NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARD NEW YEAR STATEMENT 2025
THE News Line Editorial Board sends revolutionary greetings for 2025 to all our readers and to the working class, youth and masses of the world.
Across the world the workers and masses are rising up against a bankrupt capitalist system that is in its imperialist death agony, torn apart by the greatest economic crisis in its history.
It is this world crisis that is driving the revolutionary uprisings that erupted across the globe in 2024 – a crisis that must be resolved through the victory of the world socialist revolution in 2025.
We send our warmest revolutionary greetings to the Palestinian people who have faced an unprecedented genocidal war by the imperialist-backed Zionist regime.
Despite the massive number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli campaign of indiscriminate bombings, and the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war, the Zionists have completely failed to crush the Hamas resistance, release captives or force Palestinians out of Gaza.
This campaign of genocide has killed over 45,000 Palestinians, the majority being women and children, and was only possible because of the full support of the United States and its faithful allies in Britain.
Israel’s role as imperialist attack dog in the Middle East has failed to defeat Hamas and it has failed to destroy the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah.
News Line sends revolutionary greetings to the Lebanese resistance force and masses who fought Israel’s attempt to smash their support for Palestine by bombing and a military invasion.
At the end of November, the Israeli ‘security cabinet’ of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to accept a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah.
This ceasefire was pushed on them by the US and France desperate to put an end to a disastrous war that they knew would escalate beyond control throughout the Middle East.
As Hamas stated at the time: ‘The enemy’s acceptance of the agreement with Lebanon without fulfilling the conditions it set out is an important milestone in shattering Netanyahu’s illusions of changing the map of the Middle East by force.’
It was also a shattering blow to Israel’s imperialist masters, whose scheme to obliterate Palestinians, crush all resistance to imperialist domination and secure the oil rich region for capitalist domination has met the unbroken resistance of the masses.
The entire situation has spiralled out of control of the Zionist regime and its backers, who have long portrayed Israel as the only ‘democratic country’ in the region and conferred on it the absolute right to ignore rulings by the International Criminal Court, which in November finally issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
What is impossible to ignore is the massive support for Palestine by workers and youth across the world.
In the UK, hundreds of thousands have marched every week calling for the defeat of their own government and in support of a general strike to end all complicity and arms deals with the genocidal Israeli regime.
There are mass demonstrations throughout Europe, while in the US, students are carrying on with campus occupations in support of Palestine despite all the threats and intimidation against them by college authorities and the police.
This uprising by tens of millions of workers and young people has created a massive crisis for the world capitalist class.
The ruling class are already reeling from the abject failure of imperialist war in the Ukraine designed to weaken Russia and leave it open to regime change and capitalist restoration.
The attempts by world imperialism, led by the US, to impose regime change and dictatorship on the world is driving revolution across the globe as workers and youth rise up against war and the barbarism of a capitalist system that is gripped by economic and political crisis.
This is a crisis that the ruling class can only hope to survive by dumping it on the backs of the people of the world and the working class at home.
This war on two fronts has created absolute turmoil and catastrophe in the old bourgeois political order.
In Europe, the two main capitalist nations, France and Germany, both enter 2025 without functioning governments as the old bourgeois political order has collapsed.
In both countries, the immediate cause of these collapses was the resistance of the working class to savage cuts to government spending that the bankers demanded in order to cut the massive national debts of both countries.
It is the debt crisis that is strangling capitalism across the globe, and driving revolutionary confrontations as the ruling class attempt to bring down debt by destroying the wages and benefits of workers.
In Britain, the Starmer-led Labour government has shown its intentions to obey the diktats of the bosses and bankers by launching a vicious attack on families, through the refusal to scrap the Tory two child benefit cap, and on the elderly by ending the winter fuel allowance.
The bankers and bosses are now demanding that Starmer drop all his other pledges about increases in the minimum wage and workers’ rights on exactly the same grounds that British capitalism cannot afford wage increases or job protections.
The economic crisis will only intensify in the new year as Donald Trump becomes US president on January 20.
Trump has already announced that he will deal with the staggering US national debt, which is standing at $36 trillion (£28 trillion) – larger than the entire US economy – by cutting $2 trillion from state spending.
These cuts will be borne by the US working class.
Along with these cuts, Trump has announced a policy of trade war on America’s rivals with promises of tariffs on imported goods ranging from 20% to 60% – increases that will drive up the cost of living for US workers while destroying the economies of the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.
The working class and masses of the world will never accept being driven into poverty, destitution and the grave to preserve the profits of the ruling class.
The working class have the power to put an end to capitalist barbarism, that in its final death agony can only offer a future of wars abroad and class war at home, by advancing humanity to a socialist society free from wars and where the productive forces are organised for the benefit of the people of the world and not for the profit of a handful of bloated capitalists.
The urgent task in 2025 is to make it the year for building revolutionary parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the struggle for the world socialist revolution.
In Britain, this is the year to build up the WRP and Young Socialists to provide the leadership required to organise a general strike to bring down Starmer’s Labour government and go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.
2025 will be the year for the victory of the world socialist revolution with capitalism consigned to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
