IT was Karl Marx who in 1848, two months before the February revolution erupted in France, began the Communist Manifesto with the words ‘A Spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’. He saluted this spectre and as the revolution developed urged the masses to make the revolution permanent, until the working class had the power in its hands.
Yesterday, the revolutionary upheaval in Europe, starting with Greece, forced Nigel Farage, the representative of UKIP, the party of the nationalist English petty bourgeoisie, to warn the world of the developing European socialist revolution, and specifically warn the UK ruling class to quit the EU while there was still time, or else perish in the flames.
Faced with a European-wide political and banking crisis the like of which has never been seen before, and a working class that is determined to reply to poverty and degradation with revolution, Farage openly expressed the fear that the bourgeoisie has of the revolutionary wave that has begun.
Farage is right to be frightened for the bourgeois order. The economic crisis manifested in the collapse of the banking and financial system has created a political crisis which has seen the ruling bourgeois parties of Greece collapse and a whole succession of bourgeois governments brought down in the EU.
This crisis cannot be resolved through elections or protests but only through overthrowing bankrupt capitalism and then advancing to socialism.
Last weekend, the working class of Greece and France smashed up the bourgeois ‘consensus’ that the banking crisis would be paid for by workers and the middle classes.
Despite the overwhelming rejection of ‘austerity’, the bourgeois leadership of the Eurozone, led by German chancellor Merkel, is still insisting that Greece has no option but to implement the savage cuts imposed as a condition for the next payment of bailout money.
While one section of the EU bourgeoisie is pinning its hopes on fresh elections, despite the fact that there can be no parliamentary solution to the Greek crisis or the capitalist crisis as a whole, as Farage understands, another section is openly canvassing for Greece to be ejected from the Eurozone.
New elections leading to a left government in Greece will see it struggling against international capital and, as it flounders, see the ‘extreme wings’, the fascists and the Trotskyists, growing – the latter to give the required revolutionary leadership to the working class, the strongest class, in order for it to take the power.
Ejection of Greece from the EU will all the more rapidly collapse the European banking system and spread the Greek contagion throughout the EU, not just southern Europe. Even now France and the UK are showing all the symptoms of the revolutionary crisis.
Meanwhile, the economic crisis is deepening with the announcement on Thursday that the Spanish government has been forced to partly nationalise the country’s fourth largest bank (Bankia) to try to stop it collapsing under the weight of unsustainable debt.
All over Europe the established political parties of the bourgeois order are collapsing or are showing the signs of collapse, preparing the way for new counter-revolutionary parties to represent the interests of the bourgeoisie, and revolutionary parties to mobilise the working class to take the power.
In 1932 the collapse of German bonapartism led to the Nazis coming to power because the Stalinist Communist Party betrayed the struggle, dubbing the Labourites as social fascists and declaring ‘after Hitler, our turn’.
History is not going to repeat itself, not even as a farce, because today throughout Europe, sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International will be built from the revolutionary youth, to lead and organise the working class to take the power and put an end to capitalism in Europe. This is what has to be done.
