Red shoots
Are we beginning to see the red shoots of recovery in the class
struggle? It certainly seems that way. The annual conference of the
Trades Union Congress (TUC), held in mid-September, approved motions
calling for ‘joint industrial action’, and union leaders have promised
‘street protests’ and a campaign of ‘civil disobedience’ to oppose
planned government spending cuts. Two-day strikes on London’s Tube
network have already taken place. And as the TUC met, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that America and Europe face the worst jobs
crisis since the 1930s and an ‘explosion of social unrest’ unless
governments tread carefully.
There’s no way of predicting with any confidence whether this expected
‘explosion’ will go off, or turn out to be a damp squib – it all
depends on what millions of people think and decide to do. But the
concern on the part of our bosses and rulers is real enough. The unions
today may remain weak: membership has declined from 13 million in the
early 1980s to just over half that today, according to the Economist,
and membership is concentrated in the public sector (57 percent
of public-sector workers are unionised compared with just 15 percent in
the private). But, as the Economist points out, unions remain an
important social movement. Its seven million members are a bigger force
than, say, the four million who attend church at least once a month.
Along with the concentration of forces in the public sector, this means
unions can still ‘cause chaos’ – a transport strike prevents other
workers getting to work, for example, and a teachers’ strike sends
millions of parents home to look after their children. The Economist
concludes from this that there is a vital need to keep the general
public ‘onside’ in any conflict – they mean (as if it’s obvious) on the
side of business and its government.
And that¹s the media’s job – to wage a propaganda war to make sure
everyone’s ‘onside’, The tragedy is that their victory seems assured
before the war is even begun. Why? Because alternatives to the system
that got us into this mess are simply unthinkable. Even the most
radical of the trade unionists, and leftwing commentary generally, did
little but offer reforms that the propagandists will have no trouble
portraying as unrealistic. If you accept the logic of capitalism, you
play by its rules – and by its rules, savage government spending cuts
are just necessary and inevitable. By its rules, to fight against cuts
and for higher wages is as senseless as trying to shake fruit from a
dead tree. Without a decent anti-capitalist argument, and an idea of
what we are for, we¹ve lost before we’ve begun.
That’s why socialism is so important. Yes, it is, as we are often told,
a ‘nice idea’. But when it takes hold of workers, it could become much
more than that. It could become the fertiliser we need if the red
shoots of recovery are going to take root, thrive – and blossom in a
world beyond capitalism, a world fit for humanity.
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The Socialist Party is
like no
other political party in Britain. It is made up of people who have
joined together because we want to get rid of the profit system and
establish real socialism.
Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for
themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring
about the kind of society that we are advocating in this journal.
We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists
for socialism.
We are not a reformist party with a programme of policies to patch up
capitalism.
We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. We
publish pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and various other
informative material.
We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies,
meetings and demos; run educational conferences; host internet
discussion forums, make films presenting our ideas, and contest
elections when practical. Socialist literature is available in Arabic,
Bengali, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish,
Swedish and Turkish as well as English.
The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be
able to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to
draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement
which you will be able to bring us.
The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no
leader and there are no followers.
So, if you are going to join we want you to be sure that you
agree fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied that you
understand the case for socialism.
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