THE TUC’s ‘Put People First’ march on Saturday brought 50,000 workers and youth onto the streets marching behind powerful contingents from the GMB and the UNISON trade unions in particular.
The march was international, with large contingents of workers from Belgium, France and Italy, with trade union leaders present from these countries and also from Australia and the United States.
Everywhere, workers are facing the same crisis, and the same problems.
There were many young people also taking part in the march, with their own improvised banners, including one declaring what every marcher was absolutely convinced of – that ‘Capitalism is not Working’!
The crucial point, however, remained undeclared, that capitalism in crisis must be overthrown, and that this can be done only by the working class and the middle class carrying out a socialist revolution.
A socialist revolution, that is carried through worldwide, to overthrow the capitalist order and to bring in nationalised and planned economies under workers’ control and management, replacing the profit motive, and the anarchy of capitalist production, with planned production for people’s needs, is the only way forward for humanity.
It is definitively the only way to defend jobs, wages, homes, basic rights and deal with the impact of climate change, by moving forward to a higher form of society and to new and revolutionary forms of production.
Without a socialist revolution to consign the capitalist system worldwide into its grave, the cap-italist crisis cannot be resolved in the interests of the working class, and the problems that capitalism has created can only become more desperate.
The trade union bureaucracy that was leading Saturday’s march has no policy to resolve the crisis. It believes in capitalism and only disputes how it should be run. It refuses to even call for the banks to be nationalised under workers’ control.
In the crisis facing the manufacturing industries, it urges workers to accept wage cuts and redundancies, saying that they will stand a better chance of keeping their jobs until the recession ends.
Socialists call for the factories and plants to be occupied and for a general strike action to bring the Brown government down and a workers government in that will expropriate the capitalists.
The trade union leaders continue to support the Brown/bankers government and refuse to challenge it or the bosses.
On the left, the anarchists and others believe that the masses should just be allowed to let off steam, break a few shop windows, and then after clashing with the capitalist state go home feeling better after a bit of action.
That this is an infantile disorder and reaction to capitalism is obvious.
What must be built up is a serious revolutionary leadership of the working class, one that is schooled in the theory and practices of Marxism and able to provide the necessary strategic and tactical leadership for the successful prosecution of the class struggle to the point of the working class taking power, smashing the capitalist state and going forward to socialism on a world scale.
This is the struggle that the capitalist crisis is driving forward at a record speed and intensity.
All workers and youth who are serious about prosecuting the struggle for the world socialist revolution and ridding the world of capitalism should join the WRP and build the Fourth International all over the world.
