International Socialists

Recent months have seen the world economy go from bad to worse.  Finance companies are tumbling like dominoes, while inflation rises ever more rapidly, eating into the wages of workers and the poor.  Rising food prices have already had a devastating impact on the third world, where the problem previously has been the low goods prices paid to producers, millions more now face the situation where they can no longer by food and basic necessities on the ‘free market’.

The current crises has it’s roots deep inside the capitalist system.  The initial trigger – a collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States – has it’s origins in the unsustainable level of debt generated from the ‘solution’ to the last recession in the late 90s.  Cheap and easily available debt fuelled a round of economic expansion based on speculation rather than the production of actual, tangible assets.  But the growth generated in this way was not in any way substantial.  Problems were compounded as competition in the market forced firms to slash their number one cost – wages.
Ultimately, it was workers wages that paid for the debt that drove the system forward and eventually, when they could no longer afford to pay, the whole edifice began to collapse.  The disaster has now spread from the US sub-prime market internationally, and to other sectors of the economy, and a cataclysm now threatens the whole world.  This, when by statistical standards, we have not yet even entered the recession!
Along with a diseased economic system comes politics that can only be described as sick.  Imperialism is not the result of a few ‘bad apples’ or the mistaken policies of the world’s superpowers, but a direct result of competition the drive for economic expansion.  Every party that aims to work through the established political and economic system is complicit – the need to run an economy is the reason the Democrats in the US won’t effectively oppose George Bush’s wars, and refuse to impeach a criminal president.  Closer to home, the same need is at the root of the foreign policy of armed intervention in the Pacific expounded by both the Labour Party and the Greens – interventions that have increased poverty in Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.
But in the midst, of all the gloom there is still hope.  The same system that creates poverty and war gives workers unprecedented power to resist.  And when the system savages them resist they do.  The sudden plunge into hunger has created riots on the streets of the third world, in counties as far apart as Indonesia and Egypt.  In South Africa, a long tradition of struggle against racism is coming home to the sell-outs in the ANC.  And resistance is spreading.  Riots and protests at the price of fuel spread through the streets of Europe in April and May.  Poverty and want has made the political playing field tinder dry.  If the resistance to rising prices emboldens the workers in western factories, a single spark could set the whole world on fire.

Cory A