Text of the leaflet distributed by CS members at today’s demonstration against cuts in Manchester. Click here to view the PDF of the leaflet.

Today working class people in Manchester and around the entire world are facing the greatest attack on their living standards in history.

This year the UK government is implementing £81 billion worth of public sector spending cuts. These cuts mean not only hundreds of thousands of job losses in the public sector -at a time when there are simply no other jobs available- but also that the public services that working class people rely on are being destroyed. Be under no illusions; the cuts to the NHS, to schools, to welfare, to higher education, to financial support for developing nations are nothing less than an outright attack by the capitalist class of the world (those who own large companies and sit on the boards of the city banks) to roll back the rights and access to welfare services that the working class have fought for and won over the last 200 years.

The capitalists and bosses argue that the country can simply no longer afford to fund these public services all the while reaping in record profits themselves. We as communists and part of the working class say enough is enough. We get up every morning to go to work for the capitalists for over 40 hours a week. We do jobs that slowly eat away at the last vestiges of our humanity so we can feed ourselves, all whilst the capitalists reap the fruits of our labour without even a thank you. They speculate with the value that our toil has produced so they can exploit more and more people and reap more and more profit, whilst ignoring any concerns for the people who bought them this wealth or any concern for the state of the planet from which they extract resources for their own private gain. Then when their next gamble fails, as it always inevitably does, they make those who created their wealth in the first place (us) pay for the costs of their greed. This economic system is the one we toil under day after day and is known as capitalism.

This process happens every single day, in every single part of the world and it’s contradictions inevitably produce crises such as the Great Economic Crash of 2007. The capitalists speculation on the prices of houses in America, for their own personal profit, led to the collapse of banks around the world in 2008 which governments around the world used public money to bail out. Whilst the profit margins of capital have recovered, and even risen to record levels since 2007 the state of the finances in the treasuries which bailed the banks out have remained dire. The capitalist class have since tirelessly repeated to governments around the world that unless they deal with these deficits then business will lose confidence in the economies and they won’t recover. For once they tell the truth. Unless the government makes these massive cuts to public services then capitalists will not feel comfortable investing their cash into economies from which they are not guaranteed huge personal profit.

So the government is implementing cuts that are affecting your lives due to the nature of the economic system that we toil under: Capitalism. It is not simply the Tories or the Bankers who are cutting £109million to the Manchester City council budget (although they are belligerent) The closure of the libraries in Clayton, in Wythenshawe, in Chorlton, the 2,000 job losses at the council, the closure of all public toilets and many youth centers in Manchester is the result of the nature of Capitalism. These cuts and closures are also far from the end. If the capitalists get their way only the rich will have access to hospitals, education, leisure and the working class can starve.

There is a glimmer of hope however. Today by marching side by side with other workers you are participating in an act of solidarity with many people you may have never met before but who share the same concerns about their futures, and share the same political interest in society as you. It is not the rich capitalist class who are going to suffer in this ‘Age of Austerity’ it is the working class and your interests and those of the capitalists are directly in conflict.

The only way to defeat the continued attacks on the working class by the capitalists is for the working class, woman and man, old and young, black and white, born in Manchester or born in Cairo to unite as one and realize that it is us who drive capitalism. Without us the capitalists would not be able to reap the profits they do. It is us, the working class majority who hold the key for revolutionary change.

The struggles to come make Karl Marx’s statement that the working class ‘have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win’ ring truer than ever. We must organise as a class and stand united against the cuts. The immediate priority of this fight should be the unity of the various small and ineffective anti-cuts campaigns into a single organisation. Of no less importance is the unity of Marxists in an organisation which encourages debate and fights openly for Marxism. We believe these are the politics which can really change the world, and consign capitalism to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

By James O’Leary