THE Editorial Board of the News Line sends its May Day greetings to the working people of the world.
Under the conditions of the greatest ever crash of the capitalist system you are battling to defend your jobs, wages, homes and basic rights against bankers’ and bosses’ governments who are determined that you will pay the full bill for the capitalist crisis.
Alongside the workers of the major capitalist states, in the same trench stand the peoples of the oppressed nations who are fighting their imperialist oppressors and their national bourgeois servants and the workers of the degenerated and deformed workers states who are now taking action against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Their unity in action is being driven forward by the world crisis of capitalism and constitutes the developing world socialist revolution. This, provided that the revolutionary leadership of the Fourth International is built, will put an end to world capitalism and imperialism in the revolutionary years ahead.
We salute the extraordinary courage of the Palestinian masses, both of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. They are battling bravely for their state, 61 years after the Naqba catastrophe, when the Zionists with the support of the imperialist powers established the racist Jewish state and then enlarged it, creating many more refugees after the 1967 Six Day War.
The failure of the Zionist armed forces to crush Hamas in the recent invasion of Gaza, when every possible weapon was used but failed to cow the Palestinian masses, indicates that the long period of the occupation is coming to an end and that the establishment of the Palestinian state through revolutionary means is on hand.
We also salute the extraordinary courage of the Tamil people and the Tamil Tigers. They are showing in the current fighting that they will never be defeated and that it is the Rajapakse regime that will come to grief, as the struggle is joined by the Sinhalese workers who are now having to pay a huge price for the Rajapakse dictatorship and for Rajapakse’s war.
The Tamil fighters will win their national rights, through uniting the Tamil and Sinhalese workers and carrying through the Sri Lankan socialist revolution.
With the imperialists and their bourgeois agents run off the island, the Tamil people will be able to exercise their right to secede if they wish.
We congratulate the people of Iraq who having run the British army out of Basra will now proceed to help the US army on its way.
Then, there will be the day of judgement for those ‘government ministers’ who rode into Baghdad on US tanks in April 2003, followed by the establishment of a provisional government that will re-establish Iraqi sovereignty over all of the country’s resources and launch a massive reconstruction and development programme.
We send our full support to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan struggling against US and UK imperiaism. We pledge that we will fight for the withdrawal of all UK troops from the region and stand for the defeat of the imperialist forces.
We send our support to the people of Iran, currently menaced by imperialism. Iran has every right to develop nuclear power and the international workers movement must fully support that right.
We salute the workers of the degenerated and deformed workers states who continue to pay an enormous price for the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but who are now driving forward in fierce struggles against the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Oligarchs who support it.
History has played a joke on Putin, Medvedev and the Chinese Stalinist leadership.
They placed their confidence in and put their resources at the disposal of the western
capitalists right at the point when the greatest crash ever of the capitalist system is emerging.
Putin’s perspective of a Russia that is Europe’s supplier of gas and oil and, from the massive surpluses that were to be accumulated, would dominate Eurasia has been ripped to shreds by the worldwide financial crash and the developing slump that has seen gas and oil prices collapse, along with the rouble.
The Russian new bourgeoisie, that emerged out of the CP at the time of Yeltsin, to seize nationalised property has been ruined in the banking crash, creating an economic and political crisis for Putin.
Putin attempts to rule as a Bonaparte.
He expelled from Russia the Oligarchs around Berezovskiy, who were straightforward servants of US imperialism and cultivated as the right foot of his base the sections of the new bourgeoisie that were prepared to allow the Kremlin a monopoly over political matters.
This new bourgeoisie has been ruined. The state has been unable to bail them out because of their vast debts to the western banks, while ‘their industries’ have gone bust, with many unable to pay wages.
Because of the collapse vital state-owned industries have also been unable to pay wages and anger is now rising in the working class. There have already been mass strikes and occupations and demands for the reconstitution of the USSR along with Gosplan and the planned economy.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, acting as a safety valve, has warned the Putin regime that there will be an uprising if the present situation continues.
The Putin-led bureaucracy which balanced with one foot on the Oligarchs and the other foot on the workers has now lost its balance entirely and is no longer sure or even confident about what it is doing, as it watches the workers of Russia and the Ukraine organising and mobilising, while sections of the western capitalists are making threatening noises and threatening war preparations.
The political revolution that is developing in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine is also emerging in China where the capitalist world slump has seen hundreds of factories shut in the New Economic Zones and millions of workers lose their jobs.
The Chinese Prime Minister has had to publicly confess his worries that the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Chinese government has invested in US treasury debt bonds are in fact lost, on top of the billions that the Chinese bureaucrats have gambled on the world’s stock markets using state funds.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the workers of Russia, the Ukraine and China. There is no doubt that your struggles are a vital part of the world socialist revolution.
However, the most decisive strategic areas for the world revolution will be North America and Europe where the conflict between the needs of the productive forces to develop and the private ownership of the means of production has reached the sharpest point, where the working class is posed with taking power.
The US banking system is broken and frantic attempts are continuing to be made to bail them out by the printing of trillions of dollars, while the world’s industrial giants are being broken on the rocks.
GM, the world’s biggest motorproducer, has sacked tens of thousands of workers, cut wages to the bone and closed dozens of plants to no avail.It can no longer stand on its own two feet.
It has had to appeal to the US administration to take a majority share in the company, along with the UAW autoworkers’ union, so as to be able proceed to the next phase of sackings, closures and wage and benefit cuts.
Crisis-ridden US capitalism is now destroying the productive forces.
The US workers will defend their jobs and their rights. They will defend their health care and their pensions.
The crisis will drive them along the road of breaking with the Obama regime and the Democrats, sacking their current bourgeoisified trade union leaders and moving to a Labour Party.
They will occupy the big plants to stop their closure and will demand the expropriation of the bosses and the bankers.
The rapid deepening of the world crisis is putting the struggle for a Socialist United States of America squarely in front of the US working class
In the days ahead it will show that it is more than capable of taking up the challenge and also of allying itself with its brothers and sisters in the Americas, including the revolutionary workers of Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, against capitalism and US imperialism.
We send our revolutionary greetings to the insurgent workers of Europe.
In France the biggest May Day marches since the Second World War are taking place.
Millions of workers are marching with students and taking massive strike actions against the attacks of the Sarkozy regime, the factory closures and its massive education cuts.
This insurgent working class is making the bourgeoisie of France tremble.
The French revolution is rapidly emerging and French revolutionary tactics will spread all over Europe, including ‘bossnapping’.
The German bourgeoisie is looking over its western borders in a state of fear, since with production falling rapidly in Germany, it is only a matter of weeks, not months, before the giant German working class emulates its French brothers and sisters but in a more thorough fashion.
Greek workers facing massive cuts and privatisations are already on the march, with the Greek youth at its head, full of courage and ardour for the struggle.
Italian and Spanish workers are not far behind and with massive growing unemployment and wage-cutting will soon catch up and overtake the others.
However it is the situation in the UK that is attracting the most attention.
Here there is a Labour regime that has publicly declared that its only concern is to safeguard the banks.
It has already handed over hundreds of billions to the bankers and bosses and run up the greatest debts in the history of British capitalism – debts which the working class and the middle class will have to pay for with their jobs, their homes, with rising food prices, with mass unemployment and with destroyed pensions and savings.
Already the government has announced in its budget that the public sector will be slashed by £15bn of ‘flexibility savings’.
Already the budget has planned for 20 per cent cuts in NHS spending.
Already the Royal Mail is to be privatised and workers having their wages frozen, a policy that the majority of British companies are adopting.
Already the motor car industry has begun to shut down, with workers resisting as they are at Visteon, with pickets and the occupation of the Belfast plant.
Faced with these savage attacks the trade union leaders and the TUC do nothing.
They continue to fully support the Brown government.
In fact the Unite trade union leaders have given £11 million to the Labour Party to save it from bankruptcy, while the same government’s policies are putting its members on the dole.
The British trade union leaders do not even bother to pose as socialists.
They refuse to fight sackings, refuse to support the occupations of factories threatened with closure and refuse to demand that they be nationalised since that would upset the Brown government and upset their allies like ex-CBI boss Sir Digby Jones.
Instead, they propose to march with him on May 16 and support his demand that there should be a national two-day week in industry with the government paying short-time working.
The trade union leaders will do anything except fight for the socialist policy of the nationalisation of slump-hit industries.
There is no doubt that an explosion of working class anger and the class struggle is coming in Britain.
This will require a new, socialist and revolutionary leadership inside the trade unions to defend workers’ jobs, wages, rights and their NHS and Welfare State and to fight for a workers’ government and socialism.
This leadership is being fought for and being built by the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Faced with the deepening of the capitalist world crisis and the fact that the working class, to defend itself, must be prepared to take the power and establish socialism, the question of the hour is the building up, worldwide, of the revolutionary leadership of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
We will close our revolutionary greetings to the workers of the world with Trotsky’s words from the ‘Transitional Programme’.
‘The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in 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 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.’
