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gle. course be either mental, or physical, or both, ers are part of the same class as manual workers. centre - you are exploited in the same way as if you worked in a chicken factory. But civil servants, or teachers, for example, may
And this often feel that they are "a cut above" other is also why the distri- workers, that they are really "professionals" bution of that or "middle class".
wealth solidarity between different sections of the working class. The labour that workers perform can of which means, for instance, that office work- a massive This may be obvious if you work in a call fact that a This feeling is used by employers to stop However, the development of trades rest of us
unions among white-collar workers
over the last hundred years shows ....
that some of the time, at least, workers. many of them recognise they are in the same basic situation as manual workers, and need the same instrument of solidarity - the union - to defend their collective interests against the employers. is therefore a fiction. The role of the State Each capitalist competes against other capitalists - but they need a framework to regulate between different interests in order to maintain the rule of the class as a whole. This framework is the state. The judicial and legal system is part of the state and it
favours the capitalists over the military. irrationality the minority guided by its own interests dictates to the
For example, there are dozens of restrictions designed to make it difficult for unions to call a strike - to the extent that workers at Heathrow recently decided to ignore the law operators. and stage a successful "wildcat" strike.
But there is no law, say, to stop a company sacking hundreds of people if it wants to. The idea that we are all equal before the law
Whenever Labour got into government in the past, there were always people who thought Labour now had control of the state and could use it in workers' interests.
But the reality was that the state, acting centrally, usually ensured that Labour acted in the interests of the existing order.
If capitalist power is seriously challenged, then the state shows its character as a body few. of armed people acting in the interests of one class - firstly as the police, with their batons, plastic bullets and CS gas, and then as the
Chilean army, with the help of the US.
Class and education
Education, as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of East London recently told students, is also "an arm of the state". It also reflects the priorities of the capitalists -unless these priorities are challenged through struggle. For example, the Blair government wants to limit access to universities, via topup fees, and promote narrow "vocational" education, emphasising technical skills. Universities such as UEL are therefore under pressure to make cuts and merge courses
Of course, universities have traditionally been associated with the idea of a "liberal education", which is designed to develop critically thinking human beings
But capitalism's need for such human • beings is limited. Now, the government believes that it is wasteful for universities such as UEL and South Bank, with mainly working-class catchment areas, to produce anything other than proficient computer
We return to the point we started with -common sense. It may sometimes seem rational, or commonsensical, to accept cuts and attacks on our conditions of life, work and study, because "the finances don't allow" another course of action.
But as we have shown, this society is organised around a massive irrationality the fact that a minority guided by its own interests dictates to the rest of us. It is up to us to fight for our own version of common sense, which is that society must be based on the needs of the many, not the profit of a • For more information, see Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), at www.marxists.org, especially the section "Bourgeois and Proletarians"