• Contact us at: info[at]workersinternational.info

Tag: Europe

image_pdfimage_print

China and the crisis of imperialism

  By , ,

“For about four decades, the west and China engaged with each other economically and diplomatically to the benefit of both. But this era is at an end. The crucial question now is to what extent a process of mutual decoupling can be managed to minimise the economic fallout and avert the risk of conflict.”

(“Averting the risk of a China-US conflict”, Financial Times, 23 December 2021)

During the 1970s, the supposedly Marxist and Communist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government of China threw a life-line to the crisis-ridden imperialist states of the US and Western Europe. This provided China with access to world markets, modern technology and finance markets. No one can deny that the people of China have a right to all of this. However, the political side of this deal was deeply reactionary, as we will show below. Fifty years down the line, a hugely changed China emerges as a redoubtable rival, within the system of international imperialism, to the powers which have been her quasi-allies for nearly 50 years.

Chinese workers and peasants paid a price for this deal. For almost half a century their underpaid and sweated labour has enriched both a Chinese bourgeoisie and Western finance capital. The price that workers in North America and Europe paid was to undergo a debilitating war of attrition on their class as industry after industry was closed down and “exported”.

Imperialism (capitalism at its highest stage of development) was in an intractable crisis in the 1970s. Throughout North America and Western Europe, a well-organised and confident working class was asserting itself in the workplace and exerting pressure on bourgeois political systems. On the one hand, Soviet troops were stationed in the heart of Europe to the east of the river Elbe, a reminder that the legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917 still lived, even under a degenerate and corrupt leadership; on the other hand, a post-war generation of workers in the west had grown up under bourgeois governments committed (despite themselves) to full employment and increasing social expenditure on welfare, health, working-class housing, access to justice and educational provision. Continue reading

APPEAL TO SUPPORT THE RESISTING GREEK PEOPLE and its TRUTH COMMISSION ON PUBLIC DEBT – FOR THE PEOPLES’ RIGHT TO AUDIT PUBLIC DEBT

  By , ,

To the people of Europe and the whole world!

To all the men and women who reject the politics of austerity and are not willing to pay a public debt which is strangling us and which was agreed to behind our backs and against our interests.

We signatories to this appeal stand by the Greek people who, through their vote at the election of 25th January 2015, became the first population in Europe and in the Northern hemisphere to have rejected the politics of austerity imposed to pay an alleged public debt which was negotiated by those on top without the people and against the people.  At the same time we consider that the setting up of the Greek Public Debt Truth Commission at the initiative of the president of the Greek Parliament constitutes a historic event, of crucial importance not only for the Greek people but also for the people of Europe and the whole world! Continue reading

Appeal for support from DITA workers in Tuzla

  By , ,

A European workers’ euro for 100 workers in Tuzla!

A very destructive war cost many lives and split the Bosnian working class. Then an international protectorate imposed new authorities, promising workers a “Swedish Paradise”. But what they actually got was a “Greek Hell”. There is no work for either young or old, there is little enough medical care and it isn’t free; You have to pay for schooling unless you go to a religious school; if the administration delays issuing you a new identity card, you simply lose the right to vote … Meanwhile they have stopped trying to catch war criminals or doing anything for former combatants or war victims.
Peace is deadlier than war In Bosnia-Herzegovina. Privatisation of industry has everywhere brought factory closures and new capitalists on the lookout for property deals; The Polichem chemical group’s seaside hotel in Neum is worth ten times more than all its plant and thousands of workers in Tuzla.
The DITA detergent works are emblematic of political corruption and decay which stand out among the thing that Bosnian workers have suffered. Only 132 of the thousand employees who provided all former Yugoslavia’s industrial and household cleaning products remain. Shares that were sold to workers quickly ended up in the hands of particular people who saddled the firm with bank debt of millions of German Marks (the equivalent of the national currency km), embezzled the money, giving it to “partners” they control and then, either unable (or unwilling) to re-start production, handed the firm back to the state for a symbolic 1km. But neither the state nor the canton of Tuzla wanted this poisoned present. They ruled it “unconstitutional”, but they also, incidentally, refused to give it back to the workers until they paid back the astronomic debts … What do you do in nightmare like this? Continue reading

Euro-election shock by Balazs Nagy

  By , ,

[threecolumns]

The surprise results of the recent European elections mean all political organisations have to re-evaluate the overall situation and their own policies.

Complete bankruptcy of bourgeois Europe

Two highly revealing and significant facts stand out about these elections, as a whole and in each individual country. First, and certainly foremost, is the particularly high level of abstentions (approaching 60% in France!), concentrated, moreover, in conurbations where workers and working people live. Abstentions were clearly higher, it needs to be said, in the countries of Eastern Europe (more than 70% in the great majority of them, over 80% in Slovakia and the Czech Republic). This clearly reflects their secondary position within European “unity”.

The second is the unprecedented and ubiquitous growth of fascist or semi-fascist oppositions, a far right which actually came first in certain countries (France, UK, Denmark).

Apart from anything else, the first and most obvious conclusion is that the vast majority of Europeans are turning their backs on and definitively rejecting that monstrous construct called “European union”. This central conclusion cannot be queried or challenged just by reference to the obviously broad range of views among those who abstained, or even voted for the far-right. Of course each of their various   ̶ and sadly all too often reactionary, retrograde or simply backward   ̶ motives is crucially significant in its own way. We should note, however, that many of those who voted for the far-right probably did so in protest against that Europe, rather than out of support for fascist ideology. Be that as it may, these results express an irrevocable verdict on the part of Europeans as a whole: They are absolutely opposed to the bourgeoisie’s pseudo-Europe, which they massively reject and will not tolerate. Continue reading