Brexit or not, the working class can and should make its voice heard!

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Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials
29 March 2017

Now that May has initiated the Brexit process, her horse-trading with the EU can be expected to dominate the political scene over the next two years.  The atmosphere will be polluted by her arrogance and the overbidding between the warring factions of vote-hungry, career-seeking British politicians.
    In fact, May's war of words with the EU leaders has only just started.  A lot more filthy linen will be washed in public over the coming months, whether it be over her cynical treatment of Britain's 2m+ EU workers, or the tens of billions that Britain may owe to the EU in compensation, due to breaking its past commitments.
    And as Brexit politicians go into hysterical overdrive, in a bid to out-Brexit May's Brexiteering government, we will no doubt be hearing even more of the idiotic nonsense of the past months, about how little Britain once again will be "ruling the waves" of the world market, alone!  Gratuitous sniping it may well be, but not innocuous - because their favoured scapegoats will, once again, be the workers and poor - from the EU or not - in any case, members of our own working class!

We won't line up behind British capital!
                                                                      
In and of themselves, May's cynical tactics and her politicians' chronic in-fighting would make her grandiose call for "national unity" behind her Brexit drive farcical.  But the hypocrisy of this call goes much further than that.
    After all, what "national unity" can there be behind the leaders of a state which is still forcibly imposing its rule on others, as it does in Northern Ireland and so many smaller territories scattered over the planet?
    But, above all, what does this "national unity" really mean when May's entire agenda is blatantly aimed at helping the bosses squeeze more profits out of our labour?  When her government is pursuing the same relentless attacks against the poor, the jobless, the aged and the disabled, as its predecessors?  When it is increasingly starving vital services of funds, whether it be the NHS, social care or education, while handing out more and more public funds to feed the private sharks' greed,  as part of an on-going privatisation drive which does not dare to speak its name?
    Whenever "national unity" has been invoked in the past, it has always been to get the working class to line up behind the profiteers and their interests.  The Brexit process is no exception.  As if, we, workers, had any interest in lending our support to the profiteering of our exploiters, whether it be against their EU rivals or at the expense of our own jobs, conditions and standards of living!
    No, it cannot be in our interests to support May, nor British capital, in the Brexit process, let alone to allow them to drive a wedge between us and our foreign working class sisters and brothers, whether they work here or abroad!
                                                                       
Time to rock their boat!
                                                                      
Significantly, once again, May's letter was enough to cause the pound to slump by another 9%.  For us, this means another rise in inflation, already officially at 2.3%.  But not for the speculators, who are now cashing in on their bets.  Whatever causes things to go ugly in their system, whether it's economic or political chaos - or both, like Brexit - the capitalist parasites always find a way of reaping benefits out of their own mess.
    Now, British bosses are not just raising demands for public cash to offset any loss from Brexit.  They are also pushing their luck by aggravating working conditions. And they can look forward to May's promise to introduce more so-called "job flexibility", under the pretext of taking "new innovative" forms of employment into account!
    "New, innovative"?  What a joke!  With self-employment and zero-hours contracts, or by imposing contracts offering just one paid hour of work a month, like Santander, the bosses are just going back to the "good old days" (for them!) when the "lump" was the rule in construction and workers had no job security whatsoever!
    And isn't Brexit a golden pretext for British bosses to push their luck even further in this direction, under the cover of "boosting competitiveness"?
    So, while they have no real plan for Brexit, they do have a plan to go on the rampage against our conditions.  And this means that we need a plan too: a plan based on the realisation that our class interests are the exact opposite of those of the bosses and their mouthpiece, Theresa May.  Lest we forget:  collectively, we produce all the wealth in this society.  If we were to use our strength against these parasitic profiteers and their politicians, they would have no place to hide!