 Alright, thank you very much Emily for the excellent introduction. I think this really is a topic that needs no introduction in reality because as Emily mentioned we can all feel the bite of inflation in our day-to-day lives. We feel it in our supermarket shops when we are filling up the tank, above all in our rents and our bills and this is what inflation means at the end of the day. It's a currency losing its purchasing power as the price of goods and services goes up and importantly unless wages increase at the same rate then it means real attacks on the living standards, the living conditions of the working class. As Emily also mentioned inflation today is the highest it's been in around four decades at least in Britain. It's officially at 10% although official figures do not give the whole picture. In the Eurozone I think it's around the same amount. In America it's over 8% according to recent figures. This is annualized inflation they're talking about. But then that's not even accounting for the ex-colonial countries and the so-called third world. There's many countries suffering from hyperinflation when you've got a particularly acute crisis. Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina and Sri Lanka all have been mentioned already this weekend. And the thing is the ruling class they either have no explanation and therefore no solution to this or they point the finger at various scapegoats. If you're here in the West that means blaming Putin for everything. He's responsible for all our problems because of the invasion in Ukraine pushing up energy prices. But above all the ruling class is united in blaming the working class themselves for inflation. We're told that workers cause inflation by demanding two higher wages so-called inflation expectations are to blame. And in this sense they say workers cause a wage price spiral. But all of these are completely false and superficial explanations that in fact explain absolutely nothing as we'll go on to mention in this talk. And that's because for the ruling class inflation instability all of these things are just effectively accidents. They have nothing to do with the failures of the system as far as they're concerned. They and the lackeys in academia in the various bourgeois institutions they're only ever looking at the surface of events. You know in this case at the movement of prices on the market. They never delve deeper to look at the real forces and contradictions that work within the economy. And that's because for these ladies and gentlemen capitalism is a perfect system. It can do no wrong. It's said to be completely efficient the most rational way of allocating resources. And basically the real blame is pesky trade unionists or reckless politicians like Liz Truss getting in the way of the the wonders of the invisible hand of the market. These people are not interested we have to say they're not interested in actually understanding capitalism. It's crises. It's chaos. It's contradictions. At the end of the day they are just trying to put forward a set of ideas and theories that effectively are an apology for capitalism. They're a defense of this bankrupt status quo. And in this sense the only so-called cure that the bourgeois economists can prescribe for rampant inflation is that of higher interest rates. They want to call the economy as they call it. Try and reduce demand. And that's all euphemism for attacks on the working class. They're actively as we've already mentioned this weekend trying to provoke a recession in order to try and bring unemployment up and therefore pull wages down and boost the profits of the capitalists. That's what's taking place right now. You've got the all the major central banks the U.S. Federal Reserve the the ECB in the Eurozone and the Bank of England here in the UK all of them hiking up interest rates in order to try and provoke this recession and tame inflation that has run away. In other words what they're doing is trying to exchange the scourge of inflation for a bitter pill of austerity but for the working class it amounts to the same thing. It's a choice of death by slow strangulation and hanging or death by a thousand cuts and we are obviously not in favor of either of them. We need to get to the root of the problem but in order to do that we've got to really strip away all of this bourgeois propaganda and mysticism that surrounds the idea of money in the market. We've got to try and analyze the system itself scientifically and dialectically understand the real processes the real laws the dynamics that are at play in the capitalist system that lie behind this this so called cost of living crisis which as Emily mentioned is really just the latest chapter in the in the crisis of capitalism. There's these invisible forces under capitalism that operate behind our backs but they express themselves in terms of the prices of life's necessities. That's how we we see these these these processes at play but they operate invisibly. So where do we begin in trying to make sense of all this? Well for Marx the the the first port of call was to look at the fundamental building box of capitalism which is the idea of the commodity commodity production exchange is what he said capitalism is based on and the law of value that underpins all of this because at the end of the day the real economy is not money right the real money is a cipher if you like it's a symbol it's a sign the real economy is is production of real things it's relations between people wealth Marx says the opening lines of capital presents itself under capitalism as an immense accumulation of commodities so we've got to understand commodity production exchange if we want to understand money and all these other things commodities Marx says are these goods and services produced by labor but not for individual consumption but for exchange on a market and and a commodity has a dual nature in this respect it has a use value is useful to society that allows it to be sold in the first place but also as an exchange value there's some sort of quantitative relationship between commodities something they share in common allows them to be exchanged in certain proportions and Marx said the thing they all have in common all commodities have in common is they are products of labor and therefore labor time is the real measure of value this is the labor theory value and that includes includes both the the the living labor of wages of workers but also includes the dead labor all the the labor embodied in the raw materials the tools and so forth that go into us and all of this together accounts for the socially necessary labor time the average labor required given a certain technique and technology in society this is what value is but we don't see value that's the thing you can't really touch the value of something what you go in what you do is you go into a shop you click on amazon you see a price you're presented with this objective price that's what we see and prices Marx points out are the monetary form or the monetary expression of this exchange value which fluctuate they fluctuate seemingly randomly due to supply and demand due to these market forces if you've got demand exceeding supply then prices will tend to go up that's that's kind of what's behind inflation today very superficially on the vice versa we see supply exceeds demand prices will tend to go down but they'll always fluctuate around something you know some some sort of average there's there's some underlying necessity to to this accident if you like and that is this idea of value this socially necessary labor time but all of that's in an ideal world obviously capitalism is not the ideal system that's presented to us or that even Marx quotes and and refers to in in capital in reality you've got all sorts of distortions you have monopolies these things that are a barrier to supply and that can push prices far above their actual value prices can wildly diverge from value if you have these these barriers and distortions in the way and that's key to understanding inflation as as we see it today now Marx outlined all of these ideas very simply not just in the three volumes of capital but even more simply in a in a great pamphlet it was actually a collection of speeches called value price and profit which which I believe I'm sure our bookstore is selling and this was actually a theoretical rebuttal and answer to a liberal reformist of his time called citizen western and citizen western put forward the same argument as the bourgeois do today that it's workers effectively who are to blame for inflation by asking and demanding for higher wages in that sense he said the trade unions shouldn't even try and fight for higher wages because they would just gain with one hand higher wages but they'd lose in the other in terms of higher prices now Marx used this pamphlet these speeches to explain his ideas and to answer this point he said no what you've got is that all value ultimately is produced by the working class all of the the value in the economy is produced by the working class in the form of commodities and this value having been created by the working class is then divided up between the classes between the workers in the form of their wages and the capitalist in the form of the profits and wages are the price of the commodity that the working class sells its labor power its ability to work they sell this to the capitalist you know work for a day a week a month and that has a value just like any other commodity so should necessary labor time the amount of time it takes to produce all the commodities that the working class consumes it needs for its production and reproduction for it to maintain its families and so forth every all the labor above this is is is surplus value is and that's the source of the capitalist profits it's the it's the surplus value produced above and beyond this necessary labor it is in other words it's the unpaid labor of the working class that forms the profits of the capitalist so imagine now you've got a the economy all this economic output this value represented as a big pie okay for the Italians amongst us you can imagine a pizza doesn't really make a difference um a pizza or a pie i'm i'm english i like my pies we're gonna i'm gonna go with a pie okay so this pie is produced by the working class right that represents all the value that then is then divided as say amongst the the different classes the workers get their slice in wages the capitalists get their slice in profits now you can measure your pie however you like it right you can have kilograms or you can have ounces you can have meters you can have inches doesn't really make a difference the size of the pie is not going to change right and it's the same with prices inflation might change the name of the slice of your pie you know the unit of measurement might change but the actual size doesn't change at all and uh and and similarly marx points out although he doesn't use the example of a pie but he points out look it's the pie that comes first and then the slices you don't assemble a pie by getting together the different slices you bake a pie and then you divide it up right and this is the point like you don't get to the value in society by adding together the wages worth the the workers wages and the capitalist profits you start with the value produced by the working class and then it's divided up according to class struggle and that's very important because this answers this point about workers being responsible for inflation inflation doesn't make society wealthier in terms of the actual value the actual commodities in society the economic output the size of the pie remains the same but it's now represented by these higher prices what inflation does do however is very subtly redistribute the wealth and the income within society creditors will lose out to debtors smaller capitalists will tend to lose out to bigger capitalists and the workers will tend to lose out to the capitalist a class as a whole if as is the case now you've got the price of uh of goods in general going up but the price of labor power the wages not keeping up with that well then the pie going to the capitalist is getting bigger proportionately because what the what the workers lose the capitalists gain at the end of the day as I said their profits are the unpaid labor of the working class the capitalists they will gain as the seller of the sellers of commodities without losing out as the buyers of labor power so in that sense they obviously benefit from uh the inflation that's going on and the pie is redivided to the the benefit of the capitalist as is exactly the case now wages are lagging behind prices and profits are actually for the big businesses going up so workers aren't to blame for inflation it's not their higher wages it's not the expectations and all these euphemisms workers are not to blame they are the victims of inflation and this is very important now that's not to say that corporate profiteering is simply to blame either as some on the left say you got unite the union produced a report earlier this year saying that um 60 percent of inflation could be accounted for by uh corporate profiteering and pointing out that uk businesses were making something like 73 percent bigger profits this year than pre pandemic and they're suggesting actually that it's a wage uh it's a not a wage price spiral but a profit price spiral in this sense now it's certainly the case big business is not suffering right now but simply blaming price gouging does not give the full picture of where inflation comes from because marx explains this actually answers he said look if it was as simple as the capitalist could just set whatever prices they'd like to maximize their profits why aren't they doing that all the time you know it doesn't it doesn't explain anything if you just say price gouging is to blame for inflation if they can just pass on higher wage costs why don't they do that all the time why why do they bother with strikes why do they bother with any of these struggles why not just pass it on to the consumers because competition prevents that you the market has sets a limit to how much the capitalist can play around with prices right now the big monopolies do have a certain advantage of being able to pass on certain costs but there's a limit to that small businesses are being absolutely crushed and this is why at the end of the day the the the capitalist class resists ferociously every time workers like oliver twist dare to ask for more you know at the end of the day they know that every real generalized increase in wages can only come about by biting into their profits so while corporations are seeing these bumper profits it's not simply profiteering and price gouging that's to blame for inflation and the logical conclusion of that is you can't simply get rid of this problem by taxing the super profits with windfall taxes and i'll come back to that more later now before we go into the actual solutions of to inflation and the actual causes just want to tackle the other side of the the bourgeois argument which is that of the monetarists the monetarists people like Milton Friedman who have this idea of a quantity theory of money they say which basically says that inflation is the result of too much money chasing after too few goods they say money you know inflation is purely a monetary phenomena that's what Milton Friedman said now the they say then the solution to is to control the money supply but what the monetary monetarists don't explain is what is money it's a very simple question but we're never actually given an answer prices as I said earlier are the the monetary expression or the unit of the exchange value of commodities and money in all its forms Marx explains is fundamentally a measure of value the value created by labor the money system the currencies the the the the credit and so forth is an expression of the distribution of value within society and the money we have or don't have in our pockets in our bank accounts that's an entitlement to a proportion of the real wealth in society all backed up by by the state now study in history we see money didn't always exist it's rise is associated with that of class society with the development of commodity production exchange and trade and what you see is that organically over time a certain commodity a single commodity a money commodity emerges that can act as a universal equivalent something that everything else can be exchanged with and and which all other commodities can be compared against and this commodity the money commodity then becomes a means of circulation it becomes a way of of accounting it becomes also a store of wealth a store of value these are the various roles that money plays and it was the needs of trading societies early on that led to the development of precious metals as money gold and silver you know had certain qualities allowing them to be transported over distances and so forth this is why they became the money commodity over centuries however the needs of the economy meant you needed greater money supply and you had the debasement of coins in other words the the the nominal value that was uh of you know that these coins represented actually became separated from the real value contained in the actual metal that was circulating money then instead of being a commodity in itself became a mere symbol of value a representation of value and that paved the way for the kind of paper notes and the digital representations that we see today it's mere tokens of value now and this has important implications because this adds potential instability into the whole system now you've got a situation where the money in circulation these tokens can become completely divorced from the real value that's in society if you haven't got a money supply anchored to some sort of base and that produces all sorts of inflation retentencies within the economy all else being equal for example if you do a say to double the money supply but you keep the real value in terms of commodities at the same amount then you're going to double the price of everything that's a truism that uh that the monetarists pick up on and they're not wrong and this is what the monetarists mean when they said that that inflation is purely a monetary phenomena and why they're actually right to to criticize and to warn against the idea of just printing money or or inflationary kind of expansionist Keynesian policies is why they also tend to be in favor of tight money monetary policy and uh and monetary systems like the gold standard that tie the money supply to something real now the gold standard was introduced in the in britain actually but in the british empire in the wake of the napoleonic wars precisely for this reason to try and control inflation and keep the money supply tight it came unstuck about a century later with world war one when different countries started to print money to try and fund the war and the gold standard couldn't contain all the tensions and the contradictions within the world economy you had different nations pulling apart and with currencies all pegged to the gold the only way that any country could kind of become more competitive was what they called internal devaluation in other words attacking the working class's standards of livings there are wages and this is precisely what we saw in britain in the 1920s britain tried to return to the gold standard under church hill as the finance minister and uh and it meant a huge attack on wages that actually prepared the way for the the general strike of 1926 the gold standard eventually collapsed around the time of the great depression uh and was replaced then by the britain wood system uh after world war two where the dollar became the world currency and the dollar was effectively as good as gold the dollar was pegged to gold and everything else was pegged to the dollar and uh and and this was possible because uh american imperialism was basically the the this hegemonic power policing world trade and the dollar became the world currency on the back of this this provided a certain stability for a certain amount of time where it allowed the expansion of world trade it allowed for the post-war boom but it all began to unravel at the end of the 60s because of these inflationary canes in policies undertaking during the boom by the usa by the advanced capitalist countries in particular high levels of military spending and eventually britain woods collapsed just on the eve of the the 70s crisis with the oil shock and and world recession and it led instead to a move a system of uh of floating or fiat currencies which is what we have today where there's no anchor there's no there's nothing pegging the money supply in these different countries no restrictions to printing money and this is a prerogative that all these governments and central banks have taken full advantage of in in attempt to try and avert crises but in the process they've introduced all manner of distortions into the system and at the same time they haven't removed any of the contradictions between the different national economies or within capitalism as a whole what they've done is allow different countries to effectively print money to try and avoid a crisis but simply by preparing the way for bigger crises down the line which is exactly what we're seeing today now the monetarists in this respect they really confuse cause and effect that they are idealists they're empiricists in the sense they imagine that if you address the symptom of something it's the same as curing the disease they rightly point to the inflationary dangers of kanzenism and they they look at examples like weimar germany or venezuela to show that correctly you cannot print your way out of a crisis very clearly that is the case but on the back of that they call for the the cure of tight monetary policy tight money systems which are no cure at all what it don't recognize in terms of this confusing symptoms and causes yes they they don't recognize that the gold standard in breton woods they collapse collapse for a reason at the end of the day these monetary systems they suffice suffice to up to a point they allowed for the development of trade and for the and for the development of the productive forces but as capitalism expands new contradictions accumulate and emerge and the needs of capitalism outgrow the rigid money systems that you have which anchor these money supplies you end up with different economies moving in different directions and monetary systems therefore reach the limit and turn into their opposite and become a source of instability now in this sense the the the monetary crises that we see and the accompanying inflation that that comes with this are ultimately therefore a reflection of the crisis of capitalism and a contradictions of capitalism they are if you like a rebellion of the productive forces against the limits of the nation state and of private property and in this respect going back to the gold standard is completely utopian or in fact any of these kind of rigid monetary systems because and this really highlights the reductionism as I said of the monetaris particularly when they say that inflation is simply down to too much money chasing after too few goods well again this begs the question what is too much money why are there too few goods most of the money that you see in the economy under capitalism is not actually produced by the state it's produced by banks in the form of credit in other words the state doesn't have a monopoly on the money supply and instead what you have you see is that the banks create money as credit in response to demands from within the economy itself from from households from mortgages and particularly from businesses for loans in other words it's the dynamics of profit making and the economy that create the demand for money it's not simply from the state down on the other side it's similarly the laws and logic of capitalism of the profit motive that determine how many goods are produced within society the capitalists don't produce because simply because money is cheap or dear they produce if they can make a profit they certainly don't produce to try and meet the needs of society in other words it's not money that is the prime mover under capitalism it appears like money is the motor force but the real motor force is profit that's the key thing that the the the monetarists don't understand and that marx tried to explain and you can see this in the example of what happened between 2008 and the pandemic where you had super low interest rates almost rock bottom at zero you had super loose monetary policy and yet where was the investment where was the growth you know the capitalists weren't investing even though all this money was cheap you had at that at that time wasn't the the real worry wasn't about inflation it was about deflation and that was even though billions were being pumped into the system in the form of quantitative easing now according to the monetarists this should have lent to ramp inflation but it didn't we've got to ask ourselves the question why well partially it's because this quantitative easing money over the that decade a lot of it never found its way into the real economy into people's pockets it was speculated as we discussed in the session yesterday on cryptocurrencies and and property and stocks and shares and so there was a lot of inflation in those bubbles if you like but meanwhile the main thing is that whilst they were pumping all this money into the economy they were sucking demand out of it in the form of austerity and attacks on the working class and the other thing and the most important thing is there were huge pressures globally pushing downwards on prices over this whole period and in the decades previously in particular excess capacity or to give it its proper name worldwide overproduction which obviously meant excess supply not excess demand pushing down on prices you had globalization as well we had a session on that yesterday which took talking about how globalization provided the these avenues for profit but also access to cheaper raw materials cheaper labor and all of that helped to keep a lid on prices you also had technology you know cheapening of capital goods through computing and so forth all of these things served to help keep prices down for many decades and it actually led to the ruling class being being very arrogant very hubristic about inflation thinking that it would never rear its head but now all these things are turning into the opposite and and the ruling class is realizing the danger of inflation a little bit too late now the monitorist as I said they think they can solve all this problem through higher interest rates through tight monetary policy on the other side you've got the the neo-cainsians the modern monetary theorists these reformists who believe that they can manage capitalism also through the money supply and they're almost like the mirror image of each other you know the the the the monitorists say don't print too much money you know the money supply is bad the the mmt is say print loads of money the money supply is great you know and they're basically both guilty of what marks called money fetishism in other words ascribing us power to money that it doesn't really have you know and and thinking that you can control the economy in good or bad ways through the money supply and marks argued firmly against this said capitalism cannot be controlled through equal tricks of circulation capitalism as I said it's it's a system of of private ownership where it's driven not by money but by profit money is just a sign if you like it so it's these symbols it's it's certainly a lubricant to the whole system but it's not the driving force under capitalism resources are not allocated rationally but anarchically by the invisible hand and instead of trying to manage capitalism through the money supply we should be calling for for socialist planning based on common ownership we shouldn't be fetishizing money but actually trying to create the conditions whereby the need for money will wither away entirely and that means taking production out of private hands means producing for needs not profits and it means replacing the laws of commodity production exchange in the market for the laws of socialist planning and democratic workers control now to get to the meat armed with this marxist understanding how can we make sense of the real forces and factors that are behind inflation now I think the first thing we've got to say is that we've got to also be equipped not just marx economics but marxist philosophy dialectical materialism we've got to understand the economy in a rounded way in an all-sided manner not in the one-sided kind of reductionist idealist mechanical empirical way of the of the bourgeois economists who are both guilty this the monetarists say it's all about money it's too much money and which needs to be controlled through interest rates and and monetary policy the Keynesians say well it's too much demand to be controlled through taxation and other fiscal levers neither of them blames the real culprit at the end of the day which is capitalism now in reality the current inflation crisis is is not down to this one or you know one you know reducible cause it's it's the product of a perfect storm really for capitalism it's the product of all the accumulated contradictions that have built up for decades first up is what marx referred to as fictitious capital that is cap money that circulates as capital money trying to make more money but without a corresponding equivalent in terms of value in terms of commodities that are circulating money and marx gives various examples of this national debts government bonds stocks and shares and other forms of derivatives but also unproductive state spending that states expending money but without producing any real value this includes kind of Keynesian projects like digging holes in the ground or also things like arm spending which is completely wasteful now the intervention of the state in the pandemic made you know it blew a huge gust of fictitious capital into the economy that fanned the flames of inflation you had something like 17 trillion in state support being pumped in in terms of fiscal measures but you also had another 10 trillion on top of that printed by the central banks across the world now as lockdowns have ended all of this this pent up demand as they call it has flooded into the economy but crashed up against the barriers of of the pandemic related dislocations and bottlenecks and and all these various other disruptions to supply and therefore what we have is a reduced amount of values in terms of commodities in the economy now represented by this this deluge of increased money and therefore a generalized increase in prices what this really shows is is yes the criticisms of the monetarist but above all it shows the limits of Keynesianism it shows the inability to manage capitalism what you've seen is that in an effort to prevent the collapse of their system the capitalists have exacerbated all the contradictions the ruling class have exacerbated all these all these problems in the economy you've now got these soaring prices mountains of debt ever greater volatility and instability all of which are paving the way and preparing the ground for for far deeper crises down the line now alongside this fictitious capital you have shocks to supplies you have the supplies of goods being knocked out by various things obviously the pandemic itself and that continues with the zero covid policy in china you've got the war in ukraine which has obviously knocked out oil and gas and other key supplies you've also got climate change droughts floods destroying whole swathes of of crops and food and diverting resources that could otherwise be be spent elsewhere towards trying to combat climate change and and all of this means that prices are rising because of the the the shocks to supply but it doesn't necessarily mean the values are actually always increasing the real socially necessary labor time doesn't always go up in imagine if you're an american you know drilling company your costs aren't really going to go up but you're going to benefit from hugely inflated prices and make super profits and that's really the result of this the prices go up the values stay the same it's super profits particularly for the big major monopolies in say fossil fuels and energy what we see then is capitalism far from being this efficient system when it comes to allocating resources we see that the market cannot keep up with the swings and the shocks to supply and demand this has actually been made worse by years of under investment by the capitalists in infrastructure in industry and instead of spending their money on these things they've obviously speculated it and and put it in parasitic parts of the economy like financial services and uh and that and at the same time all the kind of robustness within the global economy has been cut away you know you've got this just in time production which basically gets rid of any redundancy all for the sake of squeezing out extra profits take the example for example of of gas storage in the uk it used to be the case that uh the gas towers you see dotted around held about 10 to 20 percent of annual demand now that's been whittled down to less than 2 percent or 1 percent of annual demand so it's just very vulnerable now to a small change in the in supply and demand suddenly that that that tiny little amount of redundancy is not enough and this is can be replicated you can see similar examples of this across the economy and as I said at the same time you've got the bosses profiting from scarcity and shortages rather than investing in production if demand exceeds supply and you have these super profits that should be a sign for investors to come into these markets to boost production to increase supplies and bring down prices but instead of that you have these huge monopolies in every sector just sitting on uh on on uh on the money and uh and and not bringing down prices not investing and meanwhile new firms can't enter the market because of the scale and size of these industries so this is another important factor in inflation as well and the final one I want to mention is this idea of the fact that real values are going up social necessary labour time is going up because of things like climate change which add to the costs of production you know extra measures need to be taken for adaptation but in particular you've got protectionism you've got the rising costs of producing goods because of the the fracturing the end of globalization if you like the the retreat of globalization the unravelling of world trade you've already seen brexit and we've had trump's trade wars continued by biden and all of this is leading to a vulcanization of capitalism which had achieved greater efficiencies greater uh you know uh abilities to bring down prices through a monopolies economies of scale multinationals and so well all of that's now going into reverse and pushing up prices as a result of all this protectionism and it shows you how the nation's state alongside the market and private ownership are these big and fundamental barriers to the development of the productive forces now the overall result is the world economy is heading into this nightmare scenario of stagflation that is rampant inflation alongside uh slowing growth and and we're already seeing the signs of a new world slump the point is that whatever the whatever the ruling class try to do in this situation is going to end in disaster you know they're caught between a rock and a hard place they can they can try and use the interest rates as i said but it's a blunt tool you know it can it can provoke this recession but what does it do to to solve the energy crisis what does it do to to force the capitalist to invest it doesn't do any of these things and at the same time if they if they don't do this they let inflation spiral out of control and they continue stimulating the economy with Keynesian measures that as I said it's just gonna allow inflation to become even more rampant and therefore on the basis of capitalism all roads lead to ruin and whether it is through inflation or austerity is the working class that's going to be asked to foot the bill and therefore the stage is really set as it stands for immense class struggles and and explosions in all countries as we said uh on Friday's session events in Sri Lanka and in Britain as well they are a harbinger of the the what we can the events we can expect everywhere across the world these political and social explosions as interest rates rise as the burden of debt grows ever deeper and heavier and as investors start putting their foot down and demanding their pound of flesh inflation in this sense as I said it can't be boiled down to just one factor it's not uh something could be reduced to this just one single cause it is a complex phenomena it's a it's a many-headed hydra if you like but the real beast at the root of it is capitalism it's the ruling class that has come in and recklessly sprayed money around the economy trying to put out the fires of crisis like some sort of you know arsonist invited to put out a blazing inferno it's the it's the capitalists who've profited from scarcity who've stretched supply chains and workers beyond their breaking point it's their political representatives who've gone down the path of economic nationalism of imperialist war all driven by profit and above all it's their system capitalism that is to blame the reformists they simply try and uh demand a few extra crumbs of the pie that we talked about earlier a slightly bigger slice of the pizza but at the end of the day what do they call for windfall taxes price controls one-off handouts and uh you know cost of living handouts or uh or one-off pay rises but we should say rather than just demanding a bigger slice we should be demanding the whole bakery we should be saying yeah we need a proper minimum wage and more importantly a wage a sliding scale of wages with with pay linked to prices we should be talking about nationalization of the big monopolies particularly the energy monopolies and rather than taxing the rich we should be saying expropriate the billionaires and all their super profits that is the real solution above all we've got to look beyond the symptoms and get to the real disease which is the capitalist system itself inflation is not a sign of scarcity we have the resources we have the potential the productive capacity to produce everything we need in super abundance we have the technology and the resources to solve climate change disease poverty hunger homelessness many times over what we really see is that volatile prices they're not a sign of scarcity they're a sign that this inherently chaotic system this unstable system cannot meet the needs of society it's a sign that the productive forces are being hemmed in by the nation state by private ownership by the market it's a sign of all you know the the rampant inflation that the mounting debts all these crises it's a sign and a product of the anarchy and decay of capitalism it's a symptom of the sickness and senility of this system that can only be kept alive by ever greater drip feeds and injections of money and debt in order to keep it stumbling on so to cure us of this plague once and for all to get rid of this menace of inflation we have to rid ourselves of the capitalist market and instead rationally plan production according to society's needs by placing the economy under common ownership and democratic workers control this rotten decrepit system cannot be patched up capitalism is crisis and chaos it must be overthrown that is the revolutionary program that we are fighting for that's what we're trying to do with the imt so if you agree with it join us join socialist appeal join the international marxist tendency and join us in the revolutionary liberation of mankind thank you