Executive Committee Domestic Resolution Another Britain is Possible - Build a Working Class Movement to Challenge the Bankers, Bosses and their Government Economic and financial crises are endemic to capitalism 1. The capitalist world is in deep and continuing crisis—a crisis of finance and of production, each aspect feeding the other. It is not an aberration. It is not based on simple 'greed' of individual bankers. Such economic and financial crises are endemic to the capitalist system. 2. The Conservative-LibDem coalition is established on the strength of a vote for the Conservatives amounting to 24 per cent of the electorate. It does not reflect the aspirations of many Lib Dem voters who supported what they believed to be progressive policies. The Liberal Democrat leadership should be 'Con-Demned' by their party membership. 3. The crisis and the Con-Dem coalition confront us with a new political situation. We are experiencing a frontal, wide-ranging and accelerating attack on the working class. But in the face of the current crisis and the ruling class offensive, there is not yet a political crisis for capitalism and its ruling class. 4. The financial crisis has taken place against the background of a year-on-year, decade-on-decade spiral of decline in manufacturing employment in Britain—with the loss of over 6 million jobs since 1965, more than four million of those since 1979, and more lost during the period of the New Labour government than under the Thatcher and Major Tory governments. 5. The Bank of England predicts that lost global output could reach a figure between £42 trillion to £140 trillion, between £1.25 trillion and £5.2 trillion in the Britain, as the effects of the crisis continue. In Europe, manufacturing output is down 20 per cent since the beginning of the recession. 6. This huge decline in manufacturing gives even more significance to the banking and financial services section of the economy—and makes any recovery 'weak, fragile and uncertain' in the words of the IMF. The continuing destruction of industry is not just about the immediate job loss. It destroys the acquisition of skills for future generations of workers, undermines trade union organisation and breaks up whole communities 7. It is in this assault on the industrial working class that we see the origins of the financial crisis, a three decade period of 'financialisation' with the progressive dominance of the finance sector over the productive sector. This is a process which has taken place not just in Britain but, significantly, throughout the advanced capitalist world. 8. 'Financialisation' led to further lack of investment in the 'real economy', and the further undermining of workers’ incomes, and eventually resulted in the credit crisis—reaching unprecedented levels. 9. The current crisis has resulted in similarly unprecedented international co-ordination of the main capitalist states and their central banks in massive fiscal, economic and political intervention. This intervention has enormous costs—over £7 trillion—one fifth of the entire globe’s economic output and just under £1,800 for every man, woman and child on the planet.
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Communist Party 51st Congress