The People's Movement

Workers’ struggles which break out today do not express– even in an embryonic form – the need for socialism and revolutionary political organisation.  Trade union struggles no longer function as a school of communism, and no longer look towards their replacement by better and superior political and economic forms. Socialists no longer expect anything revolutionary from unions. Too often the unions propagate the false idea which sees the emancipation of the oppressed as being possible within the framework of capitalism. The "official" workers' movement has largely failed to resist attacks old and new.   Many unions simply seem to be hoping for the best, while failing to prepare for the worst. No matter how close some unions get attached to the bosses, they cannot escape the fact that their organisations are the target for emasculation just the same. 

The unions were formed in the first battles of the class and aimed at the establishment of less severe conditions of exploitation by uniting the greatest possible numbers of workers:

“The trade unions aim at nothing less than to prevent the reduction of wages below the level that is traditionally maintained in the various branches of industry. That is to say, they wish to prevent the price of labour power from falling below its value...The workers combine in order to achieve equality of a sort with the capitalist in their contract concerning the sale of their labour. This is the rationale (and logical basis) of the trade unions... The value of labourpower is ‘regarded by the workers themselves as the minimum wage and by the capitalist as the uniform rate of wages for all workers in the same trade’. For this reason the unions never allow their members to work for less than this minimum...” - The Grundisse

“Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organising centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fail to enlist the nonsociety men into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as the agricultural labourers, incapable of organised resistance by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the broad masses of workers that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions.”

(Karl Marx, Instructions for the delegates to the central provisional council of the IWA on the various questions to be debated at the Geneva Congress of 38 September 1866)

 In a letter to F. Bolte on 23 November 1871, Karl Marx precisely defined the characteristics of the political struggle of the working class in the conditions of his time:

“To become political, a movement must oppose to the dominant classes the workers acting as a class to make them concede by means of external pressure. Thus, the agitation is purely economic while the workers try, by means of strikes etc., in a single factory or even in a single branch of industry, to obtain from the private capitalists a reduction of working time; on the other hand, it is political when they forcefully obtain a law fixing the working day at eight hours etc. It is in this way that, from all the isolated economic movements, there develops everywhere a political movement, in other words a class movement with the aim of realising its interests under a general form which has the force of constraint for the whole of society”

You’re not paranoid if you think the world feels more unstable — it is. How do we win ? The tasks are the same as before, but with a new sense of urgency. As before, we must engage millions in the fight for a different future. No true revolution is possible without mass participation. We must build a vast network of work-place and community-based organising committees alongside mass socialist parties challenging the ruling class for political power. We must also be prepared to go beyond the concept of a general strike, and to build worker and neighbourhood assemblies that will replace the state with a true social democracy. This is a struggle not just to restore the old world-system, but to build a new one. This is the time to be revolutionary, to fight to win the world we actually want. Otherwise, catastrophic apocalypse of epic proportions awaits the working class. Intensified exploitation at work when it is possible to protect jobs from automation, the ecological destruction of our life-giving planet, resurgent racism and xenophobia including vigilante attacks on immigrants and refugees with mass deportations, and the constant threat of global war. That is why we fight for the future. That is why we need to fight to win.