BY THE NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARD
THE NEWS LINE Editorial Board sends its revolutionary New Year’s greetings for the year 2008 to the workers and poor of the world and to the struggling oppressed nations.
In particular, we salute the workers of Iraq who have defeated the efforts of the imperialist powers to recolonise them and seize their oil wealth.
We are sure that in 2008 the US and UK armies will be driven out of Iraq, and that the Iraqi masses will push forward to a workers’ and peasants’ government that will use the country’s massive oil wealth to rebuild what has been destroyed and to advance to socialism.
We also salute the workers of Palestine who are determined to achieve a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, the withdrawal of all of the Zionist settlements from the West Bank, and the right of all of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes which were seized from them from 1948 up to 1967.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian people who have bravely stood up to the imperialist powers in 2007, and we give our support to Iran’s right to develop nuclear power.
We are sure that a rout of the US armies from Iraq in 2008 will lay the basis for driving the imperialists and their agents out of the Middle East as a whole and establishing a Palestinian state as part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
We also send our New Year greetings to the workers and masses of Pakistan.
We are confident that they will avenge the assassination of Benazir Bhutto by revolutionary actions to overthrow the Musharraf military dictatorship that is backed, financed, armed and supported by US President Bush and Prime Minister Brown of the UK.
Only the working class, leading the rural masses can overthrow the military regime and carry out the historical tasks of the bourgeois revolution, including the breaking up of the great feudal estates and the division of the land amongst the peasantry, before advancing to carry out socialist measures, such as the expropriation of the bosses and the bankers, and the smashing up of the capitalist state.
2007 saw the essence of the world capitalist system, its deepening crisis – its death agony – burst through the surface appearance of ‘normality’, which appeared to be a never-ending supply of credit, without ever being called to account!
The US sub-prime mortgage crash revealed the indebtedness of the world’s banks, leading to the run on the UK’s Northern Rock bank, and a situation which forced up banks’ interest rates and mortgage interest rates all over the planet.
At the same time the colossal US expenditure of over a trillion dollars on the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with only defeat to show for it, led to a huge and continuing inflation of oil, gas, and metal prices, and the exposure of the feet of clay of two of the capitalist world’s major currencies the US dollar and the pound Sterling, which are now poised on the brink of a historic collapse, threatening US and UK imperialism with state bankruptcy, and the capitalist world with a massive slump.
The capitalist ruling classes know only one way out of this crisis – and that is to unload it totally onto the backs of the working class and the poor of the world.
The situation in Sri Lanka should be studied carefully in this regard.
There, the imperialists, especially the UK imperialists who have invested very heavily in factories to produce cheap clothing for their home markets, have instructed their agent, President Rajapakse that there must be no wage concessions to the working class, even in the face of very rapidly rising prices, since that would interfere with the super-profits of the imperialists, and that there must be no concessions of any sort to the doubly oppressed Tamil people.
This has resulted in the Sri Lankan government launching savage military attacks on the Tamils, at the same time as attacking the trade unions, imprisoning thousands without trial, and declaring that trade unionism is a form of terrorism, and a form of support for the Tamil Tigers.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the Sri Lankan workers and to the United Workers Party which is leading the fight to bring down the imperialist puppets of the Rajapakse regime and to go forward to a workers and small farmers government.
However, the fact that the imperialists have been fought to a standstill in the Middle East and the Gulf means that they are all the more determined to speed up their confrontation with the workers of the US, the UK and the EU to make them pay for the world crisis of capitalism.
With the capitalist crisis deepening by the hour 2008 will see massive attacks on workers jobs, wages, pensions, and basic rights in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Greece, as the bourgeoisie struggles to impose the cost of bailing out the bosses and the bankers onto the working class.
In 2007, there have already been big struggles in all of these states after the bosses slashed wages, and pensions and declared that any opposition to them will see them shifting their industries out of the metropolitan capitalist states into different parts of Asia.
In the US, the Big Three motor car producers have already imposed 50 per cent cuts in wages and are dumping their previous health care and pensions obligations as fast as they can.
In 2008, the class struggle in the US will immeasurably sharpen as the capitalist crisis worsens, forcing workers to change their union leaderships and to occupy plants to stop them closing and to fight for living wage increases.
The US working class will rediscover its socialist traditions and the need to break from the major capitalist parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, and to build a Labour Party that will fight for socialism.
2007 in the EU saw major strike actions, including the biggest-ever general strike in Greece to defend workers against attacks on wages, pensions and state education.
Millions of workers and youth took part in these actions.
2008 will see the bosses of the EU seeking to impose shock austerity programmes onto the working class, the youth and the rural poor.
They will be answered by massive actions of the working class which will pose the working class leading the rural poor to take power in the EU capitalist states, to overthrow the EU and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe.
However, the sick man of Europe is undoubtedly the UK.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US produced a run on a British bank, the Northern Rock.
The UK is in more than £1.3 trillion of domestic debt.
The Brown government has already spent £50 billion trying to prevent the Northern Rock bank going bust and is committed to bailing out other banks that go the same way as the Rock.
In 2008, 1.5 million mortgage holders are coming off fixed mortgages and will have to re-negotiate their mortgages and pay much higher mortgage interest rates.
Hundreds of thousands of these 1.5 million are threatened with the loss of their homes, and by the crash in house prices that is taking place.
There is already a heavy inflation of food prices taking place severely cutting the purchasing power of workers’ wages, at the same time as the Brown government is advocating wage cuts for workers in the public sector for the next three years.
Massive clashes with the trade unions on the issue of pensions are due to erupt on January 7 when BAA airport workers stop work to defend their final salary pensions with BAA already committed to bringing in ‘replacement’ workers to do their jobs.
This struggle, on its own, can very quickly lead to a general strike in Britain.
However, it is certain that the deepening of the world capitalist crisis in the year 2008 will be immediately reflected in the debt-ridden UK economy with runs on the banks and on the pound sterling.
This will force the Brown government to immediately having by establishing a national government to impose crisis austerity measures onto the working class and the middle class.
At that point British workers will be forced to take general strike action to bring down the government and to go forward to a workers’ government.
It is clear that the year 2008 is going to see a massive deepening of the capitalist crisis as the world revolution explodes in the advanced capitalist states.
They will be at the centre of the struggle and the historic opportunity will arrive to take forward the world revolution, begun in October 1917, by going forward to the Socialist United States of Europe.
In 2008, the working class of the oppressed nations and the workers of Europe and America are going to be in the same trench.
What is required to secure their victory is the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in all of the major capitalist states to smash capitalism and imperialism with socialist revolutions.
That this opportunity will be presented out of the deepening capitalist crisis there is no doubt. Not even a minute must be wasted in the struggle to build the Fourth International.
This struggle will have an immediate revolutionising effect in Russia, Belarus and China, all degenerated or deformed workers states.
Revolution throughout Europe will encourage the Russian and Chinese workers to organise political revolutions to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the new bourgeoisie that it has encouraged, to bring in rule by workers’ and peasants’ soviets as part of the world socialist revolution.
In 2008 we will see a world wide unity of the working class in the metropolitan capitalist states, the oppressed nations and the deformed and degenerated workers states to complete the world socialist revolution, begun in October 1917.
2008 will be the year of world revolution!