A Future That Works

A Future That Works
NO2aTory/Liberal coalition - Vote with your feet for an alternative to a neo-liberal economy and neo-conservative state Yes2aLeftFront and a Red/Green Left Alliance

Wednesday 23 March 2011

What Is to Be Done?

This is why we must resist the agenda of privatization and marketization of health care, education and welfare provision. This is the first priority of any Left Alternative, without ownership by the people of Britain and Europe of the key elements of society there isn’t any democratic control. This is at the heart of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative project to restore class power and as a direct consequence increased inequality that favours the capitalist elite at the expense of the working classes. It’s the reason the social-democratic project failed and that capitalism survived, it’s the reason why I see Marxist socialist theory as more relevant to the situation of capitalism in the 21st century than the theories of Bernstein and social-democracy. This doesn’t mean that social-democracy isn’t useful or been beneficial to the working class, but that it was useful in a particular stage of bourgeois capitalist development. It may still have a role to play in the class struggle between capital and labour but the high point of social-democracy has passed as the antagonisms between capital and labour become more confrontational and compromise less possible.

http://leftalternatives.myfineforum.org/sutra5792.php#5792

4 comments:

  1. Rob Griffiths general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain has said the TUC demo in London would mark a major step in developing "a huge mass movement to defend jobs, public services and local communities" and added "George Osborne had better cancel his yachting holiday and prepare for an almighty battle to decide in whose interests Britain is run - for his millionaire pals in the City or for the millions of working people and their families". Let’s make Saturday's March for the Alternative a day to remember in the British labour movements history and one that the Tory/Liberal coalition government won’t be able to forget either.

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  2. Power to the people

    http://action.goingtowork.org.uk/page/s/marchforthealternative

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  3. Notes on Contemporary Imperialism

    By Prabhat Patnaik

    ‘‘Since finance capital itself becomes international in character, the controllers of this international finance capital constitute, to borrow Lenin’s expression, a global financial oligarchy’’ (Prabhat Patnaik December 2010)

    Countries are drawn into the vortex of globalized finance and subject to ‘‘the vortex of globalized finance’’ and subjected to ‘‘the caprices of the global financial oligarchy’’. Finance ministers, governors of central banks, the IMF World Bank ‘‘constitute what has been called an “epistemic community”. …they…share the same world view….the same theoretical positions’’.

    Ideological thinkers and strategists that promote this belief system in the interests of global finance perpetuating the hegemony of international finance capital.

    In the developed world such as the USA, Britain and Europe we see a current account deficit and in the developing world such as China we see a current account surplus. It has become harder for advanced ‘‘capitalist nation-States’’ to adopt Keynesian demand management strategies and in the developing world it’s harder for ‘‘bourgeois-led State’’ to protect peasant farmers and small producers from displacement by multi-national corporations and agribusiness.

    Therefore we see social costs in both the developed and developing world from the dominance of international finance capital. In ‘‘Lenin’s sense’’ transitional demands act as an educational device mobilizing the working classes and their allies. In the developed world this is ‘‘the working class, the immigrants, the so-called “underclass”, together with the white-collar employees and the urban middle class’’, in the later ‘‘the peasants, petty producers, agricultural labourers, marginalized sections like the tribals and dalits, and the working class’’.

    These two groups will be engaged in two distinct struggles against the effects of globalization and international finance capital. In the first instance to defend the real gains made in the social-democratic Keynesian phase of capitalism and in the second against disposition of indigenous peoples and falling into destitution and super exploitation by global capitalism.

    From this it’s possible to see real possibilities for either regression or the advance of the reactionary far-right in the developed world and in the developing world fundamentalist organizations or for the combination of circumstances to produce the dynamics for a socialist transition in the developed world on one front and the developing world on a second front.

    http://www.pragoti.in/node/4234

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  4. Lenin dated the imperialist phase of capitalism, which he associated with monopoly capitalism, from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the process of centralization of capital had led to the emergence of monopoly in industry and among banks. The coming together (coalescence) of the capital.

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