THE Editorial Board of the News Line sends its revolutionary greetings to the workers of the world at a time of the greatest ever crisis of capitalism.
With the bosses seeking to dump the cost of their entire crisis onto the backs of the working class, the task of the hour is the completion of the world socialist revolution – which began in Russia in October 1917 – to bury capitalism and imperialism and go forward to socialism.
We send our special greetings to the Greek workers fighting the most savage cuts in public spending Europe has seen since World War Two.
We also support the heroic struggle of the Sri Lankan trade unionists and the Tamil masses in standing up to the Rajapaksa military-police dictatorship.
The Greek dockers’ leader described the situation in Greece yesterday morning to the BBC as a ‘permanent state of revolution’ as the working class fights the savage cuts in wages and pensions, the huge price increases, and the major hike in the retirement age being imposed by the Papandreou ‘socialist’ government on behalf of the EU bosses and the IMF.
The Papandreou regime is now a puppet government of the European Commission and the IMF which has dictated its terms for financial aid to the Greek government, and has its men in place in the Greek ministries to see that the policy is being carried through.
Already the Greek workers are calling for the removal of the EU-IMF Junta, while the Greek bosses are planning an attempt at a return to a ‘regime of colonels’ to forcibly impose starvation conditions.
The only way out for the Greek workers is to carry out a socialist revolution.
This will be the first blow of the European socialist revolution and will spread throughout the EU and even further, in conditions of a raging capitalist crisis where the German and main EU banks are loaded up with over a trillion euros of Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish, and Eastern European debt.
The notion that the European bourgeoisie could create a United States of Europe has been shattered by the crisis and the calls that are already being made by the German bourgeoisie for Greece and a number of the other ‘PIGS’ states to be drummed out of the euro and the EU.
The only viable way forward for Europe is to a Socialist United States of Europe and the Greek revolution is just the first blow in the struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe.
After May 6th they will be followed by the British, French, German, Spanish and Italian workers, who are all determined that they will not be loaded up with the costs of the capitalist crisis, while the bankers sneeringly insist that ‘market forces’ make their million pound bonuses untouchable.
We also send our revolutionary greetings to the workers and the poor of Palestine, Iraq and Iran at a time when Israel is threatening to evict thousands more Palestinians from the West Bank and Jerusalem (see page 6), and when it is also plotting with the United States to launch a military strike against Iran.
The Palestinian revolution continues to drive forwards. Its masses will not tolerate any ‘solution’ to their struggle that does not establish the right of every Palestinian refugee to return, that the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are to be abandoned by Israel, that East Jerusalem becomes the capital of Palestine, and that the Palestinian state is established along the 1967 boundaries.
Leaders who are willing to settle for less than this will find themselves removed by the masses.
Sixty-two years after the ‘Catastrophe’ – the establishment of the State of Israel – the Palestinian masses are determined not to allow the betrayal of their tens of thousands of martyrs, by the acceptance of anything less than their historic demands.
We salute the struggle of the Iraqi masses against the occupation and destruction of their land by the imperialists and their puppet regimes.
We are confident that your liberation, by your own hands, is not far away, and that it will not be long before the Iraqi people re-enter the revolutionary struggle in the Middle East to drive out imperialism and Zionism.
We also insist that the Iranian people have every right to develop nuclear power for their national economy, and that imperialism, which is armed to the teeth with nuclear bombs, as are its allies such as Israel, cannot be allowed to keep countries like Iran in a state of technical backwardness.
However, we do not equate the US workers and US imperialism.
We send our best revolutionary greetings to the workers of the USA and to the revolutionary peoples of the Americas – to the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Bolivian peoples.
The US workers are on the march for jobs for all, for universal healthcare, and for all ‘illegal’ immigrants to be welcomed to the US and be given citizenship.
The workers are not satisfied with the minimal health gains that Obama was able to achieve after he experienced how angry US workers were at the lack of progress.
More and more US workers are realising that Obama is never going to tackle the rule of the bosses and the bankers in the USA.
They are revolted by the sight of the tent cities of the homeless that have sprung up in every city of the US.
They are also astonished at Obama’s enthusiasm to make war in Afghanistan and elsewhere to secure US imperialist interests.
It will not be long before the US workers force their unions to break from the Democratic Party and form a Labour Party to fight for the interests of the workers and a socialist USA.
After all, if Obama can temporarily nationalise GM to save it for the bosses, there is no reason why the workers cannot permanently expropriate all of the bosses and the bankers to achieve the jobs, the healthcare and the pensions that they want.
We support every anti- imperialist action by the Venezuelan and Bolivian masses led by Chavez and Morales who are challenging the concept that South America is ‘Uncle Sam’s backyard’.
The future of American socialism rests on the united action of the US workers and the insurgent peoples of the Americas to overthrow US capitalism and imperialism.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the working class of the former Soviet States.
We hail the defeat of the Orange counter-revolution in the Ukraine, the emergence of workers’ strikes and demonstrations in Russia, the revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and the steps that are being taken to reintegrate the economies of Russia and the Ukraine as the beginning of the political revolution to reconstitute the USSR by revolutionary means.
This will overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Oligarchs that have emerged out of its attempts to restore capitalism, and replace them with rule by workers and peasants soviets.
A similar process is under way in China where the working class has begun to push forward against a Stalinist bureaucracy which declares that it exercises the dictatorship of the proletariat in a workers state which is made up of two social systems.
The class struggle is now sharpening in the New Economic Zones where the imperialists have invested their capital, while the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy keeps US capitalism from going bankrupt by its purchases of US Treasury Bonds.
However, US imperialism, is already threatening China that it faces ‘consequences’ if it does not revalue its currency so that its exports to the US are more expensive and US exports to China are cheaper.
The issue for China remains whether it is driven back to capitalism or forward to socialism via a workers political revolution as part of the world socialist revolution.
One of the centres of the wordwide struggle will be the UK.
After the May 6th general election a political realignment will take place as the ruling class drives to resolve its political crisis by quickly forming a national or coalition government, with leading Labourites in it, to prevent a Sterling collapse.
This government will then have to lay into the working class and the middle class with a Greek ‘socialist’ style ferocity.
It will be replied to in like manner by a working class and a middle class that will say that no party has a mandate to carry out such policies.
Under these revolutionary conditions even the pro-boss, leadership of the TUC, led by Brendan Barber, who signed the notorious Gate Gourmet sell-out deal, will be put in a position in relation to the whole trade union movement, as the Unite leaders have been put by events at BA, where they have to recommend rejection of what the bosses and the Labour government want.
In the UK we are entering into a period of mass actions by the trade unions that will include general strikes.
This is why the working class requires a new leadership that is in the battle to win it and will take every necessary action to do so.
A leadership must be built that is prepared to bring down governments to go forward to a workers government and socialism, as part of the world socialist revolution.
Our message to the workers of the world this May Day is the same as that of Leon Trotsky in 1938, when he formed the Fourth International.
He said: ‘The present crisis in human culture is the crisis of 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 the 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.’
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