Unite to Turn the Situation Around!

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Unite to Turn the Situation Around!

The demonstrations celebrating May Day, up and down the country, on May 1-5, represented the spirit and determination of the working class affirming its international day of unity and struggle. This is a forward looking festival of the class, building on the present stage of the communist and workers’ movement, and pledging to take up for solution the problems of the day and to turn the situation around. It is a day whose significance needs to be grasped by the class in the spirit of renewal, of beginning afresh, of settling scores with the old conscience of the obsolescent forces, a conscience which these outdated forces, stuck in conceptions which became anachronistic over a century ago, also seek to impose on the working class and their organisations.

The festival of May Day also stands against the trivialisation of politics and political affairs. The working class on this day also affirms that to oppose and remove the blocks to the working class movement, to overcome the crisis of working class representation, to address the fundamental flaw in the political processes and institutions which claim to be democratic, but which precisely keep the working people away from the levers of political power, it is necessary for the workers themselves to become political. The workers cannot hand over political affairs to any condescending saviours. But neither is this the whole story. The workers cannot accept the organisations, parliamentary political parties, state institutions as they find them. They must themselves consciously participate in building what is new, discussing what will transform society according to their needs.

To begin to turn the situation around, workers will continually have to sum up their experience of taking a stand and fighting against the claims of the monopolies and of finance capital to dictate over the economy and have political affairs run in the interests of this dictate. They will have to be guided by the reality that the existing arrangements in society which can be seen to be in crisis need to be changed to favour their interests and the general interests of society, and the socialised economy. Every attempt by the workers themselves to come to positions of power is a step forward, but it has to be recognised that the arrangements which serve the status quo are themselves a block to this advance. For example, the exercise of the right for the workers to become decision-makers from the grassroots up in matters which affect their lives, and that of their region and of the economy as a whole, is blocked by arrangements which give them no say or make participation impossible in anything but name. It is the same with the exercise of the right for the workers, along with the electorate at large, to select candidates from their peers who will represent and effectively fight for their interests. For the workers to take a stand and fight for the rights of all is a necessary and indispensable requirement for being able to confront the old arrangements, look reality in the eye and challenge them with initiatives that come from the workers and their collectives themselves.

May Day is a festival where the working class affirms that it has a programme for the renewal of society, a programme whose substance is anything but a series of policy objectives, a programme which comes from the needs, the claims and the rights of the working people themselves, and the content of which is adopted by them. The determination and conviction of the workers and their collectives comes in organising for the actual success of this programme. In this respect, the affirmation on May Day of the pride and dignity of the working class and the building of the organisation and consciousness that embody that pride and dignity is the spirit and perspective which informs the forward march of the class to achieve its aims.

Let the year till May Day 2009 be a year of creating the conditions to turn the situation around! It can be done! WDIE calls on the working class to develop the workers’ opposition to the political programme which enforces the economic demands, system and arrangements of the monopolies, achieved through the private ownership of socialised production, and to take up its own independent programme around which it unites all the working people. This independent programme of the working class is anti-war, pro-social, pro-worker and is founded on the defence of the rights of all. It bears the stamp of the working class which exploits no one nationally or internationally, which envisions a society that meets the claims of all its members through social consciousness and organisation and guarantees the right of all by virtue of their humanity.

Success to this programme! Unite to turn the situation around!