The Guardian 29 June, 2005
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Can the workers run society?
Can the working class actually run society? Do they have the capacity, the understanding, the intellectual capabilities to successfully take charge of a modern state?
To the communist, of course, the answer is axiomatic: of course the working class can run society. And not only can, but in various countries has done and is doing just that.
So why would I raise such questions in The Guardian? Because they all came up in discussion with a prospective new member of the CPA just last week.
This young man is in agreement with our Party’s basic aims and principles. He has attended meetings of one of our Branches in Sydney and also taken part in Branch work.
Nevertheless, his reading of our Draft Political Resolution for the Tenth Congress of the CPA later this year left him bewildered and troubled. There were concepts in it that he simply found hard to accept.
The most basic of these was the notion that the working class could, should and, in due course (and after the expenditure of considerable effort) would, take over the running of society.
How can the working class do this, he asked. Surely it should be the intelligentsia or some other better-educated sector of society?
You couldn’t blame him for thinking like that. The capitalist class has been strenuously fostering that self same sentiment ever since Marx and Engels unveiled a scientific rationale for getting rid of capitalism and replacing it with the rule of the working class over a 150 years ago.
"The workers run the factories and the government? Preposterous! Laughable!" cried the members of the ruling class. But they knew it was perfectly feasible, and they were filled with dread.
If their workers ever realised that the boss needed them but they did not need the boss, then society would indeed be turned on its head, and quickly, too. The cushy, privileged life-style of the bosses would come to an abrupt end, their mansions turned into children’s homes, art galleries and sanatoria for injured workers.
So, on the one hand they tried to suppress the Marxists and their wicked propaganda, while on the other they sought to neutralise the Marxists’ message with a multi-faceted propaganda campaign of their own.
The essence of the capitalists’ argument was that they were, in effect, born to rule. They did not, they implied, occupy privileged positions because they — or their daddies — were rich, but because they were "the best and brightest".
Certainly they were usually educated at private and hence expensive schools to which the working class could not aspire. However, the needs of the capitalists for a highly skilled workforce had necessitated the introduction of universal education so members of the working class could, with diligence and tenacity, claw their way into the ranks of the professions, politics, and academia.
However, even if working class types went into business and made lots of money, they would never be fully accepted into the ranks of the "top people".
An English friend of mine was married to a submarine officer in the British Navy. He was of working class origins and eventually quit the navy when a senior officer pointed out that, with his North Country accent (traditionally associated with the working class of the English mill towns), he had no chance of promotion.
The idea that the leadership of society belongs to the capitalist class and its supporting elements (professionals especially) has been assiduously propagated, sometimes crudely, sometimes with sophistication.
So all-pervasive is the ruling class propaganda that workers cannot successfully run things on their own, that even left-wing or progressive people become convinced that it is at least partially true.
The left-wing English actor and director Bernard Miles, who made the most overtly pro-Soviet English film of WW2, Tawny Pipit, made another "radical" film in 1950, Chance In A Lifetime. This was about workers taking over a factory and running it themselves.
This concept had quite a lot of currency in the years after WW2, but even so Miles’ film soft-pedals on the takeover (the boss lets them, seems he’s fed-up with union demands), and the workers only succeed in actually running the plant after the former boss joins with them.
Instead of a revolutionary message the film ended up advocating class collaboration as the way forward. Even then, the major theatre circuits refused to show the film, claiming it wasn’t "entertaining".
In truth, of course, workers can do anything. They are people and have all the skills and potential of people anywhere.
Workers have led revolutions and built great nations. They provided the great military commanders who mastered the science and art of war to defeat fascism and save humanity from barbarism.
It is not the working class that is inadequate, but our image of the working class, of its capacity and potential, that is deliberately kept distorted, inadequate, enfeebled.
Despite the best efforts of the capitalist ruling class, however, the number of working people who know that they are capable of running the whole show, without the bosses, is growing all the time.