Vote For Your Class - The Rich Do!

In the run up to the June local elections there’ll be a lot of media debate about the policies of the parties competing for our votes but there’s never any discussion about what class each party really represents.

In the case of Fiana Fáil and Fine Gael it’s obvious to any working class person who can think straight that they represent the wealthy. They are parties of the boss class - the capitalists and the landlords.

This doesn’t mean that every single member of those parties runs a business or rents out a property - although many of them actually are bosses and landlords - but their actions are actions taken in the interests of the capitalist and landlord classes.

They get well rewarded after a stint in politics by going straight onto the board of a business. Look at how former Taoiseach Enda Kenny went to work for a vulture fund as a reward for enacting policies that favoured the funds.

When he was Taoiseach, Kenny invited vulture funds to Ireland where they bought up €200 billion of Irish distressed debt. His officials showed them Section 110 tax ‘loopholes’ so they got away with paying little or no tax on vast profits.

The former Taoiseach was named as chair of the Global Advisory Council within VentureWave Capital. And Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Brian Cowen got a nice reward from billionaire Denis O’Brien when he was given a seat on the board of Topaz oil.

But the relationship between the right wing parties and the class they represent can sometimes be broken by political concerns - just look at how the Tory Party in Britain had to detach itself from the City Of London business elite (who were pro-EU) in order to compete for votes with the far right.

A Century ago the establishment had to concede workers the right to vote and they presented an illusion of democracy to cover up the reality of their exploitative system. The battle for votes led to these parties half heartedly adopting policies they knew would win votes while clamouring for power to do the real business of making the rich richer.

They’ll promise you the sun, the moon and the stars during an election and then afterwards they get on the phone to the vulture funds and billionaires and ask them what policies they want. But what about the other parties in Irish politics?

The Green Party represents the bad conscience of the upper middle class, those who defend capitalism but want a few token gestures towards the environment. In power they’ve promoted the sinister CETA deal which massively extends corporate power.

They’re a party of upper middle class servants of the capitalist class. By middle class I don’t mean white collar workers, those workers are members of the working class despite their accents. The actual middle class is made up of managers, small businesses, lawyers and academics.

This class is weak compared to the power of the big corporations or when contrasted with the power workers have to strike and shut down production. So they vacillate between the main classes - between capitalists and workers, sometimes following one and sometimes the other.

The weakness and hesitations of the Green Party is the weakness and hesitation of a class.

The Labour Party claims to represent the working class but when they were in government they hammered working class communities. In reality though they represent the union bureaucracies - a parasitic layer that balances between workers and bosses and holds back struggle in the name of social partnership.

The Social Democrats are the Labour Party in disguise, rebranded after Joan Burton’s austerity made the Labour brand unpopular in our working class communities. They sell the same tired old line - get capitalism working and some crumbs will fall into workers laps.

Never happens. We work harder, the bosses get richer, wealth doesn’t trickle down. This utopian ideal is a middle class illusion. Capitalism is an inequality engine. The Soc Dems hope to go after the middle class Green voters. They don’t represent working class struggle.

Sinn Féin, as the biggest opposition party, will claim to speak for the working class. But they’re not socialists, based on the working class, they are nationalists - they promise to represent every class.

Mary Lou McDonald will meet with the business elite and promise them favourable tax policies, or commit to obeying EU budgetary rules, that limit public spending - yet Sinn Féin claim they can keep the elite happy and satisfy workers at the same time. It’s a fantasy.

National liberation movements, once they gain power, always coalesce with capitalism - we’ve seen this happen with the ANC in South Africa. They fought a brutal Apartheid regime but once they took power they became corrupted.

This is because the aim was always to run capitalism for “their community” - not to take on capitalism in the name of all workers and oppressed people. That’s why Sinn Féin in the North introduced austerity while speaking against it in the South.

Sinn Féin may have many working class members but the policies of the party represent the same old middle class illusion that you can make capitalism work for the people. You can’t. You have to pick a side and Sinn Féin change sides depending on which way the wind is blowing on any given day.

The establishment parties in Ireland lost loads of votes after the bank bailout and so decided to pretend to embrace change on social issues - like marriage equality and repeal. This pissed off their conservative grassroots and created a pool of voters open to far right manipulation.

The far right are led by the middle class and well funded - just look at how the wealthy and extremist Iona Institute went from campaigning to keep their control over women to funding Gript media.

The middle class leaders of far right movements then recruit from broken and atomised people on the margins of the working class and try to turn them against the left and those who want workers to fight the establishment.

But small business owners can have working class accents too - from drug dealers to people who start up a shop. Accents aren’t an indication of class. It’s about what you do for a living. If you earn a wage and a boss makes profit off your back - you’re a worker.

Once in power far right movements all over the world always represent corporate power and adopt pro-market policies - and when dissatisfaction rises they find scapegoats to divert blame from capitalism. In Germany for example the far right AfD are mad Thatcherites.

They want neoliberalism - that is outsourcing, privatisation, the destruction of public services. They want to slash welfare. These are the very same policies that had destroyed Ireland over the last 40 years and led to the worst housing crisis in memory.

From Fianna Fáil to Labour, from Sinn Féin to the far right they all support neoliberal capitalism. Yet that’s the source of all our problems.

Only socialists challenge the Thatcherite economic direction of the last 40 years. Socialists represent the interests of the working class. Socialists look at every political question and ask “what is best for the working class?”

That doesn’t mean every single socialist is a worker - but the movement aims to fight for workers. And Rebel Telly is the voice of the Red Network inside People Before Profit. We believe that working class voices should be to the fore on the left and lead the left.

We will fight for a more working class left that speaks the way workers speak, that organises and educates the best workers to fight back, that puts class war ahead of the culture war.

Socialists see elections as a platform to mobilise workers and increase the confidence of our class. If you are working class then you need to vote for your class - vote for socialists like those in People Before Profit.