Observations: Class struggle and social revolution (1988)

The Observations Column from the June 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a leading article in the Guardian (4 May), the writer arrogantly admonished both the NUS and the P&O employers for getting involved in what the writer termed "19th Century Class Warfare”. However, the class struggle exists because a minority have social and economic power over the majority. The class struggle is the conflict of material interests existing between two antagonistic classes — capital and labour — and is not the figment of a Marxist’s imagination. Nor is it an apparition of the past at odds with the so-called "New Realism” of the 1980s. Under Capitalism the class struggle is unavoidable.

Indeed in the very next column the Guardian editorial highlighted the strikes and civil disturbances currently taking place in Poland. The writer even drew attention to the factors involved: a government forced by economic necessity to remove food subsidies and on the other hand workers struggling for higher wages against state enterprises trying to hold down wages in a bid to increase productivity and become more competitive. So the class struggle also exists in state capitalist countries. State capitalism and private capitalism are after all two sides of the same coin.

Unfortunately for politicians and journalists alike the class struggle is not going to disappear by wishful thinking; nor will it go away by the introduction of economic or social reforms nor by draconian anti-trade union legislation. The state coercion at the disposal of the Polish state, where strikes are in the process of being made illegal, did not stop workers striking there. Nor did it stop building workers in Nicaragua striking against the ruling class there for higher wages and better working conditions.

So whilst capitalism remains, the class struggle remains. The solution to this struggle between capital and labour, a solution propounded by socialists throughout this century, is that workers must organise politically to abolish capitalism. Trade unions, strikes, and other manifestations of the class struggle can only go so far. They are always limited by the class position of the workers and the vagaries of the trade cycle which capitalism periodically passes through. In the end, workers must realise that it is in their immediate interests to push the class struggle to its limit and abolish capitalism.

Richard Lloyd