Capitalism leads to concentration of wealth and squandering at one pole of society and to precariousness and poverty at the other one, to destruction of environment, to the resurgence of religion and obscurantism, to recurring economic crises and to ceaseless wars.
Money-capital circulates freely, but not human beings. In the whole world, States raise walls against workers who try to escape misery. Israel does it against Palestinians, while pursuing colonization in Jerusalem and in the West Bank. The most democratic countries close their borders to refugees who flee daily bombings in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen …, exactions by police and torturer regimes (Syria, Eritrea …), genocides (implemented by the Sunni “Caliphate” of Daesh, the Buddhist Rakhines and the Burmese army …). In the United States, the main candidate to the nomination by the Republican Party campaigns to expel foreigners. Xenophobic and fascist organizations progress electorally in Europe and some start to organize aggressions against migrants (Greece, Germany, Bulgaria …).
The world capitalist crisis of 2008-2009 was overcome in imperialist countries by the intervention of States (rescue each for itself of its groups in banking, insurance, the car industry; abundant loans at a low rate by central banks to banks in their zone …) and in the whole world by reinforcing exploitation (raising the intensity of labour and labour time, wage freeze, lowering of retirement pensions and of unemployment benefits, restrictions on strikes and weakening of trade unions, etc.). All bourgeois governments implemented the same policies against producers and in favour of exploiters, including those led or co-led by “labour” parties (Brazil…), “communist” ones (China, Vietnam, South Africa …) , “socialist” ones (France, Germany …) or by the “radical left” arising from the reconversion of Stalinists (Greece …).
The rate of profit rebounded and the world accumulation of capital recovered in 2009. However, some countries stagnate (Japan, France …). Other ones did not even recover their production level of before the previous crisis (Greece, Spain, Italy …). Finally, among those that had been classed “emerging”, some big countries plunge into economic depression (Brazil, Russia …) and the Chinese economy itself slows down. Fed by monetary policies of Keynesian type, financial speculation has resumed more than ever.
The world capitalist crisis intensified rivalries between imperialist great powers, with at one pole the dominant bourgeoisie (that of the United States) and its more or less disciplined allies (those of Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain …) and, at another pole, a circumstance alliance between the new bourgeoisies (of China, of Russia) that challenge the old division of activities, influences and dominations. The European Union, which embodied the bourgeois attempt to surmount the narrowness of national borders, is shaken. Following the world economic crisis, the German and French governments humiliated and bled the Greek people. Ukraine was divided by rival imperialisms. Towards refugees, all States revived borders between them, multiplied barbed wire, and concluded a sordid treaty with the authoritarian and Islamist government of Turkey.
Great world powers and, in their wake, some regional powers, arm themselves ever more, defy each other in the Sea of China, clash in an indirect way in Ukraine and in Syria. In the name of “liberalism”, the bourgeoisies diminished social spending. At the same time, the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois State reinforced itself: ever more prerogatives against citizens, ever more military spending, ever more secret services, policemen, and prisons … The economic role of the bourgeois State did not grow indistinct. All strive to help their capitalists against their proletariat and against other bourgeoisies: integration of trade union bureaucracies, repression against trade union and revolutionary activists, gifts to bosses, money war, “industrial” spying, diplomatic pressures, military threats, coups, military “low-intensity” interventions (arms, advisers, drones, special forces …), open interventions (bases, bombings, expeditions, occupations).
The western imperialist States supported (with the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR) the foundation of Israel, a colonial State. They established the monarchies of the Arabic-Persian Gulf that spread Salafist obscurantism in the whole world and finance Islamo-fascism, they staked on Islamist fanatics in Iran in 1953, in Indonesia in 1965, in Afghanistan in 1979. They pushed Iraq to war against Iran in 1980. They invaded Iraq twice in 1991 and in 2003, there they stirred up ethnical and sectarian conflicts, they dislocated Libya in 2011. Today, they make a pretext of Islamist attacks for restricting democratic freedoms at home and justifying the continuation of their meddling with Sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia.
The clericalist fractions of the bourgeoisie succeeded in obtaining a hearing among Muslim masses and could lead real counter-revolutions in Iran, in Iraq, in Syria. Islamists are unable to defeat imperialism because they defend private property and capitalism. Therefore, they are reduced to exert pressure on imperialism through reactionary attacks that aim first of all workers. However, if they remain in place after having exterminated the labour movement, as in Iran, they end capitulating in front of great powers, as bourgeois nationalists with a “socialist” discourse before them.
The social force able to prevent the catastrophe and to accomplish a social revolution exists: it is the world working class. The wage-earning workers, youth in training, the unemployed struggle everywhere, sometimes heroically. Workers and students in Europe have demonstrated in a massive way to defend jobs or their social gains. Workers in Africa and Western Asia fight in difficult conditions for wages, for improving working conditions, for the right to have their own trade unions. The peoples of North Africa and Western Asia raised against tyrants supported by this or that imperialism, Kurds resisted Islamist reaction in Turkey, in Syria and in Iraq. In North America, Blacks revolted against repeated murders by the police.
But for want of a revolutionary workers’ party that allows the working class to take the lead of the exploited (poor farmers, workers of the informal sector, etc.) and the oppressed (women, youth, minorities …), the risings of Tunisia, Egypt and Syria have been contained by a double counter-revolution: on the one hand, mass bombings and torture by the regime and the head of staff; on the other hand, Sunni fascism. Kurdish workers stay separated from other proletarians and divided between them by nationalist parties, which enter into a compact with States that oppress their Kurds (PDK), or rest on Russian or American imperialism (PKK-PYD). Bureaucracies in power in North Korea and in Cuba prepare the restoration of capitalism. Governments of Brazil and Venezuela, after having served capitalism and respected the bourgeois State, face attempts at overthrow by imperialism and the comprador fraction of the local bourgeoisie. Resistance to mass dismissals and government austerity measures in advanced countries is canalized and dissipated into powerless “days of action” by trade union bureaucracies with the help of their centrist accomplices (Belgium, Canada, Spain, France, Greece, Norway, Sweden …). “Reformist” parties and their centrist deputies sow illusions on bourgeois parliamentarism. But when they come to power, these parties do the same policy as those of the bourgeoisie (Greece, France, Austria …).
The vanguard must revive Marxism, adopt the strategy of permanent revolution, construct a revolutionary workers’ international.
Workers, both women and men, in order to preserve or conquer their rights, to save environment, to save their children from unemployment and war, to end exploitation, must demand the break with the bourgeoisie of the organizations that they founded in the past (mass parties and trade unions), set up organs of democratic struggle and centralize them, expropriate big capitalist enterprises, crush fascist and Islamist gangs, dismantle State organs of repression and spying, democratically control production and exchange, dissolve borders.
Down with capitalism and imperialism!
Long live world socialism!
May the 1st, 2016
Permanent Revolution Collective (Austria, France, Peru)
Marxist-Leninist Tendency (Brazil)