£100 billion for bosses – cuts for us. Fight for the socialist alternative

Billionaires like Jeff Bezos would be nothing without theirworkers, photos reynermedia, Steve Jurvetson, Scott Lewis, all CC

Billionaires like Jeff Bezos would be nothing without theirworkers, photos reynermedia, Steve Jurvetson, Scott Lewis, all CC   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

James Ivens

MPs get extension after extension on their Brexit crisis. But there are no extensions for workers and young people on our suffocating rent and bills.

School workers at the 2019 National Education Union conference say some kids attend having not eaten in two days. More than half of the 8,000 members surveyed reported hungry students.

But the shareholders of British big business are on track to receive £100 billion in dividends for the first time in history this year, says Link Market Services. The top payouts in the first three months of 2019 – over a billion each – came from big oil, big tobacco and big pharma.

Meanwhile, the workers who make the bosses their money are crushed in the vice of Dickensian wages and dizzying living costs. And then there’s Universal Credit. Destitute claimants can only hope against hope that their next utility bill won’t arrive.

Why should the bosses rake in billions when we can’t even pay our rent? Why is there always money for tax breaks for the corporations, but never any for our wages and public services? Why do we go to work at two or three jobs for peanuts while wealthy shareholders ‘earn’ billions for nothing?

These smouldering injustices lie beneath every explosive development in world politics.

The working-class revolt against the capitalist establishment which was the Brexit vote. The surge for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity promise in the 2017 snap election. Social movements against sexism, racism, climate change, and all the evils inflicted on us by the bosses and their politicians.

Socialism

As long as the billionaires control industry and politics, this thievery will go on. The Socialist Party fights for public ownership of big business, under the democratic control and management of workers.

Then the working class could plan how to use that £100 billion – for schools, hospitals, wages, homes, green energy and more.

That’s socialism. A society founded on democratic, collective planning and solidarity – not competition and division of every kind to enrich the super-rich.

Workers have shown their power through strike victories, like the mass action for equal pay in Glasgow last year. We say Corbyn and the trade union leaders must exercise this power. Call for mass mobilisations, plan for joint strikes, to end this hated Tory government!

That would be the first step towards a movement to take control out of the hands of the capitalists once and for all. If you want to help build it – join the Socialists.