LENIN’S definition of a revolutionary situation was one in which the ruling class could not rule in the old way, and was riven with crises and scandals of all kinds, and where the working class could not live in the way that it had become accustomed to, and was not prepared to put up with the changes that the ruling classes wished to impose on it to maintain a bankrupt system.
This could well be a description of the state of affairs in the UK today.
The party of the ruling class, the Tory party, has not won a general election since 1992, and has been virtually drive out of Scotland and Wales. British capitalism no longer has the power and resources to even maintain its one capitalist union, the UK, and had to call in Gordon Brown to rescue it in the closing stages of the Scottish referendum.
The economic and political power of British imperialism is disintegrating while its political leadership continues to have all of the arrogance of the public schools and little else.
In 2008 the bankers and the bosses crashed the capitalist system, and ever since then the workers have been made to pay, with their jobs, wages, their NHS and their lives to keep bankrupt capitalism going.
However, the trauma and the suffering has only just begun. Now the ruling Tory party wants to press ahead with £50bn plus of savage austerity cuts, and a programme that everybody knows includes privatising the NHS, and making the right to strike illegal.
This prospect is absolutely unacceptable to the working class and its response will be revolutionary through and through, of that there is no doubt.
The Tories are meanwhile building up their state apparatus for an attack on the working class, with masses of draconian powers to arrest, detain and imprison to meet this crisis situation and to suppress the working class and all revolutionary resistance to austerity.
We saw the beginning of that revolutionary resistance in Scotland in the referendum ballot where the traditional nationalists did not vote in their majority for independence but the working class and youth of Glasgow and Dundee voted for a complete break with the Tories and their UK.
The nationalist leaders are donkeys leading lions. They are still Scottish Tories, temporarily in a pseudo- socialist disguise, and preparing to sell themselves to the highest bidder in the Westminster parliament.
The Tories, gripped by an enormous crisis of their system, have already conceded that they will not win a majority. Their tactic is to attack the SNP, so that if Labour has the bigger party, with the aid of a shares crash they will be able to force Labour into a National Government that will see PM Miliband and Deputy Cameron go forward arm-in-arm with a joint austerity programme!
This is the plan that the Tories have been reduced to by the severity of the capitalist crisis and the weakness of the UK ruling class.
There is no doubt that under the pressure of a shares crash and banking disaster tremors Labour even if it has an overall majority can be forced into a national government to save capitalism.
The WRP is standing seven candidates in this election with the message that the working class must get ready for a general strike to defend its jobs, wages and basic rights.
A majority Labour government that carries on with austerity and hospital closures must be brought down by a general strike and an uprising of the masses and replaced with a workers government and socialism.
Any attempt to form a Labour-Tory national government to save capitalism must be met with the same revolutionary tactic.
The working class is not going to be forced back to the days of the hungry 30s.
British capitalism has had its back broken by the crisis of capitalism. It must be brought down and replaced with a planned socialist economy.
The British crisis is part of the world crisis of capitalism, that’s spread from Athens, Berlin, Paris, Washington and Tokyo.
The working class of the world has a historic task to carry out. It must replace bankrupt world capitalism with the establishment of a world socialist republic where planned production to satisfy human needs will be the norm.