capitalism. British capitalism is now a becoming a rentier capitalism, with a growing percentage of profits coming from overseas investment, the service sector and financial institutions. Manufacturing industry drastically declined, and with it the structure of employment. More capital flowed to overseas investments; as debt grew, so did the financial sector. And foreign investment in Britain increased. Every crisis of capitalism brings a new 'international division of labour'. Today this means the growing relative strength of Japan and Germany, and the relative weakening of the US and But the US is still the largest economy and the largest domestic market. Britain by contrast is no longer in the big league. In the last five years it has rated the second-worst country in terms of growth and investment in the top 21 OECD economies. Capital, increasingly mobile across international borders, can 'restructure'. But economic decline and crisis is always an attack on the working class. read than the two of them put together, we asking for just E7K. Reasonable or Thanks to Mr Lament, your money is almost worthless anyhow. Don't waste it on that mortgage when you could send if to us here at the Socialist Outlook Staff Holidays in Bermuda Fund.
We desperately need dosh to buy bettet desk top publishing computers, improve production quality, pay those photographers we already owe a packet and extend our circulation.
If you can legitimately plead to being skinter than we are, why don't you take a bundle of Outlooks to flog at your union branch, Labour Party or campaign meetings, so people can have something interesting to do during the boring bits? LAST WEEK'S financial turmoil has dealt a massive blow to the 'Maastricht road: to European capitalist unity.
Monetary union, due to be completed by 1999, is the cornerstone of the moves towards political unity The chances for achieving it are now remote.
The chaos in the markets, and the row between Britain and Germany, are symptoms of the underlying contradictions in the whole unity process.
The capitalists need European integration to compete with the United States and Japan. But while they need unity, the interests of the different capitalist classes are not identical.
Savage
The savage deflationary policy and high interest rates of the German Bundesbank, required to draw in money to pay for unification, is devastating for the weaker economies in the EC. The EMS compels other currencies to follow the Deutschmark, ensuring massive deflation.
The crisis has hit Italy, forcing down the lira and compelling cutbacks in the large state and welfare sector.
In Greece, (as we report on page 13), the government's deflation policy - in preparation for monetary union - has been met by a massive working class fight-back Under the terms of the EMS, every state is supposed to take co-ordinated action to defend a threatened currency. This the German government and the Bundesbank conspicuously failed to do in relation to the pound.
Options
Underlying these intergovernmental conflicts is a stark fact; European unity is just one of the op tions open for Germany. If the process of monetary and political union doesn'thappen, then Germany remains the most powerful state in Europe. It can build a zone of political and economic domination around itself, extending into eastern Europe.
If Maastricht goes down it will give European governments other than Germany the leeway to partially eflate their economies: it would mean that the worst deflationary attacks on the working class would be avoided - though only in the short term.
But it would not in itself pull capitalist Europe out of recession. The long-term winners would be Japan and the United States, as the EC remained a free trade zone and failed to turn itself into a more powerful productive bloc to challenge them.
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