THE CAPITALIST powers of the EU, US and UK are growing fearful that the prosecution of their war against Russia, is actually unleashing a socialist revolution at home.
The sanctioning of oligarchs, the ‘breaking of Europe’s reliance on Russian gas’, the refusal to import Russian grain … all of these measures that the imperialist powers are bringing in are having a devastating effect on the UK and EU economies.
Even the announcement that Europe intends to ‘break its reliance on Russian gas’ sent gas prices rocketing up 35 per cent in a single day. Now British Petroleum (BP) has announced it is selling its 20 per cent stake in the Russian nationalised energy giant Rosneft and breaking its plans with Gazprom.
Massive price rises of basic food stuffs like bread, hundreds of thousands of families unable to turn their lights on or heat their homes, motorists forced to abandon their cars because they cannot afford the running costs – ‘this cost-of-living crisis’ as it develops will bring millions onto the streets, and lead to revolution. And it has only just begun!
The mouthpiece of the Tory Party, The Daily Telegraph, in an article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, expresses the fears of the ruling class about how the crisis is developing.
Under the panic-ridden headline: ‘Putin’s energy shock is broadening into a world food crisis, so brace for rationing’ Pritchard warns: ‘The world was facing a grain supply crunch even before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The United Nations food price index was already higher in real terms than at the height of the global hunger crisis a decade ago, when Tunisian bread protests set off the Arab Spring.’
‘The world,’ he further warns, faces what amounts to a commodity ‘black Swan’ across the gamut of primary resources. Oil, gas, coal and agriculture are all spiralling higher together, with metals catching up fast. ‘It is a systemic stagflation shock, an intractable problem for central bankers.’
His solution is the traditional one: ‘We’re all going to have to tighten our belts, and the mood could get very nasty even in countries like Britain.’ In fact, in saying ‘we’ he means ‘you’. In other words the ruling class is determined that the working class is going to be made to pay for this crisis and what this Telegraph pundit fears most, expressing the wider fears of the British ruling class, is that the ‘mood could get very nasty’. In other words he fears revolution!
‘Nasty moods’ ahead is the understatement of the year. The working class are already furious that after 15 years of austerity, since the 2007/8 banking crash there is going to be even more of it directly ahead. In fact ‘nasty moods’ have already expressed themselves. We have already seen university lecturers at 68 universities across the country out on strike again and again over job cuts, pension cuts, casualisation.
Night Tube drivers have been out every weekend since November. The entire tube network was out last week twice against 600 jobs being axed. Council workers, bus workers, binmen, teachers, nurses and doctors.
We are in the middle of a nationwide strike wave. However it’s going to get even nastier, as the rulers of this country fight their class war on two fronts, war against Russia and war at home against their own working class.
The German rulers have the same fears, that these sanctions on Russian will spark revolution on the streets of Germany. Germany’s economic minister admitted yesterday that Germany is so dependent on Russian energy that cutting off the supply risks sparking social unrest.
Robert Habeck, former leader of the Green Party, refused to support an embargo on Russian imports given Germany’s heavy reliance on its supplies. ‘I would even speak out against it,’ he said, ‘because we would threaten the social peace in the republic with that.’
Threatened with Russian energy supply disruptions, Berlin is considering firing up coal power stations and extending the lifespan of nuclear energy. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Capitalist Germany with its former economic prowess and industrial base cannot exist without benefiting from the socialised gas and oil from Russia.
The survival of the whole of European capitalism depends on the great gains of the Russian Revolution of 1917, nationalised industry and energy! And the whole of the capitalist world relies on the extraordinary cutting-edge industrial output of China, with its nationalised production, won through the 1949 socialist revolution, putting it light years ahead of capitalist production.
As far as the capitalist nations are concerned, their only chance of survival is to attempt to smash up the gains of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and to break the back of the working class at home. Germany, the UK, the rest of the EU and the USA are heading for socialist revolutions.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in all of the advanced countries, to lead the developing world socialist revolution to its victory.
