"It is an abiding and indisputable truth that a people which does not understand the past will never comprehend the present, nor mould the future."

So wrote Tom Johnston in his foreword to the 1946 edition of The History of the Working Classes in Scotland.

Johnston's powerful message echoes down the years and so it was fitting that it was recalled at the start of a special labour history workshop last Saturday at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre.

The workshop focused on trade union and co-operative banners held in the Glasgow museums archives. It was a celebration of working-class history which is not remembered enough.

Through these banners it is possible to see popular art vividly displayed, often with humour and always with high idealism.

Among the archives on display was the Yarrow Joint Shop Stewards Committee banner from the days even before the Upper Clyde shipbuilders' work-in, the Co-operative Women's Guild banner from the oldest guild in the country - Kinning Park in Glasgow - and two which centred around disputes from the mid 1980s, the Caterpillar Joint Occupation Committee banner and the Morris Furniture Timber and Allied Trades banner. The testimony of the rank-and-file trade union leaders from both of these disputes was in turn moving and instructive.

The Caterpillar workers occupied their factory in Lanarkshire for 103 days at the start of 1987 when the US owners announced their intention to shut the factory just days after substantial state and corporate capital investment had been pledged.

In 1985 35 Morris Furniture workers in Glasgow were summarily dismissed and locked out of their factory after taking action for a return to the National Labour Agreement standard 39-hour week.

They picketed the factory for two years before setting up their own workers' co-operative.

In both cases these heroic trade unionists laid to rest the myth that workers cannot run industry. The inner confidence of a group of working people was boosted, unleashing creativity and huge productive potential.

It is precisely for this reason that history demands that we reawaken our interest in industrial and a wider economic democracy. It was Keir Hardie, Labour's first and greatest leader, who wrote in his seminal 1907 tract From Serfdom to Socialism that "socialism represents the same principle in industry which radicalism represented in politics - equality."

In contrast the SNP's white paper Scotland's Future fails to mention industrial democracy or co-operatives and merely promises a consultation about employee representation on company boards post-independence.

It is noteworthy that the example which is cited, the London Stock Exchange-listed First Group, does indeed have an employee director, but that director has to resign any position in the trade union, pledge loyalty and confidentiality to the board and can be vetoed by the company. This is not industrial democracy. Far from it.

What we need is a genuine transfer of power within industry and the economy.

And that's what the Red Paper Collective is calling for. Because it is clear that the decisive struggle is not on the national question but on the class question.

The real division in society is not between Scotland and England but between working people and the idle rich.

It is not the so-called "Westminster system" invoked by those in the Yes campaign peddling an instant road to socialism, but the capitalist economic system which needs to be tackled.

Economic relations determine power relations so that requires us to organise, put pressure on the state and win political power at the level where that economic power rests, not break away from it. There are no shortcuts.

The distribution of power is not simply a question of geography and territory.

Of course a line can be drawn through this small shared island and a nation-state of Scotland declared independent from the rest.

Indeed this is summoned up in an attempt to persuade Labour supporters to vote Yes because it will get rid of the Tories forever. The trouble is a Yes vote won't open up possibilities for fundamental economic and social transformation, it will close them down.

Indeed worse still under the SNP's preferred option of a shared currency Scotland's interest rates, exchange rates, public debt ratio, employment and inflation targets will be set by the Bank of England and the "Rest of UK" Exchequer over which the people of Scotland will no longer have any control or representation. Far from banishing the Tories it will hand power over to them.

One of the other illusions on the Yes side of the debate is that this is a colonial liberation struggle with parallels to India in the 1940s, as though Scotland is somehow a colony or dominion of the British empire.

Well, I can't think of another colonised nation providing so many leaders for the colonising nation as Scotland has, from Campbell Bannerman and Bonar Law to Gordon Brown.

The irony here is that if the SNP has its way Scotland will have its financial affairs run by a foreign bank, its economy controlled by external boardrooms, Nato dictating defence policy and the EU in charge of much else. That really does begin to look like colonial status.

Of course we do need a liberation struggle - it's just that Scottish nationalism is not it. It is economic emancipation we are after.

As those old banners remind us the trade union and labour movement will be the best hope for building the better society. That is where advance for working people has always sprung from and always will.

No-one spoke of this socialism in our time with more conviction than Tony Benn. In his foreword to John Foster and Charles Woolfson's masterly volume on the UCS work-in he reflected on "the shipyard workers on the Clyde who lit a lamp of hope during their campaign for jobs and in doing so, opened up a real prospect for socialist transformation that one day will be realised."

Though he has left us, let this vision of hope live on.

Richard Leonard is GMB Scotland regional organiser and political officer