WORKERISM – or, society should be ruled by those who produce all the essential goods and services of life

WORKERISM – or, society should be ruled by those who produce all the essential goods and services of life

 

By Gregory A. Butler

 

The fundamental problem in our society has it’s roots in two interrelated conflicts  -

 

1. COMMODITY PRODUCTION All of the necessary goods and services of life are sold as commodities, for the private financial benefit of a small exploitative minority of society

 

2. THE EXPLOITATION OF LABOR The majority of society are forced to sell their labor power to the class that sells those commodities; that majority produce all the wealth that flows from that commodity production but only receive a tiny portion of those values as their wage

 

This is the root cause of every social problem in our society and in every capitalist society on the planet (as every country or territory on Earth is a capitalist society, this is a problem everywhere)

 

This has been the fundamental problem in the world since the origin of capitalism in the Dutch Republic, Venetian Republic and the City of London in the 15^th century

 

This is the reason the middle class professionals of Europe created the ideology of Scientific Socialism in the 19^th century – with the goal of their class leading the working class to establish socialist societies. Socialism would involve their class leading the working class to create a reformed capitalist system, which at some future date would be replaced by a classless communist system.

 

That movement only succeeded in creating a new form of state capitalism – they succeeded in making Russia, China and a few other major Third World countries into major imperialist capitalist states.

 

The working class needs to build our own movement. We need to seize control of capitalist societies – peacefully in the major democratic imperialist capitalist states where it is possible to do so.

 

The goal is to end commodity production and the exploitation of labor – not to reform those exploitative systems, or to replace our current bosses with new ones, not a kinder and gentler form of exploitation, but no exploitation at all

 

This has never been tried on a large scale so we really don’t know what it would look like

 

There have been embryonic attempts – like the city wide workers councils and workers seizing control of factories from management that sprang up during the revolutions in France in 1871, Russia in 1905,  Russia, Ukraine, Finland and Poland in 1917, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Italy in 1919, Poland, Germany and North Korea in 1945, Czechoslovakia in 1948, East Germany in 1953, Hungary and Poland in 1956, Algeria in 1962, China in 1966, France in 1968, Chile in 1973, Iran in 1978 and Poland in 1979

 

Unfortunately, none of these embryonic attempts at workers seizing power ever got beyond the local citywide council stage, or in some cases not even beyond the local factory council stage – also pretty much all of these attempts after 1919 were actively suppressed by the leaders of the working class movement – in particular labor unions, socialist parties, social democratic parties and communist parties.

 

The state socialist governments of the Soviet Union and China specifically played a decisive counterrevolutionary role in most of the modern examples

 

So we have no idea of what workers seizing control of the workplace would look like beyond the manufacturing workplace or what kind of regional, national or international government structures would flow from citywide workers councils

 

However, this is an experiment well worth carrying out

 

It’s not like the present labor movement or the left has a way forward for us.