Reading My Booklet Arguing that Workers Need Their Own Parliamentary Chamber

This is going to be the first instalment of a series of videos of myself reading my self-published little book, For A Worker’s Chamber. It argues that as parliament is dominated by millionaires, who legislate in their own interest, Britain’s great working people need their own parliamentary chamber to represent them, occupied by working people elected by working people. It draws on the Chartists, who looked forward to having their own ‘parliament of trades’, the syndicalists and Guild Socialists, who believed in a society run by working people through trade unions, the corporativism of the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon, and the worker’s, soldiers and peasants’ councils of the 1919 German Revolution. It also discusses the Fascist corporative state, and the liberal corporativism of the planned economy after the War, as well as the experiment in workers’ self-management in the former Yugoslavia. And yes, it does draw on Marx’s view that the state in an instrument of class rule. There are very many problems with Marxism, but when all the parties seem to be rushing to advance the interests of big business against small business, the working class, the disabled and the unemployed, then it’s very clear that Marx is right at least in this point.

Tags: 1919 Council Revolution, Big Business, Corporative State, Guild Socialism, marxism, Millionaires, Parliament, Planned Economies, Small Business, Syndicalism, Workers' Self-Management, Workers' Soldiers and Peasants Councils, Working Class, World War I