British working class

British working class
In early 21st century Britain the degeneration of working class politics is manifest. Thought either advances or declines. Workers here view politics either as spectator sport or with extreme distrust.

The sight of a G8 summit in Gleneagles, a bunch of capitalist predators, posing as latter-day Knights of the Round Table, ready to save Africa from poverty, when they were just gearing up to work out how best to exploit its peoples, was gut-wrenching. For workers it was politics without politics. A few pop concerts and millions of wristbands later – Disney politics with celebrities - and capitalism continues as before, as if it could do anything else.

The level of debate about poverty was abysmal. Is it a disease for which a cure might be found? Is it a defective gene? Or is it the consequence of a system which puts profit first, middle and last? They can't help it, capitalists. They are caterpillars, eating machines without the metamorphosis at the end, just bigger caterpillars.

British workers see through the motives of politicians, and this extends to anyone who sets themselves up to represent their interests. That's why they won't vote for them. Not in parliamentary elections, not in local government elections. And not in their own organisations, union elections. Leftist posturing in unions is an excuse not to get involved, when it could be dealt with easily if workers decided to.

Politics are a big turn-off. There is a massive turning away from trade unions, which shelter together in ever-larger US-style "super-unions", the proportionally smaller the membership, the seemingly larger the organisation and the more strutting with self-importance on the national and even, at its most corrupt, EU stage.

Trade unions are increasingly incorporated into the state machine through the continued adherence to the centralised power of Downing Street. There, of course, they are ignored, and to hell with the working class. A result of, and a reason for, workers showing contempt for their own organisations. For sheer treachery, witness the joint statement by Number 10, the CBI and the TUC about how good migration is for the economy.

We have said before that the worst mistake British workers made was the creation of the Labour Party a hundred years ago. The politics was: you do our thinking for us, you represent us in the house of the enemy. As if this were possible. It is the ultimate superstition. We'll organise at work, you get on with the politics on our behalf.

Now that workplace organisation is at its lowest level, involvement in unions similarly, cynicism about the Labour Party absolute, what remains? A class doing its best to turn its back on class politics. There is a whiff of the peasant mentality, of doggedly bowing our shoulders under the blows of fate in the face of the terrible reality of Britain 2006, with its disappearing industry, terrorist menace, declining wages, bankrupt hospitals, an impoverished old age.

With workplace organisation at its lowest level in generations it should come as no surprise that the level of class-consciousness among workers in Britain is also at its lowest level for generations. To believe that class-consciousness improves as things get worse is the same dangerous illusion that pretends that the poorer you are, the more revolutionary you are. This lack of class-consciousness is at the root of the failure of all working class organisations – bar none – to recruit and thrive. It must be reversed for growth to come.

As a class we are clear about regionalism and the euro, but less clear about the EU and war. We are clear about the value of manufactured goods but unclear about the importance of manufacturing them in Britain. How do we imagine a country without industry or agriculture can sustain itself economically? We respond with calm and collective skill to dying and injured workers attacked by terrorists on tubes and buses, but are unclear that we – only we – can prevent barbarism. The fascist attack on London in July 2005 was met by a heroic working class response. If we do not root out the cause though, political fundamentalism, it will happen again. And again. No such attack was possible during the time of the Soviet Union, even though we were lied to and told that it was they that made the world unsafe. It was precisely the removal of Socialism in Europe that made such obscenities ever more likely.

Blairism is the shrug of the shoulders – "What can you do? It's all beyond us." "We can do something about it" becomes the most controversial – and revolutionary – thought.

What's missing is the recognition that if capitalism wants to abandon us, we can do without capitalism. That we have to work out what is needed and get on with it. As the song puts it, we have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. We are not suicidal, so have no choice. Workers today clearly do not want a dictatorship of the proletariat, workers in power, but this is what is necessary.