Socialist Alternative: Is The Working Class Really a Revolutionary Class?
Published: 25/11/2006 Written by: Tom Bramble Socialist Alternative Socialists argue that the working class needs to make a revolution to bring about a socialist society. But as soon as you say this you encounter an obvious objection: that the working class does not appear to be in a mad hurry to make a revolution. The supposed reasons for the apparent passivity of the working class are many and varied. That the working class in the West is too well-off. That the working class is trapped in a fog of media lies. That, with the decline of the blue-collar workforce, the working class doesn't exist in the way that it did in Marx's day. What often underpins this pessimism is a romanticised idea of the past. People think of the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the stirring struggles of Spanish workers in the 1930s and believe that workers then were constantly itching to fight and that society was in a permanent state of turmoil. This objection is nothing new. In 1907, the ...