THE News Line editorial board sends its revolutionary greetings on this May Day to the insurgent workers of Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.
The Iraqi insurgency has defeated US and UK imperialism.
The development of this struggle inspired the masses of the Lebanon to chase the Israeli military out of their country, and the masses of Palestine to demonstrate the strength of their democracy by electing a Hamas government, and standing fast against all US-UK attempts to starve them into submission.
The victory of the Iraqi insurgency has split the US ruling class, setting the Houses of Congress against the presidency, with Bush preparing to veto their measure to begin a US withdrawal from Iraq in October 2007 and complete it by March 2008.
On this issue the Houses of Congress represent the will of the US people.
Thus the Iraqi insurgents have created the conditions for bringing down the Bush regime.
They are also on the brink of bringing down Prime Minister Blair, the inspirer of countless dodgy dossiers of all kinds, and of securing a speedy British withdrawal from southern Iraq, since British troops are now suffering unsustainable losses every time they leave their barracks.
The masses of Iraq, after suffering hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, and after seeing their country destroyed by the alleged ‘defenders of Christian civilisation’ have also struck huge blows in defence of other oppressed nations.
After their disaster in Iraq, no US regime, Democratic or Republican can even contemplate a land war in Asia to carry through regime change in Iran.
It was Lenin who declared that socialists had to unconditionally support the movement for national liberation since this would weaken imperialism to the point where the workers of the advanced capitalist states would be able to overthrow it.
He emphasised that without the assistance of this movement for national liberation the struggle for socialism in the advanced capitalist states would not be won.
Once again he has been proven to be correct.
The Iraqi revolution has not only inspired the masses of Palestine and the Lebanon to continue to fight imperialism, it has greatly sharpened the economic and political crisis of the imperialist powers.
It has created the conditions for a massive and permanent inflation of oil and gas prices, that has struck at the heart of imperialism as well increasing the specific political and economic weight of oil and gas producing anti-imperialist states such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
There has not only been a weakening of the US ruling class militarily and politically, but economically as well.
Witness the destruction of its great industries – the closure programmes of the Big Three motor car giants, GM, Ford and Chrysler, along with the collapse of the housing market and the collapsing dollar.
The conditions have been created for the US working class to push forward to bring down the Bush regime and not just to return the Democrats.
The working class will advance its defence of wages, jobs and basic rights, to demand a national health service and decent pensions for all in the US.
This forward movement will cause the US working class to break with both the Republicans and Democrats and to found its own Labour party, with a socialist programme.
In Britain the Iraq war has brought the chronic weakness of British imperialism to the fore. It is now nothing more than a camp follower of US imperialism. In fact the Iraq war has destroyed its territorial army and along with the Afghan war greatly weakened its regular army.
Politically, the Iraq war, along with the Blair-Brown privatisation programme has completely discredited reformism.
We now have a situation where the working class does not want Blair-Brown and also does not want Cameron and the Tories.
In fact a revolutionary situation is sweeping down on a much weakened capitalist Britain, whose industrial economy has been destroyed, and which is drowning in debt, with the bulk of the working class and the middle class being pauperised.
There is a growing popular revulsion with the bourgeois order and with the kind of bourgeois politics that spells out that a functioning Welfare State and a decent society are unaffordable.
This alienation from capitalism, and the sharpening of the class struggle, are creating exceptional conditions for a big growth in the revolutionary party to bring the historical crisis of British capitalism to its conclusion, with a socialist revolution.
All over Europe the same issue is posed, either into the abyss with capitalism or forward to a socialist revolution.
Everywhere the working class and the majority of the middle class has no choice but to go forward.
The requirement of the hour is for the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead this struggle.
In France the presidential election has revealed a class polarisation, with the left wing outside of the socialist party getting millions of votes more than the Stalinists.
In Germany the bosses are threatening to move all industries further and further to the east.
In Greece there are daily mass demonstrations as workers and youth resist the EU’s orders to the Greek ruling class to privatise everything.
Further east the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Kazakh workers are organising against the Stalinist bureaucracy and the new bourgeoisie that it has spawned.
As US imperialism and its missiles camp on the borders of Russia and Belarus the issue of ‘whither the USSR, either forward to socialism or backwards to capitalism’ remains to be settled.
There is no telling how long the alliance between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the pro-Putin new bourgeoisie will last under pressure from both imperialism and the Russian workers.
The only way to a future for the working class is for it to move forward to a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and its bourgeois allies, to restore rule through workers and peasants soviets, and to carry out the revolutionary reconstitution of the USSR.
Throughout Africa and Asia, in the new bourgeois states that emerged after the second world war, globalisation and the investment of foreign capital has brought a ruthless repression of the working class and civil war.
Sri Lanka is a major example of this.
After major foreign investment in clothing industries and tea plantations the government has been reduced to being a gendarme for foreign capital.
After the inflation in oil prices has driven up the cost of living, the working class through its trade unions is demanding more wages, a call that is anathema to the foreign capitalists.
They have instructed their Sri Lankan government to drive the working class and the trade unions back.
The Sri Lankan government has responded by restarting the war with the Tamil Tigers in order to split the Sri Lankan working class along national lines, and has then attacked the trade unions who are agitating for more wages by declaring that they are traitors and allies of the Tamil Tigers.
To reinforce the point a number of trade union leaders have been arrested and some have disappeared.
Globalisation has not brought democracy and freedom to Sri Lanka, only repression and war carried out by what has become the puppet government of foreign capital.
The Sri Lankan government is now running a war against the Tamil Tigers and the trade unions on behalf of foreign investors whose only concern is to keep Sri Lankan wages down and their profits up.
The only way out of this crisis for the Sri Lankan workers is to mount a general strike to bring the government down and then to go forward to a socialist revolution that will introduce workers’ power carried out by workers’ soviets.
There is no other road for Sri Lanka, and there is no other road for any of the other new bourgeois states of Africa or Asia.
In fact the period ahead is one where the world socialist revolution will erupt all over the planet.
The decisive question is therefore the building of sections of the Fourth International in all countries to lead this world socialist revolution to its victory.
MayDay 2007 is ushering in a period for the historic and revolutionary transformation of the planet.