LAST week Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled the Tory offensive against the rights, conditions and wages of every worker.
This is the strategy behind the ‘kickstart scheme’ which aims at creating an army of 350,000 young people in a cheap labour scheme by paying employers the full amount of their minimum wage for 25 hours of work a week.
To give the employers time to organise dumping their workers and making use of this cheap labour force the Tories are even offering to pay them a £1,000 bonus to keep previously furloughed workers in their jobs until January 2021 on their existing wages and conditions.
When this ends the wholesale slaughter of wages and conditions will be launched against the dwindling number of jobs remaining.
Already in Sunday’s Telegraph paper an article commented that business needed ‘to free up the employment market’ and that ‘the best way to encourage firms to hire people is to make it easier to fire them’ as the only recipe keeping the profits flowing.
With unemployment estimated to reach at least 4 million as the furlough scheme ends the drive will be to super exploit the working class by beating them into submission.
The world has indeed been turned upside down from the days not long ago when Johnson pledged to ‘level up’ society, and end austerity. The elderly who were promised the everlasting protection of the triple lock guaranteeing pensions kept pace with inflation will soon find this abolished along with their free TV licenses.
Having been thrown out of hospitals and pushed into the life threatening environment of care homes without any protection from Covid-19, pensioners are discovering that as far as capitalism is concerned they are entirely dispensable.
This rapid transformation into its opposite under the impact of capitalist crisis is also seen in the international conflict between imperialism and the degenerated and deformed workers states of Russia and China.
Boris Johnson is due on Tuesday to set a deadline for the Chinese company Huawei to be thrown out of the UK’s 5G network and Tory MPs are demanding that Huawei equipment be removed from all parts of the mobile network.
What a change from the days when China was Britain’s best friend ever, when Tory prime minister David Cameron could happily sit down in a pub for a pint and fish and chips with Chinese president Xi Jinping back in 2015 and proclaim it marked a ‘new golden era’ between the two countries.
Since 2010, under Tory governments, British capitalism has welcomed with open arms Chinese investment and last year the UK was the second largest recipient of direct Chinese foreign investment.
All this changed in the past few months. The massive international crisis of capitalism is driving this transformation as the capitalist class are turning in desperation to a war on two fronts – a war against the working class at home to smash trade unions and war against the degenerated and deformed workers states of Russia and China to restore capitalism.
Lenin always insisted that there is no hopeless situation for imperialism, that it will always turn to war for survival and rely on reformist Labour leaders to rescue it from revolution at home. Lenin’s warning must be taken seriously today – capitalism will not simply collapse and give way without a fight, it must be overthrown by the working class in a socialist revolution.
This requires the building of the revolutionary leadership of the WRP in the UK and building sections of the Fourth International throughout Europe and the Americas to overthrow capitalism and imperialism.
This will create the conditions for the Soviet and Chinese workers to carry out politcal revolutions to bring back rule through workers soviets and set the scene for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This is the way forward for the working people of the world. Build the WRP and sections of the Fourth International worldwide to organise to smash capitalism and imperialism and secure the victory of the world socialist revolution.
