THE sense of panic and of impending doom is running wild amongst the international banks and the world bourgeoisie as they are forced to confront the reality of capitalism crashing around their ears with nothing that can be done to prevent it.
This panic is reflected in the contradictory demands being made by the leaders of the major capitalist nations in the Eurozone to come up with a solution – any solution – to the crisis that has engulfed Greece and Spain and now threatens the entire capitalist world.
On Wednesday, US president Obama was on the phone to David Cameron with orders that he, Cameron, must meet with German chancellor Angela Merkel and demand that Germany come up with an ‘immediate plan’ that will prevent the complete crash of the Spanish banks, a crash that would propel Spain out of the Eurozone and bring down the entire world banking system.
This is the terror that is gripping Obama. The crisis can no longer be written off as a minor problem confined to the small Greek economy and that can be contained – Spain is too big to bail out.
Spain’s latest proposals for keeping their banks afloat is to demand that the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pump billions of euros into them.
They are refusing to accept that this money is a bail-out to the Spanish government in the full knowledge that this would then become part of the Spanish sovereign debt and would involve Spain being subjected to the draconian ‘austerity’ measures that have brought Greek capitalism to its knees and driven Greek workers and youth to the point of insurrection.
In a country with 50 per cent youth unemployment, the Spanish government is mortally afraid of going down this road.
Merkel is refusing to countenance such a move and has tabled her own ‘plan’. This is one that, in return for Germany underwriting the entire banking debt of Europe, the constitution of the EU is re-written to effectively smash up the national sovereignty of Europe and force every nation in the Eurozone to submit to complete financial and political integration – in effect become vassal states of Germany in a capitalist unified Europe.
The object of such a union would not be to provide any economic solutions to the debt crisis – which would not simply disappear as a result of this enforced union – but to provide the European bourgeoisie, led by Germany, with a political structure that would enable them to wage an all out-war on the working class of Europe as a prelude to its own attempt to reorder the planet.
Only by dumping the entire crisis on the backs of the working class can capitalism hope to survive.
This is the plan that Obama and his mouthpiece lackey Cameron are urging on Merkel, that she lead nothing short of a modern crusade in Europe to smash the resistance of the working class and youth to ‘austerity measures’ and impose on them the naked dictatorship of capital, stripped of all its bourgeois democratic trappings.
The last time capitalism attempted to unite Europe under the iron heel back in the 1930s it resulted in the slaughter of workers on a mass scale and concentration camps across the continent.
But today is not the 1930s; the working class of Europe have not been defeated after being betrayed, as they were then, by the Reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies. History is not going to repeat itself, not even as a farce! This time round, this desperate attempt to unite Europe under the heel of German capital will drive forward the socialist revolution and the socialist united states of Europe.
Victory in this vital struggle for the future of humanity can only be assured through the building of a new, conscious revolutionary leadership within the working class. This is the urgent task before us, to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the developing socialist revolution.
