There is a relatively well-known saying on the left in the Anglophone world: “The cause of labour is the hope of the world.” “Labour” here is not any Labour (political) party but, rather, the largest existing social group of human beings, namely workers whose labour is held to create the wealth of the world but that never receives anything approximating to its “fair” share of that wealth. If labour can achieve economic equality and social justice for itself, then it would achieve economic equality and social justice for the vast majority of human beings.

In 1894, English artist and book illustrator and sometime collaborator with William Morris, Walter Crane, created the illustration of the “The Workers’ Maypole” for the socialist newspaper, Justice, from which the dictum is derived. Among the demands adorning the maypole are “socialization”, “solidarity” and “humanity”. These are expressed in the aforementioned saying along with another one on the maypole being “the hope of labour is the welfare of all”. Only a few years earlier in 1875, Karl Marx (1950:17– 18) in the Critique of the Gotha Programme had boldly stated the notion that workers create the wealth of the world and that exploitation as theft of the fruits of labour creates a separate social class: “Since labour is the source of all wealth, no one in society can appropriate wealth except as the product of labour. Therefore, if he himself does not work, he lives by the labour of others …”

If both assertions are true, and there is much evidence and inclination to support them, some of which can be found in the preceding pages, then it is politically and practically correct that most of the analysis and assessment made in this handbook has concerned itself with not just diagnosis but also prognosis. This is because, in general and notwithstanding certain places in time and space including Russia in October 1917, not only has labour as an organized force through labour unions (and any associated political parties) been historically weaker than capital but in the new millennium labour is weaker than it has been for many decades.