Last week, thousands of disabled had to take to the streets in London, against the Con-Dems' plans to reduce their inadequate benefits and to use punitive "tests", for the sole purpose of harassing them off benefits under the most spurious pretexts.
This march took place just after the Sunday Times published its lastest "Rich List". It showed that the wealth of Britain's 1,000 richest individuals is almost back to its pre-crisis level. In fact, just 12% of that wealth would be enough to avoid all the expenditure cuts that the coalition wants to push down our throats over the coming 5 years!
Politicians may well repeat ad nauseam that we are all living through "hard times" and that "we're all in it together", the fact is that we're not. Some are clearly far more "in it" while others have no idea what the words "hard times" mean!
They're thriving at our expense
But it is not just the 1,000 super-wealthy who are doing well out of the crisis. The whole capitalist class is, particularly the very same bosses who keep telling us that they "have to make savings" by cutting jobs and "cannot afford" wage increases.
And it is not just the case of outrageous "fat cats" like Barclays' Rich Ricci, with his £14m pay package - which amounts to no less than the lifetime income of 11 workers on average earnings!
For instance, boardroom pay at Britain's top 350 companies soared by 45% last year. This may well be due to the return of bonuses. But how many workers saw such a jump in their pay? How many got their jobs back after being made redundant?
In fact, after the short-lived slump in share prices and despite the on-going crisis, the parasitism of the capitalist class has resumed its upward trend at the expense of the working class.
This is clearly illustrated by a report just released by the so-called "High Pay Commission". It shows, for instance, that over the decade up to the beginning of the crisis, the income of the 30,000 richest individuals (the top 0.1%) increased 7 times more than the income of the bottom half of the population, and almost 20 times more than the income of the bottom 10%.
This trend is even more striking when looking at the 1,000 highest paid executives of Britain's 100 largest companies: over the 7 years preceding the crisis, their pay packages increased 14 times more than average pay - and probably far more compared to low wages!
And, in so far as the pay of top executives reflects more or less companies' real profits, this shows how much the share that workers get out of the value they produce, has shrunk, to the benefit of bosses and shareholders!
Inflation, another face of their crisis
But what has happened to workers' pay, especially since the beginning of the crisis? This is a well-guarded secret. Official statistics only talk about "average pay", which is a grossly distorted measure since it includes everyone, from workers on the minimum wage to boardroom fat cats.
But even on this distorted measure, the impact of the crisis is unquestionable. Over the past year alone, the purchasing power of average pay fell by 3.8% and, in March, it was already estimated that it would fall by another 3% by the end of this year, meaning a return to 2004 levels!
Last week, however, the Bank of England warned that the government's measure of inflation - the so-called CPI - will rise from today's 3.1% to at least 5% by December, due to higher energy bills. What will this mean for the higher RPI index (which takes into account housing costs and already stands at 4.6%) is anybody's guess and yet, we all have housing costs!
By a cynical twist, although wholesale energy prices are more or less at the same level as they were 3 years ago, average bills are 21% higher, and we should expect another increase! No wonder the energy sharks are making record profits!
No, contrary to what politicians want us to believe, inflation is not some sort of fateful plague that affects everyone, not any more than the crisis itself. In fact, it is just another mechanism - like job cuts and public expenditure cuts - used by the capitalist class to make us pay for its crisis.
This is why it is high time that wage rises were put back on the agenda, but in such a way as to protect our purchasing power against the bosses' attempts at making us foot the bill of their crisis through inflation. And this requires, in addition to a substantial wage increase to recoup what we have lost, a system of indexation on real prices, under the direct control of the working class.