March 13th, 2020

Stock market crash, border closures, recession…

 As in 2008, the crash of the world capitalist system is here

 Amidst the recession, the trade war and its new oil battle

The coronavirus, the last straw for the capitalist catastrophe

 Towards a depression of the world economy?

 

On March 9, the world imperialist press announced that a new "Black Monday" was already here. With collective hysteria, the bourgeoisie spoke of "the biggest drop suffered by the stock exchanges since 2008", both that day and the following.
During the previous weekend, the “OPEC + Russia” block was broken since they did not agree on how to reduce their oil production by a few million barrels, because the surplus that these nations throw at the market far exceeds what the world capitalist economy actually consumes. It is in a frank process of shrinking, divesting and already going into recession in key countries such as Germany, Italy and Japan. Added to this, it is the abrupt "stop" of the Chinese economy as a result of the blockade that the United States in fact imposed on the surplus of Chinese exports to the US. A growth of 2.5% in China, as it is foreseen for this year, already means an open decline in its economy, which fails to replace the labor force it wastes and therefore also the dead capital (machines, tools, raw material, energy, etc.) that it uses.
The world economy has shrunk. Capital fails to recompose the rate of profit in the production process and permanently generates small economic cycles based on speculation and parasitism, which explode here and there again.

With this recession, the price of oil fell to $ 30. Given this, OPEC's proposal, ruled by the big imperialist oil companies, with Saudi Arabia at the helm, had been that they, Russia included, would reduce the number of barrels thrown on the world market in order to keep the price higher. Moscow refused, stating that, as the world's second largest oil producer, if it did not produce those barrels, others would sell them instead on the world market. As a reply, and actually acting as a spokesperson for the “7 sisters” (Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, etc.), Saudi Arabia announced that it would increase its production from 8 to 15 million barrels per day to export to the world market, openly threatening with further sinking the price of crude oil. The price of oil (which is a commodity) is governed by the supply and demand balance in the world market, by the cost of its extraction and commercialization and, to a large extent, by what the cartels fix.
A fundamental battle of the trade war has begun: the oil battle. A key issue here is that, amidst this recessive world economy, the US has recently entered the world oil market as a self-supplying oil consumer thanks to fracking. This geometrically increased a crisis of overproduction of oil, since the United States is one of the largest consumers of crude oil in the world.
In this oil battle, the UK-US transnationals, the French Total and the Italian ENI go for the Russian Rosneft. The latter tells them "you give me no choice." Oil is one of the great revenue sources for Russia along with gas and arms' sales. Trump's trade war directly hits Moscow’s plexus.
This means the US is willing to stand cheap oil, at $ 20, buying it at that figure, replacing fracking (whose production is not profitable below $ 30).US imperialism can put up with that figure. But for Russia and all the oil countries this will mean a sharp drop in their income. New crises and cracks are brewing in the semi-colonial world. Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil and other oil-producing countries in the Middle East will see their incomes shrink enormously. This is already reflected in the fall of their stock exchanges. In any case, they will also be targets in this trade war, from fiery dispute among the different imperialist powers for supremacy in the different production branches of the world economy.
Besides Rosneft, the "7 sisters" also go for Gazprom, the Russian gas company. Wall Street has already gone for Russia finances and seized all its accounts abroad. Thus the United States disciplines its counter-revolutionary hitmen, such as Putin, to play a role of maintaining capitalist order in Eurasia.

As if all this were not enough, the coronavirus, seen at first with passivity by the western states, spread enormously from China as a pandemic that quickly reached Italy and Spain, which are currently quarantined. This just started pandemic is threatening to paralyze the world economy even further. The conditions for a perfect storm are already accumulating.
This storm is already being paid for by the world working class and the large number of impoverished masses in the world.
200 million migrant workers traveling country after country looking for work and bread to survive is nothing more than the reflection and barometer of parasitism and the destruction of productive forces imposed by the rotting decaying capitalist system. With the recession that has just begun, millions of jobs will be lost, as in 2008.
It is not only the coronavirus that is stopping production, killing and murdering, but also -and centrally- it is the bankrupt capitalist system that stops the machines. It is the capital that comes out of the production process -as it has been doing so sharply for 12 years- and goes to speculation, to quick, easy, usurious and parasitic businesses, and which causes the open destruction of the workforce with the "pandemic" suffered by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of children who die from the "virus" of hunger, the lack of medical attention and wars... And now, the coronavirus, in its spread and generalization to different parts of the planet, threatens to sweep away hundreds of thousands of hungry people who will have neither gel alcohol, nor a hospital ward, or any health care, as happens in semi-colonial countries plundered by imperialism, where there are no sewers, millions live under conditions of destitution and without any drinking water network.
Face this pandemic, capitalism shows all its rot. In Italy and Spain, which are in quarantine, they still send workers to work in factories.
The bosses take the opportunity to dismiss all the workers who are not registered, mainly the immigrants, and then hire them again according to their convenience and needs, and manage not to pay these quarantine days. How miserable! Corrupt-and-sold-to-capital union bureaucracies are who guarantee that the workers risk their lives and those of their families every day in the face of the pandemic, and at the same time cover up the hundreds of thousands of layoffs.
Likewise, in the United States, where medicine is private and employed workers and especially the unemployed cannot attend a dentist, where a swab test costs no less than $ 1,000, it is clear that if the pandemic spreads, it will kill thousands of workers. Killer employers! They do not put a dime to save the workforce. The finances of the states are to save capitalists’ profits and not the exploited’s lives, as the recent action of the US Federal Reserve proves it, which put one and a half trillion dollars to sustain the collapse of the shares of all imperialist companies.
The true pandemic is this rotten capitalist system, where a few will seek to save themselves and risk the lives of millions and millions of workers and exploited.

 

9M: Neither the first nor the last "Black Monday" since the crash of 2008

In 2008, the capitalist system creaked from its foundations. The U.S. housing bubble was bursting. Capital had overvalued the home mortgages and had distributed profits for years to the shareholders of large companies and banks for a fictitious value. The US had attracted the imperialist Maastricht banks to this investment process; they had more than 70% of their assets in the Wall Street housing bubble.
It did not take long for the capitalists and parasites of the ruling classes to see that the values ​​of the banks and the benefits that they distributed did not express either properties according to their value or genuine production backed by goods. The superbanks bankrupted. The insurers, who had the coverage of the value of these properties, which at nominal prices were 150% of their real worth, could no longer cover the insurance due to this crisis. A widespread bankruptcy chain ran across New York, London, Frankfurt, Rome, Tokyo, and the globe.

Anticipating the 2008 crash, the 1997-2001 crisis had already developed before. Back then, IT companies had forged and falsified their balance sheets. Via this scam, they had inflated the value of their companies and their shares, from which they made juicy dividends. The dot-com companies, installed on a computer in a Silicon Valley home workshop, were worth $ 40 billion. The bubble popped. This was a true pre-heart attack that anticipated the 2008 crash.

The imperialist gangs had swallowed their own deceptive speech. The capitalists were exultant. Since 1989 all the former workers' states had been recovered for the capitalist economy, and with them the millions of slave workers of China and Vietnam, the cheap gas and oil of Russia, the maquila zones in Eastern Europe... But this was short-lived, the “fresh blood” that entered the stagnant veins of the capitalist system. Actually, above these new assets that the imperialist banks appropriated, Silicon Valley IT companies, how could it be otherwise, with falsified balances (such as those of the Enron, etc.) had increased their value although it was not real, as we already said, multiplying their profits.
The world financial oligarchy emerged from this crisis of the early 21st century, first of all, through wars, with the development of destructive forces. The multiplication of the US military force on the planet, accompanied by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, meant that transnational companies received subsidies each year for the development of military technology and the maintenance of the US armed forces all over the planet for an amount equivalent to everything spent in WWII by the USA.
On the other hand, the huge masses of capital, and as a portion of them the devalued bonds of technology companies and bad debt in the semi-colonial world, bought and repurchased mortgages in the US. A great bubble was being prepared, which burst with the crash of 2008. However, this time it would not be just another crisis, but "THE" crisis.

This 2008 crisis hit the US that controls world politics and economy. Since the beginning, US imperialism have tried to throw its crisis to the world: to the rival imperialist powers, to the working class and to the semi-colonial world.

Today it is announced by shouting from the roof tops that 1% of capitalist parasites own 50% of the world's wealth. That is what the capitalist system is about in its imperialist phase, of decomposition and agony. If there is something that distinguishes imperialism, it is its parasitism. The reason is the enormous productive forces -created by the accumulation and concentration of capital- have long ago collided with national borders and with relations of production and capitalist anarchy.

 

The working class engaged in a thousand battles to avoid paying for the 2008 crisis and suffered cruel betrayals

Capitalism revived from the 2008 crash, first of all, because the treacherous leaderships of the masses saved it. The US was fleeing Iraq due to a domestic anti-war movement, which turned against the superbanks at the cry of "Occupy Wall Street".

In 2008-2009 a wave of factory occupations and general strikes swept across Europe, from Spain to France to Portugal to revolutionary Greece and Eastern Europe as in Romania and then Ukraine.
The Latin American working class still remained in an offensive position in their anti-imperialist combat. The Chinese masses were engaging in revolt maneuvers. In 2011, a widespread mass offensive erupted with a chain of revolutions throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East, which shook the world capitalist system, pushed by the brutal rise in food prices, inflated in a new bubble in the Chicago commodities stock market, as we will see later.
The leaderships of the World Social Forum (WSF) at that time -Stalinism, neo-Chavista movements, bourgeois nationalists-, all supported from the left by the renegades of Trotskyism, and the emergence of the so-called New Left, which diverted this revolutionary wave of mass rise in response to the crash and guaranteed heavy defeats for the masses.
Imperialism concentrated all its forces in two foci of the revolution to crush them, such as Syria and Ukraine, to interrupt the revolutionary process in Europe and the Middle East.

Both Castroites and Bolivarians handed Cuba over to imperialism. They sealed a deal with Obama, what made him appear as a “good president”, although he took away all the conquests from the American working class. Chávez, Ortega, Morales, Kirchner, Lula, etc., led the attack on the Latin American working class. Podemos of the Spanish State, Refundazione Comunista of Italy and Syriza of Greece, with a policy of class collaboration, led the European working class to the dead end policy of “mitigating austerity”, and also to openly betray the working class struggle, such as the Stalinist union bureaucracy did in Italy, France and particularly in Greece, which was the most advanced fighting of the European working class facing the 2008 crash.
After these leaderships were worn out, it was the so-called New Left which guaranteed, along with Stalinism, bourgeois stability in the face of the outbreak of the revolutions in the Maghreb and the Middle East. The so-called “anti-terrorist front” of France, the United States, Moscow, and Frankfurt stood up, with the support of the entire world reformist left, whose goal was to support al-Assad and Putin massacre of the revolutionary masses of Syria and stop there, as we have already said, that chain of revolutions that shook the planet and even threatened to cross the Mediterranean and reach the metropolises, as the Iraqi resistance had already done when reaching the United States with the anti-war movement.

The working class has fought a thousand battles to avoid paying for the capitalist bankruptcy crisis and a thousand times was betrayed by the treacherous leaderships that capitalism shaped since the fall of the workers' states in 1989. The conditions for the revolution were not only then and are still “ripe”, as stated in the Transition Program, but were and are frankly decomposing. Capitalism was saved by the treacherous leaderships, that is to say, the union bureaucracies and labor aristocracies and the social-imperialist parties, which live on the crumbs that fall from the superbusiness and the super looting by international financial capital.

 

The capitalist system in crash continues surviving from 2008 by multiplying parasitism, wars and looting

Under these conditions, imperialism was able to survive. With the Federal Reserve dollar printing machine, it nationalized the debts of the superbanks. It made a 600,000 million dollars investment in them and then returned them to the private owners already sanitized.
European imperialist banks emptied the treasures of their states, which bailed out their debts and left adjustment, crisis and attack on all the gains of the working class in Europe.

In the US, with the rise of Obama, they threw the entire crisis at the working class with the blackmail of the economic crash, threatening with layoffs. Thus the American working class was losing one by one their conquests and also their jobs, homes... 43 million American workers were living with U$6 bonds a day.
Over 200,000 revolts of the Chinese masses were crushed and suppressed by that counterrevolutionary regime of the "red" bourgeoisie of the PC. The masses were pushing for a new general uprising, as in 68-74.
But imperialism, supported by the treacherous leaderships, and causing hard partial defeats, broke them up.

Thus, throwing the crisis at the masses, with the leadership of the proletariat selling out each combat, the deeply troubled capitalist system was able to take a breather.

In 2008, $ 90 trillion vanished, which were false securities unsecured by real assets, held by the global financial oligarchy. The crisis, which greatly reduced the production of goods, the market and the world economy, caused hunger, looting of national riches, and unprecedented suffering for the masses. Capitalism purged itself. It survived by sinking entire areas of the planet, including minor imperialist powers, and causing a concentration of capital in the different branches of production of the world economy.
Again it seemed that capitalism was breathing. But the huge masses of capital, a year and a half or two after 2008, were not going essentially to productive investment, where the rate of profit was still low, but went primarily to commodities. Thus, the prices of cereals, petroleum, minerals, soybeans were seen to increase... The most powerful cartels of the transnational companies fictitiously increased all prices.
With the super-exploitation of the working class and the new mass of surplus value obtained in China, a domestic market of 200-300 million consumers was recreated. The goal was to rearm a world division of labor, broken by the 2008 crisis, based on exporting to China -transformed into a consumer and importer-. A new bubble was then mounted on those exports of commodities to a consumer China, where cartels set future prices that had nothing to do with the real values ​​of the goods that were traded in the world economy. For a couple of years, China acted as a countervailing trend to the brutal capitalist crisis, alleviating the crisis of overproduction of consumer goods, such as automobiles, computer equipment, etc.
But the party was short-lived. High commodity prices ruined entire nations, such as those in the Middle East, that do not produce enough food and saw bread prices rise by 200-400%, an issue that led to huge revolutionary outbursts from Tunisia to Damascus.

These commodity prices, which were already inflated, overvalued, began to deflate during 2011-2012, once again paralyzing the world capitalist economy and causing new “Black Mondays”, stock market bursts and a new depreciation of financial capital.
This is imperialism. Above real businesses, such as the sale of commodities to China, it generates a speculation bubble, fake future values, inflates prices, etc., that is, fictitious values ​​that are nothing but spent on account the benefits not yet produced.

 

Loans at 0% Interest Rate: A New Capitalist Alchemy to Maintain the Super Profits of the Global Financial Oligarchy

Imperialism, according to Lenin, is parasitism. Corroded by its contradictions, it continually saws the very same floor where it is on. The more the US sought to maintain its control of the planet, the more it has weakened its domestic market in its economic offensive.
While lesser imperialist powers were sinking in Europe, Greater Germany was conquering its living space. Maastricht imperialist Europe was in a position to openly compete for the world market against the United States from the maquilas in Eastern Europe, the use of gas and cheap energy from Russia, the recreation of a huge European market under the Franco-German axis, from Portugal to the Russian steppes and with the German locomotive achieving enormous productivity at work. Thus, the clashes between imperialist Maastricht, the USA, and even Japan over Russia, China and the world market could only intensify.

Monopolies and bankrupt financial capital, as we see in each of their crises, have received and continues receiving aid from their states. Surely, monopolies and transnational companies would not exist for a day without the imperialist states, with their fleets, military bases and treasures, that help them when they go bankrupt. Monopolies have a flag, according to Lenin.
This time, to get out of this new morass after the bursting of the commodity bubble, the central banks of Frankfurt, Tokyo and Wall Street began to grant banks and transnational corporations loans at an interest rate of 0%, and even some at negative rate.
These huge masses of capital again went not essentially to production, but to seek quick profits. They were placed as loans in the semi-colonial world, which was forced to borrow. For example, they forced all the countries of Africa to take those credits to buy weapons. They provided credit to the countries of southern Europe that had been ruined by the 2008 crisis, such as Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal. They not only indebted the entire semi-colonial world, but also the companies and banks themselves, while forcing countries like China, which had a huge surplus of exports to the US, to buy their bonds.
Thus, the monopolies obtained funds without interest and loaned them at rates of 7%, 12% and up to 40%, thus obtaining a super profit without moving the productive apparatus at all. A huge mass of money was scattered on the world market.

In 2015-2016, the bourgeoisie had forgotten about their "black Mondays" from 2008 onwards and began to announce and believe that a new "Belle Epoque" was coming, an economic boom. The US grew from 0.1% to 3%. Large transnational corporations and bankers began to distribute very high profits to their shareholders, but not from profits obtained in the production process, but instead pocketed the credits obtained at a rate of 0% while accumulating a huge super-profit with usurious loans as we have already said.
Capital lived and reproduced in these years, essentially, in a parasitic fiction. Huge profits were pocketed without capital going through production. The US used the dollar-making machine and went out to sell bonds to finance its $ 18 trillion fiscal deficit, which makes its debt unbearable to be sustained by the entire world-economy. This huge deficit is subsidized with the reserves of the nations of the world and with the bonds of the US state.
New unsupported money supply circulates in the world market. Large banks have $ 252 trillion in derivatives (such as debt bonds, future securities, mortgages, etc.) in their possession.
The bankrupt capitalist economy increasingly resembles a house of cards. With few exceptions, fundamentally in the war industry, in services and goods derived from it, or in technology, almost no branch of production pushes the world economy and it no longer progresses en bloc, as it has not done throughout the imperialist era. The sector 1 of production, that is to say the manufacture of machine tools, is in a huge stagnation. The planet's industrial capacity is full of idle machines and millions of workers in chronic unemployment.

Capitalism emerges from its recurring crises just like a downward saw line, announcing its decline, living on goods that have not yet been produced. In Trotsky's opinion, values ​​must express the goods created by human labor. Where human labor has not created new goods, nothing can be done even by Rockefeller himself; nor is there a God who can invent them. From this point of view, we can say that 2008 is here and is far from gone.

According to Lenin, in his work "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism", imperialism has 3 peculiarities: "1) monopoly capitalism, 2) parasitic or decaying capitalism and 3) dying capitalism". Monopoly -taking the form of a cartel, trust, transnational, multinational, etc- has carried out an enormous concentration of capital and wealth. 1% of parasites control the entire economic life of the imperialist countries and the entire world. Parasitism, which in turn guarantees the looting of the semi-colonial world, already announces that this rotten system deserves to die.

With transnational corporations distributing loans at a 0% rate as profits, without producing new goods, nothing could happen but a new outbreak of the system, a new "Black Monday" that unfolded with new falls in the stock market, as happened in 2018. This is how 1% of parasites control 50% of the planet's wealth: sinking most of the planet.

Thus, world production has shrunk. Hundreds of millions of jobs were lost worldwide, both in industry and in services, the countryside and the states. All the debts of nations, banks and companies grew to a brutal $ 188 trillion, equivalent to 230% of world GDP. That is, those are the benefits that the capitalists have already spent and now they want the working class and the oppressed peoples to pay for.
While the semi-colonial world is double-strapped and triple-looted, the world market has shrunk. Entire powers, small or medium, fell, like Portugal, Greece or Spain itself. Italy backs down. Greater England was caught up in business with Frankfurt and the EU on the one hand, and in the City of London's historical partnership with Wall Street on the other. The imperialist crisis already expresses that there is no room not only for the minor powers, but also for the coexistence of all the great powers. The US could no longer maintain its supremacy without an open confrontation with the Franco-German axis for the world market, and even leaving its former strategic allies in England and Japan adrift.
The world economy, since 2008, is then like a car stuck in the swamp. Its wheels gyrate quickly, but it cannot move a meter forward.
The capitalist system has paralyzed the machines. Chronic unemployment has only increased. The "pandemic" of hunger and despair of the masses does not stop. On the other hand, this rotten parasite system has machines that are not working and a surplus of oil, medicines, and food, with which it could solve all the hardships of human civilization. Capitalism is already an absolute brake on the development of the productive forces. There is no doubt, this system deserves to die.

 

Amid the crash, under Trump's rule, the USA begins a trade war to dispute and maintain its control on the world market
It disputes the colonization of Russia and China to the rest of the imperialist powers

After the failure of the Obama plan to negotiate with competing imperialist powers, in 2016 Trump, that is, the most avid gangs of US imperialism and most determined not to lose their supremacy on the planet, assumed the presidency of the United States. Trump entered the world market not “benevolently” and through deals, but “kicking”, by closing US domestic market and using it as blackmail to open the different markets in the world, particularly in Maastricht Europe, and subjecting and treading on Russia and China.
Trump broke all the regional deals and treaties that Obama had sealed both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 2014-2015, the US had already trodden Ukraine with blood and fire. He placed NATO troops on the border with Russia. From there, he asked Germany to buy US canned gas and augment its money input to support NATO. In this offensive, the imperialist gangs go behind dividing up the loot. Biden, perhaps the future Democratic Party candidate for president, got Ukraine's gas companies. Putin soon received his due: staying with the Crimean peninsula cost him the embargo of all his and his cronies' accounts abroad by the United States.

This is America's strategy today to control world politics and the economy: "America first," kicking the negotiating board, seizing and besieging entire nations, and forcing them to surrender and negotiate, not just colonies and semi-colonies, but also the dependent capitalist countries, like Russia and China, and more importantly, the imperialist powers with which it openly competes, like Germany.
They paid Iran for its services rendered to massacre the Syrian masses and save al-Assad from his fall at the hands of the revolution, by seizing and encircling that oil nation.

After threatening and making North Korea surrender, US offensive hit China hard. US closed its market. It imposed tariffs on China for 250 billion dollars to export hundreds of products to the US market. It forced Huawei to return 5G technology -forcing it to pay a patent- and caused China a deep recession, which only accelerates.

Trump stepped on US "backyard" in Latin America. He broke NAFTA and closed the border with Mexico. The fact is that through NAFTA the production of the European imperialist transnational companies, German in particular, which had taken over the entire automotive industry in the US and Mexico, had been entering US market without tariffs. He emboldened himself face Europe and placed tariffs on steel and aluminum from Germany, demanding that it open its market to the entry of American auto companies without taxes.

This aggressive US policy was answered by Germany, which never ceded and does not want to cede its living space in Europe, by making a business deal with France. The expression of this is the construction of the gas pipeline that goes directly from Siberia to Germany called Nordstream 2. This would allow it not to have to buy canned gas from the US, or pay the commission charged by Kiev for the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine; neither that Turkey charges for oil from the Caucasus.

The construction of this gas pipeline from the Russian steppes to Germany also indicates the degree of dependence and the limit to autonomy that Putin has in Europe, where he plays the role of supplier of gas, oil and raw materials to Germany and Maastricht Europe. In Eurasia, he plays the role of a jailer who controls, manu militari, all the borders of the Muslim republics of the former USSR. There, American companies do juicy business, guarded by Russian bases.

The struggle for raw material sources by the imperialist powers has already led to two world wars. Right now, when the crisis of 2008 worsens, when the world economy shrinks and it enters a recession, there are plenty of imperialist, transnational nations and monopolies in all branches of production, such as pharma/drugs, automotive, cartels of raw materials ... This is what the trade war is about, as in the imperialist era it defines which power manages to kneel its competitor. Capital needs a new purification and a new concentration, leaving entire areas of the planet destroyed and advancing small poles of expansion where it concentrates its profits.
Both recession and crisis push capital more and more to leave the production process and enter speculative investments in geometric progression.
The trade war that the US has launched means the sources of raw materials are again in question. Maastricht needs Russian oil and gas, and transnational companies need China's slave labor, which is what the latter essentially contributes to the world market.

Imperialist China? A bad taste joke if it were not a tragedy. The US has stepped on it to keep its workforce, its domestic market and those Chinese state companies that render profits. US banks have already taken Chinese banks out, as well as the advanced technology, for which China must pay the transnationals a patent.

The trade war has started. The productive forces have rebelled both against the rotting capitalist mode of production and the national borders. These powerful productive forces created need the world market, they need to free the borders of nations in order to grow and develop, a question that only a socialist mode of production can solve.
Lenin argued that the most important economic factor was war. The economic and political war has already begun. The military war will begin if imperialism manages to defeat the working class to be able to go on superior adventures.

 

The world economy on the brink of depression

With the outbreak of the stock markets due to the overvaluation of companies and their fictitious profits, due to the development of an acute recession that is already underway, and hit by the clash between the imperialist powers and the trade war, China has entered a recession. Also Germany has entered into a sharp stalemate. US growth forecasts fell to 1.2%. The world economy is on the verge of a global recession and a depression, which is nothing more than the devaluation of capital assets, which have to express the real goods created by human labor.

What caused the semi-paralysis and the recessive tendencies of the world economy is this trade war, together with the fall in the rate of profit, and the financial super-businesses that recreated monumental debts of nations and companies. The reason is that the credits that they showed as profits have not been repaid or invested for a new cycle of capital accumulation. And now it is necessary to repay them. Debts are adding up.

Years and years of developing and recreating fictitious capital, of not recomposing the rate of profit and on a time the enormous productive forces collide with national borders; recurring crises are recreated in which existing values ​​are leveled with the real goods created by human labor. The collapse of the price of oil, the drop in the shares of today's companies and banks are indications that the global depression is already here.
The recession is only exacerbating. On top of this, a pandemic, like the coronavirus, further paralyzes the world economy.
To get out of this trap, the US announced short-term loans, issuing $ 1.5 trillion to its companies. Everything is used for developing the world market dispute, including the pandemic, where the strongest powers are aiming for their competitors to collapse.
Leaving Maastricht aside, Germany has already announced that it will give unlimited credit to all its companies that suffer losses or are paralyzed by the coronavirus.
China was fenced off. After its last agreement to hand over patents, technology, markets and banks to the USA, Trump was not reciprocal in any agreement. Not to mention the coronavirus, which is further sinking its economy. When the virus reached the Mediterranean and Italy, the Chinese foreign minister read a brief statement, which went unnoticed and was ignored by everyone, faced with the threat of euros and dollars being thrown by the US and Germany into the world market. The minister announced that China would no longer buy US treasury bonds, trying to threaten to cut off the entry of dollars into the US to finance its fiscal deficit. But the US replied: 1.5 billion dollars issued in 48 hours.

The lukewarm attempts of resistance by Beijing, the rebellion of Russia and Rosneft against OPEC, are nothing more than a defensive policy of capitalist countries increasingly surrounded by the imperialist powers to subdue them.

With the trade war and the economic crisis, the world division of labor has been broken again, violently sharpening the clashes between the imperialist powers and making them a thousand times more aggressive so as not to lose their share of the world market.
Once again the political, economic and social balance on the planet has been broken. If the proletariat, with new revolutionary offensives, does not prevent this catastrophe, tomorrow the military balance of the planet will also be broken and war will be at the top of the agenda. As Lenin and the Third Revolutionary International would say, war is ultimately the most important economic factor.

The background for this scenario is the devaluation of capital, which places the world economy on the verge of a depression. With the monumental debts contracted in the world economy, with the engine of creating unbacked currency -as the US or Germany do today to get out of the crash- the way ahead is for an inflationary outbreak.

China has announced that it will dump petro-yuan used to trade oil on the world market. This yuan, due to the (low) productivity of the work it represents, cannot compete with the dollar or the euro and can only throw more inflationary fire on the world economy.

As in the 1930s, the 2008 crisis and its recurring outbreaks are preparing to open a cycle of stagflation (recession with inflation), where capital must purge itself and finish unloading its crisis on the masses. The crisis of imperialism leads the masses to despair.
But this time, with this jump in the crisis, one or some of the most powerful imperialist powers (France, Germany, England, USA and Japan) will be left out of the distribution. They, either forming blocks or unilaterally, need to appropriate the oil, gas and the industrial-military apparatus of Russia.
The US advanced on Chinese banks. With its transnationals installed there, now it seeks to take the state-owned companies that make a profit. But for that it will have to break the backbone of that nation and, with encirclement and blockade, recreate there a bourgeois fraction allied to its colonizing offensive on China.

 

We are facing a leap up of "THE crisis". The crash of 2008 is here again.
The time of crisis, wars and revolutions is sharpening to extreme degrees.

The US enlists its institutions of domination in the next presidential elections, which will again legitimize a strong government for the US offensive on the planet. The American working class is divided. The political crime of the US and world left, be them Stalinists, Social Democrats and renegades of Trotskyism, is that they support Sanders, as yesterday they supported Obama together with Castroism. They are and will be responsible for this tragedy for the world proletariat.
So the US is advancing to encircle the sectors of the planet that it wants to conquer with absolute hegemony as it is not willing to share. In the 1930s, England closed its spheres of influence with the Commonwealth. Today, the US, with its trade war, blocks countries like Cuba, Iran, Korea and closes China and Russia with a trade war economically, and has already begun to encircle them militarily with NATO. The reason is there are other imperialist powers that are fighting for the same, such as Germany for Russia, because it is part of German living space as a supplier and source of raw materials. The US is fighting for China with England, France, Japan. The Pacific is also in dispute. Obama had already said that the United States is "a Pacific power", as its men fell there in the Second World War. But while the US exited the "Pacific Pact", Japan stayed in it, in a free trade pact with 16 nations, through which Tokyo enters China with its business.

Thus, the US has stated that all companies that build the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, which runs from Russia to north Germany, will no longer be able to commercialize in the US market. The response from Germany and Russia was immediate: the gas pipeline is built and Germany takes over. Actually, there cannot, nor will be superimperialism on this planet, but fierce competition among several powers.
Likewise, the United States has blocked Iran, and condemned not to trade in the US market any company that breaks that blockade. Germany, France and England quickly set up an off-shore company, through which they outsource all their trade with Tehran.

As the pandemic that exacerbates the ongoing crisis and recession progresses, the US knows -as all imperialist powers do- that trade disputes need gunboats, not only fences and economic blockages. The US has already begun a military deployment of 20,000 soldiers in Europe for NATO's largest military exercise in the last 25 years. Sarcastically, this military exercise is called "Europe Defender 20". The same -as analysts and the NATO command say- “will increase the preparation and strategic operation of the US army to quickly move a large combat force to Europe, along with allies and partners.” This operation is essentially carried out in Eastern Europe, on the border with Russia and in Germany... By this military action, the US imperialists are saying "we are the winners of WWI." This is a demonstration of US forces against Germany and Russia.

The trade war, the fight for China and Russia, will continue historically in the military field, which is the continuity of politics and the economy by other means, if the world proletariat does not prevent it. The fighting in Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, France, the state of organization and combat of the proletariat of India and the Middle East, which is still burning despite heavy defeats, are some of the centers of the revolution that threaten to cause a new revolutionary rise of masses worldwide.
Here and there we can witness revolutionary flashes of the masses. In these ongoing battles it will be defined whether imperialism, defeating the masses, will be able to have a green light, which will lead civilization to war and fascism. The massacre in Syria, the policy of extermination over millions of exploited, announces the future of civilization, if the working class does not end with the rotten capitalist system.

 

Before the crash, despite the thousand and one betrayals, the masses are engaging in battles
The siren songs of the class collaboration fronts numb the exploited and prepare hard blows for fascism

There has been no attack by the bourgeoisie on the gains of the masses or capitalist collapse in which the working class has not sought, with furious fighting, to find a way out in their favor, openly confronting the governments and the regimes of the exploiters.
Those who posed as allies of the proletariat were the ones who caused the worst defeats, diversions and wear and tear to the enormous mass offensives. This was possible by a perfidious policy of the so-called "popular fronts", democratic fronts, which are those that subject the workers' organizations to allegedly "progressive" sectors of the bourgeoisie, as they call them.

They were the Castroes and the whole world left supporting Obama which allowed him to apply the worst plans against the American working class in 2008, as we have just said. It was the Labor Party that allowed the submission of the English working class to the plans of Imperialist Maastricht, where the workers lost their conquests, one after one. Now huge strips of workers, desperately, have turned right looking for a way out from outside Maastricht and outside the Labor Party and its henchmen, the "anti-capitalist" members of the English SWP, which as we said only created the conditions for this cruel political crisis and partial defeat of the British proletariat.

Bolivarians in Latin America, as the Iranian Clergymen, have been applying very hard plans against the working class. In Brazil, the CUT and the PT surrendered before the judicial tightening of imperialism. Lula preferred to be a prisoner rather than mobilizing the CUT and the working class against the reactionary assault and the attack of imperialism with Bolsonaro to the workers of Brazil. Let alone the Neo Stalinist governments associated with the bourgeoisies in Africa, as in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa...
We are facing a vicious policy of class collaboration, such as Syriza and Podemos’, which made the working class in Greece and the Spanish State lose enormous conquests. They held the ignominious regimes of the Troika and the monarchy of the Bourbons. This explains why extensive sectors of the US white working class go behind Trump, or Johnson in England, something that gives social base to those imperialist powers to launch new counter-revolutionary military offensives on the planet.
Meanwhile, France brutally attacks the conquests of the working class to be in better conditions for the commercial war. The French working class takes more than 100 days of shutdowns, pickets, general strikes. A pre-revolutionary situation that is only contained by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CGT and the falsely called "anti-capitalists" of the Solidaires union, who refuse to fight for elevating economic struggle to a direct political struggle for throwing down Macron, i.e, what the masses strive and fight for.
The class collaboration policy has led both mass uprisings and workers' struggles to a dead end and prevented a revolutionary and socialist solution to the collapse of the world capitalist system. There have been new and huge betrayals. Cuba was handed out to imperialism. In the name of "anti-imperialism" and "21st century socialism", Chavists violently attacked the Venezuelan working class, carrying them to hunger and catastrophe. China's CP mandarins enslaved the working class. Putin managed to settle as the counterrevolutionary hitman of Eurasia.
In the Middle East, the collaboration of the reformist left with pseudo-democratic bourgeoisies led, before the fall of regimes as in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, to fraudulent "Constituent Assemblies" traps and left untouched all the domination institutions of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. The result of this perfidious class collaboration policy is already in sight: Pseudo-democratic outputs proved to be no more than a detour to come to dangerous counterrevolutionary blows such as Al Sisi in Egypt or the reposition of the Ben Ali military regime in Tunisia where his Party was recycled and got the government again.

For the revolutionary Marxists, the class collaboration policy, the so-called "popular fronts", "democratic fronts" that submit the working class to the bourgeoisie only serve to separate the workers from their allies, the peasants. They are to wet the gunpowder, extinguish the fire of the revolution, and disorganize the revolutionary offensives of the exploited. They use it to launch the worst attacks against the left wing of the masses. Thus, the conditions are prepared when the masses are numb and what is coming is fascism and Bonapartism... al Sisi in Egypt, a divided Ukraine which is massacred both in Kiev and in the Donbass, or an al-Assad in Syria… or as the recent events in Bolivia.
In this last country, imperialism has just promoted a coup that began as a fascist putsch and culminated with the Anez government thanks to the "pacification" deal sealed by the MAS and the COB bureaucracy, with which they sustained it. This government, direct agent of US imperialism, had the doors opened by the MAS, with Evo Morales that fled overnight.
This was a hard blow to the revolutionary mass struggle that was developing in Latin America, such as in Chile or Ecuador. As it had done in Syria, imperialism concentrated forces in Bolivia, and today we see that there it has centralized all the Intelligence Agencies of the States of the Subcontinent under the command of the CIA at a meeting inaugurated by Anez.

We are experiencing huge clashes among antagonistic classes. Here and there, the perfidious policy of the leaderships led these fights to a dead end. Despite this, the unprecedented suffering pushes the masses to break the control of their leaderships. This is when the "siren songs" of class collaboration and the blows of fascism begin to act openly.
In whole countries of the planet, the masses have entered the state of revolt, of independent actions and revolutionary offensive, before the catastrophe. This happened in Chile, Ecuador, Sudan, Lebanon. The French working class does not bring peace to imperialist French Fifth Republic that, feeling encouraged by its invasion of Mali and sub-Saharan Africa, is going all the way for all the conquests of the French working class.

 

The leadership crisis is going ever more acute

The bourgeoisie is a social force that is reluctant to lose its property and privileges. But the proletariat has also proven to be a social force with full vigor and strength. The crisis this social force is enduring comes from an overabundance of treacherous leaderships bought by Capital, which proclaim the socialist revolution is not in the agenda as an immediate task at a time when there is perhaps the highest historical crisis of capitalism.
These leaderships announce that you can only fight for "more democracy", without touching the property of the capitalists, bankers and imperialist parasites; without attacking the counterrevolutionary war machine with which capitalism and imperialism defend themselves through all its states.
Actually, there is an overabundance of treacherous leaderships that, in moments of collapse of capitalism, seek to settle the strategic defeat that 1989 meant with the loss of the worker states at the hands of the capitalist global economy, sold out by the Stalin scourge.

It is not the vigor of this rotten capitalist system what keeps it standing, it is the leaderships of the proletariat, to which capitalists and imperialism pays with some coins to divert and betray the big combats of the masses. For, as Lenin said, imperialism it means the split of socialism.

The bourgeoisie preserved the Stalinist CPs in the West after the 1989's debacle as a union bureaucracy, which maintains the control of most of the world's union centrals many militari.

In China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Russia, CPs have become a new bourgeoisie that imposed dictatorial, Bonapartist, autocratic regimes, for preserving and guaranteeing as minor partners, imperialist plunder through tough repression. But in most of the countries of the West Stalinism could have done nothing, after surrendering the former workers states if the renegades of Trotskyism had not sustained them from the left, both in the unions and in political fronts of class collaboration. They had already done it throughout 2WW postwar, when they ended up holding the rotten Stalinist bureaucracy that sold them with the excuse of "defending the worker states". Now they are doing the same thing again.

 

The Fourth International, either becoming in a bunch of centrist tendencies during the post-war, or then in national socialist parties at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the 21st one, in the hands of a cruel revisionism, has already lost its organizational independence and become a new reformist force. Soon they broke with the fundamental premises of the revolutionary theory and program. They have adopted as their own the theory-program of the two-stages revolution, of the "progressive bourgeois fields", etc.

That is to say that imperialism not only coopted and destroyed the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, as in the 20th century, but also the Fourth International, the true heir of revolutionary Marxism in the 21st century. This has been a huge victory of the world capitalist system, for in its name and the name of its revolutionary program, ex-Trotskyists, "anti-capitalist" transvestites, have covered with a halo of "left" heroes the greatest agents of capital -not to mention innumerous times when they entered in unified fronts and parties with them.
As we have already seen, all of them were carrying out the popular front class collaboration policy. They said "everybody against Bolsonaro" in Brazil, or "everybody against Macri" in Argentina, or "against Trump in the US". This is the old Stalinist politics of seeking "progressive" bourgeois, submitting to the "left wing" of the bourgeoisie, which means to completely annul the strength of the working class, which is subjected to the interests and support of the capitalists and their regimes. Today the renegades of Trotskyism have become a new wave of Menchevism. They are a form of Neo Stalinism.
The Society of Renegades of Trotskyism and their "anti-capitalist" parties holds both the class collaboration fronts and Stalinism around the world. First, they support the counterrevolutionary offensive of the fascist al-Assad to crush the heroic revolution in Syria. They make the semi-fascist clerics of Iran look like "anti-imperialist combatants", as well as showing the butcher Putin as an "anti US imperialism hero", when in reality, in the Conferences of Minsk and Geneva, he was ultimately the guarantor of counter-revolution.
It is an "anti-capitalist" movement that supported Corbyn, Maastricht's agent in London, the same Maastritch with which, as we said, the English working class lost all their conquests. In the US, the political crime of subjecting the working class and the radicalized youth to the trail of Sanders, who in turn, after the primary elections will give again all his votes to the Democratic Party.
In dozens of countries they are who support the Stalinist union bureaucracy and accompany it in all their outraged against the workers' movement, as in Chile, Sudan, Spain, Greece, Italy. This new Stalinist bureaucracy has self-proclaimed the "founder of the III International". The renegades of Trotskyism, become in a Neo Stalinism, are who support it.
In Argentina, they support the "progressive measures" of the Fernandez Government, which means reneging the struggle to overthrow it and instead taking responsiblity for it, which commands the police and any repression to the workers. In the Spanish State, they were with Podemos Party that supported the Bourbons invasion to Catalonia. In France -from Solidaires-, they support Stalinism at the head of the French CGT. In Brazil -from PSOL, they support Lula and the worst of the Pelega (scab) Union Bureaucracy.
They are the ones who, like the CRCI (Altamira split, PO of Argentina, EEK of Greece, DIP of Turkey), built parties together with dark Stalinist characters used by Putin to deceive the Russian people who are longing for the return to the USSR. They are those that in South Africa supporting and playing the role of new Stalinist parties, such as the SRWP (Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party) when the CNA crisis burst.

The emergence of currents such as the International Socialist League, an old Morenoist current in a state of decomposition in Argentina, has even called both al-Assad and Putin to "massacre all jihadists" there are in Idlib (Syria); namely to smash the masses. In his role as a fifth column, even Stalinism had not dared to voice such counterrevolutionary defacement in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
In that sense, LIS follows the path of Bolivian POR, which openly supported the recent military coup in that country.

The leadership crisis has been but sharpening in the first decade of the 21st century. But the working class has not yet surrendered. The revolutionary tide of the Middle East pushes millions of exploited of the Muslim masses to combat, country to country. The combats of Ecuador and Chile put the masses of Latin America in the counter-offensive position. The rebelled French proletariat is the vanguard of European proletariat.
Each decisive combat puts in the agenda the fight to recover militant internationalism in the working class ranks. In this fight, the conditions live for the Fourth International Program for the triumph of the Socialist Revolution to achieve a channel to the masses.
Seated on the new international spotlights of the World Revolution, fighting unabatedly for its program in great class clashes, regrouping cadres and internationalist forces in a common combat that the vanguard of the proletariat craves and needs, we Trotskyists can retrieve the flags and the program of our Party, the IV International, which was taken to the mud of class collaboration by revisionism and opportunism within our movement.

The speed race between how much the capitalist system manages to throw the CRAC to the masses and how much the latter manage to dislocate this counterrevolutionary offensive of imperialism has again started. The tendency to class polarization is already here once more. The unheard sufferings are the engine of combat. It is about opening a speed race of revolution versus reform. A time of counter-reformism has begun. The crisis of reformism accompanies, as soul to body, the crisis of parliamentarism.

Here and there they bust in dozens of splits those who, speaking yesterday on behalf of Trotskyism, are now betraying its program and revolutionary combat at every step. It is, then about entering unabashedly, from the heart of the vanguard of the international proletariat, in an open struggle to separate revolution from reform, Trotskyism from Stalinism, an independent class and Soviet strategy for the socialist revolution from reformism, a dedicated nurse of capitalism. It is about defining that the renegades of Trotskyism, who yesterday supported Stalinism, today, in the 21st century, have given it an extra life so it can return to betray and sink the world proletariat in blood once more.
The struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the former worker states under revolutionary ways maintains all its validity. The struggle for the socialist revolution is already a race against time, before imperialism hits the masses with new massacres, as in Syria, or wars that will make the two that developed in the 20th century pale. If the proletariat does not stop it, no doubt that the World War III will begin as the second one ended, amidst nuclear bombs as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But before this happens, there are still decisive battles to fight. Imperialism does not have a free rein for superior adventures. In the current revolutionary processes and their victory lives the future of human civilization.

Revolutionaries, let's devote to our affairs!

Each hard combat of the masses acts as an electric shock that awakens the solidarity and enthusiasm of millions of workers around the world. The fighting in Chile and Hong Kong counted with the sympathy of millions of workers and students and young rebels on the planet. Radicalization processes are permanently opened in strips of the vanguard of the working class internationally, moved by the revolutionary actions of the masses.

In the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War aroused the solidarity of the entire world working class. Strong battalions of internationalist workers went to fight there. In the ‘70s, in the revolutionary uprising, the cry of "Gringos, Out of Vietnam!" was a rallying banner for any radicalization process of the international proletariat.

The reformist currents know that this feeling of international solidarity of the workers is the engine of radicalization and new class struggles worldwide. The role of reformism is to abort these processes and subject the working class to their respective governments and regimes. It has remained in the hands of the Trotskyists to fight and deepen the internationalist enthusiasm of the masses, to light the fire of revolution at every step.
This is the only way to recover both the flags and the revolutionary program to regroup forces that are the stronghold to re-found the world party of the socialist revolution, the Fourth International.
A new internationalist regroupment of the vanguard of the proletariat is at the top of the agenda. Setting up new revolutionary Leninist combat parties is a necessity that arises from the decomposition and decay of the rotten world capitalist system.

Collective for the Re-foundation of the IV International / FLTI