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Editorial by Martin Levy. 

Apologies to readers for the delayed appearance of this issue of CR.  Quite apart from the logistical difficulty of putting the journal together during the recent intense period of election campaigning, we thought it sensible to wait a while until the dust had settled afterwards.  Well, the Con-Dem coalition government has set to work at breakneck speed, and the axe is really swinging. 

At the time of writing, George Osborne is due to present his ‘emergency’ budget, but cuts totalling £6 bn have already been announced.  There will be a freeze in civil service recruitment; over £1 bn is being lopped off central government grants for local authorities; and £836m is being slashed from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which funds universities, colleges and job creation programmes.

And this is just the start.  The coalition intends to make deep cuts in public spending in order to reduce Britain’s budget deficit of some £156 bn.  This is bound to lead to massive job losses and a dramatic worsening of services on which people depend.  Sooner rather than later, we can also expect a hike in VAT, a freeze in benefits, an early increase in the state retirement age, an attack on public sector pay and pension schemes, and a ratcheting up of student tuition fees.

We already know from the Queen’s Speech that the Con-Dems mean to force many more people to work for their benefits and plan to part-privatise Royal Mail.

An enormous con-(dem-)trick is being played on the British people: that these spending cuts are necessary to plug the deficit, and that we are ‘all in this together’ and have to ‘share the pain’.  There is precious little sign of any pain being inflicted on the super-rich and their friends in the City of London whose speculation led to the 2008 credit crunch.  In fact, as the Communist Party argued in the election campaign, the deficit could immediately be eliminated by closing tax-avoidance loopholes for the wealthy and corporations, and by imposing a 20% windfall tax on the super-profits of British-based banks and monopolies, a ‘Robin Hood’ tax on major financial transactions, and a 1% wealth tax on the richest 10% of the population.

The slogan on which the Communist Party fought the General Election, “Britain for the People, not the Bankers”, put the issue clearly and still remains valid today.  It sums up what many people feel, but of course – like almost all other left-wing voices – it failed to make inroads against the media saturation coverage of the leaders of the three major pro-big business parties.  The Tories, Labour and LibDems were all committed to public spending cuts, though none was prepared to say exactly how much or what they would actually mean, an omission which the media largely did not challenge.  The only real difference was that Labour was going to postpone the intensification of the misery until next financial year.  That was never going to encourage the return to Labour of the many working class voters who had deserted it over the last 13 years, because it had failed to deliver for them.  But people certainly did not vote for the massive onslaught on the working class that is now being unleashed.

There are lessons which need to be drawn from this.  In particular, those trade unions which largely bankrolled Labour need to ask whether that investment was worthwhile, given that they have ventured all, and ended up with nothing.  Not that any of the other horses was worth backing, but if you are going to put money on one, isn’t it sensible to make sure that it will run in the right direction?  What the unions got from the Warwick Agreements were minimal reforms leaving untouched the big issues of the Tory anti-union laws, the privatisation of public services, the shortage of decent affordable homes and the widening gap between rich and poor.  As always in the past, Labour in government failed to stand up for the working class – only this time with even fewer crumbs thrown from the table.
But the election also provides a lesson for those who argue that Labour is finished – or at least ought to be dumped, in favour of a new workers’ party or socialist political alternative.  You cannot simply put the word ‘socialist’ on the ballot paper and expect to get thousands of votes, or even win.  When people vote, they do so largely in the hope of making their vote ‘count’, and very often therefore vote tactically and for limited purposes.  Many who agreed with what the left candidates were saying will have decided to put their cross against Labour, because they were worried about the prospect of a Tory victory.  A little bit of class consciousness, perhaps?  Only a little, unfortunately.  Strong votes for the left are a pipe-dream in such circumstances.  Furthermore, with such a level of class consciousness, you cannot expect that people will automatically see the big picture and fight the oncoming onslaught on the basis that “an injury to one is an injury to all”.
What do we understand by ‘class consciousness’?  It isn’t some kind of mystic fluid which permeates people’s minds and somehow binds them together.  Class in any case is an abstraction from the individuals who make it up, all with their individual psychologies.  In the words of Hans Heinz Holz, “Class consciousness is the ‘self-confidence’ of a generalised person at a particular historical period”, behind which every individual actually remains.  It is not the same, as Lenin pointed out in What is to Be Done?, as the spontaneous articulation of class-determined interests, important as it is.  Even that is at a relatively low level in Britain today, although there are notable expressions in the battles of BA strikers and other workers.  Educated class consciousness, however, understands that the individual experiences are more general, and are inherently linked to the existing social system.

The past 30 years of Tory and New Labour governments have done their damage here.  Defeats suffered by the working class, and the destruction of manufacturing industry – traditionally strongly-organised – have played a role.  However, changes in the organisation of work have also contributed, making the real opposition between labour and capital appear more impersonal and anonymous. 

A key task for the left is to reverse this process.  There has to be, as Holz says, a mediation between the individual and general consciousnesses, and opportunities are provided for this at the level of working class struggle.  The left needs to draw out to workers the understanding that they are not just fighting a particular boss, or the government, but that they have a commonality of interests with all other groups of workers, against the monopoly capitalist class.  And one of the best ways of building that understanding, and reinforcing it, is developing solidarity.  That is why the Communist Party’s message in the election was not so much ‘vote for us’ as ‘unite and fight’.  Our manifesto urged “working people not to rely on elections or parliaments to defend their interests.  If they want to protect jobs, wages, services, pensions and their rights at work, they must take action wherever and whenever necessary.”

The forthcoming period places such an approach on the order of the day.  Whichever New Labour clone wins the Labour Party leadership, or indeed whether the working class needs a new mass party, is much less important than winning recognition in the trade union movement that campaigning means more than passing resolutions, and that the only response capable of halting this government is the building of the widest possible unity, across workplaces and communities, in a campaign of resistance involving coordinated industrial action.  This will not happen overnight, of course, and it will not happen if the trade unions try to go it alone.  They need the support of communities fighting to protect their services and employment opportunities; and there is a vital role for trade union councils to play, not only in making the links with the communities, but in bringing workers together across different services and industries, to see their common interests.
It would be a mistake to think that this will be easy.  The Con-Dems are not stupid, and will not unleash a frontal assault on all areas at the same time.  Many of the initial £6bn cuts have been carefully decided so that the workers affected are relatively isolated, and the same will happen in the future.  Having the Lib Dems in government actually helps the Tories to sell their approach, because the government’s programme includes a number of ‘populist’ LibDem measures which can be presented as softening the Tory policies without having any such effect in reality.  Osborne’s plan to involve the public in a ‘debate’ about where the cuts should fall, and Cameron’s vision of a ‘big society’ rather than a ‘big government’, show that the Con-Dems understand the role of obfuscation and ideology in pushing through their policies.

The left and the labour movement need to be able to respond to that with an ideology of their own, building on the development of educated class consciousness to make connections with the issue of who really controls the levers of power in society, and therefore the measures needed to provide a real government by the people, not the phoney one that Cameron and Clegg are offering.  This is where the People’s Charter becomes crucial, as it makes the links between, on the one hand, fighting the cuts in public services, and providing jobs and homes, and on the other, the necessary economic measures to marshall the resources currently in the hands of the banks, speculators, financiers and the super-wealthy.  The perspective of the People’s Charter has to be built at the same time as the movement against the cuts.

Of course Britain is not alone in having a government determined to push through measures to make the working class pay for the crisis.  Last Autumn the Irish government cut spending by €4bn, equivalent to £50bn in British terms, and many public sector workers saw actual pay reductions.  Greece cut £10bn last year, then another £4.4bn this year, under pressure from the European Union.  Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany have also announced massive cuts too.
Arguably the measures have had the strongest impact in Greece, and the response from the working class there has been the most vigorous – due in large part to the resistance mobilised by Greece’s strong communist party, the KKE.  Their analysis of the situation is therefore of considerable interest, and we are pleased to be able to present it as the feature article in this issue of CR, although it does require careful reading.  Discussion contributions on this article would be welcome.  The KKE is particularly scathing about the role of social democracy and the class-collaboration trend in the trade union movement, reflecting their own experiences.  Their strategy also appears to exclude any intermediate stage between capitalism and socialism, such as the People’s Charter in Britain.

In the following article, Ian Pinkus argues that the left needs to learn from the achievements of capitalism as well as from the inequality and misery that it creates.  Profit and monopoly, he says, are not solely characteristics of a capitalist society; it is a question of how they are used.  He goes on to argue for trade unions to campaign to take over the collection and investment of their members’ savings in pension funds, as a step to owning and controlling the means of production.
The international flavour starting with the article from the KKE continues throughout this issue, with contributions from the Chinese delegation to last November’s international communist meeting, from Ken Fuller on the Philippines Communist Party, PKP, and from Fidel Castro on the threat to humanity from nuclear weapons and climate change.  One of our three book reviews deals with education in Cuba; and even Soul Food this time is internationalist, featuring the poetry of German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Finally, we are proud to be able to present here the moving tribute by leading South African communist Ronnie Kasrils to his late wife Eleanor: a marvellous person and a real role model.  Belatedly, we extend our sympathies to all who knew her.