The ruling class in Britain was not prepared for the Brexit result. That there was no plan in place has become evident in the subsequent months. The Cameron government had no measures prepared. Those who campaigned to Leave the EU have gone back on slogans such as ‘£350 million a week to be spent on the NHS’ but not suggested anything in their place. The British bourgeoisie had partly lost control of its political apparatus and was looking for strategies to limit the damage to the economy, to stabilise a situation in which, especially after the advent of President Trump in the USA, instability and uncertainty are rapidly spreading.

May’s “brighter future”

The government’s February 2017 White Paper spends nearly 25,000 words trying to resolve a raft of contradictions. In a speech in January Theresa May said that the “British people … voted to shape a brighter future”. The White Paper aims at paving the way for a “smooth, mutually beneficial exit” and wants to “avoid a disruptive cliff-edge.” Whether this future will be ‘brighter’ remains to be seen.

You can read that “We will not be seeking membership of the Single Market, but will pursue instead a new strategic partnership with the EU, including an ambitious and comprehensive Free Trade Agreement and a new customs agreement.” So, the UK is going to leave the Single Market and then come to some arrangement with the 27 remaining countries. To leave the EU there need only be the agreement of 20 of the remaining countries, whereas a trade deal may need the backing of all the remaining 27 EU states. With trade, the government thinks that “An international rules based system is crucial for underpinning free trade and to ward off protectionism.” At a time when the US under President Trump seems to be going in a protectionist direction, putting America First, and renegotiating trade deals, this is not a welcome prospect for British capitalism as the US is the UK’s single biggest export market on a country-by-country basis. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has suggested that, while the UK’s contributions to the EU budget will cease, the loss of trade will have a much bigger impact on the British economy.

May proposes an alternative to the Single Market “If we were excluded from accessing the single market – we would be free to change the basis of Britain’s economic model.”  Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, speaking to Welt am Sonntag (15/1/17) said “If we have no access to the European market, if we are closed off, if Britain were to leave the European Union without an agreement on market access, then we could suffer from economic damage at least in the short-term. In this case, we could be forced to change our economic model and we will have to change our model to regain competitiveness. And you can be sure we will do whatever we have to do.” The proposal to do “something different” has been greeted with much speculation. Will the UK become a tax haven? Will it get stuck into a trade and tariff war? There are only so many options, one of which is certainly not Britain undergoing a revival of manufacture on any significant scale, despite vague promises in this direction.

One reason that British access to the single market seems impossible to many commentators is that it would involve a commitment to freedom of movement for EU citizens. May has said “We want to guarantee the rights of EU citizens who are already living in Britain”, but at the same time her government is prepared to use these nearly 3 million people as bargaining chips. Liam Fox was reported as describing EU nationals in the UK as one of the “main cards” in Brexit negotiations. A leaked document from the European parliament’s legal affairs committee said there could be an EU backlash against this.

The contradictions in the British government’s position reflect the position that British capitalism is stuck in. “We will take back control of our laws”, says May, but, at the same time, “as we translate the body of European law into our domestic regulations, we will ensure that workers’ rights are fully protected”. The goal is to have everything ‘beneficial’ about the EU, plus every advantage of ‘independence’. The British bourgeoisie will employ any and every manoeuvre it can. It will blame the EU for every difficulty. But it’s not starting from a position of strength.

Adapting to crisis

The British bourgeoisie has historically been noted for the ability of its political apparatus to act in defence of the interests of the national capital. The result of the referendum showed a growing loss of cohesion within the ruling class, but it also showed the capacity of the British ruling class to adapt to its difficulties. This was demonstrated after the referendum when May was quite evidently ‘selected’ as Tory leader to resolve a temporary government crisis. Similarly, subsequent legal and parliamentary battles, and the role of the media, have to be seen in this context. The case brought against the government, to stop it acting on its own and insisting on a role for parliament, produced a wave of populist media rage against the judges of the Court of Appeal: the Daily Mail branding them as “Enemies of the People”, while the  liberal media defended the ‘independence of the judiciary’.

But what was being touted as a ‘constitutional crisis’ soon subsided. When the government’s appeal to the Supreme Court was also dismissed there was far less hysteria. The House of Commons performed its duty and rubber stamped the proposals of the executive, despite the majority of MPs having been in favour of remaining in the EU. The Labour Party was particularly helpful. Jeremy Corbyn imposed a three-line whip on MPs to ensure they supported the latter stages of Brexit legislation. Corbyn was loyally supported by the Trotskyists of Socialist Worker (9/2/17) “He had rightly insisted that Labour MPs vote for a bill that would begin the process of leaving the European Union”. For all Corbyn’s attempts to pose as a ‘radical’ he remains a very conventional participant in the battles over Brexit, as he said in a speech on 10 January 2017. “Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle”. Labour principles start from the defence of British capital and the manoeuvres of bourgeois democracy.

Elsewhere in parliament, a government source said “If the Lords don’t want to face an overwhelming public call to be abolished they must get on and protect democracy and pass this bill”.  Brexit Secretary David Davis called on peers to “do their patriotic duty”. Threats to the House of Lords from the Conservative party are intriguing evidence of the divisions within the bourgeoisie, even though at a deeper level they are united as parts of one state capitalist class

Britain’s imperialist options are narrowing

Despite all the declarations of ‘freedom for the UK’, in January 2017 the reality of British imperialism’s position was seen in May’s visit to the US and Turkey. With Trump, she held hands, and clearly grasped at any straws available. The so-called ‘special relationship’ has always been one-sidedly weighted to the US’s benefit and there seems little prospect that the imbalance will be modified in the foreseeable future. In Turkey May “issued a stern warning to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoðan about respecting human rights yesterday as she prepared to sign a £100m fighter jet deal that Downing Street hopes will lead to Britain becoming Turkey’s main defence partner” (Guardian 28/1/17).

This is the current international face of the British bourgeoisie. Unsure of prospects outside the EU, desperate for any crumbs from American imperialism, uncertain about the prospects for its financial sector, but at least able to rely on arms sales to a country in conflict. A leaked government document showed the industries that are set to be prioritised by the government during Brexit talks. High priorities included aerospace, air transport, gas markets, financial services, land transport (excluding rail), insurance, and banking and market infrastructure. Low priorities included steel construction, oil and gas, telecoms, post, environmental services, water, medical, and education. Behind the scenes decisions are being made as to which sectors might survive, or can be sacrificed, and which need more serious backing.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (Telegraph 11/2/17) doesn’t underestimate the abilities of the British bourgeoisie to intrigue and conspire, “the Brits will manage without big effort to divide the remaining 27 member states”. And the British government does have a fall-back position as, in May’s words “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain”. That is the ‘hard Brexit’ position that the British bourgeoisie appears to be rallying round. The ruthlessness of the British bourgeoisie hasn’t vanished, but its ability to function cohesively in a period of growing decomposition has declined.

The problems faced by the working class in Britain echo those faced internationally. In 1989 the momentous transitions in the regimes of eastern Europe were accomplished with the working class just a spectator, not playing any independent role. In the last couple of years, we have seen the spread of terrorism to the streets of western Europe, the EU Referendum, the election of Trump, and the resurgence of Marine Le Pen’s Front National. Again, for all the talk about the tremendous changes that are taking place, and the discontent of the people up against the elites, the working class has not been an active factor in the situation. The bourgeoisie will try and use the decomposition of its system against the working class, whether promoting the populist option or ‘anti-populist’ battles and campaigns. But whereas the bourgeoisie is defending a society in decline, the working class has the capacity to create new social relations based on solidarity rather than exploitation and nihilism.

Car 15/2/17

The bourgeoisie has made no mistake in spending decades concocting the shabbiest lies about the revolution in Russia in 1917. 100 years after the soviets took power in Russia, the propagandists of the ruling class continue to sing the same hymn to the virtues of bourgeois parliamentary ‘democracy’ and spew out the worst falsifications about the reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. In fact, despite a whole number of quibbles, these historians of the bourgeois order have unceasingly presented the February 1917 revolution as a movement for ‘democracy’, hijacked by the Bolshevik ‘coup d’etat’. February 1917 was an authentic ‘democratic festival’, October 1917 a vulgar ‘coup d’etat’, a Bolshevik manipulation of the backward masses of Tsarist Russia. This shameless brainwashing is the product of the fear and rage felt by the world bourgeoisie faced by the collective work and solidarity, the conscious action of the exploited class, daring to raise its head and put in question the existing order. The shock waves from this proletarian earthquake still haunt the memory of the bourgeoisie, which has done everything possible, then as now, to separate the working class from its historic experience. Today, falsifying the nature of the Russian revolution and degrading the essence of the workers’ councils is part of capitalism’s odious campaign on the ‘death of communism’, identifying the proletarian revolution with its executioner, Stalinism. This is the misleading idea that revolution can only lead to the Gulag. Faced with this torrent of calumnies and mystifying propaganda, the defence of the Russian revolution is a duty for revolutionaries in order to help the working class rid itself of all the ideological muck spilled by the bourgeoisie, and re-appropriate the whole richness of this vital experience.

February 1917: first episode in the world proletarian revolution

The workers’ rising in St Petersburg (Petrograd) in Russia did not come like a bolt from the blue. It was in continuity with the economic strikes launched by the Russian workers since 1915 in reaction against the savagery of the world butchery, against hunger, misery, excessive exploitation and the permanent terror of war. These strikes and revolts were in no way a specificity of the Russian proletariat, but an integral part of the struggles and demonstrations of the international proletariat. A similar wave of workers’ agitation developed in Germany, Austria and Britain. At the front, especially in the Russian and German armies, there were mutinies, mass desertions, fraternisation between soldiers on the two sides. In fact, after allowing themselves to be carried away by the government’s patriotic venom and ‘democratic’ illusions, after being led astray by the treason of the majority of the social democratic parties and unions, the international proletariat raised its head and started to come out of the fog of chauvinist intoxication. The internationalists were at the head of the movement - the Bolsheviks, the Spartacists, all the lefts of the 2nd International who had intransigently denounced the war since its outbreak in August 1914 as an imperialist pillage, as a manifestation of the collapse of world capitalism, and as a signal for the proletariat to complete its historic mission: the international socialist revolution. This historic challenge would be raised internationally by the working class from 1917 to 1923. The vanguard of this vast proletarian movement, which stopped the war and opened the possibility of the world revolution, was the Russian proletariat in February 1917. The outbreak of the Russian revolution was not, then, a national affair or an isolated phenomenon - that is to say, a late bourgeois revolution, limited to the overthrow of feudal absolutism. It was the highest moment of the world proletarian response to the war, and more profoundly to the entry of the capitalist system into its decadence.

The formation of the workers’ councils: specific organs of the revolution

From 22nd to 27th February, the workers of St Petersburg launched an insurrection in response to the historic problem represented by the world war. Started by the textile workers - overcoming the hesitations of revolutionary organisations - the strike involved almost all the factories in the capital in 3 days. On the 25th there were 240,000 workers who had stopped work and, far from remaining passive on their shop floors, meetings and street demonstrations proliferated, where their slogans, in the first hours, demanded “bread”, soon reinforced by the calls “down with the war”, “down with autocracy”.

On the evening of the 27th February, the insurrection, lead by the armed proletariat, reigned supreme in the capital, while strikes and workers’ demonstrations were starting in Moscow, spreading in the following days to other towns in the province, Samara, Saratov, Kharkov... Isolated, incapable of using the army, profoundly undermined by the war, the Tsarist regime was forced to abdicate.

Once having broken the first chains, the workers did not want to retreat and, in order not to advance blindly, they revived the experience of 1905 by creating soviets which had appeared spontaneously during this first great mass strike. These workers’ councils were the direct emanation of thousands of workers’ assemblies, who centralised their action through elected and instantly revocable delegates.

Trotsky had, after 1905, already shown what a workers’ council was: “What was the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies? The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people ... which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control.” (Trotsky, 1905). This “finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”, as Lenin said, rendered the permanent organisation in unions null and void. In the period in which the revolution is on the historical agenda, struggles explode spontaneously and tend to generalise to all sectors of production. So the spontaneous way the workers’ councils arise results directly from the explosive, rather than planned or programmed, character of the revolutionary struggle.

The workers’ councils in the Russian revolution were not the simple passive product of exceptional objective conditions, but also the product of a collective coming to consciousness. The movement of the councils itself carried the means for the self-education of the masses. The workers’ councils mingled the economic and political aspects of the struggle against the established order. As Trotsky wrote: “in that lies its strength. Every week brings something new to the masses. Every two months creates an epoch. At the end of February, the insurrection. At the end of April, a demonstration of the armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd. At the beginning of July, a new assault, far broader in scope and under more resolute slogans. At the end of August, Kornilov’s attempt at an overthrow beaten off by the masses. At the end of October, conquest of power by the Bolsheviks. Under these events, so striking in their rhythm, molecular processes were taking place, welding the heterogeneous elements of the working class into one political whole.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, ‘Shifts in the Masses’) “Meetings were held in the trenches, on village squares, in the factories. For months, in Petrograd and in the whole of Russia, every street corner became a public tribune.” (ibid).

The role of the Bolshevik Party in the workers’ councils

Although the Russian proletariat gave itself the means for its combat by forming the workers’ councils, as early as February it encountered an extremely dangerous situation. The forces of the international bourgeoisie immediately attempted to turn the situation to its advantage. Unable to crush the movement in blood, they tried to orient it towards bourgeois ‘democratic’ objectives. On the one hand they formed an official Provisional Government with the aim of continuing the war. On the other hand, the soviets were invaded by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries straight away.

These latter, of whom the majority had passed into the bourgeois camp during the war, enjoyed an enormous confidence among the workers at the start of the February revolution. They were naturally put on the Executive of the Soviet. From this strategic position they used all means to try and sabotage and destroy the soviets.

From a situation of “dual power” in February, a situation of “dual powerlessness” had emerged in May and June 1917, with the Executive of the Soviets serving as a mask for the bourgeoisie to realise its objectives: the re-establishment of order at home and at the front in order to continue the imperialist butchery. Menshevik and Social Revolutionary demagogues made ever more promises of peace, “the solution to the agrarian problem”, the 8 hour day etc., without ever putting them into practice.

Even if the workers, at least those in Petrograd, were convinced that only the power of the soviets would be able to respond to their aspirations, and although they saw that their demands were not being taken into consideration, elsewhere and, among the soldiers, there was still a strong belief in the “conciliators”, in the partisans of a so-called bourgeois revolution.

It fell to Lenin in his April Theses, two months after the opening of the movement, to unveil an audacious platform to rearm the Bolshevik Party, which had also drifted towards conciliation with the Provisional Government. His theses clearly explained where the proletariat was going, and formulated the perspectives of the party:

“In our attitude towards the war, ...not the slightest concession to ‘revolutionary defencism’ is permissible...

“No support for the Provisional Government: the utter falsity of all its promises should be made clear, particularly of those relating to the renunciation of annexations. Exposure in place of the impermissible, illusion-breeding ‘demand’ that this government, a government of capitalists, should cease to be an imperialist government...

“Not a parliamentary republic - to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step - but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country from top to bottom.”

Armed with this solid compass, the Bolshevik Party was able to make proposals for action corresponding to the needs and possibilities at each moment of the revolutionary process, keeping in mind the perspective of taking power, and to do this by the work of “persistent and patient explanation” (Lenin, op cit). And through this struggle for the masses to take control of their organisations against bourgeois sabotage, after several political crises in April, June and especially in July, it became possible to renew the Soviets, within which the Bolsheviks became the majority.

The decisive activity of the Bolsheviks had the central axis of developing consciousness in the class, based on confidence in the masses’ capacity for criticism and analysis, confidence in their capacity for unity and self-organisation. The Bolsheviks never pretended to make the masses submit to a preconceived ‘plan of action’, raising the masses as one raises an army. “The chief strength of Lenin lay in his understanding the inner logic of the movement, and guiding his policy by it. He did not impose his plan on the masses; he helped the masses to recognise and realise their own plan.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, “Rearming the Party”).

From September the Bolsheviks clearly posed the question of the insurrection in the assemblies of the workers and soldiers. “The insurrection was decided, so to speak, for a fixed date, the 25th of October. It was not fixed by a secret meeting, but openly and publicly, and the triumphant revolution took place precisely on the 25th of October” (ibid). It raised an unequalled enthusiasm among the workers of the entire world, becoming the “beacon” which lit the future for all the exploited.

Today, the destruction of the political and economic power of the ruling class is still an imperious necessity. The dictatorship of the proletariat, organised in sovereign councils, remains the only way to open the way to a communist society. This is what proletarians need to re-appropriate in the light of the experience of 1917. 

SB (Originally published in WR203, March 1997, and published again in WR 301, February 2007)

Ken Loach’s latest film, I, Daniel Blake, has already generated a lot of ink. First because it is the work of a very expressive film-maker who is well-versed in criticising the capitalist world. Second, because the film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, to widespread surprise. Since then there have been numerous articles in the press, praising or attacking the film, seeing it either as a real social thermometer or as an alarmist tear-jerker.

We don’t intend to portray Ken Loach as a new Eisenstein[1], or his film as a new equivalent to the Communist Manifesto, or to see it as a sentimentalist apology for the British Labour Party, as one or two reviewers have claimed. Even though Loach denounces the “conscious cruelty” of David Cameron and has all kinds of illusions in the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, none of this really effects the quality of the film: it sometimes happens that a work of art escapes its author and takes on a life of its own.

In this film, Loach inveighs against the destruction of whole sectors of the economy and sides with the unemployed who are told to go out looking for non-existent jobs. This reality of de-industrialisation and this approach by the state are certainly realities. Ken Loach has the merit of showing this while going beyond observing how miserable everything is, pushing his audience towards a real indignation against the current state of affairs. He has the rather rare quality of providing a lucid and dynamic image of the consequences of the capitalist crisis in Britain – consequences which can easily be transposed elsewhere – and of exposing the totalitarian face of the state through its practice of social exclusion, repression, and dehumanisation.

All the passages in the film showing the “treatment”, via the telephone,  of the unemployed by “healthcare professionals” who are made to function as the guard-dogs of the system, would be laughable if they were not so realistic. This facet of the democratic state – in fact its dictatorship – is no fiction: the capitalist system, its democratic institutions, including those which are supposed to support or protect vulnerable, elderly, sick or unemployed people, function like a juggernaut and like tools of exclusion. Trying to get the minimum needed to live on becomes a real battle where you pay heavily for the least slip in writing, the slightest sign of the “wrong” attitude, and often end up starving. Daniel’s partner Katie is more or less cornered when she falls hungrily on a tin of beans after going with him to a food bank.

But what’s really at stake in this “social” movie, as with all the others, is whether it can envisage a perspective of resistance, of struggle against the crisis and the capitalist Moloch. Is such a struggle possible? Who could lead it? It’s on this level that you have to judge the real qualities of this kind of film and few are up to it. Most remain at the stage of merely recognising powerlessness or retreating into ethereal ideals.

On the first question, Ken Loach’s film expresses all the difficulties of the working class to fight back and confront the state. Today, most attempts to resist, to keep your head above water, are limited to the level of the individual or to narrow networks of mutual aid. The title of the film, I, Daniel Blake, is a clue in itself: individual self-assertion as the only possibility.

Here we are very far indeed from a collective, offensive class solidarity, which is a real weapon in the struggle and in developing a long-term perspective of going beyond capitalist society. This is not in the frame of the film and none of its characters gives any sign of raising it. The only situation where we catch a glimpse of something more collective is when Daniel reacts by daubing graffiti on the walls of the job centre. Enthusiastic reactions and applause from passers-by: they understand his action and perhaps live in the same situation, but at no point do they express solidarity by coming to talk to him or opposing the cops who come to arrest him. They are no more than impotent spectators. Only one individual reacts more openly: a homeless person, who you imagine to be marginalised, probably alcoholic – a whole symbol of powerlessness.

But the film does have some small, limited moments, where we see human reactions, people listening to each other, helping each other, taking pleasure in sharing. Between Daniel and Katie, her children, with a former work-mate, a neighbour, an employee at the job centre who really wants to help but whose initiatives come to nothing – all this is a source of humanity, even if none of them can see how to go any further.

Clearly, behind the immediate incapacity to change anything, we feel that there are sparks of life, possibilities that contain the basis of really human social relations. This is not at all like the film by Stéphane Brizé, La loi du marché, where behind the same observation of social problems and the reality of unemployment the most awful nihilism is advertised, without a trace of hope, without any perspective, a totally static vision of society, which can give rise to nothing but “no future”, to death[2].

Another aspect emerges very strongly from this film: the dignity of the characters, their sense of self-worth. This is definitely one of the qualities of the film. The key to any proletarian’s self-worth is to hold on to moral values, to defend their dignity whatever the circumstances. The defence of this proletarian morality is what reveals the possibility of a future in which humanity can go beyond barbarism, beyond each-against-all. Daniel Blake expresses this when he discovers that Katie has had to resort to prostitution to avoid dying of hunger. This devastates him more than anything, even more than his own drama. Dignity again when Daniel insists that “When you lose your self-respect you're done for”.

But this proletarian dignity is also contradicted by the words attributed to him and read out at his funeral:

“My name is Daniel Blake, I am a man, not a dog…I, Daniel Blake, am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less”. Daniel sees himself as a citizen rather than a proletarian. But to be a citizen means belonging to a nation, not a social class. The difference is fundamental, above all for the proletarians. It’s always in the name of citizenship or the defence of democracy, or the Republic, that the ruling ideology tries to mobilise us for the interests of our exploiters. This can only be the logic of the bourgeoisie. The defence of citizenship is not the logic of the proletariat. It leads to competition and division and the perpetuation of the capitalist world.

As Daniel Blake expresses it, his situation is shared by millions of exploited proletarians, thrown into precariousness, excluded by the capitalist system. Whether it’s in Britain, France, China or anywhere else, the same capitalist laws of wage labour exert their violence on us. Even when it wears a democratic mask, capital divides us, grinds us down, kills us.

Real class solidarity, which is a necessity for the future of humanity, must above all be expressed by struggle: a conscious, collective struggle which goes beyond national frontiers. The phrase from the Communist Manifesto, “the workers have no country” is no dream. It’s the key to transforming the world.

Stopio, 15.12.16

Today everyone wants to talk about the working class. At the last UK general election Cameron claimed to speak in the name of “hard working people” and Theresa May has gone one better in wanting to represent the working class, while UKIP claims to be able to speak for – and take the votes of – the workers who have become disillusioned with the Labour Party which imposed austerity on them for the 13 years of the Blair and Brown governments.

But when workers struggle for their own interests it is a different story: Mrs May’s spokesperson condemned the strikes called in December as “completely unacceptable” and showing a “shared contempt” for ordinary people.

Although strike days are at a historic low at present, the disputes going on this winter involve many of the concerns all workers face, especially when they are an average of £20 a week worse off than before the financial crash. To take some examples: BA cabin crew taken on since 2010, in the “mixed fleet branch” with worse pay and conditions, have rejected a derisory 2% pay offer and are concerned about cuts in training courses; workers at Crown post offices are concerned about job security, due to closure of offices, as well as pension changes; tube workers also concerned about jobs with closure of ticket offices, as well as bullying management; rail workers are concerned about safety on trains, as well as jobs for guards. These disputes illustrate the fact that what members of the working class sell to the capitalist, their labour power, is not simply a commodity like any other sold at around the minimum cost of production. If supply outstrips demand it results in the suffering of unemployment. And the cost of labour power, the wage or salary, has a cultural and moral component according to what is considered an acceptable standard of living, and according to what the workers can win by struggling. While there is a working class there will be class struggle.

Trade unions are not the voice of the working class

Does this mean that the trade unions, which after all are negotiating these disputes, speak for the working class? Not at all. If we take the example of the strikes on Southern Rail over driver operated trains, an issue of safety that affects drivers, guards and passengers, we can see that the unions are not working according to the principles of solidarity that underpin all workers’ struggles. Not only have ASLEF and the RMT kept the drivers and guards separate, when they both face the same issue, but ASLEF, the TUC and Southern Rail cooked up a deal for drivers that would isolate and undermine the guards’ struggle, and actively oppose any tendencies for solidarity. They are acting according to the principles of insurance – pay your dues to ASLEF and we will provide certain benefits – in opposition to the working class principle of solidarity. The vote to reject the deal shows that this principle remains alive in the working class.

At this time it is certainly very difficult to grasp the nature of the working class and its struggle, and the revolutionary potential it carries within it. Not only are the unions able to reduce almost every struggle to a question of their negotiation, over the heads of the workers; not only is almost every politician claiming to defend capitalism and nationalism in the name of the working class; but this comes more than a quarter of a century after 1989 when the fall of the Soviet Union was used for a barrage of propaganda purporting to show that there is no possibility of any better society than capitalism, as the Stalinist counter-revolution performed one last service for capital through its collapse. Nevertheless proletarian struggle still contains the revolutionary perspective it showed 100 years ago in the Russian revolution. The solidarity necessary for any struggle is a small indication of this, contradicting the capitalist principle of “every man for himself”.  

Alex 17.2.17