The
classical view of how capitalism develops is that within feudal society a
class emerges made up of merchants, bankers, early industrialists, i.e.
the bourgeoisie, and that for this class to be able to develop its full
potential a bourgeois revolution is required to break the limits
imposed by the landed feudal aristocracy. That is how things developed,
more or less, in countries like France and England, but not in Japan.

Last weekend in Ireland, a Labour minister used the Sunday press to launch an attack on unemployed youth. Readers here will recognise the same arguements she makes as those which have been made over the years by assorted Tories and Blairites in our own movement. They must be opposed. Fightback, the Irish Marxist voice, reports on this disgraceful attack.

As ratings
agency Moody’s considers the possibility of cutting the US AAA debt
rating, concerned that the US could default on its debt obligations, we
publish a recent editorial statement of the US Socialist Appeal on the
forthcoming wave of massive cuts in public spending in the United
States. As the article points out, “the capitalists must impose a new
normality on the U.S. working class. The crisis of their system means
that small cuts or adjustments are no longer enough. The hatchet is out
now…”