CAN we challenge the “inevitability” of the “hard times” that Rishi Sunak — ex Winchester public-school Head Boy, millionaire 10 times over, $700 million hedge-funder, speaking from his £7m home — tells us are “now here,” reassuring us that, despite this, “no-one will be left without hope and opportunity?”

Of course, he means none of his class will be left without opportunity.

We know from long bitter experience that crises and recessions such as those building throughout 2019 are inevitable features of the “failed free market” (as Unite’s Steve Turner called it in his challenging Star article over the weekend) and the anti-working-class politics that go with it. And we know from such experience too that no narrow or sectarian campaign can substitute for such a broadly led movement based in our workplaces, towns and villages.

Now the impact of the virus crisis on jobs massively and exponentially multiplies the systemic crisis and is every bit as political. Social organisation and politics are all about humanity living within a natural world which our history of class greed has clearly brought to breaking point and which can often appear hostile. 2020 has shown to all but those who do not wish to see that the more integrated the society, the better able it is to meet natural challenges. The more divided it is, meeting the needs only of a small minority, the less well equipped it is.

Even the Tories have been forced to intervene in unprecedented ways — not just by lockdown economics — but by the trade union and People’s Assembly-style organisations which launched a sustained education campaign and demanded job and pay protection measures, direct investment into essential goods, proper protection for workers, the continued closure of unsafe workplaces and much more, as the Tories resisted and prevaricated to keep the profit machine working for as long as possible at the cost of thousands of lives.

Our strength is in our workplaces and across industries and in our towns, villages and communities. We have come to doubt that strength over the past 40 years of neoliberal aggression against us. We have taken many steps in retreat — some necessary, but too many giving up the power we have had previously as a united force, searching for less conflictual alternatives of “social partnership” — the class cuddle.

But class conflict can never really be avoided. The virus crisis has become part of that struggle and in fact has exposed many ever-present fault lines in the system for many more to see.

We need to do much more than protest as joblessness, poverty and homelessness escalate. We need to step up the demands and action that saw us successfully driving the Tories back from their genocidal position of “herd immunity” and into state interventionist positions that are very alien to them.

We don’t just want — we need — an integrated national programme of state investment, based on the green new deal, centralised priority planning, public procurement and public ownership, diversification into socially useful and environmentally supportive production, trade union rights and dignity at work.

As well as putting the plan for jobs forward, we need to mobilise the people for the right to work. We all know that when class power is challenged it’s not a walk in the park; it’s not called a struggle for no reason.

How can we raise the expectations, the confidence, the demands, the unity, the organisation of the people? The struggle without doubt begins most effectively in individual workplaces and communities.

It’s just on 50 years since the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and 40 years ago communities were galvanised by the People’s March For Jobs. These were not on different planets, though the situation is far from identical now.

But in recognising the similarities between union struggles and community struggles for jobs and the right to work, we are beginning a process where we are going beyond protest to a situation of struggle for the future of our class. There will be many and diverse proposals for how to achieve this — and these need to become the matter of vibrant, unifying argument at all levels of the movement.

Every union at every level from the workplace upwards needs to make a full-on assessment of the effects of job loss — and what intervention is needed.

We need to build sustained community campaigns — led by trades union councils, local People’s Assemblies, unemployed centres, trade union unemployed sections, Morning Star readers and supporters groups and working-class parties — many of which will be reinvigorated or even re-established by the process.

We need to identify job losses not just in the abstract but by particular employers and supply chains and organise around the damage to local economies and the devastating effects on current and future populations and communities.

As and when possible we need to organise community activity including street rallies and people’s marches through towns, from town to town, within and between regions — and aim for action across Britain by next year.

We have been celebrating some great events in our working-class history very recently. Let’s ensure that 2020 to 2021 is remembered by future generations not just as the years of the virus crisis, but the years that we raised the fight for the right to work to new levels.