IT IS now accepted that the capitalist system is in its greatest crisis ever, bigger than the crisis created by the First World War, which led to the Russian Revolution, and the 1929 crash and the Hungry 30s which led to the Second World War. This was concluded when the Red Army marched into Berlin and planted the red flag on the summit of the Reichstag.
This current crisis therefore has the most revolutionary implications. These are that the capitalist system is now in the final stages of its death agony, and is a gigantic barrier to the further progress of human kind. It deserves to perish and must be swept away.
The productive forces have to be rescued from the anarchy of capitalist production, and the conditions created for their further development by the mobilisation of the working class of the world to carry through the world socialist revolution.
There is not one problem that affects humankind, whether it is mass unemployment, homelessness, hunger, war, disease, and the impact of climate change, that can be resolved without the smashing of capitalism through a socialist revolution.
One of the major effects of the crisis is that it brings to life, enlivens and drives forward the force that Karl Marx analysed in the Communist Manifesto to be the gravedigger of capitalism: the working class and its youth.
This class, the only really revolutionary class in capitalist society is now called upon to lead the majority of the middle class forward to bury the capitalist system to go forward to socialism.
This task requires, as its guiding force, the building up of the revolutionary party, based on the most advanced workers and the masses of revolutionary youth, to provide the strategic and tactical leadership necessary for the working class to smash capitalism and take the power.
One of the major battle grounds of this struggle is the trade unions.
In this country, the trade union leaders are completely craven and support the Labour government and still finance it. Since 2005, the Unite trade union has advanced £11 million of its members’ funds to prevent the Labour Party going bankrupt.
The Brown government has not only handed hundreds of billions to the banks to rescue the bankers from the crisis, but has left the banking class in control of the banks, to continue sacking thousands of workers and repossessing thousands of workers’ homes.
Not content with this, Brown and Mandelson have continued to attack the working class with their programme to privatise the Royal Mail with the support of the Tory Party.
The more billions that they have handed to the banks, the more determined the government has become to sack hundreds of thousands in the public sector, to ruthlessly complete the privatisation of the NHS and education, and to allow industry to shut down.
The only policy for this crisis is for the trade unions to oppose all sackings, short-time working and closures with occupations and national strike action to secure the nationalisation of the major industries under workers control.
The Unite trade union leaders predict that without government aid GM Vauxhall will be shut by the end of April, and that throughout the industries up to a hundred thousand jobs are threatened.
Their solution is to join hands with the bosses such as Lord Digby Jones and support his call for government sponsored short-time pay for a two-day week until the slump is over.
This disgraceful policy accepts that all the working class can do in this situation of capitalist crisis is accept what the bosses are offering.
Unite supports the government, which supports the bankers, and supports the bosses who want to put the working class on a two-day week for the duration of the slump, or until they close the plants. The working class must remove these leaders and replace them with a revolutionary leadership as a matter of the greatest urgency.
