Protests grow Against Market Mayhem
IT’S BEEN a particularly rough week for the capitalist bosses. Firstly, 10,000 protested in Washington against the World Bank and IMF’s exploitation of the Third World.
Then stock markets lost £2 trillion in share values world-wide in what the financial press wrote off as “the jitters”. In fact, the stock market falls show that the bubble of the world share boom is bursting.
Rich investors may shrug off £2 trillion losses. But the capitalist system already keeps half the world’s population close to starvation. Some are dying from lack of food.
Thousands protested in Washington against this poverty amidst wealth. Millions more are losing any faith they had in the bosses’ system and in capitalist globalisation.
And that number will grow. In Britain, New Labour chancellor Gordon Brown was the darling of the IMF when he was refusing to spend a penny on vital public services. He was following IMF policy.
But when fear of losing workers’ votes made Brown spend more on the NHS and education, the IMF gave New Labour a public dressing down. The priorities of capitalism and the needs of workers are on a collision course.
Even before the bubble bursts completely, the bosses threatened tens of thousands of West Midlands workers with redundancy for not making enough profit. If we let this system continue, many more jobs will be threatened.
But why should workers pay for capitalism’s failures? During the ‘boom’ the bosses made themselves rich, behaved like tyrants and exploited the world even though millions died as a result.
Now if companies threaten closures or sackings we say, let’s see their accounts. What have they done with the huge profits they made from our hard work?
If the money’s still there, the workplace should stay open – not one job should be lost.
If the money’s vanished, we should fight to get the firm nationalised, with minimum compensation and with workers managing and controlling production.
The bosses should pay for their own system’s crisis.
We fight for a socialist society, where production is geared to meeting people’s needs internationally, including in the poorest nations on earth, not to swelling the profits of a tiny minority of capitalists.