The Communist Party rejects the notion that the current economic and financial crisis is primarily the result of so-called “subprime” mortgage lending to high-risk homebuyers in the US. While US corporate greed and war expenditure helped precipitate a credit crisis, the new Labor government and the financial monopolies in the City cannot escape responsibility for their policies.
To serve the interests of big business, they have subjected almost all sections of the British economy, including the public sector, to rule by finance capital and the City. While manufacturing industry has been run down or sold off to transnational corporations, public services and utilities have been privatized or used as a source of superprofits for British and foreign monopolies.
Because the real value of wages, benefits and pensions has been held down, millions of people have resorted to credit based on inflated house prices to try to maintain and improve their standards of living.
In the deregulated City, financial institutions have erected an enormous edifice of “fictitious capital” based on financial instruments, which bear no relation to the real value produced in the real economy. On the basis of such artificial business, together with the fleecing of the public sector and the general public, they embarked on an unrestrained orgy of profiteering.
The resulting bubble of personal, government and corporate debt maintained demand in the British economy long enough for Gordon Brown to proclaim the end of “boom and bust.” Now that the bubble has burst, the economic cycle is reasserting itself just when the money market and financial institutions are losing confidence and credibility. Continuously pumping credit into the financial markets is inflationary and will reduce both wages and the social wage in the interests of monopoly profits. So will the state taking on bad credit and converting it into tax liabilities.
The Communist Party therefore insists that a Left-Wing Programmed is vital to combat capitalist crisis, based on the following specific policies:
1. No public subsidies to rescue private shareholders from the anarchy, greed and chaos of their own system;
2. Government intervention to prevent mass redundancies, including the takeover of failing building societies to protect jobs and stop house repossessions;
3. Switch the public cash being pumped into the money market, wars and Trident to taking utilities into public ownership and to a massive public-sector housebuilding programmed;
4. Rebuild a powerful public sector in the banking industry through nationalization, to supply credit and investment to industry while retaining ownership;
5. Impose a wealth tax on the super-rich and a windfall tax on energy, banking and supermarket monopoly profits;
6. Freeze gas and electricity prices at their January 2008 levels and take the gas, electricity and oil industries back into public ownership.
7. Britain’s Communists call on the labor and progressive movements to step up the fight for substantial increases in wages, benefits and pensions to ensure that the capitalists, not the working class, pay for this crisis.
8. The depth of this crisis demands mass action to break the domination of the City and finance capital over our economy, to sweep away the neoliberal politicians leading all the major political parties and to reassert the struggle for socialism as the only alternative to capitalist chaos.
