Workers face draconian cuts to pensions, welfare benefits, hospitals and public services in general. In short, a head-on assault on present and future living standards. In the wake of the TUC’s ‘March for the Alternative’ opposition to the cuts has been dispersed to localities and fragmented sector by sector. So far, at any rate, there is no sign of a general groundswell of workers prepared to act and fight outside the unions’ suffocating frame. So we have the familiar picture of strike ballots in the offing (teachers, civil servants) … leading to the possibility of ‘strike action’ … by one group of workers and then another … maybe for a day … if it’s not postponed by the union leadership…

This phoney war cannot go on indefinitely. The economic crisis is certainly here to stay and at this stage - when the capitalists are up to their ears in debt and when they have little room for manoeuvre - it is difficult for anyone to pretend that workers are sharing in the ‘growth’ on which the capitalist vampire depends.

In January Mervyn King, (Governor of the Bank of England) predicted that VAT increases and general inflation would mean, “in 2011 real wages are likely to be no higher than they were in 2005. One has to go back to the 1920s to find a time when real wages fell over a period of six years.”

He is wrong. Real wages have been falling since 1973. Inflation is rising and real wages are falling but the powers-that-be are in denial. One of the reasons for this is that they are scared of putting up interest rates and instantly attacking the privatised ‘property-owning’ British worker where it hurts directly: the mortgage payment. Sooner or later though the tactic of direct attacks on the weak and vulnerable whilst the majority face the slow erosion of health and welfare provision, accompanied by gradual belt-tightening for now and the promise of an old age in penury… will become something much more unbearable, an intolerable misery which has to be resisted…

In the meantime the political parties of Westminster provide plenty of diversions. At the moment the ‘debate’ over alternative voting is supposed to attract ‘voters’ disillusioned with the present political set-up to take an interest in what’s going on. The Con-Lib coalition is showing the first signs of cracking. Not over the draconian cuts in public spending which all parties were unanimous in implementing (Labour disagree only on timing), but over how best to involve the working class in choosing a party to rule over them from one parliament to the next.

As the global capitalist crisis develops the onus is on those workers who see there is no future within capitalism to combine. Without a clear revolutionary programme the struggles which workers will have to mount in future will be beaten down and fizzle out. Otherwise, as in North Africa and the Middle East today, they will be diverted into racism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism or some other ideology suited to exploitation and further wars. We have to strengthen the voice of those of us who can see a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. This can only be communism: By this we do not mean the sort of state capitalist regimes which existed in Eastern Europe etc.

We hold to Marx’s original vision of a community of freely associated producers without states, national frontiers, exploitation and money, run by workers themselves. If you share this view we’d like to hear from you.

-- CWO