STATEMENT BY THE NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARD
THE News Line Editorial Board sends its May Day greetings to the working class, the youth and the poor throughout the world who are rising up in revolutionary confrontation against a bankrupt capitalist system which is in its death agony, and is gripped by the greatest economic and political crisis in its history.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the working class and the youth of Palestine who are determined to achieve their independent state in the face of vicious and murderous attacks by an Israeli government that contains self-proclaimed fascists, and is supported 100% by the British and the US governments.
We give our full support to the workers of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics who are fighting against the Ukrainian fascists, who want to destroy them, and then grab the Crimea from Russia.
We condemn the US and UK governments who are arming the Ukrainian fascists with massive weaponry with which they hope will see them weaken Russia, and even create the basis for regime change in Russia itself.
The fact that imperialist intervention in the Ukraine has led to massive inflation in food and oil prices, which is pauperising the workers of the UK, the US and the EU is a price worth paying, as far as the bosses and their governments are concerned.
In fact, the message of the Bank of England is that UK workers will just have to get used to extreme poverty – they will just have to grin and bear it, says the bank.
UK workers in fact have a different message. This is that they are absolutely determined not to accept the return of mass poverty and as the current strike wave shows, will force the calling of a general strike by the TUC to bring the Tories down and bring in a Workers Government and Socialism.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the French, Greek, German and Spanish workers who are fighting their ruling classes to a standstill, defending their jobs, wages and pensions with a revolutionary fury.
The UK workers will join them in the struggle to establish a Socialist United States of Europe which will signal the beginning of the end for world capitalism.
In fact, the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system is today driving forward the world socialist revolution at breakneck speed in every corner of the world.
In 2008-9 the capitalist world financial system teetered on the brink of collapse. Now, in 2023, capitalism is driving into a massive inflation and slump with no weapons in its economic arsenal capable of averting a crash into a depression greater than that of the 1920s and 30s.
The only solution to this crisis is the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a world socialist republic.
To avert the collapse of the banking system in 2008, the central banks in the US, UK and EU resorted to ‘temporary emergency’ measures of printing trillions of pounds, dollars and euros in a Quantitative Easing (QE) programme, backed up by zero interest rates that made debt cheap for the bankers and giant corporations.
The world was flooded with worthless paper money, driving the stock markets to historic levels, while on the ground the economies of the capitalist countries were filled with ‘zombie’ companies – companies that produced little if any profit and only thrived through more and more debt, made affordable by zero levels of interest repayments.
The shock to the central banks came with the growing realisation that this had created a massive bubble in asset prices – that the stock markets of the world bore no relation to the real world where production was stagnating, and many so-called advanced economies were sliding rapidly into recession and slump.
In desperation the central banks slammed on the brakes of QE replacing it with Quantitative Tightening (QT) with interest rates being driven up by the central bankers.
Cutting off the ‘free money’ had a catastrophic effect on the banks, an effect that is being felt across the US and Europe in a wave of banking disasters and a major banking crisis.
Over the course of 5 days in March three large regional banks in the US – SVB, Signature and Silvergate – collapsed as investors scrambled to withdraw billions of dollars of their invested money overnight.
The US government was forced to jump in and completely reverse its policy of never again bailing out shareholders and investors with taxpayers’ money as this collapse triggered a massive fall in global stock prices.
The crisis rapidly spread to Europe where the giant Credit Suisse bank collapsed and the EU’s largest bank, the Deutsche Bank, came close to folding, forcing the German government to bail-out depositors and shareholders with taxpayers’ money.
This contagion has not been contained. Last week it was revealed that the large US First Republic Bank had experienced a massive withdrawal of over $100 billion, sending its stock market value crashing by 93%.
The bankers are blaming rising interest rates for ‘damaging their balance sheets’, in other words all the trillions of financial assets that the banks claim to hold have turned out to be nothing more than being based on huge debt and bad loans!
Despite investors screaming for interest rates to be cut the central banks have refused and instead indicated they will push them higher, driving inflation and mass poverty even higher.
Indeed, the central banks are of the opinion that high inflation is a good way to discipline the working class and bring prices down.
This increased inflation means ordinary people will have even less money to spend on essentials, such as food, heating and rent, and that this will bring inflation down automatically.
It turns out that starving workers and their families is the official policy of the central banks to ‘solve’ the capitalist crisis.
It is a crisis that the capitalist class has no way out of, except to make the working class and the masses of the world pay with starvation and millions of corpses.
The working class and people of the world are having none of this.
On this May Day in the UK, thousands of workers are on strike and marching against a Tory government that has spurned all the appeals by the trade union leaders to ‘get round the table’ and negotiate a pay rise – even one that doesn’t begin to make up the pay erosion suffered under over a decade of cuts and wage freezes, let alone compensate for the spiralling cost of living.
The headline inflation rate in the UK is currently at over 10% with the inflation in basic food and energy having soared even higher, some to even 80%.
Over three million food parcels have been sent out by food banks in the year to March – the most ever delivered in a single year.
The working class has had enough of seeing their lives and the lives of their children destroyed by a bankrupt capitalist system that is in death agony.
The determination of workers to fight has seen the nurses defying the recommendation of the RCN leaders to accept a miserable pay increase.
It showed itself on Friday when the largest union Unite announced that its health members had also voted to reject the same offer despite the lack of leadership from the bureaucracy who refused to make any recommendation.
In the face of this determination the Tories turned to the existing anti-union laws in the High Court which on Thursday ruled the scheduled strike by nurses on Tuesday 2 May to be illegal.
Last week, the chief economist at the Bank of England, Huw Pill, spelt out exactly what capitalism holds for the working class when he insisted that British families must ‘accept’ they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain real spending power by bidding up prices’ through higher wage demands.
The message was clear, workers must accept poverty as the price to pay to keep capitalism going.
If they don’t passively accept this fate, then the Tories are prepared to use the full force of the capitalist state to break the trade unions and make striking illegal.
This was shown on Thursday when the Tories used existing anti-union laws in the High Court. where the judges ruled the scheduled strike by nurses on Tuesday 2nd May to be illegal and ordered the RCN to pay £35,000 in legal costs.
Under the new Tory ‘Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill’ about to become law, the Tories won’t have to rely on arguing about whether unions have exceeded strike ballot mandates by 24 hours.
Instead, the law will give the Tories and the bosses the absolute legal right to force workers to cross picket lines and break strikes under the threat of instant dismissal if they refuse.
If a trade union fails to take all the steps demanded by the Tories and bosses, then the employer will have the right to sue the union for damages.
The Tories want to turn the trade unions into Labour Fronts whose only function is to ensure the compliance of their members with every instruction issued by the bosses.
In the face of this declaration of war by the Tories, the reformist TUC leaders have run a mile.
While criticising the anti-union laws as an ‘undemocratic’ attack on the rights of workers, they have restricted themselves to promises to oppose them through the courts.
The same courts that have ruled the nurses’ strike illegal will never protect the rights of workers.
When the Fire Brigades Union recently issued the call for the TUC to lead a campaign of ‘mass non-cooperation and non-compliance’ with these laws, it was met with a blanket silence from the TUC.
The very thought of breaking bourgeois law sent the TUC bureaucracy running for their lives.
The main prop of this weak, divided Tory government has been the cowardly leadership of the Labour Party, which has refused to oppose any of the attacks launched by the Sunak government, and in fact agrees wholeheartedly that wage increases are ‘unrealistic’.
Labour leader Keir Starmer refuses to stand with the working class, instead standing full square with the Tories along with the trade union leaders who refuse to fight and have reduced themselves to begging the Tories for help, while working flat out to hold back the anger of workers, and at all costs avoid or limit any strikes that threaten the employers and government.
These leaders act in the interest of the bosses against the interests of the working class – they must be thrown out and replaced with the revolutionary leadership of the WRP in the immediate period ahead.
There is only one way for the powerful working class to win the class war and that is to use its full strength in a general strike.
Today is May Day and the working class must make it the day to demand the TUC immediately calls an indefinite general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
May Day 2023 must be the start of the British General Strike.
News Line calls for the workers of the world to unite.
It sends its warmest greeting to French workers and youth who have risen up against the hated government of Emmanuel Macron and his attempts to drive through an increase in the retirement age – part of an all-out attack on every right French workers have fought for and won in the past.
France has been rocked by three months of demonstrations and strikes that have seen up to a million workers and youth on the streets of Paris and every city throughout the country.
Despite this massive movement Macron has driven his pension reforms through.
Today, on May Day the major French trade unions have organised the biggest anti-government demonstration, with millions rallying in a ‘tsunami of protest’.
Along with British workers, the French working class has reached the point where an indefinite general strike to bring down Macron and his government is the only way forward.
French and British workers must unite in calling general strikes that will spread throughout Europe and unite the entire working class in the struggle against the common enemy, world capitalism.
The US and UK plans to arm the Ukraine against Russia, and its war plans against China, reflects the desperation of world imperialism that grasps that the worldwide capitalist order is under threat
Capitalism in its final most degenerate state can only hope to survive through war against the working class at home and war against the people of the world.
In fact, capitalism is heading for the ‘dustbin of history’.
It must be deposited there by the power of the working class of the world and the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International worldwide.
While the working class in Britain and throughout the world support the struggle of Palestinians, the leadership of the TUC has maintained a shameful silence.
This May Day workers must demand that the TUC immediately support the Palestinian struggle and institute a total boycott of all Israeli goods.
Around the globe, the working class has shown it is the most powerful class – more powerful than the Tories or the capitalist state.
The immediate historic task confronting workers, young people and the poor throughout US, Europe and the world is the struggle to put an end to bankrupt capitalism with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This requires building up the WRP and Young Socialists in the UK and revolutionary parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the struggle to victory and consign this bankrupt capitalist system to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
- Join the WRP today!
- Demand the TUC calls a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism!
- Build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International worldwide!
• Forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution!
