Back in the nineteenth century Karl Marx wrote that society was dividing into two great hostile classes: the workers, and those who live from exploiting the labour of others. It’s a perfect description of Britain today…
What is the working class?
This meeeting is in-person! Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.
Tuesday 22 March. 7.30pm.
The working class is changing. But does that mean the fundamentals of class have changed?
Come and discuss. All welcome. Free entry.
Discussion meeting (via Zoom): What is the working class?
The working class is changing. But does that mean the fundamentals of class have changed?
Email info@cpbml.org.uk for an invitation.
16 January 2021
This useful book analyses and criticises the anti-working class attitudes of all too many in the labour movement.
As the 19th century dawned, trade unions were made illegal, prices rose, wages fell. Skilled workers led the fightback…
The ruling class, the establishment – call it what you will – has always underestimated the people of Britain.
Suddenly, politicians seem to be wanting to talk about work. Low wage work, minimum wage work, gig work, any kind of work. Just as long as there’s no contradiction between employers and workers…
We look at two struggles from the late 19th century that helped define our class, and what Britain means…
25 February 2017
Since the birth of industrial capitalism, a web of industrial sinews has held the constituent regions of Britain together. The recent dismembering of much of that web has brought not only economic collapse to regions but also threatened our national integrity. We recount struggles in Scotland, London and North Wales that pursued essential class goals of improving wages and conditions of work.
13 February 2016
Political statement from the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist, 17th Congress, London, November 2015. There can be no advance without Marxism, because Marx showed that only the eventual victory of the exploited class, the working class, represents a real future. Capitalism means only destruction and war. Here in Britain, we need our own unique vision of a working class future in order to fight and win in the present.
One world – divided by class
Bertrand Russell Room, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
We live in a world where workers now constitute the majority. And as workers we face the same enemy, a capitalist class which has claimed for itself the raw materials and the means of production, distribution and exchange. Migration is no solution. Neither are aid and charity. In each country ruled by capital, workers must settle accounts with their own ruling class if the world is to have a future.
Come and discuss. All welcome.
Wage labour and capitalist practices became the norm in English agriculture centuries earlier than elsewhere. This prevalence of wage labour in the countryside was a vital precursor of the industrial revolution and probably a key trigger for it.
In the first of a two-part analysis of class in the 21st century, Workers dismisses the notion that class is dead. In fact it is central to making sense out of our day-to-day experiences and the world at large.
The Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist held its 16th Congress in late 2012, a coming together of the Party to consider the state of Britain and what needs to happen in the future. Here we set out briefly six Calls to Action for the British working class.
We have all the requirements to manage society. Revolutionary politics will harness them for the greater benefit of everyone within a growing economy.
Our Party is unlike any other in Britain, a new type of political body wedded to a different destiny, one of workers taking control and refashioning the world.
Human life is utterly dependent on social organisation and activity. Yet addicts of the free market declare that there is no such thing as society.
How did previous working class gains materialise? Improvements and reforms came out of past struggle and campaigns by organised workers.
We only have one shot at life. Consigning workers to periods of prolonged idleness is a criminal waste of talent and an indictment of this flawed society that treats us as just flotsam and jetsam.
Social democracy, including its British counterparts such as the Social Democratic Federation and successors including the Labour Party, saw workers as passive, an electorate, a force to be harnessed,
Anxious to work out why the oldest working class, the British, had avoided moving to revolution, external commentators at the height of empire concocted a false argument in an effort to explain away this behaviour. In some circles it is still lazily dispensed a century or so later.
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?
In Britain, there are only two classes – those who sell their labour power and those who exploit the labour of others, in other words workers and capitalists.
In 1917, after three years of world war, Lenin identified the nature and function of the state. He declared that a partnership exists between the state and the dominant ruling class with the former charged with serving the interests of the latter.
Nothing is more insulting to the history of working class struggle than the notion, born of ignorance and malevolence, that workers have to be instructed and commanded to do the correct thing. Indeed, according to some of the disconnected, to do anything at all.
What were our origins as a working class? The British working class was the first in the world to emerge out of the land, the first to become an overwhelming majority.
Political statement from the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist, 15th Congress, London, November 2009. The British government and the capitalist class internationally want us to believe that the working class cannot change anything, everything is beyond our control. We think differently.
Change Britain – Embrace Your Party
Political statement from the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist, 15th Congress, London, November 2009. The British government and the capitalist class internationally want us to believe that the working class cannot change anything, everything is beyond our control. We think differently.
The only way to understand history and the current situation in Britain and the world is to understand class. Marx realised that all history is the story of the struggle between classes.
The Future is Ours
Political statement from the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist, 14th Congress, London April 2006. At the 2003 congress the Party laid out an analysis of the state of Britain and the class which has been utterly borne out by events. The questions for us to consider now are: Where do we go from here? What has changed? How do we strike out for a future?
