STATEMENT BY THE NEWS LINE EDITORIAL BOARD
The News Line Editorial Board sends its warmest May Day greetings to the working class, youth and the masses throughout the world who are rising up in revolutionary confrontation against a bankrupt capitalist system which is in its death agony, and is gripped by the greatest economic and political crisis in its history.
Six months ago on October 7th, the Zionist state of Israel and its imperialist backers were shaken to the core when the Palestinian resistance organisation Hamas defeated all of Israel’s ‘impregnable’ military might, backed up and sustained by United States and world imperialism.
The illusion of an all-powerful US imperialism able to impose its will and exploitation on the world through military might was shattered on 7th October, leading to an unprecedented crisis for the US ruling class and its allies.
The barbaric response of the Zionist occupation regime was to launch a savage onslaught on the 2.3 million Palestinians forced by the Zionist occupiers to live in the Gaza Strip.
For six months, Israeli forces have bombed and launched ground attacks on Gaza that have killed over 34,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, according to the latest figures.
At the same time, Israel has carried out a systematic programme of mass starvation through its absolute control over food and medical aid entering through the Rafah crossing.
Despite the murderous genocidal war being waged by Israel they have failed utterly to crush the Palestinian people and drive them from their land.
News Line extends its warmest revolutionary greetings to the Palestinian revolutionary struggle which has created a major crisis not just in the Netanyahu regime but also in the very heart of US and world imperialism.
So much so, that in its annual ‘Threat Assessment Report’ on the state of America’s economic and political stability, the US intelligence agency, the CIA, reported that America faces an ‘increasingly fragile world order’.
According to the CIA, the major factor in the fragility of US imperialism is its assessment that Israel has no chance of defeating the Palestinian resistance to occupation.
Instead, it predicts that at best ‘Israel will probably face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come’ and that the risk of an escalation of the Gaza war ‘remains high’.
This dire assessment has proved correct, with the military actions conducted by Yemen against Israeli ships in the Red Sea creating havoc for the supply lines the capitalist class rely on for their profits.
The abject failure of the much lauded international naval force, cobbled together by the US and UK to stem these attacks, has underlined the inability of imperialism to ‘rule the waves’ as it once did.
Similarly, the retaliatory strike by Iran against Israel in response to the Israeli missile attack on the Iranian embassy and consulate in Damascus has been a direct challenge to imperialist domination of the oil-rich Middle East.
With the façade of military dominance being shattered by the Palestinian revolution, the US ruling class is now facing its greatest challenge at home.
Last week, protests by students began at Columbia University in New York City when they set up an encampment of tents on campus grounds demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an end to US military assistance for Israel and for the university to cease investment from companies profiting from genocide.
Police were deployed to break up the camp and over 100 students were arrested, but this police crackdown, along with the threat of suspension, has only served to ignite a wave of similar actions spreading in universities across the US from the East to the West Coast.
From Los Angeles to New York, from Austin to Boston, from Chicago to Atlanta, American students and faculty members at major US universities have risen up in support of the Palestinian revolution, in complete defiance of attempts to use the forces of the capitalist state to intimidate and crush them.
This massive rebellious and revolutionary upsurge amongst US student youth poses a huge threat to the dominant bourgeois parties in the US, with the approach of the presidential elections at the end of the year.
Hundreds of thousands of youth and workers, inspired by the Palestinian revolution, are now breaking with both Democrats and Republicans and are in revolutionary revolt over the support given by both bourgeois parties to Zionist genocide.
The US bourgeoisie is supplying all the bombs used to kill thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
Today we send our warmest greetings to American students who are showing the way forward for the entire US working class and the working class of the world, by leading the fight and breaking with the bourgeois parties, opening the way for building a revolutionary leadership prepared to take power and advance the American and world socialist revolutions to victory.
This is the struggle that is now reverberating across the world.
In Britain, workers and youth have demonstrated their massive support for Palestine and their hatred of the Tory government and the decaying capitalist system it serves.
In its final stage of imperialist decay, capitalism can only attempt to survive through wars abroad to reimpose its dictatorship on the world’s resources, while simultaneously waging war on the working class at home to dump the economic crisis firmly onto the backs of workers and their families.
In Britain, while the Tories, with the support of the right-wing Labour Party and their media supporters, are constantly banging the drum for war against Russia and China, they are also preparing to take the gloves off against British workers and their trade unions.
The prime target has been the unemployed and those workers and young people ‘economically inactive’ due to ill-health.
With Tory chancellor a Hunt proposing to cut benefits for the sick and disabled, the right wing media is increasingly calling for conscription to swell the ranks of the armed forces.
One Tory MP proposed conscripting the unemployed as the answer to the economic crisis of British capitalism.
At the same time, the Daily Telegraph is demanding that the central issue for both Labour and Tories at the general election must be building up the armed forces not spending money on ‘benefits or an unreformed NHS’.
The driving force behind world capitalism’s war on two fronts is the historic economic crisis that is crashing the economy of the US which will bring down the economies of every capitalist nation across the globe.
The depth of this catastrophic crisis has caused panic amongst the leading US bankers with Jamie Dimon, boss of JP Morgan the largest US bank, warning his shareholders last month that the era of American domination is collapsing.
Dimon cited the US national debt, standing at over $33 trillion, and the failure to defeat Russia despite all the billions handed to the Zelensky regime in Ukraine along with the failure of Israel to smash Palestinian resistance to occupation.
This, Dimon, asserted had ‘punctured many assumptions about the direction of future safety and security, bringing us to this pivotal time in history.’
Dimon added that the greatest fear amongst the US ruling class is that ‘America’s global leadership role is being challenged outside by other nations and inside by our polarised electorate.’
In other words, the US workers and youth are breaking from the two bourgeois parties and forging ahead down the road to the revolutionary overthrow of US capitalism.
In the UK, the Tory government under David Cameron imposed savage austerity cuts on the working class to bail out the bankers from the 2008 world financial crash.
There are cuts to wages and to spending on vital public services with the NHS brought to its knees through a sustained Tory attack on funding.
The bosses and bankers are demanding super-charged austerity and a class war to smash the unions and destroy the right to strike as the price for keeping the bosses and bankers from economic catastrophe.
The working class has already shown its determination not to be driven into the gutter by a bankrupt capitalist system that can only survive through war against the workers and masses of the world and the working class at home.
On this May Day, the working class is indeed at a pivotal moment in history.
It alone has the power to put an end to a capitalist system that is in its death agony by going forward to taking the power and advancing humanity to socialism.
Standing in the way of the working class throwing off the shackles of the bosses and bankers is the treacherous reformist leadership of the trade unions.
On every issue immediately confronting workers and youth they have remained completely silent on all the burning issues of supporting the Palestinian struggle while refusing to take on the attacks of the Tories on workers’ rights.
Not a single TUC leader or leader of any of the major trade unions has participated or spoken at the numerous demonstrations demanding an immediate ceasefire and an independent Palestinian state.
The imperialist wars being fought and the fact that the ruling class is demanding the working class pay for the world crisis of capitalism are ignored by the TUC. It is desperate to avoid a political confrontation that threatens to bring down the Tories and the entire British capitalist system.
These leaders avoid mobilising the full strength of the working class against the Tories and the capitalist ruling class.
Instead of organising the working class in a struggle for socialism, through a workers revolution, the TUC restricts itself to meaningless calls for ‘growth’ in the economy as they attempt to spread the illusion amongst workers and youth that capitalism is not completely bankrupt and still has a future.
The working class and its most revolutionary section, the youth, have shown they are not prepared to tolerate a future of mass unemployment and poverty.
The immediate historic task confronting workers, young people and the masses throughout the US, UK, Europe and the world is the revolutionary struggle to put an end to bankrupt capitalism with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This requires removing the old reformist leaders in the trade unions and replacing them with the new revolutionary leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
It requires the building up of the WRP and Young Socialists in the UK, and revolutionary parties, sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International throughout the world, to lead the struggle for the victory of the World Socialist Revolution and consign this bankrupt capitalist system to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
- Build the WRP and a mass Young Socialists in Britain to lead the struggle to make the TUC call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
- Forward to the independent state of Palestine
- Build parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International worldwide
• Forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution and the establishment of a World Socialist Republic.