Ye are many-- they are few

We were sold a dream of a fictitious caring, sharing Welfare State. We were told that if we studied and worked hard we would be promised a well-paid job which would be enough to pay for a comfortable home to raise a family. Workers have been finding out that this was all a lie. The question now is what happens next.

We have had all the failed palliatives meant to patch up the flaws and faults of the system. We have had New Deals, Old Deals and Raw Deals in abundance. But although things could get worse, we shouldn’t completely despair. Social change is happening. The stories of the poor and the nearly poor, and the hardships they endure, are now being told. The anti-austerity and Occupy protests have introduced (or more accurately re-introduced) resistance, challenging the centres of power and calling for the re-building of society. Trade unions are once again discovering their back-bone and asserting their industrial muscle. Everything is in motion and we ourselves are that movement.
Class struggle means refusing to succumb to fear and refusing to surrender. It means saying no more compromise or no more concessions. Enough is enough. Hope and history are companions: one looks forward and one looks back. If we look forward, we’ll see where we have to go. We look backward to grasp clearly what we are moving forward from, and to understand the paths others have made so we can map our own road forward.

Hopelessness often comes from amnesia of our past, forgetting that everything is in flux, everything changes. There’s the people’s counter-history that we don’t learn in school and don’t see on the TV: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now. We forget that we fought for the vote, the eight-hour day, for workplace health and safety and for free access to education and health-care. If we forget how we won them, then we can lose them again. Even in our defeats and set-backs the seeds for future more successful struggles were sown.

Things change and people have the power to make that happen when they come together and act as one and not alone.

"Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fallen on you--
Ye are many-- they are few."
Shelley