THE development of the world capitalist crisis is now affecting every section of the working class and the poor in every part of the planet.
What began as an imperialist adventure in Iraq to grab that country’s huge oil and gas resources, has turned into a massive crisis of the whole capitalist system, with banks staggering under the dead weight of trillions of dollars of unrepayable debt, alongside rapidly declining production all over the capitalist world, while at the same time, a massive inflation in all basic commodities is taking place, whether it be oil, metals or basic foodstuffs.
No capitalist country is immune from this crisis, whose grip objectively unites not just every country, but the working class and the poor of the whole world, who are now being made to pay for the capitalist collapse.
The newly independent nations of Africa and Asia are gripped by the desperation of hunger riots, while in the more advanced capitalist states the working class, which has already been weakened by the export of millions of jobs by the bourgeoisie to take advantage of cheap labour areas in Africa and Asia, is now seeing its wages slashed by inflationary food price rises, while the homes of millions of workers are now under threat, because the rapidly rising cost of living means that they cannot repay their mortgages.
Meanwhile what is left of the middle class is being destroyed as the small family hauliers are finding out to their anger and disbelief.
They are furious – as are millions of motorists whose cars have become luxury items beyond their means to use – that billions of pounds in oil taxes from the North Sea oil revenues are pouring into the Treasury, while they are going under, unable to afford the highest diesel and petrol prices in the world.
It is hunger and starvation for the workers and the poor of the developing countries, whose development has been brought to a full stop, while in the advanced countries the most explosive class struggles every seen on this planet are emerging over which class is to pay for the capitalist crisis.
In the US, the UK and throughout the EU, in France, Germany, Italy, Greece and Spain, the working class and the middle class are under attack from bankers and bosses governments whose credo is that the banks and the bosses must remain solvent, whatever the cost.
In Britain billions have been poured into attempted rescues of bankrupted banks, while workers and the middle class are visibly going under. The government has made a point of observing that oil prices are a world problem, meaning that the North Sea oil wealth is to remain in the hands of the bosses and bankers, and will not be used to ameliorate the crisis of the working class and the middle class through exercising the policy of expropriation.
For Marxists the way forward is crystal clear.
The world capitalist crisis is driving forward starvation, slump, war and the world socialist revolution.
The working class and the poor are responding to this worldwide crisis by taking to the streets realising the historic role of the working class, the class which Marx analysed as the gravedigger of capitalism, whose job is to smash the out of date and historically backward and bankrupt capitalist system and replace it with world socialism and a classless society whose productive forces are organised and planned to satisfy people’s needs.
The task of the hour is to build the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution, in every country, principally from young workers, as the party that will provide the necessary revolutionary leadership for the working class to take the power.
In Britain this means joining and building the WRP and its youth organisation the Young Socialists into the leadership of millions of workers.
Central to this task is the organisation of a general strike that will bring down the Brown government and bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and go forward to socialism, as part of the European socialist revolution.
