THE US, EU and Asian stockmarkets have taken yet another hit as the decline and fall of the US capitalist economy continues.
On Thursday, the slump in US manufacturing and a rise in unemployment, combined to drive Wall Street down.
First there was the finding of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s monthly report on the state of manufacturing industry in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. It showed a contraction from plus 5.1 in July 2009 to minus 7.7 in July 2010. Hardly the picture of a recovering economy.
Then there was another shock as the figure for new signings for unemployment benefit in 2010 reached 500,000 workers last week.
The response to this news in Tokyo, Canberra, London and the EU’s stockmarkets was unanimous as they all fell.
One of the effects of the unexpected jump in initial jobless claims was that gold futures rose to a seven week high. Gold has already climbed 12 per cent this year, spurred on by the refusal of the capitalist economy to ‘recover’.
Meanwhile France has cut its forecast for economic growth next year from 2.5 per cent to 2.0 per cent, with Sarkozy summoning his ministers to cut their holidays short and meet him at his official retreat, Fort de Bregancon to decide and adopt the necessary measures to cut the French deficit.
Sarkozy insists that the government deficit must be reduced from 8% to 6% in 2011, a reduction that will still leave it at twice the EU limit.
He has already announced that he will abolish 10 billion euros of tax breaks in the autumn.
The French working class is already preparing an autumn offensive of mass strikes to resist his pension busting plans, and has already denounced his divide and rule tactic of deporting gypsies and immigrants making them the scapegoats for the world and French crisis.
French workers say that the tactic reminds them of Hitler and Petain. They are mounting an Autumn offensive beginning with a mass strike in September.
They say that the movement will continue through to next Spring when they will launch a new ‘May and June 1968 type action’ to remove the regime and end Sarkozy’s pension busting, job cutting and racism.
As France and Greece lurch towards revolution the rest of Europe is not too far behind.
In the UK, the governor of the Bank of England has predicted ‘choppy’ waters ahead, and conceded that there may well be a period of rampant inflation and a ‘return’ to the conditions of the 1970s and 80s when the bosses were involved in a civil war with the trade unions.
In fact the Tory-LibDem coalition is setting out to pauperise every section of the working class and the middle class, as well as consigning the mass of pensioners to a freezing and early grave.
What is going to erupt on this side of the channel is a situation that will make the class struggles of the 1970s and 80s seem like tea parties, because this time to defeat the enemy the working class is going to have to take the power.
Meanwhile, in Ireland the cost of propping up the banks is rising to 20 per cent of GDP, over six times the limit for such deficits imposed by the EU.
It is clear that the future for Europe, the Americas and the whole planet is a revolutionary one. The world working class is being given no alternative but to carry forward the world revolution begun in October 1917, to smash world capitalism and imperialism and bring in world socialism.
