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Workers have the power to end this crisis!
Issued by: CPGB-ML
Issued on: 01 May 2014
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 The working class does not march in protest on May Day, but to declare our power to organise ourselves behind our own class ideology – scientific socialism.
We are not ‘speaking truth to power’ but asserting that we already have the power to overturn the tyranny of capital over labour. All that is lacking is the organisation needed to use it.
It is, of course, vital to oppose the destruction of the welfare state, the closure of factories, the slashing of benefits, the massacre of jobs, the freezing of wages, the undermining of pensions, the imposition of zero-hours contracts, the instigation of new wars and all the ‘austerity’ measures driven by the capitalist crisis.
Taking part in such struggles will help us to develop the organisational and political skills we need to secure victory in the bigger battle that lies ahead – the struggle to free ourselves from the capitalist system altogether.
But we will not acquire those essential skills if we cling to the illusion that protesting alone will ‘make a difference’. No amount of ‘pressure’ on MPs to sign Early Day Motions, signatures on e-petitions, or polite marches will ever persuade the capitalist class to ‘see reason’ and change its ways.
The crisis of capitalism is so deep that no capitalist government, Labour included, can do other than drive workers into poverty at home and wars abroad. To end the crisis, we must end capitalism.
When false friends of the working class on the ‘left’ insist that the crisis is not really so bad as it is painted – that it is being ‘talked up by the Tories’, and that a bit of financial regulation and government spending could set the capitalist economy back on an even keel – they are misleading workers about the real scope and severity of the crisis and hiding the scale of its consequences.
When the ‘People’s Assembly’ (PA) leadership took the opportunity of Budget Day to rustle up a fantasy-football wish-list of what they would like to see in a ‘People’s Budget’ (“living wage, green-energy jobs, public ownership, robin-hood tax, empty-property tax, bankers-bonus tax, scrap trident, affordable housing, rent controls, stop tax avoidance, renewable energy, bank regulation”), they crammed everything into their “giant red briefcase” except one vital ingredient: any whisper of the fact that capitalism cannot be regulated out of its inherent contradictions, but must be overthrown and replaced with socialism.
And yet without that basic understanding, all that workers are being offered by these great ‘leaders’ is more of the same pointless protest-politics. Instead of helping us to get onto our feet and get organised to take on our class enemies, they have invited us to sit in the ditch and dream.
They might just as well have posted a letter to Father Christmas at the North Pole for all the results their efforts will bring to the working class. No wonder that those workers who are really suffering at the cutting edge of today’s cuts are nowhere to be seen at the PA’s liberal do-gooder gatherings.
Social democrats – Labour and all those who ask us to put our faith in it – are passionately attached to the idea that monopoly capital can somehow be ‘fixed’. All the groups popping up to declare themselves as ‘people’s assemblies’ pledged to ‘unite the resistance’ in an ‘anti-cuts alliance’ behind a ‘network of shop stewards’ have one common trait: they are all desperate to persuade workers that capitalism can be reformed by mass protest; desperate to stop us from learning Marxist science, taking a revolutionary path and abolishing the system that is at the root of all our problems.
Workers don’t need capitalists
Here’s the truth these illusion-mongers avoid like the plague: workers can do without capitalists but capitalists cannot do without workers.
Without our work, every wheel of capitalist production would come to a halt, leaving the capitalists as kings of a vast and useless realm of means of production.
Workers, on the other hand, are quite capable of using those productive forces for ourselves. Without the capitalists’ need to make profits, the problems and crises of the capitalist system will simply melt away, to be replaced by the simple requirements of planning to meet the needs of the people.
Likewise, workers can do without the warmongers, but the warmongers cannot do without workers.
We have it in our power to withdraw cooperation from the barbaric wars of national oppression being waged by imperialism. Collectively, we can refuse to fight; refuse to assist the war effort by making or moving armaments and materiel; refuse to help broadcast or print the propaganda that hides the truth about British imperialism’s vast and terrible war crimes.
It is social democrats – bought-off ‘leaders’ who talk ‘socialist’ but ultimately serve the interests of capital – who stop workers from exercising our huge collective power, continually promoting the fraud of British ‘parliamentary democracy’ instead of giving workers a scientific lead in the class struggle.
In this way they help the capitalists to impose a permanent, unelected rule of the moneybags behind the scenes – at the expense of the divided and confused working masses.
And it is left to the communists to point out the truth that those who claim to ‘represent the electorate’ in Westminster only really represent our enemies.
“Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when ... he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!” (Lenin)
In order for the working class – the overwhelming majority of Britain’s population – to unite and go onto the offensive against capitalist exploitation and war, we must first rid ourselves of the paralysing influence of Labour – and all those who are in any way involved with promoting or prettifying it.
As the crisis deepens, the message that communists bring to workers is simple:
– We are in the throes of an overproduction crisis far greater even than those which drove the world into slump, wars and revolution twice in the last century.
– The only ‘solution’ on offer from any capitalist party is to drive workers into deeper poverty, escalating racism and endless war.
– The socialist solution to the crisis needs workers to take the lead in transferring the means of production from private to public hands, thereby ending the contradictions that lead to crisis and war.
In order to accomplish this task on behalf of society as a whole, the proletariat needs to build a strong organisation; one that has the strength in both numbers and understanding to lead workers in overthrowing the dictatorship of the billionaires.
In its place, a state of the working class will be tasked with building a planned socialist economy, organised to meet the needs of the many rather than to make profits for a handful of parasites.
Join us and help to make it happen!
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