RUSSIA, Belarus and Kazakhstan have just signed the historic Eurasian Economic Union. It comes into effect in January 2015, and will get rid of trade barriers, and see a completely free movement of its 200 million people.
Armenia will join the union on June 15, Kyrgyzstan plans to join by the end of 2014, and Azerbaijan is still considering joining.
President Putin commented: ‘Citizens of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan will have the right to work freely throughout the member states without having to be issued any special work permits. . . Today we have created a powerful and attractive centre of economic development, a large regional market that brings together more than 170 million people. Our union has huge reserves of natural resources, including energy, which accounts for one fifth of the world’s gas reserves and 15 per cent of oil reserves.’
Kazakh President Nazarbayev warned members to try and avoid repeating the mistakes of the European Union, which is still facing grave economic consequences from the continent-wide slump.
The formation of the Eurasian Economic Union comes hot on the heels of the Russia-China gas deal.
The $400 billion deal will see infrastructure investment from both sides of more than $70 billion. It will be the world’s largest construction project, with Russia providing $55 billion up front and China $22 billion for pipelines on their respective territories.
Russia will supply China 38 billion cubic metres of gas per year via the eastern ‘Power of Siberia’ pipeline, which crosses Siberia and reaches China’s populous northeast regions. A separate route that could deliver gas to China’s western provinces and provide diversification is also planned.
While the Eurasian Union and the Chinese Peoples Republic will be booming, US and EU capitalism will be on the brink of permanent economic disaster. No wonder the Ukrainian workers refused to be dragged in to the EU to face the same future as the Greek workers.
This huge leap forward will also create a massive trading area that will not have the dollar as its common currency, a huge blow to the world power of US imperialism, which has a vast indebtedness, which can no longer be disguised by a sea of paper dollars and billions of electronically created quantitative easing ‘money’.
In fact, it is this crisis that has made the US determined to annexe the Ukraine politically and economically, bring Georgia into NATO and undermine Belarus, with its main target being Russia.
Obama has also been very active in the East, mobilising Japanese imperialism and other South East Asian states against China. As far as US imperialism is concerned, the Eurasia economic union and the Russia-China gas deal is a Casus Belli, justifying war, to maintain the position of the US and imperialism as the power that rules the world.
However, the working class of the US and the EU and the UK will not support any such imperialist war. The workers did not support the wars in Iraq and Libya, and stopped US imperialism and the UK launching a land and air war against Syria.
They are angry at the massive austerity at home and imperialist adventures abroad. However, a new imperialist war will only be stopped by the victory of the world socialist revolution.
We are approaching a notable anniversary, the centenary of the 1917 Russian revolution. It changed the world for ever!
It was led by Lenin and Trotsky as the first blow of the world socialist revolution. It immediately set Europe and Asia ablaze, stopping the First World War and leading to the Chinese and Vietnamese Revolutions.
Through its Five Year plans and its massive industrialisation of Russia, it saved Russia from colonisation by Hitler, and built the tanks and the guns and inspired the working class to tear the guts out if the German army.
Now, imperialism is preparing to make war on the working class at home and abroad as the only way to resolve the crisis of capitalism, by drowning the world in the blood of the working class and the poor.
The way forward is to complete the great work that was begun with the Russian revolution. Now is the time to build sections of the Fourth International in every country in the world to lead the developing world socialist revolution to its victory, smashing capitalism and imperialism and replacing them with world socialism.
