THE DEEPENING crisis of British capitalism sees the UK ruling class at least 100 times more interested in provoking regime change in Russia through its massive, no limits, multi-billion pound support for the right wing Ukrainian regime than dealing with the massive inflation in the UK, that has smashed living standards, and has created the conditions where more and more sections of workers are fighting for wage rises to try and keep pace with the nightmare increases in the cost of living.
This crisis is a direct result of the UK ruling class ditching its previous lovey-dovey relations with the Russian and Chinese Stalinist bureaucracies, out of its intense fear, that in reality it was being eclipsed and about to be deposited into the dustbin of history.
So now it is no-holds barred in relation to the struggle against Russia and China, while the main result of this policy, a galloping worldwide inflation, is being paid for by the working class at home, with workers, youth and the elderly facing a freezing and hungry winter, with many early deaths.
In fact, the ruling class have gone out of their way to state that UK workers should be proud to go hungry, to add power to the Ukrainian fascists and perhaps even remove Putin.
They are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian and willing to see large numbers of the poor and the working class die of cold and lack of food this winter.
In fact, accompanying the growing inflation is a growing drive by the UK bosses, to completely privatise the Royal Mail, and put an end to the right to strike with new legislation that legalises strike breaking and using the military as strike-breakers.
Not one of the great gains of the working class, including its right to strike and its NHS, are now safe from privatisation. The working class is now fighting for its life, and is faced with a ruling class that is determined to drive it back to the dark ages of the 19th century, where the only right that the working class had was the right to starve.
However, there is a very great awakening taking place in the ranks of the working class, where rail, bus, Royal Mail, dock workers and millions of others can see that they are being threatened with a return to the 19th century.
There is now a huge strike wave emerging. The trade union bureaucrats have no alternative to leading these struggles but they are hoping for a miracle or a deal that is not on the table.
They are peddling the fiction that if you add up all of the strikes taking place, then you have the equivalent of a general strike!
In the CWU and the RMT, there are leaders who will not surrender to the bosses, but do not have a strategy for victory – they live in hope of a deal and are opposed to a general strike which would challenge the power of the Tories and the state.
Dave Ward, the leader of the CWU, told The Daily Telegraph that because of the number of disputes the current situation is like a de facto general strike.
Ward continued that the CWU was working with other unions, saying: ‘We are involved in other campaigns. The CWU has been ‘calling for a new deal for workers. A serious look at insecurity of work. A serious look at the balance of forces in the world of work.’
In fact, the Tories are out to put the world of work into a prison of a number of new anti-union laws.
The issue is that what is required is not mass confusion and every union for itself, but an officially declared TUC general strike to mobilise the whole working class as one, in a struggle to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and a nationalised and planned socialist economy.
A number of different trade unions engaged in strikes with individual negotiations taking place with the bosses dividing and ruling, is no substitute for a general strike called by the TUC, to bring down the Tories and to go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
Only the WRP is fighting for this policy which is gaining more and more support in the working class, which grasps that capitalism has had its day and must be replaced by socialism as a matter of life or death for hundreds of millions of people.
Join the WRP and the Young Socialists today to organise the general strike and the British and World Socialist revolutions.
It is time to put an end to the anarchy of capitalist production and replace it by a planned socialist economy to satisfy the needs of the working people!
