Every picket line and strike can build working class people’s confidence
The working class has never been so massive or potentially powerful as it is today—it’s a fact those in power would like us to forget. They don’t want workers to realise that their class can be, as Karl Marx put it, the “gravedigger of capitalism”.
Bosses may own the shops, call centres, factories, and machinery, but nothing runs without workers. Capitalism is a system reliant on profit. But profit-making is only possible because the capitalist class doesn’t pay workers what their labour is worth. Bosses keep what’s left over, the surplus value, for themselves.
They pay workers, in theory, just enough to feed and clothe themselves, and look after their families. Socialists call this type of robbery exploitation. But capitalist society is not only marked by exploitation—its other main feature is competition. Rival capitalists are in an endless battle to make the most profits.
The drive to compete has created a system that no one really has control of. It’s prone to crisis and instability. It’s a system where profit comes before people’s needs. And it’s the driving force behind all the interlocked crises facing working people today, including war, climate change and oppression.
Yet the conditions that create such massive suffering for workers also create the potential for a battle to topple the system that created them. For their own convenience capitalist bosses pushed workers to come together in towns and sprawling cities. And the bosses’ constant drive to develop new technology to grow their profits means workers have never been so well equipped to fight back.
Workers have been able to organise, develop trade unions and mount a fightback against the bosses. Never has an exploited class in history had such potential to take over and run society. But workers can only achieve this change through collective action.
Workers can’t dream of dividing up factories or supermarkets like peasants divide up landowners’ plots. If one worker went out on strike for pay, the boss could punish them. If the whole workplace walked out together, the strength of the workers would be much greater.
Exploitation forces workers together as a collective, giving them the potential to come together to fight. Workers are a collective class in exploitation as well as liberation. In the Socialist Workers Party we believe the working class is the only class that can crush capitalism and usher in a socialist society. Our vision of what this would be like is clear in two ways.
The first is that workers who actually run society will make decisions about how it is organised. The second is that it will be a society based on meeting humanity’s needs, not making a profit. To achieve this transformation we need an uprising of millions of workers across the world.
As Marx put it, a worker’s revolution is the only way to rid workers of the “muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew”. We don’t believe that socialism can be imposed from above through parliament or guerrilla warfare—or even electing good left wing MPs.
State capitalism, seen in Russia under Josef Stalin, put the means of production in the hands of the hands of bureaucrats. He called that socialism, but workers were not in control. The authentic Marxist tradition shows that socialism can only come from below, from workers themselves.
Workers can throw off the horrors of the capitalist system when they act in their own interests as a class together. As Marx argued workers must become a “class for itself”. That’s why visiting every picket line and backing every strike is so critical. Only struggle can build worker’s confidence and offer them a glimpse of how they could seize control of their lives and destinies.
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