On the march there were trade union banners in plenty from branches and regions up and down the country. The range was impressive – CWU, PCS, PoA, Unison, Unite, NUJ, UCU, GMB, TSSA, RMT, NUS, as well as Trades Councils and Labour Parties. They all came to demand that action be taken by the labour movement to oppose the cuts package that will target the poor to pay for the crisis of capitalism. Demands from speakers for a general strike were greeted with enthusiasm. But the overall message of the marchers was that working class people should not pay for a crisis caused by the bankers and their system.

Promises were made to support workers in struggle to defend jobs and services even if such action is illegal under the anti-trade unions laws. If these promises are carried out in practice, we will witness in the coming period a mounting wave of industrial action as working people are forced by events to take measures to defend the gains they have made through struggle over past decades. All of this action must be supported by the labour and trade union movement at all levels. If it is not, then the struggles of past generations of workers will be nullified as the gains of the past are swept away. With this crisis of capitalism nothing is guaranteed.

However, the struggle must also be political. We know that one of the main causes of the present crisis was the banking and credit system where loans were made with money that the banks did not possess. They created money, what Marx called fictitious capital, to lend to people who had no hope of paying it back. The explosion of lending provoked an inflationary spiral in the housing market that left millions of working people squeezed out of ever being able to buy a house. When the system collapsed, the banks came crawling to the Labour Government for handouts to save their system.

The banks were bailed out with £850 billions of public money and the resulting government debt created uncertainty in the money markets which then demanded government cuts to balance the books. The idea promoted by many speakers on the march that the cuts are “ideologically driven” is misleading. The need to save capitalism for the rich is driving the cuts package. It is not ideology that determines the policy but the reality of the crisis of capitalism. If ideology were to blame, it would foster the belief that all that as needed was to change the ideology.

 What is in fact needed is a bold programme of socialist measures to put an end to the system of capitalism so that the wealth that is created by working people is owned and controlled by the whole of society. Only then can we begin to prepare a democratically decided plan to use that wealth to build homes, hospitals, schools and public services. We can use material resources to raise living standards, create jobs and remove fear and want. In this way too we can remove the material base for the rise of organisations such as the EDL and other proto fascist groups that seek to exploit the unsatisfied real needs that many working class people have in order to drive wedges based on skin colour between different sections of the working class.

To create such a plan would require as a minimum the taking of the whole of the banking and financial system into public ownership with compensation based on proven need. This would provide the material and financial basis for the development of a plan of production to increase the material wealth of society. That would be the first stage of transforming capitalism into socialism. Without state ownership of banking and finance we will not be able to take the first steps to put an end to the crisis of capitalism. This is the political solution which along with the industrial battles we will be witnessing will herald the start of a new era for humanity.