Hannah’s Reviews > How the Establishment Lost Control > Status Update

This is clearly not a moment to be downhearted, but nor is it a moment for cheering from the sidelines. A time of system failure and classbased discontent is a time to take the initiative.

Only people actively and passionately engaged in trying to change the world can identify the elements in the situation which can take the struggle forward. This is the practical meaning of the central idea that socialist theory is the crystallization of the experience of working people.

Concentrated at the heart of the corporate machine and in all the strategic institutions of the system, working people can become agents of self-liberation through their collective and active opposition to the system.

Once mass opinion, mass movements, and a mass political project started to assert alternatives the core project of the ruling class was thrown into doubt.

In Britain the anti-austerity movement took some time to gather after the banking crisis. But the anti-war movement had created a model and the inspiration of the Occupy movement, UK Uncut actions, protests by disability activists, huge trade union demonstrations and important one-day strikes helped to cohere the sense of common action and generate enthusiasm for an anti-austerity coalition.

Trade union organisation and struggle is stuck at very low levels. And the left needs to turn its attention to overcoming this weakness because organised workplace based resistance is the necessary centrepiece of any successful struggle for social transformation.

These are real changes going on that require a serious strategic response from the left and the labour movement. But permanent and full-time jobs remain the majority experience, and the facts don’t support the idea of a new, separate precarious class.

The kind of industry that a person works in is not what defines their class position. In our highly commodified society, almost all production and the majority of what are defined as services are produced directly for profit. What is decisive is an individual’s relationship to that process of profit making.

No one nowadays bothers much to challenge the idea of a ruling class. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the owners of big capital is so blatant that it can’t be completely denied.

But it is important to note in the meantime that nothing spreads clarity and understanding about capitalist class relations more effectively than mass struggle, the active embodiment of human being’s ability to cooperate to change things. Participatory struggles are important because they can lead to victories, but also because they are profoundly educational.