Crisis grows world-wide

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interests. bad enough news for the capitIts recent controls on ship- alist class, they know there is ments of cheap British lamb and still worse to come. mutton are illegal under EEC À sharp drop in Iranian oil rules and in defiance of a output is threatening a repetiLast week saw a flurry of fresh evidence to show the scale of the economic crisis that stands as a major threat to working class living standards the world over.

In Britain the gover rnment announced that inflatic has reached an annual rate of : 16.5% with stilt more major price increases to come.

Derisory

Such continual pressure on weekly wage packets more than offsets the derisory tax rebates now being handed out to workers as a result of Howe's rich man's budget.

But the budget was also one setting a course for recession and mass unemployment, and last week saw additional evidence of this, with the mammoth attack on BL jobs being supplemented by gloomy forecasts elsewhere in the engineering industry.

The Alston Foundry in Cumbria will close next year, at a cost of 130 jobs, pleading a lack of orders from the car industry and general engineering. This brings total closures among iron and steel foundries to over 40 in the last year: and, as the recession gathers in pace, demand for castings is estimated to be less than half the existing capacity-threatening up to 200 of the present 680 foundries with closure in the next few years.

Elsewhere, tọo, British industry seems set to enter a Howe Giscard further recession after a period of increased output as Central Statistical Office figures showed a weakening of demand, and proved that once again the bulk of the last year's growth in output was solely the result of expansion in North Sea oil and gas.

Underlying causes

The depressed state of British manufacturing industry is also the underlying cause of the continuing balance of payments deficit which is outpacing North Sea oil revenues.

But while the high value of the pound and the soaring interest rates of the Tory credit squeeze, coming on top of the world slump begin to take their toll of weaker sections of capitalism in Britain, the plumeting value of the dollar on the money markets has now forced Carter's US administration into adopting of similar policies.

Tight controls on money supply and sharply increased US interest rates now threaten a new downturn in the crucial US economy, which will have profound repurcussions not only for the American working class but also for workers in Europe and throughout the world.

'Recessionary mode' Even US Treasury Secretary William Miller has declared as Carter approaches a traumatic reelection campaign that the American economy is in "a recessionary mode"

The US recession will in turn heighten the demands from ailing sections of US capitalism for Carter to impose protectionist measures to keed out imports arannaa.so. from their capitalist competitors in other countries.

But it is not only the US that shows such tendencies. Even within the supposedly "planned" and orderly set-up of the European Common Market nationalistic tensions and divisions are growing alongside the economic crisis in each member country While. Thatcher conducts her despairing appeals from one unsympathetic EEC head of state to another, seeking a reduction in the colossal £1.5 billion cost of British membership next year, the French government, too, is taking unilateral steps to defend its own European Court ruling. They have been condemned by seven member nations-but are still being upheld.

It is interesting to note in this context that the supposed "internationalists" of the French Communist Party have no difficulty in assessing where they stand on the issue of such Fifty French CP members demonstrated outside a meeting of EEC farm ministers, campaigning in favour of the controls, sporting a nationalistic banner declaring "France must save its sheep meat producers!

Worse to come

But, as if recession and existing inflation were not already tion of the shortages which caused such chaos earlier this year.

Crisis ridden

And while Libya has unilaterally raised the price of its crude oil above the present OPEC price ceiling and Kuwait is talking of cutting back oil production, OPEC ministers seem certain to raise prices by at least another 10% this winter.

On every front the worsening crisis compels the capitalists to contemplate intensified attacks on the working class.

And the total inability of crisis-ridden capitalism to develop and expand the forces of production to cater for the needs of the vast majority of mankind points unmistakeably to the material necessity for the worid socialist revolution. Raising oil prices-Gaddafi