Last Saturday's national demonstration for a "People's Vote" in London was huge. Hundreds of thousands from all over Britain marched against the chaos caused by May's Brexit saga and her endless concessions to Tory hard-Brexiteers.
And, yes, they were right to march against all those things. But what were they marching for? What is this "People's Vote" that the campaign organisers are demanding? Yet another referendum on May's final deal, in which we will be given a fake "choice" between two rotten options? And all this, only to allow politicians to tell us, once the polling stations have closed, that we've got to bite the bullet since the "people have spoken"?
As if we hadn't already seen it all, with the Brexit referendum's bogus "choice", the lies on both sides and the poisonous atmosphere they both created by using a large section of our class as a scapegoat - those of us who happen to have a foreign passport! Who would want a repetition of this no-choice parody of democracy which is so clearly tilted against the working class?
No "people", just classes!
The "People's Vote" campaign was launched by a motley crowd of MPs and personalities from all the mainstream parties. But they have their own agenda.
Significantly, just like May, they choose to focus on the "People" - and it's not an innocent choice in this class society. As if, we, workers, who are at the receiving end of capitalist exploitation, could have any common interests with our exploiters, the wealthy and capitalists who are scared for their dividends and profits because of the Brexit chaos!
Indeed, the promoters of the "People's Vote" are merely trying to sell to the City the idea that they would be more efficient at negotiating a deal that would be "good" for business, than May, whose position in her own party is increasingly precarious. And behind them is Jeremy Corbyn, who chose not to join last Saturday's protest so that no-one could claim it was a Labour front, but has nevertheless been promoting himself to the City as its best alternative to May's dysfunctional leadership.
This is why, in last Saturday's march, workers' demands were swept under the carpet: nothing against low wages, decreasing standards of living or casualisation; nor against the long list of job cuts in retail or the threats against jobs in the car industry; nothing either against the government's on-going cuts in social and public service budgets nor against its hand-outs to the capitalists!
For fear of upsetting the capitalists they are so keen to woo, the promoters of the "People's Vote" - as well as their supporters among the union machineries, which were invisible in this march - made sure that workers' demands would not be allowed to stain the "People's" consensus they claim to represent!
We need our own class voice in politics!
So, despite this protest being the largest since the 2003 march against Blair's Iraq war, the working class majority of the "People" had no voice in it!
This has got to change. We've had enough of hearing politicians telling us that our interests are tied to our exploiters' profits. This is a lie! In "good" times, greedy shareholders and bosses steal the bulk of the wealth we produce and nothing "good" ever filters down to us. And in "bad" times, they give another turn to the screw of exploitation, in order to prevent their loot from shrinking. This is what capitalism is really about.
In these days of worsening crisis, the capitalists will use any old pretext to attack our standard of living and conditions, to protect their profits. Brexit is one of the main pretexts they are already using, the other being the crisis itself. And this is why we have to defend our own class interests, not in an alliance with Brexit-worried capitalists, like the "People's Vote" campaign, but against the whole capitalist class and their politicians.
This means that the working class needs its own political voice - a party of its own, which, instead of aspiring to manage capitalism like the Labour party does, or to build a "partnership" with the bosses, as union leaders do, aims at being our voice and weapon against the capitalist class.
Today, such a party would state that we, the working class, have no interest in allowing Brexit to build or strengthen borders around us and isolate us from the world, or from our foreign working class brothers and sisters. It would state that the hardship we face should be blamed on British capital and, above all, on this capitalist system and its on-going crisis. It would aim to build up our collective strength and lead our fights against the capitalists' offensive. And it would boldly set itself the task of overthrowing this rotten profit system instead of helping it to survive, by trying to tweak it at the edges.
This is the party we need to build, urgently!