There's a thought
WORKERS, JANUARY 2009 ISSUE
Have we British workers any idea what is just around the corner? Do we, the sole remnants of the national entity, understand what we have allowed to develop?
It was clear by the end of the 1970s that Britain had become an industrial wasteland. It was equally clear that we could not survive on finance capital and services alone.
We have also abandoned much of our agriculture and fishing. One wonders what our collective thought has been.
History teaches us that we have been in industrial decline since 1870, when we produced a third of the world’s industrial goods. This decline is not some natural phenomenon out of our control. It is a product of perpetual lack of investment by “British” capitalists. Greed, pure and simple.
There is no wonderful symmetry of nature in being the first to decline because we were the first to develop. There is no justification for being the first to commit suicide because we were the first to organise to resist capitalism. Both processes are in our hands. In other words, both are influenced by our thought processes.
We are suffering the consequences of allowing a strategy of reliance on the madness of gambling with other people’s money. We are going to see a massive and rapid economic decline, worse than that of any other once industrial nation, because “our” capitalists have always been the most greedy.
The only alternative to dealing with this is a future of itinerant pauperism.
Assuming that enough of us are willing to continue, and not surrender to degradation, what can be done? The first, and most important, step is to recognise that our rejection of conscious theory, and our embracing of the false hope of social democracy, was an error.
We have been too cynical, too sceptical. We have shied away from ideas. We should have listened to Marx when he worked here and not surrendered our political thought to others by inventing the Labour Party.
When we have reclaimed the theory based on us, and developed for our use, Marxism, and we have each taken responsibility for its collective development, we can not only survive but we can build Britain anew.
Now, there’s a thought.