THE world crisis of the capitalist system is deepening rapidly, and is creating a political and revolutionary crisis in the major capitalist states, where the ruling classes and the working class have begun to do battle with each other.
The message of the ruling classes is simple. The crisis means that they can no longer afford the wages, working conditions, pensions, health care and educational opportunities that workers won in the period after the second world war. All these gains must be surrendered, or else the jobs will go to Asia.
The crisis is indeed grave, but it is capitalism that is in its death agony. Both the United States and Britain have huge record trade deficits, big government spending deficits and in the case of Britain massive domestic debt of some £1.4 trillion.
The major powers of the European Union, France, Germany and Italy have record levels of unemployment, stagnation and record breaking public spending deficits.
The failure of the US-UK military adventure in Iraq to put that country’s oil resources under their control has led to a massive inflation of gas and oil prices worldwide, leaving Europe’s bosses dependent on Russian gas and oil, and dreading what disasters any new US-UK military adventure against Iran, a major oil producer, will bring down on their heads.
In the US, billionaire capitalists are now viciously attacking the working class. Ford and GM are set to close up to 30 plants while Delphi is going into bankruptcy to be able to cut wages by 62 per cent and to slash all employee health benefits and pensions.
The response of the working class will be indefinite strike action and occupations of the plants. Where GM, Delphi and Ford go, the rest of US capital will follow. The working class will respond by organising revolutionary mass actions that will put socialism back on the agenda of the US workers.
In Britain, the Labour government tells workers that its entire Welfare State is out of date and must be reformed ie privatised, and that its final salary pensions are to be abolished, while it will have to work up to ten years longer. Its youth meanwhile are only fit for asbos!
The public sector pension strikes are just the semblance of the mass revolutionary response of the working class to the bosses and their government. The working class reasons that if capitalism cannot afford the Welfare State, then it is capitalism that has to go, and that all the means necessary to do the job must be adopted by the working class.
In France this revolution of the working class is already underway, with millions taking to the streets to protect the youth from superexploitation and instant dismissals. De Villepin says that without these measures French capitalism will not survive. Workers respond that if this is the case French capitalism deserves to perish, and they are its gravediggers.
In Germany, Spain, Italy and Greece this same struggle is raging, with the revolutionary strength of the working class, the most powerful class in society, rapidly emerging.
This revolutionary movement of the working class is creating the conditions where the working class of Russia and China can take action to defend the gains of the Russian and Chinese revolutions against the attacks of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its bourgeois friends, and where the masses of the Middle East can take much bolder actions aga- inst imperialism.
A new period of the most powerful development of the world socialist revolution has begun.
What is decisive for this period is the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in all of the major countries to provide the necessary revolutionary leadership to the working class and the youth to take them forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Trotskyism is the Marxism of today and the International Committee of the Fourth International must be built into the world party to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory. There is not a moment to lose!
