Capitalism is in crisis. The entire system of profit has been thrown into chaos with the world’s major economies going into recession left, right and centre.
This is nothing new – capitalism has always had these crises and they tend to arise around every 7-10 years. Sometimes they are shallow crashes and sometimes they cause utter devastation on a world scale. The recession starting in 2008 looks to be one of the latter.
The bosses and their representatives in parliament will do whatever they can to save capitalism, which provides them with wealth and power whether the economy is going up or going down. They have spent the last ten years amassing huge profits out of sweatshop labour abroad, destroying the environment and launching wars to control energy resources in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Now the economy is on a downturn the capitalists are not about part to with their money or their property. The question posed to all of us is “who will pay for the economic crisis?” Will it be ordinary working class people thrown out of their jobs? Immigrant workers thrown out of the country? Young people made to work for poverty wages?
Or will the rich bosses pay for the crisis? After all, it’s them and their system that caused it in the first place!
If we want the bosses to pay we will have to force them. We will have to build a movement that fights for work as a right, decent pay and that guarantees work for all who want it. We want to provide employment through the building of more schools, colleges, universities, hospitals through massive spending in public services by taxing the rich – not through giving Lloyds, Natwest and Barclays blank cheques.
We should fight for decent benefits for all those laid off during the recession and those unable to find a job. We should fight for nationalisation under workers control of industry when the bosses threaten closures.
But overall we should fight for a democratically planned socialist economy. This would be a system run by workers making use of the centralisation of production and trade that already exists. It would be free from crises and would, in the words of Karl Marx work upon the principal of “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs”.
This pamphlet by REVOLUTION explains how the bosses will try to make us pay for their crisis and why the capitalist system is to blame. Here we will put forward our views on how young people in particular will be the worst affected by the crisis and how we can organise to fight back and defeat the system altogether.
