In the 1980s capitalist crisis our party published a series of pamphlets about the destruction of the means of livelihood for our class. The third of these sold out almost immediately, and we reprint extracts from the beginning and end of it, highly relevant in the present crisis.
In the home of industrial capitalism a transformation is taking place. A shrunken distorted version of a once-powerful economy residing in a radically altered landscape is created, prey to the depredations of multinational and finance capital. A design appalling in its implications is pursued by the ruling class. To produce a climate fit for capitalism, capitalism as it has developed over the past 200 years must be destroyed. A counter-industrial revolution has been declared.
…Thatcher represents the thinking of the financial and multinational interests who see no place in the world for a Britain with a strong productive base and who hate and fear those productive and skilled workers who create the value which makes that financial parasitism possible. Her government has concentrated the long decline of Britain, accelerated it, and by so doing irrevocably changed the situation. A slump of unprecedented proportions grips the land out of which a Phoenix is supposed to rise. Yet only ashes are created.
…Many nations have died in the past. Famine, pestilence, invasion from without, civil strife from within, have been the instruments of destruction. Yet nothing like the decline of Britain has been witnessed in the modern world. By the hand of its own ruling class the country is being dismembered and laid to waste in the pursuit of the destruction of its opposing force – the working class. The “common ruin of the contending classes” has taken on a new and nightmarish possibility.
Capitalism has no loyalty to our country and moves its operations elsewhere. But workers cannot desert these shores en masse for we have nowhere to go. We face a callous policy of deliberate destruction and we have nowhere to run to. The longer we delay our revolutionary response, the greater the quandary we shall find ourselves in. We must stand and fight now and make a future for our class here, independent of capitalism. If we don’t fight, we shall lose everything.