Revolutionary Perspectives

Revolutionary Perspectives What has been concerning me for some time has been how the political situation, as it now exists in Britain, is viewed. To explain what concerns me, I have to explain my own political background. I am much older than many of my comrades and grew up in a very different situation and have passed through many periods of which these comrades may have no direct experience. This is not to claim any superiority over anyone, but is simply stated as a fact. There were three major influences on my early life, my family, the Methodist Chapel Sunday school and the Working Mens Club. All of these had one thing in common, they were all working class institutions, and in fact all overlapped. In other words I grew up in a working class environment, and was conscious of this environment. Working class ideas of unity and solidarity, a hatred of such things as means tests and charity, and also a recognition of the ‘them and us’, ‘bosses and workers’, predominated. This is not to say that politics was a particularly concern but people knew where they stood and whom they would vote for. My class position was made very clear when I started Grammar School and I knew then that my loyalty would remain with my class and that has been the driving force throughout my life. My aim has been to make the conditions of living, and working, better for my people in any way that I possibly could. During my life I have moved from being religious, to being very active in the Labour Party, to organising through the local Pensioners Forum, to being part of revolutionary party. At all times being active within my union (NAS later NASUWT) and maintaining my class position. In society terms, the major changes has been in the nature of work. My early studies involved three years at Sheffield University studying Mining Engineering which included working in the industry, underground, during those years and for two more years full time. In the course of this I worked with a large number of different miners doing a variety of different jobs, including full face training. The aim was to train me for management or as a specialist engineer. Eventually as the time to leave my training approached I left the industry as my interests were in favour of the men I worked with rather than any idea of management. My career then became that of a teacher. My concerns are two fold. First, it is clear that the work situation has changed considerably over my life time. This is best illustrated in my experience in the Coal Industry. When I initially obtained the Coal Board Scholarship to attend University I was assured that I had ‘a job for life’. Even before my University course ended, coal mines were beginning to close. My home town, as I was growing up, had a large variety of different industries, coach building, bells, hosiery, cranes, electrical engineering, hosiery machinery, needles, pharmaceuticals. None of this exists any more. Britain has to a large extent moved from an industrial economy to a service industry. There is a vast difference between a strike in the mining industry, which directly affects the mine owners and also the many industries that depend on coal, and a school strike, as I know from my active union days, which affects most directly the pupils we are committed to teach. The Ruling Class has no interest in the education of the working class, except to steal those working class youngsters who can supplement and fill in for the weaknesses of their own progeny. There his been great agitation for strikes in the health service, universities and schools, but in none of these areas are the Ruling Class greatly affected. They have their own provision in all of these areas. This concern links in with another aspect of society. That is the distinction between productive and non productive labour. As far as the Ruling Class is concerned, the only section of the working class they are concerned with is the productive working class because that is the section of the working class that produces surplus value. It is quite possible for sections of the working class to prosper whilst other sections face deteriorating conditions. A situation faced in the early days of trade unions when specialist workers were organised but general workers were not. The present day workforce is much more variegated and many work in areas that are not unionised. In addition large sections of the working class are not in work at all. I was struck by Government figures which suggested that in some areas of the country one in four and one in five workers are on benefits, in other words, large numbers of workers cannot find work. The second concern I have is that we ignore general politics, both national and local. We quite rightly say that there is no parliamentary road to socialism. However we ignore the fact that many of the decisions which greatly adversely affect working class people are taken in Parliament or in local councils. Those sections that are struggling on inadequate wages, are unable to find work or are unable to work for other reasons such as health, have to exist on short time or have two or three jobs, have to rely on food banks or zero our contracts, are not in a position to take strike action. I mentioned earlier the unity and solidarity of the working class. We have to see the working class as a whole, undivided. It is not in the interests of any member of the working class to divide the class on capitalist lines of productive and non-productive workers. In those immortal words, ‘The working class united will never be defeated.’ However, working class unity is not a given. It has to be fought for. To my mind it is important for all sections of the class to see people on Councils and in Parliament making the case for a different form of society. This is one way of building the hegemony of the working class that did exist to a much greater extent in the situation I described earlier. The problem, as I see it, is that at an earlier stage, when the Labour Left was stronger, it was possible for a Revolutionary Party to act as a vanguard party because the Labour Left was, maybe not very effectively, actively, arguing, and working, for a better society for all. With the defeat of Corbynism this is no longer the case. The question we have to ask is, do we work as a vanguard party that seeks to lead an army of would be socialists, or do we work to build a mass revolutionary party. My aim has always been to build a mass party that will unite the whole working class in order to change society so that all people can live in harmony and that there is no class that dominates any other class. The classless society that Marx argued for. With these thoughts in mind, I was encouraged when I started reading the book by Mike Davis on Old Gods, New Enigmas, Marx’s Lost Theory. Particularly when I read the list of questions set out after he has noted that “Neoliberal globalization over the last generation has recharged the meaning of ‘the wretched of the earth.’ Hobsbawm’s ‘grey area of the informal economy’ has expanded by almost 1 billion people since his interview, and we should probably subsume the ‘informal proletariat’ within a broader category that includes all of those who eke out survival by day labor, ‘micro-entrepreneurship,’ and subsistence crime; who toil unprotected by laws, unions or job contracts; who work outside of socialized complexes such as factories, hospitals, schools ports and the like; or simply wander in the desert of structural unemployment” The “three crucial questions” that Mike Davis asks are: “(1) What are the possibilities for class conscientiousness in these informal or peripheral sectors of the economy? (2) How can movements, say, of slum dwellers, the technologically deskilled, or the unemployed find power resources – equivalent, for example, to the ability of formal workers to shut down large units of production – that might allow them to struggle successfully for social transformation? (3) What kind of united action are possible between traditional working class organisations and the diverse humanity of the ‘grey area’”? Mike Davis expands on these thoughts. He quotes Karl Marx to the effect that “since the purpose of productive labour is not the existence of workers but the production of surplus value, all necessary labour which produces no surplus labour is superfluous and worthless to capitalist production.” The inter relationship between different types of labour is a factor for Hobsbawm who notes that “Socialism will have little future unless large sections of this informal working class finds sources of collective strength, levers of power, and platforms for participating in an international class struggle.” Mike Davis interprets this in discussing agency writing that “Agency in the classical socialist sense also imputed hegemony: the political and cultural ability of a class to institute a transformational project that recruits broad sections of society.” Later in this chapter Davis quotes Stathis Kouvelakis who writes “ Faced with the social question Marx placed himself in the tradition of the French Revolution and the project of a ‘popular political economy’ defined by the Robespierreans, the urban sans–culottes, and the most radical wing of the peasants movement: a project centred on subordinating property rights to the right to existence.” Commenting further on Marx’s understanding of the French Revolution, Davis quotes Marx as recognising that “instead of the rising power of industrial and commercial capitalism, growing out of the expropriation of small producers by large, confirmed the prescience of the original sans-culotte communists, Gracchus Babeuf and Sylvain Marechal, who had argued that liberte could be realised as equalite only within a system of common property.” Mike Davis examines the views of Lorenz von Stein who looks at the question of poverty. Von Stein notes that “ It is not only the poverty of part of the labouring classes, not only impoverishment which hits large sections of the population through industrial changes, but it is the poverty reproduced by industrial conditions from generation to generation within the family which characterises industrial pauperism. The great difference between mere poverty and pauperism can be clearly seen. Lack of work and income results in poverty but pauperism is brought about by work and wages. In industrial society, poverty can be coped with through charity; in order to fight pauperism the whole industrial working- and wage-system has to be changed …. It is pauperism that has led practical people …..to adopt the ideas of socialism.” Mike Davis notes that (1) Marx, following Moses Hess, Flora Tristan and von Stein, nominated the property-less proletariat – a group excluded from, and with no stake in, the traditional system of estates and private property – as the successors of the revolutionary bourgeoisie .” But says Davis “Marx saw beyond the idea of instrumental agency, ie the workers as mere constituency and brute means of achieving a new society designated by some reformer. Instead he embraced, as did Flora Tristan, even earlier, the interpretation of agency as self-reliance and self-emancipation that was advocated in radical artisan circles by the so called ‘materialist communists’.” (2) “Even in its immature or transitional incarnation Marx saw workers as the only class with the will and radical need to pursue the struggle for democracy to its conclusion.” (3) “The industrial revolution was not only creating a property-less class of industrial workers but so developing the productive forces that they would one day seize to free all of humanity.” Mike Davis notes the three elements of revolutionary agency, organisational capacity, structural power and hegemonic politics. He also notes the crucial position of the proletariat within the mode of production. Because of this they are in position to shut down production (through strikes etc) and have limited informal control over the labour process. We can now return to the three questions that Mike Davis proposes. What are the possibilities of class consciousness in the informal sectors of the economy? How can they struggle for social transformation? What kind of united action between the different sections of the working class? I would argue that there is already a consciousness among the working class that we are all in the same position. What I do believe is that sections of the class who have achieved a relatively higher standard of living have accepted the propaganda pumped out by the Ruling Class that they are somehow a distinct group, a middle class (completely ignoring the fact that the Middle class was originally the rising bourgeoisie). This false belief is based on such things as house ownership, salaries as opposed to wages and a higher standard of living. This has held for a long period but we are now in a situation in which so called middle class workers are finding jobs in which they have felt secure are no longer safe. Fire and rehire is affecting groups in this category. Despite increasing measures that remove institutions that brought people together, as seen in closure of public houses; demanding that football supporters sit rather than stand whereby they can move around and meet more people; the decline of church and chapel attendance; the ordering and purchase of goods on line. All of these are resulting in people being more isolated. The effect is to weaken the solidarity that has always existed within communities. However, in fact, the evidence is that when events happen that people recognise as contrary to the norms that people expect from life, people come together and act together. On a large scale we can mention the Miner’s strike when large sections of the community came together to support the miners; the campaign against the Poll Tax when many refused to pay and were prepared to go to prison to oppose the tax; the massive demonstrations against the gulf war, clapping for nurses during the Covid crisis, Black Lives matter and support for refugees both from the third world and from Ukraine. The important question is how all these separate struggles can be linked together and a concerted campaign that will overturn the present structure of society. I fear that there has grown a gulf between the revolutionary parties who have been severely weakened, the reformist parties who have drawn away from the workers movement and adopted a weak liberal position rather that the socialist position on which they were built and the working class who are either succeeding and losing class awareness or a struggling section of the class who feel that they are being ignore by society at large. How then do we relate to all these groups in order to build a revolutionary movement? The key factor in all of this, and what ultimately unites the working class is the question of property. The basis of the capitalist system is that one section of the population owns the means of production and controls the wealth that exists within society. The other section, by far the largest section, depends ultimately on the work that that smaller section provides. It is also true that the wealthy section of society obtains its wealth from the work done by the working class. Of the three elements of revolutionary agency the one that is largely neglected is that of hegemonic politics. I understand that members of organisations join because they believe in the aims of the organisation and seek to defend those aims against those who have different aims. But this means that people who agree on large areas of policy find that they are arguing over a small section of their beliefs and this prevents them from working together. What is needed is for all sections of the class to see that their interests are all the same and that the only way forward is revolutionary change. This is not an immediate possibility. In the meantime those who are actively involved in politics have to demonstrate that they understand the immediate needs of that section of the class who are suffering in the present. For reformists, which is probably not a term they would use for themselves, it is the short term activity of improving the conditions of life that they consider to be important. Just as nurses, teachers, social workers often see their work as more than just a job. The important role that revolutionaries can play is to work for reforms but to continue making the case that although reforms are valuable they are not the ultimate solution to the problem. In the past, in organisations such as the Anti Nazi League, revolutionaries took a lead, but were strongly supported by left wing members of the Labour party. Now that the pressures are on to drive out left wing members of the Labour party so that the Party no longer has a socialist, working class orientation of any kind, the revolutionary parties have to relate to the new conditions. That included reconsidering their relations towards local and national politics, local authorities and Parliament. The working class needs unity and solidarity and a clear strategy of moving forward. This requires both actions to improve conditions of work and life for all working class people. This means being seen to be active in all areas of life, including elections for local authorities and parliament, in campaigns around the health service, for educational reform at all levels, in support of refugees and in opposition to wars. In fact there is a need to be active and to be seen to be active in any struggle that any section finds itself. Clearly it is not possible to do everything but we should engage with people who are active in particular organisations so that we are seen as involved and not seen as people who stand on the sidelines claiming to be the fount of all wisdom and appearing to criticise those whose aims are good but may have a different perspective to our own. But it also requires that in taking an active role in all these forms of struggle, whilst giving our support to others, we also make clear that fighting for reforms is not enough, that we have to go further and that what is needed is revolutionary change to produce a classless society. We have to show that not only is revolution needed, it is also possible and can be brought about if the working class has the will and the resolve to use it position and strength within society to achieve the desired new society. Scribar 13.06.22