The next issue of World Revolution … under the next UK government

In World Revolution 333 we said the most important thing about the 2010 elections. "This time the big issue is not who will win, not even how many people will bother to vote, but how to reduce the deficit over the next few years - how to make the working class pay by cutting jobs, pay and services."

The material situation facing British capitalism is hardly up for debate. All the main parties, despite their efforts, cannot hide the reality of the economic crisis and admit that the next government's cuts will be tougher and deeper than Thatcher's in the 1980s. The little parties - both left and right - who say that capitalism can be run for the benefit of the majority of the population are liars, fantasists, or, mostly, both.

Yet, while the state of the economy is a known quantity, and the austere implications for the working class under a new government are devastating, the political carnival is not obviously leading toward a particular result. The TV debates, the talk of a hung parliament, the emergence of the Liberal Democrats, the fluctuating polls - these are all calculated to draw people into the electoral game, to convince us that our vote could count.

The economic reality we know. What has not yet been revealed is the new shape of the political apparatus of the British ruling class.

Each issue of WR is produced at the beginning of the month. For us to do this at the start of May would be redundant. Everything in WR 333 remains valid up until the election, and after it we want to rapidly analyse what the changes in the political scene say about the line-up of the bourgeoisie. This is not because we are passive consumers of the parliamentary pantomime, but because the British bourgeoisie, at the political level, is one of the most important in the world, and revolutionaries have a responsibility to put forward their understanding of the manoeuvres and conflicts within the capitalist class, the dominant class in modern society.

So, we can tell all our readers and subscribers that WR 334 will be produced in mid-May, and, following on that, WRs 335 and 336 in the middle of June and July respectively. Of course, each issue will continue to be concerned with the whole range of issues facing the working class: the class struggle, the economic crisis, imperialist conflict, the internationalist milieu - as well as the particular spasm of the bourgeoisie we are seeing in this episode of the democratic soap opera.

WR 23/4/10.