Wake Up Bradford!

Simeon Scott

Introduction

Fortunately our screens are no longer dominated by the spectacle that was the 2024 general election. As working class people we were faced with a Punch and Judy show of career politicians, Love Island for ugly people. With an annual salary of around £80,000 plus all the expenses you can fiddle, plus lots of other perks, being an MP is not bad work, if you can get it. The Labour Party won a landslide under Starmer’s leadership, yet garnered less votes than it did under Corbyn’s leadership. Labour’s victory was based on campaigning for change after 14 years of the Tories; however, as one member of a hustings audience remarked: the only change Starmer is offering is turning Labour into the Tories.

So, as working class people, can we expect anything better from Starmer’s Labour government? Things have been getting worse for most of us since the Thatcher governments of 1979 and after, with no let up during the Blair period. Compared with the 1980s, for example, trade union membership is a fraction of what it was; most unions being in the public sector with, often politically corrupt, officials offering little to their members. Whilst, on the bright side, UK workers in Amazon warehouses are currently fighting for union recognition, in the main workers are struggling to pay their bills, to keep their jobs and homes. As a change from the usual spectacle, such as the soaps and football, distracting us from the daily grind that is wage labour,the election focused our attention on politics. Yet, the media coverage was a waste of time for workers because it did not offer alternatives to the wage labour system. To be fair to the media, there were few parties, movements or individuals actually offering real change to workers at the election. Before looking in detail at the few alternatives on offer, it would surely be worthwhile to address some basic topics that are relevant to workers in Britain and indeed throughout the world.

What is the working class?

We can begin this election survey with a question posed at a pre-election meeting organised by a Gaza Independent candidate in West Yorkshire. One of those attending the meeting argued that the then UK prime minister’s wife, Akshata Sunak, was working class because she earned an income, even though she is one of the richest women in the world. Most career politicians, journalists, academics and others avoid use of the term working class if at all possible, preferring such terms as: hard working families, low income families, people from deprived backgrounds and the like. Of the few who do refer to social class, their analysis is largely restricted to three boxes, one labelled the working class, another the middle class and the third the capitalist, or upper, class. For those of us who want to transform the world into democratic classless societies, it is surely necessary to understand the essential features of capitalism and, in particular, the way in which workers are systematically exploited. Simply put, the exploitation of the working class cannot be understood by pictures of boxes with labels on them. The above mentioned three classes at the core of capitalism are not things, but rather are to be defined by their relationships with each other. Crucial to this set of relationships is the wage labour system. 

As we all know, wages or salaries are the income earned by workers employed by capitalists; often referred to as “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”. This slogan implies that wages are paid in return for the goods or services produced by the worker. However, this is not the case. Wages or salaries are paid in return for the worker agreeing to rent out his or her ability to work physically and/or mentally for a given period of time, normally a week or a month. The wage being a given, the actual output of the worker during this working period is determined by the capitalist or their hired manager and, as all workers know, we are typically subject to repeated harassment to increase output by working harder. Yet, the quantity of goods and/or services produced by each worker is by no means the same as what could be bought by the worker using his or her income. So, for instance, if as a self-employed person I produce and sell 20 coffee tables in a week, then I earn all of the revenue from the sale of the tables, less the costs of producing them. If, however, I decide that I do not want to do the work involved in making the tables then I can employ a wage worker to make them for me. The wages I pay to the worker will only be equivalent to, let us say, 10 of the tables, less costs, that he or she has produced. Needless to say, the surplus 10 tables, when sold represent the revenue which, less costs, provides the profits earned by the capitalist owner of the coffee table business. Market conditions permitting, the capitalist may decide to expand the business, employ more wage workers and smile all the way to the bank. In effect, as the classical political economists indicated, the wage earner labours half of the working day for herself or himself and the other half for the capitalist. So, the reason that Ms Sunak is not working class is that, in so far as she does any work at all, she does not live off wages but rather from the profits earned by her family’s various businesses. Although in many poorer nations pre-capitalist economic systems are the norm, such as feudalism where landowners exploit the peasants who work on their land, most advanced economies, including Britain, are dominated by the wage labour system.

Socialism or state capitalism?

Now that we know the bare bones of how capitalism works, the question that few, if indeed any, of the candidates at the election asked is: how do we get rid of the wage labour system and create a democratic classless society? One ‘answer’ to this question was offered by the Bolshevik coup in Russia in October 1917. Although the Russian working class was then smaller in number than the country’s landless peasants, most workers initially supported the coup and set up local workers’ councils, referred to as soviets, in order to move towards a classless society. However, this was not what the Bolsheviks had in mind; when writing of the dictatorship of the proletariat, what Lenin meant was dictatorship of the Bolshevik, i.e. Communist, Party. By the time that those wanting to restore the Tsarist regime had been defeated in 1921, the self-selected Bolshevik leaders Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin turned on the Russian workers and peasants. Closing down or taking over the new soviets, rejecting the result of democratic elections and violently crushing all those workers who opposed the regime, the Bolshevik leaders established a form of capitalism overseen by the state. Introducing American capitalist time and motion systems in the factories, to be run by managers formerly employed during the Tsarist era, the Bolsheviks were happy to accept western capitalist investment and so, as Lenin boasted, began state capitalism. In other words, the wage labour system was expanded with state appointed managers, rather than private owner/capitalists, ordering around and viciously exploiting the workers. Whilst claiming to be Marxists, or Marxist-Leninists to be precise, the party leaders showed no interest in implementing what Marx himself had advocated for Russia late in his life; i.e. production based around local democratic councils, referred to as mirs. In fact, Marx specifically rejected post-revolutionary rule by a vanguard party styled on the French Jacobins, which was exactly the model favoured by the Bolsheviks.

Putin: state capitalism becomes gangster capitalism

As Stalin took over the Bolshevik party, there ensued a range of events that revealed the psychopathic nature of its leaders. Rivals to the leadership were murdered, an attempted invasion of Poland turned into a military disaster with thousands of workers in uniform dying on both sides, a famine was created in Ukraine in which millions starved and Stalin eventually signed a pact with Hitler. In short, like Putin’s troops in Ukraine, the Russian working class was treated as dispensable factory and cannon fodder. Despite a mass of fake output statistics, the Bolsheviks’ economic policies were a disaster; and as a result corruption and black markets became the order of the order of the day amongst party officials. Attempts at keeping up with the United States both militarily and economically proved impossible and the USSR collapsed in 1991. As living standards were so low for Russian workers, the country’s per capita income currently being 65^th in the world, the shares given to those workers whose industries were being privatised, such as oil and gas, were sold to the so called oligarchs. Selling these shares on at massively increased prices, Roman Abramovich and the other oligarchs made a financial killing, becoming billionaires in the process.

Distressed at the “collapse of communism”, a middle ranking secret service (KGB now renamed the FSB) officer named Vladimir Putin, serving in what was then East Germany returned to St Petersburg. This was a city which, like elsewhere in Russia, was run by organised criminal gangs and corrupt politicians. When not driving taxis, as he recently claimed, Putin cleverly, and ruthlessly, rose through the ranks of the cesspit that was organised crime and politics in St Petersburg and later Moscow. Eventually, Putin became president in return for offering the corrupt alcoholic Boris Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.

Putin set up the TV channel Russia Today (RT) in order to spread his ideological vision around the world; this consisted of praising Stalin, embracing the Russian orthodox faith and restoring the borders of the country to those in the post-1945 period. A number of British career politicians, including Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway, began to appear on RT. An unsuccessful candidate in the 2024 election, Galloway hosted a weekly show in return for an allegedly handsome, but undisclosed, fee. Realising there was money to be made out of Putin’s gangster state, British capitalists, along with a number of Tory MPs, also jumped on the merry go round. They began investing in Russian oil and gas companies, taking directorships in these companies and making sure that the oligarchs’ sons and daughters were able to gain admission to top British private schools and elite universities. This state of affairs continued long after the invasion of Crimea in 2014; ending only with Putin’s attempted invasion of the Ukrainian mainland in 2022.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, in keeping with the Bolshevik slogan my enemy’s enemy is my friend, some would be career politicians standing in the 2024 election have argued that anyone who challenges America’s economic and military dominance is to be supported. Calling for a “multipolar world”, it seems that Putin, Xi of China and even the latest in the dynasty ruling North Korea are to be praised. With regard to Russia invasion of Ukraine, it is estimated that over 500,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded so far; yet, Gaza Independent candidates showed no interest in this genocide. As Russian workers receive the body bags of their sons, middle and upper class kids are not called up, demonstrations against the war are brutally put down by Putin’s thugs. It comes as little surprise, therefore, that the criminal and Putin stooge turned traitor, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was warmly received by the workers of Rostov-on-Don. As Prigozhin’s Wagner group mutineers travelled towards Moscow, many of Putin’s soldiers were reluctant to attack the military convoy as it sought to challenge the conduct of the war on Ukraine. Needless to say, because of his naiveté in accepting Putin’s offer of a deal, Prigozhyn and his mercenary jailbird lieutenants did not remain in the world of the living for long.

The strange cases of Nigel Farage and George Galloway

One successful career politician appealing to disaffected Tories, on an anti-immigration ticket, in the recent election was Nigel Farage. When not sucking on the Putin financial teat, via RT, and offering apologetics for the latter’s regime, was hobnobbing with his chum Donald Trump. During his presidency, Trump himself famously offered support for Putin’s regime, despite opposition from the CIA and most other members of the US’s ruling elites. The story with Trump’s pro-Putin stance is alleged to date back to the former’s visit to Moscow to host a Miss Universe pageant in 2013. Various press reports claim that FSB officers videoed Trump being urinated upon by prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, whatever turns you on. The implication is that a potential release of the video was used to persuade Trump to view Putin’s regime with favour. This is a claim Trump denies, along with denials of other claims made regarding his sexual behaviour. One such claim ended with a jury unanimously finding him guilty of corrupt payments to a porn star and there was also a successful civil case against Trump for sexual misconduct. It is likely that Farage’s claim that emerged during the 2024 election, i.e. that NATO and the EU challenged Putin’s control of Eastern Europe, is true; western capitalists would love to get access to the vast resources in the world’s largest landmass. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian working class voted overwhelmingly to get rid of Putin’s puppet government, in the orange revolution, as is the case with the working class in both Georgia and Belarus; reasoning that as a class they would be better off aligned to western capitalism rather Putin’s gangster alternative.

The former MP for the constituency of Bradford West, George Galloway, lost his seat in Rochdale in the recent election. He has repeatedly used religious chauvinism in low income constituencies with significant Muslim populations, along with a few pro-working class slogans, to garner votes. However, he achieved notoriety as a grovelling supporter of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain who, along with his sons, was respnsible for tormenting Shia Muslims and Kurds in the country. Ever seeking to maximise his income, and add to his portfolio of properties, Galloway also appeared on the Iranian Channel Press TV; the Iranian state being dominated by Shia Muslims. Needless to say, given press reports regarding his personal life, the fact that the Iranian regime typically arrests, tortures and even murders women who refuse to wear headscarves, is seemingly of no interest to George. Galloway also distinguished himself by dressing up as a cat on the unedifying television show, Celebrity Big Brother. After winding up his Respect party, Galloway formed the Workers Party of Britain, which recently won no seats;quite what this party has to offer workers remains a mystery.

The use of and abuse of religion

For centuries ruling elites have used the politics of identity, particularly religion, as a means of playing off workers one against another. Obviously, to the extent that workers are concentrating on issues related to identity we are ignoring social class and the real enemy of workers: the wage labour system. Across the globe, capitalists, landowners, career politicians and others stand by as Uygur Muslims are, after centuries, still being tormented in China, Rohingya Muslims are attacked by Buddhists in Myanmar, Muslims are slaughtered in Sudan, Chechnya and other Russian republics. One important feature of the recent UK election was the intervention of Gaza Independent candidates who campaigned almost entirely on the genocide in Gaza. This movement arose from people rightly leaving the Labour party because of Starmer’s initial refusal to call for a permanent ceasefire and the commencement of peace talks. Notably, a number of Labour councillors in Burnley resigned in protest against Starmer’s apparent pro-Zionist stance, arguing that Gaza was not a Muslim, or indeed religious, issue but rather one for everyone wanting to create a better world. However, important though the marches and demonstrations on Gaza are, protesters at these pro-Gaza events become aware that mass rape and genocide being committed against religious believers in many nations across the world, including Muslims as mentioned above, were seemingly of little, or no, importance. Although most Gaza Independents were unsuccessful, four won their seats by defeating Labour candidates. Whilst some Independents, such as Jeremy Corbyn, did offer some challenges to the capitalist status quo, most did not do so.

Some home truths about Gaza

With regard to the Gaza Independent intervention in the election, it has been argued that there was little detailed analysis of the origins of the genocide. For example, little attention was given to the financially corrupt prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and, in particular, his relationship with Hamas. The latter organisation, which attacked and killed Israeli civilians on 7^th October 2023, emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood based in Egypt. Elected and later banned in Egypt in 2013, in large part because of protests by women opposed to its sexist policies, the movement’s leaders crossed the border into Gaza. The Washington Post has pointed out that successive Israeli governments supported Hamas as it established itself in Gaza so as to weaken the influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which wanted Muslims, Jews and Christians to live together in a secular single state.

Amongst the courageous Israelis speaking out against the Gazan killing fields is the journalist Tal Schneider who, in The Times of Israel, writes under the headline: “For Years, Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas, now it’s blown up in our faces”. She explains how Netanyahu cynically sought to prevent a single representative voice of the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as a means of weakening attempts to create a state in which people of all faiths and none could live in peace. In order to prevent such a unified voice, successive coalition governments led by Netanyahu quietly negotiated with Hamas leaders and turned a blind eye to Gulf state funding and arming of their organisation. Schneider explains further that, as long as casualties were light, the firing of crude rockets into Israel by Hamas was tolerated and, crucially, used as a reason for Netanyahu not to negotiate with the Palestinians and continue to encourage Israeli settlers to grab more land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Another courageous Israeli is Adam Raz who, in the newspaper Haaretz, refers to the Netanyahu-Hamas “alliance”, arguing that the “pogrom of October 7^th, 2023, helps Netanyahu, and not for the first time, to preserve his rule, certainly in the short term”. Netanyahu’s policy, argues Raz, has been to bolster Hamas and weaken the Palestinian Authority, in contrast to “his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, who sought to end the conflict through a peace treaty with…Palestinian leader…Mahmoud Abbas”. This “divide-and-conquer policy”, claims Raz, has involved…the funding of Hamas by Qatar, with Netanyahu’s “assistance” …thereby turning it “from a terror organization…into a semi-state body”. Public denials of this policy involved the Israeli prime minister “lying through his teeth”. Raz also writes of “the poor and oppressed Gazans – who were also victims of Hamas…with its reign of terror…Netanyahu’s nightmare was the collapse of the Hamas regime”. In 2019, a former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, claimed that Netanyahu’s “strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking…in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah”. Finally here, given Israel’s oft-repeated boasts regarding the efficiency of its secret service Mossad, it has been claimed by Egyptian politicians and others that the Israeli government ignored prior warnings about the Hamas attack; Netanyahu reasoning that a war with Hamas would keep him in office and out of jail for financial corruption.

Conclusion

The main parties, the Tories, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK have little, if indeed anything, to offer working class people. Of the various Leninists, Stalinists and Trotskyites, the Socialist Workers Party and The Socialist Party, previously known as The Militant, seem not to have stood candidates; the former presumably failing to recover from the scandal following which a large part of the membership resigned. The scandal arose when young female members accused some of those on the Bolshevik style central committee of sexually abusing and threatening them. Some supporters of Gaza Independent and others were calling for a multipolar world featuring support for Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China and, amazingly enough, North Korea. Whilst Putin does, in traditional Bolshevik style, hold fake elections; China and North Korea do not see the point and don’t bother with the masquerade. There was, it seems, quite a lot of betting during this election and maybe you the reader should think about placing a bet that those candidates praising these regimes will not be visiting these countries anytime soon. They, like the rest of us, know that inside these three nations demonstrations on Gaza, or any other issue for that matter, would be met by savagery by the thugs employed by the ruling elites of these nations. In fact, as Chinese workers see their jobs moving to Vietnam, as wages are lower, the Chinese economy is in trouble, with growth rates falling behind those of India. Many North Korean workers live on the edge of starvation and, apart from exports of gas and oil to China and India, the Russian economy is weak; when did you last buy anything made in Russia?  With regard to the Green Party, they won four seats by offering workers substantially more than Labour. The focus on identity politics, along with allegations of financial corruption, meant that in Scotland the SNP went into near meltdown.

Rather than engaging in national chauvinism, as if politics was an international football contest, we should support the working class of every nation. Similarly, we should not be sucked into religious chauvinism, as the elites of all nations want us so to do, Modi’s India being a case in point. With regard to our votes, there is much to be praised in the programs of the Greens and some Independent candidates. However, with regard to plans to nationalise a range of the UK’s industries, we are it seems being offered state capitalism, as discussed above. To be blunt, for both wage workers and customers, past experience across the world would suggest party bureaucrats are typically little, if any, better than private capitalists at running industries. Since the Tories nationalised the Northern rail company, for example, it is hard to discern any improvement for the workers or users. What is really needed is to put all industries under the democratic control of workers and users’ councils, with the aim of ending the wage labour system once and for all and, in doing so, push humanity into a new egalitarian phase of its history.