The People’s Assembly Against Austerity
National Demonstration
Saturday 16 April Central London (full details tbc)
The Peoples Assembly is building the movement that opposes the government’s austerity attacks on the working class. It’s broad campaigns against the Tories’ economic policies promote unity by also opposing racism and war.
Until the defeat of Chartism in the middle of the 19th century, Britain had the most advanced mass labour movement in the world. That was then thoroughly derailed by the rise of modern British imperialism with the British working class being told the deal with British imperialism was the following: ‘We will militarily attack foreigners, promote domestic racism, and your living standard will go up’. Very regrettably the majority accepted that deal. By the second half of the 19th century as Marx and Engels remarked the working class on such issues, apart from a small minority, thought in the same way as the ruling class.
But in the last decade British imperialism and the Tories have explained we can now only offer the following deal: ‘we will militarily attack foreigners, we will practice domestic racism, and due to austerity your living standard will go down or stagnate’.
That deal is not acceptable to the mass of the working class in the same way. Jeremy Corbyn has offered a different deal. He proposes: ‘We will not attack foreigners, we will not practice racism, and we will oppose austerity and your living standards will go up.’
This alternative to austerity is what the Peoples Assembly Against Austerity is campaigning for. It has the support of millions of people in the trade unions, has mobilised hundreds of thousands on protests against austerity and inspired hundreds of thousands of people to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.