THE developing world-wide economic crisis is now bringing the contradictions inside the EU together and sharpening them to the point of a massive transformation that will bring the dissolution of the EU, and a series of workers revolutions in Eastern Europe.
When Yeltsin decreed the end of the USSR the bourgeoisie of the world proclaimed that there was to be a ‘New World Order’, and set out to bring in that order, via the war to destroy the Yugoslav workers state, and the war to destroy the most advanced Arab country, Iraq, and grab its oil resources.
A great future was proclaimed for eastern Europe and the Ukraine. They were all to be part of NATO, and they were all to become part of the EU, billed as a paradise, but in this world.
For a while the Ukraine went Orange, but in the teeth of working class resistance the Orange counter-revolutionaries were driven back.
Now, throughout Eastern Europe, production has collapsed with the hundreds of billions of euros loaned by the EU banks to the bosses of the Baltic States, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia unrepayable.
The bourgeois fear is that Ukraine will default on its debts and the shock will spread throughout Eastern Europe and explode under, in particular, the German and French banks.
Already the mass demonstrations of the revolutionary movement of the Greek youth and workers has had a profound impact on workers from the Balkans to Latvia and Lithuania. And there is certainly more to come.
These developing contradictions are now openly interpenetrating with each other and qualitatively transforming the situation.
Before the EU summit in Brussels, 10 EU states had their own meeting to insist that they would not tolerate deals being pushed by the German and French governments to give financial support to ‘their’ motor car employers on condition that French and German factories would not be closed, but Easter European plants could.
The Prime Minister of Hungary declared that such deals would see a new ‘Iron Curtain’ descend throughout central Europe, and that western European states would see tens of millions of Eastern European workers descend on them looking for work.
On top of this ‘threat’ the East EU states demanded 190 billion euros aid, so that they could stand a chance of surviving the crisis.
However the contradictions are irreconcilable. Eastern European workers remember that when their countries’ economies were nationalised and planned, everybody had a job, education and heathcare were completely free, nobody went hungry or was homeless and there were a tremendous variety of free recreational facilities for youth.
What a contrast with today, when all that the EU can offer is joblessness, homlessness and slave labour employment.
What the workers objected to in East Germany and the other deformed workers states was the Stalinist dictatorship and the lack of workers democracy. Vast numbers did not want a return to capitalism.
They and others who have now experienced the capitalist crisis want to go forward to democratic workers states. The working class in Eastern Europe is gearing up for a new round of revolutions, in which they will join hands with the workers of western Europe to smash the capitalist EU, to go forward to the Socialist United States of Europe.
For workers in the still degenerated workers states of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, where capitalism has not been restored, the situation requires that they take revolutionary action, that is carry out political revolutions to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and the new bourgeoisie that it has spawned, and restore the Gosplan, the Soviet planned economy and rule through workers and peasants Soviets.
This is the revolutionary movement that the crisis is preparing to unleash, one that will take forward the October 1917 revolution, as part of the world socialist revolution. Now is the time to build the Fourth International, as the leadership of the developing world socialist revolution.