THE head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Legarde, spelt out the task confronting the capitalist class of Europe last Thursday when she issued an ultimatum that European governments must bail out the banks and that the working class must be made to foot the bill.
Speaking on the eve of the IMF annual meeting in Washington, Legarde said: ‘It is critical to fuel growth, for banks to be in a position to finance the economy’.
By the IMF’s own calculations the banks have lost £260 billion in the last year, mainly as a result of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and increasingly the threat of default by the major economies of Spain and Italy.
It is not a question that the banks be re-capitalised (i.e. bailed out by the working class) in order to fuel some non-existent growth; it is a question that, for the banks and capitalism to survive, it must drive the working class of Europe, and indeed the entire world, into an era of destitution, poverty and unemployment.
No nation is immune from this crisis.
In the past three months, the French banks have suffered a disastrous 50% drop in their share price, while in the UK the bailed-out Lloyds bank dropped 10% of its share price this week.
Not just banking share prices have collapsed internationally – shares in manufacturing industries have also been hit across the globe as the world slump of capitalism grinds on, cutting ever deeper and defying any attempt by governments to prevent complete collapse.
Every ‘weapon’ in the capitalist economic arsenal, from printing more money to holding interest rates at near zero, have failed to halt this collapse.
Now the IMF is demanding that the bankrupt Greek economy be bailed out once again to prevent the collapse of the entire European banking system, a collapse that would bring down the already embattled US banks.
When Legarde talks of urgent action to prevent Greece defaulting on its massive sovereign debt, what she and the IMF are insisting upon is that the working class of Europe pay for vast sums to be pumped into the Greek economy, and that the Greek workers and small proprietors be subjected to mass unemployment coupled with savage cuts to the tune of 20% to 30% for pensions and wages.
The IMF is in agreement with Merkel and Sarkozy that these measures can only be imposed upon the European working class through a centralised European government and beefed-up European bank that would tear up the facade of bourgeois democracy and dictate policies to individual governments.
Legarde and the IMF are openly stating that the international crisis of capitalism cannot be resolved through the manipulation of the money supply or tinkering with the interest rate, it can only be resolved through the class struggle being fought out to a conclusion.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Greece where the working class has responded to this latest attack with a determined defiance and a refusal to accept that they should suffer to keep the banks in profit.
But Greece holds an important lesson for the working class internationally.
The Stalinist and reformist leadership of the Greek trade unions have been working might and main to keep the spontaneous uprising of Greek workers and youth within the confines of protest in the form of one-day general strikes.
The issue is not protests, no matter how militant, but of a revolutionary struggle to bring down the capitalist governments and replace them with workers’ governments that will expropriate the banks and industry and advance to socialism.
This requires the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country.
