Unity! Against Austerity 2017

CPB

CP BRITAIN

CP BRITAIN

www.communist-party.org.uk Autumn 2017

Tory danger Theresa May’s EU Withdrawal Bill incorporates all the worst neo-liberal aspects of EU law

K C A B E TAK

NEO-LIBERALISM JOHN FOSTER

Austerity is working – for the rich and powerful CAPITALISM EvAN PRITCHARD

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This Tory government – acting for the rich – wants to slash state spending which benefits working people and slash financial and economic controls on capital with tax cuts for themselves. They want to hand over even more vital public services to big business.

This government of the rich and powerful wants to further restrict our rights to organise, demonstrate and take industrial action.

Behind the headlines about so-called full employment there is a crisis for working people. Three-quarters of new jobs are parttime, or with workers seeking full time jobs forced into precarious and zero hours contracts by threat of benefit sanctions.

In this desperately precarious ‘gig’ economy more workers are ‘self-employed’ facing long hours, uncertain and low incomes and without pensions.

Even with faked statistics there are still 1.7million people on benefits and registered as

unemployed. 600,000 young people are on the dole, more than one in eight, with many forced to face oppressive sanctions and benefit suspensions.

The drop in living standards is the biggest since records began in 1856. A million families depend on food banks.

Meanwhile the richest five percent own over a half of all the country’s wealth while half of the population share only two per cent of all wealth. One in a hundred are the poorest of all and own practically nothing.

Average annual salary of the top 100 FTSE company bosses last year was £4.53 million. It would take a worker on average pay (£28,000) 160 years to earn that much.

Company profits are up from an average rate of return of 9.5 per cent at the depth of recession in 2009 to 12.7 per cent in 2017.

Meanwhile corporation tax on company profits fell from 30 per cent in 2008 to 19 per cent in 2017 and are planned to be reduced again to 17 per cent by 2020 .

Britain parasitic banking and finance industry made an annual profit of £90 billion and paid out around £7 billion in bonuses on top of their bloated salaries. Banks, hedge funds and other holders of government bonds have been paid £375 billion in ‘Quantitative Easing’, which has been used to recapitalise failing banks or fund speculation rather than

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EvAN PRITCHARD IS SECRETARy OF THE MANCHESTER COMMUNIST PARTy

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communist review All Power to the Soviets!

Alexandra Kollontai The Socialist Revolution Andrew Rothstein Images of revolution Nick Wright The Wars of Intervention Dennis Ogden Leninism in the struggle of the workers for power Steve Johnson Paris Commune and the Great October Revolution Liz Payne The Greatness and Fall of the Soviet Union Lars Ulrik Thomsen Soul Food Mike Quille

stimulate manufacturing and housebuilding.

But, as Jeremy Corbyn spelled out in his conference speech this week, there is an alternative to capitalist austerity.

We can end tax cuts for the rich and big business, cuts in public services, welfare benefits and our pay and pensions.

Working people need a government that can deliver financial and economic policies that ensure full and sustainable employment, rising living standards, social justice and a better quality of life socially, culturally and environmentally.

Such a government can legislate to end the public sector pay cap, enforce equal pay and strengthen union rights so that workers can take effective action to raise wage. It can take our utilities into public ownership, expand our public services and tax the rich to modernise Britain’s industrial base rather than sacrificing it on the altar of financial speculation.

Challenging austerity in this way, and defeating the resistance of bankers, bosses and bureaucrats, will shift the balance of wealth and power away from the rich and towards a Britain run in the interests of the working people and with power exercised not by the few but by the many. H

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Over the next twelve months we can be sure that she will seek to make these elements the basis of a binding treaty with the EU and that one key political objective will be to invalidate, and prevent the implementation of all the progressive elements of Labour’s manifesto – those that most directly threaten the Conservatives electorally.

What are these neo-liberal prohibitions ?

Key among them is EU competition law. This disallows comprehensive state ‘monopolies’ and hence any full, integegrated public ownership of rail transport, energy or posts. It also precludes state aid and thereby severely limits the scope for state investment to safeguard manufacturing jobs and overcome Britain’s disastrous productivity gap, thus negating Corbyn’s activist industrial policy Equally damaging are the EU’s procurement rules. Unless there is a massive campaign of resistance these also will be included in any Tory treaty. These rules will end the possibility of requiring state contractors to recognise trade unions or pay a full living wage – or to play an integrated role in regional industrial reconstruction. Compulsory competitive tendering will continue as before and Labour’s objective of full sectoral collective bargaining will be lost.

Unfortunately these issues don’t figure at all in current debate. Instead the mainstream press is focussing everyone’s attention on ‘hard-soft’ Brexit - while the government pursues its objective of a neo-liberal Brexit that matches the interests of the City and the big corporations and its own political and ideological ends.

What happens in Britain is of great importance for workers across Europe. If we can stop a neo-liberal settlement here, then it will help all those struggling internationally against EU neo-liberalism. Last month workers in France were demonstrating against the destruction of their contractual entitlements in line, as the French communist newspaper l’Humanite puts it, with the EU’s neo-liberal directives. The same goes for workers in Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy who have suffered similar attacks – and even those in Norway who, as members of the Single Market, have just seen their dock labour scheme struck down by an EFTA court. H JOHN FOSTER IS INTERNATIONAL SECRETARy OF THE COMMUNIST PARTy

Jeremy Corbyn ‘The Morning Star is the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media’ Daily paper of the left £1 from your newsagent or online at www.morningstaronline.co.uk

“From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the “advanced” and “civilised” colonial powers —a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary” vI Lenin writing in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 44, August 23, 1915

Starmer’s moment of summer madness risks election defeat Labour’s Establishment tendency has made its play. With his plan to stitch up a ‘transitional’ deal that would keep Britain in the EU single market and the customs union Keir Starmer threatens to sabotage the prospects of a Corbyn-led Labour government seriously challenging austerity

AUSTERITY NICK WRIGHT BIG proportion of the parliamentary Labour Party are happy that – with the commitment to fully accept the EU treaties, rules and directives that constrain public spending, inhibit public ownership and police the EU marketisation regime – chances that a Labour government could sweep away the austerity straitjacket are threatened.

The decision will weaken Corbyn’s reputation for straightforward dealing and honesty. Millions of Labour voters – including many who were won back to support the party in the last election – will see this as a betrayal. Corbyn’s careful positioning on Brexit, his immediate pledge to respect the referendum result, his emphasis on protecting the rights of EU citizens living and working here and on strengthened workers’ rights for all went a long way to detoxify the post-Brexit debate.

This is in danger of being thrown away with the possibility that the Tories’ Brexit pitch might gain some traction in comparison to Starmer’s surrender stance. It might even breathe some life into the UKIP corpse – enough to weaken Labour’s vote in the great majority of Labour constituencies that voted for Brexit.

City finance houses and big business now find their desire – which underpinned their opposition to Brexit that Britain remain in

A

Culture Matters is a web platform for socialist and progressive art, culture and politics. It is aimed at a broad, non-specialist audience, ill-served by most other platforms in this field, which either target specialist, often academic, audiences or fail to cover the broad sweep of culture offered by Culture Matters.

The EU, Brexit and class politics lays bare the class character of the European Union. It shows how the EU and its forerunners have been based on treaties, institutions and rules that serve the interests of the big monopoly corporations in a capitalist, militarist and imperialist United States of Europe. IIt explains why all the big guns of big business – the CBI, Institute of Directors, the City – their political creatures (Cameron, Osborne, Blair, Mandelson, Cable, Hammond, Hunt) line up with their imperialist allies in the EU, IMF, OECD and NATO. The EU, winning a progressive settlement written by John Foster, ends with a warning. The EU’s imposition of neo-liberal policies on all governments, including those led by traditional parties of the Left, has resulted in the collapse of support for social democracy.

Britain and the EU What Next? examines how are Brexit options defined by the government and what are their implications for workers? This pamphlet examines the EU: its positive achievements, its neo-liberal economic framework and the consequences for the crisis of social democracy and the rise of right-wing populism. It looks at the aims of big business and the City and the relationship with the US. The EU deconstructed Five critical voices from within the European Union, from Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Cyprus and Germany describe the austerity effect of EU membership. £2 printed at www.manifestopress.org.uk or download free at http://tinyurl. com/zg6llar All pamphlets are £2+p&p from www.communist-party.org.uk/shop/

Join the party of working class power and liberation If not defeat is certain.

We back these processes because communists believe that revolutionary change SOCIALISM and the construction of a fundamentally new type of society to replace capitalism is essential DURING TUC CONFERENCE a Labour for the future of humanity and our planet. comrade asked me why belong to the In all three countries of Britain, capitalism is a Communist Party when the Labour Party is barrier to balanced economic development, changing and offers the chance of forming a environmental security, social justice and government? meaningful democracy. The big business profit It is a good question. Corbyn’s victory and system has to be replaced by a new system – the massive growth in Labour’s support offers socialism – based on mass participation in the real prospect of an opening to a Labour decision making, social ownership of the government of a new type. The Communist economy, democratic planning and solidarity.

Party has always argued that the neo-liberal But fundamental change will also require a class collaborationist direction taken by New s Err! What have I done? transfer of political power, taking it out of the Labour could be reversed and the key to this the EU ‘free market’ – fulfilled in the hands of a small number of monopoly capitalists would be mass movements like the People’s medium term. Within hours arch Blairite whose interests dominate our society. Such a Assembly and the unions. Labour right wingers Peter Mandelson gave voice to their long feared this and most of the sectarian left denied revolutionary process will have to be led by the term preference – to extend the ‘transitional’ its possibility. working class – the producers of society’s period until it becomes permanent.

Thus communists welcome the new direction wealth – at the head of an alliance of forces And with Starmer’s ‘transitional’ plan the taken by Labour, work to sustain the forces that representing the interests of the people as a continued ‘free’ movement of capital, whole. make it possible, back, as always, the Morning labour, goods and services is guaranteed.

The Communist Party is the party of the Star as the daily voice of the left.

The power of big business and the banks working class and liberation – not because Communists are convinced that even more will continue to be underpinned by the millions of working people can be won to back a workers as a whole support it at present – but unelected EU Commission, the European because its aim is working class political power. government of genuine change but – as John Central Bank and the European Court of The question which each class conscious and McDonnell warned – such a government will Justice. politically active worker must ask themselves is: face enormous resistance from the ruling class, Democracy and the Brexit vote will have the mass media, the big corporations and banks, “Where best can I make a contribution to this been subverted, workers will remain subject the state apparatus, NATO and the defence and goal?” For many this will be in their union or the to the raft of ECJ judgements and in any Labour Party or campaign. But for the success of intelligence sectors. And that the most disputes between big business and elected our common project many more must join with dangerous fascists and racists will be mobilised. national and regional governments the EU the communists.

How a Labour government deals with this regulatory regime remains in place.

If not you, who? If not now, when? H will be decisive. If it mobilises the people, European Union structures are designed presses home the attack on the power that to constrain sovereign government action. wealth confers on our rulers, it can open the ROB GRIFFITHS IS GENERAL SECRETARy OF THE The EU diktat is unashamedly fashioned to way to further socialist advance.

COMMUNIST PARTy protect the power of capital. Any measures by a Labour government to regulate trade, control the export of capital to invest in public services, protect manufacturing, abolish or modify VAT on goods and services, prevent the use of ‘posted workers’ to weaken pay and workplace conditions or force contractors to comply with higher standards will run up against the power of unelected EU bureaucrats in the service of big business. H ROB GRIFFITHS

NICK WRIGHT IS THE COMMUNIST PARTy’S HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS.

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