2013 Manifesto – STATEMENT BY THE NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARD
THE News Line editorial board sends its revolutionary greetings for the year 2013 to the working people and the poor of the world.
It is now generally accepted that the world capitalist system is undergoing its greatest-ever crisis.
In fact, it is in its death agony, and for the future of humanity must be removed by the world socialist revolution, and replaced by a world socialist republic, based on a socialist planned economy producing to satisfy people’s needs.
This is the only way out of this crisis and that is through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
Central to this is building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country.
Everywhere the deepening of the world crisis has driven up food prices and mass unemployment, creating a vast army of unemployed youth and a gigantic leap in the development of the world socialist revolution, with the working class showing its power.
The News Line editorial Board sends its revolutionary greetings to the South African working class and especially to the miners of Marikana.
With their courage, audacity and willingness to die, they have brought an end to the period where the political heirs of Mandela, in the ANC, Cosatu and the South African Communist party were able to rule South Africa on behalf of international capital, enriching themselves in the process, by assisting in the super-exploitation of the South African working class, which remains living in shanty towns and working as cheap labourers.
The massive struggles of the miners and the farmworkers have opened up the road for the building up of the revolutionary party in South Africa to lead the South African socialist revolution to expropriate foreign capital, the bankers and the bosses and hand over the land to the people.
The huge movement forward of the South African working class has had a massive impact in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria, where the trade unions are now on the march and where the youth are discussing and organising for socialist revolutions and a Socialist United States of Africa.
News Line also sends its revolutionary greetings to the workers of Tunisia and Egypt where the revolutions that overthrew Ben Ali and Mubarak are continuing against Islamist regimes that have emerged as the new agencies through which imperialism rules.
And also to the Libyan masses who are resisting the rule of the US-supported Islamists who have handed over Libya’s oil wealth to the imperialists, following the murder of Gadaffi.
The Egyptian workers are completely opposed to Mursi and the rule of the US-backed Muslim Brotherhood which is seeking to put the leaders of the opposition on trial for treason, and which supports the overthrow of President Assad in Syria.
The Egyptian workers want free trade unions. They want to elect their own union leaders and they want a socialist revolution to bring forward a government that represents the working class and the rural poor.
The Egyptian working class is the giant of North Africa and the Middle East and its revolutionary movement is already inspiring the masses and youth of Palestine to push forward beyond the present political leaderships for socialism.
We send the Palestinian masses and youth our most fervent revolutionary greetings,
The heroes in Gaza who fought Israel to a standstill, till the US got Mursi to negotiate a truce, were supported by an intifada in the West Bank, when tens of thousands of youth took to the streets and battled with the the Zionist occupation army.
The Palestinian trade unions are now also in struggle against the notorious consequences of the Oslo agreements.
The masses of Palestine no longer support a two-state solution.
They are for united revolutionary action with anti-Zionist Jewish workers and youth to establish the state of Palestine over all of its territory with Jerusalem as its capital and with all refugees having the right to return.
Their struggle has been enormously strengthened by the revolutionary movement of the Egyptian workers.
Internationally the imperialist powers have sought to hit back as the crisis developed.
They have imposed regime change in Libya, and destroyed the country, and are attempting the same in Syria.
They are again allying themselves with the feudalists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, and a number of reactionary Islamist movements, to overthrow another Arab nationalist regime, which was a bone in Israel’s throat – and anti-imperialist in alliance with Iran.
Iran is the next state on the US–UK–EU hit list if they should succeed in Syria in overthrowing the Ba’athist Assad, replacing him with imperialist puppets.
The aim is to grab the oil and gas resources of North Africa, the Gulf and the Middle East.
Then the imperialist powers will move on to challenge Russia and China (the US is already moving its most advanced military forces into the Pacific region), and no amount of help from Putin to try and find some ‘democratic way’ to get rid of Assad in Syria for the imperialist powers, will lessen the imperialist pressure on Russia and China, or reduce its war drive, since it is being driven on by the depth of the capitalist crisis.
Meanwhile in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the feudal regimes that are supplying the guns, the cash, and the fighters to try to remove Assad in Syria, are themselves fighting for their lives against pro-democracy movements.
The time is here for the building of sections of the Fourth International all over the Middle East and North Africa to organise socialist revolutions to drive the imperialists and Zionists out of the region, overthrow the feudalists in the Gulf and establish a Socialist Federation of Middle Eastern States.
The major response of the capitalists and imperialists to the crisis of their system has been to begin the forcible pauperisation of the working class and youth of Europe and America, destroying all Welfare States, benefits, health services and all of the gains of the working class in the process, including free state education.
Wages are being driven down, prices are rising, and tens of millions are being sacked or forced into taking part-time work at part-time pay.
In all of the advanced capitalist countries, a savage struggle is now taking place where key government ministers are appointed to push through extreme austerity measures, including mass unemployment, creating armies of unemployed youth and whole communities that live off food banks, since they have no money to buy food.
In Greece, Portugal and Spain, youth unemployment is over 50% while unemployment as a whole is in the region of 25%.
There are marches and mass demonstrations every day against the dictatorship of the banks and the speculators.
While the established Stalinist and reformist trade union leaders engage only in the minimum of protest actions, the masses are being driven along the road to revolution and openly call for the expropriation of the bankers and the bosses and for workers’ governments.
In Italy, there is mass anger at the austerity measures and the appointed Prime Minister Monti has resigned in the face of the mass opposition to his policies.
In France, and Germany unemployment is growing, the motor car industry is in crisis and is closing down, while the German government is driving to a greater EU integration and central bank control on the basis of the destruction of the Spanish, Greek, Portuguese and Italian economies.
With tensions rising by the hour it is only a matter of time before a revolutionary eruption begins in Greece or Spain and spreads throughout the EU.
Now is the time to build sections of the ICFI throughout the EU to organise socialist revolutions and go forward to the Socialist United States of Europe, by expropriating the bosses and bankers and establishing a planned socialist economy.
Of all of the EU states, the UK is gripped by the deepest economic, political and historic crisis.
Britain has lost its empire, has wound up its industries and has seen its banking system go bust and be, as well, completely discredited by the rigging of the Libor rate and HSBC functioning as the bank of the Mexican drug cartels.
The News International crisis has exposed the fact that the government and the police were hopelessly compromised with the Murdoch empire, which supplied media spokesmen for 10 Downing Street and the Met Police while employing leading retired police officers.
With a zero economy, and faced with a massive working class, the only bourgeois solution to the UK capitalist crisis is the complete destruction of the NHS, the Welfare State, free state education and the scrapping of the entire benefit system.
Facing a population that cannot go along with these measures, the state itself is in a deep crisis, and split and divided.
The Tory Party is at war with the police and vice-versa; the government does not know whether it is or is not to remain in the EU, the media are now fighting state regulation, the armed forces have suffered serious defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan and are being cut, while the government is seeking to bring in secret courts and state control of the internet. Then there are the scandals: among them how Jimmy Savile, who has now been publicly disgraced after his death, was made a knight by the Queen and the Pope and had very close relations with Margaret Thatcher.
This is not a state that is in the best possible shape for forcing the vast majority of the people to accept what they are determined never to allow to happen, the destruction of the Welfare State and the NHS.
It is clear that in this coming year, in the UK, hundreds of thousands will take to the streets to defend the NHS, the Welfare State, and their wages and jobs.
It is clear that under these conditions that the coalition will be brought down and the issue of taking power will suddenly appear in front of the working class.
The only alternative to a worker’s government will be a Miliband-led coalition that will carry on where Cameron left off.
What is decisive is the building up of the WRP in this new year of revolution to lead the way from the bringing down of the coalition to a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and go forward to socialism as part of a Socialist United States of Europe.
The USA is however not going to be a spectator to the revolutionary convulsions in the EU, the UK and the Middle East.
The US fell over the edge of the cliff in 2010. It has a colossal debt that is being bought up by China that manages to keep the US afloat.
The current fiscal cliff drama is to decide the best way to skin the US working class.
In this new year, US workers will be faced rapidly with breaking with the Democrats and forming a Labour Party to defend their class interests.
The US section of the ICFI will take part in such a Labour Party and play the leading role in bringing forward the American socialist revolution.
Meanwhile, attempts by the US to intervene in revolutions abroad, either in the Middle East, Africa or the EU, will meet a massive response at home many times greater and more powerful than the movement that brought the US to its knees during the Vietnam war.
2013 will be the year of revolutions that will provide the essential support for the Russian and Chinese workers to organise political revolutions to overthrow the Chinese and Russian Stalinists and bring in workers’ democracy and soviet power.
As Leon Trotsky said in the Transitional Programme: ‘The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership.
‘The advanced workers united in the Fourth International show their class the way out of the crisis.
‘They offer a programme based on international experience in the struggle of the proletariat and of all of the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offer a spotless banner.
‘Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International, it is the banner of your approaching victory.’