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Workers' Liberty'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class'Workers' Liberty Australia |
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This is the text of a leaflet that was distributed by Workers Liberty at the S11-13 blockade of the World Economic Forum, Crown Casino, Melbourne.
From the World Economic Forum, the bosses of global capital will go away to push forward their plans for profit. What will we do? Here are some suggestions:
The bosses of the big corporations represented at the WEF do not just come together to promote the cause of profit once in a while at special occasions. They do it every day. If the alliances built around S11-12 are allowed to fragment again into dispersed campaigns and one-off actions, it will weaken us. The movement is diverse. There is no point denying that. Only by making room for proper open political debate among us will we develop a common strategy to unify large numbers. In the meantime compromises will be necessary. But there are plenty of possibilities for united activity. We need to build a movement as multifarious, as nimble-footed, as little limited to set-piece spectaculars, as capital itself, and one which also is capable of drawing in and offering channels of involvement to every worker and to every person willing to ally themselves to the working class in the great worldwide struggle between capital and labour.
The power, the riches, and the new technologies of modern capital are produced not by financial speculators or sharp sales managers, but by the collective efforts of workers of many sorts. The profiteers appear as the active agent of the whole process only because they can sustain a social order in which the cooperation of labour and science can be expressed only through the presiding voice of capital. As soon as workers become even halfway conscious that we, not capital, are the creative force - and that we can stop capital's flow of profit whenever we have enough solidarity, organisation and determination to stop production - the rule of capital is limited or endangered.
A drive to take on capital, not just in its assembly halls and ceremonial chambers, but in the clatter and roar of its production lines, means taking our cue not just from headline events in the capitalist media, but also and primarily from the concerns of working-class people in their daily struggles. It means a strategic priority for helping and developing rank and file movements in the unions and workplaces. Many activists other than trade unionists can contribute to this, supporting struggles, building campaigns, making connections. It also means organising working people in their community battles and arguing for the unions to take up the issues of all the oppressed.
In the 21st century, capital is being reproduced much larger on a world scale; but so is working-class resistance. In South Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Indonesia and other countries, assertive new workers' movements have emerged. They have fought not just on wages and hours, but on wider issues, as in the Korean unions' recent strikes against sexual harassment and the Brazilian Workers' Party's stand for lesbian and gay rights. Our solidarity should be global. Our cause is not anti-globalist, but anti-capitalist. Against capitalist free trade, we advocate not national protectionism, or renewed economic barriers between countries, but an international alliance to level up working-class conditions across the world and to bring global wealth under common ownership and democratic planning.
The movement cannot afford to be dependent on analysis and information from sympathetic but more or less detached academics and journalists. Activists themselves need to develop core groups which can combine activism with intensive analysis, research, self-education and study. Capital can push ahead "instinctively" without any strategy beyond its inbuilt priority of the bottom line. We have to depend on the clarity of our awareness, vision, and strategic long view to give shape and strength to our efforts. We are for the strengthening of the organised revolutionary socialist groups in the movement - in the first place our own, Workers' Liberty - and for debate, dialogue and cooperation between them to build a revolutionary socialist party.
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