Monopoly capital has strengthened its grip on economies across the developed world during the Covid pandemic, according to Britain’s Communists.
‘The monopoly corporations are sucking in resources, skills and wealth directly and through their huge supply chains; they are exploiting their multi-million strong labour forces to extract super-profits for their shareholders and taking absoĺute control of finance, advanced technology, security, ‘defence’, commodity production and service delivery’, Liz Payne told the Communist Party’s executive committee at the weekend.
‘They are degrading the environment on a massive scale, extracting natural resources and leaving scars that can be seen from outer space’, the CP chair added.
Ms Payne was addressing a special meeting of the party leadership called to discuss building an alliance against the power of the capitalist monopolies.
She highlighted the operations of UK Seabed Resources – a wholly owned subsidiary of armaments giant Lockheed Martin – which is prospecting for polymetallic nodules in the last untouched part of the planet, 133,000 square kilometres of the deep Pacific Abyss, in a project sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Accusing the monopolies of dumping contaminated waste on a massive scale in the quest for maximum profit, the CP chair also referred to the scandal of 22 decommissioned nuclear submarines rotting since the 1980s and 1990s in the Rosyth and Devonport naval dockyards, nine of the latter still containing radioactive fuel. Public money is being paid to private engineering giant Babcock to keep them there.
Convenor of the CP Political Economy commission, Stewart McGill, emphasised the fusion of the economic power of the capitalist corporations and the political power of the state in today’s system of ‘state-monopoly capitalism’. He also outlined the predominance of the financial sector in modern imperialism and attacked the role of the mass media in promoting the ‘normality’ of monopoly domination of society.
Opening and closing the EC meeting, Bill Greenshields condemned the ‘criminal profiteering’ of the capitalist monpolies in the energy, pharmaceutical and armaments industries. He urged communists, socialists, trade unionists, peace campaigners and environmentalists to campaign in localities and workplaces to expose big business exploitation and project social ownership as the only pro-worker, pro-people alternative.
The Communist Party urged its members to promote a new pamphlet by John Foster, Johnson’s post-Brexit Britain or Progressive Federalism?, and resolved to approach other bodies to convene an Anti-Monopolies Conference in 2022.
