“THE working class is back.” So said RMT general secretary Mick Lynch at the recent rally launching the Enough is Enough campaign.

It is the most important declaration in British politics this year, maybe this century. In it lies the seeds of the only possible solution to the imposing range of crises besetting the country and the world.

Pedants might argue that the working class was there all the time. As a sociological category, true; as an active social force capable of shaping the destiny of society — Marx’s understanding of the matter — not so much.

The decline of the trade union movement; the shattering of so many working-class communities; the neoliberal assertion of a consumerist individualism as the measure of all things; and the prolonged hegemony of New Labour in what used to be called the labour movement’s political wing, a hegemony refreshed at least temporarily by Starmer — farce following tragedy right on schedule; the causes of the smashing of the working class as a political actor are well understood.

That absence has been particularly keenly felt since the neoliberal economic model went down in flames, and nowhere more so than in Britain, in 2008.  

The years of austerity and slump since have proved that no situation is so dire that the elite cannot survive if there is no-one bidding to take over control.

Corbynism challenged that vacuum, and it sent the ruling class into a tailspin of panic. 

Yet among the causes of Corbynism’s ultimate defeat was the fragmentation of the working class and, above all, the fact that it was not reinforced and refreshed by mass movements and struggles outside Parliament.

The ever-deepening social crisis, spinning beyond the Tory government’s control, is now providing the fuel for those struggles. The cost-of-living emergency is achieving what mere invocation could never, a mass movement of working-class organisations against further social degradation.

On the other side, we have an establishment that has failed by every measure save self-enrichment, at which it has been Olympic-class.  

Never has this been clearer than during the pandemic, during which persistent government failure to take timely action led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths — yet Tory cronies, including those involved in testing and PPE supply, raked in tens of millions in profits, at a rate of 40 or even 50 per cent plus.

People have gone to the guillotine for less. Absent a powerful working-class movement, however, the exploiters’ heads will rest easy on their shoulders.

Let’s look a little further at what Mick Lynch said: “We refuse to be meek, we refuse to be humble, we refuse to wait for politicians and policy-writers — and we refuse to be poor any more.”

These are truths being asserted on picket lines throughout industry and across the country. 

And this is definitely not the 1970s, whatever right-wing media pundits might say. There were no striking lawyers in those days. The rot in today’s capitalism spreads wider.
 
 However, a question looms — if the working class is indeed back, what does it do, beyond securing pay justice?  
 
If one of Corbynism’s weaknesses was that it walked perforce on one leg, the party-political one, unbalanced by an aroused and militant class movement, there is no value in simply switching to the other leg and still hopping.

The record of trade union action without political initiative is not encouraging, historically. 

That is not to say that there is any value in parliamentary point-scoring or obsessing about Labour’s internal affairs. For the present, that game is played out and will stay so until Labour’s left finds the ways and means to defeat the Starmer counter-revolution.

But there needs to be a political strategy, in the sense of projecting a comprehensive solution to the crisis that can engage the millions not directly taking part in strike action, alongside those who are. Ignoring politics, broadly defined, is no answer. The working class is back when socialism is again on the agenda.

Corbynism seeded this ground. The question is how to synthesise its successes, and the lessons of its shortcomings, with the new spirit in the fighting unions.

The launch of Enough is Enough by leading trade unionists from the CWU and RMT and left MP Zarah Sultana has injected a massive shot of the energy required.

Hundreds of thousands have signed up to the campaign so far. It brings together the leaders of the unions which have been in the forefront of the summer’s industrial action together with some of the few MPs not to have lost their voice under the Starmer dispensation.

It has given a sense of leadership to all the frustrations felt by not just the Corbyn supporters systematically alienated from today’s Labour but by a wider public too.

There have been criticisms as to how Enough is Enough was established, and these would seem to have some validity.  

All this echoes the Cook-Maxton campaign, launched by miners’ leader AJ Cook and ILP MP James Maxton in 1928 to rally left forces against capitalism. That, too, was beset by controversies over its launch and it speedily fizzled.

However, that initiative was taken when the industrial tide was going out, post-general strike. Today, the prospects are better.

It would border on the unforgivable for the surging mass movement to be divided.  

The demands that Enough is Enough has mobilised around are ones everyone can support.

Yet which campaign would not be the stronger for the weight of Unite behind it, together with its perspective of rooted action in the communities, an essential complement to the sometimes ephemeral nature of internet clicktivism.

Likewise, the People’s Assembly has a track record of pulling people and organisations together in the fight against austerity at the grassroots. Hopefully, the new campaign will reach out in these directions.

But now is not the moment for carping or noses-out-of-joint sulking. If the working class is indeed back, the potential of that return — a renewed fight for socialism against crumbling capitalism — can only be realised in unity.