STATEMENT BY THE NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARD
WELCOME to 2009. It is the year for getting rid of capitalism and the capitalist world order.
Capitalism is now gripped by the greatest banking, industrial and political crisis in its history.
Its explosive impact is absolutely atomic, especially since the bourgeoisie and its legions of dullard propagandists never saw the catastrophe approaching, and were blinded by their own arrogance into believing that there would never be another capitalist collapse, such as the world witnessed in 1929-31.
In 2008 the greatest banks in the capitalist world were exposed as being absolutely cashless, while the world’s stock markets lost between 30 per cent and 45 per cent of their total share price.
The economic giants of the capitalist world such as the Detroit ‘Big Three’ of GM, Ford and Chrysler are bankrupted, and begging for aid, while all over the capitalist world the productive forces are being shut down and the most vital part of the productive forces, the working class, is being sacked by the million.
The capitalist private ownership of the means of production, and capitalism’s nation states are truly the historic enemies of humanity, and barriers against all human progress.
The crisis is so great that the leaders of the world bourgeoisie have had to give up the pretence that the capitalist world market and its laws of development are progressive.
Bush has had to declare that the fate of the US motor industry, and the US bourgeoisie could not be left to markets, and that there had to be immediate state intervention and aid for the stricken banks and bourgeois.
Capitalist governments in the US (of the ultra right-wing Republican party), and the UK (of the right-wing Labour Party) have lurched from ‘fighting the battle against inflation’ to printing money, à la Weimar, and the building up of a massive inflation of state debt, since they cannot get those states, in the Gulf and other places, who have cash to buy their dodgy debt bonds.
With the capitalist system convulsed in its death agony, the essence of the UK Labour and trade union leaders has rapidly emerged.
Prime Minister Brown insists that the poor must be made to sacrifice to keep the banks and the bosses going, and that there cannot be wage increases above 2.1 per cent, or benefit rights for the disabled and single parents.
Despite the fact that bourgeois US and UK governments have effectively nationalised banks, the leaders of the trade unions, such as Unite’s Woodley-Simpson leadership, have refused to demand the nationalisation of the motor car industry in the UK, and have limited themselves to begging for state funds for the steel industry and motor car industry bosses.
This is in a situation where, in Woodley’s words, 40,000 sackings are imminent.
The trade union bureaucracy is definitely not for the mobilisation of the working class, and has gone over to the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system.
All of the ‘good and the great’ of the bourgeoisified labour leadership have committed themselves to the defence of capitalism and imperialism, and accept that the working class and the poor must support the bankers and the bosses in their hour of need, to the extent of accepting wage cuts and job losses.
They have all linked their fate completely to that of the capitalist order.
This will be challenged by the working class in 2009 in class battles that will pose the working class bringing down the Brown government and taking power through the establishment of a workers government to expropriate the capitalists.
The way for revolutionary action in the UK has been prepared by the developing Greek workers revolution which has exploded against a reactionary government determined to make the Greek workers and youth pay for the capitalist crisis.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the Greek workers and youth. The whole of Europe is following your struggle and will be joining the action in 2009.
It is in this revolutionary situation, where the complete and utter bankruptcy of the capitalist order is being revealed on an hourly basis to tens of billions of people throughout the world, that the News Line sends its New Year revolutionary greetings for 2009 to the working class and the poor of the planet.
We urge the workers and youth of the world to build revolutionary parties of the Fourth International to organise for the victory of the world socialist revolution in the period directly ahead.
We salute the enormous heroism of the Palestinian masses of Gaza who are standing up to a most brutal assault by the US-armed and financed Israeli military.
In the last days of the Bush presidency the US ruling class has moved through its Israeli surrogate to try to destroy the Hamas movement via a mountain of corpses.
This desperate measure is to try to strengthen those within the bourgeois sections of the Palestinian national movement who are willing to make a deal with Israel, and give up the demands that Jerusalem will be the capital of a Palestinian state, that all Palestinians must have the right to return, and that all of the settlements must be demolished.
Bush and Olmert are working to drive Hamas back and create an opening for the incoming president Barak Obama to obtain a settlement of the Palestinian problem that will create a greater Israel dominating a Palestinian bantustan.
This tactic will not work. The Palestinian masses will not allow Hamas to be run out of the Gaza Strip.
They will also confront and make Israel pay a very heavy price for any ground assault that it is driven to mount by the failure of its air assaults to demoralise the Palestinian masses.
The time has come to take the future of the Palestinian masses out of the hands of the Palestinian bourgeoisie.
A section of the Fourth International must be built in Palestine so that the revolutionary working class and the youth provide the necessary leadership to establish a socialist secular Palestinian state from the River Jordan to the sea.
We also send our revolutionary greetings to the working class and the poor of Iraq, who are demanding the immediate withdrawal of all US and UK troops.
Your struggle has torn the guts out of the US military and has undermined US capitalism itself.
We urge united action by all of the insurgent movements to liberate the country from US imperialism and its puppet regime, a step that will revolutionise the entire Middle East and spell the beginning of the end for Zionism and imperialism in the region.
In the United States itself, the Bush regime has declared that its bailout billions for the ‘Big Three’ depends on the UAW trade union leaders agreeing to big cuts in wages, pensions, health benefits and jobs for its members, to create ‘a level playing field’ with the non-union Japanese car plants in the southern states.
The Bush alternative to this holocaust for the working class is Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with a judge deciding what the wages and conditions should be for workers in the remnants of the ‘Big Three’.
The UAW leaders are poised to agree to the Bush deal, saying that they will get the incoming President Obama to agree a revision of the harsh conditions.
This Obama will not do. The ensuing clash will bring a huge and massive change to the US workers movement and see it break with the Democrats, and found a Labour Party based on the unions, and the occupation of plants and their nationalisation to halt their closure.
The world capitalist crisis is bringing the socialist revolution to the US.
This is therefore the time to build a section of the Fourth International in the USA, to direct this struggle to overthrow the rule of capital, a struggle that will, to a great extent, decide the future of the planet.
The sharpening class struggle in the US will be immediately reflected throughout the Americas.
There the Fourth International will build sections to strike together with the revolutionary nationalist movements that have emerged in the fight against US imperialism, but march and organise separately, for workers power exercised through soviets, and a socialist revolution.
The News Line also sends its revolutionary greetings to the workers of Japan where there has been a devastating fall in output in the last year of nine per cent, with the most advanced industries in the world now experiencing closure, mass sackings and short time working.
The Japanese workers in the period ahead will take their place in the vanguard of the world working class movement, and the struggle for world revolution, of this we are absolutely sure.
This enormous revolutionising capitalist crisis is having the most profound affects on the degenerated and deformed workers states of Russia, China, the Ukraine and Belarus, and those states that broke with the USSR and gravitate around the EU, the Baltic states and Hungary amongst them.
The capitalist crisis has brought that section of the new Russian bourgeoisie that supports political rule by the Kremlin to its knees.
It has been bankrupted and is now seeking aid from Putin to survive.
The Putin regime, which rules through having one foot on the new bourgeoisie and the other on the working class, has been unbalanced by the crisis and the collapse of oil prices.
The Russian working class decided a long time ago, in 1917, that it did not want capitalism. It restated its view when it got rid of the ‘shock therapists’, Gaydar and the others, in the 1990s.
Its reaction to the deepening capitalist crisis has been to demand the reconstitution of the USSR and the planned economy.
The Ukraine, the Baltic states and Hungary have had to run to the IMF for bailout.
But the price for such aid is very high, huge increases in prices, a steep rise in VAT, and big job cuts in state owned industries.
This has created a major crisis in these states.
Workers in the Ukraine are demanding the restoration of the USSR, and in the Baltic States and Hungary workers are demanding socialist policies and an end to capitalism.
The decisive influence in Eastern Europe is the developing Greek revolution.
The Greek workers and youths’ battle against privatisation and the ravages of the EU in crisis has attracted huge support.
Workers throughout eastern Europe agree that there is no future under capitalism. They are opposed to Stalinism but support socialism.
The forming of a section of the Fourth International in Greece will lay the basis for sections throughout Eastern Europe.
In China, in the economic zones where western capital has been allowed to exploit up to 100 million workers, factories are now shutting down on a daily basis, because of the slump in demand from the US.
The working class is demanding guarantees concerning its wage and jobs and challenging the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The key to revolution in India is the struggle of the trade unions and the Tamil people in Sri Lanka.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the Sri Lankan workers and to the defence organisation of the Tamil people the Tamil Tigers.
Bringing down the Rajapakse regime in 2009 will prepare the way for a workers revolution and government in Sri Lanka under which the working class of the island and the different national groups will be able to decide on their way forward without imperialist interference. This will revolutionise the entire Indian sub-continent.
The world capitalist crisis is driving forward the world socialist revolution in the most explosive way.
In this revolutionary situation the Editorial Board of News Line sends its revolutionary greeting to the workers and youth of the world.
We urge you to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead this world socialist revolution to its victory, so as to continue the building of worldwide socialism that was begun in October 1917.
