'Public opinion' vs People's Power

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We have heard a lot about 'public opinion' in recent days in relation to the public sector pensions strike. According to the media pundits, the government and the unions will need to keep public opinion on their side. Whoever doesn't will lose. But there is something more important than public opinion, and that is people's power. I don't know if Ed Miliband and the Labour party leadership understand this - they seem to feel the need to genuflect before the press overlords by condemning the strikers who are taking a stand against a government hell bent on squeezing the living standards and hard won rights of public sector workers. The ConLibDems are deviously setting public sector workers against other workers, trying to divide them on the basis of beggar my neighbour politics. Why should he keep his pension when I don't have one? We can't afford it they say, even though the experts say we can. Some people will fall for this line. Others may see that this is a ruse by a government of the rich and for the rich. What we can 'afford' is what we think important. It's a question of priorities. Unfortunately Labour will not make this argument - as a progressive force - one that defends the majority against privilege - it is utterly spent. It sees its fate as in the hands of the right-wing media and Britain's interests as those of big business. There is another way. To quote from a writer on Venezuela:

The building of People’s Power is a complex effort, less easy than taking the sky by storm or taking power – understanding power as an object. It’s about weaving consciousnesses, going about configuring new relations of power in a laborious and slow organizing effort – it’s about sowing the seeds of socialism in each individual and in each political space and territory that belong to the people. It’s about cementing, little by little, revolutionary hegemony. It’s also about destroying the backbone of the capitalist model, its anti-values and its individualist culture. This requires a great deal of patience and conviction because it responds to a different logic, to another perspective on power, distinct from those known to date on both the left and the right. We take on, with the passion of lovers, People’s Power and the daily efforts to go about germinating and cultivating it in the heart of the People.

We understand People’s Power as the transversal axis of the Revolutionary Project, as the alpha and omega of all transformations, as the primary source for the construction of the new Socialist State that substitutes the still alive Bourgeois State.”

It is precisely Venezuela’s attempt to consolidate People’s Power, a proposal based on the ideals of revolutionaries like Che Guevara, which make 21st Century Socialism such an important historical process to observe, understand, support and defend.

Without a revolutionary humanism to guide those who are building People’s Power, without the insistence that each person partake in the decision-making that will develop 21st Century Socialism, without a great love for and trust of humanity, the struggle for socialism will have lost its point of reference, its light on the walking path. In the words of Che Guevara, “the development of a socialist society makes sense only if it serves to transform people, if it multiplies their creative capacity, if it takes them beyond egoism. The transition towards liberty’s realm is a voyage from the ‘me’ to the ‘us’.”

In other words, it does not mean trying to get good headlines in the Daily Mail and betraying the people who fund and support you - Ed Miliband. It's about arguing for what is right and thinking about the future of society not just tomorrow's headlines or even the next byelection. Saying the wrong thing to win favour from the powerful, and even to temporarily assuage 'public opinion', which is moulded by the hegemonic forces, is not a political strategy - it is bankruptcy. If the hegemonic 'public opinion' is not challenged, it will never shift from the dominant values that preserve inequality and privilege and this irrational economic system.