The capitalists have intellectuals of all categories to praise and exalt its benevolence. Scarcely anybody but socialists retain a belief in the anti-capitalist strivings and sentiments of working people or trust that they can in time participate in a movement toward socialism. For adhering to these convictions and being guided by them, the Socialist Party of Great Britain is looked upon political fossils, relics of a bygone era and dogmatists who cling to outdated views. As Marxists we hold no religious-like faith. Our views are derived from a reasoned analysis of the decisive trends of our time, and an understanding of capitalist development. Marxism has clarified many problems in philosophy, sociology, history, economics, and politics but its achievement is the explanation it offers of the key role of the working class in history. No sooner has the prospect of working class revolution been dismissed for the umpteenth time than it returns to haunt its sceptics. Some see the seeming omnipotence of the ruling class and succumb to sentiments of hopelessness.
All over the world industrialisation and urbanisation is causing the working class, that is, those who sell their own labour power to the owners of capital, to grow in size. We do not misled ourselves. They are a working class which has not cut loose from subservience to the capitalist parties and established a political organisation of their own. We witness its conservatism with a small c at every election. Most have not even organised industrially and even those who have, receive criticism from some “radicals” who appear to deny labour unions any progressive features. They ignore the fact that the mere existence of trade unions act as a shield against lowering wages and working conditions and check the aggressions of capitalist reaction, albeit with limits and frequent set-backs. These “Left-communists” leave out the working conditions before unions, the fourteen or sixteen-hour days, and they neglect to point out what happens when unions are made exceptionally weak or actually destroyed by dictatorships.
What will change the working class from being a prop to capitalism? The resurgence of labour radicalism may well come from the flagging of the long-term postwar capitalist expansion and an extended downturn in the industrial cycle. Under intensified competition, corporations will be increasingly pressed to shave their costs, beginning with the cost of labour. As the unions engage in defensive actions against such attacks, sharp tension can quickly replace the prevailing toleration between the bosses and the workers. It could be provoked by anger against anti-labour legislation. The possibilities are so diverse that it is impossible to foretell where or how the break in the dyke will come.
Workers in the past have far more passive, helpless, and poorly organised than today. The workers then as today were divided against themselves: native against foreign-born, white against black, skilled workers against the unskilled workers, men against women. The anti-union forces of the employers associations and the government were powerful. The magnates of capital had the workers at their mercy. They controlled the police, the courts, the State and the press. They used the blacklist, union spies and strikebreakers. Moreover, the privileged union leadership was complacent and more interested in maintaining industrial peace. In America De Leon, Debs , the Wobblies, despite sacrifice failed to achieve fundamental change. Then, the 1929 Wall St happened and appeared to be a knock-out blow. With industry’s recovery, workers morale and fighting spirit also revived. Labour went on the offensive against corporate capital, independent of its union bureaucrats.
It is ironical that many intellectuals who reject Big Business mimics its low estimation of the working class potential and capabilities. Although they fancy themselves as progressive, they remain captive to the political backwardness of capitalist apologists. They view workers as sheep, who cannot look beyond their filling their stomachs bellies. The disparagement of the workers reinforce the indoctrination of the ruling class and weakens the self-reliance of the workers. They do not see the working class as the producers of wealth but simply consumers of it. Capitalist production cannot do without an ample labouring force, no matter how many are unemployed, because profit-making and the accumulation of capital depend upon the extraction of labour power which creates value in the form of commodities. The industrial work force as such is not expendable, no matter how fast or how far automation proceeds under capitalist auspices.
During the lulls in militancy, people come to believe that the social contradictions of capitalism will never generate insurrectionary moods and movements in their time. It results from an over-estimation of capitalism on the one hand and an under-estimation of workers on the other. Beaten down in so many ways, workers seldom suspect that they are capable of resistance. Necessity forces individuals, groups, classes, and whole peoples to perform prodigious feats. The working class has displayed considerable fighting spirit, initiative, and stamina in the past. If the workers can produce all kinds of commodities for the market, if they can build and maintain powerful industrial unions for themselves, why can’t they go beyond all that? What prevents them from organizing a mass political party of their own, being won over to socialist ideas, which can challenge the existing order and lead the way to a new society? Why can’t workers, who make make history and remake society, remake themselves? If they perform all kinds of jobs for the profiteers, why can’t they do their own jobs? If they wage and win wars for the imperialist rulers, why can’t they conduct a class war in defense of their own interests?
The will to win is an indispensable factor in the way to win. The working class can go forward to victory only as they become convinced that the ruling class are not born to command, that they are leading the world to catastrophe, that they are not omnipotent and unbeatable, that their system of exploitation is not everlasting but has to go and can be abolished. This is the message of Marxism. It teaches that the workers can and must supplant the plutocrats and oligarchs as the directors and organisers of economic and political life and become the pioneers of the first truly human society. Nothing less than the very survival of the world depend on the achievement of socialism.
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