The Seventies changed everything. Working class struggles at that time ensured that the ruling class could not rule in the old way, so they created the monster Thatcher to destroy our class by destroying our industry and causing mass unemployment – absolute decline.
Every government since Thatcher has been a variation on her destructive theme. Every capitalist government to come will be a variation on the same destructive theme, if we permit it.
Since Thatcher, there can be no return to the 1940s, or to the 1950s, the 1960s or the 1970s. The decline is new, different, and ever more dangerous.
But what to do? Next year’s general election offers us only a choice of the next monkey to the EU organ grinder, but a choice of monkeys is no choice. The state machine we have does not represent the vast majority of the British people, the working class, and so is not democratic. Whose interests does it serve? It serves only the interests of the tiny, increasingly foreign-oriented ruling class whose interests are wholly opposed to ours.
We are now ruled under the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty, although we have never voted on it. The EU can take whatever new powers it wants, without ever risking another treaty or referendum. All the parliamentary parties connive at this. They don’t mention it, never mind oppose it.
The LabourParty comes of course from a different place than the Tories and the Liberals, because it was created by the working class, but by living with capitalism, as social democracy, it has ended up in the same place – in the embrace of finance capital.
The “left” wants us to unite behind a reborn, reformed Labour Party. This reactionary idea would take us back into the swamp of social democracy, of muddle and confusion of thought. Let the “left” try to unify the “left”. The task is not only impossible, it is pointless as well, and has no connection with the unity of our class.
The answer lies with us. We the working class must take control.
The British ruling class has always been one of capitalism’s commanding heights. It has played a key role ever since the Bolshevik victory in 1917, when it took the lead in waging unceasing, relentless class war on the revolution.
This war took every form: the War of Intervention of 1917-22 waged by 14 armies, killing millions of people; the criminal, illegal economic blockade (defined correctly in international law as aggression), designed to cause hunger and unemployment in the Soviet Union; the endless cranking out of lies against socialism.
The ruling class in Britain took the lead, too, with Thatcher, in promoting the primacy of the free market: look to her role in the Maastricht treaty for the origin of the free movement of labour and capital in Europe that is devastating employment not just in Britain but around the Continent.
In our refusal to make revolution here, we have permitted reaction to be deployed around the world. We have allowed Britain to become a breeding ground for the ideology of globalisation and a base for the rotten edifice of finance capitalism. Yet when the British working class seizes power here, it will change the world.
So if you really want to save the world, save Britain. Take responsibility, take control.