Workers United is my blog. I am a supporter of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. TUSC today rests on three pillars, and three out of four ain’t bad. While we don’t [yet] have the vibrant membership organisation that I believe we need, we have signed up the two largest groups of political activists in Britain: The Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. And we also have a trade union, The RMT.
The RMT is the vanguard of trade unions. They will, sooner rather than later, be followed by many other affiliates. Trade unionists are in the process of waking up to the pointlessness of sponsoring their own personal hitman. This pro-capitalist hitman is a Blairite who was elected to defeat Blairism. He is someone now rebranding himself as a One Nation Tory. His name is Ed Miliband.
TUSC has been dismissed by many socialists both inside and outside the Labour Party. Many of our detractors are indeed socialists but they’re not members of TUSC. Not yet. They dismiss TUSC as an organisation whose members hate each other. We should be able to simply laugh off such criticism. And one day we will. But not yet. It’s funny cause it’s true. Or to be precise, it does contain a grain of truth. And one grain is one too many.
Sectarianism is a poison that saps the enthusiasm, attractiveness and potency of the socialist project. We are many, they are few? Why have socialists in Britain and across the world had to console ourselves with such a paliative for a century and more? Why do we fester in a chaotic economic prison, one that condemns so many of our brothers and sisters to grinding poverty, homelessness, wars and civil wars? Not to mention the ever present danger of nuclear holocaust? Why is humanity not fulfilling its full potential?
We suffer all the above and more because that other soundbite, “united we stand, divided we fall,” has not been implemented positively. Its truth has been demonstrated the other way. We, the people, the majority, the exploited and oppressed, we, the poorest 99%, are far from being united. That is our tragedy, comrades. We, the masses, need to get off our knees. And socialists who understand that our enemy is capitalism need to set an example to the rest of the exploited and oppressed. To cut a along story short, we need to stop fighting each other. As Owen Jones has reminded us all, the enemy of socialists is capitalism, not each other.
We need to focus all our anger on those who own the means of production, distribution and exchange. Simultaneously, we need to sow the seeds of disunity within the special bodies of armed men (and women), those whose job it is to protect the wealth and privilege of the richest 1%, those whose wealth is the direct cause of our misery.
The capitalists are parasites, a fact Ralph Miliband must have explained to his idiot son, Ed. The capitalists are rich because of hard work? Yes, that’s true. But it is other people’s hard work. It is the hard work, the blood, sweat and tears of their employees. The wage slaves are exploited, comrades. Profit derives from surplus value. It is high time the expropriated took back what is theirs. And an inevitable first step on the road to achieving that is reintroducing the revolution in theory brought about by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The ideas of Marx and Engels are are not about prediction. Their ideas are about changing society by making the exploited and oppressed conscious of their role in production. Lack of consciousness of their status of as victims of exploitation makes any act of resistance infinintely more difficult. A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work? That is simply impossible under capitalism.
TUSC exists to educate, agitate and organise. We all need to play our part in helping disspel this allegation that TUSC suffers from sectarianism. To the extent it still does, I want to help bring that to an end. I want to help make TUSC the place for all socialists to get together to fulfill Owen Jones vision of socialists uniting to fight capitalism, replacing it with a society for working people, run by working people.
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