MAY DAY STATEMENT BY THE NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARDNews Line sends its revolutionary greetings to the workers, youth and masses of the world who today are engaged in a life and death struggle against a bankrupt and historically outmoded capitalist system that has reached the end of the road.
Today, the world capitalist system is in the grip of the greatest crisis that is beyond doubt the deepest and most far reaching in its history.
This crisis cannot be resolved in any other way than through the completion of the world socialist revolution that will dump capitalism and imperialism in the dustbin of history and advance humanity forward to socialism.
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 Israel’s genocidal 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 51,000 Palestinians, the majority being women and children, and was only possible because of the full support of the US and its faithful allies in Britain.
This failure has been a huge blow to US and world imperialism and created a massive crisis in the Zionist state with over 100,000 Israeli reservists either refusing or avoiding call up to serve in the occupation forces.
Trump’s boast of turning Gaza into the ‘riviera’ of the Middle East is in tatters along with all his boasts of rescuing US capitalism from crashing into bankruptcy.
The heroic resistance of the Palestinian people and the revulsion felt by hundreds of millions of workers across the world to the genocide being carried out in Gaza has ignited a mass movement that is terrifying the ruling class with its profound revolutionary implications.
The revolutionary nature of this crisis has erupted across the world as all the old relations between nation states have been ripped apart by US president Donald Trump.
Trump boasted before his election that he would be a dictator from ‘day one’ and true to his word, for once, he started off with a massive campaign, headed by Elon Musk and his DOGE outfit, of arbitrarily sacking hundreds of thousands of US Federal jobs, closing entire departments of state.
Trump’s campaign to slash jobs and federal spending had the aim of fulfilling his pledge to the American capitalists of massive cuts to regulations that inhibit their ability to exploit workers while dramatically cutting taxes for corporations and his multi-billionaire supporters.
All this would be achieved by making the rest of the world pay through a trade war on every country across the globe.
The immediate effect of Trump’s tariff wars was to immediately set countries at each other’s throats as the old relationship of ‘free trade’ between nation states was ripped apart.
Trump with his threats to invade Panama, Greenland and turn Canada into the 51st US state has sparked a huge crisis across the world that has exposed the complete fragility of America as the most powerful capitalist nation on earth.
His tariff wars, aimed predominantly against America’s main enemy China, immediately caused Wall Street and the rest of the stock markets to crash, forcing Trump to perform a humiliating retreat by announcing ‘relaxation’ of tariffs, including holding out the olive branch to China which so far it has rejected.
While Trump could shrug off Wall Street crashing, he, and his administration, could not ignore the fall-out amongst the international financial funds who buy up US government bonds and finance America’s massive $36 trillion national debt – a debt on which it has to pay $1 trillion a year in interest.
These bonds, previously considered a ‘safe haven’ for the money markets, overnight were transformed into high risk areas for finance companies to park their money.
US bonds have been dumped as investors fled upon realising US capitalism was in reality bankrupt and drowning in debt.
Trump, the would-be dictator, has ignited a mass uprising amongst US workers and youth over the huge surge in inflation and food prices along with his assault on the universities and a vicious war on all forms of dissent.
Mass protests of hundreds of millions of workers and youth across the US have broken out in April against Trump, while his popularity vote has plunged in the polls.
The working class and youth in the US are rapidly emerging as a powerful movement prepared to take on Trump and the capitalist ruling class.
Britain, in common with the rest of the world, has been hit by the world economic crisis, exacerbated by Trump’s attempt to re-assert US imperialism’s political and economic domination.
The Labour government under Keir Starmer have determined that the working class must be forced to pay for the crisis in order to ‘balance the books’ on a national debt of around £2.63 trillion.
Labour have tried to bring down this astronomical debt by slashing jobs in the public sector, refusing to repeal the Tory two child cap on benefits that has condemned over 1 million children to poverty and ending the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
In the latest attack on wages, Labour has made it clear that pay increases for public sector workers in health and education above the paltry 2.8% they intend to impose will have to be paid for by cuts in the NHS and schools.
This all-out austerity war to rescue capitalism from collapse can only intensify in the coming days and weeks, as the global crisis of world capitalism spins out of control, driving economic collapse on scale exceeding that of the Great Depression of the 1930s which saw workers forced into hunger and poverty.
But today, the powerful working class will not allow itself to be driven into the ground by a capitalist system that has reached the end of the road and can provide no future for workers and youth except mass poverty and wars.
The working class internationally are the force that has the power to put an end to capitalism that in its death agony can only offer a future of wars abroad and a class war to impose the crisis on workers at home.
The only way forward today is for the working class to use its strength by forcing the trade unions to call general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments and bring in workers governments that will expropriate the bosses and bankers, and advance to a socialist society, free from imperialist wars, and where the productive forces are organised for the benefit of the people of the world, not for the profit of bloated capitalists.
In Britain, this means building up the WRP and Young Socialists to provide the leadership required to kick out the Starmer government and bring in a workers government and socialism.
In every country the urgent task is to build revolutionary parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the struggle for the victory of the world socialist revolution that will consign capitalism to the dustbin of history where it belongs.