From little things, big things grow

Class is dead, right?

After all, you only have to look at Anzac Day and compare it to May Day and it's clear that Australian nationalism dominates over any old fashioned analysis of bosses and workers.

Millions of Australians celebrate Anzac Day. Surely it’s just a few stodgy old commies and their union mates hankering back to the glory days of the Soviet Union who might turn up to march on May Day if there is a march!

So there’s no comparison. One can safely assume that class is definitely dead.

But I’m not so sure. Let me tell you why.

May Day is a day lefties like me celebrate international working class solidarity. It came out of bloody campaigns in the United States for the eight-hour day in the 1880s. The Second International adopted it for workers across the world and it was recognised by many workers in many countries by the early 1890s. For example 100,000 went on strike for it in Vienna in 1890.

In Australia the situation was more ambivalent because we had, in a number of States, already won the eight-hour day (the earliest in history to do so, I understand). Labour Day celebrated that victory of workers over bosses.

The May Day/Labour Day differences also reflected divisions to some extent between moderate and radical elements in the Australian Labour movement.

For example, at one stage the aims of May Day were better wages, working and living conditions, an end to imperialist wars and for socialism.

So what you might ask? That’s all old history stuff. The world has moved on since then. And anyway, today is what counts and today May Day is dead.

Yes and no. It is true that there won’t be many people celebrating May Day like they used to in Australia. But even now, in NSW, unions are using May Day to build a rally, outside the ALP's state conference, to oppose privatisation of the electricity industry.

It’s interesting. Who in NSW has the real power to block the sale? Well, NSW workers, especially power workers, who could shut the state down tomorrow if they pulled the plug. Morris Iemma could shout all he wanted to, but that wouldn’t get the power turned on again.

If workers don’t lift a finger, nothing happens.

The 40th anniversary of May 1968 in Paris will be with us on May 10. On May 13, and for a few weeks afterwards, there was the biggest mass strike in history. Ten million workers were involved. De Gaulle, the President of France, even fled to West Germany such was the intensity of the class polarisation.

Just to let the bosses know who really ran society, French power workers would occasionally and randomly cut off electricity to the bosses. “Without us you are nothing” they would say.

NSW power workers are in the same position. They could easily stop the sale by taking widespread industrial action that cut off the flow of power, and profits. Whether they exercise their strength or not is the real question.

It’s what Marx was talking about when he described the class as being a class in itself. The working class is the working class, irrespective of whether it sees itself as such or not. This hasn’t changed since the beginning of capitalism about 450 years ago.

Workers sell their labour and create profit. Bosses, through ownership of the factories, mines and the like, expropriate that profit. That is as true now as it was in the 1890s, for example, when May Day became popular.

The problem lies in whether it is a class for itself, or can become such. How do workers begin to understand the power they have and the centrality of their role?

Working class revolutions have swept the world time and time again since 1848. This is when the class has the potential to become a class for itself. When the class begins to move as a class, as it did in France in May 1968, the whole world changes. It begins to realise it runs society anyway and can run a new society for the majority (i.e. workers), not the minority (bosses).

Today in Australia we are a long, long way from that. But we need to be careful not to mistake the quiet on the surface for the turmoil underneath. A tsunami could break out anytime, and from small beginnings.

In France in May 1968 it was a few hundred students holding demonstrations about Vietnam, separate dormitories and rotten and under funded universities that two months later became the biggest mass strike in history. That strike could, with real leadership, have led to the overthrow of French capitalism.

In Russia in 1917 it was women workers on International Working Women's Day whose strikes and demonstrations began a chain of events that led to the abdication of the Tsar and nine months later the Bolshevik's working class Revolution.

Over to you, NSW power workers. You have the power to stop the sale. And who knows what could come out of that?

As the song says, from little things big things grow.