Erima Dall explains why the working class is still the only force with the power to bring fundamental change—and a world run in the interests of people and planet
Why do socialists talk so much about the working class?
Socialists can often be found on picket lines or convincing their workmates to join the union and stand up to the bosses.
Even over issues such as climate change or the genocide in Gaza,we point to the importance of winning working class support and union backing for our campaigns.
This is because the working class remains the key force in society capable of challenging the exploitation and horrors of capitalism.
Mass strikes cannot be ignored in the way that protests sometimes are, because the economic impact can be dramatic.
A mass strike can bring society grinding to a halt and cut off the flow of profits on which companies and the capitalist system depend.
Ordinary people do all the work needed to keep society running. At the end of the day, if the boss stays home, nobody notices much. But if nurses, bus drivers, Google employees or Amazon warehouse workers don’t show up to work, whole industries come to a standstill.
The working class is the only social group that can take control of the economic levers of society and fundamentally restructure it to put human need before profit.
The working class today
It is fashionable to say that the working class has disappeared— replaced by “the middle class”, a “knowledge economy” or a “precariat” of gig workers.
But this misunderstands what it means to be working class.
Workers aren’t just those in blue-collar jobs. What makes you working class is your role in the economy and the level of control over your labour. Class is determined by your relationship to the means of production.
The vast majority sell their ability to labour for wages to the bosses and so are part of the working class.
Most of us are not part of the tiny minority that own and control production.
Many white-collar jobs have become mundane and alienating, increasingly resembling factory-line production. Big strikes of public sector workers, teachers and university staff show that white-collar workers are just as capable of unionising and fighting.
Manufacturing jobs have declined but blue-collar work remains vital.
Construction employs over a million people in Australia and has produced powerful unions like the CFMEU. Workers like these can take strike action that has a huge economic impact even if undertaken by a small workforce of dozens, shutting down mines, the rail network or the power grid.
Globally, the working class has grown to represent more than 50 per cent of the population, with hundreds of millions of workers in countries like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia.
There has been a massive rise in inequality over the past 40 years. Workers everywhere are exhausted and overworked, often juggling multiple jobs to survive. Full-time workers struggle to afford homes.
Workers are systematically exploited to make corporate profits for the rich.
Bosses will always want to cut wages and conditions to increase their profit margins, forcing workers to fight back. Workers’ interests remain fundamentally opposed to those of the wealthy minority of capitalists and therefore to the system itself.
Fighting back
Workers have used industrial action to win many of the rights we have today.
Unions campaigned for annual leave over many decades, going right back to the stonemasons in Melbourne and Sydney who fought for the eight-hour day and a right to a life outside the workplace.
Enormous strikes in the 1890s led to maritime workers winning ten days of paid annual leave . In 1935 the Printers Union won one week’s leave. It was not until 1970 that a full four weeks was finally won.
The 1970s was a general period of upheaval and workers’ struggles. A national general strike involving 1.6 million workers took place in 1976 to stop the Fraser government abolishing Medibank.
Workers also have a history of standing up to war and racism.
The movement against the Vietnam War started out small—but by 1970, tens of thousands of organised workers were taking to the streets on weekdays, marching under the slogan “Stop work to stop the war”.
Apartheid in South Africa was ultimately defeated by a militant Black workers’ movement, supported by a global boycott movement that saw unions famously disrupt the tour of the all-white South African Rugby team, the Springboks.
In Australia, hotel workers refused to book the team’s accommodation and transport workers refused to move the team around, forcing them to take private jets.
This movement also reinvigorated a determined Aboriginal rights movement. First Nations workers had already taken strike action themselves, as in the Wavehill walk-off of Gurindji stockmen in 1966.
The demands began to be supported more broadly by the working class, who took to the streets to march for land rights most famously with the Black Moratorium in 1972.
Faced with genocide in Gaza, we need unions and the organised working class to enforce sanctions on Israel like those in the past. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has resolved at the national level to implement Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel—an achievement won over a year of rank-and-file organising in the union.
Unions in Spain, Italy, Greece and Belgium have prevented shipments of weapons going to Israel. We need workers here to do the same.
Challenges
One of the obstacles to this is that unions today are weaker and there has been an overall decline in class struggle. Strike days have plummeted since the 1970s, from an average of 2368 disputes annually to just 198 in the 2010s.
Conservative union leaders are often the first to highlight the decline of organised labour, in order to dampen expectations and accept compromises.
During the peak of class struggle in the 1970s, wages accounted for a record share of GDP. However, the ruling class retaliated.
The 1980s saw a decisive attack on class struggle and a shift toward neoliberalism—casualisation, privatisation and wage restraint—first introduced in Australia by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. Unions became complicit in policies that restricted strike activity.
In the early 1990s, new legal restraints were introduced, limiting the scope for strikes and imposing harsh penalties for illegal “unprotected” industrial action.
The union movement increasingly fell into line, relying on legal disputes in courts, limited enterprise bargaining and lobbying inside the Labor Party as the path to change.
Rebuild
But strong unions have been built, and rebuilt, out of equally tough conditions.
During the Second World War there was immense pressure to support the war effort and many unions had no-strike policies yet, as the war dragged on, illegal strikes began to surge. Women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time were particularly enthusiastic.
Throughout the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War red scare, unionists faced increased repression.
But by 1969, frustration with anti-union laws reached boiling point, and a general strike led by Tramways Union Secretary Clarrie O’Shea broke the back of the “penal powers” that imposed punitive fines on striking unions.
Unions that fight consistently grow. In 2023 the NTEU at Sydney University recruited hundreds of members through a determined campaign of strike action to win better pay and conditions.
The potential for decisive class struggles today is immense. In 2020 the biggest strike of human history occurred in India, involving 250 million people.
In the US, 2023 was declared the “year of the strike”, as auto workers, teachers, Hollywood writers and actors as well as Starbucks workers and nurses all took strike action.
A world to win
The working class also holds the power to create a completely different society, run on the basis of real democracy and human need.
Workers’ role in production means we already do all the work to run society—but the decisions about what to produce and where to invest are in the hands of the capitalist ruling class.
Any strike on a wide enough scale forces workers to take decisions about running society into their own hands—from how to feed people to when to run transport, power systems and hospitals.
A small example of what workers’ control can look like occurred in Greece in 2013, after the global financial crisis.
The entire government TV broadcaster ERT was shut down, sacking 2700 workers.
Rather than accept their fate, the workforce decided to occupy, and run the network themselves—reporting on the strikes and struggles. Workers reported teaching each other new skills, and many women reporters stopped wearing makeup in an act of liberation.
Throughout history, revolutions and uprisings have seen the emergence of workers’ committees and councils on a much wider scale.
This was true of the 1918-19 German revolution, the upheaval in Chile in 1973 and the 1979 Iranian revolution, to name a few.
Despite its later degeneration into dictatorship, the most complete form of workers’ democracy arose out of the Russian Revolution of 1917, with factory committees based in each workplace nominating delegates to higher district-wide committees called soviets.
Every day workers debated the tasks of the revolution at work and were closely engaged in the decisions of the local soviets. If they didn’t like the way things were going, they sent new delegates instead.
Working class control of the economy means we could redirect money away from militarisation and towards building affordable, quality housing.
Instead of opening up yet more gas fields and oil wells, we could construct major renewable projects instead.
Technological improvements and automation can be used to create shorter working days, not just to put people out of a job.
We need more revolutionary socialists who understand the potential of the working class so that we can build and channel these struggles into a fight for a better world and to end the insanity of capitalism for good.
