July 4th, 2018

After the massacres and counterrevolutionary offensives in the Maghreb and the Middle East the imperialist bourgeoisie readies its governments and regimes to deepen its attack on the masses and the looting on the semi colonial world.

EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES: AMID ECONOMIC BANKRUPTCY, A TRADE WAR AND THE CLASS WAR

IN EUROPE, KEY BATTALIONS OF THE WORLD WORKING CLASS
ARE STANDING AND ENGAGE IN COMBAT

The “New Left” follows the steps of Stalinism and Social Democracy:
it is a hotchpotch of reformists and former Trotskyists

By CARLOS MUNZER and JACOBO GARCIA

 

The 2008 crash, and now under Trump’s command, the USA again goes to the world as an erupting volcano, the same as it did in the 1930 crisis.
US imperialists are ripping the present world division of labor up and starting again because it does not serve them any more to maintain their domination over the planet

From 2008, after the crash in Wall Street, the world capitalist system has entered a deep crisis that we could call “the” crisis something comparable only to that in the 1930s, which would further on open the road to the Second World War.
Either the present crisis is solved in favor of the working class with a new period of successful revolutions or what would come is war and fascism. The world market has shrunk and there is no place for all the pirates of the imperialist powers.
It is enough to see the massacre in Syria, the occupation and destruction of that nation by the imperialist powers and their hitmen as al-Assad, Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs, to understand what will happen to the proletariat if it does not defeat the capitalists, their regimes and government.
The USA is obliged to throw its whole crisis to the world and it is doing so. Yesterday in 2008 it did it in the hands of Obama, with a defensive policy, throwing the crisis to the planet with pacts and agreements after the crash as in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. The European Banks that had a 70% of their assets in Wall Street went bankrupt. To finance their deficits, they used the funds of the imperialist states, left them broke and threw their entire crisis on the working class of those countries. Minor imperialist countries in the south of Europe, as the Spanish State, Greece, Italy and Portugal went bankrupt and some of them quasi-vassals of Maastrich’s Europe, that is, of the German-French axis.
Evidently, Obama’s policy of agreements had the objective of throwing the crisis not only on the working class and the oppressed countries but also on the rest of the imperialist countries, particularly Europeans. This policy he impelled under a “pacifist” and “good-natured” cover. Meanwhile in the USA Obama stateized the losses of Wall Street to bail-out its broke Banks (and then he returned them to this parasite oligarchy after overhauling them) and threw this fierce crisis on the workers with recession, layoffs, loss of the labor gains…
The FED devoted itself to issue dollars without a backing in goods and lend them at “zero rate” to reactivate the economy. Billions went to support the Banks in crisis and US transnationals. The US deficit was financed through the taking of foreign capitals, overall of China and Japan. This policy of Obama’s then, served to cushion the crisis that beat Wall Street and throw it over all the competitors and the US working class.
Obama embraced Fidel Castro to get Cuba and “stretched his hand to the Muslim world”, as he said when he took the presidency, and lifted the embargo to Iran so then he sent the ayatollahs to massacre the Syrian revolution. Meanwhile the US imperialists had to get out from Iraq; though backstage and from the UNO, in the Geneva conferences, the USA went on monitoring the advances of the counterrevolution and the massacres to the revolutions in the Middle East.
Today, once Obama’s “dirty work” had been completed, comes Trump with an aggressive, offensive policy, sending to hell it all of the world division of labor, breaking all pacts and agreements that are of no service to the USA and with his trade war seeks to impose custom openings in favor of US goods all over the world. This is made to favor US transnationals and financial capital at the same time shutting its domestic market as is the case with the tariffs on steel and aluminum and against Chinese products up to USD 50 billion, with the objective of diminishing the USD 300 billion trade deficit the USA has with China. This time a trade war that was simmering undisclosed, came into light abruptly. The USA has launched an aggressive policy against imperialist Maastritch, as the French-German axis has strengthened and conquered its living space in Europe. From it they advance to dispute the US the latter’s spheres of influence in the semicolonial world and even the own USA’s domestic market. So the “Great Germany” one of the major world exporters in machine-tools and hi-tech has strengthened in the world economy. German imperialism though it emerged as a defeated power from the Second World War has become again the “Great Germany”, the outpost in the looting of Russia and Eastern Europe after the restoration of capitalism in the former USSR and the former members of the Warsaw Pact.
The present American domination is the result of the distribution of the planet through shootings in the Second World War. Trump is not a “crazy maverick” as is considered by the reformist left. Trump is the government of the US monopolies that need to recover their own domestic market and advance in the possession of the world market that has shrunk after the 2008 crash. Then 90 trillion dollars evaporated from the balance sheets of the super-banks of the world financial oligarchy, what shows that the capitalists ate the profits that human labor had not yet produced. That’s what the capitalist system lives on in its epoch of decay and death agony: eating the future benefits human labor has not yet produced. Today 262 trillion dollars in derivatives in the bank assets, that is papers…securities, futures of commodities, oil; virtual quasi-currencies, new bubbles, recreation of external debts in the semicolonial world at usury rates, etc. We are witnessing a huge mass of fictitious capital while the productive process in the world economy is once and again diminishing.
With Trump US imperialists go out defending their businesses in the world market under the present conditions of crisis. His war cry is “America First”, without pacts or blocks. Thus the US imperialists goes out to defend its supremacy in the world to recover its domestic market and force the other imperialist powers and the whole world to lift their custom barriers. The trade war impelled by Trump came because US competitors in the world market have advanced excessively.

Also the trade war among the imperialist gangs has the objective of each one advancing on the niches of the world market that still rest as business for the transnationals and the financial capital. It is about turning Russia and China into semi colonies. For them imperialisms, this is a question of life and death. What yesterday Obama sought (and failed) to attain through pacts and agreements, today Trumps does through kicking and abusive twits. For this is the true goal of his present trade war: retaking the firm and full control of both Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, that is, as said, Russia and China, and he knows that for it he has to make the German-French axis kneel, get rid of even England and any other ballast and go on its own to reconquer the world.
In Russia -as well as in China-, there are gigantic resources as oil, gas, minerals and a huge military-industrial complex as a legacy of the former USSR, and also state enterprises that guaranteeing big rents that US imperialism seeks to appropriate completely. Gazprom and Rosneft, Russian gas and companies, are disputed fiercely by the USA, Germany and even Great Britain, which together with the Bundesbank have the 49% of Gazprom shares.
Trump wants to impose Germany to buy LNG from US companies; instead, Merkel agrees with Putin in building a new gas pipeline that runs directly from Russia to Berlin, which would turn Germany into the gas distributor for the whole imperialist Europe.
It is already no secret that Trump is fighting to get the Chinese state steel enterprises still rendering a profit. The USA wants to make China surrender its steel industry so that it can control the world steel production. Trump and his gang also want to take the Chinese state power company that gives energy to 1,200 million inhabitants and thousands of diverse enterprises, and grab the major stakes in all Chinese Banks.
Trump has a particularly aggressive policy towards China; he is forcing this country to reduce the trade deficit the USA has with it. US imperialism not only wants China to be the greater undertaker of its “Treasuries” (US Treasury Sovereign Bonds) covering its budget deficit; it wants China to import USA goods and services, i. e., to be centrally an imperter.US imperialism seeks to take advantage of the 400 million Chinese consumers market. Into that market the USA has already advanced while having in its assets a great quantity of Chinese Bank shares and getting subsidies for its transnationals.  Wall Street pirates are already placing the world wide super production of goods of their transnationals, as motor vehicles, compu-tech goods etc. Though, it has to share the Chinese domestic market with English transnationals and financial capital, as well as with these same sectors of imperialist Maastricht and Japan.
The USA made the agreement between China and the EU and UK for la new Silk Road (known as One Belt, One Road, OBOR) get stale; it was about creating a “road” of dry ports and transport infrastructure from Beijing to Berlin to Paris to London with a billionaire investment. Therefore, Trump “denounced” that China is copying USA technology violating copyright laws, so that Germany and England had to freeze the project.
The scrum for Russia and China is open. So it was no surprise US aggressive policy of covering Ukraine’s border with Russia with NATO troops in 2014.
The world financial oligarchy used fresh money handed them by the FED at zero rates after the world crash to organize huge financial usury businesses in the semi colonial world, recreating new external debts for the oppressed countries and fabulous profits for the Banks. Today when the USA is increasing its rates and the hedge funds come again to the Wall Street “safe heaven”, both colonies and semi colonies are left with huge debts and a new twist in the looting of their riches. The crisis in Argentina and the BRICS are simply a consequence oof the deeds of these pirates of the Wall Street financial oligarchy.
With Trump, the USA has entered the world as an active volcano. After the collapse of the minor imperialist powers of southern Europe, there is no more room in the different branches of production or the world market for the five imperialist “superpowers”: USA, UK, France, Germany and Japan.
Trump’s offensive over the DPRK to “tame” “rebel young” Kim Jong-in and directly submit him is part of the USA outpost for the control of the Pacific Area. The control of the Korean Peninsula is a key issue in the near future for besieging China and at the same time a source of gigantic businesses. It is the USA which seeks to take the entire Korea both South (of which it is already an owner) and the North.
Trump’s offensive over the DPRK and his negotiation with Kim Jong-un is not a symptom of a “weakness” on the part of imperialism. It is incredible to see that sectors of the world left still believe that US imperialism is a “paper tiger”, as during years the LIT-CI held, while “Mr. Reagan” together with his partner “Ms. Thatcher” grabbed the former USSR and China by organizing the capitalist restoration in the 1989 purchasing for a bunch of coins the new bourgeoisie in those countries
Kim Jong-un is ever nearer to being a direct agent of Trump and US imperialism while he holds 40 million overexploited semi slave workers and peasants under the boots of counterrevolution. This is what the imperialists see when they reunite with Kim. The bourgeois analysts are discussing who won and who lost in those meetings, but Big Capital and its CEOs are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of 40 million exploited that Kim is ready to put at their disposition for them to suck up to the last drop of their blood.
North Korea is a great reservoir of slave labor under a fascist regime. A “paradise” for maquilas (sweatshops), which are actually working from some time now in that country. And the Kim Dynasty is already collecting commissions from the transnationals for the slave workers it has producing in the border with South Korea. Articulating a labor division in the Korean Peninsula is very important for the imperialist transnationals in order to land with new energies in China and the entire Asia Pacific area.
Kim Jong-il is the guarantor as well for the North Korean workers -due to their recurrent hunger crises-, not to rebel or unite with their class siblings in South Korea or the Chinese slave workers.
As any native bourgeoisie, the Kims want to negotiate with imperialism their situation as small partners, and utilize their quasi-nuclear armament (which to be true does not get anybody afraid) to do that from some power place. Imperialism knows that these Messrs. -do not build nuclear bombs with the aim of attacking it but as its servants they have the goal of discussing the size of their slice of the national rent. Imperialism is actually afraid that the masses in their revolutionary processes could ultimately grab the nuclear armament and the power attached to it, unite with the workers in South Korea and set the entire peninsula on fire with the socialist revolution as they did in the 1950s in the aftermath of the Second World War. As we can see Trump is upsetting not only the economy apple-chart but that of the world politics. He uses this or that institution of domination as the UNO, the OAS etc. only if they are useful to his aims.
That is why he returned to put an embargo over Iran, which had major businesses with Germany and France for the reconstruction of its industrial plants and infrastructure, stopped US military maneuvers with South Korea to be able to put North Korea under his feet, trampled Ukraine to the end, and gave an ultimatum to China, Germany, France and UK for them to surrender economically to the USA.
For the US imperialism, its “home market” is the world and it includes the own USA, which Trump wants to recover. A US where cheap goods enter not only from China but also from Canada and Mexico Thanks to the NAFTA; where German, British, French, etc., imperialist enterprises have their own industrial plants thanks to what they sell their products untaxed in the domestic US market; that is what Trump wants to recover and why he also kicked the NAFTA out.
The USA attempts to resolve the terrible crisis that shook it with the 2008 crash throwing it for good over the entire world, in a trade war that is just starting, and which it intends to make all its enemies surrender with. This time, however, they have strengthened themselves, they are not now defeated or destroyed as they were in the aftermath of the Second World War. The German-French axis is on its feet and is not afraid of the challenge. Powerful native bourgeoisies of countries dependent of the imperialist world economy, as Russia and China, will not be easy to be tamed and submitted. Imperialism, on the other hand, keeps on advancing against them with its finances, goods and military pressure.

The fallacy of the “harmonic globalization” of monopolies and transnationals in the world market under the imperialist domination
The validity of the Leninist theory on imperialism as the “death agony phase of capitalism”

The cockatoos working for the bourgeoisie that speak of an “harmonic globalization of the monopolies and transnationals”, proclaim that the USA is hurting itself with the trade war. It is not so. The truth is that the monopolies and transnationals have their flag, as Lenin said. They are the imperialists states which defend THEIR OWN finance capital and THEIR OWN transnationals in the different spheres of influence and production branches that those same imperialist states control. Without those states from which the finance capital is exported, imperialism would not have emerged; it would not have been maintained in the planet and the different powers would not have been able to dispute the different spheres of influence to control them afterwards.
The world has been completely distributed long ago and this was made through war. The victors of the Second World War defend their spheres of influence in the world economy using warships and military bases. That is because which controls the spheres of influence, controls the sources of raw materials, minerals, oil, rubber, food commodities and also the trade routes, key questions of the productive process. Moreover, it also controls the super plus-value that it grabs from the colonial and semi colonial world working class. That is what the power of the USA is about, an imperialism that conquered the majority of the spheres of influence as main victor in the Second World War, and it has not or will not cede them pacifically.
The capitalist restoration imposed in 1989 and the crash in the USA in 2008 helped “Great Germany” to emerge as an economic “superpower”; as we have said, it advanced to the East and consolidated its power in the imperialist West. This Great Germany under the NATO boot, has been banned from arming itself up to now. Moreover, the USA wants to impose all the Maastricht powers to pay for the NATO expenses. These powers have said no, creating instead the legal bases for advancing to form a European Army. But for now that is too little for confronting the US powerhouse.
The pact between France and Germany has consolidated Maastricht and went so far as incommoding powerful England in the European business. British “Brexit” is ultimately an expression of the inability of England to compete openly the German-French axis. The fall back of England mirrors the power of the German imperialism allied to France. Great Germany’s exports’ value is almost 1.28 trillion dollars, what makes it the second exporter in the world with 82 million inhabitants, while with 1.38 billion inhabitants, China’s exports’ value is 2.26 trillion dollars. This figures show clearly Germany’s high labor productivity, particularly in high-tech and machine-tools production.  Again in the 21st century, this time allied to France for now, and the USA are two locomotives that are clashing in the world economy. The natural living space for Germany is Europe and it has been taken by Germany very strongly from 1989. For Europe on the contrary, the USA is its financier, its usurer; Germany controls instead its trade, the circulation of goods and the riches, Russian oil and gas.
Speaking about “globalization” without mentioning the harsh dispute among the imperialist powers around the world economy the enormous clashes between the USA and Germany and the drowning of some minor powers as those in southern Europe equals to believe on a harmonious development of imperialism in its control of the planet. It is the same as considering these parasites not as pirates but as gentlemen.

To say this is a true evil pacifist lie. USA needs a government such as that of Trump in his competition against the rising imperialist powers such as Germany, France and imperialist Maastricht. Morgan Bank, Citibank, General Motors, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, Cargill, the entire finance capital of USA needs the US state that rules the world to do business deals. It needs the US Federal Reserve that put 600,000 million dollars to cover the bankruptcy and shortfalls of Wall Street banks, such as the German and French monopolies need of their states and of imperialist Maastricht for now.

The crisis sharpens the inter-imperialist clashes for the world market. If Germany or France take off from USA the spheres of influence, from where they extract super-incomes from finances, commodities, minerals of every kind, raw materials, that is to say super-profits, they would remove US imperialism its supremacy in the world market. If so, US decline would’ve started. It would mean that by conquering and semi-colonizing Russia and China, France and Germany would corner USA in the world economy. This cannot be done peacefully but with wars. No declining imperialism and no imperialism that tries to take over the control of the world economy will do this the good way.

The world has been partitioned with the war. What USA is doing is to defend what it has conquered with guns last century, which is questioned today by Germany, France and even Japan. The former workers states entered to the world market inheriting huge productive forces that the capitalist economy has started to suction but it has yet to complete doing so, as we have seen.
The world market has shrank and this means that huge masses of capitals have evaporated due to imperialist parasitism. This sharpens the trade war that has started at an extreme point.

The Leninist theory about imperialism is confirmed in the 21st century. The monopolies have banner. Through it, they can do their business deals. In US “back yard”, Latin America, all the transnational companies invest and make business deals, but the ruling one is USA. Sub-Saharan Africa and Maghreb are spheres of influence of Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain… all of them, together with Japan, penetrate in the US spheres of influence as minor imperialisms. But also in there, there’s aggressive competition against USA.
The Middle East, although the US today cannot unleash a direct military offensive after the defeat of Iraq, is the sphere of influence of the "Seven Sisters” (oil companies), under the US-UK command of Exxon, Chevron, British Petroleum, Shell ... Thus, after the crushing of the Syrian revolution, the US prepares the State of Israel to return as an interventionist gendarme throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East. Undoubtedly, listing Iran again in the "axis of evil", after using the Ayatollahs to crush the revolution in Syria, is meant for Zionism to recover its firepower, including crushing that theocracy, lackey and Gurkha of the imperialist powers.
Meanwhile, Germany and France reluctantly had endorsed the new embargo that the US decreed on Iran. That’s US sphere of influence. Either the French-German axis disputes it to the US by wars or they have to comply Trump's resolutions. This is how the world was partitioned in the last war.
That view of a "free trade", of a "harmonious development of the productive forces, of globalized imperialism and financial capital", is a scam to the world working class. The world's productive forces and their successive technological revolutions have crashed not only with the capitalist mode of production but also with national borders long time ago. Here and there, capitalism creates poles of development in different branches of production or sectors of the planet, while plunging most of them into misery and catastrophe. The contradiction is that if the US is doing well, the imperialist Maastricht Europe is doing badly. And vice versa: if the French-German axis controls Russia and advances on the "silk route" that was being prepared with Beijing, the US will do very badly.

The theorists of "globalization" ultimately are talking about a "super-imperialism", repeating the opportunistic view that Kautskyism had. They are people who see only imperialism "from the purely economic point of view", according to Lenin, who considered it "nonsense". Against the reformists of the early twentieth century, Lenin insisted: “If the purely economic point of view is meant to be a ‘pure’ abstraction, then all that can be said reduces itself to the following proposition: development is proceeding towards monopolies, hence, towards a single world monopoly, towards a single world trust. This is indisputable, but it is also as completely meaningless…” (Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism). Reformists today are saying that we head to a single monopoly of the ultra-agriculture, of medicine, and son on because the capital trend is to concentration and “globalization”.
Life has given its verdict on this pseudo-theory that fell apart when the imperialist powers, each one with its own monopoly, clashed in two world wars. Lenin denounced Kautsky saying: “Kautsky’s utterly meaningless talk about ultra-imperialism encourages, among other things, that profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to the mill of the apologists of imperialism, i.e., that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy, whereas in reality it increases them.” (Idem, bold are found in the original). Ultimately, the view of currents such as PTS of Argentina and other “anticapitalists” of Europe that capitalism “expands itself by developing democracy” is a political conclusion of this Kautskyist view of “harmonious development” of “globalization” of monopolies and imperialist control of the planet.

We insist, the imperialist companies have banner. They have armed forces, war navies, military bases and atomic bombs behind them, that is to say, they have imperialist states with which they achieve their supremacy in the planet, as they did with two world wars.
World economy is ruled by a relationship between imperialist states that compete among each other and semi-colonial and colonial states that are plundered. As Lenin said: “The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits. And they divide it ‘in proportion to capital’, ‘in proportion to strength’, because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and capitalism (…) The epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the ‘struggle for spheres of influence’”. (Idem)
To say that such contradictions have been solved with a “harmonious globalization of capital” is only to justify the dominance of imperialism in the planet and the huge destruction of productive forces that it causes in its decline.
How can there be a "harmonically developed" world market when the trade war due to the shrinkage of the market has taken a qualitative leap? How to speak of "globalization" and "unlimited growth of transnational companies and trade" in a world market that has been reduced, shrank and destroyed in enormous proportions? How can there be a "harmonic globalization" when, on the other hand, there’s labour force, machines, tools and technology available and totally paralyzed? With them, huge global productive forces could be developed that guarantee work and welfare to all the inhabitants of this planet. This will never be said by Marxist scholars, social democrats and revisionists who speak about the era of "globalization". The revolutionary Marxists affirm that this can only be applied with a planned global economy that can be made when socialism triumphs at international level and in the whole planet. That is why the task of the moment is the struggle for the socialist revolution.
Seeing 250 million immigrants going around the world looking for work and a place to live is a slap in the face of those all chatterboxes of the university that appropriate themselves of the name of socialism only to sweeten and beautifying the rotten declining capitalist system.

The US with Trump does not "shoot his own feet" at its own transnational companies when it places an embargo on Iran, when it raises customs tariffs on steel and aluminum, when it destroys NAFTA or when it closes its domestic market. Just the opposite; what it is defending is the share of its transnational companies in production, in trade and in finance worldwide and its spheres of influence in the context of the current conditions of crisis and market shrinkage. And this is so, even if a specific branch of the transnational companies is affected by these measures.
USA defends its companies such as the French-German axis does with theirs, seeking control of Europe as their sphere of influence and vital space, from Portugal to the Russian steppes.
Nobody can forsee that USA will go well in this trade war. But if USA wants to continue ruling the planet, it has to make this war, beyond circumstantial pacts that it establishes. This crisis of the imperialist dominance of the planet, opened with 2008 crash, will be solved by the trade war that has started or the military war, if the world working class does not prevent it with the proletarian revolution.

No imperialist power, victorious from a war, such as USA, will gave away the world market in a harmonious and peaceful way. USA has 80% of the military budget of the world, that is to say, the biggest investment for its imperialist transnational companies and its finance capital, in DESTRUCTIVE FORCES, the juiciest business of imperialism in its decline, bankruptcy and agony. Technology and direct investments of capital go mostly to plunder, parasitism and the production of destructive forces, for war.
Trump has given 250,000 million dollars to the high technology companies of the US industrial-military apparatus, meanwhile, on the other hand, he offers to double the amount of planes of his Air Force and Navy, and build 300 new warships and double the amount of troops in the military bases around the world at the end of his term.
US company Boeing, which belongs to Goldman Sachs, had scheduled a delivery of planes for Iran worth 20,000 million dollars. Will Boeing be willing to keep its business deal with Iran and lose 250,000 million dollars only for research in military high technology in USA? They don’t even think about doing that. This company is the largest provider of planes for the US war industry, together with Lockheed Martin.
The “theorists” of the “globalization” must understand –and stop lying the masses at least for a day- that the shareholders of Boeing do not really see their business deals to flourish with Iran’s flag and its religious leadership of its theocracy.

The talking parrots of the bourgeoisie announce that robotics and artificial intelligence, as new technological advances, are questioning US dominance in the planet. 250,000 million dollars in technological research for the war industry means one of the biggest investments made by an imperialist state in destructive forces in the history of modern capitalism! Only like this the world market can be broaden: producing for destruction and with state investment.
As the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky clearly stated: THE MOST IMPORTANT ECONOMIC FACTOR IN THE IMPERIALIST EPOCH IS THE WAR. And this has not only proved its validity in the 20th century, but it has intensified to an extreme degree in the 21st century. The US spends 600,000 million dollars per year just to keep its army operating around the world. This is the equivalent to what the US invested during the entire Second World War. American decay? When the French-German axis begins to invest the same in the war industry and sharpen its fangs to dispute the US its spheres of influence, the American decline will have begun.
In the 20th century there was no technological investment, from planes to televisión, from the leaps in telephones to medical research, that hasn’t been a result of the huge investments for war industry. Mustard gas thrown on the children of the tormented Syria today is a result of those “technological advances” of chemistry of the beginning of the 20th century.
The fashion today is to talk about capitalism being in a new high technology "industrial revolution", developing robotics, artificial intelligence, etc. As we saw, these new "technological revolutions" have already been developed, but linked to the war industry and not at all as a productive investment funded by the capitalists. All advances in robotics have been a result of its development for the military-industrial apparatus. There are drones that are replacing conventional aviation in wars, massacring hundreds of thousands of exploited without the need of a pilot. Have you ever seen a robot so perfect for the adventures of plundering of imperialism in the world?
Robotics is tested every day in the battlefields. Artificial intelligence, as yesterday happened with the development of cell phones or Internet, is nothing more than a large-scale organization of a high technology war, under a system of command and artificial intelligence operations that controls all the war movements, forecasts and possible alternatives in the battlefield. It trains tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers of the imperialist troops every year. Furthermore, 30,000 Russian soldiers are trained in high technology war simulators in Germany, which has even made the smallest submarine in the world (of only 21 crew members) that can stay under water for one year. Not to mention the development of anti-missile frigates in France or their high technology helicopter carriers (which they were going to sell to Russia for 1,400 million euros, which was prevented by the US through its embargo on the current accounts of the oligarchy of Putin).

With the "technological revolutions" what are advancing are the destructive forces and together with them, the parasitism of 1% in the world economy, which lives at the expense of work, sacrifice and slavery of the majority of humanity.
Thus, then, without any cost of technological investment, transnational companies and financial capital allocate a part of the instruments of war to the productive process, where it cannot generalize them, unless we consider the absurd that capitalism could create 100% robotized factories, with a market of robots that do not consume. If this were possible, they would have done it a long time ago. But it is easier for the capitalists to obtain super profits by parasitizing the states, gambling in finances and buying futures. And where production is robotized, it means that the workers who are producing, they have to do twice as much as work.
The only market that can develop all the way these technological advances is the military one, which is unlimited because the bullets, drones and tanks get destroyed and there’s a need to produce them again.

The monopolies have a flag. As we said, the banks of England, Germany, Italy, Greece that went bankrupt with Wall Street 2008 crash, they were saved by their states that emptied their treasures and made their workers to pay for them with slavery, tax increases, etc.
The “globalized” transnational companies will last only a couple of hours without their states, because they live from them and through them they control the world. It is time to end with so much vulgarity and lies of the defenders of the capitalist system, which has entered in decline and rotting long time ago.

The US in the 1930s needed World War II, perhaps more than the vassal Germany, in order to get out of its crisis and dominate the world. In those years the Fourth International affirmed: “US capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war (…) For Germany it was a question of ‘organizing Europe.’ The United States must ‘organize’ the world. History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism.” ("War and the Fourth International", cited in the Manifesto of the Fourth International on the imperialist war and the proletarian world revolution, May 1940).
If USA yesterday sought to impose itself as the ruling imperialist power in the planet, today US imperialism must keep its world dominance.
Therefore, after 2008 crash, today once again, the volcano erupts again. USA, to keep on dominating the planet, must destroy and take the imperialist powers off the board, as they compete for the spheres of influence and in several branches of production.
As Trotsky said, in the reformist epoch of capitalism, the competition was “the bigger fish eats the smaller fish” in a process of crisis and capital re-concentration. In the imperialist epoch, as we have seen in the 20th century and mostly in the 21st century, the competition is put down to its knees, neither peacefully nor in big “globalization circuits” but throughout states and trade and military wars.
USA, returning to the world aggressively, prepares for Europe no new Marshall Plan but a war offensive to force it to surrender. For the moment, this war is political, economical and trade war. Without this war, US imperialism cannot find the way to Russian gas and oil and will have a permanent competitor in the “silk route” to Beijing.

Finance capital, with its monopolies and transnational companies, compete for spheres of influence and for the control of the majority of the branches of production. This is done either with circumstantial association of imperialist monopolies of different nationalities or fighting all of them among themselves, employing not only labour productivity but also the imperialist states in the world market to define the custom barriers, the usage of slave labour force in the semi-colonial world and also the extraction of cheap raw material of the areas they control. In times of crisis, the trend of capital to concentration and submitting the competition is enhanced, and this deepens cartelization of the world economy and a bigger concentration of capital.

While for the reformism the crisis in the imperialist epoch are the exception, for the revolutionary Marxists are the rule and the growth cycles are the exception. These cycles, on the other hand, fail to recover what the crash has destroyed, as it was shown in the 2008 crisis. The slow recovery that was experienced between 2015 and 2017 in the world economy was abruptly stopped by the trade war that the US launched and the fall of Wall Street stock market last February that expressed that the growth of the economy was due to the "zero rate" loans granted by the Federal Reserve, the European banks and the Tokyo bank. It was a slow low growth that in the US only allowed 20,000 bankrupt companies, called "zombie companies", to stay alive, paying their debts with those "zero rate" loans, without investing a single dollar. Meanwhile, the great financial oligarchy distributed these funds from the Federal Reserve in the form of profits for its shareholders or they lent them in a usurious way to the semi-colonial world. The values ​​must express the created goods. That is why stocks quickly collapsed on Wall Street and around the world, indicating that a new bubble had been made. Imperialism is parasitism. And in its crisis is when it develops it the most.
World capitalist economy in the imperialist stage breaths as a human being in state of agony, intermittently. The trade war and the attacks on the working class are a ventilator that makes it breathe for now.

There’s still the tendency to the decline of the productive forces and it is deepened. The utopia of believing that under these conditions China and Russia can emerge as imperialist powers by a "peaceful way" is, at least, a lack of respect to intelligence. Their dependence on the world economy and the penetration of international financial capital at the heart of their productive and financial processes make impossible such attempts, except in the heads of pseudo-Marxists who play hide and seek with the global geo-strategy, renegading from every serious Marxist basis. China does not have a single military base on the planet. It is just building its first aircraft carrier. And it was NATO that left the Crimean peninsula to Russia, when the IMF stepped on Ukraine, so that from there and from Tartus in Syria, Putin can be the gendarme and hitman of the peoples of Eurasia and the Middle East.
China and Russia are transitory capitalist states that even imperialism has not managed to colonize or semi-colonize. That is precisely the current contradiction. For the imperialist powers to live, China and Russia as "powers" -as the pseudo-Marxist scholars call them- must disappear as they are and become new colonies or semi-colonies.
The imperialist powers need, as we said, the gas, oil and minerals of Russia. They also want to keep their military industrial apparatus, inherited from the former USSR, including its 7,000 nuclear warheads, which must be modernized and updated with technology and capital that Russia does not possess, at the risk of hundreds of Chernobyl blow up. The Russian state does not even have funds to maintain them all. Imperialism prepares a huge business deal.

As we see, the dying capitalist system needs a new blood transfusion. That's why it looks at Russia and also at China. This comes largely at the expense of the deficit of the US state with its trade surplus. The US, with its trade war, is pressing and besieging China to lower its tariffs, as we have already said, and become importer. This is the way to destroy the tendency of Beijing to copy technology from the imperialist countries, but above all, it would mean that the dominant powers would keep the banks and mainly the profitable state companies. There is a huge business and fixed income market that imperialism is desperate to control. But the Chinese native bourgeoisie is asserting its role as enslaver of the most numerous working class in the world.

The speed race between the different imperialist gangs to semi-colonize Russia and China -now shared by all of them- has begun. Trump with his trade war is ahead in the race for China, for now, while Germany, which has made direct investments for 25,000 million euros in Russia and absorbs its gas and oil together with its partners of the imperialist Maastricht, is the one that goes first in the race for Moscow.
“Globalization”? No. There’s an inter-imperialist fierce confrontation, a trade war and class war. Everything else is a lie to sweeten a declining capitalism and the current role of the imperialist monopolies in times of crisis, wars and revolutions.
The alternative for Russia and China is not to advance into new imperialist powers (there are too many of them in the planet) but to become new semi-colonies, as Vietnam already is or as Cuba and North Korea threaten to be… Or it can be that the proletariat of those former workers states enter again in new revolutionary offensives and advances in the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary ways, but this time without the Stalinist scum that sold it out to imperialism and became a new owner class.

 

Revisionism in Marxism disarms the working class for the ongoing class war

Pacifism, which prepares the working class for decades and perhaps centuries of "democracy, fraternity and equality", is a cancer and a poison that paralyzes the forces of the proletariat against their oppressors. Because reformism, which supports imperialism, must disappear before so that the working class can liberate its forces to defeat capitalists and move towards the socialist revolution.
As Lenin said, taking Hilferding’s words as his own, in his work "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism": "FINANCE CAPITAL DOES NOT WANT LIBERTY, IT WANTS DOMINATION". This is because financial capital looks for sources of raw materials in its colonies and semi-colonies, not only those already discovered and in the process of extraction, but also those that are likely to be exploited. Technique develops so quickly that the unproductive lands of today, tomorrow may stop being so. The fight for water, for open pit mining, for controlling oil to be extracted from the rocks through fracking, returns a million times more voracious and dominating imperialism in its crisis, even more than in its short cycles of expansion, because this is how capital is also valued.
We must end with so much vulgar Marxism. The value of an oil company and its actions are not only due to the barrels it extracts, but also because of the oil under its feet to be exploited by future generations.
Monopoly seeks domination and for that it looks for the most totalitarian government at hand to oppress its colonies and semi-colonies.
  The reformism had been stating that US imperialism advances "expanding democracy and human rights." This is a lie and an infamy. 80% of civilization, if not 90%, is submitted under Bonapartist, totalitarian, fascist or semi-fascist regimes, as in Russia, China, the entire Pacific, Africa... Reformism shows the "Eden" of the bourgeois democracy, when it does not even work in rich countries, where there is a permanent tendency to bonapartization of the regimes.
The infamy of saying that "imperialism expands democracy" is to cover up its most ferocious counterrevolutionary adventures in the world market and in the countries it oppresses. We reaffirm: "Financial capital does not want liberty, it wants domination." The law of Lenin and the revolutionary Marxists that imperialism is a reaction all along the line has been corroborated in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
  The prognosis of revolutionary Marxism in this 21st Century is still “socialism or fascism, socialism or war”. And this trade war that has been unleashed today between the imperialist powers opens the prospect of war, if the working class does not prevent it.

Between the economic bankruptcy and the commercial war, key battalions of the European working class are already rising and fighting
√ The Ukrainian working class enters the fight again with the strike of the steel workers of ArcelorMittal and the mobilization of the miners,
√ Fighting against Putin, the war criminal, Russian workers win the streets in defense of their pensions and their salary
√ The Greek working class goes back on its tracks with a new general strike against the social-imperialist government of Syriza
√ French workers do not back down in their fight against labour flexibilization and defense of the 35 hours working week
√ With the strike of the IG Metall, the powerful union of the metal workers of Germany entered the combat
 √ Millions of immigrants hit the doors of Europe looking for work, bread and dignity like their class brothers from that continent

Russian workers return to the fight with the European working class against murderer Putin

  Once again the workers of Russia win the streets. The World Cup organized by Putin is being used as a smokescreen to hide the onslaught on the Russian working class: millions of public servants are not getting their salaries or they get them 6 months later, the same happens in the steel industry where workers stopped the production and entered the fight like in "Red October", a steel factory that is a link in the production for the Russian industrial-military apparatus. The heavy industry workers have entered the fight. The disgraceful silence of all the currents of the European and world left before the awakening of the Russian working class is striking.
Now, in tens of cities, workers are taking the streets against increasing the retiring age. Putin is shown by the Stalinist parties, and the ex-Trotskyists hanging on their skirts, as an "ally of the oppressed workers and peoples"; the onslaughts launched by capitalists in countries all over the world pale in comaprisson with the one launched by Putin. Russia is the "paradise" of labour flexibility that today Macron in France, Temerin Brazil, Macri in Argentina, etc are trying to impose
 Capitalist restoration in the former USSR, as in China, has meant not only the end of the foundations of the workers' states but also taking all their achievements away from the workers. Moreover, in Russia the right to strike, demonstrate or assembly are not even allowed, unless they are previously authorized: the one of Putin is a true Bonapartist anti-worker dictatorship. Just to give another example of this, we can see that the 8 candidates that appeared in the last presidential elections, from the different Communist Parties to "United Russia", were all bourgeois candidates of the high oligarchy linked to Putin and his businesses.
Russia is shaken by a deep economic crisis. Already the crash of 2008, which sank the price of oil, contracted the economy by 8 points. Due to this situation its economy has entered a deep recession since 2014, as Russia depends mainly on its oil and gas exportations. A new round of US sanctions has shaken its entire economy. The aluminum giant, Rusal, was at the edge of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, German BASF and British Petroleum own 50% of Gazpron’s shares.
The one who paid for this crisis were the workers, with a minimum wage of U$ 160 and an average salary of U$ 680, which places the Russian working class as one of the most exploited in Europe. The state deficit increased and therefore the government seeks to quickly increase the retiring age from 55 to 63 years for women and from 60 to 65 years for men.
It seems incredible that there are still leftist political currents such as the Partido Obrero of Argentina that still affirm that in Russia the "capitalist restoration is incomplete, it is in transition" and that there is a "restorationist bureaucracy", as Altamira proposes in her intervention in the International Conference of PO last April. That is to say, they are affirming that a workers' state still exists and capitalism has not settled on it. A real nonsense that only seeks to cover up the bourgeois oligarchy of Putin and his gang, fully imbricated with imperialism in their business. Does anyone know a better way to support one of the most anti-working bourgeois governments on the planet, based on the force of rifles and counterrevolution against the masses of Russia and Eurasia, with a regime and a state supported by 23 bourgeois oligarchs, of the richest in the world, associated with transnationals and imperialism? Speechless.
Russian parasitic oligarchy have stolen the wealth created; they have taken it and they are still taking it from the country. They are rapacious bourgeoisie oligarchy that appropriated the great conglomerates of the productive chains that had been nationalized in the former USSR. As we said, it is a bourgeoisie associated in thousands of businesses with both European and North American imperialisms, via finances, the looting of gas by Germany and Maastricht Europe and with succulent bank accounts in Cyprus, London, etc. This bourgeoisie is throwing the whole crisis to the workers of Russia.
 Putin, the jackal of Eurasia, the murderer of the Syrian people, today carries his counterrevolutionary victories in the Middle East to the cities of Russia. The workers do not allow it and they have been marching on the streets. A colossus wakes up. The international working class needs the Russian workers in the 21st Century to fight against imperialism as they did in the 20th century.

The working class of Ukraine returns to combat

In neighboring Ukraine today, the workers of French steel company ArcelorMittal, the second largest company in steel production, are fighting. The miners also marched in the streets against the IMF attack on the privatization of Ukrainian mining. Despite the partition of Ukraine, despite the submission of the working class of the Donbass to the pro-Russian oligarchy of "Novorossia" by Stalinism, despite the emergence of a proto-fascism in Kiev linked to the finances and front men of the financial capital in that region and the presence of Russian counter-revolutionary troops in the Crimean Peninsula stolen by Putin: the Ukrainian working class has not been defeated and is still at war fighting IMF and imperialist plunder and defending their salaries and their living conditions, which are among the most opprobrious of the European working class.
A third of its labour force has gone to work as a slave to imperialist Europe. The average salary of € 250 - if they even get it - has placed workers long below the poverty line. This constantly sparks the struggle of the Ukrainian workers. Their battles push the unity of the working class of a nation divided by imperialism, the Russian oligarchy of Putin and their local servants in the Minsk pacts.
 In 1989, with the bankruptcy of the former workers' states in the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy who handed them over to imperialism, many Ukrainian workers, as the ones in Eastern Europe, believed that capitalist system would give them full gondolas and wages like the ones of German and French workers. But what they received was plundering of Ukrainian wealth and onslaught on their living conditions. That is why in the awakening of the Ukrainian working class over the last few years has flourished the feeling of hatred for capitalist exploitation under the war cry of "Let the USSR return!" which roared around the streets of Donetsk, an issue that will not be possible unless the councils of workers and soldiers, the soviets, be set up again, without the Stalinist clique that yesterday delivered the workers states to world imperialism.

The true war is the one that the imperialist powers declared to the European working class

Meanwhile, the working class of the imperialist Europe is far from giving up before the brutal war the imperialist powers declared.
In France, the working class has entered into a class war against labour flexibilization and the expropriation of their gain of 35 working hours a week.
In Germany, in a mass struggle, with partial and full metalworkers strikes at the beginning of the year, the workers of IG Metall have succeeded in breaking the limit of inflation for a wage increase, in order to recover at least a very small part of their wages that was taken away by the German imperialist bourgeoisie for years.
The Greek workers, after tens of combats, once again made a general strike against the anti-worker bourgeois left-wing Syriza government, which imposed the last memorandum agreed with the imperialist Troika, which means a new and brutal attack on the workers of Greece.
Stalinism, which leads the unions in Greece, and the Social-Democracy in Germany are the ones preventing the unity between the Greek and German working class, which would bring down not only Syriza’s attack but also the plans of misery and removal of gains against the German working class that has started. The enemy of the Greek and German workers is the same: Troika, the imperialist Maastricht, Morgan bank and Wall Street.
Years ago, the workers of Renault in Romania came out to fight with the war cry “we want to make as much as the workers of Renault in France!” The bureaucracy of the unions prevented this common struggle and we see today how the French workers are losing their gains one by one, approaching each time more to the misery of the Romanian workers. That’s the treacherous notorious role of the union bureaucracies, the labour aristocracy and its parties.
The feeling of the workers of Renault of Romania was the same one of that of the workers of Ukraine of the steel factory ArcelorMittal, which were also trying to raise their wages to the level of their class brothers and sisters from France, seeing the huge super-profits of that transnational steel company which is one of the biggest of the world.
The workers of the Russian Steel factories have a huge ally: the German workers. The German imperialist bourgeoisie, together with British Petroleum and associated to Putin’s oligarchy, plunder the oil and gas wealth of that nation.

The longer the proletariat in the west takes to seek for unity and solidarity with its class brothers and sisters from Eastern Europe, the more it will lose its gains. The Glacis is swarming with sweat shops of the transnational companies, with slave workers in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, the Balkans, Poland, etc. This plunges the value of the labour force in the imperialist Europe and allows imperialism to over-exploit the working class in the East.
The unity of the European working class from Portugal to the Russian steppes is the minimum condition for victory, to declare a war of the working class against the generalized war declared by the capitalists. The trade war of steel and aluminum, in which the imperialist pirates dispute the world market, is paid by the workers. The transnational companies and the bankers want to subordinate them country by country. The imperialist gangs need to take away the gains of their own working classes to be in a better position in the trade war.
Therefore, the trade war for steel and aluminum, of the Franch-German pirates and the US parasites is either defined by the working class uniting its ranks and demands against labour relaxation, for decent work, against dismissals and the antiworker government of Maastricht and the US, or it will be defined by the imperialist gangs and their transnational companies and make the workers pay for it.

 

The immigrants are part of the working class. They are the labour force expelled from the production by the imperialist bankruptcy and their counterrevolutionary wars
Millions of slaves strive to enter to Europe and USA

Between the trade war and the treasons of the working class leaderships, in moments of economic crash and capitalist bankruptcy, the tragedy of 250 million immigrant workers looking for a place in the planet to work and it and can’t find one comes to light. At the beginning of the 19th century, when the proletariat entered as a class in history, it developed a blind force against exploitation, burning the machines because it thought the machines caused their sufferings. Now it is the bankrupt imperialism destroys and paralyzes them, preventing that millions of workers of the world produce wealth. Marx defined the labour force as a commodity whose use value is to produce other commodities, other values, i.e. all the existing goods. 250 million pair of hands are not producing, in a world where 50% of the planet is subjected to the worse sufferings, backwardness, starvation, misery. This capitalist rotten system cannot even feed its slaves for a long time. It deserves to die.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants strive to enter to Europe. The imperialist bourgeoisies imprison more than 20,000 immigrant children in jails. They have transformed the Mediterranean Sea into a graveyard of the working class of Africa and the Middle East. They want to create ghettoes and concentration camps in Maghreb, where they incarcerate the migrant workers while many of them, coming from the tormented Africa, are sold as slaves to the imperialist Maastricht.
These millions of exploited are the working class, today turned into a huge industrial army of reserve that cannot enter into the productive process, as we have said. The 2008 crash has destroyed 800 million jobs worldwide and only a third of them were recovered, under conditions of slavery a thousand times worse, and in few sectors of the planet. For a long time now, the capitalists spent the profits that human labor has not produced. They have thus closed the chance of a process of productive investment each time more, while they create and recreate permanently fictitious capital of their financial gamble and their bubbles that explode here and there, causing more and more catastrophes and famine to the masses. All the "anti-cyclical" mechanisms of the imperialist governments before the crash of 2008 were used by the imperialist gangs to further parasitize their super-profits. They used the “zero rate” (or sometimes negative rates) loans granted by the US Federal Reserve and the European and Japanese central banks, not to invest in the productive process, but to distribute dividends and profits among their shareholders. This was quickly expressed in a collapse of all stock markets and Wall Street in particular, in last February.
It was the states that made the investments... in the war industry, increasing the military budgets, as the US did increasing it by 50%.
Reformist currents keep saying that the working class is able to improve its level of existence under these conditions of decline of the capitalist system. They lie to the workers. The objective conditions for the socialist revolution are not only mature but rotting. And 250 million immigrants traveling across the planet are the objective verdict of this premise of the program of the revolutionary socialists and of the IV International.
Millions of immigrants traveling through Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to reach the imperialist powers, fleeing from starvation, plagues, counterrevolutionary wars that imperialism provokes in the subjugated countries, are a true x-ray that shows a whole body of rotten capitalism that deserves to die. They are a factual proof that the productive forces have not only stagnated, but are regressing abruptly on the planet.
The epoch of crisis, wars and revolutions only gets deeper. While the demographic growth does not stop, the world market is only shrinking. This pushes to trade wars and, if the working class does not prevent it, to future global conflagrations between the different imperialist powers. This also causes the exacerbation of the class struggle. But this is developed under a rotten capitalism, with a rise of the industrial army of reserve that expands to hundreds of millions.
A 1% of parasites have kept the 50% of the wealth of the planet and the working class has to stand reformist shameless that want to make them believe that socialism is no more and that the fight is for "more democracy" ... to "democratize" the imperialist beast that is supported in the worst fascist, Bonapartist and counterrevolutionary governments in the vast majority of the planet. China, Russia and India, the most populated countries in the world, together with the martyred Africa, the counterrevolutionary wars in the Middle East, the sweat-shop countries in Eurasia, the Pacific and Latin America, are a true punch to the teeth against so much chatterboxes, lies and infamies of the left that is lackey of the great capital.
Thus, this wave of immigrants, of millions of slave workers, is knocking at the doors of Europe. They are the owners of the wealth that was stolen and plundered by the imperialist transnational companies. They are the modern slaves in the 21st century. The imperialist gangs use this labour force to do the worst jobs. They make them to enter or not into Europe and the US depending on the slave labour they need to make the production or to plunge the value of the European or North American labour force. The role of reformism does not end only in dividing the working class of Europe, but it also separates their struggle from the millions of immigrant workers.
The union bureaucracies are enemies of organizing their ranks and of transforming the workers' organizations into the advance of the struggle for the opening of the borders and to conquer "equal pay for equal work" for all workers, reducing of the hours of work per shift and with a decent wage for all. The union bureaucracies and their social-imperialist parties are enemies of organizing and centralizing the struggle against labour flexibilization and against the attack on all the gains of the working class that the great capital has launched internationally. They are far from promoting an international struggle of the working class as it was done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for conquering the 8 hour workday. The greatest defeat and tragedy suffered by the world proletariat has been that this excrescence of the workers movement, i.e. the union bureaucracies, workers' aristocracies and their parties, have destroyed the militant internationalism, when it is more necessary than ever to confront the bankrupt capitalist system.

The bourgeoisie gets its governments and regimes ready to attack the masses
The so-called “New Left” covers the left flank of the imperialist governments
A 1% of traitors that supports the 1% of parasites that took 50% of the world’s wealth

The “New Left” -made of social-chauvinist parties, traitors of the world working class, shameless that live of the crumbs that fall from the super-profits of Morgan Bank of London and Frankfurt cities, supporters of the murderer and gendarme of imperialism Putin- saw that the workers in Europe were controlled. From Syriza’s government they imposed a new attack plan in Greece. They supported Macron’s plan of imposing labour flexibilization on the French workers.
With Podemos of the Spanish State, they took PSOE to the government, saving the monarchy from the brutal political crisis in which it is as a result of the fight for the independence and the self-determination of the masses of the subjugated nations and the deep hatred awoken by Rajoy’s government within the working class.
With the votes of Podemos, the government of Sanchez of PSOE took office and the monarchy changed its executioner. Podemos guaranteed it. And within Podemos, the so-called Anticapitalists, who are silent today, also raised their hands to save the monarchy and make PSOE to take office once again, when it is a social-imperialist party, manager of the Spanish imperialist bank, plunderer of the peoples of Africa and Latin America, and brutal enemy of the workers of the Spanish State. Pablo Iglesias of Podemos is today the head of the cabinet of Sánchez and the monarchy in the backstage. Miguel Urban of the "Anticapitalists", an European member of the parliament, member of the self-titled "Unified Secretariat of the IV International", who has stained the banners of Trotskyism to put them at the feet of the imperialist powers for a long time now, is embraced to Iglesias.
That is the role of the Podemos and the "New Left" in the Spanish State: to be the true supporters -together with the old UGT and CCOO trade union bureaucracy- of the Moncloa Pact of the monarchy, CP, PP and PSOE, that the revolted "outraged" masses left in crisis in 2011.
This plan to "democratize" Maastricht, preached by the European "New Left" -as announced by one of its main leaders, Varoufakis, former finance minister of Syriza and Banca Morgan in Greece- means to disorganize every workers' struggle. It means to support the butcher Putin in the east and the imperialist governments in the west as well as subordinate the working class to their respective imperialist gangs country by country. Like yesterday the Social Democracy or Stalinism, these new counterrevolutionary leaderships of the workers movement are defenders of the pockets and super-profits of their own imperialist bourgeoisies.
The British SWP, the "socialists" of the queen, has proclaimed that Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour Party, the party of London City, NATO, British Petroleum and Anglo American, would have suddenly become "anti-capitalist", "anti-imperialist", "anti-militarist" ... They are "socialists" dressing the Labour Party of the imperialist British transnational companies as red. This is a "New Left" of lackeys of the imperialist powers.
Their partners of USA such as ISO, groups like The Militant, etc. are not far from them, as long ago they abandoned the struggle for the revolution and they support Sanders of the imperialist Democratic Party.
This is how they prepare to contain the working class of USA and Europe if it manages to break all the containment walls and enter into a revolutionary offensive facing the brutal attack of the capitalists.
This "New Left" entered the class struggle with the hands stained with blood. In the Middle East they supported Al Assad, who is the biggest genocidal of the working class in the 21st century like Zionism, the US and other imperialist powers. These leaderships made the Bashar dog, supported by Putin's missiles, appear as an "ally of the subjugated peoples", when he was no more than a servant of imperialism who did the "dirty work" of massacring the Syrian revolution.
Denying this, others cover him up deliberately, saying that in Syria there is a "war of two reactionary bands", when one of them has planes, helicopters, missiles, chemical weapons and massacres and destroys the entire Syria city by city while the other band, except for a few kalashnikovs remaining of some militiamen, has nothing because all the heavy weaponry was taken by the generals of the FSA under the Turkish command that gave the weapons and all the cities to Al Assad. While confronting the revolution and the counterrevolution, the "abstentionism" of these currents only served Al Assad and his government to have their hands free to crush a revolution, which was sold out from within by the generals of the FSA.
Other currents of the "New Left" ended up riding the coat-tails of those "democratic" bourgeois generals of the FSA, as is the case of the British SWP, the French NPA and LIT-CI with its "mothership party" the PSTU of Brazil. They asked the US to stop the war by establishing a no fly zone in the airspace of Syria or sending weapons and supplies to the resistance... Nothing could be further away from reality: the US lifted the embargo on Iran and sent the Ayatollahs to defend Al Assad who was surrounded in Damascus. They sent ISIS to massacre the rebel cities that dared to touch the property of the capitalists. While supporting the dog Bashar, the US with the bourgeois FSA generals sold out all the rebel cities one by one.
None of these currents passed the test of the civil war and the revolution and counterrevolution in Syria and the Middle East.
This "New Left" has nothing to envy to Stalinism that in the entire Yalta period was subordinated to the "democratic imperialisms" to consolidate the American dominance in the postwar period. For 7 years, the pro-FSA left asked the "democratic" US imperialism to stop the fascist counter-revolution of Al Assad, just as Stalin asked the US in the Second World War to help him to fight against Hitler. A deliberate betrayal to the proletariat that cost 20 million workers killed in the former USSR at the hands of fascism, as it cost hundreds of thousands of workers and exploited massacred in Syria.
Let alone passed the test those who uphold the policy of "war between two reactionary camps", that is to say, of a blatant support to Putin and Al Assad. They remade the old counterrevolutionary class collaboration policy with a direct agent of imperialism like the dog Bashar.
The Syrian question today divides waters in the international Marxist movement. It has put two trenches on the battlefield. We, revolutionaries, fight and die in that of the working class and the subjugated people. In the flames and in the blood of the Syrian revolution, reformism will see the floor beneath their feet to plunge. Reformism will never be able to speak on behalf of the revolution again.
In Latin America, this "New Left" made its appearance, as in the entire semi-colonial world, raising as a strategy the pseudo-theory of "victorious democratic revolutions"... they seek to conquer a "generous and democracy as broad as possible", which in Europe is called "to democratize" Maastricht, to fight for a "real democracy", as we said. They don’t say a word about socialism. Long time ago, Castro declared that "socialism is no more, not even in Cuba", while giving away the island to imperialism. The "New Left" is his heir.
In the semi-colonial world plundered by imperialism, this evil reformist policy poses that imperialism, IMF, the transnational companies and the lackey governments are to be defeated by voting, by “broadening democracy”. How to break with imperialism, the IMF, the pacts and the political, economical and military agreements that subjugate the semi-colonial world to the imperialist powers, by means of elections? How to expel the military bases of NATO from the subjugated countries of the world by voting and by peaceful means?
A true exponent of this farce is PTS of Argentina, which calls to make referendums to “broaden democracy” and defeat IMF. This is what they propose in Argentina and in Venezuela. Besides, they call to set up a “citizens front” and not a workers front, in no less than Bolivia’s COB. It is an extract from Podemos and Syriza, which monitor them as puppets…
The sham of the “broadening democracies” for the working class to “improve its living standards” in it has proven to be a fallacy. Without the victory of the socialist revolution, no colonial or semi-colonial country will be able to break with imperialism definitively. Today, more than ever, the theory-program of the Permanent Revolution is highly valid. This theory-program was developed by Troyskyism at the end of the ‘20s and beginning of the ‘30s, when it was generalized as theory of the international revolution. It says “With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries (…) the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.”
This theses is openly counter-posed with the swindler of Marxism and the ones that sell out the Fourth International that sell the fake paradise of the possibility to conquer national independence for the subjugated people by broadening the bourgeois democracy, that is to say, the dictatorship of the capitalists. These people has broken away from Trotskyism long ago. They destroyed its theory and took its clean banners to the mud of class collaboration with the enemy.
The renegades of Trotskyism in all its shades retake the policy of Stalinism in the 20th century and its pseudo-theory of “staged revolution”. They do this in moments of a fierce offensive of the imperialist powers on the semi-colonial world, to which they are burdening its crisis with more counterrevolutionary plundering and attacks.
In Colombia, PST, the party of LIT-CI in that country, in the past presidential elections has called to vote for Petro, a bourgeois “left-wing” candidate of the USA, settled in Antioqueño Corporation Group, who ran as candidate together with boss parties such as “Citizen Compromise”, the “Green Alliance Party”, “Our Party is Colombia” and “Citizen Force” in a true bourgeois front. The Colombian PST policy is to give a “left” coverage for the bourgeois left wing of the regime of the US military bases in Colombia. They had to legitimize Petro before the working class as a “left candidate” and PST and LIT didn’t hesitate in doing it.
The same thing was done by Alan Woods calling to vote for Lopez Obrador and celebrating his victory in the elections in Mexico. This is total cynicism, typical of US lackeys. Alan Woods had given the Trotskyist Transitional Program to Chavez, of whom he was an adviser in order to paint him as leftist. Today he intends to do the same with Lopez Obrador, a bourgeois politician that wants to put some oxygen, sugar and “democratize” the “Priate” regime, servant of imperialism. Seeing his program and election campaign is enough to know that Lopez Obrador doesn’t want to touch a single interest to imperialism. Let alone judging and punishing the fascist gangs that terrorize the workers and peasants masses.
Before the electoral victory of Lopez Obrador, Alan Woods cried internationally that the “left advances in Latin America”. But Lopez Obrador has quickly dissipated that mirage from Zocalo Square when he called for “national reconciliation with PRD, PAN and PRI”, US lackeys and murderers of the workers and Mexican people. “My style is not revenge nor hatred” said Lopez Obrador with 60,000 exploited that were disappeared and murdered by narco-DEA, police and the armed forces of Mexico. Meanwhile, he called to keep a friendly and fraternal relationship with USA, to which they won’t touch their property, when USA is the one that has been plundering the subjugated Mexico for decades and decades.
The policy of the "New Left" of "deepening democracy" is a dead end for workers. These leaderships claim to fight for a "real democracy" and "citizen fronts"... As Lenin denounced in its polemic against Kautsky, we should ask these people “democracy of and for what class are you talking about?”. They are renegades of socialism, which only give the right to a minority of parasites to exercise their dictatorship, that is, the dictatorship of capital, and deny the vast majority of society, the workers, the right to exercise theirs, is say, the dictatorship of the proletariat, to end with exploitation and plundering of the planet.
The World Social Forum departs from the historical arena with the Maduro, the Ortega, the Morales, the Kirchner, the Lula, the Iranian Ayatollahs, starving and shooting the people, after having aborted the anti-imperialist struggle of the working class of the semi-colonial world.
They left a roadmap to their followers, who under the command of Podemos and Syriza organized the last meetings of that World Social Forum in 2013 and 2015 in Tunisia. In those meetings, they cried "the enemy is ISIS". They packed their bags, they left and imperialism and its agents massacred and crushed the revolutionary processes that broke out in 2011 in Maghreb and Middle East.
But not only that. This road map also included the order and mandate of Castroism: "Socialism is no longer possible, even in Cuba"... For them the only thing possible is to fight for a "generous and real democracy". But when democracy is crushed by counterrevolutionary blows like that of Al Assad, they declare themselves "neutral". They are not even capable of "defending democracy" when it is attacked, as the proletariat must do: with weapons in hand and with the method of proletarian revolution. We are before liberal pseudo-democrats, neo-Kautskyists, supporters of the bankrupt imperialist capitalist system.
This is how the substitutes of the World Social Forum have emerged: a “New Left” that defends the different imperialist gangs that are disputing the loot of the world market.
This deception must be sustained with the sticks of Stalinism in the unions. The bourgeoisie preserved the Communist Parties in the west, as labour bureaucracies and aristocracies, in order to control with manu-militari the unions and trade union federations of tens and tens of countries around the world. Meanwhile, his former bosses became new ruling classes and owners as in China, Vietnam or Russia.
With the Stalinist Third International, together with former Trotskyists that got appropriated of the Fourth International and its banners, petty-bourgeois politicians and with the shadow of the bourgeoisie, this “New Left” is built; a new baked of Menshevism that scourges the world workers movement.
As we see, capitalism, as a mode of production, is not sustained by its vigor or intrinsic strength but by these paid agents of capital that disorganize, divide and take the struggles of the working class to deep defeats.

The "New Left" following Stalinism’s and Social Democracy’s steps: a bunch of reformists and ex-Trotskyists who gathered to support bankrupted capitalist system
The current and validity of the theory and program of Trotskyism and the Fourth International

The commercial war has started and it has developed chauvinism in the main powers and treacherous pro-imperialist leaderships in the colonial and semi-colonial world. That is what this new wave of Stalinism, self-titled "New Left", is about, financed from Wall Street, the city of London and Frankfurt.
  Social-chauvinism in the imperialist powers means tying the fate of the working class to the counterrevolutionary adventures of the bourgeoisie; and in the semicolonial world it means that the proletariat is subjected to their native bourgeoisies, which always end up making a pact with imperialism against the masses.
This social-chauvinism is developed both by the "leftist" social-imperialist currents, as well as by the labour aristocracy with its "right wing" and "reactionary" positions. In the US Trump seeks to recreate a white working aristocracy after the catastrophe of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and the defeat imposed on the workinsg class along with Obama. This is the current demagogy of Yankee bandits to achieve mass influence in their commercial war. Ultimately, it is the same war cry of "British jobs for British workers" raised by the Trade Union bureaucracy in 2010. Here it is "American jobs for American workers".
 On the other hand, Syriza administrates the business of the Troika in Greece and Podemos supports the government of the monarchy in the Spanish State.
 Meanwhile, the anticapitalists of the NPA in France recreate a front with the former Stalinist Melenchon before the possibility of a crisis in the government of Macron, while the Socialist Party is going through a serious crisis. They are looking to build put a new Podemos there to support the regime of the Fifth Republic.
And, as we said on the crisis in England after the "Brexit", the Labour Party volunteers with Corbyn and the "anti-capitalists" of the SWP to gain support for the crown business in the world.
  In Germany, Merkel seeks to ingratiate itself with the labour movement from the labour aristocracy, by showing as generous the concession of salary increase given to the IG Metall workers. Meanwhile, in Italy, the government of the Northern League announces demagogic measures "in favour of the workers". This is because they need a privileged layer of workers to be able to mobilize it to crush and defeat, even physically, the enormous immigration entering the country.
As Lenin would say, imperialism is parasitism and the split of socialism. In this regard Lenin wondered in his work "Imperialism and the split of socialism": "Is there any connection between imperialism and the monstrous and disgusting victory opportunism (in the form of social-chauvinism) has gained over the labour movement in Europe?"... To characterize this phenomenon Lenin defined imperialism as the split of socialism, namely the rupture of the workers' ranks and the corruption of the labour movement by the financial capital of the upper layers, with the change that falls out of the super profits they get from plundering the colonial and semicolonial world.
  Social-chauvinism -"right" or "left"- is a policy defending the interests of the imperialist gangs supported by the bureaucracies and labour aristocracies of the great powers.
But the workers are indeed intervening in this situation, they have responded with a hard class war, to the war that capitalists have declared throughout the world and they are carrying out enormous battles despite the treacherous leaderships that deliver their struggles.
  In its war against the exploiters, the proletariat does not have the leadership it deserves... Under these conditions, a period of enormous polarization and class struggle like the one of 2009-2010 is in the taking place all over Europe and the world.
  Millions of slaves are arriving in the European coasts in the Mediterranean, as we said, due to the counterrevolutionary wars of imperialism and is looting of the colonial and semi-colonial world. These catastrophes of the masses are of the entire civilization.
The unity of worker ranks has become a life-or-death question. As the Transition Program states, the future of today's fighting depends on how soon the revolutionary vanguard of the working class of Europe and the world regroups their forces to unify the proletariat under a revolutionary program, both in the semi-colonial world and in the imperialist powers.
 The struggles are to expel IMF that plunders the countries of the Glacis, to defeat butcher Putin and to put the workers of Eastern Europe on the warpath to restore the dictatorship of the proletariat in the former workers' states under revolutionary forms without Stalinist bureaucrats and without those who surrender socialism. Those struggles are inseparable then from the struggle to defeat the current capitalists’ attack and the imperialist regimes that seek to impose on the working class of Maastricht the conditions of slavery of immigrant workers, who have already entered Europe or are trying to. The decisive anti-imperialist task of the proletariat of the European imperialist powers, as well as of the USA and Japan, is shouting "the enemy is at home", against transnationals and imperialist bankers who have been throwing their crisis to the workers and the European people.
The struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe is the only solution to the capitalist catastrophe. And for that the working class must get rid of the social-imperialist scourge and the business administrators of the slave bosses. The reformist left has impregnated the working class and the masses of Europe with an "Islamophobia" used to justify and support the great massacres of imperialism and its counterrevolutionary agents in Middle East, such as Zionism or Al Assad and Putin in Syria. They invented the ghost of ISIS, which proved to be an appendix and nothing but a battalion of imperialism and native bourgeoisies used to crush the revolution in Syria and Iraq, becoming the "perfect enemy" to terrorize the exploited in Europe and those leaderships made them support the imperialist gangs who today plunder those nations, which have been bankrupted and tormented. These leaderships showed Putin as "progressive" and "anti-imperialist", who together with the Yankees and Merkel organized Agreements of Minsk used to divide Ukraine.
So many betrayals against the proletarian revolution hit today European, American and Japanese workers. The war declared by capitalists has been already declared against them, as well as in the semi-colonial world. As we said, the crisis of leadership has been exacerbated.
 In the hands of the so-called "anti-capitalists", the Fourth International has been taken to the swamp of Stalinism, social-imperialism and social democracy.
 The renegades of Trotskyism destroyed the Fourth International from within. The old French LCR of the "Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International" in the late 20th Century disowned the dictatorship of the proletariat and proclaimed the struggle for democracy and socialism, returning to Kautsky’s old policy of defending (bourgeois) democracy in general and the fierce dictatorship of capital in particular. The social-chauvinists and anticapitalists of today take up this policy of the old Pabloism, who delivered the Fourth International and socialist revolution. That is their fight for "real democracy", for "expanding democracy", for "a generous democracy"... All of them revived the Stalinism that the bourgeoisie rescued and preserved after they surrendered the workers' states, to put this Stalinist scourge to tightly control the working class through the trade unions.
Now, Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism together, embracing the same pseudo-theories and programs of "two-stage revolution" and pushing the working class away from the path of socialist revolution, have set up this "New Left", this new wave of Menshevism.
 Despite the deceptions and lies, under the current conditions of the capitalist bankruptcy, reformism sees at every step mow the grass under their feet. They are forced to unmask themselves every day. Their limit is in the masses struggles of Hamburg against the G-20 last year, the German proletariat entering into the scene, the general strike in Greece, the hard struggles against the attack of the capitalists in Italy..., their representatives, like Pablo Iglesias del ‘Podemos’, constantly prove that not only they buy €600,000 mansions, but they also carry on his shoulders, supported by the "Anticapitalists", the crisis of the Spanish monarchy and its imperialist bankers. At every step they are exposed as what they are, even more so when they support Al Assad and Putin, who imposed a true genocide and holocaust against the Syrian masses. Like Stalinism yesterday, this "New Left" emerges with hands stained with the blood of the world working class.
The strength of the theory and program of the Fourth International for the socialist revolution remains intact and keeps passing the test. The question now is recovering the Fourth International from the mud to which opportunism and revisionism led it to regroup the forces to re-found it.
  Without the struggles of the working class and without the advanced workers who permanently emerge from them, this task is and will be impossible. The struggle for the unity between the brave internationalist forces of the working class and the revolutionary socialists is the way to go immediately to provide the proletariat with the revolutionary leadership it deserves.
  Only fighting to centralize and coordinate the struggles of the workers, the revolutionary socialists can conquer a path to the masses.
Permanently the class struggles decant forces that turn from right to left among the working class, recreating left centrist phenomena within the unions, creating new militant organizations and even within the reformist apparatuses.
  At every step this "New Left" tries to prevent this shift to the left of layers of the working class and when this occurs, these leaderships are responsible for putting a limit. This is what happened with the Labor Notes meeting in the USA, where hundreds of delegates from trade unions and workers' organizations sought a way to face capitalists’ attack. The same happened with the meeting held in Madrid in January of the International Trade Union Network promoted by the LIT-CI through the CSP-Conlutas trade union of Brazil, together with the trade union center Solidaires of France, led by the NPA
These international conferences and meetings that brought together tens and hundreds of workers' organizations around the world have been unable to articulate the slightest centralized struggle at international level to coordinate the struggles of the working class. And even more so when they have a huge force, in the case of Conlutas and Solidaires, in the battles of the working class of Brazil and France who are confronting severe attacks on their working conditions with flexibilization of labour. Likewise, the LIT-CI and Conlutas were at the meeting of the Labor Notes in US: a new opportunity lost to coordinate the struggle of the working class of the semicolonial world with the American workers who are being brutally attacked by capitalists’ war.
 The "internationalism" of the "New Left" is a salute to the flag of meetings held once a year so as not to vote for a single measure of unified struggle. That is to say, its objective is to prevent the left internationalist wings of the workers movement from moving towards the path of socialist revolution. But by being forced to hold these international meetings, they reveal the truth: that the fierce vanguard of the world workers movement is looking for a way to unite its battles around the world.
Reformist leaders subject the working class to its own bourgeoisie, or they contain the turn to the militant internationalism of entire layers of the world labour movement. In the Middle East this was seen acutely. The siege of the Syrian revolution was supported not only by the currents of the reformist left that support Al Assad, but also by the parties that from the trench of the Syrian masses demanded weapons to USA for 7 years.
 The goal of these meetings was not calling for mass actions in support of the Syrian exploited from the hundreds of unions organized in Labor Notes and in the International Trade Union Network led by the LIT and the NPA. They cannot claim that they are not in a position to demonstrate with thousands of workers on the streets or centralize strong actions for the Syrian revolution. There were conditions to send food, weapons and equipment to the resistance; to collect a daily wage per worker to send to the refugee camps, as we, the Trotskyists, proposed. The policy of these organizations is opposed to the one that IV International had in the 1930s with the Spanish Civil War.
This is the tragedy of the labour movement. The Palestinian Intifada and the counterrevolutionary massacre in Syria, Yemen and Middle East, the millions of immigrants arriving in Europe, the struggle against the centralized attacks of capital such as flexibilization of labour, the plundering plans of the IMF to the semicolonial world, the thousands of political prisoners who are rotting in the prisons of capitalist regimes throughout the world; those conditions place at the top of the agenda the need for a coordinated struggle of the world working class. The most combative sectors of the proletariat see this unity as a necessity for their victory. This process is open to the most courageous of the working class and is precisely what they try to control with these international union meetings like the one that was held in Madrid, which voted the resolution to coordinate with a telephone conference via Skype every two months.
But that symbolic "internationalism" is no longer credible: layers of the working class are looking for a way to unite their battles at international level, for that they must clash with the social-chauvinist and nationalist leaderships. The task of the Trotskyists is breaking those fences to get a way to the masses and regroup their forces.
 As stated in the Transition Program of the Fourth International: “Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth. Conjunctural crises under the conditions of the social crisis of the whole capitalist system inflict ever heavier deprivations and sufferings upon the masses. Growing unemployment, in its turn, deepens the financial crisis of the state and undermines the unstable monetary systems. Democratic regimes, as well as fascist, stagger on from one bankruptcy to another. The bourgeoisie itself sees no way out (…) The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”
Written 80 years ago, the objective premises of the Transitional Program maintain an even greater validity than when they were written. Reformism and revisionism settled down destroying these premises to end up supporting the bankrupted capitalist system.
 It has been a while since capitalist imperialist system deserves to die. As stated in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, it is time to provide the gravediggers of capitalism a program for victory. Separating reformists from revolutionaries within workers' movement is the task of the moment. Showing the exploited who their allies are and who their enemies is a decisive question.
 The combat is under the banners of the IV International. Reformism is unmasked every day. They can no longer pass alms as conquests. In its struggle, the working class here and there poses "milestones of socialism." The fight to regroup the revolutionary forces organized to combat in the 21st Century of crisis, wars and revolutions, is far from over. It has just begun.

CARLOS MUNZER AND JACOBO GARCÍA