The seasons are shifting, and with them, the balance of power. A scorching, record breaking European summer will soon give way to a cold winter. In the midst of a catastrophic energy crisis and a land-war in Eastern Europe that shows no signs of ending, Europe seems poised on the edge of a knife. The tepid social order that has been constructed in the decades since the great crisis of the 70s, and held together with spit and glue since the great crisis of 2008, seems on the verge of collapse. European capital is being ground into the dirt. German industry is grinding to a halt. French energy is in crisis. And in Britain, spiraling power bills are placing the working classes of the UK on the brink of a cold, hard winter – the hardest in a generation. After decades of austerity, it is not an exaggeration to say that Britain is in the midst of the greatest social crisis since the Second World War – a social crisis that threatens to create a generalized social collapse.
Let us for a moment examine the situation: an unpopular, conservative government representing the interests of Big Capital and the most backwards and vicious reactionary petit-bourgeois presides over a generalized social crisis. Workers are hungry, they are poorer than ever, and they are facing rising costs. This was before the country fell into a recession, and energy prices spiked to a catastrophic level. Make no mistake. People will die this winter. They will die in droves. They have been dying for years. Austerity has killed thousands, and is set to butcher many more. The Social Murder State is in full effect.
In the opposition box is the most feckless and incompetent opposition in years. Keir Starmer has presided over a purge of the Labour Party left, and in the process, shifted dramatically to the right. Under his leadership, and under the leadership of any of his likely successors, there is no chance of a genuine resistance to the Social Murder State, or even to the Tories. The Labour Party has fallen far from the heady days of Corbynism. Lightning will not be caught in a bottle again.
Where now is the opposition to the Social Murder State? Who is militant enough and resilient enough to confront the state apparatus? And where is their party? Where is the communist party?
The Vanguard Emerges
The Leninist conception of class struggle has always noted that in the process of the class struggle, militancy and class consciousness necessarily unfold unevenly. This is a natural product of the diverse and divided nature of the proletariat, held in subjection as a slave class by the capitalist system.
This uneven development inevitably leads to some layers emerging as “advanced layers,” those that are engaged in class struggle politics and more or less conscious of the need for class struggle. The most advanced of this layer, the most militant, most aware of their conditions, those coming to realize the historical task of their class, is the vanguard.
In the current cauldron of the class struggle, the vanguard is being formed. It is being formed on RMT picket lines, and in wildcat strikes, and in non-payment campaigns. It is now advancing at a rapid pace, intermingling and constituting itself in the course of the development of the struggles happening right now. This process is likely to continue into the winter, as the class struggle intensifies. It is likely we will see a larger wave of strikes, perhaps even a general strike. It is also likely that a generalized collapse in living standards may spark riots in major cities. All of these processes feed into and advance the development of this class vanguard.
Hammer Meets Anvil
The emergence of a fighting vanguard is not enough to guarantee the emergence of a real class politics. Only the successful merger of socialist politics and ideas with the workers’ movement – the merger of revolutionary theory with revolutionary struggle – can produce a genuine anti-systemic alternative. This alternative must take the form of a class party – a mass party-movement unified by a radical program of a socialist society and a workers’ republic. Past attempts to forge such a party in the UK have failed. That does not mean they always will. The current situation is unlike any in living memory. The time to forge a new socialist party is now.
The situation that is developing will not last forever. The next year will be a decisive one in the development of class struggle in the United Kingdom, and in the world more broadly. It is of vital importance that socialist forces, be they in the unions, the Marxist groups, the labor party, the social movements, or elsewhere, regroup and organize around a common program of class struggle to save the lives of working-class people. The forces that can be gotten in the room to hammer out some kind of platform must act.
Now is the hour of our discontent. There can be no delay in undertaking the immediate tasks of the movement. We are on the cusp of a global revolutionary wave unseen in a generation, and the subjective organizational forces of the class struggle lag far behind the objective ones. It is up to all of us, all of us class-conscious proletarians, to prepare the ground for the seizure of power by the working class. We must do the work now. There are no shortcuts, but there can be no delay.
For Grenfell, and for the thousands upon thousands of others butchered by the Tory Social Murder State, we must fight.
For class unity, for socialism, for a workers republic,
Roxy Hall
