This article will appear shortly in the print-version of Vital Signs Mag Issue no.2 – we distribute 1,000 copies to fellow workers at Southmead hospital and the Bristol Royal Infirmary. We pay for the print costs ourselves – if you want to support us you can donate here.
The subtitle of this magazine is ‘The struggle for a new society’. What exactly do we mean by that? As someone once said when they had a bright moment: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. We all can imagine that the war in Ukraine or Gaza spills over, that a climate-change induced flood or storm will erase our homes or that the next financial crash may wipe out our pensions. Or perhaps Elon Musk’s space-rocket won’t make it to Mars, but crashes on Southmead parking lot when you come off of a night-shift…
For as long as people have been exploited or oppressed, there have been visions of utopias of a better, just and equal society. Some of them have been wacky, for sure – paradise, the promised land, through to space colonies – but they were not entirely disconnected from reality.
Since society has become more connected through industry and global markets, these utopias have taken on more concrete shapes. Now, we don’t work alone in a field, but in a coordinated fashion together with other workers while the products of our labour are taken away from us by the rich. Now, we don’t go hungry because bad weather caused a bad harvest, but a series of man-made modern crises. We live in an absurd situation where crisis and social misery is caused by overproduction, not underproduction: companies cannot sell their stuff profitably, they close down, unemployment increases, wages drop, the poor fight over scraps and the rich start wars over remaining markets.
Under these conditions it didn’t take workers long to come up with ideas for social alternatives. Why make some people rich with our collective labour? Workers imagined running society in cooperatives or councils, where all relevant decisions on what and how to produce are made together and the product is shared equally without the arbitrary mediation of money and markets. They fought for a classless equal society that uses humanity’s social time and natural resources consciously and in the best interest of all. If we all work equally, if we abolish socially useless jobs and use technology in the interest of all, we would have to work much less and would have more time for learning, friendships and enjoyment. If there is no division into rich and poor – and into rich and poor nations – then the main reasons for violence and war are abolished. Hierarchies between men and women and between people with different skin colours that are used to divide our class can finally be overcome.
This utopia of the modern working class was not just ‘a nice idea’, it was a rational way out of the social nightmare of 20th century capitalism that produced deep and global economic slumps, resulting in world wars that killed millions of people.
These visions for a new society that used to be shared by millions and created a brother and sisterhood of workers around the globe have not disappeared, but they have become marginalised. Why? The reasons for wanting a new society have not disappeared; they have become more acute, what with the climate crisis, economic crunch and wars. We can describe two main reasons why the hope for a conscious classless society has been weakened.
First, so far the efforts to put these ideas into practice failed. Workers created councils that ran society in Paris, 1871, Russia and other countries 1917-21, Shanghai 1927, or Spain 1936. But as these efforts remained geographically isolated they could either be defeated militarily or – also in response to the external threat – created structures that reintroduced a new class of rulers, such as the so-called Communist Parties in the Soviet Union or China. The latter have given the idea of communism a bad name for generations, a tragedy we still live with. Another way to suppress the struggle for a new society is by trying to use the means of the current system to get there. Parties like Labour or the SPD in Germany tried to use parliament and the current state to bring about socialism, but ended up killing workers’ self-activity and spirit. In the end these parties joined the game of divide-and-rule of the current ruling class.
Secondly, social production has become much more complex and global. It is much more difficult to imagine that grassroots workers’ councils can take over the means of production and run them, when most of the stuff we need at work comes from far away – just look at PPE, disposables or medication in our hospitals. At the same time we now have the means that previous generations of workers have lacked in order to communicate, coordinate and share knowledge without relying on the ruling elite. While currently computers and the internet are used to speed-up financial speculation, to plan high-tech military operations and to stupify and isolate the poor, we could make much better use of them by consciously, collectively and effectively planning our social lives. Workers are currently trying to find ways to change their industries. For example, groups oil workers in Scotland discuss a ‘green transition’ under workers’ control. Or ex-GKN automobile workers in Italy occupy their factory and build links to engineering students and movements for free public transport – in order to produce green busses or cargo bikes rather than polluting passenger vehicles in future. New communites emerge within these struggles.
People are forced to think about a new and better form of society again. This happens in all sorts of forms. Just check out this video by friends who seriously think about how to re-organise production on a large scale!
But what are steps towards a new society? What role can we, as 1.4 million workers in the NHS, play when it comes to learning how to organise work and social life in an egalitarian and equal way? How can we prepare ourselves for the struggle that will be necessary to take the means of production (power plants, factories, railways etc.) away from those who profit from them now?
Send us your ideas and read more about it in Vital Signs issue no.3!
