March for a real alternative

Figures published on the eve of the Budget shed more light on an unrelenting global crisis that pays little or no attention to chancellor Osborne, or to his shadow-boxing “critics” at the Trades Union Congress.

Ever since the TUC announced its March for the Alternative way back in October, it has been promoting the slogan – “Jobs, Growth, Justice”. In practice, it's no alternative at all.

To back up its central plea for growth, the TUC has been arguing that spending cuts announced last October and being implemented around the country by Labour and Tory councils alike, are just not necessary. They are simply part of a conspiracy by the government to favour the bankers who are really the culprits and should be made to pay the cost of the yawning deficit.

This simplistic, muddle-headed “analysis” has, unfortunately, been picked up and broadcast onwards by people engaged in the most radical of actions. As one student in a college occupation said: “There are real alternatives to the problems facing higher education funding ... what we are seeing are ideological political choices, not necessities… It is the public sector, including students and lecturers, who are being made to pay, not the overzealous banking system who caused many problems that the country is now dealing with.”

At the heart of it all is a global crisis of capitalism, however, not just a bunch of crazed bankers who got out of hand. This can’t be sorted by pumping more money into the economy and can make even matters worse, as figures from the Office for National Statistics show. The injection of massive doses of credit to shock the stopped heart of global capital back to life after 2008 has at best put the economy back on the accelerating inflationary path it has been following for more than 10 years, whilst gross domestic product – the key measure of growth – has failed to recover.

The Consumer Prices Index annual rate of inflation has risen to 4.4%, while a more realistic index shows a rate of price increases of 5.5%. All the essentials are soaring: clothing, footwear, food and fuel. Diesel prices have passed 140 pence per litre at the pump in some areas. Clearly much worse is to come as events in the Middle East unfold.

The combined effect of the crisis and actions by governments has been to reduce the incomes of households in the UK. The real income of those in the middle of the income distribution will be 1.6% lower in 2011 than it was in 2008, wiping out all the gains made in the previous 50 years. Pensioner households saw their average income fall even further, by 2.4%. As Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s economics editor has it, for most people “the recovery has been more painful so far than the recession”.

All the analysts agree on one thing: Osborne has little room for manoeuvre. So we’re likely to see plans to revive the Wild West-style low tax, low regulation, low-wage economy of enterprise zone of the 1980s. It's desperate stuff from a cornered government that, however, knows it faces little official opposition in Parliament or from the TUC.

This isn’t a peculiarly British phenomenon that can be fixed with more credit, or even by changing the government. The TUC’s policies of more taxes and higher public spending wilfully fail to address the real issue: the meltdown at the core of the economic system of production for profit, aka capitalism, for which there are no quick fixes. Avoiding the challenge of an alternative not-for-profit model of ecologically-sustainable production for need, simply strengthens the hand of Osborne and company.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Let the battle commence

The £6.2 billion cuts package announced by chancellor George Osborne and his Lib Dem partner in crime David Laws will cost jobs and hit services, and are just the opening round in plans for savage reductions in public spending. The big issue is how workers and communities can defeat these plans.

Osborne claimed that the first tranche of cuts were aimed at eliminating “wasteful expenditure”. But the freeze on job recruitment in the civil service and the axing of a series of semi-government agencies can only result in fewer jobs and more intensive conditions for those who remain. The cancellation of private sector contracts will inevitably result in closure of medium-sized firms and send more people to the dole queue, which is already at its highest level since the early 1990s.

The immediate cuts will be followed by an emergency budget next month and a major programme of reductions lasting years will be announced in the autumn. These are certain to include effective pay cuts for hundreds of thousands of public sector workers.

To plan how to defeat the coalition and its plans, we have to be clear what the cuts aimed at reducing the state’s £150 billion plus budget deficit are about. The deficit is a result of the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, the bank bail-outs and the consequent recession.

The economic globalisation that began in the 1980s was driven by debt – the debt of individual households, corporations and governments. There is a reason for that and it’s called capitalism. As we explain in our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions:

“Competition on price demands increases in the productivity of labour which reduces the hours needed for the production of a commodity. So the value, which is determined by the quantity of labour it contains, and hence the price of, and profit from each commodity tend to decline as a result. To offset the reducing profit derived from each ever-cheaper computer or car, more units of each type of commodity must be manufactured and sold.”

Because people’s income through wages can never be sufficient to buy all the goods produced globally, the financial system developed new ways to provide credit. This in turn got completely out of hand, as the Manifesto notes:

“The global cloud of credit expanded way beyond the value of productive capacity, goods and services it supposedly represented, engulfing the world in debt. By 2006, around 90% of the world’s credit was effectively worthless, sustained by and sustaining the fiction of endless growth ... The consumer boom gave way to a downward spiral that ended the dream of continuous credit-and-debt fuelled growth.”

The globalisation train is now running in reverse as global capitalism heads for an unparalleled slump. Countries with massive state debts are the weakest links in the chain. These include not just Greece and Spain but the United States and Britain.

The cuts are the expression of the destruction of capacity and assets by capitalism when it is in crisis and, of course, they only deepen the problems of the economy as more people become unemployed. The British coalition government has to make the cuts because that’s what the system demands, just as British Airways has to slash staff costs and benefits to survive.

So when Osborne says “we are in this together” and that today’s cuts are a first step to “improve the quality of people’s lives and build a better future” we know that he is simply lying. The immediate future is one of building an all-out struggle against the government, telling the trade union leaders that if they are at all serious, they will have to defy anti-union laws and lead immediate walk-outs.

Actions in Spain and Greece have already provided a significant lesson. Strikes, rallies and resistance must be part of a vision of a different society, one based on co-operation and co-ownership not competition and profit or they will not succeed. People’s Assemblies that take up the issue of power and an alternative to capitalist rule have a decisive role to play in the coming struggles.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor