Economic crisis

It’s not much fun being young at the moment. If you manage to stay in education you end up accruing large debts only to be told standards are slipping and the only reason you’ve passed is because the exams are so easy now. On the street you’re either patronised as a ‘chav’ or feared as a ‘hoodie’. Everything from the summer riots to cultural decline is down to you and your self obsessed, greedy individualism: you just can’t win.

One of the enduring themes of the ruling class is the idea that the current crisis is the result of a credit-fuelled consumerism. Supposedly the working has run up a credit card bill with high living during the boom and now we have to tighten our belts in order to pay for it. The really insidious lie is that the working class enjoyed some sort of renaissance during the ‘boom’.

Statistics, official and unofficial, continue to show that the state of the capitalist economy means further deterioration in the conditions of life of the working class.

 The text that follows is, apart from a few minor changes, the economic part of the report on the situation in Britain for the 19^th Congress of the ICC’s section in Britain. We thought it would be useful to publish it to the outside since it provides a number of factors and analyses which enable us to grasp how the world economic crisis is expressing itself in the world’s oldest capitalist power. 

The election campaign is already underway and one of the main points at issue between the parties is the problem of Britain's vast mountain of debt.

Britain's public sector debt crisis has been a serious concern for the ruling class for a long time.The time is now coming to pay the bill and the bourgeoisie has no choice but to turn to the class that, in fact, produces all social wealth: the working class.

1) The resolution on the international situat­ion from the 6th Congress of the ICC in November ‘85 was placed under the heading of the denunci­ation of a whole series of lies put forward by t

The formidable class combats that shook Belgium last April/May - the most important since Poland 1980, and since the end of the ‘60s in western Europe - have revealed the poverty of the bourgeo

It's necessary to be suspicious of all the economic statistics produced by the ruling class. However, it is interesting to note the claim that France, Germany and Japan, among some other smaller economies, are no longer in recession. What does this actually mean in practice?

Every time someone says the recession is ‘bottoming out' and economic recovery is on the horizon there's a report or set of figures to contradict them. Even those with the most rose-tinted spectacles admit that the British economy in particular is in bad and still declining health.

In the real class war the government is determined that the working class will pay for capitalism's economic crisis. There will be billions of pounds worth of public spending cuts, billions cut in ‘efficiency savings' that will affect those working in the public sector and those who rely on state-funded services.

The main reason for the concentration on the remuneration of undeserving bankers is to distract from the seriously bad news that is accumulating about the world economy, and to give the impression that the state has a workable strategy for dealing with the credit crisis and the recession.

The IMF has declared that, of all the most developed economies, Britain's will be hit hardest by the recession.

The article published in WR320 is section A of the Report on the British situation fo the 18th WR congress. The whole of this report (which also covers the class struggle, British imperialism and the political problems of the British ruling class) can be found here in ICC Online .

The crisis - what's happening and why? What does it mean for us today and how can we be prepared for future struggles? These and related questions were the topical programme for a day school held in Brighton on Saturday 29th November, organised by some of the people involved with Aufheben and local anarchist and community activists. These are the impressions of one of the ICC sympathisers who took part.

After months in the political doldrums, Gordon Brown finally has something to be cheerful about. At one point nearly removed by an internal Labour Party coup, he's now feted by Nobel Prize winning economists for saving the world economy through the example set in the bailout of British banks.

The current financial crisis means a fall in living standards for the working class.Credit is close to unobtainable; prices of everyday necessities are rising far higher than official inflation; unemployment is up and growth at a standstill.

Economic conditions today are "arguably the worst they've been in 60 years" according to Chancellor Alistair Darling (Guardian 30/8/8). No, that's not just for Britain, but for the whole world economy

Everywhere you look, prices are going up! The prices of the energy suppliers have jumped up and so heating bills and travelling to and from work have become more expensive. There are big increases in the prices of essential foods, like bread and milk, and shoppers are getting a lot less for their money in their weekly supermarket shopping. And while prices keep going up.... wages don't.

‘Everything is going well - it's not serious'. ‘There's no need to be disturbed'. These are the lying and hypocritical speeches of the bourgeoisie. In the last months, when the new phase of the acceleration of the world economic crisis of capitalism broke out, the so-called ‘sub-prime crisis', the bourgeoisie wanted at all costs to reassure us with ideological mystifications.

In the pages of World Revolution we frequently refer to the attacks of the ruling class, often giving figures for the latest redundancies or the impact of the budget and other government

As he stood outside the door of Number 10 on the day he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown declared his commitment to change: "Change in our NHS, change in our schools, change with affordable housing, change to build trust in government, change to extend and protect the British way of life." He declared he had "listened and...learnt from the British people" and pledged to lead "a new government with new priorities" and "to reach out beyond narrow party interest."

Things are looking good for working people, according to the government. Wages have risen, unemployment remains low, poverty is falling, waiting lists for hospital treatment are down, there are more doctors and nurses and standards of education keep on rising. Yes, they admit, there are social problems with unruly children, street crime and immigration, but overall things did get better under New Labour. However, if you step back from the hailstorm of statistics, all is not what it seems.

A simpler tax system in a largely neutral budget – what could be wrong with that? Nothing at all, if you believe the Chancellor and the Treasury. But no-one does. The budget robbed the poorest sections of the working class by abolishing the lowest 10p in the pound tax band to fund a small cut in the basic rate of tax. Some workers will be ‘compensated’ by tax credits, the very system that has been utterly discredited, not just because it is so complicated that many of those entitled to it don’t apply, but also because so many of those that did have been plunged into debt when the Revenue decided it had made a mistake which had to be clawed back.

Health service jobs under attack, hospital closures, inadequate services getting even worse. This has led to a discussion on the libcom.org internet discussion forum about whether defending the social wage means defending the NHS. Many important questions have been raised. We aim to return to the questions raised in this discussion in a future article. For now we are reprinting an article we wrote in 1998 for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the NHS as a contribution on why we do not regard this state institution as a reform to be defended.

Despite the dismissive public attitude of the bourgeoisie they are aware that they are in a very difficult situation and that with the deepening of the crisis they are faced with hard choices... This is all very reminiscent of the 1960s. Then, as now, the Labour party had to manage a fundamental downward shift in the economy, due to the inescapable contradictions of the crisis. The key difference is that the crisis has developed for forty years and the contradictions are much more acute.

For the last 2 months health service trusts have been announcing job cuts, 750 at North Staffs, 400 at NHS Direct…totalling at least 6,000 so far, with estimates that the final number could reach 15,000-20,000 as the NHS battles to deal with overspending of around £700 million.

The bubble of the British economy is about to burst. It appeared to be in reasonable health from the mid-1990s. However, we have shown that this has been achieved by cutting labour costs and increasing working hours, and by the increase in private consumption based on a massive extension of individual debt, primarily through mortgage equity withdrawal and credit card debt.

The crisis in the NHS is getting worse. It’s forecast to be in deficit by between £600 million and over a billion... For the leftists, it is Blair and New Labour’s love affair with private capital that is to blame. What none of them say is that the cause of this crisis is the crisis of capitalism. These attacks are part of a long-term strategy to reduce the burden of the NHS on British state capital that has been underway since the 1980s.