Britain, Glasgow Anarchists: More of the Same by awhendry

So, the votes are in and it’s a victory for the Conservative Party. Which doesn’t really 
surprise me to be honest as there is nothing, aside from tie colour, to differentiate the 
two major political parties. They both offer the same ‘solutions’ to the economic crisis 
-class warfare dressed up in the rhetoric of austerity and fiscal cut backs. Many of my 
friends on Facebook today have been wailing and gnashing their teeth over the results of 
the election as they seem to believe that had the Labour Party won enough seats to form a 
government then they would have mitigated the onslaught of attacks on the quality of life 
that we have at the moment. The truth is that had Labour won the election, either with a 
majority or through forming a coalition with the smaller parties, then they would have 
continued on the path laid out by the Tories.

When Labour were last in office, 1997-2009, they slashed benefits, introduced private 
testing for the sick and disabled (because apparently GPs don’t know enough about their 
own patients to be able to tell if they’re fit for work or not), introduced the much hated 
‘Bedroom Tax’ in the form of Local Housing Allowance for private tenants, and they did not 
repeal a single piece of anti-union legislation brought in by the Conservative Party under 
Thatcher and Major. How can a party that calls itself ‘The Labour Party’ not have repealed 
laws preventing flying pickets/secondary picketing? By having absolutely nothing to do 
with the interests of the working class, that’s how.

It seems that many people have very short memories.

I have to admit that the Scottish National Party landslide up here in Scotland did make me 
smile. Not because I support the SNP -far, far from it in fact- but because I absolutely 
detest and abhor the racist, war mongering, anti-worker, Labour Party with a hatred that 
knots my stomach. I worked with asylum seekers through the last Labour administration and 
the horrendous policies they brought in, that saw children being incarcerated for the 
crime of having been born in the wrong place, caused unthinkable suffering to people I 
knew and deeply cared about. That and the millions dead in Afghanistan and Iraq means that 
I can never forgive the party that has the cheek to claim a socialist heritage.

The SNP victory here in Scotland does however serve as a nice illustration of one of the 
problems with bourgeois, sorry, “representative” democracy. The people in Scotland, those 
who engaged with the election anyway, have chosen the SNP as they feel, I’m sure, that the 
SNP will best represent the interests of those who live in Scotland. However the power to 
make decisions over what happens in Scotland still lies firmly in the hands of political 
parties that have absolutely no interest in the wishes of the people who live in Scotland. 
The decisions that affect the lives of people from Ardrossan to Aberdeen and beyond are 
still being made hundreds of miles away by people who are not affected by the outcomes of 
those decisions.

If we take this to a more local level then in Scotland where, for the most part, people 
are represented by SNP members. Now these individuals, whatever their intentions, are 
expected to represent the interests and wishes of the tens of thousands, sometimes 
hundreds of thousands, of people within their constituencies. It’s plainly and simply 
impossible. Add to this the fact that the vast majority of politicians, of all parties, 
tend towards being business people, solicitors, or professional politicians -having joined 
the party straight of university, which is hardly representative of the population at 
large. These people aren’t the ones affected by changes and cuts made to the benefit 
system, they aren’t the ones working all the hours they can and still needing to claim 
benefits to make ends meet, they aren’t stuck on zero hours contracts, or having to feed 
their children from the charity of strangers via food banks. In fact it is often these 
same people, and their friends, who benefit from these decisions. It is utterly absurd.

To have a properly democratic society we need to do away with the antiquated notion of 
representative democracy and find something that is more suitable for a growing 
technological society. We need decisions that affect communities to be made by those 
within those communities and not by a class of wealthy politicians who, understandably, 
only look out for them and theirs. We need to be able to have a proper say over how our 
communities are organised, how our resources are utilised so that we have what we need and 
what we want in our communities.

We will never be able to have a truly democratic society however whilst people are having 
to spend a third of their lives working for fear of being made destitute. How can you 
spend time as part of a proper community, taking part in making decisions that affect your 
community when you are working 40+ hours a week just for the privilege of being alive? For 
that reason we need to change the way that work.. well, the way that work works. We need 
to stop producing things for the profits of a tiny minority and start producing things 
that benefit everyone. Sure I want to have the latest gaming tech and a snazzy smart phone 
in my pocket, I want nice clothes and a nice house. I want everyone that wants them to 
have these things -and for those that don’t to have access to them should they so desire.

And you know what? We *can* have all these things. We can have these things without the 
need to work 40+ hours a week, without the need to destroy the environment that our kids 
will inherit, without the need to sell our lives to a parasite so that we can just about 
afford some of these things.

To achieve this we need, to put it bluntly, communism.



Not the communism of the USSR, China, or Cuba. No. We need to work towards the stateless 
and classless society which Marx described thus in The German Ideology:

in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can 
become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and 
thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the 
morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just 
as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

A society where we organise our work and our lives ourselves, where our concept of work 
has changed so much that it would be unrecognisable to us today. A world where a person 
can engage in useful activities without being explicitly defined by those activities. Thus 
I may spend the morning writing and the afternoon working on a local farm. Doing the 
things that need to be done to improve my life and the lives of those in my community.

Of course those who presently hold all the wealth and the power will not allow change like 
this to be implemented as they have a vested interest in maintaining their positions of 
power and influence. These are the same people who are friends with politicians, who fund 
the political parties, who control the various media outlets we turn to for news and 
entertainment. It is these people who have done such a good job over the last hundred 
years that many of us now see the placing of a tick in a box every five years as political 
activity. That we see the theatrics of Parliament as the be all and end all of politics.

I don’t consider either voting in Parliamentary elections nor the charade of the House of 
Commons to be politics. Real politics happens where we live and work. Real politics is 
when you get together with your neighbours and fight to get the council to fix the local 
play park or to prevent them closing down your local library or sports facility. Politics 
is when you and your workmates go on work to rule or walk out on strike. Politics happens 
all the time all around us.

It would be foolish to believe that the rich and powerful would allow us to merely vote 
for meaningful social change. instead we are given the illusion of choice and pretty 
sounding yet empty promises. For this reason we have to force change, we have to 
collectively change the way our society works so that the work done benefits us all.

In order to force change we need to be organised. Traditionally the way that the working 
class has organised has been through the trade union movement with workers in a given 
trade bandying together to support one another in their common interest. This works well 
when you are in a trade that has high union density and when you are specifically 
struggling for something that affects those within that trade. Many modern workplaces 
however have people from a variety of trades working within them and so the workers within 
a given place of work are divided with some having greater bargaining power than others. A 
good example of this is the rail industry where if the drivers go out on strike then they 
are bargaining with the bosses from a very powerful position -without them the entire rail 
network shuts down. The people who clean the trains however do not have such a strong 
position from which to struggle.

For the modern workplace it is far better that workers are all organised into the same 
union rather than being spread across a variety of different unions with varying levels of 
militancy -and when it comes to unions militancy is extremely important. For that reason I 
shall, later on today, be renewing my red card and rejoining the union who say:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so 
long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who 
make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as 
a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in 
harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centring of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes 
the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The 
trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted 
against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in 
wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into 
the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an 
organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all 
industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department 
thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must 
inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of 
production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to 
carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially 
we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

I didn’t vote in the election. I have never voted in an election and I never will. What I 
have done is fight; I have fought for a better world for us to live in in the here and now 
and for a better world for our children to inherit. If you voted in this General Election 
and are feeling disheartened by the results, don’t be. The game was rigged from the 
outset. Choose instead to get organised, actually engage in proper politics, and to fight 
for a better world.

https://glasgowanarchists.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/more-of-the-same/