This is the text of a leaflet we issued at the founding conference of Youth Fight for Jobs on Saturday May 9, which was attended by about 100 comrades. A small report will follow in due course.

One manifestation of the capitalist crisis is in the jobs market. According to the government’s own statistic the claimant count was 1.46 million in March 2009 – up 672,100 from the previous year. However, we all know that the real level of unemployment is always far higher than the number of those claiming jobseeker’s allowance. The same official statistics tell us that the unemployment rate now runs at 6.7%, representing a rise of 486,000 over the past year, to reach 2.10 million. But these statistics fail to take all the factors into account. Other estimates claim the real figure is more like 3 million plus.The government statistics also accept that: “The redundancies level for the three months to February 2009 was 270,000, up 45,000 over the quarter and up 162,000 over the year. This is the highest figure since comparable records began in 1995.” Once again, this figure will only scratch the surface, but it does show that something serious is going on. We have seen numerous companies seeking to reduce losses by getting rid of their workers. This is also taking place in the public sector where we Brown has pushed for tens of thousands of job cuts. City economists expect the official unemployment rate to rise to 3.3 million by the end of 2010, a level higher than during the recession of the 1980s. The capitalists are seeking to make the working class pay for the crisis of their system.

Young people will be adversely affected. Those leaving school, college and university and searching for work for the first time will have a hard time of it. Almost 40 percent of unemployed people are under 25. And those young people who do find work will often be landed with the worst and least secure jobs. Many students will be well aware of this, as with the rising cost of entering higher education most working class students must work and study just to get by. Any youth campaign over unemployment must also raise demands for free quality education and training, as well as for student grants and a minimum wage that allow young people to live a decent life – much more than the paltry sum of 8 pounds/hour the campaign is proposing. Training must be voluntary, not the compulsory schemes the government puts people on to massage unemployment figures.

But the crisis has not just resulted in job cuts and attacks on working people. It has also created a period of ideological flux in which the mantra of the pseudo-market is no longer widely accepted. People can see more and more clearly that capitalism is a rotten system. Workers have begun to take more militant action in defence of their interests such as the occupations at Visteon, Waterford, and Prisme and the unofficial walk outs at Lindsey Oil Refinery and the other construction sites. We must support these actions and seek to win those involved to support for a revolutionary socialist programme.  We must be clear that any working class fight-back must not allow itself to be held back by the union bureaucracy, and that effective national action must not be constrained by the anti-union laws. They must be smashed through mass action.

In seeking to help take our class forward, we must also learn from history. As well as mobilising young people to take action and build solidarity with other workers, Youth Fight For Jobs must take the question of education seriously.

We should hold meetings discussing various moments of working class history which are of relevance to the campaign, not least the Communist-led National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) of the 1930s. NUWM demanded “Work at union rates or full maintenance” and an income sufficient to cover all basic needs  if the government didn’t provide them. NUWM organised mass marches, direct action and self-defence against police violence, while the union leaders collaborated with the bosses. Any campaign today will be different to the NUWM, but there is a rich history there which we must learn from.

Whilst it is absolutely right that we raise immediate demands for the here and now such as for the right to a decent job with decent pay, we must not neglect the fact that as revolutionaries we are out to abolish the system of wage labour (or “wage slavery” as Marx termed it) in its entirety. As Marx put it in The German ideology, we should fight for a communist society, where “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”.
The modern capitalist division of labour sees many people spending their working lives performing the same mind-numbing sub-operation. Communism offers the prospect of socially useful and rewarding labour for all. We must recognise that slogans such as “Jobs for all” are two-sided. Having a job is often better than rotting on the dole, but under capitalism people are highly alienated from their labour and often only do the jobs they do because they feel they have no choice. Others seek to avoid work at all costs, and who can blame them? Most of the jobs we are likely to get are pretty shitty! If we are going to inspire the mass of people then we need to put forward a vision of a radically different future.

It is our duty to do this. There are other contending ideologies also seeking to make capital out of capitalism’s crisis. Nationalist sentiment represents a serious danger that could grow in a climate such as this. It is also a sentiment that sadly finds an echo on the left. The platform of No2EU is nothing but rotten left-nationalist bilge. If the campaign were ever to get anywhere, it would only foster the illusion that British capitalism is in some way superior to European capitalism. But revolutionary socialists do not take sides between competing capitals – we seek instead to end the competition by uniting with our fellow workers in opposition to the capitalists and their state of all countries. This platform comes as no surprise given the prominent role the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain have played in the campaign. These Stalinists still believe there is a British road to socialism, which they think will be brought about by a left-Labour government legislating in the bourgeois Parliament. Some had higher hopes of the, ostensibly Trotskyist, Socialist Party. Yet it seems they are happy to tag along and assist in spreading this nationalist muck because of the presence of a trade union bureaucrat. How very Trotskyist! Trotsky himself, of course, argued that the revolutionary party must effect “the liberation of the workers from the reactionary influence of the trade union bureaucracy”. Unfortunately, in bending over backwards to get the Bob Crows of this world on board, the Socialist Party is shirking this fundamental task.

We call on members of the Socialist Party and others to renounce their capitulation to nationalism and the trade union bureaucracy. Fight for proletarian internationalism and the democratic subordination of the union bureaucracy to the rank and file. Fight for a united revolutionary Communist Party based on the inspiring and practical politics of Marxism!