PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

President’s column Well last year certainly ended on a sour note with the news of nearly 3,000 redundancies at City Link. What a Christmas present. The real surprise for me was the shock the news was greeted with. Why? This is what capitalism does, this is how it works. It is a system that benefits the wealthy, a system that needs to be done away with. This is not just my opinion, it is enshrined in our rule book. Rule 1 Clause 4 (b) which states: “to work for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”. I know that there are many political opinions and ideas within RMT, but this rule has been there, as far as I am aware, from the very beginning and it is a vital rule. Our forebears knew the corruption and inequality of the capitalist system and wanted to do something about it. How we achieve this is up to debate. One school of thought would be to go down the armed uprising road similar to what happened in countries such as Cuba, Russia and China etc. Others would like to see a democratic parliamentary route, such as happened in Chile, Nicaragua, and, latterly, in Venezuela. The former choice is highly unlikely to happen, so we need ways to look at it following the democratic road. The Labour Party, as I have said many times before, is not the answer. Apart from the fact that, in my opinion, you can’t reform capitalism only destroy it, the Labour Party with its radical 1945 agenda, is long gone. I do not think that they have any sort of socialist agenda anymore. They seem to want to be part of the central ground, a sort of red Tory party. We cannot rely on them anymore, there is no way that they are going to change, you only have to listen to Ed Milliband to know that. He repeatedly says that he will continue with cuts and he is considered left wing! Capitalism has peaks and troughs and, whenever there is a trough, it is the poorer classes who pay. Companies expect to at least maintain their profit levels during difficult times. To do this they cut public spending and put the squeeze on workers. It never enters the heads of any of the three main parties to raise taxes and put the burden on the people who cause the slumps, and the very ones who can afford to help. The answer to this problem is that the Left need to think and act in new ways. They should build alliances with like-minded groups, discuss things they have in common and not continually bicker about their differences. As long as they do that we are faced with the inevitable continuation of the capitalist system and all it brings with it including wars, poverty, inequality etc. We should look at what is happening in Greece, and Spain with Syriza, and Podemos. I have said this before, and make no apology for saying it again, there is lots we can learn from them. I thought a Syriza speaker at a meeting I attended last year was very brave when she said “Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky are important, but we don’t live in that century anymore!” There is a lot to be said for that statement. We can use the works of those people and build on them to face new challenges, challenges they did not know about. We all want the same thing, a fairer society to benefit all, so we need to think hard as to how we bring that about. Peter Pinkney A NEW BEGINNING RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: january 2015 :: RMTnews 19 Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund - the three institutions responsible for imposing austerity Europe-wide. Demonstrators and riot police clashed across the country and in Rome protestors bombarded the German embassy with eggs and paint. Germany, which has the only economy in growth in Europe, has widely been seen to be behind the EU push for evermore austerity. The European Commission has warned France, Italy and Belgium that they are in breach of the deficit-and-debt rules under the Stability and Growth Pact and has warned that they must slash spending budgets by March or face fines. France has already twice received a postponement of its deficit reduction deadline And, despite promising to wipe 3.6 billion euros off its deficit, Paris could now face a fine of up to 4.2 billion euros. Italy and Belgium are already blacklisted because of their public deficits, which are far above the 60 per cent of GDP demanded by the EU. Spain, Portugal, Malta and Austria are also at risk of breaching hardline neo-liberal EU rules. Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and the German EU commissioner Guenther Oettingerare are both demanding tough action for fear of the EU being accused of letting France and Italy off the hook because they are large member states. The EU, backed by Germany, has already imposed harsh austerity measures on Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus.