Down
with the imperialist European Union of austerity, unemployment,
racism and social cannibalism!
Down
with the governments of Merkel, Monti, Samaras, Rajoy, and all
capitalist governments!
All
the power to the workers! For workers’ governments and the United
Socialist States of Europe!
Resolution of the International Secretariat of the CRFI
The European Union and its Euro-zone have become the epicenter of the worst world capitalist crisis in history that exploded more than five years ago, starting from the center itself of the world system, the United States.
The meltdown of the world financial system, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the world-wide plunge into a Great Depression, the unprecedented but fruitless intervention by all the governments and central banks injecting gigantic amounts of liquidity to save the banks, led to the eruption of the European sovereign debt crisis, breaking, first, its weakest link first, Greece, and now expanding and threatening to disintegrate the entire Euro-zone and the EU itself.
Endless
series of EU Summits and packages linked with Memoranda of ferocious
anti-popular measures totally failed not only to end the “Greek
tragedy” but to prevent the much feared “contagion” to Southern
Europe hitting also the hard core of the EU, France and Germany.
After Greece, Ireland, Portugal, now Spain and Italy, the fourth and
third strongest economic powers of continental Europe, are on the
brink to fall in the same abyss with incalculable implications for
the entire European and world economy.
The EU economy, including its industrial powerhouse, Germany, has entered into a recession, which will be worsened in 2013.
INDUSTRIAL
COLLAPSE IN EUROPE
“When
the tide is low, you see who swims naked.”. The end of the
financial 'bubble' and international credit contraction denuded the
core of the capitalist bankruptcy: the overproduction of capital and
goods. This is what happened in Italy and France, where the
automobile, steel, construction industries as well as several others,
have been forced to close their plants, lay off workers en masse and
even put a question mark over the continuation of several
international cartels. Fiat and its “indotto”, in Italy, Peugeot,
Arcelor Mittal, in France, are facing an extreme situation, which
raises the complete reorganization of half a century of industrial
development. In France, only during the last three years 900
factories closed their doors. The weight of the industrial sector in
GDP was reduced from 25 to 13 percent. The nationalization of the
industry has become the backbone of the national debate, which for
the capital and the Hollande government is a manoeuvre to the rescue
of the big fish. The gala press demands to proceed as Obama did with
GM and AIG: to massively inject funds into bankrupt companies to
produce a personnel downsizing of a large scale and to reduce wages.
The CRFI calls the vanguard of the working class in France and Italy
to launch a campaign for the expropriation without compensation of
the big fish of the industry and to prepare the conditions for the
general occupancy of companies based on this goal. “Keynesian”
illusions scattered by French “socialism” have melted like snow
in the sun, given the evidence that would aggravate the global crisis
of overproduction and lead to a trade war record. In a reverse mode,
a recent article by Wolfgang Münchau, a prominent columnist of the
Financial Times, warns that the austerity measures imposed by Monti,
threatens to bring Italy into a complete economic breakdown. To
Münchau, Italy’s retreat from the euro would be a “lesser
evil”!
The
project of the “banking union”, that would give a unified output
to the financial crisis in Europe, has opened a new front in the
crisis. The president of the Bank of France announced the intention
of displacing the centrality of London’s financial market, and
Cameron has threatened to take Britain out of the EU. On the other
hand, the intention to turn the ECB into the sole authority to decide
in cases of banking crises has sunk, facing the resistance of the
national central banks. It shows again that the attempt to solve the
great historical question of the unity of Europe within capitalist
terms is “a reactionary utopia”. Greece has been forced to buy
back debt, which is in the hands, above all, of Greek banks, with a
profit of 200%, according to the Financial Times, for private
holders.
Centrifugal
and centripetal social, political, financial, economic, fiscal,
monetary forces, contradictory tendencies of disintegration and
integration are turning apart the initial EU project. Every move to
promote further integration, such as banking or fiscal union to face
the disastrous effects of financial fragmentation and unbalances
between State members, produces more disintegration. It inflames all
national and imperialist antagonisms: between Germany and the
Northern bloc with the Southern European countries; between Germany
and France; between Britain and all continental European powers etc.
It is intensifying the disintegration process.
Germany’s
hegemonic role, and its attempt to impose its savage
Ordo-liberalismus
in an
integrated “German Europe” dominating a number of EU
protectorates without any trace of economic sovereignty clashes with
antagonistic imperialist national interests, with powerful workers’
and popular resistances, as well as with the historic limitations of
German capitalism itself. Germany is more powerful than any other
European country but weaker than the other European countries
together. Its export-economy is severely hit by the shrinking of
demand in the European and world market, including China. A break up
of the euro-zone or a return to a Deutschmark will have disastrous
effects for German capitalism.
More
than twenty years after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the
turn to capitalist restoration of Eastern Europe as well as of China,
we assist to the disintegration
of the imperialist bloc that European capitalists have created,
around the German-French axis, on the basis of the Maastricht Treaty
and the launching of a common euro-currency, for the “integration”
of the former workers’ states into world capitalism. While they
expected a way out for declining capitalism, a new chapter of the
crisis of world capitalism has been opened.
CHINA
The
huge tax “stimulus” applied by China in 2008 - 25% of GDP - not
only exhausted itself as a recovery factor, but above all has
increased the country's industrial overcapacity and has generated
speculation about the size and characteristics of the “bubble”
that caused the mortgage crisis in the United States. The industrial
crisis in Europe is linked to the decline of the Chinese demand,
which is also evident in the import of minerals that damaged strongly
Brazil. China is under the pressure of a great social crisis; this as
a result of the transition from agrarian to industrial economy, with
the methods of the expropriation of peasants and workers operating
without any legal protection. The workers' struggle runs throughout
its’ vast geography; a state-and-bureaucracy-independent labour
movement is being formed, with different rhythms. The experience of
the Commune of Wukan, which resisted the peasant expropriation and
the police siege, finally imposing a relatively authority-free
election, is a metaphor for the tendency to political and social
revolution in China.
The
CRFI underlines the importance of the Chinese labour demands and
stresses the need to fight the expropriation of peasants by methods
of political revolution to overthrow local authorities and implement
people's communes, and calls to support the formation of an
independent labor movement through strong mobilization of
international solidarity.
MIDDLE
EAST
At
the doors of Europe and interacting with its crisis, is the crisis in
the Arab world. In Egypt, the recent uprising against the
government's attempt to impose Morsi’s reactionary constitution,
drafted by a “constituent” narrow and reactionary, has opened a
new stage of the revolution, which lays bare the limitations of Islam
to control the masses. This is an explosive data, as the Muslim
Brotherhood appears as the main beam in all resistance movements,
shocks, crises and civil wars in the Arab world. The Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, have armed a government committed to Mubarak’s
scaffolding, have the support of the capitalist class and have become
an instrument of imperialism. In the country which was the starting
point of the Arab revolution, Tunisia, now extend labour protest
against the provisional government of the Islamist Ennahda Party. The
agreement of the HM
with the IMF, to remove consumer subsidies and direct government
resources to the local bourgeoisie has turned economic crisis into an
explosive, to the point that the government has been forced to delay
its implementation by some weeks, with the danger of a national
uprising.
The
CRFI supports the struggle of the Egyptian people for the convening
of a free and sovereign Constituent Assembly, we emphasize on the
importance of the working class in the Egyptian revolution and
conclude that the victory of the democratic revolution is only
possible, in a process of permanent revolution, through a workers'
government supported by the urban poor and poor peasantry.
The
CRFI calls the popular masses of the region as well as and the
working class in the imperialist countries in Europe and America to
oppose uncompromisingly the military-political interventions by US ,
EU, and Zionist imperialism, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to
highjack the popular uprising in Syria.
It calls for a popular revolutionary movement against the Assad
tyranny politically independent from imperialism and the local
reaction. We call for a struggle against all reactionary attempts to
deepen ethnic and sectarian divisions, particularly the Sunni/Shia
divide, as well as against the preparations of an imperialist
Zionist war aggression against Iran. We fight to defeat all these
interventions and machinations, whose goal is to re-establish
imperialist control in the entire Middle East by defeating the Arab
revolution in progress
The
CRFI condemns the new Zionist aggression against the Palestinian
people in Gaza under a constant siege, and it salutes the valiant
resistance of the Palestinian fighters. As the entire geopolitical,
political and social framework in the Middle East has been
dramatically changed with the eruption of the revolutionary Arab
Spring, the isolated Zionist State has plunged in a deep crisis. The
extension of new Zionist settlements in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem decided by the Netanyahu regime is not an act of
consolidation but more a flight forwards in panic. Nevertheless, it
proves the impossibility of the so called “two states solution”,
and vindicates the only progressive way out from this bloody trap
both for Palestinians and Jews: the historical necessity for a
united, secular, and socialist Palestine, where the right of return
to their homes of all Palestinian refugees would be guarantied and
where both the Palestinian Arab and Jewish populations could live
together in peace and equality.
Now
more than ever its is actual the task for a struggle for the
establishment of a Socialist Federation of all peoples of the Middle
East , including the Kurdish people, with full guaranty of their
right of national self-determination.
LATIN
AMERICA
Latin
America and its nationalist governments do not represent an
“alternative model” to avoid the crisis or a way out of it.
Latin America has not been left out
of the global crisis, as was evident in the recessions of 2008/9;
their governments (Mexico, Brazil, Peru) had to be rescued by the
Federal Reserve or the Bank of China (in the case of Argentina).
After this rescue, in Latin America, as in other regions of the
capitalist periphery, the capitalist crisis manifests itself in a
contradictory way, because, contrary to what happened in the crisis
of ‘30, instead of an agrarian crisis it passes through a “boa”
of prices and raw material exports. It is the consequence of the
emergence of China in the world market and the use of agricultural
raw materials for bio fuels with state subsidies. The huge land rent
generated by this process, has not served, however, for local
industrialization, but to the rescue of capital in the metropolis
broken through capital flight. On the other hand, it has exposed the
industry to foreign competition: the industry participation in the
GDP has dropped everywhere. In short, under the transitional form of
an increase in global production and trade the parasitism of
underdeveloped economies has increased. The national bourgeoisie has
literally wasted the opportunities offered to develop the global
crisis domestic productive forces, for it should have, as a first
step, nationalized the banks and foreign trade, and promoted an
agrarian revolution and the unity of Latin America. The investment
does not grow, and consumption is driven by a growing mortgage on
families. Mercosur has receded; dollar inflation has grown as a
result of the impact of issuing Federal Reserve monetary and dollar
devaluation. The two major integration projects have failed -
continental gas pipeline and the South Bank. The first signs of
recession in demand from China are shaping the conditions of a new
financial crisis.
The
cycle of the American nationalist governments closes. Strikes and
youth rebellions occur throughout all of Latin America. The recent
general strike in Argentina, reports a process of breaking-up between
the working class and the Kirchner government. The corruption trial
of PT in Brazil is the last slab on a party that has led Brazil into
a greater entanglement with the international finance capital. The
boundaries of the so-called workers' parties (workers centrist
parties), as in the case of PT, have been laid bare long ago as a
means of class independence, and has shown its’ muddle and
counter-revolutionary role. The CRFI states that Latin American unity
is only possible through social revolution. We oppose to the
bourgeois nationalism the political independence of the proletariat
through the merger of the revolutionary left and the labour movement
that is emancipated from the union bureaucracy. The rise of the
Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores in Argentina demonstrates
the possibility of the revolutionary left to penetrate the masses,
even in electoral events. It is not, however, only a tactic frontage:
is the consequence and the systematic development of a policy of
building a revolutionary party by the Workers’ Party (Partido
Obrero) of Argentina.
CRISIS
AND CRISIS OF POWER
The
process of disintegration of the EU has refuted the myth of an
“ultra-imperialism” of a European kind superseding the Nation
States and their frontiers. On the contrary, the European national
states are in clash between themselves, and some of them face
centrifugal nationalist and separatist tendencies, from Scotland to
the Basque country and Catalonia, where there are unresolved
historical problems and legitimate demands for the right for national
self-determination.
The
EU, the instrument of European imperialism and of the big capital,
cannot be “reformed” or turned into a “social Europe” for the
benefit of the European workers and peoples. It has to be smashed
before it will burry us under the ruins of its bankruptcy. By
breaking from the prison of the EU, the solution is not to return to
the straitjacket of a bankrupt capitalist national State but to fight
for an alternative internationalist perspective: the common struggle
with all European workers and oppressed for the socialist unification
of the Continent, the United
Socialist States of Europe,
including Russia.
The
EU is dying in an impasse. The vicious circle of debt-
austerity-recession- more debt produced armies of millions of
unemployed while the rest of the population is under the joke of the
most exploitative forms of precarious labor under nearly slavery
conditions. The European social landscape is devastated. The young
generation is condemned in permanent unemployment. Health and
education are falling in ruins. There are uncountable evictions (from
homes bought with loans during the real estate speculative bubble)
producing a mass of new homeless and new poor. Draconian austerity
and labor precariousness slash savagely wages and pensions. State
repression intensifies. Racist harassment of the immigrants and all
minorities becomes more and more brutal. Fascist gangs proliferate.
The storm troops of the Nazi “Golden Dawn” in Greece acting
systematically against immigrant communities, Jews, Roma,
homosexuals, organizations and individuals of the Left, is a new
element in European politics, not a replica of Le Pen’s “national
Front” type of far right. It is a warning for the entire Europe as
they exploit social despair produced by social decomposition, are
funded by big capitalists, promoted by the bourgeois mainstream mass
media, and act under the protection of a capitalist State, in
conditions of a permanent “State of exception”, trying to control
a growing pauperized population, angry, indignant, in other words,
uncontrollable by a discredited bourgeois parliamentary party system.
Bourgeois
governments, either recently elected like the Samaras government in
Greece, and Rajoy’s government in Spain or “technocratic” like
the previous Papadimos government in Greece or the Monti government
in Italy have failed.
The
establishment in November 2011 of these non-elected, arbitrarily
imposed by the EU “technocratic” governments was a clear
manifestation of the decline of bourgeois parliamentary democracy and
the open declaration of a “State of exception”. The attempt by
the EU and the Greek ruling class to keep Papadimos government in
power and post-pone elections indefinitely, “until the completion
of its work, the implementation of the Memorandum signed with the
troika” failed because of the social resistances that threatened
with disintegration the parties that supported this government.
Finally, early elections in May 2012 became unavoidable, and at in
these inconclusive elections, as well in the elections of June 2012,
the bipartisan political system of the two bourgeois parties that
ruled Greece from 1974, New Democracy and PASOK, disintegrated, the
third partner in the Papadimos government, the far right LAOS was
pulverized. From these elections and the ruins of the previous ruling
parties, most of the masses have turned to the left, catapulting the
small reformist left coalition Syriza to the position of Official
Opposition; but, from the other side, another part of the electorate
contributed to the threatening rise of the Nazi ‘Golden Dawn”.
In
Italy the counter-part of Papadimos, Monti and his “technocratic
government expressed the decomposition of the Second Italian Republic
but did not provided any solution to the deteriorating financial,
economic and political crisis.
Regime
crises erupt throughout Europe starting from its South, from Greece
in rebellion against the hated troika and its subservient governments
to Rajoy’s Spain in turmoil.
It
has been opened, on a continental scale, a transitional period of
social convulsions, political regime crises, class confrontations,
clashes with State repression, as well as with a rising Far Right,
including fascist storm troops, emergence of pre-revolutionary and
revolutionary situations where the question of power is objectively
posed, as well as the actuality of a struggle for workers
governments. The crisis has become a
crisis of political power.
The
recent electoral ascent of the Left - Syriza in Greece, Bildu in the
Basque Country, Esquera Republicana and CUP in Catalonia et al.-
manifests undoubtedly a turn of the popular masses to find an end to
their disastrous conditions by putting the Left itself in
government.
Unfortunately,
various leftist tendencies draw opportunistic conclusions from the
Greek experience. We take as an example the Left Bloc in Portugal,
which has taken the slogan of a Left government into a purely
electoral and parliamentary sense and depended on a program that
defends the European Union. If in Greece this slogan gained notoriety
and strength, it was because it was taken up by the masses to destroy
the traditional parties and to put in the forefront of the agenda the
abolition of the memorandum of austerity. The Left Bloc, however,
voted in the Portugal’s Parliament the Troika’s plan for Greece.
GREECE
More
the popular masses turn to the left more the parties of the left
approaching governmental power through elections turn themselves to
the right. The experience of Greece is on that very clear.
Six
months after the June 2012 elections, the tripartite pro-Memorandum
coalition government of New Democracy - PASOK - DIMAR shows symptoms
of exhaustion and disintegration, expressed in expulsion of deputies
and splits of many kinds. Social resistances are growing as the
depression reaches the levels of the Great Depression in the 1930s in
the US and all social services, particularly in health and Education
is in ruins. There are new General Strikes and mass mobilizations (
in September 26 , November 6/7, November 17, December 6), strikes
and occupation of public buildings in local government against mass
sackings of public employees, strikes in Health and Education,
mobilizations against factory closures like the metallurgical BIOME
in Thessalonica, multiple activities in self-organization of social
networks of solidarity, popular assemblies in the neighborhoods,
antifascist activities etc. There are discussions for a new early
election next Spring, where, as the polls show, Syriza will come in
the first place, together with the prospect again for a government of
the Left.
Syriza
had moved the last months further to the right. The “pragmatists”
in its leadership not only constantly declare their faith to the EU
and the euro but also they find that the slogan for a withdrawal from
NATO is “not timely”, in the recent conflict between the IMF and
the EU on the Greek debt’s sustainability, they supported the IMF.
While the last years a strategic alliance is forged between
Athens-Nicosia-Tel Aviv for the common exploitation of oil-gas
deposits in the ‘Exclusive Exploitation Zones’ of Eastern
Mediterranean, Syriza’s Chairman Tsipras officially and
symbolically for the continuity of such an alliance, met with the
Zionist President of Israel Shimon Peres visiting Greece. The new
program of Syriza, although rejecting the Memorandum, accepts new
negotiations for the external debt, and an “Audit” to cancel its
“illegitimate” part, not the cancellation of the entire debt
itself. Furthermore, Tsipras promotes a totally reactionary Utopian
scheme for a “solution the Greek and European sovereign debt
crisis” on the lines of the 1953 post-war agreements to deal with
the German debts as well as by launching a new “Marshal Plan” in
Europe – ignoring entirely the abysmal gulf separating today’s
from historic conditions in the 1950s…
The
current unprecedented world capitalist crisis destroys these illusory
fake reformist schemes. It poses again the vital question: which
social force, based on which social alliances can take power and open
a way out from the historical impasse?
Those
“above” cannot rule anymore as before as the capitalist ruling
elites of finance speculators, bankers, industrialists, ship-owners
and their political personnel cannot provide any solution for the
worsening social devastation of the masses but only more devastation.
Not the people, it is them that they have to pay for the bankruptcy
of their social system of exploitation.
Those
“below”, workers, unemployed and employed, pensioners, pauperized
popular strata in the cities and the countryside, first of all a
young generation condemned by the capitalist bankruptcy cannot any
more accept to be ruled by their destroyers. They are more and more
in mobilizations that have a pronounced tendency to social revolt.
Only those below, both with their self-organization in their own
organs of struggle such as Popular Assemblies, Social networks of
Solidarity, Workers Defense Squads etc. as well as through the old
and new trade union organizations, with their own mobilization on a
program with transitional demands, and a perspective to take power
and re-organize the economy on new social bases according to the
social needs of the vast majority and not to the profits of a tiny
capitalist minority, can provide a real way out from social
catastrophe.
A
United Front in action of the exploited, of the oppressed, and of
their organizations is urgently needed. The active role of a combat
political organization of the revolutionary vanguard of the working
class in this process is crucial and its construction cannot be
delayed any moment.
FOR
AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
The
Coordinating Committee for the Re-foundation of the Fourth
International (CRFI) addresses itself to all the fighting workers and
popular organizations and collectivities in Europe involved in social
struggles, particularly their vanguards, as well to as the forces of
the revolutionary Left and calls for an
International Conference on the crisis in Europe
to discuss an Emergency Program to resist and defeat the social
catastrophe and a plan of common actions unchecked by and free from
the “usual” bureaucratic apparatuses of control, and the building
of an urgently needed new revolutionary leadership.
The
CRFI calls to fight back the international usurers, the dictatorship
of the “markets”, of the banks and financial capital, by the
cancellation of ALL the public debt
that robs and crashes the lives of millions, and by the expropriation
of the banks under working control
All
the “austerity” plans of social cannibalism imposed by the EU,
the EBB, the IMF and the capitalist governments have to be stopped
immediately. The capitalist have to
pay for the crisis of their system of exploitation, not the
exploited! We have to fight to restore wages, pensions, and social
rights of the working people according to the social needs, not for
the profits of the few.
Against
mass unemployment, we call to fight
to forbid sackings, for distribution of the working hours among all
workers. Public works of infrastructure, which anyway are vital and
urgently needed, have to be developed to create new jobs.
The
barons of the big industry blackmail always the workers to accept
more cuts of wages and jobs or they would close or “de-localize”
their factories abroad; our answer should be to occupy all factories
that close or fire massively workers, to expropriate them, without
compensation, making them to function again under workers control and
workers management.
The
CRFI calls for a resolute struggle against
fascism, racism and discrimination of all minorities! Defend
the immigrants and all the communities of oppressed! Equal rights for
all workers, independently of color, ethnic origin or religion! The
workers and popular movements have to organize Workers Defense Guards
against the fascist gangs and State repression.
For
the dismantlement of the bourgeois State apparatus of repression, of
NATO and all imperialist military bases and alliances- full
solidarity to all anti-imperialist struggles of oppressed nations in
Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America!
For
all immediate vital demands of the working class and popular masses,
our battle cry should be: Down with all capitalist governments!
For
workers’ governments and workers’ power! Down with the European
Union of the imperialists! For the United Socialist States of Europe!
Athens,
19 December 2012
