Bosses lose theil trousers on see-sa of world trade

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The capitalist system depends for its health, not only on being able to maintain equilibrium at many levels in the individual capitalist economies between capital and labour, but also between the capitalist economies on an international scale.

As Trotsky said, capitalist equilibrium is never stable; it is always in the process of being destroyed or being The decision by the TGWU bureaucracy to resort to unprecedented measures of McCarthyite witch-hunting in their bid to expel and ban from created.

Right now the in at ternational level econo nic equilibrium between the major capitalist powers clearly in the process of being destroyed.

Almost daily measures are announced to hold the equilibrium together; and daily new evidence appears that equilibrium is continuing to break up.

It was the EEC's chief of international relations who reflected this seemingly uncontrollable process when from British Leyland's Cowley Assembly Plant, then witch-hunting of opponents will rapidly become the rule throughout the unions as hard-pressed officials, 'right' last week he said ominously that "There is an atmosphere of August 1914 about world trade today.

"Those who insist on believing that nothing serious can go wrong with the existing system may find themselves without their trousers"

The main evidence for the disequilibrium is the persistent and growing gap between the balance of trade between the USA on the one hand, and Japan and West Germany on the other. alist crisis is forcing intensified attacks on the class.

The Workers Revolutionary Party has a very different conception of the situation, Trotsky While the USA faces an apparently uncontrollably worsening trade deficit, Japan and West Germany announce growing surpluses.

The fall in the value of the dollar and the rise in the West German mark and the Japanese yen is partly caused by this imbalance.

But these devaluations and upward revaluations of currencies which should in week the Japanese government introduced a new import encouragement scheme under pressures from the rival capitalists of the USA and the EEC.

This follows various agreements with the USA to 'voluntary' restrictions of exports to the USA and precedes talks with the EEC designed to find ways of redressing the five billion dollar trade gap in Japan's favour.

Highlighted

The total failure of such methods up to now was highlighted at the end of the week when Japan announced a record export surplus of virtually two billion dollars in the single months of February.

This is an annual rate of almost twice what was being predicted a few weeks ago.

This seemingly inexorable movement is one of the reasons why the value of the dollar failed to respond more than falteringly to the new currency swap agreement

Scissors

But the more profound reason is that the scissors continue to open between the values of the main currencies, in that the increase in the competitiveness of US capital depends in the end not so much on (reversible) changes in the exchange rate, but rather on irreversible defeats inflicted on the American working class.

The refusal of the coal miners to be intimidated by theAmerican ruling class show, however, just how far off is a solution to the perilous disequilibrium of world capitalism by this route.

Protectionism

The capitalists' frienzied search for a solution to the chaos of the trade and currency markets thus goes on-and it finds them every day moving further along the road to protectionism and other forms of economic warfare.