by Roger Silverman
We’re witnessing the return of nightmares that we’d always been told had been relegated to ancient history. There had been no pandemics since the flu of 1918; no major slump since the great depression in the 1930s; no threat of world war since 1945; no fear of nuclear annihilation since the 1962 Cuban crisis; no trace of inflation since the 1970s.
Just look now: plague; slump; war; inflation. And even if we could somehow escape these deadly threats, capitalism still dooms humanity by choking and poisoning and plundering the environment with floods and drought and forest fires.
But not everyone is complaining. Just in the two years since the start of the global pandemic, the world’s ten richest men have seen their global wealth double to $1.5 trillion: that’s $1.5 million million.
The 0.1% are getting grossly richer by the minute, while the mass of the population are being forced down deeper and deeper into poverty and hunger. No wonder we’re in the midst of a worldwide uprising, a wave of protest that dwarfs the revolutions of 1848, or 1918, or certainly 1968. From Colombia to Lebanon to Sudan to Belarus to Sri Lanka and countless points in between, millions of people are in revolt.
In Britain too, we’re witnessing a mass uprising by railway workers, postal and telecoms workers, dockers, airport ground staff, bus drivers… We’d have to go back half a century to the 1970s to witness a comparable situation. Then Mrs Thatcher had deluded herself that by shutting down Britain’s productive manufacturing capacity – destroying the miners and shipbuilders and car plant workers – she could cow the workers into submission. Now her successors are confronted by strikes of hospital doctors, teachers, university lecturers, barristers, and GPs at one end of the scale and Amazon delivery drivers, office cleaners and Uber drivers at the other. We’re on the eve of a mass revolt by millions of workers resisting poverty. Calls for a general strike suddenly sound almost trite and commonplace.
Yet the working class finds itself politically disenfranchised. Where is the political opposition? Originally created by the trade unions to defend the interests of the working class, the Labour Party is dominated by a crypto-Tory clique. Starmer is hell-bent on appeasing the ruling class and reassuring them that Labour is once again “safe”: on driving out the hundreds of thousands of activists who under Jeremy Corbyn’s left leadership had surged into its ranks to build it into the biggest mass party in Europe. In the 2017 election, Labour’s radical manifesto inspired an extra three and a half million votes compared to the previous election two years earlier. Even in the 2019 election – a serious setback – Labour still won more votes than in 2015, or 2010… or even 2005 when Labour won.
Under the current alien leadership, thousands have had their membership summarily “terminated” without a hearing or right of appeal, and huge numbers have dropped out in disgust. Membership has slumped by at least 250,000; party finances have dropped from a record £13 million surplus to bankruptcy; and voting figures in successive by-elections have fallen by a catastrophic two-thirds since the Corbyn era.
One way or another, the working class will find its voice and a route towards the creation of a mass socialist party. Meanwhile, while there will certainly be independent left candidates standing in many constituencies at the next election (including mine, in Newham), no individual, no matter how charismatic, can launch such a party by sheer force of personality. The immediate task is to mobilise the hundreds of thousands who had previously rallied to Corbyn’s banner, and especially to establish a strong base in the trade unions.
Millions are looking for a political voice to confront this government of speculators, hedge fund sharks and black money launderers, and to speak out for the workers on poverty wages, the families living off food banks, the households without heating, the youth without a future. (According to respectable opinion polls, 70% of under-25s in Britain are in favour of “socialism”.)
One immediate task is to build a united front against the nightmare of crippling price rises. “Can’t pay won’t pay” is not just a snappy slogan; it’s a clear statement of stark reality. Non-payment is not a matter of choice but a literal fact of life: millions of people simply can’t pay. We should all unite around a mass campaign of direct action: marches and demonstrations, pickets of the energy companies; occupations of supermarkets and food monopolies; support for strikes for higher pay; blockades and pickets. We should call for a government freeze on price rises; an immediate 15% pay and benefits rise; a freeze on energy prices, legal curbs to keep prices to affordable levels; automatic rises in pay and benefits to keep pace with inflation.