Time for us to Stop Making Sacrifices - Let’s Organise and Fight for a Better World!

May Day 2009 Statement of the IBRP

It’s Their Crisis

This First of May comes at a time of dramatic crisis for the world working class. In just three months fifty million people worldwide have lost their jobs. In the USA 32.2 million people, or more than ten per cent of the population, are now receiving food stamps (worth $83 or £56 per month). This is not just a crisis about deregulated capitalism but the deepest capitalist crisis since the Second World War. Having exploded in the financial sphere, the knock-on effects for the real economy - which is in fact where the crisis was born - are overwhelming. In fact for at least thirty years the capitalists have been trying two ways to offset the falling rate of profit.

On the one hand they have massively encouraged financial speculation, parasitism, huge public and household debts with the - absurd - hope of not only making money, but of specifically getting the spectre of the crisis to fade away, not by concretely producing commodities but instead by a wave of the wand from financial tricksters. On the other hand, they have enormously increased the exploitation of the working class - and of wage earners in general - by having the world’s proletariat compete to undercut each other, including highly qualified sections of the labour force who once believed themselves to be protected (and who partly were) from the worst attacks of capital.

Sacrifices Won’t Save jobs

Thus we see jobs being transferred abroad, wage cuts, speed-ups, longer working days even in the citadels of ‘advanced’ capitalism. In places where they exist, workers’ indirect and deferred wages (social security and the welfare state) are being plundered. There are no longer any safe jobs and the whole labour force is becoming casualised, all with the aim of making the working class totally instrumental and submissive to the need for the company to make a profit in an increasingly competitive world.

Even so, this is not enough to stop the crisis exploding with its dramatic and inevitable consequences. Millions of people have already lost or risk losing their home. Millions more are obliged to work illegally or part-time against their will as unemployment widens. The dramatic fall in wages is hardly offset by social security and welfare payments (where these still exist). The spectre of hunger or of being unable to survive to the end of the month is no longer a sad prerogative of “developing countries” and the ex-Soviet bloc. Yet, while governments have given, and will give, stacks of money to the financiers and industrialists, for the workers and the poorest ranks of society there are only handouts directed at preventing an outbreak of proletarian class struggle: the one thing which has been absent until now.

Unions and Reformists Against the Working Class

In fact the once great working class strongholds have been pummelled and reduced to fragments by years of vicious attacks. Workers have been disoriented by an insistent ideological campaign which says that any alternative to capitalism is impossible. In the metropoles they are “drugged” by decades of consumerism and last, but certainly not least, anaesthetised by the unions who largely comply with the bosses. The upshot is that, apart from the few dazzling exceptions, workers in the main have submitted to the attacks without an adequate response.

Instead the impotence of trade unionism - which pretends to have an alternative - has been revealed, not only by its inability to improve workers’ conditions but by not even fighting the attacks of the bosses and their governments because, in the last analysis, the unions accept the rules of the game imposed by the class enemy. That same impotence is also shown by the whole spectrum of radical reformists both inside and outside parliament. (From Socialist Worker and Respect in Britain to the Linkspartei in Germany, and Rifondazione Comunista in Italy etc...)

We Must Rely On Our Own Organisations

Thus, yet again the crisis underlines to any workers who at least want to begin defending themselves that they will have to start by injecting life into struggles at the very bottom. They cannot rely on a union setup that is protected by the bosses and their state. In so doing they will bring down the anti-strike laws which have been imposed everywhere as the struggle extends beyond the artificial divisions of sections and nationalities and across regions, creating its own autonomous bodies to direct the class struggle against workers’ real enemies: the bosses and their hangers-on.

This is only the first necessary, but not sufficient, step. The next one is that such struggles give strength and muscle to the revolutionary organisations of the working class in order to unify them politically and give them a coherent perspective of overthrowing capitalism. In so doing they will form an international party which will be recognised as a vital political instrument for getting rid of the capitalist system and all its attendant horrors. From the predation and destruction of the environment, the imperialist wars which no amount of détente or summits between the “great” powers can eliminate, to the increasing poverty and social barbarism that is part and parcel of capitalism: all this will be thrown into the dustbin of history.