THE new year is a time to take stock. Over the past decade and a half, we have bounced from crisis to crisis. While the incompetent handling of these crises can be laid squarely at the door of the Conservative government that was in office for the bulk of this time, their roots go much deeper.

From the great economic crisis of 2007-09 to the cost-of-living crisis of 2022 onwards, we have been affected repeatedly by fractures in the economic system, which have hit working people particularly hard.

Each of these individual events has been precipitated by specific factors — most recently, the war in Ukraine, crop failures due to climate change and the destabilising impact of the Tories’ handling of Brexit. However, as Michael Roberts argues in a recent article on The Polycrisis of Capitalism (Theory and Struggle 2024), across the entire period, there are clear underlying factors, amounting to a prolonged crisis of accumulation.

Profitability is close to an all-time low, with drops in the rate-of-profit in the major capitalist economies starting in 1997-98 and becoming more sustained following the 2007-09 crisis. At the same time, global debt is at an all-time high, more than 300 per cent of world GDP, and “zombie companies” — where debt servicing costs are higher than profits — make up an increasing percentage of the world’s dominant economy.

Increases in interest rates have significantly worsened the burden on British workers, with levels of household debt running at 130 per cent of disposable incomes and 83 per cent of GDP in 2023, while the international rise in inflation and interest rates threatens many of the world’s poorest countries with the prospect of debt default. Meanwhile, global trade has stagnated and begun to fall since 2007-09, reflecting an end to the age of globalisation under US unipolar dominance.

Clearly, this is not just a conjunctural crisis, where several different factors have come together, expressing underlying contradictions, but can be addressed within the current framework of capital accumulation.

Rather, as Costas Lapavitsas and the EReNSEP Writing Collective argue in their recent book, The State of Capitalism (Verso 2023), there are strong arguments that this represents a deeper, organic crisis within the world economy and that the period since 2007-09 constitutes an interregnum in the Gramscian sense — the old is dying and the new cannot be born. As Gramsci says, in such an interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

The crisis has been deeper in Britain than much of the rest of the core capitalist economies. British wage growth has lagged behind the US and Europe, with an average annual growth of minus 0.2 per cent since 2007.

Household disposable income fell by 2 per cent between 2007 and 2018, and Britain has lower productivity than the average across Europe and the US. This is rooted in the deindustrialisation and financialisation of the British economy over the past 45 years, leaving it heavily dependent on imports (in particular energy and food) and with significant supply-side weaknesses. In short, a weak productive economy makes us particularly vulnerable to the global economic crisis.

As these realities impact on the day-to-day experience of the vast majority of the population, and mainstream political parties offer no fundamental solutions, simply more of the same, we have seen growing support for the far right.

This manifests both in terms of electoral support for the hard-right racist populism of Reform UK, and growing street mobilisations around populist right slogans organised by far-right fascist movements. In both cases, this boils down to the same thing — desperate people who have seen their living standards plummet in a single generation are offered a simplistic solution by right-wing racists and no real alternative by mainstream politicians.

Unless the Labour government is able to put more money in people’s pockets, there is a real danger they will be replaced by a government of the hard right, backed up by far-right street movements, as we have seen elsewhere in Europe.

In this context, the strategy adopted by the trade union movement, Britain’s largest democratic organisations, matters. If we can give a real voice to workers’ demands, win real victories that start to reverse the massive transfer of wealth to the super-rich and chart a course to economic recovery based on an alternative economic strategy, we have an opportunity to reverse the social and political crisis as well.

This will mean taking a clearly independent approach which is unafraid to voice workers’ concerns. While there will be many opportunities to work with the Labour government on areas of shared concern, it is clear that big business will be putting huge pressure on Labour to continue to protect declining profits and pass the costs of economic stagnation on to workers and their families.

The fight for above-inflation pay rises, to improve terms and conditions, and for the right to organise at work, including scrapping all anti-union legislation, must not be subordinated to a form of Labour-loyalty which would be seen by working people as a clear betrayal.

The fight for national sectoral collective bargaining, along with the insourcing of all outsourced jobs, will be crucial. This represents the single biggest opportunity to raise wages, terms and conditions, and reduce structural inequality.

Women and black workers are massively over-represented in outsourced jobs, and bringing them in-house with other workers while putting in place mechanisms for direct bargaining over terms and conditions would strike a huge blow for equality.

However, the institution of sectoral collective bargaining must be combined with building strong militant workplace organisation if these aims are to be realised. In the current crisis, there will be battles to be fought over pay and conditions and without strong workplace organisation and a militant shop stewards movement, collective bargaining arrangements could prove toothless.

Finally, these immediate moves must be combined with political demands for an alternative economic strategy and the involvement of workers, through their unions, in determining the future of Britain’s economy.

We must be demanding real investment in the productive economy, price caps and rent controls to protect working people, and measures to curb the dominance of finance over our society and democracy.

The current crisis has hit working-class families hard, as successive governments have acted to protect profits by making workers pay. However, it also presents a real opportunity for fundamental change. The old is dying — it is up to us to demand a new economy.

Gawain Little is general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions — www.gftu.org.uk.