Posted by John, November 11th, 2010 - under Workers.



Marxists argue that workers can organise themselves into a force which can smash the capitalist state and replace it with their own genuinely democratic organisations – a workers’ state. But is this really possible?

Absolutely – and you don’t need to see a revolution to see the potential that exists for ordinary people to democratically organise society for human need.

Take the Melbourne tram strike of 1990. As the Victorian Labor government moved to sack 1,100 workers and replace them with ticket machines, workers fought back by commandeering the trams. A leaflet from the Essendon depot explained:

We, the tramway workers, are running the system ourselves. The management and inspectors have left the depot expecting the service to be shut down. The drivers and conductors are keeping it alive!

For a whole day the tram system ran under workers’ control, for free. The Herald proclaimed (with slight embellishment):

The revolution began at dawn – it was the day the workers took over the trams. It was the day the connies [conductors] put the bosses to flight, commandeered the trams and showed the government how to run the public transport system.

The government responded by cutting the electricity to the whole system, but not before the workers parked the trams throughout the CBD in a giant blockade, and then occupied their depots. The occupations lasted a month, with each depot expelling management and organising itself through elected committees to deal with food, security (from police raids), finances and media.

In this case the strike and occupations did not spread sufficiently, and the struggle was eventually sold out by the union officials.

But it gives you a sense of the possible. Today, despite the decline in union membership, whole industries continue to have elected representatives in almost every workplace. So in Melbourne, it would be difficult to walk into a school, hospital, city construction site or dockyard without finding that workers have elected delegates and health and safety reps to represent them.

Many industries have delegate meetings, where those elected in each workplace come together to vote on motions – usually to do simply with how much money they will bargain for in the next enterprise agreement or some such thing.

But just think about how things would look if these elected representatives had real power – not just to discuss pay offers, but over the day-to-day running of society. So the nurses would decide staff/patient ratios and make decisions about how many new hospital beds – and hospitals – were needed.

Construction workers would have a say over what they built – another office block in an already saturated CBD market or housing for the homeless? Or a hospital that the nurses had declared necessary? A school the teachers were asking for?

The resources are not lacking for this to take place. The problem is that workers and their elected representatives currently do not have the power to make those decisions. The foundation of a workers’ state would be to extend decision-making power to this sphere.

This would be genuine democracy, where mass meetings of delegates, informed by workplace meetings, coordinated the actions of thousands of workers across the country.

No longer would it be a system where the rich minority dictate what happens on the basis of how they can make the most money. The questions of what is produced, how it is produced and who gets employed would be settled by those who actually do the work.

It would be an economy run in the interests of the majority.

Unsafe, unsavoury or environmentally destructive work could be banned almost overnight. The mass waste of resources – currently directed into armaments, useless tram ticketing systems, the marketing industry, private schools etc. – could be drastically reduced.

Obviously, such a state of affairs is completely at odds with capitalism and the tyranny of the market. But in revolutionary situations organisations of workers’ democratic control, similar to those set up by the tram workers, have been generalised, coordinating the working-class struggle to such an extent that they begin to wrest control of the whole society away from the capitalists.

In such situations, if a revolution can dismantle the capitalist state, the collective nature and common interests of the working class mean that a new society can be organised democratically from the bottom up.

That is the sort of society socialist are fighting for, a world where, as one Russian revolutionary put it: “every cook can govern”.

This article, by Josh Lees, first appeared in Socialist Alternative.