In many countries workers cannot celebrate May Day 2015, the international day of the working class struggle, or they only can do it under adverse circumstances. Everywhere in the world the persistence of capitalism entails unemployment, exploitation, war, fascism, oppression, extreme poverty, destruction of the environment, obscurantism… Lenin’s view on declining capitalism is confirmed: “Political reaction all along the line is a characteristic feature of imperialism”.

The 2007-2009 world capitalist crisis has been temporarily overcome on the backs of the workers. On the one hand, the bourgeois States rescued their banks and industrial groups in accumulating debt. On the other hand, worldwide bosses increased exploitation in relying on the national bourgeois State (higher intensity of work and longer working hours, wage freeze, lower pensions and unemployment benefits…). Therefore the consequent recovery benefited to the wealthiest: for the first time the richest one percent of the world population owns more than half of the wealth of humanity. Such a reprieve allowed the financial speculation to start all over again. Yet the world capitalist economic growth is still fragile: several European countries have not returned to their 2008 production level; the “emerging countries” are experiencing a global slower growth (Brazil’s economy is in stagnation and Russia’s sinks into recession).

In the UN, in the IMF… the imperialist powers cooperate to keep on exploiting the oppressed countries. They are not able to agree on a world scale anymore, hence the collapse of the latest WTO negotiations. They attempt to elaborate economic blocks against each other: North American Free Trade Agreement against the European Union, Eurasian Economic Union against the European Union, Trans-Pacific Partnership against China, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership against Russia, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank against the United States…

Even more dangerous are the military alliances opposing the old imperialisms and their allies (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan) with the emerging Chinese and Russian imperialisms and their periphery (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Collective Security Treaty Organization). Militarism threatens humanity: in 2014 military expenditures amounted to 1 800 million dollars. In the Pacific, tensions increase between the United States, China, Japan and South Korea. Proxy wars are raging in Western Asia and in Eastern Europe. Nationalism, religious fundamentalism and racial hatred are stirred up in every continent. Tens of thousands refugees die every year off the European coasts.

The imperialist powers are the greatest terrorist and criminal organizations. They use the resistance against their own crimes in other countries as an excuse for vindicating further military interventions, for persecuting migrant workers, for discriminating the Muslims, for reducing liberties, for spying their population.

In Ukraine, the inter-imperialist contradictions bear on the backs of the workers and of the national minorities in incredibly brutal and cynical ways. The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union entailed the creation of independent pseudo-States, which are nothing but pawns under the control of Western imperialist powers and of the new Russian and Chinese imperialisms. The European imperialisms intend to attract those countries into their sphere of influence through the EU. With the NATO, the American imperialism aims to surround and to weaken its Russian rival, which is not as powerful but exerts a pressure on its own periphery, and it proved able to prevent the American and French bombing of Syria still under the control of Assad the bloody tyrant.

The attitude of imperialist powers facing the start of revolutions in 2011 in North Africa and West Asia shows that all discourses on democracy and human rights are a sheer mockery. The United States still subsidize the State of Israel, which again massively slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza. In Egypt, Obama still finances the military junta of general Al Sissi, which represses islamists and centrists. In Syria, the Baath regime was saved only by the war against population (including a chemical one) and by foreign powers (the Pasdarans sent by Iran and their allies of Hezbollah in Lebanon). The rebellion passed into the hands of clericalist movements enjoying the support of Turkey and of the Gulf monarchies, themselves allies of the United States. The intervention of Western imperialism under antiterrorist pretexts in Iraq (1991, 2003) and under humanitarian pretexts in Libya (2011) weakened economy and dislocated the bourgeois State. The result is the division of the country and a civil war. The American sorcerer’s apprentices left power in Irak to a Shia bourgeois clique that oppressed violently Sunnis. Thus many Iraqi Sunnis greeted the ISIS-Daesh as a protection. The recent bombings by Western imperialists and exactions by Shia militias only reinforce the authority of djihadists on the population of the “caliphate” (and on Muslim minorities in imperialist centres).

Islamo-fascists destroy workers’ organizations, defend private property, do away with freedoms, brand religious minorities as scapegoats, persecute them, indeed even exterminate them. When the clericalist fraction of the bourgeoisie takes hold of a State, it capitulates immediately in front of great powers (Turkey) or ends doing it (Iran).

In Latin America, local capitalists and their international allies try also to switch over to the offensive. In Brazil, the bourgeois parties and fascist groups profit from the rise in the cost of living and from corruption in order to mobilize the petty bourgeoisie against the popular front government constituted by the discredited PT; American oil groups envisage to take advantage of a possible privatization of the public oil company Petrobras. In Venezuela, there is a growing wave of demonstrations against the bourgeois nationalist government of Maduro, powerless to take revolutionary measures while it suffers a decline of the oil revenue. The pro-imperialist sector, the majority of the bourgeoisie, hopes that workers, disappointed by “21st century socialism”, will stay passive in front of a frontal attack against the government.

Where the labour movement subsists, trade union bureaucracies and bourgeois workers’ parties, aided by centrists, disarm workers and youth, prepare defeats, by serving their capitalist class. A recent example is Greece, where Syriza, a party arising from the merger of a wing of stalinism and of pseudo-trotskyists, formed a popular front government with ANEL, a clericalist anti-immigrant bourgeois party, in order to preserve the bourgeois State and to make workers repay the debt of the Greek bourgeoise. Social-democrats and stalinists in the United States (and in the whole world) supported the two successive candidatures of the Democratic Party. Obama did not close Guantanamo, he was unable to set up a real socialized medical protection, he sends aircraft carriers to bomb in Iraq and in Syria, he tolerates the murders of Blacks by police…

For the working class in all countries and continents, it becomes more and more urgent not only to resist actively the growing brutality and aggressivity of declining capitalism, but to lay out another way, that of socialism. A new workers’ international is indispensable in order to lead world revolution. To build it, to build in each State a revolutionary and internationalist communist party, it is necessary that the vanguard regroups itself and leads a resolute struggle against “reformist” bureaucracies of all kinds that dream of a peaceful transition to “socialism” in a remote future or of a “humanization” of the capitalist system.

The construction of the new revolutionary leadership can be achieved only under the red banner of permanent revolution, a socialist revolution that answers all tasks that the imperialist and reactionary bourgeoisie cannot anymore resolve (self-determination of peoples, elimination of the division of the working class by religious, ethnical or sexual criteria; elimination of large landed estate; complete separation of religions and the State; etc.). These are all the essential elements of a world without exploitation, oppression and obscurantism, of the “free association of producers”.