The Spring 2009 issue of Socialist Resistance is dedicated to two apparently contradictory themes. We devote a lot of space to looking at the extent of the capitalist crisis. Unemployment in Britain has now topped two million and the International Monetary Fund estimates that the British economy will remain in recession through 2010 and that the global economy is likely to shrink this year. British industry is only using three quarters of its productive capacity. The other quarter is lying idle, evidence of what Marxists call a crisis of over production. This will have to be resolved by some of that productive capacity being destroyed. The preferred capitalist solution for that quandary is to close plants and put workers on the dole.
Since its launch we have been using this journal to chronicle and analyse what capitalism is doing to the economy, the world’s ecology and population. Last year we flagged up the food shortages and price hikes that were bringing hundreds of millions of people to the brink of starvation. After that the record increase in oil prices terrified all the oil importing economies. Even though the price of oil has greatly reduced it has not served to stimulate capitalist economic growth. As we point out in this issue the speculation, deregulation and privatisation of the decades since Margaret Thatcher have brought the global financial structure to the brink of disaster. This has caused many of the world’s super rich to see billions wiped off their nominal fortunes. The real losers are those who are already worst off.
We are clear that it is possible for capitalism to find its way out of its troubles. As we report the Irish government is showing one possible option by making big cuts in public spending and putting a levy on workers. In Britain companies are using the recession not just to cut jobs to freeze or reduce wages and erode terms and conditions.
A realistic assessment is necessary. The level of resistance to these attacks in Britain has been somewhere between pitiful and abysmal. Unions have been complicit in the sacking of long term agency staff; negotiating pay cuts; agreeing to unpaid overtime and plant closures. The British labour movement has still not recovered from the thrashing the Tories gave it.
One of the things that we aim to do in this issue is offer a practical set of demands around which we can begin to coalesce union militants, workers and communities who want to fight back. These include things like:
• Halt all give-back negotiations. Uphold and defend trade union agreements.
• Halt all house re-possessions for mortgage arrears.
• A crash programme to build new sustainable publically owned transport systems which could create hundreds of thousands of new jobs
It’s not all gloom. A lot of positive things are happening in the world which are barely reported in the mainstream press. In France the New Anti-Capitalist Party has been launched amid a wave of strikes, demonstrations and militancy insisting that the working class and the poor will not be made to pay for the mess the capitalists got us into. General strikes lasting six weeks in Guadeloupe and a month in Martinique won a €200 monthly increase for the lowest paid workers; measures to aid farmers and fishers; employment and training for 8,000 youth aged 16-25. If you fight you can win.
The huge Chinese working class is starting to show that it will not passively accept what its capitalist factory owners and corrupt bureaucrats want to force on it. In one city 30 000 people demonstrated and attacked a police station and elsewhere there have been demonstrations by migrant workers.
In Iceland and Latvia governments have been brought down by popular protests while in Greece youth have fought the police and in Dublin more than one hundred thousand workers marched against austerity plans. Hundreds of millions of people have worked out that public money has been poured down the capitalists’ throats to preserve their rotten system.
There is no doubt that we are now in a new historical situation in which all the neo-liberal fantasises have been destroyed and workers and youth are coming onto the field of struggle globally.
We may be witnessing the emergence on an international level of a militant and politicised working class which is willing to rise to the challenge of rebuilding a society to meet the needs of people rather than the needs of money.