What is class struggle and whose interests does the British state represent?
By GSA, August 2023
In recent years, widespread discontent has resulted in strike actions across Britain’s public sector, including among barristers, rail workers, postal workers, teachers and doctors. The protests are the result of decades of austerity, pension cuts, underfunding, stagnation of real wages and inflationary prices. Strikers have demanded inflation-proof pay increases and better working conditions, to which the British state has responded with hostility and contempt. To curb the unrest, the state has offered small wage improvements while, at the same time, employing repressive methods. For example, in the context of the RMT rail strikes, the state has sided with the train operator companies in suppressing workers. It has also threatened workers with anti-strike legislations to ensure that disruptions would be kept to a minimum level. The main intention of anti-strike laws is to undermine collective strength and weaken the bargaining power of workers.
The current strike wave raises various questions, such as what is class struggle? What are the conditions that lead to strike action under capitalist democracy? How can we explain the hostile attitude of the capitalist state towards workers? Whose interests does the British state represent? Before we venture into a nuanced analysis of strikes, trade unions and vanguardism, we begin with a brief analysis of capitalist democracy.
Capitalist democracy
Most people speak of democracy in general terms. By concealing class relations and class domination, they present democracy as an inclusive political institution that represents all classes and sections of the population on an equal basis. However, in reality there is no such thing as a “pure” democracy. All forms of government have a class character which is determined by the existing production relations. Under capitalism, democracy is a tool used by the rich minority to exploit the working masses. The democratic capitalist state promotes the interests of the capitalist class and obtains the support of the masses by presenting these interests as the ones of the general public. Elections, for example, are conducted in such a way as not to threaten the interests of the rulling class. Through the electoral system, the state is able to give priority to capital while, at the same time, obtaining a degree of social stability (this stability, as we will see later, is only temporary). The recent introduction of anti-strike laws epitomises the attitude of the state towards workers. New legislation will force striking workers back to work and empower employers to fire those who continue to fight for the collective interests of workers. Thus, the state acts on behalf of employers and attempts to paralyse the collective power of the working masses. It is important to note that the democratic capitalist state tolerates certain freedoms, such as the freedom to organise. However, it does so only to the extent that these freedoms do not negatively impact the accumulation of capital.
Class Struggle
Capitalism consists of a small number of capitalists and a large number of workers. While capitalists own the means of production such as raw materials and factories, workers are seperated from them and, as a result, are forced to sell their labour power to survive. When capitalists buy labour power they agree to pay a price to the seller. This is the wage, which is only meant to cover the subsistence needs of workers and their families. Employers seek constantly to reduce wages in order to obtain higher profits. Workers, on the other hand, constantly struggle for higher wages in order to maintain and improve their living standards. The constant struggle over wages between the employers and employees marks the principal conflict under capitalism. Although living standards may improve as a result of this struggle, workers continue to be subject to ever-increasing relative impoverishment since the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster than wages.
Workers in Lewisham protesting against the attempt to convert the Prendergast group of schools into a multi-academy trust –a semi-private organisation.
Workers recognise their shared condition of struggle and become aware of the power they hold when united against their bosses. Strike is an important tool through which workers realise their collective strength. Collective actions against employers may allow workers to obtain concessions – such as higher wages. Importantly, however, strikes involve various sacrifices, on the part of workers, such as loss of wages and dismissals. Moreover, workers who participate in strikes are frequently subject to policing and intimidation by the government. As we have seen, the government may introduce tougher legislations to make the strike action ineffective. Strike action thus has the potential of making workers understand clearly that the capitalist state acts in the interests of employers and not that of workers. They may realise, through this experience, that their struggle is not just against their employer but also against the state, i.e. the defeat of the capitalist state is an essential condition for their emancipation. It is thus the hostile reaction of the state and employers which politicises the working class – not the strike action itself. As Lenin puts it, strikes are “a school of war” in which workers learn how to fight for their own emancipation. Workers do not need to read any books to understand the political character of the state and its bureaucratic institutions; through confrontation, the capitalist state exposes its own class character.
Strike actions are, for the most part, supported by trade unions which organise and mobilise workers. By articulating the lived experiences of workers, unions empower and encourage workers to demand higher wages, pension reforms and decent working conditions. However, there are limitations with regards to what they can achieve. Since trade unions are localised – their outreach is limited to a specific workplace or sector – they are not in a position to address class struggle in the economy as a whole. This necessitates the existence of a vanguard party, whose function is both to coordinate the actions of workers and trade unions and also to carry out political tasks such as educating the working class. Before taking a closer look at the role of the vanguard, we will analyse in more detail the limitations of trade unions, as well as their reactionary tendencies in the form of economism, wageism and trade unionism.
Dangers of economism
Economism means focusing on the narrow economic interests and immediate concerns of the workers rather than the larger political struggle to overthrow the capitalist system and build a socialist society. As we have seen above, strike action raises class consciousness but it does not in and of itself raise the political class consciousness1 of workers. This is because strike action by itself is nothing but a spontaneous act – an outcome of accumulated everyday sufferings of the exploited. The economism of trade unions reduces these sufferings to economic questions such as the level of wages and thus fails to raise important political questions and provide education to the masses. Consequently, workers lack the analytical tools to understand various social and political phenomena from a working-class perspective. For example, what causes wages to go down? What causes inflation? What are the roots of workers’ suffering? What are the roles of various classes in society? Why are women and the LGBTQ community still oppressed? What about the question of national oppression in Scotland and Ireland? The lack of political education makes it easy for the capitalist state to coop and appropriate workers’ struggle and, in this process, manufacture answers to these questions which suit the capitalist class.
In Britain, the tendency to reduce workers’ struggle to questions of everyday economic sufferings can be witnessed in the current strike wave led by major unions such as CWU, RMT, IWGB, UCU, PCS and UNISON. The current trade union leadership does not put any effort into studying and explaining the socio-economic conditions underlying workers’ struggle. For example, no effort is put into developing an argument against the inflationary theory put forward by the ruling class to justify wage reductions. Nor is there any effort made to think about alternative systems of socialism. None of the trade union leaders offer any concrete political programme for struggling workers. Instead of developing a programme to overthrow capitalism, they act as facilitators of capital, reducing the structural questions of capitalist exploitation to the greed of a few employers. However, the working class can only free itself from suffering by overthrowing the condition of exploitation generated by capitalism. Any attempt to redress workers’ suffering without understanding its cause will set back the struggle and pave the way for the defeat of the working class.
Striking PCS members, April 2023
To overcome economism, workers require a mass-based working class organisation which aims not only to raise work-based class consciousness but also to lead the political struggle to overthrown capitalism and initiate a transition towards socialism. Under the current conditions of economism and trade unionsim there is a dire need to build a political vanguard which not only coordinates work-based struggles but also actively fosters a revolutionary consciousness among the people to prepare the grounds for a mass assault on capitalism.
The importance of the vanguard
We have seen that trade unions, due to their focus on work-based struggles such as the improvement of wages, are unable to transform the immediate work-place class consciousness into a political class consciousness. Transforming the immediate working class consciousness into a progressive political force to overthrow capitalism requires the presence of a vanguard. Let’s analyse why this is the case.
One may begin by asking the following questions: are workers in a position independently to produce theories of revolution? Can workers by themselves learn lessons from historical struggles against capitalism, summarise them and develop new theories? Can the working class spontaneously produce its own intellectuals who will lead the struggle to end oppression? To all of these questions, the answer is NO. History is replete with examples of failed working class upheavals and uprisings. This history teaches us that spontaneous outbursts of the working class cannot in and of themselves end oppression. A vanguard, which aims systematically to develop revolutionary methods and theory, is needed to lead and guide the working class struggle.
What does vanguardism mean? A vanguard party consists of the most class-conscious and politically advanced members of society who are trained in revolutionary theory and practice, including organising and educating workers to overthrow capitalism. Vanguard members comes from all social classes, including the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie classes. However, any bourgeoisie member must detach from their social class origin and politically adopt the socialist ideology that serves the interests of the working class. The vanguard organisation and its members asses the sporadic and unrefined ideas of workers by situating themselves among the masses. They systematise and refine these ideas and go back to the masses to test them. Vanguard organisations function in a myriad of ways. However, an important function of all vanguards is their ability to develop concrete analyses of concrete conditions, as well as developing revolutionary theory. Furthermore, based on practical experiences, the vanguard will continuously make theoretical adjustments and, vice versa, improve practices based on new theory. In other words, for the vanguard, the relation between theory and practice is dialectical.
By adopting a revolutionary mass line, the vanguard creates various mass organisations to mobilise and agitate people on specific issues, such as students who are struggling to scrap student fees or workers fighting for higher wages. The relationship between the vanguard and these organisations is also dialectical; they exist both as a unity and as autonomous bodies. The vanguard and its mass organisations produce posters, leaflets and pamphlets in order to educate people in political and economic theory. In addition to literature, they use culture – such as theatre, music and painting – to advance political class consciousness and train the masses in theories of capitalism and socialism. They firmly locate workers’ miseries in the contradiction of the capital–wage labour relation and explain this contradiction through educational programmes. The vanguard not only educates masses on various political and economic questions but also learns from the masses. The vanguard, as the workers’ intelligentsia, sums up the historic struggles of the working class and uses the historical summed up experiences as the basis for developing new practices. Importantly, unlike social democrats, the vanguard organisation does not reduce political and economic questions to moral questions of profit and greed.
It is important to note that the working class is not a homogenous entity. It is shaped by a number of contradictions, including the contradiction between manual and intellectual labour. Moreover, it harbours various reactionary tendencies, including racism, sexism and homophobia which divides and weakens workers as a social class. Only a vanguard is able to expose and resolve these contradictions by focusing on educating the working class and its allies.
Currently, in Britain most of the trade unions are linked to the Labour Party. They identify this party as the vanguard to lead the struggle of the working class. However, in reality Labour is an imperialist party, complicit in various war crimes across the world and in strengthening capital in its exploitation of workers – there is plenty of literature providing proof of this. The Labour Party neither offers a political programme to overthrow capitalism nor fights on behalf of workers to obtain concessions from employers. Rather than shattering the illusions of bourgeois democracy, the Labour Party strengthens the hegemony of liberal democracy. Other political parties like Socialist Workers Party, Workers Liberty and many other mainstream “socialist” parties lack the potential to become a vanguard. For example, in the context of the national question, they lack a strong theory and political programme to address the concrete experiences of various national independence movements. This also applies to the question of informal workers – these organisations lack an economic theory for understanding changes in the labour regime. Their contemporary understandings of politics and political economy are filled with cliches from the past.
This article serves as a call to build a mass workers’ party to lead us towards socialist revolution.