Amr Gharbeia's Library tagged socialism →  View Popular

Nowadays the working class, who always faced problems outside of work, has to put up with the general aggravation of life the landlord, taxes, social security, transport, the health service for the young, the education system, the workfare schemes etc., the difficulty of finding a job or home. For women, there is the double day of work - in the workplace and at home - aggravated by the attack on women going out to work. For ethnic minorities and immigrants, there is an increase in racist attacks and discrimination.

These multiple aspects of class experience and struggle are directly political in the sense that they oppose political positions advanced by the boss class, in the public space of the towns, and of society in general, rather than in the private space of the workplaces. A new working class movement has to have as its strategy the urgent need to organise in all spheres of society. There will be no recomposition of the class without the unity of struggles, without re-creating the sense of a class in opposition to the social order. Revolutionaries must not just adopt simple voluntarism and participate in these struggles, they must advance alternative perspectives. Otherwise these struggles risk the danger of recuperation, where resistance is diverted so you end up supporting who you're supposed to be fighting e.g. by taking nationalist forms of defending the standard of living like 'Buying British'. The new movement we are talking about must go beyond defending wages and jobs (although it must do these as well). It must question the legitimacy of the capitalist system, of production for production's sake. It must question the logic of work under Capitalism. For many the need to work has become impossible because the economic system has no need (or no regular need) of their capacity to work. To give cohesion to a new movement, we have to pose all the needs of social liberation.

What is needed is the growth of a new culture of economic resistance without a permanent structure but able to produce high levels of militant activity as and when it is needed. this is not to say that there should be no on-going radical work. Far from it. We believe that, even when not officially in dispute, workers should establish semi-secretive (but never elitist) non-permanent 'workplace resistance' groups. These have been established by Revolutionaries in some industries have in the past, with some success. Their secrecy and lack of permanent structure means that their members cannot be identified, victimised or bought off by management, and they can concentrate on action and theory, not on self-perpetuation. Such groups must not seek to be alternative unions. They must be anti-capitalist, anti-company, anti-union and anti-party political and have no respect for legality. They should advocate class war and practise direct action to achieve their objectives. Such groups would have a propaganda function (pushing resistance and rebellion, slagging management, attacking trade and alternative unionism, advocating go-slows, non-cooperation, sabotage and unofficial action, mass sick-days etc.) and an active function (co-ordinating such activity in practice).