While the queues at food banks grow longer and longer, the financial banks are terrified of another 2008-style meltdown.
The world economy is in danger of suffering a lost decade of growth. This would be even more severe if the current financial turmoil sparks a global recession, as new research from the World Bank warns.
This once again reveals the complete impasse of the capitalist system, which has lurched from one crisis to the next.
Basket-case Britain
Britain is also hitting the headlines internationally: not for any achievements, but for how far the country has fallen behind.
The New York Times recently carried a frontpage story decrying the rising levels of poverty facing ordinary families in the UK.
“When her two sons asked for snacks she can no longer afford,” the paper comments, “Aislinn Corey, a nursery school teacher in London, lays down a blanket on the floor and plays the ‘picnic game’.
“She takes an orange or an apple collected from her preschool’s food bank and slices it in thirds to be shared,” the NYT continues. “‘We do it as an activity,’ she said. ‘So they don’t know that mummy is struggling.’”
“She says dinners are often reduced to ‘pasta, pasta, pasta,’ and she sometimes skips the meal entirely so there is more food for her children.
“As the costs of grocery shopping and heating homes have hit records in recent months, the signs of distress are everywhere.”
Damp and deprivation
The UK now has all the features normally associated with a ‘third-world’ country. The cost-of-living crisis has only made a bad situation even worse. An estimated 14 million live in absolute poverty in Britain.
The recent case of the two-year-old boy who died from mould in a damp room is unfortunately not unique. Four million children live in dire poverty, subject to all the illnesses that accompany such conditions. 14 million live in damp or substandard housing.
Shockingly, life expectancy for workers has fallen. Those living in the poorest areas can expect to live ten years less than those in affluent areas.
According to ONS statistics, for people living in the most deprived areas of England, average life expectancy fell by eight months for women and five months for men, between the periods 2011-13 and 2018-20.
Life expectancy “has slowed down, especially for people in lower income groups”, states Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London.
Work till you drop
Half the UK population live in areas that are poorer than Eastern Europe averages.
People living in social housing are being left behind. Recently, tenants living in the Peabody Housing association complained they were being treated like animals. This is life in 21st-century Britain.
While workers in France are on the streets, fighting to stop the pension age from being increased from 62 to 64, in Britain the pension age is heading towards 70.
Now the Tory government wants to encourage retired workers to return to the workforce. You have the great prospect of working until you finally drop and die.
Accompanying the Chancellor’s latest Budget announcement, OBR forecasts predicted that real household incomes in the UK will still be below pre-pandemic levels in 2027-28.
In effect, the Financial Times highlights, “Britons risk experiencing hardly any improvement in their living standards for 20 years.” That’s right – 20 years!
Left up to the Tories and the bosses, workers would suffer another 20 years of shrinking living standards! Welcome to the wonders of capitalism!
Austerity and inflation
Inflation is running at over 10%, and even seems to be heading further upwards. Food prices are rising by more than 18%, biting into household budgets. Interest rates are also increasing, adding to borrowing costs for homeowners and businesses.
Yet workers are being asked to accept below-inflation wage increases. Nurses and teachers, for example, are currently being offered a paltry pay rise that amounts to a 5% real-terms cut.
An estimated 9.7 million are having to hold back on meals. No wonder people are angry! Who can blame them?
All the Tories’ talk of ‘growth’ is a load of baloney. The UK economy is predicted to technically avoid a recession. But for the working class, no matter what the forecasts say, it will feel like a slump. All that workers ever experience these days is austerity and falling living standards.
Spectre of communism
It is clear the future looks very bleak for working people. This is especially the case for the youth. All they have known growing up is crisis and war; uncertainty and attacks.
This is why they have been radicalised. One poll – conducted by the Fraser Institute – found that almost a third of young people in the UK believe that ‘communism is the ideal social system’. This means that some 4.5 million youth in Britain are looking to communism!
This is a remarkable fact. And given the deepening crisis of capitalism, this figure will only grow with time. We base ourselves on this rising reservoir of revolution.
There is no way out under capitalism. On a capitalist basis, there will be nothing but misery for the working class.
As more and more workers and youth become conscious of this fact, pressures will build in society, preparing the conditions for revolutionary explosions in Britain and beyond.
Establishment in crisis
The reformist leaders, both in the Labour Party and the trade unions, have nothing to offer. All they can suggest is to accept the bitter medicine and hope for sunnier days to come.
They have enormous faith in capitalism. In fact, they are the only ones who do. They dream of a nicer, kinder capitalism. But this is pie in the sky. The capitalist system has reached its limits, and is in a deep organic crisis.
Capitalism and its apologists can no longer afford reforms. In fact, counter-reforms are on the order of the day. Permanent austerity is the only item on the menu.
This is why people have lost confidence in their MPs and ‘representatives’; in the entire establishment; and in all the institutions of bourgeois democracy.
Compromise or class struggle?
A Starmer government will act little different from a Tory government, in this respect, as it bends the knee to big business.
The recent decision to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP is a clear signal to the ruling class. The message is loud and clear: Starmer’s Labour is not on the side of workers and youth, but on the side of the bosses.
Truth be told, however, the Labour left are all washed up. They have no perspective or determination.
These lefts believed that they could compromise with the right wing, and build a ‘broad church’. But this woolly reformist approach led to a dead-end; and ultimately to defeat and demoralisation.
Not they, but a new generation of class fighters will lead the struggle for socialism.
Forward to revolution!
The youth are looking well beyond these ‘lefts’. They have revolutionary instincts. They want communism: a classless society built on common ownership, equality, and production planned for need, not profit.
This is what we, the Marxists, are fighting for. We want to abolish the class divide, by abolishing classes themselves.
Only a root-and-branch revolution can solve our problems, and use the tremendous productive forces at our fingertips for the benefit of all.
As Lenin explained: “All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.”
That is why we must build a revolutionary leadership that is prepared to go all the way. On this basis, we can lay the foundations for a mass revolutionary party, which can be a factor in the explosive events that impend.
We appeal to you to join us in this task. Forward to the world revolution! Forward to genuine communism!
