Nationalise the banks and industry
Penelope Dawber, Lancashire Socialist Party
Energy company profits are soaring. So are prices at the petrol pumps. As the prices of everyday items start to creep up – unlike our wages – the working class is paying for it. Since the war on Iran began almost 2 months ago, the price of oil has regularly exceeded $100 a barrel. In this time, the 100 biggest oil and gas companies have earned $30 million in profits per hour.
Should this trend continue, their profits will reach a whopping $234 billion by the end of the year, with Saudi Aramco alone set to rake in 10% of this.
Similarly, six of America’s largest banks made profits of almost $50 billion in the first quarter of the year, most of which coming due to the war, as trading volumes increased 15-20%. The big banks have made money as the prices of oil yo-yoed from the impact of Trump’s pronouncements the war was ending, followed by new rounds of missile strikes on Iran.
The oil and gas industry globally already made annual profits of $1 trillion over the past 50 years. Some have gotten very rich, while workers and poor people across the world have to struggle to get by.
And what’s on the horizon? According to the International Monetary Fund, we have a global recession to look forward to. At the same time, wages have still not recovered from the 2007-09 Great Recession, and energy, housing, and food prices continue to skyrocket.
To avoid catastrophe and provide a decent standard of living for us all, we need to nationalise the big energy companies and the banks under democratic workers’ control and management. A socialist plan of production would end imperialist war profiteering and means those billions of pounds of profits would be put to use funding our essential services in dire straits after decades of brutal austerity, instead of further enriching a tiny few.
Using those resources to plan to produce what we need, and move away from polluting fossil fuels, we could provide a decent standard of living for all. Join the socialists in fighting for a world free from wars over resources, and build a world based on genuine cooperation instead of the brutal reality of the capitalist system.
