A club of the rich to protect the interests of the rich

CPI Statement

The gathering of the G8 leaders from the dominant centres of monopoly capitalism, like previous such gatherings, will look for solutions to the crisis of the system at the expense of the people. They have nothing to offer working people but more wars, death, and destruction, more intense and aggressive competition between them over the the world’s natural resources. They have no solutions, nor have they the political will to solve the growing crisis in the global environment.
     The global structural crisis of the system continues to deepen, and the signs are clear that the solutions being presented are having little impact, nor are they bringing about any sustainable recovery of the system.
     The policy of “austerity” being universally imposed is clearly working, as wealth is being transferred, directly and indirectly, from the people to the big monopolies and to rich and powerful individuals.
     The leaders of the G8 are all agreed that the people will pay for the crisis. Workers’ rights are under constant and sustained attack throughout the global monopoly-capitalist system.
     The debt crisis is being used as a battering ram to press forward their need to restructure the whole monopoly-capitalist system. In Ireland it is being used to drive down wages, to undermine workers’ terms and conditions, to dismantle and commercialise public services, and to push forward the privatisation of public assets and natural resources—the people’s wealth. The same anti-people policies are implemented in the South by the Irish Government, in active collaboration with the “Troika,” and in the North by the British government.
     European monopoly corporations, using their political puppets, are also using the debt crisis to further concentrate power at the EU centre, to the benefit of the big powers at the heart of the EU and at the expense of the people and national democratic accountability. Within the EU the debt crisis is also being used to further undermine the sovereignty and independence of the peripheral states and to establish the permanent debt-enslavement of the mass of people in a new form of neo-colonialism. This further demonstrates the imperialist nature of the European Union.
     During the visit of the G8 leaders the Communist Party of Ireland hosted an international rally against imperialism, at which sister parties from Britain, Greece and Portugal spoke, a gathering of workers’ representatives presenting a different way forward for humanity, one completely at variance with the one presented by the G8.
     All the parties were in agreement on the need to mobilise workers to defend their interests in the first instance but also that the system itself is beyond reform and that there is a need to present a radical new direction for working people. That only socialism could create stable economic and social development. Socialism is the only system capable of creating a balance between building a sustainable economic and social development and the need to protect and sustain the global environment.
     All the parties agreed on the need for the greater co-operation and co-ordination of communist parties as an essential prerequisite for building and sustaining a workers’ fight back. They expressed their solidarity with all those workers who are resisting and struggling for real change.
     While the G8 was a gathering of the representative of the rich, the four communist parties pledged to rally support for the world’s oppressed and exploited, for those resisting imperialist aggression and for all those opposing imperialist wars and esecially to redouble their solidarity with people building socialism in very difficult conditions.