THIS week the ‘big guns’ of the capitalist world banking system will each be holding their regular monthly meetings with only one question on the agenda – how to deal with the twin crises of international debt that is bankrupting entire countries while simultaneously attempting to stop the complete collapse of manufacturing industry around the globe.
The Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank are all being called upon to do the impossible: namely to somehow breath life back into a world capitalist system that is being torn apart by the crisis.
The only measures at their disposal are to hold down interest rates at their historically low level and to print more worthless paper currency in the different forms of quantitative easing (QE).
Both these remedies, designed to magically promote ‘growth’, have been tried over and over again since the banking collapse first broke on the international scene in 2008 with the bankruptcy and collapse of the giant Lehman Brothers bank in America.
This collapse, which was a result of decades of capitalist credit boom, saw credit transformed over- night into debt – a debt which the banks quickly transferred onto the nation states and demanded that the working class pay.
Since 2008 in the US, the Federal Reserve has launched two rounds of QE, pumping $2.75 trillion into the economy, and now they are proposing a further round.
The net result of all this inflationary ‘stimulation’ has been precisely nought; far from being stimulated, the US economy is going backwards, with production growth being slowed to almost nothing.
The same bleak picture dominates in Europe, where the banking crisis hit hardest, with official figures this week showing that manufacturing is at its lowest point in three years with the once mighty German industries being the worst hit, followed rapidly by France.
All this is despite the more than 1.5 trillion euros artificially created by the ECB to try to prop up the banks and try to prevent the outright bankruptcy of eurozone countries like Greece and Spain.
Such is the desperation in the eurozone that this week the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, declared that the ECB should have access to unlimited funds to stop the collapse of the euro and the bankruptcy of entire states.
Small wonder that Draghi has run up against the implacable opposition of the German central bank who are only too aware that printing money on this scale produces not just the hyper-inflation experienced by Germany in the 1930s but a mega-inflation that would see the currencies of Europe become worthless pieces of paper.
In Britain, where manufacturing was smashed up in the 1980s by Thatcher, the crisis is just as catastrophic.
No amount of state-promoted hysterical enthusiasm around the Olympic Games can disguise the fact that the only way to preserve this rotten system lies in making the workers pay for the crisis with their wages, jobs, basic rights, pensions and healthcare, not just in the UK but throughout the world.
Far from us all being ‘united’, the Tories and their coalition partners are carrying out a full-scale class war on UK workers and on the workers of the world, including the workers of Syria.
Across Europe and the world the refusal by workers to accept a future of poverty and starvation as the price for keeping the historically bankrupt capitalist system afloat is creating a world revolution of the working class and the poor.
The key to resolving the crisis of capitalism lies in the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the revolutionary leadership that can lead the world socialist revolution to victory and bury capitalism once and for all.