MAY DAY 2009 – WORKERS NEED TO ORGANISE THE STRUGGLEAGAINST THE RICH AND FOR A NEW SOCIETY: NO MORE BAIL OUTS FOR THE RICH!

Capitalist society is in deep crisis. The financial crisis is intertwined with an overproduction crisis. The drive to maximise profits has led to too many goods being produced. The workers across the globe do not earn enough to buy these goods at the prices they are set. Capitalism has recently been dealing with overproduction by making cheap credit available to workers. All the credit has now been used up. The rich do not have any answer to the crisis.

In this situation all the policies and packages being put forward by Obama,
Brown, the G8 and so on are aimed at three basic things:
1.Protection of profits for the banks and multinational companies.
2.Maintaining legitimacy for the capitalist system in the eyes of the people.
3.Preparing for the inevitable resistance of the workers as their conditions get
worse and inequality deepens.

Currently:
● One billion people worldwide are on the verge of starvation (UN 6 April '09)
● Every six seconds a child dies of malnutrition ( UN 6 April '09)
● Global unemployment increased by 14 million in 2008 and could rise by 38
million in 2009 (International Labour Organisation Report 2009, The
Financial and Economic Crisis: A Decent Work Response)
● Many countries have very little social protection for the unemployed(ILO)
● Working poverty and casual work are increasing(ILO)
● 75 million people in working poverty globally, most in South Asia and Sub-
Saharan Africa(ILO)
● 40-50% of all men and women are expected to be unable to earn more
than $2 a day in 2009(ILO)
● Pension entitlements globally have been cut by 20%(ILO) and
during 2008 individual wealth held in private pensions has declined 40% in
advanced countries and 54.5% in less developed countries(ILO).

More and more of the people's taxes are being handed over to the rich through bank bailouts by the Government, supported by the other big parties and the TUC. The TUC justify bank bail-outs as “..protecting banks from the greedy excesses of their bosses.”(TUC press release,21 April '09). These are the very banks that are forcing factories to close, repossessing homes and decimating small businesses. Bailing out the banks is simply a way of continuing to maximise profits by stealing from public taxes to prop them up. In the fina lanalysis all this money is being taken out of health, social services, education or other forms of essential social expenditure.

We cannot continue with a society run for the few at the expense of everyone
else. Production and banking run by the rich for the rich has no future. It is
destroying society and the planet. It causes wars and occupations over
competition for raw materials and sources of energy, access to cheap labour and places to which to export capital.
Bringing production and the financial institutions into genuine public ownership is a necessity to protect society. As long as we tolerate private ownership and the capitalist state which protects it crises will continue.
This crisis is not going to go away with a bit of tinkering. Some people advocate that public money can be used to prop up manufacturing in one or two areas to “save jobs”. Others say that the solution is in short-time working topped up by working tax credits. Still more advocate that workers should take pay cuts to save jobs and so on. However, the overproduction is still there. All these short term “solutions” are no solutions at all, just ways to keep on maximising profits at the workers expense and in the end they do not prevent further job losses or closures. If the crisis is so severe then how come we still have £millions to spend on wars which cause death and destruction for workers in other countries? It is time to face the fact that the crises is systemic and it is the capitalist system that needs to be dismantled so that production can be carried out to meet the needs of the human beings in the world rather than the profit motive.

There is a serious problem of legitimacy for any politician or party or workers'
union, seeking to prop up the capitalist system. Many of these are putting a
great deal of spin into blaming the crisis on individual “greed”, “bad,
irresponsible bosses” and so on to divert attention from the root cause – the
capitalist system. There also moves to divide workers through using the fascist slogan “British Jobs for British Workers”. As if the crisis was not an international one, affecting workers all over the globe. Those who accept this slogan, hoping to get some small gains, have forgotten that as far as the employers are concerned, the only good workers are those who come cheap, compliant and flexible regardless of nationality. For unions to compromise with this fascist slogan and demand that employers reserve jobs for only British workers is to openly side with the rich as a class and is a betrayal of the class interests of all workers.

The violent police attacks on the G20 protests, the increased state surveillance of activists and demonstrators, and racist raids on various communities are all signs that the rich are taking steps to deal with the growing opposition of the people to their project of maximising profits at all costs.

Only determined working class resistance in defence of the rights of all will save the situation. We need to build local committees of resistance now to stop house repossessions, to stop extortionate bank charges on small businesses, to demand a living wage, or dole equivalent, to end privatisation of public services, to demand free universal higher education, cancel student debts, and to demand an end to the arms trade, wars and occupations, halting the killing of workers, and the massive cost to the public from taxation. We need to organise meetings amongst work friends, amongst the youth in the schools, colleges, universities, and in communities to discuss our reality and create committees of resistance to support each other. At the same time we need to take up the task of creating a unified mass workers political party in Britain
.
RESIST CAPITALISM!

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!

Open Discussion May Day 2009 e-mail  opendisc@ymail.com