One of the problems in writing about this particular crisis is that it is moving so fast that before you get to the final page new events have happened which need to be taken into account. In the past few days in completing this article the government has taken a majority shareholding in the Lloyds HBOS Group and unemployment figures for the USA show that 650,000 American workers were thrown out of work in the month of February. In Britain the banking crisis is getting worse and the CBI has just announced that they expect one in tem workers in the UK to loose their jobs during 2009.

 

The purpose of this document is to launch a regroupment process, which will culminate in a conference after a period of discussion. It registers the most important areas of agreement we have achieved at the beginning of this discussion.

 

This piece by Alan Thornett is a contribution to the discussion on organisation between Marxists in Respect who are involved in a process of regroupment. The document is uncontroversial among those who have had a chance to discuss it and goes some way to establishing a framework for a Marxist current to actively build a broader party while retaining an independent existence.

 

An ecosocialist contribution to the discussion on revolutionary regroupment

....we with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and... all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly — Friedrich Engels.

 

Since the rise of new Labour the building of an effective broad alternative to its left has been a central task for revolutionary socialists. Far-left organisations in their existing form were not, and are not, adequate to address the opportunities this situation opens up — although they potentially have a crucial role to play in building a broad alternative capable of tackling the crisis of working class representation.

 

These notes start from Alan Thornett’s characterisation of the crisis in his document, Capitalism’s Crisis and Our Response. What this note hopes to do is to go into a bit more detail about the way the crisis is likely to develop and to look at some of the possible strategies that capital might adopt to try to resolve the crisis. This can then lead into our later discussions about the position of the working class and a socialist response.

 

The RMT transport union is backing a national alternative in June’s European elections. ‘No2EU - Yes to Democracy‘ aims to provide a working class alternative in the elections, and has been able to gather the support of the Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Party and the tiny Liberal Party as well as the Indian Workers’ Association.