Change? Or Just Short Changed

Both david cameron and Nick Clegg have run their campaign on the grounds of change, itself no doubt just an attempt to latch on to the "change" slogan of Obama. Of course, there has been no real change accomplished by Obama either. Still less do Cameron and Clegg represent change. In many ways, its a pity that, in the Leaders Debates, the SNP and Plaid didn't get to be represented, because although they too are bouregois parties, at least on a superficial level they stand to the Left of the main three. It would, if nothing else have shown up just how meaningless is Cleggmania, just how tenuous is his claaim to be something different rom the other two parties.

In reality, anyone who wants to judge the parties on fact rather than claims for the future has only to look around. The idea that the Tories or Liberals represent change can be judged simply by looking at what they are already doing! The Tories and Liberals HAVE been in Government for several years. The Tories and liberals for several years have been in control of large swathes of the country through their control of huge County Councils, Metropolitan Councils etc, and through their control of hundreds of District and Unitary Coucils. Have they represented anyhting new in their control of lagre chunks of Government? No, absolutely not. If they have it has only been to the extent that they have cut spending, and attacked Local Government workers even more viciously!

Of course, irts true that Labour Councils have hardly been hotbeds of militant socialism either. But, the difference is clear. The Trade Unions continue to play an important role within the LP, including the provision of finance. The unions if they organise themselves, if workers at a rank and file level force the unions to act, can pressurise the LP to act in their interest. Ordinary workers as members of the LP can organise within their Trade Union Branches, and within their communties likewise to apply pressure within the Party. That is not true about the Tories or Liberals. On the contrary, both the Tories and Liberals as outright bosses parties will feel the presssure on their necks not of worker members, but of the large and small bosses. Although Blair, and probably Brown, would have liked to break the link with the unions, they have not been able to do it, and now their is even less chance hey could achieve it. Although, Blair and brown have failed to get rid of all the Tories anti-union laws, they have facilitated workers struggles in some limited ways, whereas the Tories in particular call openly for strike-breaking by the State, and for workers to ignore even clear demcoratic decisions in order to scab!

Its true, as I have written that the Tories proposals for the "Big Society", for workers to have the right to establish their own Co-operative organisations for education and so on, stand closer superficially to the ideas of Marx than do those of the statists, including Left-wing statists. But, as I've also argued that is only true at a superficial level. Their support for such Co-operatives is not the support that Marxists advance for such ventures, which breaks out way beyond he bounds that the Tories would limit them within. It was remarkable this week that at the Conference of the RCN there was considerable support for the idea that ordinary nurses and healthworkers could efficiently run their own facilities, similar to that which is already being undertaken in Surrey. But, the loudest most sincere applause came when one nurse put it to Clegg that if it was okay to sack your MP, why shouldn't nurses and healthworkers be able to sack their NHS Chief Executives!!!

Quite right too, but in defending the state capitalist NHS, the vast majority of the Left fails to raise such demands for workers and patients control, or een for a thoroughgoing democratisation of the NHS. As so often the Left is tailing large sections of the working class in its ideas. Workers such as those health workes in Surrey, and many thousands more in worker owned enterprises throughout the country aredoing what Marx suggested and demonstrating in practice that they can run enterprises effectively, and efficiently without bosses, and in so doing are demonstrrating to the mass of workers that a different type of society is possible.

Of course, the Tories and Liberals are not going to give worekrs the right to sack NHS Chief Executives, just as they will not give rank and file Coppers the right to sack Chief Constables, or troops the right to elect their commanding officers, or any other worker the right to sack their bosses. Workers can only win that right by themselves owning the means of production, which for now and the immediate future means by establishing their own Co-ops, by demanding control of their pension funds to buy up big businesses lock, stock and barrel.

If we want real change, and want it now, we should not look to any politicians to deliver it for us. We have to deliver it for oursleves, through our own, direct self-activity, by taking control of our own lives back into our hands, not in some kind of Tory individualistic way, but by recognising as workers our own collective self-interests.