The need to "regain control" of society as a whole!

Drucken
Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials
13 March 2019

At the time of writing, just after the second rejection of May's withdrawal deal, speculation is rife over what will happen next in this seemingly unending Brexit saga.
    Additional votes are scheduled in the Commons in the coming week, but these amount to just more banana skins, thrown by one faction of the Tory party under the feet of another.  No actual decisions - and no real moves in any direction - can possibly come out of any of these votes.  Their only purpose is to help the political factions in their point-scoring and grandiose posturing.
    As to the rumour of a possible third attempt by May to get her deal endorsed by the Commons, it just beggars belief!  Presumably this would involve yet another claim that she's "won new concessions from the EU" and the same worn-out blackmail that her deal is the only alternative to both "no deal" and "no Brexit"!
    At this point, in any case, no-one can be sure about what's coming next - except that the Brexit process is definitely sinking even further into farce - and never mind the chaos this causes in the real world, which is increasingly threatening for the working class.
                     
Cynical hypocrites calling the shots

This is the balance sheet of the past 9 years:  6 years of nationalist posturing and anti-migrant overbidding by Tory politicians, leading to the Brexit referendum; and then nearly 3 more years of so-called Brexit "negotiations", against the backdrop of the same posturing and overbidding, by the same Tory factions!
    In their frantic attempts to preserve and promote their careers, these self-serving politicians have devoted all these years to peddling deluded fantasies about the affluent future that was supposed to await the British economy by going it alone outside the EU.  And to make their false promises more attractive, they spread outright lies about the so-called Brexit "dividends" that would benefit the NHS and public services.
    With the crassest cynicism, the Tory Eurosceptic right-wing factions - and their twin brothers-cum-rivals in UKIP - used and abused the disorientation and frustration of large numbers of voters who felt left out by the general degradation taking place across society.  They blamed the EU, EU migrants - and, more generally, all migrants - for all the ills that were piling up here.
    Never mind that this degradation, the rise of poverty and job insecurity, the damage caused by the chronic under-funding of public services, etc., were all direct by-products, first of the capitalist system's financial crisis and then, of the austerity measures used by subsequent Tory governments to get the working class to foot the bill of this crisis!
    In the end, because there was no organised political force which was really prepared to challenge their lies by putting the blame on the real culprit - capitalism itself - these hypocritical pro-Brexit politicians have managed to hijack the political scene for the past many years.  And it is the result of this hijacking that we are facing today.

Our only enemy is capitalism

Ironically, the Brexit saga has been driven from beginning to end by politicians who claimed that, by doing so, it was us, "the people" who were "regaining control".
    But, of course, what these politicians call "the people", is just the number of votes cast in polling stations.  But once the voting is over “the people” are meant to go back home and abide by the diktats of political institutions over which they have no control whatsoever.
    And when these politicians called for "the people" to "regain control" from Brussels, what they really meant was that they - the Westminster MPs - would gain even more power than they already had, including to attack the material conditions and interests of the working class who form the majority of "the people".
    By now, we have seen what it means when Westminster "regains control" in our name.  We have seen what chaos they are prepared to generate by fighting their own internal wars, in order to promote their own interests.
    Throughout the Brexit saga, we have already seen the impact that their "regaining control" has had on our standards livings and jobs.  And this is the last thing we need!
    So yes, given the damage that Brexit has already caused and given the attacks that we can expect from the capitalist class, in order to make us pay for their Brexit costs as well, it is high time for the working class to "regain control" - not from the EU or Brussels, not even from the Tory party and its Brexit bigots, but from the capitalist class itself.
    There lies our future - a common future for the planet and its workers - by joining forces across borders in order to build a new, profit-free world.