The organisers and promoters of the Charter are now seeking to get one million signatures supporting a list of demands that cannot be changed. You sign or don’t sign. The Charter’s instigators, in the main activists from the RMT and the Communist Party, hope that the implementation of the Charter’s demands will go some way to ensuring that the burden of the present economic crisis will not be borne by working people.

(click here to visit the Charter website)

Introduction

The preamble to the Charter states the following; “Britain is in the grip of an economic crisis. So is the world. Every time there is a slump the politicians and financiers seem mystified as to how the system has failed. But boom and bust is the way it works. It's not stable.” We would agree with this statement. But why is the system, and let’s call it by its real name of capitalism, unstable? The Charter states that “banks, corporations and speculators gamble other people's money in their global casino” and when the bubble bursts we pay the price in job losses as well as direct and indirect cuts in our living standards. But why does this happen? The Charter believes that the reason for all of this is that the perpetrators of the crisis are “driven only by greed."

As Marxists we recognise that people’s personal predilections can make a system worse, but the cause of the crisis is not found in personal habits but within the contradictions of capitalism itself. Each crisis can have a multitude of causes that interact with each other. The present one is mainly a result of a market being expanded beyond its natural limits by the recent phenomenal growth in credit, in the main for house purchases leading to house price inflation, with banks lending money they did not have, a phenomenon that Marx called fictitious capital.

In the main workers did not benefit from the boom before the slump but were squeezed mercilessly by the bosses. Wealth travelled from the poorest sections of society to the richest! And this had implications for the level of demand, purchasing power, in the economy. We saw a situation of capitalist overproduction where the goods that were produced could increasingly not be bought so factories closed, workers lost their jobs and the market was cut even further. However, the main contradiction of capitalism, the struggle over surplus value, the class struggle, is not mentioned. Neither is the fact that capitalist society is a class society and that at bottom people’s actions are driven by their material interests. The Charter however believes that the fault lies at an individual level, the “greed” of individuals. Right from the outset therefore we believe that an incorrect analysis leads to incorrect conclusions.

The Demands of the People’s Charter.

The demands constitute a list of aims which the promoters hope would, if implemented, ensure that workers do not pay the price of the crisis. Aims or demands however are only part of a programme. Just as important are the methods for achieving those aims and the people in organisations who are to fight to achieve those aims. The demands however limit themselves to aims and remain therefore at the level of aspirations without saying how they are going to be achieved.

"A Fair Economy for a Fairer Britain."

This is the first main demand of the Charter and within the demand there are a number of concrete steps that should be taken. Nobody could disagree with the need for a fairer Britain, not even Liberals and Tories. But what does it mean? It implies that Britain is unfair, but how and why is it unfair? For Marxists “unfairness” stems from the fact that we live in a capitalist society, a class society, and that those who produce wealth through selling their labour power do not receive the full value of that wealth. The surplus value is creamed off by the owners of the means of production, the capitalists. Each aspect of unfairness such as the unequal ownership of wealth, income, economic and political power, educational opportunity and so on stems from this exploitation. Until social production is socially owned and the value created belongs to all in society, until we get social ownership of the means of creating value, this “unfairness” will continue. In modern parlance this means public ownership of the means of production, the banks, insurance companies and land under democratic workers’ control and management. This is the only way to ensure that “fairness” is achieved.

"Take the leading banking, insurance and mortgage industries fully into democratic public ownership run for the benefit of all.”

We agree. But why only the “leading” ones and which ones are they? What about other sources of finance. Are we to have a dual system operating side by side, a state system and a private system? What is meant by democratic public ownership? Are these NATIONALISED industries to be run by elected boards? If so, who elects them and by what method? How are these industries to be nationalised? Is this a demand to be carried out by a labour government or by the trade union movement acting politically by standing candidates in a general election and hoping to form a government? Or are the demands to be achieved by a new workers’ party that has gained sufficient support to form a government? Unless these demands are placed on someone to be carried out by someone they remain at the level of vague aims.

"Regain control of the Bank of England and keep interest rates low.”

Is this a demand for the Labour Government to take back control from the arms-length Monetary Policy Committee that has been setting interest rates? But the MPC has been keeping interest rates low in the hope of stemming inflation and stimulating demand. Is the Charter therefore calling for state control of finance so that investment can be planned to satisfy people’s needs and not where the greatest profit can be made for a few individuals? Does this demand echo the demand of Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto for a “centralisation of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly”? If there were a demand for the Bank of England to be the financial lever of government policy and if that government were a socialist government, then the demand would be correct. However, the next statement in the Charter shows that this is not the case.

"Tightly regulate the City markets to facilitate lending and to stop speculation and takeovers against the public interest.”

The Charter wants the tiger to stop behaving like a tiger. It wants the capitalists to be controlled – by the capitalists and their political representatives. It believes that “regulation” can achieve this. Whilst it is true that the relaxation of banking regulations under Chancellor Gordon Brown contributed to the orgy of recent speculation, it was not the main cause as shown above. What is meant by public interest? Is it the same as national interest where we are fighting a war in Afghanistan in the name of our national interest? National interest means the interests of the capitalist class which owns the nation. Who determines what the public interest is? Secrets are kept by the state, the executive committee for managing the affairs of the capitalist class as a whole, in the name of the “public interest”. In other words those who own and control society determine what the public interest is. The main question however is that if we have state control of finance within a planned system of economic growth, why do we need a stock exchange and city markets?

"Ban hedge funds, raids on pension funds, asset-stripping and corporate tax loopholes."

Restructure the tax system so big business and the wealthy pay more and ordinary people pay less -  again a very worthy aim. The problem is that the rich in Britain, the capitalists, financiers and landowners, have had centuries of practice and experience in how to avoid paying their just taxes. They employ an army of accountants and lawyers to ensure that the wealth they have swindled from the labour of “ordinary people” remain sacrosanct. The TUC has calculated that the rich manage to avoid paying taxes each year to the value of up to £85 billion. Each time attempts are made by governments to try and ensure taxes are paid by all, the rich get their hirelings to invent new methods to circumvent the new law. Even worse, they also try to blackmail the government by threatening to move from Britain and take their “wealth creating activities” with them. Philip Green of BHS lives in Monaco, flies into Britain for two or three days “work” each week and flies out again. He pays virtually no tax. And don’t forget that we have a government that is relaxed about people getting filthy rich. Fiddling with the tax system will not make the rich pay more and the poor less. Let us repeat once again. If the system for creating wealth is socially owned, then the value created will be owned by society that will determine through its own democratic institutions how that wealth is to be distributed. Tinkering with the tax system will not achieve the ends that the supporters of the Charter desire.

But, it will be argued, the Charter does not wish to end capitalism, merely to make it “fairer.” Such a desire is noble but is at bottom a complete failure to understand how capitalism works. The old saying is that you can peel an onion layer by layer and it will make you cry. If you attempt to control a tiger by removing one claw after another, you will be devoured.

Perhaps the modern day “Chartists” see their demands as a step towards firstly creating a more responsible and therefore controlled capitalist system before moving on to fighting to create a fairer society which can only be achieved under socialism. If this is so, it is a rehash of the discredited two-stage theory from the 1920s and 1930s where it was promulgated that a healthy and more just capitalist system could be developed as a stage in the development towards socialism.

Then, but even more today, capitalism has entered its period of senility and cannot be reformed. It has to be done away with and that should be the task of all socialists and communists, not to tinker with a system but to change it.

We stand by the position outlined by Lenin in December 1917 when he said, “The banks, as we know, are centres of modern economic life, the principal nerve centres of the whole capitalist economic system. To talk about "regulating economic life" and yet evade the question of the nationalisation of the banks means either betraying the most profound ignorance or deceiving the "common people" by florid words and grandiloquent promises with the deliberate intention of not fulfilling these promises.”