THE News Line editorial board sends its revolutionary greetings, as we enter the new year of 2015, to the working people of the world.
We salute especially the heroes of 2014.
Among them are the workers of eastern Ukraine, of Donetsk and Lugansk who have been resisting the NATO-backed coupist regime in Kiev, with arms in hand, for almost a year since the US-organised coup of last February.
We salute the workers of Syria who have stood fast, at a very great cost, against the US-UK attempts to remove the Syrian government so as to allow the imperialist powers to re-carve up the oil rich Middle East.
We salute the Palestinian masses in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Palestinian masses of Gaza withstood the full force of the Israeli killing machine during the recent 51-day blitzkrieg, and won the support of the working people of the world for their struggle against the 48-year-old occupation.
The Palestinian masses are now marching forward and with the support of the workers of the world will win their state, with no settlements, with Jerusalem as their capital, with refugees having the right to return and with their borders under their own control in 2015.
Finally, we salute the masses of Ferguson and other US cities who are standing up against US police capitalist state violence.
In 2014 the world capitalist crisis continued to deepen, as the banks, then up to their necks with Quantitative Easing fake money, continued their speculation on a massive scale and are now more indebted than at any time in their history!
This is to the extent that bank chiefs such as the Bank of England’s Governor Carney, and the heads of the IMF are warning that the banking system could be collapsed once again, at any moment, by massive banking speculation, by bankers who are still convinced that they are ‘too big to fail’, and will always be bailed out by governments placing their iron heel austerity measures onto the necks of the working people of the world.
Now, as the EU stagnates and declines, with a massive youth unemployment from Greece to the UK, and the US is able to advance only marginally by a huge growth in low paid, temporary employment, the world crisis has been qualitatively deepened by the collapse of oil prices.
North Sea oil is now history, while the giant UK oil monopolies such as BP and Shell have a financial catastrophe to deal with.
Oil based economies such as those in Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela and Russia have been hit hard, while the US’ Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar boast that they will not cut back production even if oil prices collapse to $20 a barrel. They say that their major interest now is not oil price but oil share.
In 2015 the world capitalist crisis, which is already driving the ruling classes of the world into a war on two fronts, on the working class at home and abroad against the oppressed nations, and on Russia, China and Iran abroad, is set to intensify and explode.
Russia is the premier target, with its vast spaces and huge mineral riches, for regime change, while in all of the imperialist states the ruling class will be locked in a life and death struggle with the working class.
The only strategy that will be able to defeat the drive of the imperialist powers to go to war abroad and crush the working people at home, is that of the world socialist revolution.
2015 must see the building of sections of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required to smash capitalism and imperialism on a world scale and go forward to socialism.
In fact in the USA where ‘recovery’ is said to be underway, the class struggle has reached explosion point where tens of millions of young workers are bringing a new and revolutionary life into the trade unions with their struggle for a national minimum wage of $15 an hour.
They are striking at McDonald’s and throughout the fast food industry and they are taking strike action at WalMart, throughout the USA, and they will not be denied.
In bankrupt cities such as Detroit where the ‘American Dream’ was destroyed by the 2008 financial collapse, the working class is fighting against wage, pensions and job cuts, in the former capital of the world’s motor car industry.
The ‘American Dream’ has been reduced to a nightmare in the ruined centre of Detroit, where there is now farmland where there were once the greatest factories in the planet.
In Ferguson, St Louis, and other cities and communities there are now mass actions taking place against gun-happy police officers, the advance guard of the capitalist state that US workers say is now occupying their communities just like US soldiers occupied Iraq.
The struggle has even reached the stage where police officers are being killed in New York due to the misdeeds of other fellow officers in towns and cities throughout the USA.
New York City Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton said yesterday that the police feel under attack from the federal government at the highest levels.
He said: ‘They really do feel under attack, rank-and-file officers and much of American police leadership,’ discussing recent claims that US President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are fuelling anti-police sentiment in the country.
During the Saturday funeral of one of the slain New York policemen, hundreds of NYPD officers turned their backs to the mayor as he was delivering his eulogy.
With the working class advancing and with the state starting to buckle under the strain, 2015 will be the year in the USA when the Obama betrayal will lead to the trade unions being forced to break with the Democrats and form a Labour party to fight for socialism.
This domestic situation will inhibit the US imperialists from making the foreign interventions that are on their agenda. In 2015 a section of the Fourth International must be built in the USA. It will have a major role to play in the struggle for a socialist USA.
Meanwhile, in the EU the class struggle is set to reach explosion point in 2015.
Greece is heading for a general election and a left government under which the working class will move to seize control and ownership of the banks and the industries, to take power and to break with the EU.
In the vanguard will be the masses of Greek youth, over 50% of whom are unemployed and are just waiting for an opportunity to surge forward in the struggle for workers power.
The Greek section of the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Marxist League, must build itself up rapidly to be the revolutionary leadership of the working class and the youth, since a left government has neither the will or the means to carry through the tasks of the socialist revolution.
Where Greece is today, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland will be tomorrow – in the course of 2015.
The EU has been unable to unite Europe and carry it forward since capitalism and imperialism are bankrupt.
The only answer to the crisis in Europe is the establishment of the the Socialist United States of Europe and a planned European socialist economy that will produce to satisfy people’s needs and not to provide super-profits for the bankers and capitalists.
However, it is in the UK that the situation is at its most explosive.
With a general election in May, the Tories are pledged to make up to £60bn more cuts and to destroy the Welfare State, the NHS and the trade unions as part of their struggle to establish a slave labour state for the British capitalists to enjoy.
However the dialectic of the British revolution is that what the working class won in the period after 1945 through the threat of revolution, and which was a source of its faith in evolutionary socialism, will give way to a revolutionary fury to ensure that its greatest gains are not handed back to the bosses and the bankers by the Labour Party and the trade union leaders.
We favour a Labour election victory in 2015, when we will be standing a number of WRP-YS candidates to explain our position and mobilise the youth for a socialist revolution.
A Labour victory will lead to a massive crisis as the masses surge forward to regain everything that the Tories have stolen from them.
These revolutionary masses will come into a first class revolutionary collision with a Labour government that will stay loyal to the bosses and the bankers.
This will create the conditions for carrying through the British socialist revolution.
This developing world socialist revolution will also create the conditions for the Russian and Chinese workers to come foreward with political revolutions to replace the bureaucratic rule of Stalinist bureaucracies with rule through workers and peasants soviets.
2015 will witness a great leap forward by the world socialist revolution.
It will be the year for building the Fourth International in every part of the planet to put an end to capitalism and imperialism for ever.
ends
