THE News Line Editorial Board sends revolutionary greetings for 2023 to all our readers, and to the working class, youth and the poor, who across the world are rising up against a bankrupt capitalist system that is in its death agony, gripped by the greatest economic crisis in its history.
It is this world crisis that is fuelling revolutionary uprisings across the globe.
We send our warmest revolutionary greetings to the Palestinian people who have been resolutely defiant in the face of a massive surge in murderous attacks launched on them by the Zionist state of Israel and its imperialist masters.
Since the start of 2022 Israeli troops have killed over 220 Palestinians, including more than 50 children, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, making this the largest number of Palestinians killed by Israel since 2005.
These attacks will be increased in the coming months as the new government of Israel, a coalition that includes racist and fascist parties is determined to drive Palestinians from their land through a reign of terror and murder.
Far from being crushed all over Palestine the resistance to the Israeli occupiers will only grow as they fight against the planned pogrom.
Their struggle will only increase the already overwhelming support of the great mass of workers and youth across the world.
With Palestinians gaining increasing support for their struggle against the racist, apartheid regime – created by imperialism to wage war against the Arab masses to secure the region’s resources for capitalism – 2023 will be the year when the Palestinian struggle, with the active support of the international working class will achieve victory.
2023 will be the year when the independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital will be established.
2022 was the year that saw all the contradictions in world capitalism, driven at breakneck speed by the imperialist war against Russia, reach the point of explosion, plunging the capitalist world into a global recession with all the economic ‘weapons’ in its arsenal exhausted.
Since the world banking crash of 2008 capitalism sought to overcome its crisis through an unprecedented era of cheap money.
Trillions of pounds, dollars and euros were electronically produced under Quantitative Easing programmes, initiated as a temporary measure to prop up the failed banks but increasingly used to provide ‘cheap’ money used to fuel a massive debt explosion around the world.
QE was introduced with the claim by the US Federal Reserve central bank and Bank of England that ‘free’ or cheap money would be invested by banks in manufacturing industry and so kick-start a capitalist recovery.
In practice all these trillions were used to fuel an even bigger asset bubble around the world – all this paper money found its way into the hands of the speculators.
The banks and financial institutions will not invest in manufacturing for the simple reason that it is not producing profits and they are motivated solely by the desire for profits.
The present manifestation of the capitalist crisis is huge with capitalism internationally literally drowning in debt.
The national debt of the US, the most powerful capitalist nation, in 2022 surpassed $31 trillion for the first time in history; over 130% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product – the total wealth created.
This is the same picture throughout the capitalist world – a bankrupt system that is based on debt, a debt that the capitalist class is determined to make the working class of the world pay.
The banks, hedge funds and financial speculators grabbed the cheap money, made affordable by record near zero interest rates, and used it in a massive round of debt fuelled speculation, that sent share prices rocketing and created thousands of new billionaires virtually overnight.
The era of ‘free’ valueless money has debased the currencies which, along with the near zero interest rates, drove an explosion in inflation sending it spiralling out of control across the world.
Last year, the crisis reached such an epic proportion that the International Monetary Fund warned in July about ‘complacency’ over the massive debts run up by nations and individual companies, and that the world capitalist economy was crashing into recession.
By the end of 2022 the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned that attempts to end the era of cheap money and debt would fail, and that the belated attempts by the central banks to reign in QE and push up interest rates had only driven up inflation, and with it created a cost-of-living crisis for every worker in the west and for the impoverished masses throughout the world.
With no economic way to fix capitalism the only way open to the ruling class is a fight to the finish against workers and against the degenerated and deformed workers states of Russia and China.
The cry now from the bankers and the ruling class is that inflation must not be ‘entrenched’ by workers demanding increased pay to match the inflationary spiral and protect them from starving and freezing to death.
At the same time Russia is blamed for the massive surge in energy costs because of its refusal to buckle under all the war preparations that saw the Nato imperialist forces tear up all the promises given over 30 years ago that imperialism would not move an inch militarily to attack Russia.
Gripped by an historic crisis capitalism is in no position to offer any concessions but is driven to try and reconquer the world with wars, to regain the countries of Russia and China that it was kicked out of by the revolutions of the 20th century.
The war against Russia is presented as an unexpected crisis by the imperialist governments, whereas in fact wars to reconquer the world to steal resources and open them up to the domination and exploitation of capitalism are the inevitable outcome of capitalist crisis.
What has become clear to the working class and peoples of the world is that in its final death agony, capitalism is prepared to risk a nuclear world war alongside war at home on its own working class to make workers pay for the war on Russia.
All the sanctions imposed by the US, UK and EU on Russian oil and gas have rebounded on Europe and the UK, driving inflation and energy costs sky high, with the working class being told it must be grateful for the opportunity to suffer in order to prolong the war to weaken Russia.
As the US and UK continue to fuel and arm the war in Ukraine, the economic crisis in Europe sharpens and the EU dives into recession as super inflation takes hold, threatening to pauperise millions of workers and the middle class.
Workers across the US, UK, France, Italy and Germany are on the march against savage job cuts and wage-cutting pay offers that ‘their’ governments are determined to impose on them.
Italy has been gripped by a series of strikes over pay and conditions during December, with the Belgium unions calling a one day national strike demanding that energy prices are capped and an end to legal restrictions on wage increases.
In Greece workers have held a 24 hour general strike which saw thousands of protesters on the streets of Athens and the city of Thessalonica, demanding wage increases, where they clashed with security forces.
Paris has been brought to a halt by a major one day strike by Metro workers, while French riot police brutally confronted protesters venting their fury over soaring inflation and the cost of living crisis.
The energy crisis caused by sanctions on Russian gas and oil exports will increase the devastation of Germany where the entire economy has been built on cheap gas from Russia.
Forced to pay much higher prices for energy on the international markets German businesses announced this week that companies expect mass job cuts and closures, according to the German Economic Institute.
The German economy has historically been the powerhouse of the European Community, helping to prop up the weak economies of Italy and Spain. Greece crashing into recession in 2023 will be the nail in the coffin for the capitalist EU bloc.
The News Line sends greetings to the working class of Europe. 2023 will be the year of the socialist revolution throughout the continent.
Britain is already in a state of recession, and a recent forecast by the financial services firm KPMG predicted that the UK economy will shrink throughout 2023.
British capitalism ranks as the most vulnerable in the so-called advanced economies.
12 years of Tory austerity cuts, along with a massive QE programme and historically low interest rates has created a situation of crisis, with Britain described by one IMF official as being an economic basket case, and likening it contemptuously as being like a ‘banana republic’ but without the bananas.
With the national debt standing at around £2.4 trillion British capitalism has been surviving through debt and free money from the Bank of England printing press.
In 2022 the Bank started a drastic programme of interest rate hikes and replacing QE with QT (Quantitative Tightening) in a vain attempt to stem inflation.
By driving up cost through increasing interest rates the bankers intended to reduce inflation by making everything from energy, food prices, rents and mortgages more expensive, forcing the working class to spend less while at the same time inflicting mass unemployment on workers, as all the companies and industries that survived solely through loans crashed into bankruptcy.
Driving the working class back to the poverty conditions of the 19th century is the only way for bankrupt British capitalism to try and survive.
The massive economic crisis had its direct reflection in the political crisis that has engulfed the ruling Tory Party.
The Tories started 2022 with a large majority and a prime minister in Boris Johnson who promised Britain would ‘bounce back’ from the covid pandemic, and that the British financial services would bring vast wealth to the country.
In fact it was Johnson who was unceremoniously bounced out of his job when Tory MPs were forced to recognise him as nothing more than a charlatan not up to the job.
Johnson was replaced by the disastrous 44 days of Liz Truss as prime minister who managed to hasten the collapse of British capitalism at the same time as inflaming the working class with her billions of pounds in tax relief to the obscenely wealthy.
Her completely unfunded hand-outs to the rich frightened the money markets as it promised to drive the already unaffordable national debt even higher, at a time when the Bank was increasing interest rates making repayments on the debt shoot up.
The money markets dumped government bonds – used to finance the government – causing a run on the pound that threatened immediate bankruptcy for the UK banks and the UK government.
This forced the Bank to drop its policy of QT and embark on a mass printing of pounds to buy up the bonds to try and ‘stabilise’ the economy.
The entire fiasco of the Truss period demonstrated conclusively the extreme fragility of capitalism, and that all its economic strategies to avert a crisis are dumped when it comes to bailing out the banks and the financial system.
It also proved who really was in charge, as Truss was swiftly dispatched and replaced by Rishi Sunak, the multi-millionaire ex-merchant banker, chosen by the world financiers as the man to carry out their diktats – namely to crush the resistance of the working class.
Sunak and his weak crumbling Tory government face an insurmountable task as they are being forced to confront a working class that is rising up in mass strike action demanding decent pay and conditions.
Almost every section of the public services from nurses, ambulance and health workers, civil servants, teachers, university lecturers, driving examiners and rail workers, to name just a few, have been on strike, strikes set to continue and escalate in 2023.
The only force holding the working class back from a real reckoning with the Tories has been the leadership of the trade unions, who have strived at all costs to limit strike action claiming that one or two day strikes spread over weeks will force the Tories back round the negotiating table and win concessions.
Sunak has made clear there will be no concessions or talks on pay, and that capitalism cannot afford anything other than poverty for workers – workers who have already seen their real wages fall by up to 20% due to previous pay cuts and freezes.
Instead of concessions Sunak is promising to rush through new legislation in 2023 to make strikes illegal in the ‘national interest’ – that is for the interest of the profits of the bankers and bosses.
The working class will have none of this, and already the demand for the unions to end their avoidance of a real fight and to immediately organise the full strength of the unions in a general strike has been taken up on picket lines across the UK.
Those union leaders who oppose calling a general strike must be removed and replaced with the revolutionary leadership of the WRP, which alone is prepared to organise an indefinite general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers government and socialism.
This is the historic task immediately before workers and youth in Britain and throughout the world – to put an end to bankrupt capitalism that in its final death agony can offer nothing but war on workers at home and war against the people of the world.
Only the victory of the world socialist revolution can put an end to capitalist barbarism and advance humanity to a socialist society free from wars, where the productive forces are organised for the benefit of the people of the world not the profit of a few bloated capitalists.
2023 will be the year for building revolutionary parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the struggle for world socialist revolution.
This year, forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
