[Six The determination of the Tories to uphold…]
Socialist Press1981 1981-06-25Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
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Six The determination of the Tories to uphold their six per cent public sector pay limit has alienated and antagonised a section of workers until recently regarded as completely integrated into the state apparatus.
The state is no neutral body, impartially administering to the needs of all. On ,Hils:
" SE Brixton.
Central to the state is the necessity for the defence of the private property of the capitalists against the demands of the working class. The two inseparable bases of this defence are the oper-. ation of a judicial system of law based on private property and the repressive powers allocated to special bodies of armed men police and armed forces.
To staff, supply and finance these, a state bureaucracy is required to levy taxes and administer the day-to-day operations of the various wings of The state bureaucracy also administers a range of The more that civil servants recognise that they, too, like other trade unionists, are exploited and oppressed by the state machinery which they operate, the greater the chances that they will see the need to join with the working class in the struggle to overthrow the existing system.
And thousands of civil servants know from their own experience how much the state machine is tied to the existence of capitalism.
Visions of simply moving from capitalism to socialism through reforms legislated no way in which the exploited majority can simply take over the state and wield it to their own advantaged. History - in particular the Chilean catastrophe of 1973 — has proved them right.
State
Only mass action by the working class can overthrow capitalist exploitation. The basis of the capitalist state machine must be smashed - the standing army and the police disbanded and replaced by workers' militias as the basis of a workers' state. new system of law appropriate to these property relations must be established.
The majority must assert its rule over the old minority of exploiters.
And in the drawing-up of a workers' plan to utilise and expand the productive forces left languishing by the capitalist class, sympathetic experts from the present civil service must be enlisted alongside rank and file trade unionists.
Only then can the apparatus of the state - a workers' state - become an instrument genuinely operating for the benefit of the mass of the people. Civil servants must play their role in this fight.