DECADES of rampant profiteering and the advance of marketisation of the public sector has led to a lack of accountability and scrutiny which is causing working-class people to suffer and die.

We are left with less of the fruits of our labour as the quality of work deteriorates and pay and conditions fail to keep pace with inflation. The NHS and the public services we need are barely fit for purpose due to decades of cuts and privatisation and they are staffed by workers who are horribly mistreated as the executives and politicians cash in.

Privatisation, wherever it is happening in the public sector, is an unrestrained racket that the ruling class are allowing to proliferate even though it is breaking the services we need and leading to the exploitation of workers.

In one way or another, every political party that has been in power over the last four decades has driven privatisation within the NHS and other public services. From PFI deals through to outsourcing and the appointment of highly paid private consultants, the NHS and public services have been ransacked for big business profits.

All the mainstream political parties continue to demonstrate their unswerving commitment to advancing business interests over the interests of the working class. It is delusional to believe that any deals will be made between the unions and the campaign groups with any mainstream political party.

One of the most serious challenges facing our class is that the left is more divided than ever and moving away from Marxist theory towards a liberal agenda.

Rows and splits around identity politics dominate left discourse and an increasing share of campaigning. Identity politics has never won a penny for workers or advanced our class in any way. It’s a complete dead end — but it is being effectively used by our enemies to divide us.

Social justice campaign groups and NGOs with competing agendas request time and money from the public. Campaign groups spring up, sometimes fleetingly, to stake ground in which they seek to influence the wider movement and direct working-class struggle into the safe lane of parliamentary politics.

Collecting names, collecting money, and putting forward vague demands raises expectations of fightbacks that don’t materialise, and it is little wonder as their watered-down demands are weak and do not fundamentally challenge the way society is set up.

Some of these organisations appeal to the representatives of the ruling class to “do the right thing” — for example, appeals to save our NHS when in fact every one of the major political parties is committed to opening up the NHS to the private sector. In essence, these types of campaigns fail to recognise that class struggle exists at all.

It is little wonder that the Establishment gives voice to those so-called “left-wing commentators” and journalists, essentially grifters, whose commitment to socialism takes second place to their own enrichment and egotism.

These self-proclaimed leaders or commentators are incapable of playing any effective role in enabling our class to fight back against poverty and the race to the bottom.

Building the struggle against cuts and privatisation is crucial to halting and reversing the downward slide into severe deprivation and misery for millions of people in this country.

What is lacking in the present period, is a set of political demands that can unite the labour and trade union movement and that genuinely advances the class struggle.

Small progressive gains are always to be welcomed, but in an era of spiralling poverty and destitution and when young people are being robbed of their future, socialist political demands that are relevant to workers in their day-to-day lives are what we need and deserve from the labour and trade union movement.

For example, social housing, free healthcare, accessible public services, and public ownership of utilities: these should not just be aspirations but goals that the movement is prepared to take the gloves off to achieve.

Workers themselves clearly understand what’s at stake because they suffer the adverse consequences of profiteering every day.

Workers are at the heart of the class war and a whole new generation of them are moving into activity in their trade unions.

The most exploited workers are rightly sceptical of the “equality, diversity and inclusion” policies being pushed by the same employers who are robbing them blind.

The consciousness of these workers has been honed in the brutal material world they are forced to exist in, and they do not have the luxury of basking in the realms of idealism.

There have been defeats and setbacks as the unions brush off the cobwebs of years of inertia, but the trade unions remain the largest democratic organisations of the working class.

The struggles of the organised working class continue to offer a true beacon of hope for the future. Union members have come together in every part of the economy and pushed back against the race to the bottom.

Every dispute and every strike raises consciousness, brings in new representatives and builds branches. Valuable insights can be gathered even from mistakes and defeats and the hidden victory of creating a large active trade union branch in a workplace should never be ignored.

What is clear is that class struggle is not dead and organised workers have a major role to play in the battles to come.

It won’t be the self-appointed lefty social media commentators who will lead the working class in the coming struggles, but rank-and-file trade unionists and unions with fighting leaderships.

Uniting these fights around industrial and political demands that advance the material interests of working-class people remains the only way to defeat the brutality of capitalism for good — and at the very core of these demands must be a united co-ordinated campaign to end all cuts and privatisation.