TUESDAY’S speech to the Labour Party conference has been greeted with an outpouring of joy from the leadership of the trade unions and the bourgeois press, all of whom hailed it as providing a ‘vision’ for the country and a way out of the economic crisis that is smashing up British capitalism.
According to Len McClusky, the leader of Unite: ‘It was the best speech from a Labour leader I have heard and it will offer hope to voters’, a view echoed by Unison which went as far as to claim: ‘He offered a vision and hope to the young, to the vulnerable, to the sick and to the elderly based on decency and fairness’.
Miliband’s speech with its constant reference to ‘One Nation’ directly attempts to portray him and the Labour Party as the true inheritors of the 19th century Tory politician Benjamin Disraeli who first coined the term back in 1872.
In reaching back to Disraeli, Miliband has revealed the reactionary outlook of the Labour Party.
The aim of Disraeli’s one nation position was to try and enlist the support of the working class in the struggle of the landed aristocracy against the rising industrial bourgeoisie.
In order to achieve this alliance he expressed verbal sympathy with the plight of workers and the poor.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, were scathing about this attempt to hoodwink the working class into supporting the reactionary aristocracy in their struggle to preserve their feudal privileges under capitalism.
Marx and Engels even devoted a section of the Communist Manifesto to the ‘Young England’ group established by Disraeli, branding them reactionary feudal ‘socialists’ who extolled the exploitation of the working class under the feudal system as somehow superior to the exploitation they suffered under capitalism.
This ludicrous attempt to con the working class into support for the aristocracy, which they describe as ‘half lamentation, half lampoon’, never got off the ground, the working class were not stupid and refused to renounce their class interests in favour of a historically redundant feudal class.
Today, under conditions where capitalism has reached the end of its road as a progressive system, Miliband is attempting to con the working class into a similar alliance with the capitalist class, only this time by trying to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad capitalists.
This means he can verbally slag off ‘fat cat’ bankers and ‘casino banking’ while demanding that workers pull together, and make every sacrifice necessary in order to preserve the very capitalist system that gave rise to them, the system that is demanding workers pay to keep the profits rolling in.
Far from giving hope to workers, youth, the elderly and sick, as McClusky claims, all Miliband, Balls and the entire ‘one nation’ Labour Party are offering is to continue the cuts to pay and benefits and carry on with the privatisation and destruction of the NHS and Welfare State all in the name of saving the nation.
The truth is that there is no ‘one nation’, we live under a class system divided between those who own the means of production and the banks and the working class whose labour is exploited for the profit of the capitalist class.
To preserve their profits, the capitalist class is prepared to drive the rate of exploitation up while seeking to take away every gain that workers have made over the past 150 years – and no lying speeches from Miliband can change this fact.
The burning issue of the hour is the revolutionary struggle of workers throughout the world to overthrow this rotten, bankrupt capitalist system and advance society to socialism through the world revolution.
As Marx and Engels famously wrote: ‘The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win.’
