What is a Realistic Attitude for the Working-Class? (1945)

From the October 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

A leading article in the Daily Telegraph, July 26th, contained the following:—

“It is the intention of the General Council of the T.U.C. to recommend to the full congress when it meets next September acceptance of a scheme for compulsory national service after the end of hostilities in the far East. . . . Hitherto whenever compulsory national service has been proposed, whether in parliament or elsewhere, trade-union leaders have opposed it. Thai they should now have changed is an encouraging indication of a more realistic attitude of mind. . . . Also it is permissible to hope, trade-union leaders now see that national service is, in the truest sense of the word, democratic, and provides the best possible antidote to class-consciousness, whether it takes the form of class, war theorising or of mere foolish snobbishness.”

Surely the most realistic attitude for the trade unions together with the rest of the working-class is to take into consideration the most important facts of their existence. First their poverty. Secondly their enslavement, due to capitalist ownership of the means of life, and thirdly their incessant straggle to raise wages above the poverty line to which they are condemned by the merchandise character of their labour-power.

These facts are the outcome of the class ownership of the means of wealth-production. Consequently a realistic policy for the working-class is to organise politically with the sole object of establishing a system in which the means of wealth-production shall be the common property of all. Under such a system a real democracy and a settled plan for production and distribution would put an end to poverty. The abolition of classes would end the incessant struggle over wages by removing the cause of class antagonism-, i.e., the class ownership of the means of life and the resulting enslavement of the working-class.

This the leader writer of the Daily Telegraph might say is theorising, but it is the logical result of reasoning from hard facts, and it is on hard facts that sound theory and a realistic attitude are built up.

F. Foan