As trade union leaders continue to call national demonstrations but fail to organise concerted strike action, so employers record rising if not record profits, the chancellor claims recovery and looks forward to winning the next general election.
Resistance continues but often it is isolated. The action of small groups, even individuals, is often crucial. Such actions are not spontaneous. They rely on an understanding of how to fight, how to organise, how to mobilise, how to communicate. Again and again we find that at the heart of the resistance is a political consciousness, a political memory, sometimes just one socialist who is able to give a lead.
Employers will often express surprise, "Oh we’ve never seen such behaviour". As always, if they're not actually lying, then they rely on ignorance. Aware that undermining people’s ability to resist includes weakening their self respect, their pride in themselves and their roots, they work to devalue, if not fully destroy people's past as well. 'History is bunk’ as the anti union, Hitler sympathizing Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, said. For all its failure to show how to reestablish collective class strength, Selina Todd's 'The People, the Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010' demonstrates a solid pride in workers ability to organise themselves.
Against the attacks on our past, while we recognise that in itself history does nothing, it is only of value when it is put to use, we argue that those who do not know their own past are destined to repeat it. History has to be learnt and that requires an organised effort. The magnificent documentary of the 1984-85 miners strike, 'Still the enemy within', is a fine example of a memory that needs to be preserved.
We take our starting point from Marx, insisting that history is not determined, that there is no destiny, that astrology is rubbish and that men and women make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. In the uncountable number of events that constitute our activity as a species, the challenge it to bring some kind of order so that a narrative can be established. For us, the basis of all human existence is the labour which transforms nature and ourselves and in so doing enables us to meet our needs. Labour is the basis of human existence, and, for last ten thousand years or so, the form that labour has taksn has been determined by the fundamental division in society, the class structure, whereby at the top are rulers and at the bottom are ruled. The rulers constitute the class that controls the productive wealth of society and the ruled are overwhelmingly those who labour for a living and in doing so produce the wealth of society, not only enough for their own continued existence but a surplus which is controlled by the rulers.
As it says in the Communist Manifesto, ‘All history is the history of class struggle’. The driving force of history, what makes sense of it as a whole is the battle over who gets what. This is not only a question of how the exploited are squeezed to produce over and above the necessities for their own existence, creating a surplus out of which the rulers expand their own wealth and meet their own needs. It also includes the battles between rulers over the division of the surplus.
This means that we need not only the history of our class, 'history from below', we also need 'history from above'. Only then, in what is sometimes called ‘total history', can we fully capture the history we need.
