Free The Wage Slaves (1)

The capitalist world is rotten to the core and the future looks grim. But the future is in our hands.The Socialist Party rarely calls upon our fellow workers to do anything but think for themselves but today we ask them to do more. We demand that on this day of trade union protest they cease their allegiances to those political parties that have brought them and can only bring them misery and strife. We shall not be identifying with the TUC’s slogan that “Britain needs a pay-rise” because we do not just want to win a better deal for wage-slaves. We want to abolish slavery. We are wage-slavery abolitionists. The unions have been fighting over and over again the same battles they were fighting in the nineteenth century, without ever achieving their aim of "fair wages" and security.

We are also throwing down the gauntlet that trade unionists disassociate themselves with a party of political careerists ho treat the workers with  contempt. Expressions and outbursts of class struggle among the workers can be used as a means of educating workers to the real political struggle - socialism. They should not be used as a means to gain leadership over the workers, or to lead them along a political path they do not understand. We are determined to bring the day closer when the working class no longer any more use for the Labour Party’s double-dealing quackery. What of the TUC, supposedly a co-ordinating body for trade-union struggles? Representing as it does the political leanings of its affiliated big unions, and working hand in glove with the Labour Party leaders, its preoccupations has not been seriously to organize working-class industrial action but to manoeuvre to secure the return of a Labour government at the next election.The Labour Party have never had the interest of the workers at heart.

Trade union action is necessary if the working class are to prevent themselves from being driven into the ground by the never-satisfied demands of profit. We should not deceive ourselves into believing that joining a union will free us from exploitation. This does not mean that the working class should sit back and do nothing. 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.

The inspiring struggles for democracy and against austerity we are seeing around the world have a common cause – they are the divided and isolated battles of workers against the relatively united attack of the world's ruling class in its attempt to resolve its economic crisis. We need to follow the ruling-class example – come together and organise in order to resolve the crisis in our way. That is, by organising a political party dedicated to taking state power out of the hands of the ruling class, and to establishing socialism. And given the extremely serious nature of the ecological catastrophe we are all facing, this is not just a nice idea. Increasingly, it's a matter of survival.  Within capitalism the trade union struggle over wages and conditions must go on but the real struggle is to take over the means of wealth production and distribution. It may seem rather too obvious, to those fetishising "industrial struggle", but what the cause of socialism needs is socialists. The struggles of the working class of the last two hundred years should tell us one thing - that it is futile to seek to fight a rearguard action against capitalism.