Humanity faces a profound crisis: a devastating pandemic, soaring poverty, inequality and insecurity, with escalating rivalries between the world’s wealthiest nations, leading to global conflicts and wars. Environmental destruction and climate change already devastate the lives of millions of people and threaten humanity’s extinction.
We are in a race against time to prevent this outcome. The only answer is to fight for socialism: a system in which resources are democratically controlled and rationally organised to meet humanity’s needs rather than those of a tiny minority.
We have been brought to the current state of crisis by capitalism, a system based on the private ownership of the means of production, the materials needed to produce the necessities of life. Under this system, human labour and the environment are exploited in an insatiable drive for profit. This underpins a never-ending process of capital accumulation. Free competition turns into monopoly: ownership and control become increasingly concentrated into fewer hands.
Capital spreads across national boundaries to find new sources for exploitation, expanding into an international system of imperialism where advanced capitalist countries loot and plunder wealth from every continent on Earth. While most of the underdeveloped world is formally independent, imperialist countries such as Britain exert neo-colonial domination through ownership and control of the world’s resources, markets and finances. This control is exercised by monopoly companies and banks hosted in the imperialist countries, and international financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF and through the imposition of unpayable debt on the developing world.
The result is a dependent development that serves the needs of the imperialist economies. This also prevents the dependent countries’ resources from being used to meet the needs of their people, the majority of the world’s population.
Meanwhile, rivalries between imperialist powers lead to investment and trade wars and military interventions in dependent nations. In recent decades, as the crisis has deepened, this has resulted in extensive destruction of countries in the Middle East and North Africa, costing millions of lives, triggering mass migration and displacement and further impoverishing the region’s people.
British capitalism’s crisis
Britain is a parasitic, imperialist power which is in relative decline. For decades it has been able to maintain its position as the second most powerful imperialist nation after the US through the dominance of the City of London as the world’s leading financial centre. However, throughout this period, the British ruling class has been divided over whether its long-term interests are better served through a closer alliance with the EU imperialist bloc or with US imperialism.
Brexit has resolved this issue for the time being, but it has left British capitalism more vulnerable in the process: it cannot sustain itself as an independent imperialist power in conditions where inter-imperialist rivalries are intensifying with the deepening world crisis. Unable to compete with the EU or China alone, it will inevitably be forced into a subordinate relationship with US imperialism.
The capitalist crisis and Britain’s relative decline have led the ruling class to squeeze the conditions of the working class through severe cutbacks to state welfare, falling real wages and the expansion of precarious work. The ever-closer connection between the state and giant monopolies, their merging into state monopoly capitalism, underpins the corruption and incompetence that has characterised the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It has enabled the ruling class to make quick profits through the outsourcing of government contracts, while the human and material cost has been dumped on the working class, in particular its most oppressed sections – women and migrant, black and Asian workers.
A new movement
The economic consequences of the pandemic have set the scene for sharper attacks on the working class. It is inevitable that people will resist, and that a movement will arise to meet these threats. The question is, what political character will this resistance take? Will it acquire a political consciousness sufficient to break through the divisions that capitalism creates, both material and ideological, between different sections of the working class?
Will it develop into a struggle for socialism? That will depend on whether it breaks with parliamentarianism, the form of democracy through which the capitalist class maintains its rule while sustaining the illusion of popular participation. In particular, it will require the movement to fight against the Labour Party which represents an alliance between the imperialists and a privileged layer of the working class, a labour aristocracy. Through its defence of British imperialism, the Labour Party is a bastion of chauvinism within the working class; it has sabotaged the struggle for socialism at every critical moment in Britain’s history. For imperialism to be defeated, the Labour Party must be destroyed.
The new movement will have to organise among the oppressed sections of the working class and fight against their specific forms of oppression as well as for their broader class interests. It will stand against racism, supporting the right to self-defence. It will fight for women’s full liberation and against sexism. It will oppose all forms of discrimination such as that against LGBTQ people. It will fight for the right to decent, secure housing, health care, education, and other forms of state welfare to meet the needs of the working class. It will support working class struggles to defend jobs, wages and working conditions.
It will defend all those resisting the imperialist onslaught in the economically underdeveloped countries. It will oppose the indebtedness which financially enslaves poorer countries and which opens them up to ever-more looting and plunder. It will support national liberation struggles among those still denied self-determination: in particular the people of Ireland, Kashmir, Kurdistan and Palestine. Only by uniting the struggles on these different fronts can imperialism be defeated.
Socialism
Socialism requires the democratic organisation of society based on a planned economy, where the means of production have been seized from the capitalist class and put at the service of the people. The Cuban Revolution demonstrates what is possible when the working class takes power and starts to build socialism; its achievements inspire oppressed people around the world. Before the Covid-19 pandemic Cuba had sent over 400,000 Cuban medical professionals to help underserved populations overseas and within one year of the pandemic it had sent 57 brigades of medical specialists to 40 countries where they had treated 1.26 million Covid-19 patients.
Cuba has achieved high human development despite 60 years of extensive and punitive sanctions imposed under the United States’ blockade. Defending Cuba as a living demonstration of the possibilities of socialism, even under conditions of material privation, is crucial for maintaining the credibility of socialism as the only viable alternative to capitalism and imperialism.
No capitalist ruling class has ever given up power voluntarily; it will take mass direct action, a revolution led by the working class and its most oppressed layers.
The RCG exists as a vehicle to strengthen the revolutionary anti-racist, anti-imperialist trend within the working class in Britain, to fight for open and democratic organising to ensure that all those involved have a say in building the new movement. If you agree, join us.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 282, June/July 2021
