The working class.

The leading force in the democratic anti-monopoly alliance will be the working class. Its interests are most directly and consistently opposed to those of the capitalist ruling class.

Its strength and capacity for organisation enables it to give leadership to all the forces for advance in society. As a class it can only achieve emancipation through socialism.

But the working class is important not just because of its numbers, but because of the special place it occupies in capitalist society. Although the working class has no need of capitalism, capitalism could not function without the working class.

This is as true of administrative staff in the state sector and ancillary workers in public services as it is of manual workers in manufacturing. Though some workers regard themselves as “middle class”, and may work in institutions which help to perpetuate capitalism and its ideas, they too are objectively part of the working class.

Their real interests broadly coincide with those of workers in manual occupations. All workers provide essential labour power for state-monopoly capitalism, all are constantly under pressure to produce more, and all are subject to the insecurity and crisis generated by that system. They share a united common interest, therefore, to challenge and abolish capitalist exploitation.

At the heart of the working class is its most advanced section - those workers concentrated in large-scale enterprises. The very scale of the means of production used in these enterprises means that their workers can never own and control them except collectively, under socialism.

A large proportion of such workers have traditionally been in the manufacturing, engineering, energy, metalworking, transport and shipbuilding industries, where the anarchy of production and profit-seeking causes the most severe industrial crises.

They have also tended to work where technical innovation raises the rate of exploitation and economic insecurity the fastest. Of all sections of the working class, these workers can see the already-planned character of the enterprises in which they work.

This improves the prospect of winning them to appreciate the potential of planned socialist production. Today, many such workers work for transnational corporations and have the biggest need for - and impulse towards - building international solidarity.

Because the ruling class knows that defeat in such big enterprises has the most dangerous implications, it has always brought to bear its sharpest coercive and ideological weapons against workers there.

On their part, therefore, these workers have been forced to mobilise the solidarity of the whole working class. Thus they have unparalleled experience in the struggle for unity.

In the past, many non-manual workers held aloof from the industrial working class and from trades union organisation. But the distinction between manual and non-manual work is being more and more eroded as a consequence of technological advance and modern processes of production.

The impact of capitalist crisis has also contributed to a substantial increase in trades unionism among non-manual and service workers, who have shown greater readiness to take action to defend their interests.

Strikes by health workers, bank employees and teachers in the recent period are significant evidence of this. Such action itself contributes to the development of working class consciousness.

Moreover, many service workers - particularly in the public sector - are today among the most unionised contingents of the working class, and are often concentrated in large departments and offices.

Whether in industry or services, in the private or the public sector, large enterprises embrace the greatest diversity of workers. They reflect in miniature the diversity of the whole working class.

To build here a concentration of organised forces, capable of confronting the organised power of their state or monopolist employers, inevitably gives these workers the deepest and longest experience in overcoming sectionalism.

They learn why it is essential to put the long-term interests of the class as a whole before the immediate interests of any one section.

Trades union organisation and ideas of class solidarity have spread among workers in the state apparatus, in the mass media and other key areas of society. Nor should their importance in smaller enterprises, including in the most technologically advanced sectors, be underestimated.

Such developments represent an important extension of the potential power of the working class to engage in mass struggle outside parliament, utilising an ever wider range of tactics and techniques.

Another significant development has been the growing number of women joining the workforce, often in part-time jobs. Increasingly they are joining trades unions and - as the TUC Women's conference shows - they are making a major and progressive contribution to the labour movement.

The scandal of low pay among women must become a central issue for the unions, who have a responsibility to step up the fight for equal pay for work of equal value, for childcare facilities, against sexual harassment and for other measures that can ensure the equality of women.

It is unthinkable that real progress in developing the unity of the working class is possible without a continuous challenge to all discrimination and a commitment to end it.

Campaigning along these lines will help to build the confidence of women so that they participate on a basis of equality with men in the joint struggle to abolish capitalist exploitation.

The labour movement must therefore be won to the fullest understanding that the demands for genuine equality for women, black people and for other oppressed sections are central areas for struggle.

Moreover, the struggle against the subordination of women, against racism and other forms of oppression, while each exhibiting their own distinctive features, nonetheless form essential aspects of the class struggle.

The fight for women's liberation and for black liberation is not a priority only for women and black people - it is a priority for the whole working class.