21ST CENTURY
Clerkenwell Green, London EC1 2nd - 3rd November 2013
MARXISM
politics, ideas, discussion, debate, culture, learning
A political festival of ideas, discussion, debate, learning, music, poetry and more
Austerity is working for the bankers & bureaucrats who run Britain! Now is the time for us to fight back! The burden of this capitalist crisis falls on the working class with the poorer half of the population receiving just 12p of every pound of GDP - a 25 per cent fall since the late 1970s. Austerity isn't working for workers. Adjusted for inflation, the real value of pay has fallen by 7% since the start of 2008 costing the average worker ÂŁ7000. But super rich incomes soar. The proportion of GDP going to profits has soared by 4%. Since the 1980s, top bosses have seen pay rises as high as 4,000%. The average chief executive now earns 145 times more than the average worker's wage. At the end of 2012, the real value of wages was more than ÂŁ50 billion a year lower than in 2008. The ConDem government is using the crisis of their system to enforce permanent austerity, slash public services break with the welfare state and roll back every advance made by workers since 1945.
Austerity policies shift wealth directly and indirectly from the people to the big monopolies and to the rich. The masters of the capitalist system buttressed by the World Bank, the IMF and the European Union - want the people to pay for the crisis. At the same time we face a crisis of political representation with Miliband's attack on the working class character of the Labour Party and the failure to offer a real policy alternative to attacks on working class livings standards. But the fightback is growing. The People's Assembly is gathering wide support with four thousand delegates from trade unions and community campaigns attended the assembly in June and local groups are springing up in every town and city across the country. Unions are preparing strike action for jobs and pay and to defend the NHS, education and public services. The Communist Party is one of many at the heart of this fightback. The party _ and the Morning Star - play a key role in
21st Century Marxism programme [!1]
working with others to initiate and sustain the People's Assembly movement and in the unions and peace and solidarity movements.
What is 21st Century Marxism? The successor event to the annual Communist University (re-established back in 2006), it’s a vibrant weekend of politics & culture.