An axe to the root

There is already existing opposition to child and sweated labour, a solidarity and internationalism that is the beginning of all socialist wisdom. Through No Sweat, a campaign launched by the London Socialist Alliance youth committee, we now seek to mobilise these concerns into an active campaign.

Capitalism is an unequal system that exploits and brutalises human beings for profit. The car worker at Ford, who works to the rhythm of the production line for year after year and watches the corporation rake in billions of dollars in profit, then shut down the plant, sees that clearly. The child weaver, overworked and beaten for Western high street giants, knows it. Even people watching from afar, shocked at capitalism's most brutal excesses, can sense it.

The job of Marxists is to analyse the roots of the exploitation and show how to get rid of it. Our starting point is the sense of injustice felt by the low paid worker, and the spirit of solidarity such as that felt by someone in the UK appalled by the horrors of child and sweatshop labour on the other side of the globe.

We plan to campaign - and to generalise. It is barbaric to pay children $4 to work a sixty hour, six day week, with few breaks, few rights, and regular beatings and abuse. It is also wrong that a small minority can make profits from the vast majority of us who have to sell our labour power in order to live. It is wrong that young workers in the UK are paid the minimum wage, or little more, to make vast profits for the stores selling the fashionable products of the third world child textile workers.

It should not be tolerated that in workplaces here trade union rights are restricted by law and by bosses, or that young workers can legally be paid less than older workers - that is, that their labour power can be exploited at even less cost by the bosses. We needn't pretend that the enemy is abroad, or that we oppose only the most extreme forms of capitalist exploitation.

We hope that No Sweat can organise many of the young people politicised by groups like Reclaim the Streets and actions like the World Trade Organisation protest in Seattle in November-December 1999, the December 2000 demonstrations at the European Union summit in Nice, the International Monetary Fund protest in Prague (September 2000), and the 18 June 1999 anti-capitalist demonstration in the City of London. Those actions have catalysed a new radical, internationalist and anti-capitalist activism. No Sweat can build a bridge between that activism and the trade union movement and the revolutionary left.

Capitalism reduces human relationships to the level of the cash transaction and crushes human lives in the pursuit of the god of profit. In campaigning against child and sweatshop labour, we will seek to point out the nature of capitalism to those we organise around us. We will seek to win people to fighting, not just against the worst excesses of this system, but against the system itself and for a society based on human solidarity and equality.
Link to the No Sweat website