The working class needs to rebuild its movement - most fundamentally, at the base, in the localities. This is true whether the coming recession is externalised onto other countries or becomes severe in the UK. A severe recession does not alter the basic tasks, but alters their urgency and relative priorities.
Paradoxical as it may seem, in order to do this, the working class needs not merely to build trade unions, cooperatives and so on, but also to build a political party which aims for working class power, grasps the international unity of the working class and the class struggle and fights for proletarian internationalism, and fights for radical democracy both in the workers’ movement (against the labour bureaucracy and bureaucratic centralism) and in the society (against the capitalists’ bureaucratic-hierarchical state).
The reason is two-sided. First, the trade unions and other forms of workers’ organisation are, precisely, sectional. In order to knit these sectional forms of organisation together so that they can effectively resist capitalist attacks, we need to organise from the starting point of the interests of the working class as a whole. We need to be working with the masses door to door and on the streets, not just in the workplaces, to organise class solidarity. The alternative is that social solidarity will be organised not on a class basis, but on the basis of religion and nationalism, and expressed in the growth of far-right politics.
Secondly and on the other side. The working class has a mass workers’ party. It is called the Labour Party. But this party is, in reality, a party of the labour bureaucracy and the relationship of this bureaucracy to the capitalist state - through the unions’ ties to the state, through Labour MPs and councillors, and so on. This character of the Labour Party is politically expressed in its constitutionalism and nationalism: its subordination of working class solidarity to the interests of the British state.
