Toward a New Model Young Labour
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1516 .... November 27, 2017
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Toward a New Model Young Labour
Max Shanly
Following decades of neoliberalism, where a massive redistribution of wealth and power has taken place in favour of the rich, the capitalist system now finds itself in serious crisis.
The preceding epoch, characterised primarily by a slavish reliance upon the financial sector -- itself based on uncontrolled, free-flowing circulation of money -- has led to politics in this country being defined by submission to those with financial clout.
Austerity measures are as deadly as they are unpopular. The privatisation of our public goods and services and the marketisation of health and education are added to the managed decline of our country’s productive base and the seismic reduction in our welfare state. Our democratic institutions have... never been weaker, and attacks on organised labour are employed to maintain capital’s dominance over the lives, aspirations and futures of the working people.
The unemployment rate in the United Kingdom is at about 4.6% -- an extremely massaged figure. This is, however, more than doubled amongst our young, with 13% of 18 to 24 year olds struggling to find work.
International capital continues to colonise the ‘third world’ in the ruthless pursuit of profit, accelerating local tensions, leading to war, increased migration, and the refugee crisis. The United States -- the world’s largest superpower -- faces internal crisis, with a white supremacist occupying the White House and a rising neo-fascist movement steadily gaining ground in both the New and Old World. Bloody and vicious wars stoked by Western foreign policy continue to destroy the Middle East; on a note of pride, our young members can be counted among those fighting in the ranks of the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) and the Bob Crow Brigade, fighting the fascist plague of Da’esh.
The European Union is rupturing and divided; no longer able or willing to maintain the social partnerships of old, capital’s mask has slipped across the whole of Europe -- and rocked further still by the decision of the British people over a year ago to break from the institutions of continental government.