THE News Line Editorial Board sends its May Day greetings to the working people of the world at a time when the world capitalist crisis is deepening and is everywhere driving forward the world socialist revolution.
The current crisis of capitalism is its deepest ever and the workers of the world must make sure that it is its last crisis, by carrying out socialist revolutions.
This crisis erupted in 2008 with the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. This rapidly spread to the world’s banks revealing to all that they were deep in fraud, and had no real money just promises to pay. This forced those who had boasted that they had resolved the capitalist crisis, such as Labour PM Gordon Brown, (he sold off most of the UK’s gold reserves as worthless metal for euros!) to mount bank rescue operations that cost the working class and the middle class over £1 trillion.
The banks had collapsed, and capitalism was broken so Brown and Obama organised that they should all be bailed out, at the expense of the lives and living standards of the working class of the UK, the US and the world.
To add salt to the gaping wounds of the crisis, both leaders organised Quantitative Easing programmes where hundreds of billions of dollars and pounds were electronically created and handed over to the banks as free money.
To keep this bankrupt, out-of-date system going, the masses of the UK, the US, the EU and the rest of the world were plunged into poverty on a scale not seen since the start of the 20th century.
Unemployment in Greece is 26% for adults and 60% for youth. Spain and Portugal are no different, while whole continents are starving.
All over the capitalist world the only jobs available are low-paid, part-time or temporary, constituting the worst kind of wage slavery. Capitalism badly needs burying. The world needs socialism.
But Brown and Obama, followed by Cameron and Osborne have seen to it that the working class and the middle class have been pauperised, plunged into unrepayable debt to the point where millions are living off food banks, while London has become the home of the world’s billionaires, with its centre being cleared to cater for them!
The working class has been put on notice that the NHS and the Welfare State are on the way out, and workfare and zero-hours contracts, ie back to the early 1900s, is now the future.
The tightrope of the crisis is drawn so taught that Osborne and other Tory leaders are warning that even a bank rate rise, or an end to Quantitative Easing could cause the new housing bubble that is developing to burst, with history repeating itself – to paraphrase Marx, as a tragedy in 2008, and a farce in 2014.
The working class in the UK and the rest of the world must take the power and establish socialism.
All of the major capitalist countries are now battle grounds where the working class, led by out-of-date Labourite reformist and Stalinist leaderships, is battling against savage austerity programmes, with the arrogant ‘Bullingdon Boys’ gang in the Cameron cabinet insisting that it is to be permanent austerity for many years ahead.
Workfare, zero-hours contracts, the end of the NHS and welfare benefits, and homelessness is the future. Get used to it, the working class is being told. This class war at home is the source of imperialist foreign policy to carry out regime changes abroad, to grab the oil and gas resources of the planet and slaughter millions in the process.
Advanced countries, such as Libya and Iraq, have been ruthlessly levelled in this cause. Millions have lost their lives, and no expense has been spared. We have seen the slaughter of hundred of thousands of Syrians by NATO’s Islamists and other stooge forces, in a desperate attempt to reorder the Middle East and its vast oil wealth for the benefit of imperialism and Israel.
However, we are not in 2008, and 2008 is not going to be repeated. The working class of the world has had enough of capitalism and its crisis, and will not put up with it in 2014. We are heading for socialist revolutions!
It was the intense hostility of the US and UK working class to the imperialist war in Syria that was behind the government’s defeat in the House of Commons when it sought permission to go to war.
The working class would not have it and Cameron and then Obama were foiled. Their goose in Syria has been well and truly cooked at the hands of the Syrian people, their army and the workers of the US and the UK, who are now looking forward to the re-election of President Assad.
However, such is the depth of the imperialists’ crisis that having been turned back in Syria, and rescued by Putin’s plan to get the Syrians to give up their wmds, their thanks to Putin was to organise a coup in Ukraine, using the fascists of the Right Sector as their stormtroopers.
This operation cost in all some $5bn, for dragging Ukraine into the EU in order for it to be plundered at their leisure, while at the same time NATO was to advance militarily into the Black Sea region and the Caucasus.
Every Russian and Ukrainian worker knows that imperialist policy has always been to turn east to grab the enormous resources of the USSR to relieve the crisis of the imperialist powers and restore capitalism there.
The signal for the coup was when President Yanukovych refused to hand over the Ukraine to the EU and US bosses. The workers of eastern Ukraine in particular have shown that they have not the slightest intention of allowing the EU to do to them what it has done to the Greek and other workers.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the workers of Ukraine who are defying the coupist government and are setting up soviets all over eastern Ukraine to organise the removal of the Kiev regime and replace it with rule though workers’ and peasants’ Soviets.
This revolutionary movement will spur on the Russian workers to reconstitute the USSR by revolutionary means, as part of the world socialist revolution.
The movement of the Ukrainian workers will also encourage the working class of the European Union to rise up and overthrow the EU, replacing it with the Socialist United States of Europe by expropriating the EU’s bankers and bosses and bringing in a socialist planned economy throughout Europe. Once again, the EU and US bosses want to get their hands on the gigantic resources of the area of the USSR.
In the same way they also want to overthrow the Chinese revolution, so that they can dominate Asia.
In fact, Obama has marked off the Pacific region as the major theatre of operations for the US armed forces, and is currently visiting the region to strengthen the US alliance with South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and other south east Asian states.
The fact is that the world crisis and the imperialist attacks on the working class, the oppressed nations, and Russia and China have created a common front of the working class and poor of the world.
The workers of the world must support Russia and China in the face of imperialist threats and attacks. Our slogan must be that the enemy is at home, and that the victory of the Syrian, Ukrainian or any other people is our victory, while our goal is to smash capitalism and imperialism on a world scale.
We also send our greetings and salute the epic and heroic struggle of the Palestinian masses for their state with Jerusalem as its capital, with no settlements and with all Palestinians having the right to return.
The workers of the EU, in particular must march arm-in-arm with the Palestinian masses and establish unity in action to impose a complete economic and cultural boycott of Israel, and to make every effort to break the blockade of Palestine.
An international boycott must be imposed until all Palestinian prisoners are released and until the Palestinian masses win a complete victory. We also salute and greet the workers of South Africa.
As the capitalist crisis has deepened so the international bankers and bosses and the South African bosses have sought to tighten the screws on the South African workers to step up their rate of exploitation.
There has been a huge change in South Africa. The working class and a number of trade unions, such as NUMSA, have had enough of the situation that has been established since the end of Apartheid.
This has seen South African capitalism being run by the ANC-CP-COSATU alliance. South African trade union leaders and ex-trade union leaders such as Cyril Ramaphosa have enriched themselves, becoming billionaire capitalists while the masses continue to live in extreme poverty.
The ANC-led alliance has run capitalism for the bosses, while the conditions of the masses have not changed at all. The South African masses have had enough of this.
The massacre of the Marikana miners by the ANC government and police was the last straw for the South African workers. The black masses now want to see a workers government that will nationalise the banks and the industries including the mines, as well as handing over the land to the rural poor.
New unions have emerged out of the Marikana massacre such as the AMCU which is leading a major strike of the platinum miners, against bosses who are based in the City of London.
The South African working class is now marching forward to a socialist revolution that will revolutionise the whole of Africa, and create the conditions for a United Socialist States of Africa.
The South African socialist revolution is on hand and its revolutionary leadership must now be built up rapidly.
The revolutionary partner of the South African working class in Africa is the massive Egyptian working class. The Egyptian working class brought down Mubarak and also the US-backed Mursi regime, when 18 million workers marched against it when Mursi refused to carry out the policies that workers wanted to see.
The powerful Egyptian trade unions will come into all-out revolutionary conflict with the regime to be led by ex-General Sisi as soon as it is installed, creating the conditions for the revolutionary leadership to be rapidly built up.
Alongside the South African trade unions and the South African revolution, the Egyptian workers will transform Africa and greatly influence the Middle East, in a much bigger way than the ending of Apartheid inspired the Palestinian struggle to go forward.
A revolutionary leadership in Egypt will enormously weaken the Zionist leadership of Israel and further loosen the hold of US imperialism on the Middle East. The Palestinian masses are now getting ready for an all-out struggle to establish their state.
This will take place as part of the struggle to drive imperialism and its stooge regimes out of the Middle East and to establish a Socialist Federation of Middle Eastern states that will use the enormous wealth of the region to benefit the working class and the Arab masses.
The workers of India and Sri Lanka are also advancing. They understand that only socialism can satisfy their requirements. The essence of the present situation is that the deepening of the world crisis of the capitalist system is driving forward the world socialist revolution rapidly, in leaps, in every corner of the planet.
What is required in 2014 is the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
In the UK, the task for 2014 is the building up of a mass movement of revolutionary workers and youth in the WRP and the Young Socialists that can rapidly build a new and revolutionary leadership inside the trade unions.
This will mobilise the unions to call a general strike to bring down the Tory-led coalition and bring in a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in socialism.
Building the revolutionary leadership is vital since the present TUC leaders have been examining the practicalities of calling a general strike for the last two years, greatly frightening themselves in the process, as they have stood by and watched as the Tories have pauperised workers and destroyed whole chunks of the Welfare State.
The British workers, like the workers of the world, require a revolutionary leadership to win the struggle for socialism.
• Build the Fourth International in every country in 2014!
• Forward to the British socialist revolution!
• Forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution!
