CBI pleas ignored by Tories

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NORTH Maybe you are furious at soaring prices, soaring rents, rates, electricity, telephone, postal and other charges; maybe you are bitter at the mass unemployment; maybe you are sick to the teeth of social spending: but spare › a thought for the poor old employers.

Many of them eagerly boosted Thatcher as she rode to power along a path cleared for her by five years of right wing Labour governments.

They threw their hats in the air as she secured a hefty majority in Parliament and gave them tax handouts and looked to her government of diehard reactionaries to force the whole burden of the crisis onto the working class.

Dull witted

Only now are some of the duller-witted and weaker sections of employers beginning to realise that the Thatcher strategy does not only hit workers: it involves driving whole sections of industry to the wall in the process!

Now, as these employers shriek in panic for a change of course, they find that Thatcher and Joseph have plugged their ears to all pleadings and are hellbent on a relentless drive to restore the profitability of the strongest sectors of capitalism at the expense of destroying the weakest.

Last week saw further anguished and unsuccessful appeals from local and national CBI leaders for Thatcher to reduce interest rates and bring down the high international value of the pound before even more firms go into bankruptcy.

A CBI survey showed that 56% of 1,960 manufacturers have cut their workforce during the last four months-and that 61% expect to do so in the next few months.

76% of firms report order books "below normal". As a result, the CBI predicts that private manufacturing investment will fall by a massive 10% in 1981.

And while the bosses' confederation expects industrial prices to ease slightly as employers try to remain competitive in a fading market, the CBI points out that many of their costs continue to rise, and that therefore profits are again tending to fall.

But don't spend too long weeping for these failed exploiters who at last are facing the dog-eat-dog logic of their own historically outmoded system of production.

Because one thing is certain: there will be no lack of trade union and Labour leaders ready and willing to argue the employers case, and to tell workers that they should sacrifice their jobs and wages to restore the profits of private capitalists.

Yet the harsh fact is that the present system, which creates mass poverty and unemployment on the one hand, while leaving wealth-creating means of production idle on the other, cannot be reformed to secure the basic. right of every worker to a job.

Unemployment, recession and capitalist crises can only be ended through the defeat of the Tory government and the nationalisation of basic industry and the banks under workers' management • as part of planned socialist economy.

Preparation

The task of leadership in the workers' movement is . to prepare for such a fight.

In the meantime the employers' strategy of rationalisation and mass sackings must be combatted at each stage by occupations, supporting strikes and blacking action, and the struggle for work sharing without loss of pay to defend all jobs.

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service cuts, health cuts, education cuts and police