Working class people, who produce the wealth and without whom nothing works, have seen their wages, living standards and quality of life collapse. At the same time, the wealth of a tiny minority in society grows without restraint.
The working class struggle to get an appointment to see a doctor or an affordable bus that runs on time, the rich stash their wealth in offshore accounts and build rocket ships to impress each other. The rich grow obscenely richer by the day – our people queue for foodbanks, die waiting for ambulances to arrive, and work soul destroying jobs for employers pushing to squeeze more and more from us.
All the existing political parties and the dominant media work to facilitate the theft perpetrated by the rich, and to normalise the sick society we live in. To tell us, in so many ways, that there is no alternative. There is no hope. This is our lot, and we should be grateful for it.
We deserve better than this. The people who produce the wealth of society, should be the ones who benefit from it. We, the working class, have the power and the right to change this society. To make it a society in which wealth serves society’s needs, where we have a real say in how the world is run, and where all of us, and our children, can live flourishing lives.
The existing order has failed us. But this order will not be changed by moral outrage, by petitions, or by the existing charade of elections. Instead, this decaying system will have to be broken, for something new to emerge. The only people capable of bringing about this change are us, the united working class.
To do it, we need political organisation. We need to take all the anger, the individual struggles, and small campaigns, and weld them together into a force that can take on and overturn the existing order.
This is why, working collectively over the last year, we have brought together working class activists, trade unionists and socialists to form Rise. Through Rise, we aim to provide a vehicle for working class people to genuinely build their own power. To connect and bolster the existing struggles, but also to move beyond defensive, reactive politics, to offensive, constructive politics.
It is plain as day, since the defeat of the Corbyn leadership of Labour, that the working class in Britain does not have a political vehicle adequate to its aspirations and the sense of hope reflected in the Corbyn project. The Corbyn moment has passed, and understanding how and why it was defeated is crucial if we are to build an alternative now and for the future.
Rise rejects the idea that there is anything to salvage in the Labour Party, or in mainstream electoralism. Instead, Rise presents the opportunity for all who know the world needs to change to organise together, to build independent working class institutions and power that can change our society. Instead of crying out, or scrabbling around, for the next leader to come and save us, we recognise that only we can save us.
For this reason, Rise focuses on organising in working class communities, workplaces and trade unions, to build forms of struggle and organisation that reject all the taken for granteds of the status quo. We know that there is no respectable path to the change our society needs, and we know we do not have time for foolish games.
With inequality spiralling, living standards collapsing, the climate unravelling and our political institutions a dead end, the time to change society is now. Only the working class can do this, but to do it we are going to have to break with a lot of old certainties and thread new ground.
If you agree with what Rise stands for, and if you are ready to get organised to build a better world, sign up to explore how you can best help support and build Rise.
Capitalism, which dominates every aspect of our lives, is in terminal decline, it will limp from crisis to crisis, each one more devastating than the last.
Freedom for Palestine. We are now in the seventh month of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. To date it has led to the deaths of more than 30,000 people, the vast majority of them women and children; the displacement of over a million people; the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and the destruction of all hospitals and medical services in Gaza.
The Origins and Importance of May Day. On this May Day we send fraternal greetings and solidarity to the struggling working classes around the world and re-commit ourselves to the pursuit of working class liberation, socialism and world peace.
