Victims must challenge bankrupt system
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IS IT A SLUMP, a downturn or a recession? Day after day the pundits debate the scale of the crisis spreading through the capitalist system since the collapse of the Asian "Tiger" economies.
One corporation publishing local newspapers in Britain has now banned its journalists from using the word "recession", for fear of its impact on advertisers!
Bankers, who neither foresaw the present crisis, nor have any idea how to resolve it, manoeuvre as best they can to safeguard their profits, as their weaker rivals and whole sections of manufacturing industry collapse.
But the people with nowhere to run and no power to influence events are those hardest hit by the crisis – the millions of workers in Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Japan and in Russia who have already been thrown out of work, with no prospect of getting their jobs back.
Thousands of workers in Britain are now facing the same problem as the microchip industries which were supposed to represent the future lead the way in slashing back production and sacking staff.
When the system bares its claws in this way, ruthlessly seeking its survival, all the pretence of "partnership" is thrown immediately out of the window. There is no "third way" out: only the first way – a frontal challenge to capital and the governments and state forces which prop it up across the globe.
The solution is not for workers to accept ever lower wages, or more "flexible" and exploitative working conditions: these "beggar your neighbour" tactics might appear to offer security in the short term at the expense of workers elsewhere, but they simply start another round of world-wide wage cuts, speeed-up and rationalisation.
The key is class action: strikes, occupations and international solidarity against the bankers and corporations which have grown fat from decades of exploitation.
Unless there is resistance, the misery will increase. It’s time the victims began the fightback.