Class war talks fill this city of historic conflicts

The European Social Forum met last weekend in the rapidly growing city of Istanbul, a city at the crossroads between east and west.

Once known as Byzantium and later as Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman empire, it became the Ottoman empire's seat of power before the establishment of modern Turkey in 1922.

It has been a staging post or stage in many conflicts. The Crimean war in the 1850s, the Churchill-inspired disaster of the Dardanelles during WWI, the deaths of Jewish asylum-seekers at the start of WWII. The city was later a focus for cold war tensions, situated on the only warm sea route from the Soviet Union via Europe to the world's oceans.

The four-day event in Istanbul hosted a bewildering array of seminars and discussion groups on environmental issues, human rights, peace, concepts of democracy and the economic crisis facing Europe. Radical parties, trade unions and social movements were all represented.

Our new great conflict and the political oppression which has accompanied dominated the closing declarations.

Europe as a whole has a varied level of public provision in health, social security and education. However the political argument for the state's role in providing them was won long ago in all parts of Europe.

Yet the 2008 banking crisis, and the huge government bailouts for banks across the continent, has been followed by a resurgence of extreme right-wing policies of retrenchment, impoverishment and inequality on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

The European Central Bank has driven austerity measures in Greece and Spain, with both countries embarking on brutal carnage in the public sector, job cuts, and cuts in social benefits.

Other countries are not far behind. Against a backdrop of rapidly rising unemployment, there is a growing media consensus that social welfare and the idea of a cohesive society are unaffordable.

France has proposed an increase in the retirement age. Britain has proposed massive cuts in public-sector employment, linked to cuts in welfare benefit, and reductions in corporation tax. At the same time VAT is rising, a measure that disproportionately affects the least well-off.

General strikes in Greece, alongside rolling industrial action in Spain and France, show that the vast majority of union members across Europe do not accept that the solution to the crisis is to hit the living standards of the poor and dispossessed. They've called for a Europe-wide day of action on September 29.

Such unity across Europe has never before existed.

A co-ordinated action that involves demonstration, strikes and marches in every major city would send a strong message to governments that feel they can hoodwink the public into believing that the banking crisis is caused by the welfare state provisions across Europe and not the greed, tax avoidance and overwhelming power of the private-sector banks which bought this crisis about through their own lending policies.

The mass unemployment of the 1930s descended into the second world war and saw millions of lives lost throughout Europe. Today, while unemployment rises, tax income falls and the cry of "austerity" rings out loud, military budgets are rising.

Alongside the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there is a drive to create a European-wide military capability to back up the endless, insatiable demand for the world's natural resources.

Many at the forum highlighted the need to radically cut arms expenditure rather than assault our welfare systems and public sector. Many recognised that the war in Afghanistan is both a war about US and European military power but also increasingly a war to carve up the enormous untapped mineral reserves of that poor benighted country.

The assembly was unanimous in its support for a mass demonstration against the Afghanistan war on November to coincide with the Nato conference in Lisbon.

Its aim, it was argued, should be to oppose the unaccountability of Nato in the Afghanistan war and the way in which this cold war creation has managed to reinvent itself as a tool of US and European foreign policy.

October 8 2011 will mark 10 years since the start of the Afghanistan war. A call was also made at the anti-war assembly for international demonstrations against the Afghan war on that day.

Every trade union and every socialist and communist party across Europe is faced with a crucial debate about how they deal with this financial and military crisis.

"Socialist" governments in Greece and Spain are leading the way in cuts and austerity and now, more than ever, it is time for the left to assert itself.

The way out of the crisis is to challenge inequality, war and the poverty these create and to resolve the banking crisis through public ownership, not the vicious economic models of the monetarists currently being driven through by the European Central Bank.

Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North.