Mass Struggle Needed To Challenge Capital

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

MASS STRUGGLE NEEDED TO CHALLENGE CAPITAL, COMMUNISTS INSIST

'Barack Obama's election in the US represents a significant victory for the mass progressive and labour movement and a serious defeat for the warmongering neo-conservatives', Communist Party international secretary John Foster declared at the weekend.

'As US imperialism reorientates itself towards a softer, multilateral and hegemonic strategy, that people's movement needs our solidarity for new battles over trade union rights, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Cuba', he told the CPB executive committee.

Analysing the international economic crisis, Mr Foster highlighted 'the contradiction between the process whereby monopoly capital extracts super-profits and the state helps redistribute wealth in favour of the super-rich through deregulation, privatisation and anti-trade union laws'.
'Ruling class strategy has been to make the mass of people poorer and dependent on credit, undermining the sustainability of economic demand as financial markets speculated in huge volumes of "fictitious" capital', he explained.

Britain's Communists urged the labour and local community movements in Britain to mobilise around a left-wing programme of demands including a substantial increase in real wages, pensions and benefits; the building of 100,000 energy efficient council houses in 2009; a freeze on domestic fuel prices at their January 2008 level; public ownership of the energy, public transport, banking, insurance and private pension sectors; controls on the international movement of capital; closure of all offshore tax avoidance centres under British jurisdiction; massive investment in a state-owned renewable energy sector; and progressive taxation measures including a wealth tax on the super-rich and windfall taxes on monopoly profits.
'An example of workplace or local community resistance to redundancies, repossessions and disconnections could spread like wildfire', Mr Foster insisted.

The Communist Party executive committee also urged support for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign's lobby of the Westminster Parliament on Wednesday, November 19, and pledged solidarity with the ongoing battle for abortion rights in Northern Ireland.