the reins. Their power is nothing to that of the working class when we set our minds to action.