NORWAY is commemorating one year since 77 mainly young people who were members of the Young Socialists, and engaged in a summer school, were killed and 242 hurt in gun and bomb attacks in the capital Oslo and on the island of Utoeya where the school was taking place.
PM Jens Stoltenberg has laid a wreath in Oslo and is expected to be joined by hundreds of people on Utoeya, including the families of those who were killed.
Anders Behring Breivik, who admires, and was even inspired by the English Defence League, has admitted carrying out the two attacks. He remains on trial, and insists that he is sane. He has used his trial to publicise his fascist politics and the need to wipe out hundreds of millions of Muslims, and purge the planet of Marxism, trade unions, Labourite reformists, and all those who support multiculturalism.
He is a thoroughly modern fascist, critical of Hitler for not liberating Jerusalem from the ‘Muslim hordes’, who now constitute the main enemy alongside of the working class of the world.
The completely sane Breivik should obviously be executed. However he is not alone, since the crisis of the capitalist system is now producing more and more of the demented mass murderers who hate humanity and constitute the raw material that will make up the fascist movements that big business will seek to use against the working class in the period ahead.
The most recent example of this is last week’s ‘Batman Massacre’ where the killer armed himself with an automatic weapon and set out to kill as many ordinary people as he could, men, women and children.
Capitalism as a social system is disintegrating and if allowed will take humanity over the edge of the abyss with it, in a series of slumps, wars, civil wars, class wars and world wars, in which hundreds of millions will be destroyed.
Both Breivik and the Batman mass murderer are warnings, tremors, of the approaching earthquakes whose source is capitalism and its economic, political and social crisis, whose contradictions are reaching the point of explosive transformation.
Some time ago, Shakespeare was able to grasp the direction that commodity production with its thirst for value, that is gold, would lead humanity.
He wrote in Timon of Athens of the metal, the store and measure of value of capitalism, its essential money, as against pieces of paper masquerading as money: ‘Gold? yellow, glittering precious gold?.
. .thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. . .Why, this will lug your priests and servants from your sides, pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads. This yellow slave will knit and break religions; bless th’accursed; make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves and give them title, knee and approbation with senators on the bench. This is it that makes the wappered widow wed again; she whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices to th’April day again.’
This perfectly describes the relationships today between the bankers and the bosses, the media barons, the police and the state and the ruling political parties, who see, hear and speak no evil of each other, regardless of what happens, until the crisis-ridden situation thrusts their noses right into it, under full public gaze.
With gold heading for a price of $2000 an ounce, and capitalism dominated by mountains of debts, they preside over profit making at any cost and at any price, no matter how many millions are trampled on or crushed under the wheel.
The stench from crisis-ridden capitalism is foul, and the social costs of the capitalist crisis are enormous. All the attempts to reform it and make it palatable as a form of human existence have failed. Now we are left with humanity on the edge of the abyss.
There is only one way forward. This is to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the developing world socialist revolution to its victory, replacing capitalism with world socialism.
