Whose fault is it that nearly 30,000 workers have lost their jobs with the closure of all the Woolworths stores? Not the workers, that's for sure. We are due to see an avalanche of job losses after Christmas. Unemployment is nearly 2 million already, and due to hit 3 million in 12 months' time. None of these workers deserve to lose their jobs. They are the victims of a capitalist system that is just not working. How can we make things better? If we fight for work or full pay, the bosses would soon find them something to do.

In 1848 The Communist Manifesto opened with the line, "A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. " The spectre of Marx haunts world capitalism still.The years of steadily rising living standards, of relatively full employment have gone, never to return. This year, and for years to come, workers look with trepidation at their future. Will they have a job? Will they still have a roof over their heads?

2008 makes for a sad story, and in 2009, the working class will begin really paying for it. Some of the worst to be affected will be young unskilled workers; cleaners, shop-workers and caterers, like myself. Minimum wage workers at the best of times, we have, during the period of boom (which apparently was the last 10 years, although no one told us) eked out an existence, hovering from one place to the next for as long as moral holds out. Most I have worked with were young, often migrants, demoralised but unorganised and so usually without contracts of employment and subject to very poor working conditions.

What a difference a few months make! In the summer Gordon Brown was on the ropes. Over the past couple of months he has picked up a thoroughly undeserved reputation as the ‘saviour of the world economy.’ Brown has embraced Keynesian policies wholeheartedly, without explaining his U-turn. His solution to our economic ills is to hurl money at them. ‘Never apologise, never explain’, seems to be his motto. So what is making Brown look good? The Tories, that’s what.