May 27 2022

The international conditions of the capitalist crisis

In the midst of hard inter-imperialist disputes for the world market, and in particular for Russia and China…

With inflation, unbearable cost of living, recession, unemployment, massive migrations of slave workers and wars…

The crisis and bankruptcy of the capitalist world economy accelerate

This issue of “The International Workers Organizer” is released in moments in which the crisis and the capitalist catastrophe don’t cease to deepen. As we have said in our Special Supplement issued in late April, dedicated to the war in Ukraine, the crisis of the imperialist world economy does not hit the ground yet. It is taking large sectors of the planet to catastrophe. Entire branches of production and countries such as China are in recessive processes and tens of other nations are indebted and plundered.
Meanwhile, other branches of production are developed dynamically and accumulate great profits, as it happens with the minerals, oil, commodities, food industry and pharmacies, which are producing commodities way above their value, which pushes inflation even higher.
This is how the capitalist system Works in the imperialist epoch: it develops a branch of production, pole or sector of the world economy while destroying most of the wealth of the planet.
This led to a handful of imperialist parasites accumulating great super-profits at expenses of hunger, despair and unemployment of millions of workers in the planet and over-plundering of the semi-colonial world.

After huge recurring crisis and crashes in this 21st century, the world market has shrunk while the population keeps growing. A chronic unemployment is consolidated, with more than 800 million inhabitants of this planet unable to find a job to survive. A part of them comes and goes to the productive process irregularly, while most of them are out of it. The waste of labour force, the commodity that produces all wealth, is the full expression of the bankruptcy of the productive forces.
Reformism, which says the working class can improve its living standards under the current conditions, hits their nose against this reality every day and also clashes with life itself of the working class.

The fight for the existing surplus sharpens the class struggle and the voracious character of a system in clear state of decomposition and crisis. As revolutionary Marxism says, a system that cannot feed its slaves deserves to die.

There hasn’t been world crisis or attack of the capitalists that went without response by an offensive and fierce resistance of the masses, opening pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situations here and there.
We have seen this in USA against Trump, in the struggles in the whole Latin America, in the uprisings in Southern Africa, in the revolts in China, in the heroic struggles of the working class in Greece, France, England, Spain… In South Africa the workers had defeated Zuma, one of the most hated governments of the ANC with the method of the general strike… Let alone Middle East, shaken by a thousand and one mass uprisings, which do not stop in 10 years and has turned the working classes of those countries in one of the vanguard sectors of the world proletariat.
Reformism hides these huge struggles, branding them as “impotent rebellions”, as the so-called “anti-capitalists”, various Stalinists and former Trotskyists of national groups like PTS of Argentina or British SWP do. These currents blame the masses for their own treasons and shames.
The key of the crisis of the working class is the leadership crisis, that is to say, the overabundance of treacherous leaderships.

Under these conditions, the inter-imperialist disputes are exacerbated. The struggle for new markets and for the raw material sources has sharpened the disputes among the imperialist powers and threatens the civilization with new catastrophes, wars and barbarism. The ongoing war in Ukraine is part of this process, with USA settled in NATO, retaking the lead in the offensive to recolonize Russia and take its raw material sources, displacing the French-German axis from the hegemony of this business.

When this international paper is printed, the Davos World Economic Forum, would have finished. It is a meeting of the general staff of the imperialist counterrevolution; a summit of the biggest millionaire and exponent of the most rapacious capitalist governments of the planet.
In that meeting, the bourgeoisie and the ruling elites, the heart of the capitalist parasites, have concernedly noted the upcoming of a hunger crisis in the planet. Their own prognosis scares the hell out of them and they are getting ready to deal with large unrests, uprisings and revolutionary upheavals of the world masses, as one of their most select spokespersons wrote in the “The Economist”. They are getting ready to crush the hungry workers and exploited, as they have been doing in tens of mass revolutionary uprisings in the planet. They are getting their governments and regimes ready, controlled by the finance oligarchies in the Metropolis, and the leaderships of the labour bureaucracies and aristocracies that operate under their command, as a true fifth column in the struggle of the workers.

They are a true counterrevolutionary general staff. In the Davos World Economic Forum, they discussed the hottest questions of world economy and politics, to centralize the imperialist bourgeois front and discipline the treacherous leaderships of the masses under their command, as they bought them off long time ago.
The crisis of the proletariat is that it does not have a revolutionary international world command to concentrate its struggles internationally and to open the road for the defeat of the leaderships which are in the payroll of the big capital and subject the slaves to the enslavers.

The capitalists and imperialism, their governments and regimes, are getting ready to continue making the masses to pay for the crisis they caused

Inflation, recession and war are the path that capital seeks to recompose its profits

The world capitalist system is coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, which sharpened the crisis and recession of world-economy.

In every outburst of the crisis there are billions of dollars without backup in goods that are evaporated. Just to provide an example, during the outburst of the housing bubble in 2008, 90 billion dollars in fictitious values were lost, bearing in mind that the sum of all trade and market operations in the world mounts to 400 billion dollars. They sole, spent and wasted more than 20% of the world trade. And now they want to keep on throwing the crisis to the masses, after attacking their gains one by one, sending millions of workers to chronic unemployment, making their existence impossible, due to the high cost of living.

The transnationals and companies were rescued by the states by printing money, while the working class only suffered more hunger, unemployment and misery.
The Federal Reserve in USA, under the Obama government, gave 600 thousand million dollars to Wall Street broken banks in only one move. Those funds were never recovered. The American state has been giving 262 thousand million dollars to the US war industry to develop high tech equipment for destruction. With three times that value, USA keeps its troops and army in the whole world. With four times that value, the imperialist states saved all the finance oligarchy of Wall Street, London City and the imperialist Maastricht, state-izing their losses, as in 2008 with the outburst of housing bubbles and finance roulettes of the US pirates.
The cause and engine of the inflationary processes that today shake the planet is printing dollars and values without any backup in goods, as we said, to support the parasites and shareholders of the transnationals and international finance capital, so that a handful of them get superprofits in the world economy.
As revolutionary Marxism says, wherever there’s no human labour producing goods and commodities, no value can be created, not even by a non-existing God. It will just fall apart as a house of cards with heavy wind.

As we said, only a handful of branches of production grew from 2019 to 2021, in the middle of recession, with the outburst of the stock markets and the Covid pandemic.
These branches of production are pushing up the prices of food, minerals, commodities, energy, medication, etc. and are propelling the inflationary processes and devaluation of the currencies. This means the plunging of wages, the cost of living and hunger of the masses.

The world economy is approaching openly to a period of stagflation, i.e. recession plus inflation. This is the direct result of three crashes of the capitalist economy, one in 1997-2001, other in 2008 and the third in 2019-2020. These crises, as true pre-heart attacks, announce this rotten system cannot continue without attacking violently the working class and the subjugated people, and without wars to destroy and then recompose its value. As Trotsky says, war is the biggest enterprise and trade in the world, and is the most important economic factor of our time, as Lenin said…
In its rotten state, capitalism only develops destructive forces, by indebting the states and allocating high expenditure in weaponry.
Even Germany, in the middle of the crisis in Europe for the war of Ukraine, is preparing to invest over 500 thousand million euros in weapons production, at the same time it funds its technological industry for microchips production for the war industry and, secondarily, for the auto industry and other branches of production. Meanwhile, France is the third high tech weapons seller in the world, followed by Germany, competing with USA and the declining Russia.

Under these conditions, the current world crisis is developing. And now, the fall in production of raw materials because of the war in Ukraine and the blockade on Russia deepen this huge food crisis in the whole planet. This happens while great superprofits are generated, which went to imperialist hands, the Chicago Board of Trade and cereal companies such as Bunge, Cargill and Monsanto, the ones truly managing the farming income in the commodities producing nations.

To prevent its decline, US imperialism not only promotes an aggressive policy against imperialist Maastricht to besiege Russia… but it also goes for China

The division of labour in the world economy and the military political balance of the planet is broken and cannot re-constitute.
On the one hand, as we have been insisting, the US offensive has broken the common European market and the division of labour established in it. Russia was the provider of gas, oil and commodities of the whole Europe. It supplied raw materials and food to Maastricht European Union of the French-German axis and other minor imperialist powers.
With the war in Ukraine, USA with NATO not only sought and seeks to besiege Russia and get its raw material sources but it was the decisive cause in making the established policy and economy in Europe to burst out. The US left the French-German axis with no gas, no oil and they separated them from its big businesses in Russia.

On the other hand, US imperialism, with Biden, also launched an offensive in the Pacific. With the British pirates took away from France the business of making more than 20 nuclear submarines for Australia. It is now clearer that USA built a new NATO in the Pacific, in pacts with Japan, where it has its largest military bases, and lately with South Korea. Also, it announced Beijing that it won’t tolerate them if they go for a single inch of land in Taiwan.
With its offensive in the Pacific, USA also is dislocating Germany from its privileged position there, especially in their trade with China. Frankfurt had been controlling each time more branches of production of machines-tools, auto industry and medications in China, and its finance capital kept on penetrating more and more in the Chinese banking system. Also, Germany and France had been trying to build the “silk route” from Beijing to Frankfurt, advancing in the trade race with China against USA.

Today, US imperialism is in a totally aggressive position in the world economy and politics. After it failed in Trump’s attempt to compete with the imperialist Europe rising the tariffs on European exports to USA, and the same it tried to do with China, to force it to give them their domestic market.
With Biden, USA returns with the gunboats and NATO to re-establish an order in the world market under its hegemony. This is what the war in Ukraine is about: The US give it away as a pawn in the claws of Putin, even letting Russia to annex a part of its territory, after it destroyed it militarily and politically, but without letting Moscow to win the war. This situation will let USA, without firing a single bullet, to keep the sources of gas, fertile lands and the huge wealth of minerals of the Ukrainian nation, already devastated and at the same time to put Sweden and Finland under its command, as they entered NATO these last weeks.

Meanwhile, Spain is rubbing its hands with France. They marched over the huge gas pipelines and oil pipelines in Algeria, reopening the ones of Morocco, so they can be the great dealers of energy to Europe. With this US offensive, the lie of the “European Union” falls down. What happens is a policy of “save whoever it can” … and however it can.

These discussions and contradictions of the imperialist powers ere expressed in the Forum of Davos by George Soros, the mogul that knocked down the British pound in the ‘90s. Soros affirmed that the war in Ukraine “could have been the beginning of Third World War” … He denounced that “Europe dependence from the Russian fuel is still excessive”. He denounced that this is because “mostly the mercantile policies followed by former Chancellor Angela Merkel”, which had “made special treaties with Russia for the supply of gas and turned China in the biggest export market in Germany.” This shows how the mogul of imperialism are located, talking without any restriction.
If one imperialism is doing fine, the other one is not. Germany, France and the European imperialist block began to be fine while USA not.
What about the chances for World War III? Despite Soros, Marxists affirm that it is yet to see if the world working class (in the central countries as in the semi colonial world) lets this happen. It is yet to see if the working class is willing to die for the businesses of its executioners in the different imperialist gangs of the planet. This is not yet defined.

An aggressive political, economic and military offensive of US imperialism is underway to retake control in the world economy, which was not achieved by Obama or Trump with negotiations or customs barriers

USA re-imposed restrictions on China, denouncing it of stealing technology and forced Europe to cut every high technology trading business agreement, as it happened with 5G systems in Huawei cellphones.

The split of the world division of labour in the world economy as a result of the US offensive not only left Russia each time more isolated, as we showed here, but also it has opened a deep recessive process and siege on the Chinese economy. It had been hit by the tariffs imposed by Trump and also by the housing bubble created by capitals that came out of the productive process and migrate to finance investment, making the properties’ prices so high that they were too far from their true value. With the shutting down and blockade of the “silk route” with Europe and the outburst of the finance bubble, as it happened in USA in 2008, which threatens to send a great share of the Chinese banks to bankruptcy, this Asian nation has entered into a deep recessive crisis, sharpened a thousand times more by Xi Jinping’s government of conquering “Covid Zero”.

A new deep recession in China is here. Huge masses of capital of the transnational companies and the finance oligarchy in London City, Tokyo, Wall Street and Frankfurt possess huge investments in China and they collect fabulous super profits. The recessive Chinese crisis threatens to restrain a great rising domestic market, sources of businesses with the transnational companies, as we said, and has been acting as a counter-tendency to the crisis of over production of the world economy.
China’s growth won’t be more than 2.5%, which would leave millions of unemployed and the attack on the working class would accelerate. Xi Jinping’s Communist Party would make the working class pay for the crisis. It is yet to be seen if he can do it. The hatred accumulated by the masses and the violence of the Chinese government to control Covid announce new clashes between the classes and how the regime is preparing to confront them, strengthening all its repressive institutions.
In 2008 and in 2019-2020, we saw huge class fights in China. Heads of businessmen that dismissed workers, as in Tonghua and Lingzou, rolled. Each factory closure meant the burning of municipalities in hundreds of cities. Huge strikes shook companies like Toyota and Mitsubishi in 2018. The anger of the Chinese masses threatens to explode again. This is also what Kissinger warns. Kissinger said at Davos World Economic Forum that surely the millionaire bourgeois of the Chinese CP won’t let the China president to keep on playing with the fate of the businesses of the big bourgeoisie and imperialism at his own will. He announced the prospect of a political crisis in the government and regime of China, which USA encourages, deepening its siege on China and putting the gunboats in their seas.

The reactionary utopia of reformism, Can China and Russia be imperialist in a world disputed inch by inch by the winning powers of World War Two?

To say that Russia and China become great imperialist powers, as the reformist currents do, is nothing but a deep reactionary policy.
These currents see a capitalist market always expanding, when it keeps shutting down and shrinking. It is an openly social-democrat location. That’s why they affirm there were and are conditions for the rising of new imperialist powers without questioning the existence of the ones already in place. The reality is different. World market keeps shrinking. What is really happening is that there are too many imperialist powers and the future of Russia and China, as former workers states today turned into transition countries that have a relative independence of the world politics but at the same time are dependent countries of the imperialist world economy, must be defined. The future of these nations is marked by their colonization and semi-colonization by the imperialist powers; or else by the restoration of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat to escape from this inevitable historical course imposed by the finance capital’s control of the world market.

In this world crisis and the current war in Ukraine, the curtains are out and it is clear that, since 1989, with the capitalist restoration, imperialism sucked fresh blood of millions of Chinese workers thrown into the world economy and one of the biggest wealth and raw material sources as Russia.
The bourgeoisies coming from this capitalist restoration became strong native ruling classes, which had been negotiating and, at the same time, resisting the imperialist assaults, as they desperately need those markets. The imperialist powers already colonized all the former soviet republics of the European Glacis.
The disputes for these new markets, handed over by Stalinism in 1989, are opening and will open the way for World War Three if the working class does not stop it.

Only a blind man or a lackey of the bourgeoisie cannot see that it is impossible for a new imperialism to rise peacefully, let alone that the existing powers give their control of the planet away peacefully. Imperialism partitioned the world in two world wars and keeps on doing it with blood, plunder and war.

A huge political economical military battle is increased, in order to define which imperialist power will definitively keep the raw materials of Russia and the Chinese domestic market.
Ahead, there’s an update of the apothegm of Marxism: either socialist revolution or war, where the ones losing will be the plundered peoples of the semi-colonial world and the international working class, that of the central countries in particular.

The imposition of the massacre on the Syrian revolution, commanded by imperialism and executed by al-Assad, Putin, Turkey and the Iranian Gurkha troops, with the collaboration of the native Sunnite Kurdish bourgeoisies and the occupation and partition of Ukraine, which would be consolidated as tutelaged colony, if the working class does not stop it, anticipate the future of colonization for the semi-colonial world in the capitalist catastrophe.

This world crisis poses in the agenda that the working class should recover the leadership it deserves, as without several victories of the socialist revolution in the central countries in the immediate period, the road to Third World War will be inevitable.
If imperialism did not advance more in the way to war is because it couldn’t consolidate its victory in the two focuses, namely Ukraine and Syria, where it concentrated all the forces of counterrevolution. It couldn’t also crush and control the working class in the central countries.
All the war adventures that imperialism could promote was due to the treacherous leaderships, which cover up for them by throwing dirt on the masses’ eyes, as yesterday they did with the so-called “anti-imperialist” front to hide the fascist massacre on the Syrian revolutionary masses. This is what they do today in Ukraine, denying the existence of that nation, one of the wealthiest in raw materials and commodities, whose working class is one of the most powerful in Eastern Europe.
These political crimes of the renegades of Trotskyism are only comparable to the betrayals of their partners, Stalinism, with which they embraced to support every class collaboration front subjected the working class to its executioners.

To be at the level of this crisis of the world capitalist system, the working class has no other way than to recover militant internationalism. As never before, it needs a revolutionary general staff at the lead. This is what the big betrayal of the renegades of Trotskyism is about. They liquidated the Fourth International and took it to the mud of class collaboration and the stinking remnants of Stalinism.
A powerful unity in the international struggle of the working class would be the decisive key element to stop the advance of the catastrophe and barbarism that are here.

The battlefield is full of rubbles not only of the Second and Third International, but also of the wastes of the revisionist currents of the Fourth International.
To solve the crisis of leadership is the task of the moment, or else after successive defeats imposed on the masses, the path to war will be directly opened, whether local, regional or world wars, whether oppression, invasion or inter-imperialist wars.
The relentless development of destructive forces is the expression that the capitalist gangs need wars to recover their losses and get new profits.

World War Two was not the last war! If in this historical period of crisis and revolutions the working class does not stop it, the next inter-imperialist war will be present in the future of the class struggle. Without any doubt, the Third World War will start from the last point of the Second World War, with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took, for instance, the US-UK “democratic” (as the Stalinist scum called it in Yalta) imperialism to the counterrevolutionary fascist control of the planet and the peoples they subjugate.

The established speed race between the expansion of the capitalist crash and the proletarian revolution is being won by imperialism. But this is not by strength of the mode of production or bravery of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class but for the thousand and one betrayals imposed by the leaderships bought by the big capital to disorganize the hundreds of offensives of the masses they have done over the last decades, to divert them and open the way for hard bitter defeats. This is what we denounce from the Collective for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International / FLTI, a matter it is developed in the presentation of this edition of “The International Workers Organizer”.

The fundamental theses of the Trotskyist program of the Fourth International seems it was written yesterday: “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” (Transitional Program of the Fourth International, 1938)

Carlos Munzer
For the Editorial Board of the paper “The International Workers Organizer”