The Scottish Trades Union Congress meets this week in Dundee, a city which has been the setting for much of the labour movement's history, from the pioneers who fought the Combination Laws to the Chartists who took strike action in the city in August 1842 and marched from Magdalen Green to Forfar for the right of working people to vote.

And the Suffragettes too who lost their liberty, or even their lives, fighting for the right to vote for women. All organised in Dundee.

So as Scotland's trades unions meet at this highly charged time with the referendum on the creation of a separate Scottish state just weeks away, we should never forget the capacity and power of ordinary people to shape events, and to make our own history.

As trade unionists all our experience tells us that we are stronger when we combine and stick together.

Combination and solidarity should be first principles for any trade unionist and every trade union.

We know, for example, that the unrelenting push of employers for plant-level rather than national bargaining and personal contracts over collective agreements is because they understand only too well the principle of divide and rule.

They also recognise the power that working people possess when labour is organised and represented at the level which capital is owned.

That is precisely why in political and economic terms we need unity around the delivery of a transformative social and economic agenda based on planning and democratising the economy - so that the economy works for the people, rather than the people simply working for the economy.

It is this struggle for power in the economic and social as well as the political sphere that it is necessary for the labour movement to wage if we are to challenge the over concentration of power in the hands of the few.

Socialism and democracy should be indivisible, and so for socialist advance we need to be democratically and politically engaged at the level where we can radically transform the relations of power. There is no short cut.

The call for workers in Scotland to vote Yes in the referendum and so withdraw democratically and politically from Britain - the level where corporate power is organised and macroeconomic power exercised - is therefore profoundly misguided.

There has been a lot of lazy and misleading talk in the referendum debate.

Alex Salmond spoke in his leader's speech at the weekend of the "Westminster Establishment's grip on Scotland."

It is as though Scotland was an oppressed colonial outpost. But this is to confuse geography with ideology.

The coalition government isn't privatising the NHS in England and dismantling the welfare state across the country because David Cameron is part of the Westminster Establishment. It is because he is part of the Tory Establishment. The government's attacks on health and safety and employment law are not anti-Scottish, they are anti-working class. The alternative to these measures does not lie in Scottish nationalism but in democratic socialism.

The real test of democracy is not nationhood but whether we can shift power from those who own the wealth in the economy to those who create it.

It was also even suggested at the weekend that a Yes vote in September is not a vote for Salmond and the SNP's white paper after all.

But to pretend that the Queen as head of state, membership of the nuclear Nato alliance, the adoption of the pound as currency and European Union membership, all commitments in the white paper designed to reassure and so win the support of undecided voters, would be ditched the day after the referendum is both delusional and an affront to the democratic process itself.

So also to pretend that a Yes vote would do anything other than cement Salmond's domination over the SNP and in turn cement the domination of the SNP in Scottish political life is a vain illusion which wilfully ignores every lesson of history.

For the working people the trade union movement in Scotland seeks to represent, freedom and liberty are not about whether powers rest in a Parliament in London or Edinburgh - it is about ending the enslavement of poverty and unemployment, breaking the shackles of exploitation and alienation at work and winning women's liberation, especially as we build a diverse, tolerant, equal and multicultural society.

Of course we need to challenge the status quo, but it is the social, economic and ecological status quo that we need to challenge much more than the constitutional one. We want to democratise the state and the economy, not simply break it up.

Which brings me back to the Chartists. George Julian Harney in a famous call for international working-class unity in 1846 warned against moves to "rekindle national feelings" declaring instead that the common cause of labour is to end the tyranny of the few.

Reject "divide and conquer," he insisted, "unite and triumph!"

It is a timeless and spirited democratic socialist message which the whole trade union movement and every trade union member in Scotland must pay heed to in the debate that lies ahead on the floor of the 117th Scottish Trades Union Congress in Dundee this week and on the floor of every workplace across Scotland in the weeks to come.

Richard Leonard is GMB Scotland regional organiser and political officer