Students and Workers, Employed and Unemployed, Pensioners and Schoolchildren: We are all in it together!

According to the Coalition “We are all in it together”. Suffering is supposed to be “fair” and “equal”. Yet bankers' bonuses are bigger than ever and the rich don’t face benefit cuts. Osborne has tried to present his tax rises as shared pain. This is an outright lie. Even the Institute of Fiscal Studies (no friend of ordinary workers) has confirmed that his cuts and tax increases will hit “the poorest” (i.e. the working class harder.) 20% on VAT alone will add 2% to poor family expenditure whilst only 0.2% to that of the rich. Add to that the increase in our National Insurance contributions and the blatant truth is obvious.

In another sense though, we are all in it together. The “we” being the entire working class. If you are disabled, on housing benefit, rely on local authority care services; if you are in low paid casual work, a pensioner or a student over 16 you are one of the millions who will suffer badly as a result of these cuts.

On top of this health, education, local and other government services are all to be cut with up to half a million losing their jobs. As unemployment has already officially passed 2.5 million and a million 16 -18 year olds are not in training, employment or education, finding another job will not be easy.

Workers will not be able to retire before 66 by 2018 and the retirement age will almost certainly go up after that, In the meantime public sector workers' pension contributions will rise by £1.8 billions in the next two years.

Add to this the rise in world commodity prices - especially on fuel and food - has driven the cost of living up well beyond the paltry 3.7% of the official index.

Cuts in social services, wage cuts and tax increases represent a massive transfer of value from the working class to the capitalist class. They control the system and the famous debts are owed to them. This is the way the system works. We produce all the wealth, they give us back enough to stay alive and take the rest. Now the system is in crisis they will take more and give us less. That is what “fairness” and all being “in it together” means under capitalism.

The Crisis

It’s worth recalling why we are in this mess. The collapse of the speculative bubble led to massive bailouts from governments to the banks in 2008 as they were “too big to fail”.

A banking crash would have brought down the entire capitalist edifice in one go. To avoid another total crash like 1929 governments had to cobble together funds to save both the banks and the system. The British Government coughed up £850 billions. The problem though was that this added to the national debt which has risen to its greatest peacetime level ever. The interest on such debt (which is held mainly in bonds) is decided by the credit ratings agencies who assess the creditworthiness of the Government. Normally sovereign debt is regarded as the safest in the world but given the scale of the global bailout there are serious fears that some states will not be able to repay them. The credit ratings agencies are the same ones who guaranteed the banks’ fictitious capital which enabled the speculative bubble in the first place! Now governments have to show that they are getting to grips with the deficit by reducing annual state spending. If the UK lost its triple A rating it would boost the interest rate and make the deficit harder to pay off. Whichever way, the working class loses. The issue is thus not just about demanding a change of policy and for the Tories (and Lib Dems) to withdraw the cuts but of fighting the entire capitalist system.

False Friends

The Coalition are ready for “some social unrest”. Their media spokesmen warn of “trades union disruption”. But let’s not be fooled by this. The bosses are really quite happy for us to protest within the union framework. After all what will that entail? A few token demonstrations here, a petition or two to save this or that public service, perhaps even a one day strike, and ultimately a campaign for the re-election of the Labour Party which will magically solve the problem. It won’t. The Labour Party, like the Tory Party, is a party of capitalism. In fact it is a party of financial capitalism. Addressing the bankers in his Mansion House speech of 2006 Gordon Brown praised their

dynamism allied to the City's openness[which] has led London to innovate …[it] is a stimulus to innovation … which … helps new companies, new products and new services to come into the marketplace.

No worries about bankers’ bonuses here! It wasn’t just Mandelson who was “comfortable” with capitalists getting filthy rich. It is to save “these modern instruments of finance” that we will be made to pay by whatever party is in power. The only difference between the political parties is that under Labour we would pay over a longer period of time (less immediately painful but in the end you pay more).

All the political parties are turning a blind eye to the new speculative games that are already being played in London’s 600 banks. Why? Because any hope for the revival of the post-industrial British economy now depends on it. That is why, as one commentator in the Financial Times has put it

European sovereigns have opted to default on their spending promise to voters rather than impose a haircut on their financial creditors.

How to Fight Back

In Britain workers' wages have been driven down ever since the end of the post-war boom in 1973. Full time “real” jobs have been replaced by part-time temporary jobs. Those who control the financial levers of capital have shipped production to low cost areas around the world where workers receive a pittance for making cheap goods to be sold back here. And their current aim is to gradually reduce us to the same condition. The capitalists conceded the welfare state when they were terrified of revolution after the war. They have been slowly dismantling it as capitalism's inbuilt cyclical crisis has returned with a vengeance and they no longer fear our response. The failure of their funny money schemes leaves them no choice but to go on the attack. We have no choice but to fight back.

There is much talk of a fightback. Campaigns are being started all over the place. Some unions have even announced solidarity with the students who gave a determined lead before Christmas. However as we noted above their agenda is not our agenda. The first thing we have to recognise that we are not just resisting “the cuts”, as the left and the unions claim, but a rotten system in crisis. It is now either them or it us. It is real class war. We already have a warning. In 2008 in Irish workers peacefully accepted job losses, wage cuts and tax increases. Their reward for accepting all this? A second, more draconian, austerity package in 2011. This has included a reduction in the minimum wage and thousands of job losses [for more details see “A Warning to the World’s Workers” in Revolutionary Perspectives 56].

Many of the campaigns are plainly divisive. Some are just recruiting strategies for the various Trotskyist or Stalinist organisations. The SWP’s Anti-War Coalition is seamlessly morphing into the anti-cuts fight whilst “The Right to Work” campaign of the 1980s is once again on the scene. This would have us believe that capitalism gives us any rights and it also separates the unemployed from the rest of the working class.

Unity

The first thing we need to do is to forget about sections: from union divisions, young and old, in work out of work, students/teachers etc. There is a world of difference between building a powerful class-wide movement and the sectarian antics of the left and the pro-Labour manoeuvres of the unions. If we can act together we are then in a position to use our three best weapons for an effective fight. The first is utilising our collective strength. This means going beyond the ceremonial marches of the unions from point A to point B just to listen to empty speeches. It means organising so that we strike together and not leaving one sector to fight alone. In Greece there have been hundreds of strikes over the last two years but they have had no impact. Each section of workers has gone on 24 hour strikes but all on different days! The unions have ensured that there have been no all out strikes. The Greek “socialist” Government has been duly grateful for this breathing space and not one of the austerity measures has been withdrawn. In Ireland union leaders told workers to accept the 2008 cuts to “avoid something worse”. Well, worse has arrived. Are workers elsewhere going to fall for the same tricks?

Self-organisation

Our second weapon is our capacity for self-organisation.. Instead of waiting for the union sharp suits to “organise” things for us, we need to take control of our own struggles. Here we can take a lead from the French workers’ struggles against pensions reform last year. Tired of “the unions’ class collaboration” workers in several places from Paris to Toulouse decided to hold mass meetings open to all in struggle at the end of the demonstrations. At first they simply met in the streets (for more details see “The Struggle against Pensions “Reform” in France in Revolutionary Perspectives 56 or our website) but soon they were issuing their own leaflets calling for an extension of the fight to all countries. One concluded

We know that this isn’t over, the attacks are going to continue, living conditions will become more and more difficult and the consequences of the capitalist crisis will make things worse. Everywhere throughout the world we must thus fight. To do that we must to restore confidence in our own strength.
We are capable of taking our struggle in our own hands and organising ourselves collectively.
We are capable of open and fraternal debate, of “free speech”.
We are capable of truly controlling the holding of debates and taking decisions.
The general assemblies must not be led by the unions but by the workers themselves.
We are going to have to fight to defend our lives and that of our children!
The exploited of the world are brothers and sisters in a single class!
Only our unity across all frontiers will enable us to overthrow this system of exploitation!

This points the way ahead. In every area the struggle needs to allow everyone a voice in a mass meeting of all concerned. This should elect a committee of recallable delegates which will have the task of linking with others in struggle. The aim should be to build an unstoppable movement which cannot be ignored.

Class Consciousness

Our third weapon is our consciousness, our awareness that what we are fighting for is not just the reversal of these cuts but for a better society. At the moment the full impact of the present cuts have not yet hit everyone but 2011 will be a year of reckoning. Even if we did get some of the cuts reversed it would mean victory in only one battle. A step forward but we would not have won the class war. As long as the current system continues the capitalists and their political henchmen will be back for more. Under capitalist conditions it cannot be otherwise. This is why we seek to cooperate with other organisations, who share this view, to widen this struggle into one against the whole capitalist system. Only by replacing the current system of exploitation with one based on real human needs, which has no classes, no national frontiers, no wars and no money system will workers guarantee that we live in a community “where the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all”. This is what we are fighting for. If you share this view we’d like to hear from you.