Socialist Party of Great Britain - Capitalism In Crisis - A Route Map Leading Nowhere...

A Busted Brown

Brown boasted about the measures taken by the Labour government to end boom and bust as long ago as 1997.

As this extract from his first pre-budget report shows, it was something he considered to be a long-running problem, and not one confined to the Tories.

"For 40 years our economy has an unenviable history, under governments of both parties, of boom and bust.. so, against a background of mounting uncertainty and instability in the global economy, we set about establishing a new economic framework to secure long-term economic stability and put an end to the damaging cycle of boom and bust

". In his last budget as chancellor, Brown said "we will never return to the old boom and bust".

Quotations from CHANNEL 4 NEWS, October 17th 2008

G20: More Hot Air

After his failure to prevent boom and bust Gordon Brown now wants to be seen as the saviour of world capitalism

Agreements made at the G20 global financial summit in Washington provide a "route map" to economic recovery, Gordon Brown has said. The prime minister hailed as "historic" the G20’s statement to act together to reverse the global economic depression.

"By the actions we take, savings are safe, people will be able to keep their jobs, they will not lose their homes in all of our countries…These are extraordinary times and they require extraordinary measures (BBC NEWS 16.11.09).

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister many workers have already seen their savings fall to the lowest level for 50 years as a result of losing their jobs (THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, 1. 10.08) including ex-employees of Lehman Brothers who lost their savings when the company went bust, many have lost their homes with the number of repossessions in the second quarter of 2008 at 11,054, up 71% compared with a year earlier and 15,000 workers in the UK were made redundant in the week before the G20 summit (BBC NEWS 15.11.08).

The “route map” is held in the hands of politicians who have not a clue where they are going, who sit in a car which has no engine trying to drive along a road which leads to a dead-end. All the G20 world-leaders gave the world was empty rhetoric. You cannot drive a car on hot air. These are not “extraordinary times”. Capitalism has been in a depression in the past and is going through one now. And while the working class does not take conscious political action to replace capitalism with Socialism there will be trade depressions in the future. Instead of “extraordinary measures” the working class should be taking revolutionary measures to establish common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by all of society. .

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Object and Declaration of Principles

Object

The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

Declaration of Principles

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN HOLDS:

1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (ie land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced.

2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.

3.That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.

4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.

5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.

6. That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.

7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.

8. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.