THE British capitalist class and their government are now up to their necks in a massive crisis, that no attempts at fake bravado, or threats that the trade unions must do what they are told or else, can resolve.
The Budget Watchdog has just informed the government that it must find £100bn at the expense of the working class or else see their debt mountain ‘spiral out of control’ into the abyss of a major capitalist collapse.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has also informed the government that the country’s £2.5 trillion debt pile is about to spin out of control.
Debt is now expected to soar from the current 100% of GDP to more than 300% of GDP within 20 years and the only way British capitalism can be salvaged is through imposing savage spending cuts and tax rises onto the working class.
Richard Hughes, the current OBR chairman, has commented that: ‘It is clear that current policy settings aren’t sustainable left where they are.’
Hughes has said that there must be major tax rises and spending cuts before the end of the decade amounting to £110 billion.
This is not taking into account the future gas, oil and food inflationary leaps and crises that are ahead!!!
Additionally, it has been calculated that the government is also losing out on £8.9bn in tax receipts as a result of the economic collapse.
It is in this situation that the working class is fighting for its life against a ruling class that is seeking to ban all strikes, and create the conditions where it can hire and fire at will and drive wages down.
To do this, the ruling class has to take on and defeat the trade unions, the great basic gain of the working class. It can only do this through sharpening the class struggle to the point of making trade unionism illegal.
The Tories are desperate to smash the right to strike, using laws to ban trade unions and trade unionism, so as to reduce the working class down to a super-exploited force.
The reality is that the working class is by far the most powerful force in capitalist society, and, like the bourgeoise before it, needs to develop a revolutionary leadership in order to take the power from the bosses and go forward to socialism.
There has to be a massive struggle inside the trade unions to build the revolutionary leadership of the working class, to take the power and smash capitalism and go forward to socialism.
This is what Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolsheviks did in 1917 and this is what the working class and its youth must do today – build the revolutionary leadership of the working class, to mobilise the millions of the working class and its youth to take the power and smash capitalism, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat in the UK, and throughout the rest of the capitalist world.
In the period leading up to the revolution the working class and its revolutionary party must put forward transitional demands to unite the masses and prevent them being demoralised by the conditions of the capitalist crisis.
The trade unions must demand a sliding scale of wages to keep up with inflation, based on a working class cost of living index, so there is no loss of pay.
The unions must also demand, and win, a sliding scale of hours so that hours are cut for the whole workforce at no loss of pay. If the bosses cannot afford to do this then they must be expropriated.
Above all, the issue of the hour is the rapid building of a mass revolutionary youth movement to provide the basis for the building of the mass revolutionary party, the WRP, to mobilise and lead the working class to take the power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in the UK.
The International Committee of the Fourth International must now be built worldwide to complete the victory of the World Socialist Revolution. This the struggle that Lenin and Trotsky began with the victory of the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Third International in 1917. With capitalism in its death agony, this struggle must be completed today!
Now is the time to rapidly build up the WRP and the Young Socialists in the UK and sections of the ICFI all over the world!
