500,000 workers, youth and pensioners marched through London on Saturday.
Unlike the Labour leaders they were in total opposition to all of the savage cuts that are being made on them, and the rest of the population, as the bankers and bosses continue to be cushioned and coddled.
They were not for slower cuts, or cuts over 10 years instead of over four, they were in total opposition to all of the cuts, and for taking on and defeating the coalition.
They also welcomed the Libyan students who marched on Saturday. They were demanding that the war on Libya be stopped. They declared that ‘Cameron is a murderer’, and called on the British workers to defend the Libyan revolution and its nationalisation of the oil wealth.
The mass of marchers understood that every day this imperialist war on Libya continues, at a cost of up to £100 million a day, another hospital, school or university is condemned to closure, and that the ground is being created for additional cuts in pensions, or further jumps in the retirement age, or in the numbers sacked by cuts.
Indeed, people can see that there is an identity between the coalition’s home and foreign policy.
To rescue crisis-ridden capitalism, the coalition is making war on the UK working class to drive it back to the 1930s, and on the newly independent peoples to drive them back to colonial status, and steal their oil.
More and more workers are becoming clear that their fate is bound up with the fate of the Libyan and other former colonial peoples – that they face the same enemy and are in the same trench.
In fact, every defeat inflicted on British imperialism by the steadfastness of the people of Libya – as they prevent their country being overrun by traitors – is a victory for the British working class, because the UK coalition and British imperialism are being further weakened.
Likewise, every rebuff for the coalition from the workers of the UK is a victory for the Libyan people and their struggle to maintain and retain their oil resources.
What immediately unites workers in the UK and in Libya is that they are inescapably locked into a struggle with British and world imperialism.
Further, in the current situation of the greatest-ever crisis of the capitalist system, when it is deep into its death agony, and is being wracked by slump, nuclear catastrophe, wars, civil wars and revolutions, for workers to keep what they have won, imperialism must not only be fought, it must be defeated.
That defeat cannot be episodic or tactical, it must be strategic.
Capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and overthrown by the victory of the world socialist revolution, and the overthrow of the bankrupt capitalist nation states and their replacement by workers states leading to socialism, and the creation of a world socialist republic, where the anarchy of capitalist production is replaced by a planned socialist economy.
This perspective is based on the fact that the development of the productive forces under capitalism has reached the highest point possible under the old order – the banking collapse and the Japanese nuclear catastrophe prove that point.
From Saturday’s march the working class in the UK must replace its bankrupt reformist leadership with the revolutionary leadership of the WRP, to organise mass strikes, occupations and a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers’ government, not a Labour government.
