Young socialists inspired by Marx fight for £10 an hour and trade union rights
By Oisin Duncan and William Campbell
Members of the Young Socialists – Young Workers Rights campaign met for a national day of action in Dundee City Centre. Our stall raising the demand for a minimum wage of £10 an hour, calling on young workers to join trade unions and the scrapping of zero hour contracts was met with a warm response .
Workers old and young came and signed our petitions. Some of our members then teamed up and entered various workplaces to talk to workers raising our demands.
Handing out leaflets to workers in JD sports, subway, Burger King, McDonald’s and Home Bargains. Speaking to young workers about the pressures of low pay and hostile work conditions.
One young worker in Subway had asked for a further handful of leaflets to hand out to other members of staff and to hang up in their break room.
All members of the young socialists then participated in a march through the city centre calling on young workers to join the young socialists and denounce poverty pay with the demand for a proper living wage.
After our activity in Dundee town centre our young comrades held a discussion on the fundamentals of Marxist economics, as laid out in Karl Marx’s Capital introduced by two Dundee comrades, drawing on their experiences as a fast food worker and a factory worker.
Such a meeting was vitally important for developing activists to better understand the laws and contradictions of capitalism as well as the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism.
The ideas covered prove extremely relevant for today, as we can see elements of primitive accumulation (Marx’s description of how capitalists came to own the means of production in the first place) in the actions of Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro to open up increased logging in the Amazon rainforest.
In addition to this, we may see the elements of a new global capitalist crisis on the way in both the ensuing trade war between China and the USA as well as the related stock market fluctuations over the past days and weeks.
Such events verify Marx’s analysis, as different sections of the international ruling class are vying with each other to increase their own profits to the detriment of both the world’s working class and our planet’s climate.
Surplus value
But of course the most central finding which Marx discovered was the concept of surplus value through the labour theory of value the connection between the profits of the bosses and the unpaid labour of the working class.
Marx demonstrated that while at their job, workers create more value through their labour than they receive back via their wages. Where does this extra (or in Marx’s terms, surplus) value go? It goes to the boss, who then in Marx’s time reinvested it in more machinery, more raw materials or pays off other costs of production.
Nowadays the capitalists are reluctant to invest, there is profit hoarding and capitalism is no longer developing the productive forces. Profit sinks right into the capitalist’s pocket. Marx termed this (workers being paid less than the value which they create) as exploitation.
This relationship between boss and worker creates a tension in the workplace which expresses itself through class struggle.
The Socialist Party, following the examples of Marx himself as well as other outstanding revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky, devote our activity to fighting in this class struggle on the behalf of the working class oppressed under capitalism.
We view Marx’s economic theories not just as academic pieces to be debated in a dry academic setting, but as a call to action to follow through and seize the economic levers of society and run them under a democratic plan of production.
Therefore, the activity we conducted earlier in the day was based on bringing Marx’s ideas to a new generation of workers, through a transitional program of concrete demands which can rally the labour movement and lead us all towards a more effective and successful confrontation with the capitalist class.
