MAY DAY MANIFESTO
By the News Line Editorial Board
THE NEWS LINE editorial Board sends its May Day greetings for the year 2008 to the workers and poor of the world and to the struggling oppressed nations.
This is the year when the imperialist powers will suffer major defeats, and not just in the semi-colonial countries, but also in the advanced capitalist states, as they try and force the working class and the middle class to pay the massive costs of their historic crisis by slashing wages, jobs, pensions and benefits.
We salute the workers and the poor of Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories who are defying murderous Zionist attacks that even the Israelis have said constitute a new holocaust.
We are confident you will win your independent Palestinian state in the period immediately ahead.
We send our special revolutionary greetings to the insurgent people of Iraq who have disabled both the US and British imperialist armies and are close to a complete victory and a total withdrawal of their imperialist oppressors.
We know that your victory will be our victory and will revolutionise the entire Middle East and spell the end for the imperialists and the Zionists in that entire region.
That we are living in an exceptional revolutionary period, when capitalism and imperialism are in their greatest ever world crisis, in fact in their death agony – there is no doubt.
The centre of the world crisis is the United States, which has been brought down to earth by the trillion dollars spent on the failed expedition to capture Iraq’s gas and oil resources.
The object of this 21st century crusade was, through securing Iraq’s oil, to reduce oil prices to $10 a barrel, and open up the way for the ‘American Century’.
In fact, because of the failure of the US-UK war on Iraq, oil has now reached $120 a barrel and is on its way to new unheard of heights of some $200 a barrel.
This massive inflation of oil prices has led to a colossal inflation of all basic commodity prices.
These include all the metals, and all basic staple foods such as wheat and rice, meat, eggs and dairy products.
This failed system is now exposing billions of people worldwide to hunger and the prospect of starvation. We have already seen bread riots in Haiti, Egypt, Jordan, and many other countries, and we will see many more as they develop into uprisings of entire peoples.
At the same time, the development of this crisis has exposed the chronic indebtedness of the worlds bankers, who thought that they could trade in worthless paper ‘promises to pay’ for ever, and that they would never be called to account.
They are now in front of the tribunal of history and they are going to be judged very harshly by the revolutionary masses and by revolutionary justice.
Their crisis erupted with the failure of the US sub-prime mortgage market which forced the US banks to write off billions of dollars of mortgage debt.
The chain reaction that followed led to the undermining of the entire world banking system, as all of the banks that had bought part of the debt were forced to write down their assets and refuse to trade with each other.
The most indebted of the imperialist states, the UK was hit the hardest, with queues of thousands forming outside the Northern Rock bank demanding their money.
The only way to save the bank was to ‘temporarily’ nationalise it after pouring £100bn into its coffers of taxpayers’ money.
This tactic was borrowed by Brown from Mussolini who in the 1930s nationalised bankrupt Italian businesses, put the cash of the state into them, and then handed them back to the bosses.
This is what is planned at Northern Rock, as the forthcoming mass sackings of thousands of workers proves.
Now the US and British bankers have announced a novel doctrine, that has been taken up by the Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England as well as by premier Brown.
This is that the state has a duty to give a blank cheque of financial support to the banks, to be guaranteed from the revenues which the state has taxed out of the working class and the middle class.
That this is the road to state bankruptcy, as the economic crisis deepens, is obvious.
This however is the strategic policy that the Labour government and Brown have chosen. It is that capitalism has to be maintained at all costs and that the working class and the middle class must be made to pay the full bill for this catastrophe.
As a consequence of this, not only must the banks be propped up, but wages have to be slashed with three-year sub-inflation pay deals as prices rocket out of control, final salary pension schemes have to be abolished, the sick and the disabled have to be got off benefits, and health, education and housing have to be completely privatised.
This policy remorselessly leads on to a national government, Labour led with Tories, liberals and other ‘men of principle’, police chiefs and army officers in its cabinet which will have the job of imposing draconian cuts onto the working class and middle class.
This government will be forced together by a situation where the economic crisis worsens and a run on the British banks and the pound sterling begins, forcing interest rates sky high.
This is the road that Brown and the Labour government is taking.
At the same time the mass actions of the British workers are mounting as the 400,000 strong strike action last month showed.
Workers in Britain must be prepared to take general strike action to prevent the formation of a national government, and to bring down the Brown government, to go forward to a workers government and socialism.
For this task to be successfully carried out there has to be a massive building of the WRP, the British section of the Fourth International, out of the millions of trade unionists and the millions of youth who now reject capitalism and want socialism.
A revolutionary situation is now approaching at a great pace, not only in Britain, but throughout the entire world.
The crisis of capitalism is a world crisis. It can only be resolved through the class struggle on a world scale leading to the victory of the world socialist revolution.
The anarchy of capitalist production must be replaced by a planned socialist economy on a world scale in which the object of production is to satisfy peoples needs, and not to make profits.
In the United States the bosses have been destroying the wages and conditions of the most advanced sections of the working class with a ruthlessness born out of the depth of their crisis.
This onslaught has now produced a defiance amongst workers that can be seen at the six-week-long strike struggle at the American Axle car parts plant.
The US working class is being revolutionised, and this is being reflected in the support for politicians like Barack Obama who pledge and promise change, to end the war in Iraq and bring in universal health care in the US and bring back decent jobs.
Obama cannot deliver what he pledges, because this can only be done through revolution.
However the US workers are determined that this must be done.
They will rediscover their revolutionary tradition that produced the mass occupations and mass strikes that led to the building of the industrial trade unions and a generation of relative prosperity that has now definitively been ended by the capitalist crisis.
The US workers are going to be forced to break with the Republicans and Democrats and to bring in a Labour Party to fight for what the working class needs.
A section of the Fourth International must be built in the US to lead the struggle for the American socialist revolution, in alliance with the working class of central and south America and the revolutionary peoples of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.
In the EU workers face the same struggle as the British workers. This is what the mass strike actions to defend wages, the working week and pensions in Greece, France and Germany show.
What is being kindled in the EU is the struggle to replace the bankers and bosses EU with the Socialist United States of Europe and a planned European wide socialist economy.
For the workers of Africa and Asia, including the Indian sub-continent and Sri Lanka, the eruption of the class struggle worldwide and revolution in the advanced capitalist states will encourage them to push forward to remove the corrupt and venal national bourgeoisie and to replace them with workers power and workers and small farmers governments.
The struggle of the working class in the most advanced capitalist countries will also encourage the working class of the deformed and degenerated workers states of Russia and China to push forward to organise political revolutions to remove the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the new bourgeoisie that it has spawned, to introduce rule through workers’ and peasants’ soviets, as part of the world revolution.
Once again, the only real response to the world crisis of capitalism – that threatens the workers and the poor of the world with slump, war and starvation – is the world socialist revolution
It’s victory requires the building of sections of the revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International in every country.
On this May Day:
Forward to the victory of the British socialist revolution!
Build sections of the Fourth International in every country!
Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!