Marxilainen Työväenliitto tuomitsee myös suomalaisten valtamedioiden tiedonanon, joka oli sionistihallituksen virallisen tiedottamisen kopio. Myös Suomen hallituksen kanta oli laimea. Ei voi vedota murhaajiin ja odottaa heidän tekevän objektiivista selontekoa tapahtumista. Suomen hallitus on odottavalla kannalla. Ennen oman kannan muodostumista odotettiin ensin EU:n ja sitten amerikkalaisten kannanottoa asiaan. Suomen hallitus on ennenkin nielaissut oman nöyryyttämisensä, kun sionistinen täsmäpommi tähtäsi ja tappoi suomalaisia sotilaita Libanonissa. Silloinen ulkoministeri Tuomiojakin oli vaatinut tapauksen tarkkaa tutkimista. Suomen valtio on osasyyllinen verilöylyyn, sillä vastoin omaa perustuslakiaan, se käy kauppaa aseista ja asejärjestelmistä sotaa käyvän teokraattisen valtion kanssa.

Suomen työväenluokan ja nuorison pitää aktivoitua ja yhdistää voimansa palestiinalaisten kanssa. Kolme vuotta kestäneestä Gazan saarrosta on päättänyt yksin Israelin valtio. Suomen valtio pitää pakottaa katkaisemaan kaikki kaupalliset, sotilaalliset ja diplomaattiset suhteensa Israeliin.

-          Israel saartoon – ei Gaza!
-          Kaikki suhteet Israeliin poikki!
-          Vapaan Palestiinan puolesta!

Marxilainen Työväenliitto

Toukokuun 5. päivänä Kreikassa ja Euroopassa luokkataistelu on tullut uuteen vaiheeseen. Satojatuhansia ihmisiä koko maassa ja pelkästään Ateenassa yli 200 000 kapinoi hallitusta ja kapitalismia vastaan. Mielenosoitukset olivat historian mahtavimmat sitten diktatuurin kaatumisen jälkeen vuonna 1974. Kreikan parlamentti hyväksyi ns. troikan (EU, EKP ja IMF) ehdot nälkäkurista. Palkkoja ja eläkkeitä leikataan kovalla kädellä, työehtosopimuksia huononnetaan, ja minimipalkkajärjestelmä romutetaan. Kuten eduskunnan keskustelusta paljastui, jopa äänestettäväksi tuodun tekstin kirjoittajana oli troikka.

Kapitalismin kriisi heijastuu eri maihin epätasaisesti. Yhteisvaikutuksessa Kreikan paikallisten ristiriitojen kanssa kriisi aiheutti sen, että Kreikasta tuli euroalueen ensimmäinen protektoraatti. Elinkeinoelämä, pankit ja suurpääoman piirit ovat kavaltaneet suuria summia, aiheuttaneet maan velkaantumista ja amerikkalaisten sijoituspankkien avustuksella peukaloineet taseita. Nyt kapitalismi Kreikassa ja sen kautta myös EU:ssa on konkurssikypsä. Tässä tilanteessa porvaristo vetoaa työväenluokan isänmaallisuuteen, ja vaatii, että kansa pelastaa kapitalismia tekemällä orjatyötä.
Kreikan työväenluokka ei suostu maksamaan kapitalismin konkurssista. Kaikki puheet siitä, että pitäisikö Suomen ja muiden euromaiden olla solidaarisia Kreikalle, ovat epätodellisia. Tuki Kreikalle on tukea maan ja välillisesti Euroopan kapitalisteille. Tuki Kreikalle on tukea IMF:n määräämälle vyönkiristykselle, työttömyydelle ja nälälle. Ainoa tapa päästä pois kriisistä niin siellä kuin täälläkin on heittää kapitalismi yli laidan ja rakentaa voimia, jotka aloittaisivat yhteiskunnan sosialistisen reformaation. Vastaus haaksirikkoutuneelle ei ole paluu kapitalististen kansallisvaltioiden aikaan; ei uusliberalistiseen kapitalismiin, kuten äärioikeisto kaavailee, eikä osallistuvan demokratian kapitalismiin, kuten nationalistinen vasemmisto haluaisi. Kysymys siitä, että Kreikalle ei pidä myöntää hätäapulainaa siksi että tämä ei kykenisi maksamaan ”meille” takaisin, ei ole relevanttia.
Kreikan hallitus on turvautunut silmittömään väkivaltaan. Tämä on porvariston ainoa jäljellä oleva työkalu jos kansa ei alistu sille suunniteltuun kohtaloon. Äskeinen kapina muistuttaa edellistä kansannousua, joka kesti joulukuun 6. päivästä 2008 vuoden 2009 helmikuun alkuun. Kansainvälisen valuuttarahaston puheenjohtaja oli silloin sanonut, että kyseessä on ensimmäinen poliittinen kansannousu Lehman Brothersin vararikon jälkeen. Nyt eletään aikaa, jolloin kaikki maat ovat pankkien tueksi painaneet tuhansia miljardeja dollareita ja euroja. Samalla valtiot ovat sosialisoineet riskit. Enää ei mene konkurssiin pankkeja, vaan kokonaisia valtioita. Vaikka eurooppalainen porvaristo näyttää olevan yhtenäinen Kreikan kysymyksessä, pinnan alla piilee suuri vaara protektionismista. Se tulee näkyvämmäksi sen jälkeen kun Kreikan esimerkkiä seuraa muut etelän maat. Silloin eri maiden porvaristo yrittää pelastaa oman nahkansa, ja maksattaa kriisiä toisen maan kustannuksella. Jo Kreikan tilanteeseen on vaikuttanut amerikkalaiset luottoluokitustalot, joiden tähtäimessä oli vahva euro.
Työväenluokan on taisteltava yleiseurooppalaisen luokkasolidaarisuuden puolesta. Vasemmiston pitää lakata tukemasta omaa kansalliskapitalismia ja taistella sen kumoamiseksi. Porvaristo osaa paremmin ajaa omia intressejä ilman vasemmistoa. Alussa meidän on yhdistettävä äänemme, ja vaatia, että lasku kriisistä on lähetettävä kapitalisteille, pankeille ja muille konnille, jotka ovat syypäitä tähän. On ehdottomasti kieltäydyttävä osallistumasta tähän kapitalistisen konkurssiin talkoisiin.
- Velka on mitätöitävä välittömästi. Jos kapitalismi ei pysty siihen, sen pitää painua historian unholaan
- Eurooppalaisen työväenluokan on konkreettisesti tuettava Kreikan kansaa. Sitä varten yleislakkoja on järjestettävä muualla kuin Kreikassa
- Eläköön Kreikan kansan kapina

08.05.2010

Kapitalismin maailmanlaajuinen kriisi heijastuu Suomeen mitä välittömimmällä tavalla. Elämme vaihetta, jolloin pankit on pelastettu toivossa, että nämä elvyttäisivät reaalitaloutta. Valtiot länsimaailmassa ovat sosialisoineet kapitalismin kriisiä ja yhteiskunnallistaneet järjestelmän totaalisen romahduksen riskit. Kaikilla valtioilla on velkaa ja monessa tapauksessa tähtitieteellisen tason vajeita budjeteissaan. Porvariston ja sen eri instituutioiden mielestä, nyt on tullut aika pelastaa valtioita työtätekevien, työttömien, eläkeläisten ja nuorison intressien kustannuksella.

Kuorossa Olli Rehnin suulla EU, OECD, IMF, EKP ja paikallistalousministerit perässä säestävät meille samoja lauluja. Kaikkialla, mukaanlukien Suomi, valtion menoja pitää supistaa, eläkeikää nostaa, työmarkkinoita joustavoittaa. OECD:n mukaan Suomessa työttömyysturva on liian avokätinen. Sen vuoksi etuuksia on kavennettava. Laitoksen suosituksen mukaan, työttömät tulisi pakkoaktivoida 50 työttömyysviikon jälkeen. Eläkkeelle pääsyn alaraja on tarkoitus nostaa aluksi 65 vuoteen. Hallitus on jo ilmoittanut esittäneensä leikkauslistan loppukesään mennessä.

Suomessakin julkinen talous on nykyään alijäämäinen yli vakaussopimuksessa sallitun kolmen prosentin rajan. Vajeet yritetään kattaa leikkauksilla tai lisäämällä valtion tuloja. Se tarkoittaa enemmän veroja, lukuvuosimaksuja yms. Epäkohdat kansantaloudessa ilmenevät pyramidiskandaalien paljastamisella ja Sofia-kaltaisten pankkien konkursseilla. Viulut maksaa työväenluokka ja yhtäkään herroista ei joudu vankilaan. Islannin ja Kreikan meininki ei ole ainoa kapitalismin kriisin heijastus Suomeen. Poliittiset skandaalit ovat arkipäivää nykyisessä Suomessa. Ministereitä ostetaan ja kokonaisia puolueita autetaan rahalla muuttamaan esim. ydinvoimakantansa. Myös valtion rahoja on valunut nuorisojärjestöjen kautta poliitikkojen taskuihin.

Muutkin vallanelimet natisevat liitoksissaan. Hallituksen päässä istuu puoli vuotta mies, joka on käytännössä kaatunut korruptiojupakoihin. Päivittäin pääministeri joko kumoaa edellisen päivän tiedotteensa, ei muista mitään, salailee asioita, tai valehtelee jne. Kokoomus on yhtä syyllinen muutenkin kuin Tiuran ja Kanervan tapausten johdosta. Eduskuntainstituution päässä istuu vähemmistöpuhemies Niinistö. Hän sai vain 89 ääntä, mutta silti jatkaa. Presidentti-instituutio on menettänyt uskottavuutensa lautasjupakan yhteydessä. Oikeusvalta on odottavalla kannalla. Se on periaatteessa valmis tulkitsemaan kaikki lakot laittomiksi. Välillisiä vallankäyttäjiä ovat työnantajat rikkureineen ja mediat gallupeineen. Lakkojen sovittelumekanismit ja ay-liikkeen byrokraatit kuuluvat vallankäyttäjiin. Kaikki yhteiskunnan tasapainoa ylläpitävät mekanismit ovat kovaa vauhtia rappeutumassa. Vastakkainasettelun voimat ryhmittäytyvät sota-asemiin.

Tilanne johtaa siihen, että nuoret vieraantuvat poliittisista puolueista ja niiden järjestelmästä. Syypäitä siihen ovat ns. vanhat puolueet. Äärioikeisto käyttää tilannetta hyväkseen ja rakentaa muukalaisvihaan perustuvaa politiikkaansa. Vanhat puolueet yrittävät pysyä kärryillä ja kilpailla Persujen kanssa maahanmuuttajavastaisuudessaan. Vanhat puolueet ja erityisesti demarit ovat nopeasti perussuomalaistumassa. Tällä tavalla viime vuosikymmenten kapitalismia hallinnoineet tahot jyrkentävät ja polarisoivat vaarallisia tendenssejä yhteiskunnassa.

Tänä vuonna Suomessa on ollut lakkojen sarja. Neuvotteluissa työläiset ovat olleet erittäin maltillisia. Monessakaan lakossa ei vaadittu palkankorotuksia tai etuuksien parantamisia. Lakkolaisia tyydyttäisi ainoastaan työpaikkansa säilyttäminen tai irtisanomissuojan takuu, ei elintasonsa parantaminen. Silti mikä tahansa vaatimus joka ei alenna oikeuksia on työnantajien osalta hylätty. Ammattiliikkeen johtajat ovat auliisti suostuneet työnantajien linjauksiin. Monessa tapauksessa, kuten Kotkan Mussalossa, työläiset kokoontuivat ohi liiton byrokraattien ja päättivät estää rikkureiden pääsyn työpaikoille. Luokkataistelu Suomessa on kiristynyt ja kiristyy edelleen.

Sellainen on oltava taistelujen taktiikka tulevaisuudessakin. Kehitetään siirtymävaatimuksia, jotka auttavat eteenpäin taistelussa uuden yhteiskunnan rakentamiseksi. Kriisistä syypäitä eivät ole työtätekevät, työttömät, opiskelijat, eläkeläiset tai maahanmuuttajat. Lasku kriisistä pitää antaa suurpääomalle maksettavaksi. Joukkojen on organisoiduttava ja ryhdyttävä poliittiseen yleislakkoon korruptiohallituksen kaatamiseksi. Sosialistisia reformeja kriisistä ulospääsemiseksi.

- Alas Vanhasen hallitus

- Kieltäytykää kriisinlaskun maksusta

- Pankkijärjestelmä on sosialisoitava ilman rahallista kompensaatiota. Pankit on asetettava työväenluokan järjestöjen valvonnan alle asetettavan keskuspankin alaisuuteen

- Raskas teollisuus, energian tuotanto, ja televiestintä on sosialisoitava ja kontrolloitava työväen toimesta

- Konkurssiin menevät ja väkensä irtisanovat firmat otettava yhteiskunnan haltuun. Irtisanomisten kieltäminen

- Työaikaa lyhennettävä niin, että töitä riittää kaikille ilman palkkatason laskua. Minimipalkka ja –eläke 1500 euroon

- Talous on suunniteltava. Osuuskuntatoimintaa on tuettava. Suuret markettiketjut sosialisoitava

- Kaikille ilmainen julkinen terveydenhuolto, koulutus ja joukkoliikenne

- On taisteltava:

* Porvariston vallan kumoamisen puolesta

* EU:n hajottamisesta ja Euroopan sosialisten valtioiden federaation puolesta

* Naton hajottamisesta

* Kaikki miehitysjoukot pois sotapesäkkeistä

Kapitalismin kansainvälinen kriisin heijastuminen Suomeen ei koske vain taloutta, tuotannon romahtamista tai viennin tyrehtymistä. Ennen muuta kriisi on jo siirtynyt poliittisen järjestelmän rakenteisiin. Muutama vuosi sitten Suomi oli julistettu maailman vähiten korruptoituneeksi maaksi. Nyt päivittäin paljastuu skandaaleja, jotka osoittavat liike-elämän ja suurpääoman kytköksiä poliittisiin puolueisiin ja poliitikkoihin. “Osta sinäkin oma ministeri” on tänä päivänä hyvin ajankohtainen iskulause.

Alussa vaalituki saatiin näyttämään lailliselta. Poliitikkojen ainoa synti oli se, ettei siitä ilmoitettu, kun kerran siitä ei rangaista. Laidasta laitaan vakuutettiin, että raha oli annettu vastikkeettomasti. Sitten tulivat vuodot ja poliisin tutkimukset. Poliitikoille annettiin rahaa puolueista riippumatta. Ainoana kriteerinä “tuen” saamiseksi oli se, että miten hyvin ko. poliitikko osasi ajaa rahoittajiensa etuja vaalien jälkeen. Vaalien jälkeen ilmestyivät merisalot ja kumppanit vaatimaan hyvitystä.

Tulevaa hallitusta yritettiin neuvoa sen kokoonpanosta lähtien, elikkä siitä, että kenestä piti tulla ministeri ja kenen piti loikata puolueesta toiseen. “Nyt saadaan paljon parempi hallitusohjelma kuin neljä vuotta sitten”, kirjoitti Vanhanen vaalien jälkeen kiitoskirjeessään Merisalolle. Ns. “lobbauspuhelut” nauhoitettiin ja nauhoilla kiristettiin poliitikkoja jälkikäteen. Rahaa annettiin eniten keskustalle, mutta aika hyvin sitä saivat kokoomuksen pääomalle uskollisetkin. Rahaa annettiin jopa vihreälle Forsiukselle, kun tämä sattui olemaan pääministerin rakastettu, ja Matti niin vaati.

Lahjanantajina olivat isot ja osittain salaiset henkilöt ja verkostot, joiden kautta varat kanavoitiin puolueille. Poliitikkoja suosittiin enemmän alueilla, joissa pääomalla oli avoimia hankkeita. Skandaalit kiteytyvät kahden henkilön ympärillä, mutta niiden kattilassa kiehuu koko hallitus. Vanhanen on ollut skandaalien ruumiillistuma. Hän sai rahaa, ehkä rakennusmateriaaliakin, ja anoi summia muiden puolesta, kiitti saamastaan, ja anoi vaalien jälkeen 250 000 euron pikaerää lisää. Jollei ole pakko, Vanhanen ei tahdo muistaa mistään mitään. Jos Vanhanen salaa lahjusskandaaliin liittyviä tietoja, hän ei kelpaa pääministeriksi. Jos taasen on todella dementoitunut, niin ei siinäkään tapauksessa kelpaa sille paikalle. Skandaalin toinen napa on Merisalo. Hän pröystäili kasinotalouden vuosina sytyttämällä sikarinsa 500 markan setelillä. Sittemmin Merisalo on tehnyt konkursseja ja saanut vankilatuomionkin. Skandaalit eivät koske vain, että liike-elämä vetelee poliitikkonukkejensa naruista. Poliitikot järjestivät valtion varojen tilinsiirtoja eri järjestöjen kautta omaan taskuunsa. Näin ollen, Kepun poliitikot hyväksyivät RAY:n tuen Kepun Nuorisosäätiölle, joka toimitti varat eteenpäin samoille poliitikoille vaalitukena.

Hallitus on istunut jo kolme vuotta. Niistä kaksi viimeistä vuotta on ollut skandaalien, salailujen ja valheiden vuosia. Suomen kansa ei ansaitse tällaista hallitusta. Vanhanen sai lähteä, mutta tämä ei pyhitä muiden tekoja. Meillä ei ole päivääkään enää varaa elää tällaisen hallituksen kanssa, maa ei kestä enempää valehtelemista. Tämän hallituksen lainsäätäjät kiertävät avoimesti lakia. Olkoonkin niin, että tämä on paras hallitus mitä rahalla saa, mutta meille se ei kelpaa. Siksi hallituksen täytyy lähteä heti. Uudet vaalit on järjestettävä heti eikä vuoden päästä. Nyt merisalojen “ostetun hallituksen” pääministeristä päättää Keskustan puoluekokous, kun siitä pitäisi päättää Suomen kansan.

Porvarihallitus on ideologisistakin syistä suurpääoman asialla. Loppukesästä julki tulevien työelämän rakenteiden reformit ovat Vanhasen ja kumppaneiden taantumuksellisimpia projekteja. Tällä hallituksella ei ole pienintäkään oikeutusta leikata toimeentuloa, ei nostaa eläkeikää, eikä yksityistää yliopistoja. Tämä hallitus on valehdellut ja valehtelee päivittäin Suomen kansalle. Sen vuoksi se ei voi jatkaa ensi vuoden vaaleihin asti.

- Alas Vanhasen hallitus

- Uudet vaalit pikimmiten

- Ei leikkauksille

- Ei Natolle, joukot heti pois Afganistanista

16.4.2010

Marxilainen Työväenliitto

Myös Merimiesunionin jäänmurtajien työläiset olivat jättäneet lakkovaroituksen mutta ay-byrokraatit tyytyivät 0,7 prosentin korotuksiin. Samalla kun valtio havittelee talviselle merenkululle elintärkeästä jäänmurrosta suuria voittoja työläisten kustannuksella, porvarillinen media haukkuu työläisiä ahneiksi.
Työläinen, tälle lamalle ei ole kuin yksi ratkaisu. Tämä ratkaisu on heivata kuoleva kapitalismi historian roskakoriin, sillä se ei pysty tuottamaan mitään hyvää kenellekään meistä. Ainoa taho,  joka tämän voi tehdä on työläiset!

- Lakko-oikeuteen ei saa koskea!
- Irtisanomissuoja kaikille aloille!
- Työläisten ei pidä maksaa porvariston kriisiä!
- Nämä lakot ovat osa työväenluokan taistelua!
- Täysi tuki lakolle kaikilta aloilta!

2. maaliskuuta 2010
Marxilainen Työväenliitto

The World Capitalist Bankruptcy

The world capitalist crisis, universally acknowledged as the worst in the history, has not ended; we are in the midst of its unfolding. At the end of 2009, the specter of sovereign defaults from Dubai and Greece to Ireland shaking the Euro-zone and the European Union as a whole and revealing the catastrophic impact of the mountains of debts on capitalist States all over the planet, starting from the United States themselves, belied early claims for a recovery.

The injection of an unprecedented mass of liquidity by governments and central banks, particularly after the panic produced by the Lehman Brothers debacle, in 2008-2009, to save the collapsing international financial system was a holding operation; they temporarily delayed the precipitated fall without resolving the systemic contradictions that have exploded in the crisis. These contradictions were rather exacerbated and new problems were produced.

Despite the rhetoric, there is no recovery in jobs but growth of unemployment; no recovery but contraction of credit to households and small businesses; no recovery of consumer spending but under-consumption; no de-leveraging of the overexposed and undercapitalized banks. The ocean of the derivatives has decreased only slightly. Its function, in any case, is vital for contemporary capitalism and cannot be abolished without precipitating the collapse of the entire system. New enormous bubbles of fictitious capital have been formed as the massively available liquidity was directed again on speculative activities. Particularly the carry trade on the basis of a weakening US dollar fueled speculation while undermining the effects of the stimulus package and re-directing the money flux outside the US. The financial markets are soaring although, in the sphere of production, overcapacity and a crisis of capital over-accumulation dominate, opening further the scissors between fictitious and productive capital. The bubbles have at some point, sooner rather than later, to be burst producing a double dip recession.

The State intervention through quantitative easing deliberately stimulates speculation to save finance capital, dominant in our imperialist epoch of capitalist decline, from collapse. But, in this way, public debt itself grows exponentially, without having a sustainable basis in the value producing sphere. Sovereign bonds to finance public debts and deficits have taken the space that until recently was occupied by the sub-prime mortgage market, which by its inescapable collapse has triggered the current crisis. Commenting on the case of Greece, board members at large western banks predict that “after two years of worrying about mortgage and corporate risk, sovereign risk is going to be the big debate for 2010- both for banks, and the wider investment community” (Financial Times, December 21, 2009)

Both metropolitan and peripheral countries are affected by the bankruptcy of finance globalization. The center of the world system and thus of the crisis is in the United States, the most powerful and most over-indebted country in the world, which tries to export its bankruptcy globally. Europe, Japan, Russia and China are shaken by the international hurricane, and all antagonisms are sharpening.

The European Union is particularly hit. Bankrupt capitalist Greece is not an isolated case but it heads a long series of EU countries with enormous deficits and crushing debts: Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy et al. Sovereign defaults threaten the banks that are over-exposed lenders as well as the sustainability of the European Monetary Union and the entire imperialist project of European capitalist integration. Centrifugal forces are growing, shaking the entire EU edifice.

The attempts by capitalists and capitalist governments to make the workers pay for their crisis produce social resistances and an intensification of the class struggle. Draconian measures have been imposed on Ireland and an even worse program, on the lines of that imposed on Latvia, is presented by the EU institutions as an ultimatum to Greece; the “alternative” to turn to the IMF for “help” is equally destructive for the popular masses. The December 2008 revolt in Greece and Police brutality, one year later, against demonstrators commemorating that event, including the murderous attack by the Special Force Delta against the Trotskyists of EEK, the mass arrests and impending trials manifest the growing social unrest, especially among the rebelled youth, overwhelmingly jobless or over-exploited in flexible labor. These battles are the first manifestations of a political revolutionary process, which could and should expand on a European continental, and international scale. Greece is mirroring world historical developments.

Despite the illusions spread by mainstream economists and mass media, China is not the solution for the world crisis but a crucial part of the problem.

The tremendous growth of the Chinese economy and the acceleration of capitalist restoration were fuelled by the US expansion of cheap money supply, a boom in US consumption and in Chinese exports based on an unprecedented overproduction of fictitious capital.

The injection in the economy by the Chinese State authorities last year of a huge 4 trillion yuans stimulus package did not overcome the crisis of over-capacity (for example, excess capacity in steel was already in 2005 120 million tons-more than the annual production of Japan, the world’s second largest producer. It led to the formation of new bubbles in the stock market prices and real estate speculation. The reasons are structural. The gigantic disproportion between a predominantly export-led economy and an inadequate, underdeveloped internal market in a still hybrid social economic formation, now facing an international plunge in depression, destroys any attempt by the leading wing of the Chinese State-Party restorationist bureaucracy to establish a temporary social equilibrium between classes and between the countryside and the industrial centers. The social tensions and struggles are growing, exposing the fallacy of a so-called “harmonious society in a market Socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

At the same time pressures are growing from international capital, seeking to find a way out for its bankruptcy, in China. Demands for a re-evaluation of the renmimbi have as an ultimate goal the opening of the Chinese financial markets, the expansion of an internal market dominated by foreign capital, and, finally the transformation of this vast country into a semi-colony of US, European, and Japanese capital. Obviously, such a goal could never been achieved without a protracted violent process of imperialist interventions, economic pressures and wars – and without producing fierce resistance and revolutionary upheavals inside China itself.

Russia too is under enormous pressures by the current world crisis that led to its first serious recession in a decade, a 30 per cent devaluation of the ruble, the bankruptcy of a number of companies, the fall of oligarchs bailed out by the Kremlin and an important decrease in State reserves. After the Yeltsin era, with the IMF “shock therapy”, the mass looting of public property in the ’90s and the centralization of wealth at the hands of the oligarchs, which ended in the 1998 default, the current international hurricane dealt a lethal blow to the Putin era of stabilization and renewed State control. The ruling elite are divided and a sizeable section under the president Medvedev turns again in a new round of privatizations and openings to the foreign capital.

US and EU imperialisms in crisis are driven in a renewed re-colonization effort in the vast space from Eastern Europe to Russia and China seeking a way out for the systemic crisis. Humanity has entered into a period of violent convulsions, with an unknown outcome to be decided by the living struggle of living forces on a world scale.

The Obama War

The United States are occupying the center not only of the world economic crisis but of the political crisis as well.

The escalation of the war effort in Afghanistan decided by the Obama Administration manifests both the continuation and the utter failure of the so-called “war on terror” started by the Bush Administration, against which Obama was elected in the first place. “Obamania” and all the illusions spread about the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and warlord in Afghanistan received a deadly blow. It is absolutely necessary and urgent for the American and world working class to draw a balance sheet of this political bankruptcy.

Obama was presented as an opponent of Bush’s foreign war policies, although keeping upfront the darling of the Zionist lobby Hilary Clinton, and the bellicose tones and imperialist ideology of the Democratic Party. Now, he resurrects the imperial Augustinian fallacy of a “just war” to justify the continuing crimes against humanity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

The new President was advertised as a new Roosevelt who would introduce a new Keynesian New Deal. In today’s conditions where not only neo-liberalism but also Keynesianism that preceded it have failed this is impossible; a new Roosevelt cannot be re-incarnated into Obama in the White House. The mass impoverishment of the American households after the housing market disaster, mass unemployment, and the ill fated Health Care reform show that the Obama Administration faces disasters not only on the war fronts in Central Asia but on the social front back at home.

US imperialism, driven by the collapse of its own internal equilibrium, cannot but strive to war and for the re-establishment on a new basis for its world supremacy, and imperial “mission”. That leads to more barbaric wars and convulsions, particularly in Central Asia, Iran and the Middle East.

Turkey plays an important role in the schemes of imperialism in that region. We resolutely have to fight this role as well as the oppression of the Kurdish people. The CRFI condemns the dictatorial verdict of the Supreme Court and of the “deep State” in Turkey to outlaw the Kurdish DTP.

The scheme for an imperialist phony solution of the Palestinian problem has collapsed. The most right wing government in Israel’s history continues its savage oppression of the dispossessed Palestinian people, the blockade of Gaza, the installment of new settlements in the West Bank. Despite the treachery of the Abbas- PLO leadership, the Palestinian people, although leaderless, did not stop its resistance to occupation.

The war threats by Israel and US on Iran intensify, under the pretext of the Iranian nuclear program. Developments in that country that knew the biggest popular revolution in the Middle East in 1979 have reached a crucial point. The impasse and disintegration of the clerical regime, the mobilizations after the June 2008 election, the role of bourgeois pro-imperialist forces in the leadership of the opposition but also the legitimate grievances of students and women against an oppressive obscurantist regime have changed dramatically the political landscape in Iran. The CRFI has to follow carefully and analyze in every step of development that process to draw a revolutionary understanding and line of intervention.

Pacifism in the center and bourgeois nationalism and/or religious fundamentalism in the periphery is totally unable to confront the dangers  of war and all the challenges of the current world historical situation. An international mobilization of working class and anti-imperialist popular forces is needed with the perspective of Permanent Revolution against permanent war.

Trends within the working class and its political tasks

Europe presents in a condensed form all the main trends developing inside the working class in struggle.

Mass strikes, mass demonstrations, factory occupations, sequestration of bosses by workers, youth and workers’ revolts in a number of countries in Europe (France, Italy, Greece, Ireland but also Romania, Serbia etc.) demonstrate the growing anger and combativeness of the proletariat under the pressure of mass unemployment, flexibility of labor, wages cuts, destruction of pension rights, State repression etc.

This development of struggles and social consciousness is non linear, uneven from country to country, contradictory. Revolutionary Parties should carefully follow every step and study their internal trends and development by intervening in the struggles with a program of transitional demands connecting the present moment with the struggle for workers power, preparing thus its victory.

We have entered a stage of careful, methodical, systematic organization and preparation for the coming revolutionary situations.

Any “anti-capitalist” front or party formation (the perspective supported by the NPA in France; the Bloc of the Left in Portugal, SYRIZA; and in a more leftist version ANTARSYA in Greece; the British SWP and their co-thinkers internationally), which pretends to fight capitalism within the capitalist system’s framework, “to defeat the anti-working class, anti-popular policies of its governments and of the EU” without overthrowing them, is a reactionary fraud.

We fight for the overthrow of all capitalist governments and of the imperialist EU that has declared class war with draconian austerity measures against all the exploited and transformed the Continent into “Fortress Europe” against immigrants; to defeat the drive of the European imperialists to re-colonize Eastern Europe, the Balkans and, furthermore Russia itself; to unify on a socialist basis all the European peoples from the Atlantic to the Pacific into a United Socialist States of Europe.

Climate Change

The UN sponsored Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change was a total and inescapable fiasco. The capitalist leaders of the world demonstrated that they are totally unwilling to take the smallest step towards a reduction of the danger of ecological catastrophe but ready to unleash a barbaric police repression against those fighting this danger by direct action in the streets like the demonstrators protesting in the Danish capital.

The final phony “agreement” cobbled together by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa is merely a hollow expression of vague aims, without any commitment, apart from the illicit commitment to defend corporate profits. But even this worthless piece of paper was torn apart immediately after by Brazil and South Africa, two of the “co-signatories”.

Decayed world capitalism in crisis, greedy for profits now more than ever before, threatens with ecological catastrophe humankind, all living beings, Nature as the “inorganic body” of the human beings. It is not the productive forces themselves- i.e. the developing material and mental capacity of humanity to overcome natural-social constraints- that cause climate change and environmental disasters but their misuse, strangulation and distortion by the historically outdated capitalist social relations of production. The so-called “green development” under capitalism is a demagogic, misleading way to find new outlets for their surplus capital, without really caring about the environment  or the survival of the entire planet. This survival and human civilization as a whole depends now upon the reorganization of the world economy on new social bases according to the needs of life, and not the profits of a few magnates.

We demand the expropriation of all contaminating industries without compensation under workers control!

We demand our right to our living space, against the metropolitan monstrosities.

We fight to re-appropriate our life against the vampires of capital, for the expropriation of the capitalist expropriators and for world Socialism!

Against women oppression

Despite all the claims to the contrary, the oppression of women has increased in the last two decades, both in metropolitan and peripheral countries. The decline and crisis of capitalism is insolubly connected with the crisis of patriarchy, sexism, trafficking, and all the forms of violence inflicted on women.

The measure for the self-emancipation of all toilers is the emancipation of women. Universal human emancipation, communism, through the world socialist revolution, cannot be achieved without the abolition of all forms of gender oppression.

Which International?

The world capitalist bankruptcy and its social and political implications pose as never before the urgent necessity of a revolutionary International of the proletariat and all oppressed to overthrow capitalism and re-organize society on socialist bases on a planetary scale.

But this workers’ revolutionary International cannot be born by the Presidential decree or call by a military populist Bonaparte, even less by a Bonaparte of a bourgeois State. The call for a Fifth International by Chavez, is addressed without any programmatic basis to a heterogeneous audience covering a broad political spectrum representing various and opposed class forces, including bourgeois liberal parties. As foreign polices are the continuation of home policies, the 5th Socialist International of Chavez appears as the international extension of the chavist PSUV, a party to regiment, keep in check and control every and any political expression of the working class.

The reference to a “5th” International and thus the recognition of the tradition of the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky and his comrades-in arms has as its aim to attract and trap revolutionary forces coming from that tradition.

François Sabado, one of the main leaders of the former United Secretariat of the FI , has already replied positively to the call, although posing some points for discussion related to the “left” liberal views prevailing in Europe, particularly in France, in the former LCR now liquidated into the NPA. In fact he accepts that a head of a bourgeois State can launch the initiative for an international organization of the working class. The entire Marxist theory of the State, of the classes, of the class struggle and of the transition to communism through a dictatorship of the proletariat, a withering away State of the Paris Commune type is rejected. The coming World Congress of the international current to which Sabado is associated is inscribed in that liquidationist perspective to liquidate the remnants of the Fourth International tradition in that current.

A similar path is followed by other tendencies with a Trotskyist reference (the Alan Woods “International Marxist Tendency” e tutti quanti).

The Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International stresses that in today’s conditions above all the conquest, preservation, and development of the political independence of the working class, of its program, of its organizations, political parties and trade unions is a condition sine qua non for its struggle against capital, for a workers socialist way out from the crisis, for workers power and world Socialism.

Athens, 12/12/2009

CRFI Statements

]]> http://mtl-fi.org/2010/01/08/in-the-midst-of-a-deepening-crisis-crfin-kannanotto/feed/ 0 http://mtl-fi.org/2009/06/19/the-capitalists-must-pay-for-the-crisis-the-workers-must-take-power-2/ http://mtl-fi.org/2009/06/19/the-capitalists-must-pay-for-the-crisis-the-workers-must-take-power-2/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:43:04 +0000 MTL http://mtl-fi.org/2009/06/19/the-capitalists-must-pay-for-the-crisis-the-workers-must-take-power-2/ Declaration of the Executive Counsil of the CRFI

1. The proletariat and the popular masses of the world are facing an unprecedented crisis and a unique historical situation, in this Mayday 2009, the Day of the international working class.

The world capitalist crisis destroys the lives of millions of people all over the planet condemning them to expropriation, unemployment, destitution, misery, and furthermore, wars and State repression. But at the same time, although the weight of the crisis is bitterly felt, resistance to capitalist barbarism is growing. There is an ascending wave of social struggles, mass strikes, occupations, and popular rebellions such as in Greece or Guadeloupe.

The Coordinating Committee for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International (CRFI) calls the international working class and all oppressed and exploited to mobilize to put an end to that social catastrophe, to refuse to be buried under the ruins of the world capitalist bankruptcy. The capitalists must pay for the crisis of their system! The capital expropriates our lives, let us expropriate capital and open a socialist way out from the current devastation!

2. The capitalists themselves had to admit that the current crisis that erupted in 2007 with the burst of the US sub-prime mortgage market bubble and the international credit crunch is not simply a cyclical one or a conjectural disturbance. It is the worst crisis from the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression. It has historical dimensions in scope and depth; it affects globally the world economy, while its end is unseen in the horizon.

It is clear now that it does not affects only the financial sector but the entire capitalist economy dominated by a decades long over-expansion of finance capital invading, interconnecting and controlling all aspects of economic life globally.

The crisis that manifested itself in 2007-2008 first in the financial sphere driving the international banking system to bankruptcy now is driving a ‘Great Recession’ (the term is forged by Martin Wolf of Financial Times) engulfing the entire so-called “developed” capitalist world and bringing big industries, such as General Motors and the car industries in the US, Europe and Asia, into the abyss. It is only the unprecedented State interventions, bail outs, and packages of the last period that prevented, so far, according to Martin Wolf, the Great Recession to turn into a Great Depression.

The IMF’s World Economic Outlook, in April 2009, predicts a contraction of world economy by a 1. 3%, revising downwards its previous prediction of 0.5% made in January 2009. A year before, in 2008, the IMF was predicting a 3.8% growth of world’s GDP in 2009… More than 60 million new jobless will be added.

The Organization for the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in its recent interim Economic Outlook stresses that “the world economy is in the midst of its deepest and most synchronized recession in our lifetimes, caused by a global financial crisis and deepened by a collapse in world trade”. As the Financial Times reports, “in the US, the rate of decline of manufactured output compares of that of the Great Depression. Japan’s output of manufactures has already fallen by almost as much as in the US in the 1930s” (FT 21/4/09). Britain and the Euro-zone countries are already in recession. The IMF current predictions for the Euro-zone economy expect a 4.2 % contraction in 2009 and a worst recession in 2010, while unemployment will jump to 10.1% this year and 11.5% in the next. The OECD predicts that the German economy might shrink by as much as 5.3% in 2009. “The 5.3 contraction would represent the biggest decline for Germany-excluding the immediate post-World War II devastation of 1945 and 1948-since the depths of the Great Depression in 1932, when the economy shrank by roughly 7.5% Considering that Germany’s GDP equals three times the combined output of its central European neighbors, the slump is certain to have immense effects on the rest of Europe” (Stratfor, 21/4/09)

The world recession expresses not solely a crisis of capital over-production but also the fact that the basis upon which the world process of capital accumulation was structured in the last historical period has collapsed.

It is not just a failure of the so-called “neo-liberal model” of the “excesses of finance speculation. Finance capital globalization itself was the outcome of a long historical process of development of all the contradictions of capitalism during the imperialist epoch of capitalist decline, of wars and revolutions, from the Great War, the October Revolution and the 1929 Crash to the post -world war two period and the crisis following the collapse of the Bretton Woods framework in the early ’70s.

3. The shift to finance capital from the ’80s and its globalization in the last decades, marked by successive shocks and crashes (1984, 1987, 1989, 1997), produced a gigantic fictitious capital pyramid to sustain the reproduction of the system. This process reached its climax in the 2002-2007 periods, after the 1997-2001 international turmoil, with the production of all sorts of bubbles and exotic (now “toxic”) financial instruments. The derivatives market reached the mythical proportions of a 550 trillion dollars ocean while, comparatively, the world GDP is about 60 trillion. The disproportion between this parasitic, non value-producing Leviathan of fictitious capital that exacerbated the crisis of over-accumulation of productive capital on the one side, and on the other side, the available global surplus value to be pumped out from the exploitation of direct producers put enormous obstacle to the valorization process. Capital finds its historical limits to itself.

Although the crisis is driving the tendency to raise enormously the rate of exploitation (the rate of relative and absolute surplus value) with every old and new means of “flexible” labor relations etc., the disproportion is such that makes it unable to overcome the crisis. It is not the established techniques of pumping out of surplus value that have reached their limits; it is surplus value itself as social form of the surplus product, and with it the law of value as regulative principle of economic life, that demonstrates its historic limits, its outmoded character.

For capital, crisis is the only way out from crisis. It has to destroy the gigantic accumulated sums of capital to restore the rate of profit and re-start the accumulation process. The catastrophic process has already started: in its latest Global Financial Stability Report, the IM estimates that capital of 4.1 trillion US dollars has been lost so far in the financial sector and losses are mounting. This sum, although huge, represents an infinitesimal part of fictitious (and productive) capital that has to be destroyed according to the laws of capital accumulation.

The catastrophe in progress means the massive destruction of surplus capital, of the world productive forces, and first of all of the most important social force of production, the working class itself.

It is by its own nature a protracted process, not an instantaneous, automatic collapse, nor an eternal fall in an endless abyss. The current world crisis marks a period of historic upheavals; it involves not simply economic- technical re-arrangements and adjustments, control of “financial excesses” and “off shore fiscal havens” etc. but a vast process of de-stabilization, disintegration and re-organization of all social relations through sharp political conflicts and violent clashes nationally and internationally.

Transition is not a linear series of successive points but a dialectical development of all contradictions with sharp conflicts, zigzags, continuities and breaks in continuity, leaps.

The current crisis becomes an unresolved riddle if its is separated from the transitional character of our epoch of capitalism in decline

The huge Tower of Babel of fictitious capital, the global credit structure that was erected the last decades, has been transformed from an instrument of global expansion into a dominant factor of global disintegration and crisis. It is the highest manifestation of transition in history, from capitalism to world Socialism and communism as Marx had foreseen:

“The credit system appears as the main lever of over-production and over-accumulation in commerce solely because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is here forced to its extreme limits [...] the self-expansion of capital based on the contradictory nature of capitalist production permits an actual free development only up to a certain point, so that in fact it constitutes an immanent fetter and barrier to production, which are continually broken through by the credit system. Hence, the credit system accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the establishment of the world market. It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise the material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction-crises- and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production.

The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labor of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production” (K. Marx, Capital, vol. III p. 441 Progress, Moscow 1977)

4. After the irruption of the current world capitalist crisis, particularly after its acceleration in September 2008, the capitalists and their governments tried to find a way out in three directions:

a. By searching to establish new international regulations, a “new financial architecture” or a “Bretton Woods II”

b. Looking to China whose impressive growth rate of the last years made her appear as a possible “locomotive” to take the world economy out of the slump

c. Above al , by intense State intervention, injecting huge “rescue” packages to the crumbling banking system and industry, introducing nationalizations etc.

The results so far are disappointing for capitalism.

Hopes for a new Bretton Woods to establish a new world economic order out of the present chaos proved to be chimerical. The first G20 meeting in November 2008 in Washington DC ended as a fiasco. The recent G20 summit in London avoided an open shipwreck but it did not achieve any of its desired goals (new international financial regulations, stimulus packages in Europe). The most significant achievement was only the G20 pledge to increase the IMF reserves by $500 billion up to 1.1 trillion dollars, including $250 billion of credit lines in Special Drowning Rights to help it in a more active role in “rescuing” countries under the immediate threat of default, first of all the Eastern European countries. The European banks have already an exposure of 1.6 trillion dollars to that countries and Turkey. Not only the sums are insufficient but provided by the IMF are always tied to draconian measures that will exacerbate social suffering and mass unrest.

Centrifugal forces, protectionist tendencies, and imperialist antagonisms are far to be dissipated undermining any attempt for a new international regulation.

The US definitely uses its historically established hegemony in world capitalism and the role of the US dollar as international reserve currency to print huge amounts of dollars to sustain its packages like the previous Paulson Plan or the current Obama plan. But the ocean of “toxic assets” is so limitless, unpredictable and poisoning that the entire endeavor becomes Sisyphean.

The US has up to now injected about 1.2 trillion dollars in its economy. US over-indebtedness and deficits took astronomic dimensions and pressures are building up threatening with collapse not only the US currency but all the international monetary relations. The European Union blames the US that by depleting world resources to bail out its own bankruptcy builds up unbearable pressures threatening the EU and the European Monetary Union with dislocation.

5. China, from the other side, has proven to be much more part of the problem than a solution.

World recession has hit hard the Chinese economy. January 2009 showed the worst drops in import (-41.3 % on year) and foreign direct investment (-32.7%), as well as a fall in exports of -17.5%.

Despite a bold and much publicized $500 billion stimulus plan, the Chinese Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the first quarter of 2009 fell to 6.1 %, half of 2007’s 13% and smaller than 2008 fourth quarter numbers. The days of double digit, 12% and 13 % annual growth rate look to be over. The fall of the GDP is reaching levels considered already by the Chinese CP -State authorities as dangerous for igniting social unrest and upheavals both in the urban centers and the countryside.

Their worries are shared by analysts in the imperialist West seeing the danger of “growing dissent that can erupt into protests and riots” (Stratfor April 15, 2009). The reasons for a social explosion are routed in the social economic structure itself: “At the most basic level, China’ economy has been structured over the past three decades to be fuelled by exports and inputs of foreign investment. Together, these remain the backbone of the Chinese economy. They are strength in times of global economic activity, but a lead weight in times of global slowdown. Domestically only about a quarter of China’s 1.3 billion are really in the economically active” middle class” and above/ While that still is a massive number, it leaves nearly a billion people on the receiving end…”( Stratfor 15/4/09).

The fall of world demand for Chinese exports because of the contraction of world trade, the flight of foreign capital because of the progressing world bankruptcy and the lack of a developed capitalist domestic market make China vulnerable to the pressures of the world crisis. A turn to develop a domestic market cannot be effectuated without exacerbating all the contradictions between the country side and the cities leading to mass unrest and social explosions. The capitalist restoration process produced super-profits for foreign capital and for the rising local middle class, and the illusion of a China rising to world hegemony later in the 21st century. As the social structure of China is succumbing to the pressures of world crisis, not only past illusions are now has been shattered but also the prospect of a new social revolution in this vast country re-appears in the horizon.

The capitalist restoration process in China played a key role for US imperialism to finance its gigantic deficits and sustain the weak upturn of the world economy in the period 2002-2007. Now the crisis is shattering this US-Chinese economic interconnection with enormous implications both internationally and in China.

Russia has entered also in its worst crisis from the times of the 1998 default, shaken by the fall of the oil price, the collapse of the rubble and the bankruptcy of most of its oligarchs under the pressure of world finance capital. Eastern Europe has been transformed into a black hole threatening to shallow the European banking system. The euphoria in the imperialist West following the collapse of the former bureaucratized workers states in 1989-91 and the opening of the road to the integration of the vast former Soviet space into the world capitalist market has been transformed from the historic dream of capitalism into a nightmare in early 21st century.

5. After decades of neoliberal “deregulation” and privatization, State intervention occupies again the center of the stage, starting from the unprecedented capital injections, interest rate cuts, bail outs and State intervention nationalizations in 2007-2008 in the US and Britain and then extended in one country after another all over the world.

There is no a return to the post-war Keynesianism nor a revival of the Welfare State in the developed capitalist countries ; the State does not “expand” but destroys public services (hospitals, education, etc) by privatizing them and accumulates deficits and public debt to secure resources to bail out the bankers and other capitalists. In fact, there is a strengthening of the role of the capitalist State as the “savior of last resort” of capitalism in bankruptcy. The success of its regulatory intervention in the economy is more than doubtful. “The market may be bust but so is the state”, wrote Philip Stephens in Financial Times (6/4/09).

Capitalist nationalizations, “the negation of capitalism within the capitalist system itself”, are an extreme action to rescue capital from bankruptcy. Within the framework of the actual social regime, nationalization puts the charge of the crisis on the shoulders of the working people through the increase of the public debt, unemployment, inflation etc. From the other side, it’s an objective manifestation of the process of preparation and transition to the collective property of the producers under the control and management of the direct producers themselves.

The fetish of the State, supreme expression of the commodity and capital fetishism, creates illusions to the capitalists themselves. For them the State, an expression of social relation, is transformed into a thing or a supreme power able to absorb all the debts and sustain all the capitals in bankruptcy: the bankruptcy of the State (the liquidation of public credit, the default of the public debt, the sinking of the monetary system, the disruption of all inter-state relations) is now in progress as a condensation of the crisis. For the working humanity, the crisis put objectively the question of the State i. e. the question of political power itself.

The State, coming forward as the mediator of the systemic contradictions, becomes the center of intense political conflict both between and with different competing groups of private capitalist interests as well as with the workers and popular masses. The question “who will pay for the crisis?” becomes the most central and disputed political question. At the same time, the question “who rules society?” and thus the centrality of state power itself becomes the apple of discord.

Clashes between the State, the capitalist group interests and the masses fuel political instability and regime crisis. Repressive Bonapartist tendencies are growing; at the same time, all sorts of bourgeois democratic maneuvers, like those introduced by the new Obama Administration, are made to deflect and neutralize popular discontent, rising social movements and anti-imperialist resistances.

6. World capitalism has entered in this new explosive stage of crisis having already behind it a decade of imperialist wars that devasted the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia without making possible to imperialism to achieve its goals.

The imperialist war drive, an expression itself of the unresolved and sharpening contradictions of the system in the post-Cold War period, produced new impasses. The “war on terror” terrorist Crusade launched by the Bush Administration led to the swamp in Iraq and to a dead end in Afghanistan that destabilized completely Pakistan and the entire Indian sub-continent. The US war strategy under the Obama Administration shifts its focus to Central Asia not solely by a surge of US and NATO troops but also by building new diplomatic bridges and uplifting a strong network of alliances, which encompasses Turkey, Russia, and Iran.

The position of US imperialism is undermined both by the world capitalist crisis, whose center is located precisely in the US, as well as by the military reverses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imperialist antagonisms and rivalries are intensifying. But this does not imply that a new capitalist superpower could replace US as world hegemon: American capitalism represents the highest point of the historical development of world capitalism and of its decline. Humanity is still confronted with the volcanic eruptions of a declining US capitalism which cannot find any internal equilibrium without establishing a new world equilibrium under its supremacy.

The new US strategic shift finds acute problems with the emergence of the most extreme right wing, racist, obscurantist Zionist government in Israel, in February 2009, three years after the defeat of the Zionist Army in Lebanon in 2006 and in the aftermath the genocidal massacre of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza at the end of December 2008-early January 2009. The election of an extreme reactionary Zionist coalition government is an expression of the crisis and impasses of the Zionist and imperialist colonial project itself. Together with it, the so-called “two states solution” of a Palestinian statelet of impotent Bantustans surrounded by the Zionist settlers and Army has been buried.

The Palestinian national movement has to be emancipated from the collaborators of Zionism and imperialism in the so-called Palestinian Authority, as well as from the religious fundamentalist leadership of Hamas, to be re-armed with a revolutionary strategy and tactics, fighting for freedom to all political prisoners, the demolition of the apartheid Wall and the dismantlement of the settlements, for the right of the return of all Palestinian refugees to their lands, for the right of self determination and for a secular, socialist Republic in the entire territory of Palestine, in the framework of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.

The revival of the Arab workers movement as it was seen in the mass strike movement in Egypt with the presence of secular and socialist forces is a positive sign that the conditions develop for an overcoming not only of the bankrupt bourgeois secular nationalist leaderships but also of the reactionary Islamist groups that occupied so far the scene.

The new stage of the world capitalist crisis re-shapes the social landscape providing new possibilities for revolutionaries in Palestine and the Middle East to unite beyond religious and ethnic divisions, and fight imperialism and Zionism under the banner of the Permanent Revolution.

7. In Latin America, the world crisis has had repercussions in a continent already immersed un profound mobilizations and political crises, linked to the world economic crises of the last decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the “Argentinazo” of 2001. The traditional bourgeois parties were in complete bankruptcy.

The nationalist/indigenist regimes of the Andes region were the expresion of the profundity of the crisis, and not its solution. Their policy of partial (and compensated) nationalizations of big capital, and of limited mobilization of the masses against the traditional right and against imperialism, is failing in the historic task of structuring an independent national State, and is now seen to be affected by the vertiginous fall in the world prices of raw materials, which questions the basis of the “social policies” taken up to conquier the support of the poor masses of the city and the countryside and at the same time discipline them.

Being obliged to establish a line of contention based on alliances with governments originating on the left (as in the case of Brazil, or Michelle Bachelet in Chile) was the expression of the political retreat of imperialism, as a complement to, and not as a source of contradiction, with the support of right-wing and paramilitary regimes (Mexico, Colombia), and the reactivation the Third Fleet of the US Navy, patrolling the eastern coast of the continent. Obama not only lends continuity, but deepens Bush’s policy, when he takes the “Great International Agreement” to the point of initiating the dissolution of the blockade against Cuba, which constitutes, apart from the attempt to preserve imperialist dominion in conditions of exceptional crisis, a historic defeat of half a century of agression and provocations by the US against the Caribbean island. With the bilateral commercial treaties, the U.S. also gave continuity to the economic colonization of the continent, destroying the local bourgeois nationalist attempts of “integration”.

This line of precarious co-existence with governments previously denouced as being part of the “evil axis” had hardly been drawn when the world crisis dealt it a tremendous blow. The crisis not only affects the economic basis of the nationalist petite-bourgeois regimes, but also that of the “left-wing firefighter” governments (Lula, Kirchner, Bachelet) giving them the perspective of a gigantic crisis, and even that of a situation of political disolution (Argentina).

Since the world bankruptcy now in course errupted in Latin America after a series of capitalist bankruptcies, political crises and uprisings during the last decade, all social classes and all states have received it in an extraordinary state of tension. The nationalist experiences (including their “radical” versions: Chávez, Evo Morales, Correa) have once again failed in their attempt at structuring a national independent State and at initiating a process of autonomous capitalist industrialization, let alone destroying the supremacy of finance capital and placing the workers and peasants as political power. Not only have they failed to create, and neither have they had the capacity to create, a national bourgeoisie, but neither have their nationalizations been able to structure a period of transition towards that objective, under the hegemony of the State. The nationalizations will only take on a revolutionary character if they transfer capital accumulated by the finance oligarchy to the nation and if they place the exploited in political power. The utilization of state funds to compensate nationalized capital, on the other hand, blocks all possibility for independent development and obliges the nation to make greater sacrifices; foreign capital, forced out of the sphere of industry, returns under the form of finance capital, bailing out the purchase of public debt.

Nationalism has used the nationalizations, not to convert the workers into the ruling class, but rather to impede their independent organization and to subjugate their leaders to the tutelage of the State, availing themselves of nationalist demagoguery as well as repression. The “nationalist” bureaucracies have hardly waited an instant in order to line their pockets, falling into frequent scandals of corruption, as denounced in Venezuela and Bolivia, where the nationalizations of Evo Morales have not been an act of sovreignty against imperialist penetration; on the contrary, they have eased it. According to Evo Morales the oil conglomerates “are now our partners”. But this, far from opening a period of prosperity and peaceful cooperation, deepens the integration of Latin America into the world economy, and its crisis. The world capitalist crisis, which in the 20th century spurred the emergence of nationalist movements and governments, now, in this new period of generalized international bankruptcy, threatens to become their tomb. The failure of nationalism returns all timeliness to the demand for the United Socialist States of Latin America – a federation of worker and peasant governments.

8. The lifting of the blockade against Cuba would be a historic victory for that country, for having overcome imperialist sabotage, even occasioning a very high price for it. But this lifting forms part of an international accord aimed at solving the contradictions in the development of Cuba by means of a restoration of dominion of capital. The question is, who orients the interchange with the world economy needed by Cuba’s economy, the bureaucracy or the workers of the cities and the countryside? Which leads to an even more decisive question: Que should decide in the historic crisis of the oppressive relations between the United States and Latin America: the petite-bourgeois governments of capital, or the alliance of workers and peasants? The world crisis has placed squarely upon the table all the historic relations between Yanqui Imperialism and Latin America. The historic conditions for the abolition of semi-colonial submission are at hand. But this abolition affects the interests of the native capitalist classes and a fraction of the petite-bourgeoisie, that takes it for granted that it has already attained its social aspirations. The Latin American bourgeoisies have placed themselves at the head of a rescue operation for this semi-colonial relationship, by means of their center-left governments. In a relatively short time this operation is bound to fail: the minimal national autonomy aimed at by Latin American governments will be swept away by the world crisis or by the attempts by Yanqui imperialism to reconvert itself into the counter-revolutionary axis of a solution to the crisis. The destiny of the Cuban Revolution is in the hands of the Latin American socialist revolution.
But the political crisis also drags the center-left governments into the wake of its continental (and world-wide) standard bearer, the government of Lula in Brazil. While the northern ex-worker travels all over the world as the solver of all problems, he has a time bomb planted in the politics of his own country. The enormous trade surpluses are a thing of the past, in the next few months the country has registered tax revenue shortfalls. The subsidies given to big industrial and finance capital by Lula’s government amount to billions of dollars in “tax revenue cancelations” and are eating into foreign currency reserves. This points to a perspective of financial crisis (cessation of payments) and social catastrophe. A monumental political crisis is in the works for the 2010 presidential succession. Lula and his apparatus (including his pre-candidate Dilma Roussef), are confronting it by putting forward a popular front coalition extending rightwards without limit, with which to face the bourgeois candidates.

One expression of that crisis are the percentages of over 10% attributed by the public opinion election polls to the PSOL – with it candidate Heloísa Helena – a label holding together a coalition of left-wing and movementist tendencies , which has even served as a model for political adventures on other continents (inside the NPA of France, first of all). This transitory phenomena may, however, create a political earthquake, and can be explained by the brutal gutting of the PT (and the bureaucratization of the CUT) rather than by the intrinsic virtues of the “party-front” model of the PSOL, with no program and based on accords between small left-wing apparatus and parliamentary groups. This position, actually, hides a perspective which seeks to close the crisis with a bourgeois program (in Brazil, the reduction of the interest rates, a demand of a whole sector of the bourgeoisie, and monetary devaluation), a party with a bureaucratic and personalist internal regime, and the sacrifice of any vestige of class independence, in open alliance with the bourgeois and pro-Church parties (Heloísa Helena, for example, repudiates the right to abortion). This right-wing alliance-ism is the natural consequence for a “party of tendencies” which repudiates the revolutionary organization of the workers and the struggle for the socialist consciousness of the working class to replace accords between chieftans. Facing the PSTU of Brazil is a choice between defending class independence or sacrificing it in the name of the “left-wing front” headed by the PSOL – and dominated by the alliance with the shadow of the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary and workers international vanguard must combat the refloating of the idea of a “party bus” (an anti-party having the form of a party), and even harder that of the International, classless and lacking a program, the World Social Forum (WSF), which ended up fully integrated into the bourgeois and imperialist policies of its principal example, the PT of Brazil, cheerleader and host of the WSF in its various editions.

A new stage in the mobilization of the exploited in Latin America can be seen on the horizon. The struggle for their most basic needs (wages, defense of jobs, access to land, and the most basic natural resources) comes to the fore under the imperious necessity for the conquest of their political independence from bourgeois and petite-bourgeois nationalism, for an independent (revolutionary) worker’s party, and for the social reorganization upon new (socialist) foundations, by means of the power of the exploited themselves.

The recovery of all of the natural and economic resources, continental unity in order to value them – time and again put forward and then destroyed by nationalism – will be achieved by means of their socialist unity, the bridge over which the struggle of the Latin American masses will join together with the anti-Capitalist fight of the exploited of the whole world. La preparación de la revolución socialista en América Latina ha recorrido un largo proceso histórico, con experiencias antiimperialistas profundas, como la revolución cubana. El entrelazamiento entre la bancarrota mundial y el agotamiento de las experiencias nacionalistas permitirá culminar esta etapa histórica. Es de este modo que el socialismo revolucionario delimita sus posiciones con el imperialismo y sus agentes, de un lado, y con las tentativas nacionalistas, del otro, y se propone como candidato a la lucha por el poder político. La tarea más urgente en América Latina es producir un reagrupamiento socialista de fuerzas en el cuadro de la crisis mundial].

9. The CRFI had pointed out the development of a process of “latinoamericanization” of Europe itself, not only in the sense of a rapid deterioration of social conditions and the existence of ghettoes and Third World zones of misery and police repression within the metropolis itself but also by a growing tendency to rebellion of the oppressed masses, particularly by a new generation of workers with precarious, low-paid work, was manifested, from the revolt in the “banlieue” in 2005 and the combative mobilization against the CPE in France in 2006 to the youth mobilization against the privatization of the universities according to the EU directives in Greece in 2006-2007 to the December 2008 revolt.

The new, contradictory but ascending wave of radicalization clashes with the old bureaucratic apparatuses of Social democracy and the recycled Stalinist CPs. The disastrous experiences of the social-liberal, third way¨, center left or “plural left” governments in Britain, Italy, France, Greece etc. have discredited the traditional reformist Left and their satellites in the so-called radical Left. A new political space has been formed for revolutionary politics.

But as the masses are moving to the left, centrist forces that have exhausted their historical potential in the past by tail ending the bureaucracies, try to meet these radicalized strata by moving themselves further to the right. A number of ‘broad anti-capitalist parties or fronts’ were formed the last period: the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), Respect in Britain, Red-Green Alliance in Danemark, Bloc of the Left in Portugal, and lately the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France. The parliamentary reformist parties of Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and of SYRIZA in Greece are usually included in that list. Most of these “anti-capitalist” parties or fronts of far left origins turned openly to reformism becoming parts of the European Left Party (Bloc of the Left, Respect). Some already knew devastating crises and splits. It is the case of Respect, of the SSP, and of the Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, considered for a long time as the leading force of the radical anti-capitalist left in Europe before collapsing after its treacherous collaboration in the Prodi government.

Olivier Besancenot´s NPA in France, founded formally in February 2009 after an initiative taken by the self-dissolved LCR, advocates a regroupment of various left forces and traditions superseding the old, historical divisions between opposite currents in the workers movement. Avoiding carefully the demarcation line between revolution and reform, it speaks about a “revolutionary transformation of society” and it proclaims as its strategic goal “socialism of the 21st century”. It is not just a flattering reference to Chavez but a conscious break from any continuity with the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolshevik communist tradition, and Trotskyism. The rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, already done by the LCR years ago, is now completed. While that rejection was done under the pretext that the dictatorship of the proletariat was discredited by Stalinism, now it becomes crystal clear that this rejection is motivated mainly by an adaptation to bourgeois parliamentary democracy, which they try to extend and improve by a combination of renewed parliamentary institutions of a representative democracy based on general elections and the direct democracy of social movements from below.

The problems of the current explosive situation in France and in Europe are approached from the standpoint of this vague left democracy. Support to social struggles and movements has to be reflected into an electoral ascent of the anticapitalist vote and a good electoral result has to lead to new social struggles and movements. A combination and alternation of electoralism and movimentism is proposed as a political strategy for social emancipation!

As far as the European Union is concerned, in sharp contrast to its crisis and the centrifugal forces that threaten to disintegrate it, the NPA rejects the revolutionary program for the socialist unification of the Continent by a social revolution and the formation of a United Socialist States of Europe; it substitutes it with a call for “a social and democratic Europe” advancing a series of anti-neoliberal demands, which leave the capitalist framework intact, and postponing the demand for a socialist Europe as a proposal to a future “democratically elected by universal suffrage” European Constituent Assembly…

No revolutionary transformation of society in France, in Europe or in any part of the world could ever be achieved with such a fetishism of democratic rhetoric.

10. The explosive impact of the world crisis on the life and the struggle of the exploited and oppressed produces rapid, often unexpected changes in the movement and the consciousness of the masses. There is a non linear process of radicalization.

Mass sackings, factory closures, and unemployment create initially confusion, frustration and a defensive attitude. The trade union bureaucracies are entirely incapable and unwilling to confront the capitalist debacle or even to organize a partial mobilization against it. They lean to the capitalists and the State for an impossible compromise through concessions and retreat, abandoning many of the gains and positions won though struggle by the workers’ movement. Trotsky has analyzed that “exceptional circumstances, independent from the will of individuals and parties are needed for the discontent to break from the chains of conservative spirit and for the masses to erupt into rebellion. Consequently, the rapid changes in the opinion and mood of the masses in time of revolution have their origin not in the elasticity and flexibility of the human psyche but, on the contrary, in its deep conservativism. Ideas and social relations are in a chronic delay in relation to the new objective conditions until the moment when they are collapsing as in a cataclysm[...] the class acquires consciousness of the problems posed by the crisis and the masses are orientated into action by the method of successive approximations”( History of the Russian revolution). This movement of radicalization can be reversed when “this impetus is broken on objective obstacles”.

We are in a stage of radicalization which has not been defeated by reaction or unsurpassable obstacles; in a transition where it is absolutely necessary for the revolutionary parties to study in detail every particular moment of development of the economic and political crisis, every manifestation of workers’ and popular resistance, from the smallest defensive struggle to mass mobilizations, general strikes and rebellions like that in Greece or Guadeloupe, by a systematic intervention in the movement, establishing a constant dialogue with the masses and their demands, old and new, advancing the program needed for the development and victory of the struggle, and preparing by the methods of propaganda, agitation and organization the revolutionary struggle for workers’ power and Socialism.

The world crisis is increasing the tendency to social explosions posing on the agenda the open question of a transition to social revolution and revolutionary transformation of society- or to barbarism.

The Greek revolt summarizes many of the problems to be resolved in that transition. It is clear that the revolt was not directed by any political party, or organized force on the basis of a political project and program. It is false to see just an expression of spontaneity of a youth rebelling against police repression. There were conscious attempts by vanguard forces to advance into a general political strike. Many experiences of past struggles were revived and superseded; the bureaucracies were challenged and ousted from the local offices in many occasions. Together with the monopoly of the violence by the State, it was challenged the control of the ruling class on information, mass media, and culture. For the first time, demands for a re-organization of the social relations on new socialist bases, for the re-appropriation of life in all its manifestations were expressed in many occupied sites, open general assemblies and centers of action.

But the limits of the December revolt became very soon visible: there was no a unifying political revolutionary organization of the masses and of its vanguard to channeling the energy of the rebellion into a revolutionary “assault to heaven”. PASOK, the official center left bourgeois opposition was naturally hostile to the rebellion, being sometimes on the right of the right wing government blaming it as “incapable” to impose effective police state measures. The PASOK trade union bureaucracy of GSEE (the General Confederation of Labor) boycotted the general strike and opposed the rebellion. The Stalinist KKE stood on the sides of the bourgeois State as a Party of Order. The rebelled masses left far behind the other left forces, including the anarchist networks. Conservative tendencies appeared within the far left, which turned from direct action to the formation of electoral blocs for the next elections. While the class conscious bourgeois newspaper Le Monde wrote with fear that ¨Greece is without a State” (10/12/08), the working class was not politically and organizationally prepared or ready for the overthrow of a shaken bourgeois regime by seizing political power and its fate in its hands.

Nevertheless, the December rebellion in Greece remains undefeated, a dress rehearsal for the next stage of confrontation in Greece, in Europe and internationally, and a source of inspiration for revolutionaries all over the world for the coming historic confrontations.

The world crisis has put the questions ¨who will pay for the crisis?” and “who rules society?” on the agenda. The answer can be given only by starting from a world point of departure. Now more than ever the task is posed clearly: we need a revolutionary workers International, the re-founded Fourth International!

Buenos Aires, April 14, 2009

These militants come from England, Italy, Belgium, Finland who together with the Greek Trotskyists of EEK(WRP), conduct the battle on a European scale:

• For a revolutionary socialist program out of the capitalist crisis.

The crisis to be paid by the capitalists not the workers.

• Down with EU of monopolies – A United Socialist Europe

• Down with the corrupted right-wing government of bankers, industrialists and ship-owners and with whatever ensuing government set to simple manage the crisis in Greece and Europe. – Workers’ Power

• In the path of continuing the revolt of December

Press office of EEK, 30 April 2009

Vallankumouksellinen Työväenpuolue (EEK)

Kapodistriou 38, Ateena,
+ 30 697 766 6470
eek@ath.forthnet.gr
pressrelease@eek.gr
http://www.eek.gr

LEHDISTÖTIEDOTE – 26.5.2009

Kreikan Vallankumouksellinen Työväenpuolue protestoi jyrkästi korkeimman oikeuden päätöstä vastaan, jonka mukaan viisi vaaliehdokasta puolueen listoilta on hylätty. Kaikki ehdokkaat olivat jonkun Euroopan Unioniin kuuluvan maan kansalaisia. Meidän hylätyt ehdokkaat ovat: Scacchi Luca Italian Työtätekevien Kommunistisen Puolueen (PCL) jäsen, Lester Jeremy Paul on Britannian Retting –yliopiston dekaani ja Counter Hegemony –lehden kustantaja, Jani Poimala ja Mikko Niemi ovat Suomen Marxilaisen Työväenliiton jäseniä ja belgialainen Ooms Maura on Argentiinan Partido Obreron tiedottajia. Syyksi Korkein Oikeus ilmoitti ”muodollisuuksien puutetta”. Mihin puutteisiin Korkein Oikeus viittaa?

Sanatarkasti Korkein Oikeus kertoo: ”EEK:n vaalilistalta ei hyväksytä ehdokkaiksi seuraavia henkilöitä: 1) SCACCHI LUKA, Italian kansalainen, 2) OOMS MAURA-CRISTINA, Argentiinan kansalainen, 3) LESTER JEREMY PAUL, Btitannian kansalainen, 4) POIMALA JANI, Suomen kansalainen ja 5) NIEMI MIKKO, Suomen kansalainen. Syynä on se, että yllämainituilla ei ollut todistusta oman valtion vastaavilta viranomaisilta siitä, että he eivät ole menettäneet vaalioikeutensa ko. valtioissa, tai sellaisen menettäminen ei ole ko. viranomaisten tiedossa. Tällaisen todistuksen puute johtaa ko. henkilöiden ehdokkuuden hylkäämiseen (artikla 5, §2, laki 2196/1994)”.
Liittyen Korkeimman Oikeuden päätökseen meidän on huomioitava seuraavat seikat:

1.    Meidän puolueen vaalilistan muillakaan 17 ehdokkaalla ei ole ollut sellaista todistusta. Tietääksemme yksikään ehdokas muiden puolueiden vaalilistoilta ei ole toimittanut ”todistusta” vaalikelpoisuudestaan. Jokaisen ehdokkaan oma vakuutus on tähän saakka riittänyt. Miksi ”ulkomaalaiset” ehdokkaat tarvitsevat erikoisen todistuksen?

2.    Edellisissä eurovaaleissa ehdokkaamme Jeremy Lester sai osallistua MERA:n listoilta, joka oli silloinen vaaliliittomme. Toimittaen samat asiakirjat silloin, Lester oli kelpuutettu ehdokkaaksi. Minkä vuoksi hän on sääntöjenvastainen nyt, viisi vuotta myöhemmin? Miksi nykyisissä vaaleissa Korkein Oikeus käyttää uusia ”mittoja ja punnuksia”? Todettakoon, että Jeremy Lester ei kuulu samaan kategoriaan Ekologi-vihreiden Ross Dailyn kanssa, joka (meidän mielestä myös väärin) hylättiin, koska Britannian laki riistää poliittiset oikeudet kaikilta yli 15 vuotta muualla kuin Britanniassa asuvilta. Jeremy Lester asuu vakituisesti Britanniassa, hän opettaa ja toimii Rettingin yliopiston dekaanina.

3.    Aiemmissa eurovaaleissa italialaisen Scacchi Lucan sijassa oli hänen toverinsa PCL:sta, Franco Grizolia, joka oli kelpuutettu MERA:n ehdokkaaksi samoilla muodollisuuksilla.

4.    Toimittamissamme asiakirjoissa Maura Ooms ei esiinny Agentiinan kansalaisena, kuten Korkeiman Oikeuden päätös väittää, vaan Belgian kansalaisena, joka on Partido Obreron jäsen.

Sanotaan, että Korkeimman Oikeuden päätöksiä ei saa kommentoida. Meillä on silti oikeus puolustaa oikeuksiamme, jopa silloin kun vastassa on maan Korkeimman Oikeuden viranomaisia. Mikä sitten on muuttunut edellisten eurovaalien jälkeen? Onko kenties muuttunut laki, ilman että meitä olisi informoitu siitä? Viittaus viiteen artiklaan, §2, lain 2196/1994 osoittaa, että kysymys ei voi olla siitä. Miksi nyt Korkein Oikeus tulkitsee tätä lakia uudella tavalla? Liittyneekö se uuteen moraaliin, joka pyritään muodostamaan, ja jotkut tahot kulkevat vanavedessä muukalaisvihan, jota yhteiskunnan tietyt tahot viljelevät yhdessä vastenmielisen rasismin ja nationalismin ilmapiirin kanssa? Häiritseekö EEK:n vaalilistan internationalistinen luonne, joka toisin kuin ennen, tällä kertaa sisälsi huomattavan määrän ”vieraita”, joita olisi mahdotonta ohittaa huomaamatta?

Kuka on viime kädessä epämuodollinen? Käännymme Kreikan yhteiskunnan, työväen-, nuorisoliikkeen ja vasemmistopuolueiden puoleen ja pyydämme heidän tukensa. Oikeudellisen ennakkotapauksen luomista ei saisi sallia. Euroopan Unioni on tarkoitettu (suurten) kapitalistien intressien liitoksi. Kun kyseessä on kansalais- ja työläisoikeudet, siellä näyttää toimivan nationalismin ja kansallisvaltion valloittamattomat muurit.

___EEK:n tiedotustoimisto
Ateena 26. toukokuuta 2009

Euroopan talouskasvu on roimasti miinusmerkkinen, julkinen velka kasvaa huimaa vauhtia kaikissa tai lähes kaikissa jäsenmaissa, samoin työttömyys, ja uusimpien jäsenmaiden (esim. Baltian maat, Tsekki, Unkari, Bulgaria) taloudet ovat täydellisen katastrofin kourissa. EU:n kriisi, yhdessä kansainvälisen kapitalismin kriisin mukana, on ollut jo pitkään ennakoitavissa, ja näin me marxilaista metodia käyttäen olemme myös tehneet. Nyt ei enää tarvitse ennakoida eikä spekuloida. Kriisi on tässä ja nyt, ja huomenna vielä pahempi.

Kun koko imperialistinen projekti nimeltä EU on suunnattomissa vaikeuksissa, ja sille on välttämätöntä tuoda hyvin konkreettisesti esiin vaihtoehto, niin mitä tekee suomalainen vasemmisto? Luopuu ennestäänkin lähes olemattomasta kapitalismin järjestelmäkritiikistä, ja suuntaa entistäkin räikeämmin joko reformistisille ja/tai nationalistisille urille. Yhdet vaativat “toisenlaista Eurooppaa” ja omaa markkaa takaisin, toiset kieltäytyvät kategorisesti osallistumasta “Imperialistisen Euroopan” vaaleihin kaikissa olosuhteissa, ja kolmannet harrastavat kovin epäilyttäviä kansanrintamakuvioita työväenluokkaiset lähtökohdat unohtaen. Ja tämä kaikki koskee suomalaista niin sanottua laitavasemmistoa. Vanhat reformistipuolueet Vasemmistoliitto ja demarit ovat sitten oma lukunsa, joiden linjauksia on vaikea edes kommentoida sortumatta alatyylisiin ilmauksiin. Entisistä reformisteista on tullut ei niin-reformistisia opportunisteja, parlamentaariseen vallankäyttöön pikkuriikkisesti osallistuvia poliittisia kääpiöitä, joille kelpaa mikä vaan, kunhan saavat olla vähän mukana.

Kriisin aikakaudella, juuri mikään ei ole niin vaarallista, kuin tosiasioiden hämärtäminen epämääräisillä termeillä, poliittisesti takapajuisimpien virtauksien mukana kulkeminen, ja työväenluokkaisten ihmisten tyynnyttely, että ” kyllä tässä lopulta käy ihan hyvin”. Ei, nyt täytyy selvästi kertoa se, mistä on kysymys, mihin se tulee pahimmillaan johtamaan, ja mitä asialle tulee tehdä. Millainen on toisenlainen eurooppa? Mitä hyötyä omasta markasta olisi? Miksi EU-vaalien tarjoamaa tilaisuutta ei pitäisi käyttää hyväksi poliittisen sanoman esilletuomisessa, jos siihen on resurssejakin? Tällaisia kysymyksiä voidaan esittää suomalaiselle vasemmistolle, mutta kunnon vastauksia tuskin kannattaa odottaa.

Pitää selvästi tuoda esille, että kapitalismi elää imperialistisen rappion viimeisiä vaiheita, ja on nyt alkanut luhistua nopealla vauhdilla, huolimatta moninaisista elvytysyrityksistä. Reaalitalouden ollessa jo kauan kykenemätön riittävään lisäarvon tuotantoon, on talouden annettu paisua fiktiivisiin ulottuvuuksiin, ja velanoton säestyksellä varastettu oletettua tulevaisuuden työhön perustuvaa lisäarvoa tämän päivän imperialismin pelastukseksi. Nyt Uus-Keynesiläisyyden nimissä toteutettava massiivinen, julkinen velkaelvytys on epätoivoinen keino saada asiat näyttämään paremmilta vielä hetken. Tuloksena on luultavasti rahan arvon merkittävä aleneminen, luottomarkkinoiden kriisiytyminen entisestään ja ongelmien nykyistäkin massiivisempi päällevyöryminen lähitulevaisuudessa. Kapitalistien keinot ovat käymässä todella vähiin. Ne kaikkein viimeisimmät keinot eivät tule olemaan mitään herkkua työväenluokalle, vaan merkitsevät väistämättä jonkinasteista fasismia lähellä olevaa poliisivaltiota. Näin ollen, MEIDÄN on luotava oma vaihtoehto, ja hylättävä HEIDÄN tarjoamansa synkkääkin synkempi tulevaisuus.

Koska tilanne on mitä suurimmassa määrin kriittinen, eikä EU:n edustaman imperialistisen kapitalismin puitteissa ole tarjolla mitään työväenluokalle kelpaavaa tulevaisuuden visiota, on vaihtoehtoa rakennettava kiireellisesti. Tämä vaihtoehto ei rakennu sillä, että mennään tavan vuoksi vaaliuurnille, ja äänestetään sitä vähiten epämiellyttävää vaihtoehtoa. Näissä olosuhteissa joudumme toteamaan, ettei yksikään Suomessa EU-vaaleihin ehdokkaita asettava puolue kykene lähellekään vastaamaan aikamme asettamiin haasteisiin.

Laitavasemmistonkaan listoilta ei ole löydettävissä yhtään nimeä, joka toisi esille nykyisen kriisin syitä, ja ainoaa toimivaa ratkaisua siihen: Sosialistista vallankumousta kansainvälisellä tasolla. Marxilainen työväenliitto ei resurssien vähäisyydestä johtuen tällä kertaa osallistu vaaleihin, ja näin ollen kehotamme työväenluokkaisia ihmisiä ja muuta tavallista kansaa olemaan äänestämättä EU-vaaleissa. Jatkamme vallankumouksellisen, sosialistisen vaihtoehdon valmistelua, ja kehotamme työväenluokan tiedostavia elementtejä lähtemään mukaan kamppailuun sosialistisen tulevaisuuden puolesta.

Marxilainen Työväenliitto osallistuu sosialistisen internationalismin hengessä EU-vaaleihin Kreikkalaisen sisarpuolueemme EEK:n listoilta kahden ehdokkaan voimin.

Marxilainen Työväenliitto

14.5.2009