SATURDAY saw demonstrations and occupations taking place in many countries following the example of the Spanish and Greek square occupations that have featured as part of the struggle against savage European Union cuts and the way that the Wall Street occupation has spurred the US trade unions to ally themselves with the revolutionary youth movement that is erupting.
Police in New York continued to deal out state violence to the Occupation Movement and arrested 70 people.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters showed how much confidence they have gained through their popular success by moving on to extend their occupation to include Times Square.
Protesters chanted: ‘We got sold out, banks got bailed out’ and ‘All day, all week, occupy Wall Street.’
There were also protests in a number of other US cities, including thousands who rallied outside City Hall in Los Angeles and marched in Pittsburgh, and Boston along with the trade unions.
In Rome, 250,000 workers and youth took to the streets where they were attacked by the infamous Italian riot police. They saw off their attackers exercising their right to self-defence.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said that the demonstration was a ‘worrying signal’ and said the perpetrators ‘must be found and punished’.
In Madrid, over 100,000 workers and youth gathered in Puerta del Sol Square on Saturday evening, while up to five thousand young people occupied the area around the London Stock Exchange.
Bourgeois commentators have sought relief in the ‘democratic’ slogans of many of the demonstrators, and their conviction that they do not need leaders, while at the same time they say that they are going to make the political leaders act for the majority.
This naivity can be explained by the fact that many of the youth who were present outside the stock exchange in London and other places would, in normal circumstances have nothing to demonstrate about, and would have gone from university to good jobs and good careers, and the conventional petty bourgeois life.
Now, all that has been put to an end, abruptly and with the maximum shock, by the crisis of capitalism and the determination of the ruling class that 99 per cent of the population will be forced to pay for the crisis, and also forced to pay to keep the bankers and the bosses in luxury.
Masses of middle class, and working class youth have been thrown into the struggle, ready or not.
They will however learn quickly, that the only real democracy is the revolutionary movement of millions of workers, the vast majority, that will put an end to capitalism through a socialist revolution, to bring in a planned economy based on satisfying the needs of the people.
This revolutionary task does require a revolutionary leadership, based on Marxism, that has learnt the lessons of the class struggle, to defeat a ruling class that has shown in Libya and Iraq that it is willing to murder millions of civilians to grab oil wells and other natural resources.
The spontaneous movement cannot provide or improvise the strategic leadership required to bring down the capitalist order and lay the basis for world socialism.
This leadership must be provided by the building of the Fourth International, the world party of the socialist revolution, that has absorbed the historic lessons of the class struggle and understands the vital role of Marxist theory – developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky – in guiding the struggle to smash the capitalist order and bring in worldwide socialism.
The masses of the working class and the youth who are now coming together all over the world will provide the forces to build the revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International, to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory. Of this we can be sure.