Now it’s official! All we have to do now is prepare for the recovery - the “jobless recovery” that is. That phrase alone speaks volumes about who the economy is really run for. This latest stage of the crisis is paring capitalism down to its bare essential: a system that cares for nothing but profit. Governments, meanwhile are there to see that the system continues even when it should have sunk in its own ocean of debt. There is no argument about who is to pay for the financial bail out. The Conservatives and Labour are competing with each other as to who will introduce the most cuts. Still, don’t be fooled by the idea that it is taxpayers in general who will pay. All over the world the wealth gap between the rich and everyone else is reaching cavernous proportions. (In the USA, land of opportunity, the top one per cent of taxpayers now has 23.5 per cent of the country’s income while here in the UK the Labour government rejects the idea of a higher tax band for the very rich because it would put off financiers from living here!) No, under the mask of “we’re all in this together” it is the working class who are paying and will be expected to keep on paying for the capitalists’ financial disaster. And in truth the full extent of this disaster remains to be revealed. Everywhere the banks are still hiding billions of losses “off balance sheet”. In the UK and the euro zone the writedowns still to come are expected to be more than double those so far. The cost of bailing out the banks so far has led to a UK budget deficit of nearly 12.5 per cent of GDP (the highest of the world’s twenty richest countries) but this is set to rise exponentially. The financial pundits now predict that UK public sector debt will rival immediate post World War levels. In the late 1940s this was 240 per cent of GDP so clearly we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Whose Sacrifices?

The official line that short term sacrifices have to be made until the economy gets back on an even keel again is just so much bullshit. In the first place, why should workers be the ones making sacrifices? In the second, no amount of sacrifices will get capitalism out of this crisis. What is for sure is that the more sacrifices we make the more confident our rulers and bosses will be. At the moment they are scared of the possible “social unrest” to come. Their confidence in their own system is low because they know that it is a social disaster. Even so, the working class (yes, we still exist) is already paying. Public sector workers of course are in the direct firing line. A third of public sector organisations in the UK are planning redundancies, one eighth of them aim to get rid of at least ten per cent of the workforce. The national health will have to cut its spending by 20 per cent. Local amenities, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, these are the first things a system devoted to maximising profits decides it can do without. But workers in the private sector are not immune. One in three companies have frozen workers’ pay this year and the only reason unemployment isn’t even higher is that so many workers are working short time for reduced pay. Meanwhile we can look forward to the prospect of working until we drop as the state pension age is pushed ever further forward and more and more of us find the pension pot we paid into for years is virtually empty.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg. “Tax the rich” is no solution. Nationalisation is no answer, that just makes the state directly responsible for capitalism’s debts. “Greater transparency and regulation of the financial markets” will not alter the fact that capital will sacrifice any number of human lives to revive profit rates. (The World Bank estimates that the present crisis has pushed a further 90 million people into “extreme poverty” - defined as living on less than $1.25 per day.) This recession is not just about the consequences of untamed financial speculators. It is the latest stage of a structural crisis which has been haunting global capitalism, not least USA and the rest of the advanced capitalist world, since the beginning of the 1970s.

We Need a Different World

Workers paid at the outset of the crisis with real wage reductions as inflation reached well into double figures. Then their lives were blighted with unemployment and job insecurity as capital restructured and moved a large part of manufacturing to low wage areas with so-called globalisation. Although they fought back, in those days workers lost the struggle because they didn’t realise the score. They put their trust in the unions which kept them divided sector by sector and even the most militant didn’t see how to organise and fight for a new world where the priority would be to get rid of capital and profit and to involve everyone in the organisation of a human community to produce to fulfil social needs. Capitalism’s long-running, global crisis will not go away. This latest notch down shows that the need to overthrow capitalism is more pressing than ever. This time the capitalists have even less room for manoeuvre. The gloves are off. Workers everywhere face a long and hard period. This time let’s make the fight worth it. Let’s take control of the future for a world without capital, without profit, without hunger, without states and without war.