EC resolution for the 54th Congress
BLOCK THE RULING CLASS OFFENSIVE AND WIN A LEFT-LED GOVERNMENT Capitalist crisis and imperialist aggression 1. Britain is seeing dramatic political change as the ruling class offensive against the working class is increasingly and more confidently challenged, bringing hundreds of thousands of working class people – many of them young and new to class politics – into activity. 2. This struggle has now reached the stage in which each side, out of necessity, must either inflict a major defeat on the other or itself be defeated. The outcome will determine the nature of society in Britain for decades to come – as did the defeats suffered by the left in the 1980s. 3. Every economic and political event must now be considered in the following ways. How can it help to build a mass movement to defeat the ruling class? How can it reach deep into the trade union movement, into the workplaces, into diverse communities of working class people and expose the truth about capitalism? Does it unify, energise and organise the working class? How can it be used to ensure that it will be the labour movement which inflicts a decisive defeat on the capitalist class, and in the process wins a left-led government, rather than vice versa? 4. This monumental struggle is not restricted to Britain or Europe. Capitalism’s international crisis continues to deepen and it seeks to resolve this by attacking working class and progressive forces everywhere. But it faces mounting resistance and a growing fightback. 5. Exactly a century ago, in the midst of inter-imperialist war, Lenin wrote: ‘Monopolies, oligarchies, the striving for domination rather than the striving for liberty, the exploitation of an increasing number of small and weak nations by a handful of the richest and most powerful nations – all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism’.