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Where are the unions?
If there is one crime against the people that no worker in Britain can avoid being aware of, it is what is euphemistically referred to as the ‘cost of living’ crisis. This month, just as last month and the month before that, workers in Britain will find themselves a bit poorer and a bit less able to cope as a result of rampant inflation.
The results are well known: we have a horrendous housing crisis, with huge numbers of people stuck in ‘temporary’ accommodation, sofa surfing, bunked up with relatives, or paying exorbitant rents to live in overcrowded, damp and dilapidated slum conditions.
Child hunger and fuel poverty are at record highs. One quarter of Britain’s children are living in poverty, with millions going to school hungry and returning to a cold house.
While workers suffer the consequences of a crisis they did not create, Britain’s trade unions are missing in action. There is not a chance in hell that the new Labour government is going to fix this problem. What we need is a mass campaign demanding urgent measures to address the crisis and stop the downward spiral now.
Most of the families sinking into poverty have at least one and often two working parents. Many others are unable to find work through no fault of their own. Why are workers paying the price of the failures of the capitalist system? Why must we endlessly bail out big business when ours is the class whose labour creates all new wealth in the world?
This crisis ultimately stems from the capitalist system of production and its global expansion into the imperialist system of economic looting and military domination.
Every war that workers are asked to pay for and to fight in is aimed at bolstering this system of capitalist-imperialist wealth extraction and control, in which the monopoly hedge fund financiers of Wall Street and the City of London amass great riches while the masses of humanity work harder only to become ever poorer and more desperate.
Labour means war
On 6 July, Sir Keir Starmer spelled it out: “Let me be clear that the first duty of this government is security and defence … our unshakable support of Nato … the unshakable support that we will have with our allies toward Ukraine.”
Ignored by the entirety of the British trade union movement is the fact that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war waged by the neo-nazi Nato alliance. It aims to bring about ‘regime change’ in Russia so that western monopolists can loot Russia’s vast resources.
Faced with this threat to its very existence, Russia has had little choice but to fight back, with the aim of denazifying and demilitarising Ukraine, a formerly socialist brother nation that has been turned into a fortified base for Nato – run by the CIA and asset-stripped by western corporations.
Workers and all of progressive humanity must support Russia in its heroic fight against the combined forces of the imperialist camp. A Russian victory will be a win for all of those who want to live in a world characterised by independence, sovereignty, peace and prosperity for all.
Less than ten million people (18 percent of UK adults!) voted for Starmer’s government, which is already continuing the Labour tradition of imperialist war in the interests of the billionaire elite. Starmer’s regime will tax the poor and spend the money funding fascist proxies around the world, driving ever deeper into WW3 in the hope of restabilising the dying imperialist system through an orgy of destruction and looting.
This is where the profit drive ultimately leads: impoverishment, war, misery, hunger and extermination for the mass of humanity.
‘Free speech’ illusion
After 12 years of persecution by the British legal system for the ‘crime’ of helping important truths to enter the public domain, Julian Assange was finally released this summer.
British workers had the power to end this travesty and to have Julian freed years ago, but the trade union movement never even tried to mobilise them to do so.
It has become clear since Nato launched its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine that the European monopolists are dependent on US military power to protect their position as privileged looters of the world. Julian’s case underlined just how closely our rulers identify themselves with US interests.
British politicians and judges bent over backwards to subvert their own laws and processes against Mr Assange, who had committed no crime, subjecting him to a slow-motion judicial lynching under the orders of the US ruling elite.
Even the National Union of Journalists failed to organise in defence of free speech and journalism.
The Assange case revealed that ‘free speech’ in Britain is an illusion – a right that exists only so long as those whose information might enlighten the people have no ability to reach a wide audience.
This is now being further underlined by the arrest and persecution under terrorism laws of growing numbers of independent journalists in Britain whose only ‘crime’ is to tell the truth about the criminal actions of Britain, the USA and their fascistic proxy forces in eastern Europe and the middle east at a time when growing numbers of British workers are tuning in to their message.
As the government prepares to intensify austerity on the workers at home and to ramp up its war drive abroad, it is steadily working to cut off the ‘democratic rights’ Britons have been brought up to believe were theirs by right.
But such niceties as free speech, political organisation, peaceful protest and due process in the courts are increasingly being seen as a threat to the imperialist war effort, and the recent treatment of racist rioters and environmental activists shows clearly which way the wind is blowing: towards a permanent state of emergency in which any action the state deems ‘threatening’ to its aims is criminalised, and where ‘trials’ are carried out immediately after arrest via a ‘fast-track’ system that dispenses with troublesome juries altogether.
Having stoked up racist riots this summer, the Starmer regime was quick to use the excuse to trial all kinds of measures against speech, protest and accepted legal process that have nothing to do with racism and everything to do with criminalising the growing anti-imperialist core of the Palestine solidarity movement.
A new world is being born
But it is a universal law of history that oppression breeds resistance. You can only keep the masses down for so long before their indignation explodes into action. Around the world, people are fighting back, and a new world is being born.
From the Donbass to Palestine, Niger to Yemen, Cuba to Korea, people are struggling for liberation and the right to peaceful development and prosperity. And the more they work together, the more they are exposing the weaknesses of the imperialist vampires.
Despite throwing everything it had at Russia, Nato has achieved nothing through its European war except the death of a million Ukrainians and the strengthening of the anti-imperialist resistance. Yet western politicians repeatedly refer to their criminal wiping out of a generation of Ukrainians as a ‘good investment’.
Across west Africa, popular governments are forcing an end to French and US domination, taking back control of their economies after centuries of colonial looting.
In the middle east, the combined resistance of Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Iraqis, Iranians and Syrians have shown that the fascistic colony of Israel will in the end be unable to continue to exist as a supremacist, apartheid regime – despite having the full support of the entire imperialist camp.
Change is coming and another world is not only necessary but possible.
Workers in Britain must organise themselves to be part of that change, and to make sure it comes sooner rather than later. We need to join our struggle for a decent life here with the freedom struggle of the oppressed all over the world into a mighty torrent that will end the bloodstained era of capitalist-imperialist superexploitation for good.
Capitalism isn’t working.
Fight for socialism!
To address the deep crisis faced by workers today, we must urgently demand:
- The nationalisation of all utilities (without compensation) along with monopoly producers, manufacturers and distributors of food, so as to ensure a secure supply of all necessaries at affordable prices, free from the vacillations and disruptions of the world market.
- The requisition and building of social housing and the introduction of a rent cap to address the housing crisis.
- The complete renationalisation of every part of the NHS, including all its buildings and the pharmaceutical industry.
- Leaving Nato, bringing all troops and military contractors home, and ending all aspects of British involvement in aggressive wars abroad.
- The lifting of the minimum wage to a level that provides a decent family existence.
- Legislation for pay and benefit rises that keep pace with real inflation.
- An end to currency devaluation through endless money printing.
- An end to the self-defeating sanctions war against Russia, which is fuelling both the energy and the inflation crises.
- An end to all subsidies to banks and monopoly corporations. Any business considered ‘too big to fail’ or ‘necessary to the economy’ that cannot make adequate profit from its operations should be nationalised without compensation and run according to a plan based on meeting the needs of the people.
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No cooperation with genocide in Gaza!
Another crime that British politicians and media are helping to facilitate is the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The people there have now endured a full year of a brutal all-out assault that is clearly aimed at wiping out everything necessary to sustain life.
Britain’s culpability
Not only does our government give diplomatic and propaganda cover to Israel, but it is also arming and supporting Israel’s armed forces with direct intelligence and logistics support.
It does so because the profits of Britain’s oil, arms and banking monopolies depend on keeping control of middle-eastern resources.
Britain has particular responsibility in the 100+ years of suffering endured by the middle-eastern people. More than a century ago, Britain’s rulers wanted to find a way to get control of the region’s oil. That is why, among other things, it guided the development of zionism – a racist, supremacist ideology that was used as a tool for creating an armed settler-colonial outpost on Palestinian land (Israel).
With the founding of the zionist state, Palestinians were massacred or forced from their homes during the deadly ethnic cleansing operation known as the Nakba, and have suffered continual attacks and land theft for the last 76 years. The genocide we are witnessing in Gaza today is simply a continuation of this process.
The right to resist
What no western mainstream politician or journalist will ever admit is that all the rights of the case are on the Palestinian side.
Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their homes. The right to resist an illegal occupation is upheld by international law, as is the right to resist the accompanying crimes of apartheid and genocide. The UN has passed many resolutions emphasising these rights. It has also endorsed the right of Palestinians to fight to end their occupation through armed struggle.
And yet the British government and media have given their unconditional blessing for the last year as the Israeli zionist regime has massacred as many as 200,000 civilians, 75 percent of them women and children, and almost all of them civilian non-combatants. Many more have been injured and permanently maimed.
More bombs have been dropped on this tiny area packed with civilians than fell on London, Dresden and Leningrad combined during the whole of WW2.
The damage is unprecedented. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been destroyed, along with every shred of infrastructure and civilian or productive life. Every vestige of Palestinian culture and heritage has been targeted for obliteration. Despite two rulings by the International Court of Justice calling on the zionists to stop their terrible crimes, Israel remains defiant, knowing that with the USA (and Britain) at its back, it can continue with impunity.
Our duty to act
In the face of these monstrous and inhuman actions, and particularly when seeing the military, logistical, media, political and diplomatic support being given by our own government, without which this obscene slaughter could not continue for even one more hour, ordinary people have a duty to act.
Just as Israel could not continue its crimes for one day without the cooperation and support of the west. so the rulers of western nations could not continue their complicity without the active participation of their own working people.
Stop the war machine
Students and academics are increasingly demanding an end to academic, research and financial links with US, British and Israeli arms companies that profit from the genocide and aid the Israeli state.
These brave students have picked up the banner of class struggle and international solidarity, but they do not have the strength to complete their mission alone. They have given a lead to society in showing how the war machine can be stopped in its tracks. Now the rest of the working class is duty bound to follow their lead by building a mass campaign of non-cooperation with the genocide in Gaza!
Mass non-cooperation:
Workers must act together to:
- Refuse to make or move any weapons or supplies that are bound for Israel.
- Actively block all such shipments that are known to be on British roads and rails or in British ports.
- Refuse to write, print or assist in the broadcast of information that justifies or whitewashes Israeli crimes or reinforces fake zionist narratives, remembering that journalism which justifies aggressive war is a war crime in itself.
- Refuse to put Israeli products or zionist-promoting newspapers and magazines on supermarket shelves.
- Cut all academic, scientific, technological and research links with Israel and force the government to break its mlitary and diplomatic ties – there must be no normalisation of genocide.
- Unions must mobilise workers to carry out this programme and defend any group or individual who is victimised for taking this principled stand.
- The power is in our hands to end these terrible crimes. We must organise and use it!
