CENTRAL bankers and leading finance leaders from across the world gathered in Bangkok this week for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
It meets under the dark shadow of a global debt crisis now exceeding $365 trillion.
The US is being suffocated by a national debt of over $40 trillion on which it spends $1 trillion a year in interest to the owners of the debt.
The UK, along with every other EU nation, is in the same position with the British national debt reaching a record £3 trillion.
The IMF before this week’s meeting found that advanced capitalist economies paid over $3.3 trillion in interest last year.
Capitalism on a world scale is drowning under a vicious cycle of borrowing more and more just to pay off the interest charged by the banks, hedge funds and financial speculators.
The IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva made it clear that the fund expected all governments, including the UK’s Labour government, to make the working class pay through brutal austerity.
She said: ‘It is impossible to stress strongly enough how critical it is to get the courage to take steps that are necessary. These are politically tough steps to take, but necessary steps to take.’
The necessary steps she is demanding Burnham takes is to fight it out with the working class in a class war to smash up all the gains made by workers in the past.
The same demands are being made by the IMF to every other capitalist government in the world as the only way to defend the bosses and bankers from crashing into bankruptcy.
The sovereign debt crisis has come to a head at the time of a massive energy crisis accelerated by the illegal, unprovoked war launched seven months ago by US imperialism and its Israeli ally on Iran.
The military defeat of US imperialism and the subsequent closure of the vital Strait of Hormuz has driven up the cost of energy and sent the cost-of-living in the UK sky-high, at the same time as the Labour government attempts to obey the IMF instructions to bring down the national debt by slashing benefits and welfare spending.
The crushing economic crisis of world capitalism is the driving force behind imperialist wars and cannot be separated from them.
US imperialism launched the war on Iran, that has sent the entire Middle East up in flames, out of desperation in an attempt to assert its failing mastery over the capitalist world by a military conquest that would open the entire region up for the US ruling class to exploit.
At the same time, president Trump lashed out at America’s capitalist rivals in a series of tariff wars designed to crush all opponents and reinforce US supremacy.
The abject failure of Trump’s war has been exposed in all its weakness and the American ruling class is now facing a huge political crisis as American workers turn on the Trump administration.
In Europe, the working class, with youth at their head, are rising up across France and Spain demanding change in a system that deprives them of the basic rights to education and housing.
In Britain, the working class will never accept being driven into mass poverty by a Labour government which lives by the ‘moral’ imperative of the bankers to make workers pay for cutting the national debt.
Capitalism has reached a crucial tipping point where a whole series of crises have come together placing socialist revolution firmly on the immediate agenda.
The working class has the power to resolve this crisis by rising up and taking power.
In the UK this means workers forcing the TUC to call an indefinite general strike to bring down the Labour government and go forward to a Workers Government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in a socialist planned economy.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists, and the parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country, to provide the leadership required for the victory of the world socialist revolution. There is not a moment to lose!
