 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're 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 I'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 their lackies in academia, in the various bourgeois institutions, they're only ever looking at the surface of events, 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 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, its crises, its chaos, its 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 cool the economy as they call it, try and reduce demand. And that's all euphemism for attacks on the working class that 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 capitalist. That's what's taking place right now. You've got all the major central banks, the US Federal Reserve, 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 is 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 so-called cost of living crisis, as Emily mentioned, is really just the latest chapter 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 see 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 first port of call was to look at the fundamental building box of capitalism, which is the idea of the commodity. Commodity production exchanges, 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. Money is a cipher, if you like. It's a symbol. It's a sign. The real economy 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 a commodity has a dual nature in this respect. It has a use value. It is useful to society that allows it to be sold in the first place, but also has an exchange value. There's some sort of quantitative relationship between commodities, something they share in common that 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 of value. And that includes both the living labor of wages of workers, but also includes the dead labor, all 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 and 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 kind of what's behind inflation today, very superficially. On the vice versa, obviously, supply exceeds demand, prices will tend to go down. But they'll always fluctuate around something, you know, some sort of average. There's some underlying necessity 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 refers to 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 barriers and distortions in the way. And that's key to understanding inflation 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 great pamphlet. It was actually a collection of speeches called Value, Price, and Profit, which I believe I'm sure our bookstore is selling. And this was actually a theoretical rebuttal, an 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 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 the wages and the capitalists 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 capitalists, you know, work for a day, a week, a month. And that has a value just like any other commodities, socially 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 surplus value is and that's the source of the capitalist profits. It's the surplus value produced above and beyond this necessary labor. 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 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. A pizza or a pie, 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 I say, amongst 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 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 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 capitalists a class as a whole. If, as is the case now, you've got the price 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 proportionally, because 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 sellers of commodities without losing out as the buyers of labor power. So in that sense, they obviously benefit from the inflation that's going on, and the pie is re-divided to the benefit of the capitalists. 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 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 60% of inflation could be accounted for by corporate profiteering and pointing out that UK businesses were making something like 73% bigger profits this year than pre-pandemic, and they're suggesting actually that it's not a wage price spiral but a profit price spiral in this sense. Now, it's certainly the case big businesses 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, he answers, he said, look, if it was as simple as the capitalists could just set whatever prices they'd like to maximize their profits, why aren't they doing that all the time? 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 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. The market sets a limit to how much the capitalists 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 capitalist class resists ferociously every time workers like Oliver Twist dare to ask for more. 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 to inflation and the actual causes, just want to tackle the other side of 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 inflation is purely a monetary phenomena. That's what Milton Friedman said. Now, they say then the solution is to control the money supply. But what the 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 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 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 the state. Now, study in history, we see money didn't always exist. Its 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 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 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 of money. Gold and silver 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 nominal value 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 were, 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 the monetarists pick up on and they're not wrong. And this is what the monetarists mean when they say that inflation is purely a monetary phenomena and why they're actually right to criticize and to warn against the idea of just printing money or inflationary kind of expansionist Keynesian policies is why they also tend to be in favor of tight monetary policy and monetary systems like the gold standard that tie the money supply to something real. Now, the gold standard was introduced 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 become more competitive was what they called internal devaluation. In other words, attacking the working class's standards of livings, their wages. And this is precisely what we saw in Britain in the 1920s. Britain tried to return to the gold standard under Churchill as the finance minister and it meant a huge attack on wages that actually prepared the way for the general strike of 1926. The gold standard eventually collapsed around the time of the Great Depression and was replaced then by the Bretton Woods system 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 this was possible because American imperialism was basically 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 cadence in policies undertaking during the boom by the USA, by the advanced capitalist countries, in particular high levels of military spending and eventually Bretton Woods collapsed just on the eve of the 70s crisis with the oil shock and world recession. And it led instead to a system of floating or fiat currencies, which is what we have today where there's no anchor, 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 an 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. 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 Keynesianism. And 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 cure of tight monetary policy, tight money systems, which are no cure at all. What it doesn't recognize in terms of this confusing symptoms and causes? Yes, they don't recognize that the gold standard in Bretton Woods, they collapse for a reason at the end of the day. These monetary systems, they suffice up to a point. They allowed for the development of trade 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 the opposite and become a source of instability. Now, in this sense, the monetary crises that we see and the accompanying inflation that comes with this are ultimately therefore a reflection of the crisis of capitalism and the contradictions of capitalism. They are, if you like, a rebellion of the productive forces against the limits of the nation's 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. And this really highlights the reductionism, as I said, of the monetarists, 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 see is that the banks create money as credit in response to demands from within the economy itself, 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 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 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? The capitalists weren't investing even though all this money was cheap. At that time, 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 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 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, 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 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 all of these things served to help keep prices down for many decades. And it actually led to the ruling class 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 the ruling class is realizing the danger of inflation a little bit too late. Now, the monitorists, 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 neocainsians, 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. The monitorists say, don't print too much money, the money supply is bad. The MMT is saying, print loads of money, the money supply is great. And they're basically both guilty of what Marx called money fetishism. In other words, ascribing us power to money that it doesn't really have, and thinking that you can control the economy in good or bad ways through the money supply. And Marx argued firmly against this, said capitalism cannot be controlled through equal tricks of circulation. Capitalism, as I said, it's a system of private ownership where it's driven not by money, but by profit. Money is just a sign, if you like. It's these symbols. 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 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. It 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's economics, but Marxist philosophy, dialectical materialism, because we've got to understand the economy in a rounded way and 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 of this. The monetarists say it's all about money. It's too much money to and which needs to be controlled through interest rates 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 not down to this one, you know, one, you know, reducible cause. 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 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. Marx gives various examples of this, national debts, government bonds, stocks and shares and other forms of derivatives, but also unproductive state spending, the state's expending money, but without producing any real value. This includes Keynesian projects like digging holes in the ground or also things like arms 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. We 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 pent-up demand, as they call it, has flooded into the economy, but crashed up against the barriers of the pandemic-related dislocations and bottlenecks 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 deluge of increased money and therefore a generalized increase in prices. And what this really shows is, yes, the criticisms of the monetarists, 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 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 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 crops and food and diverting resources that could otherwise be spent elsewhere towards trying to combat climate change. And all of this means that prices are rising because of the shocks to supply. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the values are actually always increasing. The real socially necessary labor time doesn't always go up. Imagine if you're an American 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 underinvestment by the capitalists in infrastructure, in industry. And instead of spending their money on these things, they've obviously speculated it and put it in parasitic parts of the economy, like financial services. And at the same time, all the robustness within the global economy has been cut away. 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 gas storage in the UK. It used to be the case that the gas towers you see dotted around held about 10 to 20% of annual demand. Now that's been whittled down to less than 2% or 1% of annual demand. So it's just very vulnerable now to a small change in the supply and demand. Suddenly that tiny little amount of redundancy is not enough. And this 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 the money 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 cost of production. 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 fracturing, the end of globalization, if you like, the retreat of globalization, the unraveling 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 balkanization of capitalism, which had achieved greater efficiencies, greater abilities to bring down prices through monopolies, economies of scale, multinationals and so forth. All of that is now going into reverse and pushing up prices as a result of all this protectionism. And it shows you how the nation 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 a slowing growth. And we're already seeing the signs of a new world slump. The point is that whatever the ruling class try to do in this situation is going to end in disaster. They're caught between a rock and a hard place. They can try and use the interest rates, as I said, but it's a blunt tool. It can provoke this recession, but what does it do to solve the energy crisis? What does it do to force the capitalist to invest? It doesn't do any of these things. And at the same time, 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 going to 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 explosions in all countries. As we said on Friday's session, events in Sri Lanka and in Britain as well, they are a harbinger of 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 something could be reduced to just one single cause. It is a complex phenomena. 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 arsonist invited to put out a blazing inferno. 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 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? Winful taxes, price controls, cost of living handouts 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 sliding scale of wages 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 the rampant inflation, that the mounting debts, all these crises. It's a sign and a product of the anarchy and the 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. 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.