The British working class stands surrounded by the impact of twin bankruptcies.
• Despite the claimed 'miracles' under 15 years of Thatcherite policies, an economically bankrupt British capitalism is in crisis, once more on the rampage against jobs, wages and welfare rights.
• And the politically bankrupt leaders of the labour movement, having thrown in the towel and accepted the capitalist market system, have no answers or policies for a fightback.
The crisis of British capitalism arises from the global convulsions of the market system, even as capitalism struggles unsuccessfully - despite the compliance of the old stalinist bureaucrats - to recapture the lost markets and cheap labour of the ex- USSR, Eastern Europe and China.
The leading industrial powers are realigning into three competing trade blocs - Europe, North America and the Japanese- dominated Pacific Rim.
This not only marginalises billions of workers and peasants in the Third World and in countries doomed by capitalism to remain dependent and underdeveloped -it also brings new misery to millions of workers and youth in the advanced countries, squeezed dry and discarded by the drive for profit and competitive advantage.
John Major's new against the welfare state is therefore no mere ideological whim, or left-over from Thatcherism: it is a central feature of post-Maastricht Europe, also emerging in other countries as the 'free' market eventually compels all states to match the meanest.
And while the British working class - after 15 years of Thatcherism and the defeatist politics of new realism - has been more intimidated than its continental cousins, the timidityand failure of British social democracy is not an exception but the rule in a world where every mass workers' party (with the marginal exceptions of Cuba and North Korea) has capitulated to the imperious demands of the capitalist market system. For British workers, the task is to throw off the shackles of the draconian Tory anti-union laws, and unite in action to defend the welfare state - by removing the hated, internally divided Major government.
Labour's failure even to campaign for a general election spells out the spineless servility of a leadership unable to offer any positive rallying point for the working class, and reliant on the short-sighted, self-defeating tactic of attacking the Tories for increasing taxes.
It is clear from this wretched display that even the election of a Labour goverment will not in itself resolve any of the problems of Italy has seen general strikes against government economic policies, while mass demonstrations have protested against 11% unemployment, a government wage freeze and moves to cut Italy's generous pension rights.
In Germany, too, there have been repeated displays of growing militancy, embracing building workers, miners, demonstrations of the unemployed, steel workers and engineering workers.
Belgium has witnessed the biggest mass workers' demonstration for many years, against the attempt by the government to impose a 'social pact.
The Netherlands too has been rocked by a huge demonstration in Amsterdam, the biggest by Dutch workers since the war.
Spanish workers have fought back against austerity plans of the Gonzalez government, with militant regional days of action and a devastating one day general strike in January. The Spanish resistance is one of the few that appears to have found any the working class: it would simply improve the chances of workers themselves pursuing the fight, after seeing off the government of the class enemy.
In this situation, in Britain as in many other countries, the strategic task for socialists is therefore to find tactical ways of building united front activity through which a new, broader, socialist current and tradition can be developed.
The work that we and our co-thinkers do - in the unions, in the VAR parties, widening the gulf between Gonzalez's 'modemising' wing and the more traditional social democrats headed by his one-time ally, Guerra.
The new militancy has not forced the mass workers' parties to out of their torpor and years of class collaboration. Labour Party, among youth, students, the black. communities, anti-racist and anti-fascist cam paigns, lesbians and gay men, and broad campaigns to ciefend the welfare state - must lead towards this objective.
We must build support, popularise the socialist programme, take on the political fight of arming the working class to overturn capitalism. We must raise the banner of socialism. union and political leaders echo the spineless performance of the British Labour Party. The left in France remains in deep crisis, while the revamped Italian Communist Party, which -after years of failed efforts to secure a 'historic compromise' deal with the Christian it in the .