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| Proletarian issue 5 (April 2005) |
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| Editorial: Election fever |
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As a general election approaches, the bourgeois parties are vying desperately for the honour of being chosen to serve as loyal executive to the British ruling class for the next few years. For the privilege of wedging their snouts firmly into the imperialist trough, there is no crime these stooges will not commit.
With the British economy in deep crisis (notwithstanding the assertions of Gordon Brown to the contrary), further attacks on public services and welfare benefits are inevitable. The Post Office, NHS, BBC, civil service and our schools are all subject to increasing privatisation and will probably disappear altogether in the not-too-distant future, with public sector pensions next in the frame. Such sops to the working class are useful in times of plenty, but are by no means indispensable when crisis bites and the bourgeoisie is desperately searching for sources of profit. Tory and Labour alike are proving their willingness to resort to any means necessary to preserve the status quo against whatever fight British workers may put up to the dramatic decrease in living standards that is likely to result. Hence the fever pitch of racist hysteria against 'asylum seekers' and 'terror suspects', used to distract people from capitalism's inability to provide a decent life and to justify the introduction of draconian laws giving arbitrary powers of indefinite imprisonment without charges or evidence to police and politicians.
With so few opportunities for maximum profit to be had at home, the quest for control of vital raw materials such as oil, as well as for control of markets and avenues of investment, is becoming ever more urgent for British imperialism. The result is endless war and a constant expansion of the theatre of war. An attack on Iran by US imperialism (or its stooge Israel) is expected in the coming months. Meanwhile, the imperialists and their zionist stooges are certain to have been behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Coups and 'civil' wars are on the increase all over the globe, and outright clashes between rival imperialist powers over division of the 'spoils' of oppressed countries' resources cannot be too far off.
And if all that wasn't enough, the environmental catastrophe of global warming threatens humanity's very existence if action isn't taken soon to halt the emission of greenhouse gases.
At such a time, with so many threats to the working class, are the 'alternative' and 'left-wing' parties doing their bit to explain to British workers the urgency of overthrowing decadent, parasitic imperialism and replacing it with planned, liberating, rational socialism? Not a bit of it. In return for the half-hearted sop of the 'Warwick Agreement', which the government has already reneged upon, union leaders have climbed obediently on board the Labour campaign bus. Meanwhile the Trots of the SWP, along with their friends in 'left' Labour, Respect and the revisionist CPB are busy shoring up support for Labour with slogans such as 'unite against fascism', 'keep out the BNP' and 'no vote for MPs that support the war', all of which are meant to encourage the mistaken belief that 'left' Labourites are somehow distinguishable from the imperialists that pay their wages and whose system such renegades have spent their careers defending and sanitising. |
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