The main title of the International Report – made by the National Committee for the 27° National Congress (EDM N°54, March 2020) – stated “From global crisis to wars and rebellions.”

Apart from dominating the world stage, the Russo-Ukrainian war contains the explosive contradictions that have been accumulated through the last years. These contradictions are opening up in an increasingly bloody and convulsive manner. Even though we have already been through war conflicts in the last decades, the current war is not a simple repetition of previous ones -such as the Iraq, Yemen, Libya, or Mali wars. In these episodes, war has taken place on the planet’s periphery and, in some of them, the main actors are second-tier powers or countries. In many cases, we can speak of proxy wars in which great powers operated and asserted their self-interest through a third party. However, this time the operation theater is Europe itself, one of capitalism’s heartlands, and the central contenders are Russia and NATO. Zelensky acts as NATO’s pawn and belt drive. Thus, we are facing a qualitative leap in the international situation. From a succession of regional and local wars -which, of course, had an international scope- we have moved on to a direct confrontation that has only taken place on territory so far. But the nature of this confrontation leaves the door open to a third-world conflagration.

This new war is inseparable from capitalist bankruptcy development. Let us remember that the two previous World Wars were preceded by world depression along with great tensions, and both economic and international political conflicts were settled using force. At present, capitalist bankruptcy seems to take place in a scenario of recession and inflation. The world economy still bears the 2008 financial crisis consequences and, on top of that, it is still burdened by the pandemic outbreak, which is far from being over. The economic activity slowdown is now combined with an inflationary explosion that has accelerated at an astonishing speed since the war outbreak, causing a food catastrophe on a world scale.

The capitalist crisis we are facing is an expression of the capital’s historical decadence and exhaustion. As in no other country, these tendencies are present in the USA itself for it’s the world’s leading power. This can be seen in its economic decline and its regression in its role of hegemonic power. What the war reflects is the international capital and, particularly, the US attempt to overcome this impasse. They take a clear path on that purpose: advancing in Russia and China colonization to control them and exploiting the capitalist restoration process to their advantage. The armed conflict shows that the capital’s historical impasse has no way out through traditional, economic, and political means. The integration of former state economies into the capitalist economy cannot be achieved by peaceful means.

At the same time, the war is Washington’s attempt to regain its shrinking leadership in the West. But beyond the White House’s enthusiasm for what is claimed to be the resurrection of NATO and US hegemony, the situation is far from returning to the status quo. The current war does not annul the deep inter-imperialist rivalries. Capitalist bankruptcy has put capital globalization in crisis and has produced a national withdrawal, which can be understood as an instrument of commercial, fiscal, financial, and monetary wars. The capitalist crisis has reminded imperialist countries that their first obligation is to rescue the capitals of their own countries from bankruptcy. This is manifested in the whole international relations breakdown. Thus, West’s current alignment with Washington does not close the tensions and confrontations that are bound to deepen. On the one hand, the White House does not hesitate to favor Europe and advance in its economic penetration at the expense of the powers of the old continent detriment —which raises misgivings and clashes with the bourgeoisie of those nations. On the other hand, the colonization of China and the former Soviet area is in dispute to see who leads and takes more advantage of those economies’ transition towards capitalism’s complete restoration. War escalation acts as a stress factor to weaken the prevailing obstacles to colonizing the former workers’ states and to pave the way for their political regime alteration or dismemberment. Such things happened in Yugoslavia, they represent a complex scenario in which the inter-imperialist disputes are developed and settled.

Chinese and Russian ruling bureaucracies alienate and promote capitalist restoration. But they intend to be its main vehicle, they do not want imperialism to unilaterally implement this to their detriment. The Kremlin’s reaction against the imperialist escalation and the military encirclement of its borders seeks to defend its place during this process. Putin conceives eastern Ukraine as a geopolitical chess piece and as a bargaining chip with the West, he is not concerned about whether peoples of the world struggle against imperialism. The atrocities that are being carried out by the Russian army are in plain view, and it has other ruthless attacks as antecedents —such as the butchery against the Chechen people or, more recently, its intervention against Kazakhstan rebellion. The military invasion is aimed at subduing Ukraine according to the interests and appetites of the Russian clique and of the new restorationist oligarchic bourgeoisie, who are arm wrestling with the West.

The current scenario raises the danger of global economic dislocation, and that includes the international financial system – especially if the war continues. War in Ukraine not only paves the way for a world war confrontation, but it is also an unmistakable symptom of the capitalist social regime’s rottenness. None of the involved parties plan to take this to the extreme of an armed world conflict immediately, but the rationale behind the escalation we are witnessing leads us down that road. The catastrophe is right in front of our eyes already. Instead of the expansion of the productive forces, which have historically been humanity’s progress driving force throughout its existence, there is an unprecedented growth of destructive forces, which also gives way to Earth’s destruction and humankind’s extinction. Historically, the Workers’ Party has been accused and stigmatized of catastrophism, which is now revealed as the only realistic approach to the present.

For the time being, we already have a new humanitarian catastrophe. There are millions of evacuees, thousands of Ukrainian casualties, and new hardships being suffered by the peoples of the world as a result of unstoppable famine ravages. Particularly, world hunger has increased at an incredible speed as a result of the food price hike, which has scourged African, Asian, and Latin American emerging countries. In a recent report, the IMF issued a warning about the prospect and danger of social outbursts. We must bear in mind that, as the capitalist crisis generates wars, it simultaneously serves as the breeding ground and laboratory for the peoples’ rebellion and social revolution.

War on this scale provides new scenarios for alignments and it also arises crises over the political formations that have governed since the Second World War, and they are tending to disperse. From this disintegration, right and left forces have emerged. On the one hand, Le Penn, Trump, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Vox, Orban, and, in Argentina, Milei. This tendency toward political polarization is expressed on the political level by the trend toward violent clashes between classes. In the mentioned cases, it takes the form of authoritarian experiences that give way to strengthening repressive States – and, in turn, to parastatal groups – to unload the crisis on the masses. On the other hand, new currents that are positioned in the center-left and/or in bourgeois nationalism – Peru, Chile – have emerged and they are gaining ground as a containment dike or as a preventive factor of popular rebellions. Today the French case is a laboratory for revolutionaries since the tendencies to class collaboration are returning as a response to the “anti-fascist struggle” – as has been the insubmissives’ vote for Macron and as it is their alliance with the old Socialist Party, the French Communist Party and The Greens, a force that has already administrated the Gallic imperialist State. Likewise, Brazilians are debating whether to confront Bolsonaro.

Such a scenario reframes the discussion on the strategy, program, and methods to face this catastrophe and gives way to a better and more favorable solution for the exploited ones. The left that claims to be revolutionary will be constantly challenged for it must act in a framework marked by an acute crisis of workers’ leadership. While the capitalist bankruptcy tends to worsen, within the workers’ leaderships and left parties, the dominant line is that of reaffirming their commitments and submission to the existing social order. This has once again been highlighted by the present conflict, in which the so-called global progressivism has ended up aligned with NATO in broad terms. Nevertheless, condemning the Russian military invasion should not obscure that the major Western powers are instigators and hold primary responsibility for this conflict. Meanwhile, a minority fringe among the left has come out to support the Russian regime against NATO’s expansionist and warlike plans. Yet neither is NATO the standard-bearer of democracy, and freedom and certainly not of the national cause; nor is Putin an exponent of the anti-imperialist cause. Both sides seek to dismantle and subjugate Ukraine for their own interests, ignoring and trampling on the Ukranians’ right to self-determination – they are used as cannon fodder for the conflict instead. Zelensky is using Russia’s condemnation for having invaded Ukraine and for employing extermination policies to reinforce an alignment with the US and the EU. What nestles in the Ukrainian people is political manipulation of the national defense sentiment, following a pro-imperialist direction.

The so-called radical left, including those that claim to be Trotskyist, has ended up supporting this progressivism wave – which is alienated and aligned with the Western side. Naturally, the Russo-Ukrainian war has put the consistency of the left that claims to be revolutionary to the test. And they have succumbed to imperialism’s democratizing pressure. We should not be surprised considering that, in their daily militancy, the balance is tilted in favor of democratism, what predominates among their files is electoralism and parliamentarism instead of revolutionary perspectives.

Once again, the war has revealed a watershed on the left and it also puts the discussion about the strategy that should preside over the left actions on the agenda. Will the left be confined to merely acting as a pressure group in their seeking for progress in the shadow of the capitalist State? Or will it stand as a channel so the working class can burst into the crisis and become an alternative of power? In turn, these two conflicting perspectives raise another key issue. The adaptation to the existing social order policy has led to fostering broad parties and making political alliances with blurred class boundaries.

We must overcome this and pave the way to building revolutionary parties that fight back and gather workers’ vanguard to fight for workers’ governments and for socialism. Revolutionary parties that form cadres capable of leading with this task – which is inscribed in the strategic struggle to reconstruct the 4th International.

In Latin America, this question becomes even more acute if we take into account that the process of popular rebellions has given way to class-collaborationist governments. As soon as they started governing, they proved to be the system’s ultimate resource and they also confronted the very workers and the youth who made the way for them among the streets of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia.

Imperialist escalation

For a long time, the Russo-Ukrainian war has been prepared and fueled by US imperialism. The reactionary coup triggered Yanukovych’s government’s fall in 2014, and Poroshenko’s afterward. Since then, a puppet government that responds to the IMF and the EU has been installed. Under Poroshenko’s leadership, imperialism has already advanced in its economic and financial colonization of Ukraine, flying the flag for the fight against “oligarchic” bourgeoisie corruption. The latter emerged from the old bureaucracy and became the recipient of the savage privatizations that were carried out by the restorationist regime benefiting the foreign capital and associated oligarchic sectors.

Ukraine’s successive agreements with the IMF made it the third most indebted country to this organism in the world. Among the agreement’s counterparts are the layoffs of thousands of public employees, taxes on consumption increase, fuel high tariffs, and the Ukrainian currency devaluation, inter alia. To unlock the last funds’ shipments, which were settled thanks to a new stand-by agreement with the IMF, the Ukrainian government, with Zelenski at the helm, committed to reducing the fiscal deficit in the 2022 budget and to privatizing Privatbank and Oschadbank. These policies eventually made Ukraine the poorest country in Europe.

Along with economic colonization and social devastation, imperialism and the Ukrainian government pursued a warlike and fascistic policy. The coup against Yanukovich relied on the organization and mobilization of the so-called self-defense reactionary and paramilitary militias. These paramilitary organizations are the main promoters of Ukraine’s integration into NATO. Systematically, Kyiv violated the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements, which granted Donetsk and Lugansk relative autonomy. Both Poroshenko and Zelensky laid an uninterrupted siege on the eastern Ukraine population. For that purpose, they used the army and neo-Nazi paramilitary forces – such as the Azov Battalion, which received military instructions for NATO member countries. At the same time, the central government proceeded with a “cultural Ukrainianization” by wiping out non-Ukrainian languages from the official languages – particularly Russian, which is used by the 30% of the population, and Hungarian and Romanian as well. Between 2014 and 2021, the Ukrainian government’s repressive and warlike policy, especially that employed against the separatist regions’ population, is responsible for the death of 15.000 people. Zelensky’s government has outlawed and banned a dozen opposition and leftist parties.

Throughout this period, the US government has invested $600 million a year to support the Ukrainian government and it has also provided weapons and military advice. NATO has consistently conducted military exercises in the Baltic and the Black sea, which have deepened since the end of 2021.

Rather than triggering NATO dissolution, an organism that was created in 1949 to defend Western Europe from an eventual Soviet invasion, the USSR implosion catalyzed a process of NATO extension. Former workers’ states that had broken with the Muscovite bureaucracy centralization and had taken a path towards capitalist restoration have joined NATO. The latter has incorporated 30 European nations into Russia’s encirclement, which is fueled by military bases, weapons, and troops from the US and other countries to go to war with Moscow.

Evidently, the Ukrainian government operates as an imperialist pawn in Eastern Europe. It has not only repeatedly and openly confirmed its imminent intention to join the militarist NATO pact, but has also rejected all Russian proposals to withdraw from such tendency.

NATO powers’ actions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine confirm this characterization. This refutes the assertions made by IS (IWU-FI) MST (ISL), and PSTU (IWL-FI). They claim that “there does not exist, up to now, neither a NATO nor US military forces intervention” in Ukraine.

After the direct war outbreak, the US Senate authorized the shipment of Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, in addition to the new weapons shipments to the value of 350 million dollars that the Biden Administration approved last month.

Josep Borrel, EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, announced in a Versailles meeting that the “contributions in the form of military material” made by European Imperialism to favor Ukraine will be doubled to €1.000 million. Meanwhile, the number of NATO troops to be strategically deployed through the borders between Russia and Europe increased from 40.000 to 100.000.

Biden has just pushed through the US Congress a $33 billion extra budget to “help” Ukraine. And it has also revived the “lease” law that was used in 1941 to sell armament on credit to the Allies during the Second World War. This constitutes a fabulous business for the US arms industry.

In addition to what has been said, imperialism has taken a series of economic sanctions against Russia. NATO member countries eliminated Russian banks from the SWIFT system, froze Central Bank of Russia assets, and seized Russian deposits abroad. They also intend to freeze major Russian banks’ assets and exclude them from the UK financial system. Moreover, extremely tight restrictions on exports/imports to and from Russia were established. The USA and Canada have already blocked oil and gas exports from Russia to other countries, and the UK has promised to implement the same policy before the end of the year. EU countries such as Germany and France cannot fully adopt this procedure because they depend on the hydrocarbons imported to keep their economies running. However, the US has already imposed the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – which was very expensive and is already built. This gas pipeline was supposed to transport gas from Russia to the United States. It has also announced plans to set up an alternative scheme to get oil and gas to Europe, which will benefit their own monopolies for sure. Americans also hope that, by joining the boycott, the EU will lose its independence and become energetically dependent on US imperialism. The EU announced a general ban on Russian flights, etc. These economic policies can be read as a war declaration against Russia.

On the other hand, the war against Russia – imposed by NATO – has been the kick-off for the general relaunching of an arms policy. All capitalist governments have voted for budgets with sharp increases in military expenditure. The German government has put an end to the doctrine prohibiting arms shipment to countries in conflict and has increased its military budget by 100 billion euros!

These have been accompanied by a general imperialist policy of censoring information from Russia – about the ones who are persecuted for advocating against militarism. Russophobia is being imposed on cultural matters: Russian artists, athletes, scientists, and many more are being proscribed. Political and cultural censorship – Russia has been banned from the Soccer World Cup – is a policy that seeks to align public opinion with a warlike position to justify eventual imperialist direct attacks. We are facing a reactionist policy.

About “Russian imperialism”

The main responsibility for the war lies with imperialism, which has been preparing for this war for a long time. This does not mean that Russia is on the “progressive” side of the barricade. The Russian army is not a liberating force, but a conduit for the oligarchy and the Muscovite ruling elite desires. They both intend to subjugate Ukraine to their advantage by reproducing the methods of national oppression they have been developing. Today’s regime led by Putin represents the counterrevolution against the revolution’s conquests. He is the guardian of workers’ super-exploitation in a place where social contrasts and inequalities are among the highest on Earth, for Russia is a link in the capital domination chain. Russian restorationist nationalism is reactionary.

Based on this evidence, many leftist currents characterize Russia as an imperialist power. But this evidence cannot make us lose sight of the fact that Russia has been relegated to a second-rate power. In the global capitalism hierarchy, the leading place belongs undisputedly to the main capitalist metropolises, starting with the USA.

Other left-wing currents claim that Russia is a semi-colony that is resisting NATO’s imperialist proceedings. Thus, they justify Putin’s “pre-emptive attack” against Ukraine. Equating Russia as world imperialism’s semi-colony is erroneous. Russia has forged itself as the second world’s military power behind the USA – particularly because of the atomic arsenal inheritance received from the USSR’s dissolution. It has also consolidated its influence on several former Soviet republics, where it sets the political agenda according to its interests. Russia leads the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan are also members of the same organization. Putin’s government stifled and suppressed popular rebellions in Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Long before that, it played a decisive role in propping Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the Syrian war, collaborating with the Iranian and Chinese regimes. Furthermore, in the last few years, Russia has signed numerous military cooperation agreements with African countries. And, at the same time, it exerts influence on some Latin American countries, as is evidenced by the close political and commercial ties with the Venezuelan, Cuban and Nicaraguan regimes.

Yet Russia cannot be characterized as an imperialist power in Marxist terms. With the Workers’ State dissolution and the capitalist restoration, the country has almost completely collapsed and its industry has been heavily destroyed. Russia has been transformed into a rentier country whose income comes mainly from the commodities export, gas and oil mainly.

In 1989, at the beginning of the USSR implosion, the Soviet nation was in 2nd place in the world economy in terms of GDP. Today, it occupies the 12th place, having not only relatively, but absolutely fallen from $2.6 trillion in 1989 to $1.3 trillion in 2020 – while the USA’s GDP went from $5.9 trillion to $19 trillion, Japan’s GDP grew from $3.9 trillion to $4.4 trillion, and the EU’s GDP is at $12 trillion. Russia is below Korea and Brazil. It is part of the so-called BRIC group of emerging countries, which also includes nations such as Brazil, India, and South Africa. Have they also become imperialist powers?

Russia was thrown into total chaos and disintegration after its implosion under Yeltsin’s regime. Under his government, he wildly and anarchically privatized state property in favor of a new bourgeois oligarchy, which largely emerged from the old “nomenklatura” of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Coming from the state security services, Putin arose as a coup leader who instituted a strong Bonapartist regime that was sustained by the security services. He was even forced to re-nationalize certain economic sectors to reestablish equilibrium and to stop Russia’s outbreak, he did this by using force. For Russia, capitalist restoration was a disaster. The tendency to national disintegration was barely contained in order not to repeat Yogoslavia’s divided-balkanized path. This was done amid strong wars stirred up by imperialism, which promoted the constitution of republics subordinated to NATO and the EU and the USA imperialism under “national self-determination” euphemism.

Putin has proclaimed he intends to restore the old – tsarist – Russian empire based on its military might. This is a reactionary delusion. It is an attempt to recreate late imperialism by military occupation that today is superseded by history. Ancient imperialism, such as the Ottoman Empire, could not resist the buffeting of today’s modern imperialism, with its monopolies and finance capital. As a result of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dismantled by the imperialist powers – France, and Great Britain. Tsarist imperialism was overthrown by the proletarian revolution, which shattered the “prison of nations” Russia and truly put into practice the right to self-determination. Putin’s intention is an imperialist weak attempt since its financial capital and military predominance are weak. But this crisis has shown that the capitalist restoration process in Russia, though it destroyed the state and planned economy basis, has not allowed the full native bourgeois class development. In this sense, we are facing an unfinished restoration process. In Russia, as in China, the State officiates as a great referee that has enabled a handful of selected capitalists – those in close relationship with the ruling bureaucracy – to achieve extraordinary growth. This is what makes it possible to classify Putin’s regime as a Bonapartist one. Putin, on behalf of the local capitalist oligarchy’s general interests, clashes with the foreign capital, which intends to proceed in a broad economic and financial colonization of the business currently held by the Russian bourgeoisie. Simultaneously, he acts as the referee of the capitalist class’s internal disputes and does not deprive himself of curtailing the interests of some capitalist fractions. He could even disempower those fractions if necessary. In the meantime, he tries to keep the working class regimented to prevent an independent and socialist policy from flourishing.

Putin seeks a foothold within world imperialism. On the 75th anniversary of Hitlerism’s defeat, Putin organized a big military parade in Moscow, showcasing his military equipment. He was pursuing an agreement with imperialism “to strengthen friendship, trust among peoples” and he even stated that they were “open to dialogue and cooperation on the most essential issues on the international agenda, including the creation of a reliable common security system, which will quickly meet the needs of today’s changing world.” We characterized that as a direct response to war escalation and trade sanctions that were imposed by the Trump government.

The attack on Ukraine was not a sudden move, it was long-planned by Putin’s Bonapartist government – though it has been accelerated by the course of events. That is not to say that it is not an adventurous move and that the current military problems – logistical, etc. – are not caused by the low morale of the Russian soldiers, who are driven to defend the restorationist clique’s interests. Putin does not deal with the US/NATO threat with a socialist, internationalist, and working-class policy, but with wannabe “tsarist” policies. He introduces himself as what he is: the most furious anti-Bolshevik and counterrevolutionary fellow with the aspiration to place Ukraine’s and former USSR peoples’ futures under his aegis. However, despite Ukrainians having been suffering thanks to IMF adjustments, Putin’s military action has reinforced nationalism in Ukraine, instead of gaining support among its people. Inside Russia, it is estimated that 15.000 political prisoners stand against “Putin’s war” for they respect Ukraine’s independence. It is difficult to ascertain – because of the strong imperialist and Putin regime’s information censorship – the existence and scope of independent workers’ tendencies or revolutionary Marxists who are taking part in the problem with internationalist socialist approaches.

But war has developed differently from what Putin had expected. Russian forces cannot fully break Zelensky’s regime, which is at the resistance forefront, heavily armed by NATO.

US imperialism is the least willing to carry out a peace treaty. Seeing the Russian forces’ stalemate, it started considering the possibility of going beyond its purpose of adding Ukraine to NATO and placing new military bases that aim at Moscow. It now believes there’s an opportunity to provoke a political crisis in the Russian government to oust Putin. Part of the Russian – and Ukrainian – oligarchic bourgeoisie, which was Putin’s social base, is changing the way to come to a compromise with the US since the sanctions the latter has imposed jeopardize their interests.

Capitalist crisis and imperialist strategy

In March 2020, The international document of the 27th Workers’ Party Congress stated “beyond the immediate vicissitudes, the bellicose boom meets a fundamental reason. On the one hand, its roots lie in the rivalries and the growing inter-imperialist tensions, now strengthened by the world recession. On the other hand, it also lies in the imperialist attempt to overcome the capitalist impasse to go on with the former Workers’ States’ colonization to their advantage to complete the capitalist restoration process. The former Soviet land and China are the main targets. The political, economic, and military hegemony in the Middle East is part of the siege laid on both nations. This occurs in the context of capitalist powers’ general rearmament – and the US leads the way. Far from being attenuated, armament has grown considerably.”

Two years after our characterization, these trends have not only been confirmed in reality, but they are also developing at an accelerated pace. American hyper-activism in the Ukrainian war aims, among other things, to discipline and subdue European imperialism to their leadership. Germany, France, Italy, and other members of the EU longed for transforming Easter Europe and Russia into their backyard. establishing “privileged” investment agreements in key sectors. The US has been trying to limit this development. Applying international economic sanctions to countries with which the US is confronted is a method that not only harms first and foremost the affected countries, but also European companies that have capital investments in them – Iran, etc. First Obama and then Trump resolutely opposed the construction of the long Nord Stream pipeline that goes from Russia to Germany – built with both countries’ capital. When Biden came to power, the mere president said he would no longer stand up to the pipeline. However, thanks to the US and NATO lobby, the German government has reluctantly agreed not to enable the recently finished pipeline, joining the boycott against Russia. French companies, such as Danone and Total, refuse to leave Russia, where they have settled advantageously. A year ago, French President Macron denounced NATO’s death and hinted at the creation of a European NATO, without the USA. Nowadays, Biden has largely succeeded in aligning European imperialism under his leadership in NATO. But inter-imperialist tensions remain.

It is fundamental to consider that the one who craves a colonizing war policy on Russia and China is the US. Whether the administration is Republican or Democratic, both the State Department and the Pentagon have been advancing in this strategic orientation. Our difficulties to get out of the world economic crisis lead imperialist governments and monopolies to believe that if they totally colonize China and Russia, they will solve the puzzle. They want to replace the oligarchic bourgeoisie that emerged from the restoration with imperialism’s direct domination. With imperialism colonization. Why? Because they have had to share the ownership and exploitation of key sectors.

Apart from the current war against Russia, China is the main target though. The US is in the process of setting up another NATO in the Pacific. Biden has delivered atomic submarines to Australia and signed a military agreement that also involves Britain, India, Japan, and other Asian countries. American provocations are constantly being raised in the China Sea. The US is also threatening to declare Taiwan’s independence – a country that has historically been part of China – and massively rearm it, just as it is using Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO.

As a result of the emerging war against Russia, US imperialism has partially modified its bellicose steps. It is now exerting pressure on China so that it will not support Russia and will bow to the imperialist sanctions against Russia. Otherwise, US imperialism threatens to increase similar sanctions against China. Although China’s ruling bureaucracy was on good terms with Putin before the invasion, it is now showing a restrictive “solidarity”. It has not defined its position against Russia – it abstained in the UN Security Council – but it demands respect for territorial integrity and maintains relations with Ukraine. It has even signed economic agreements with Ukraine over the “silk road”.

Chinese government bureaucracy and its oligarchic bourgeoisie, which emerged from the capitalist restoration process, are taking precautions regarding the NATO offensive against Russia instead of confronting it. In his trip to Europe for the NATO meeting, Biden showed his intention of encouraging the EU to actively take pressure actions against China.

US imperialism has been losing much of its hegemonic power. The most recent and profound blow was abandoning Afghanistan in fear after a decade of military occupation. Trade war with China has had relative success and losses for the US: the great mass revolts at the end of Trump’s administration, the Latin American and international rebellions against the IMF adjustments, the capital impasse persistence – along with its crisis. These are symptoms of its hegemonic setback. The very fact that Putin encouraged Ukraine’s invasion, has to be incorporated into this American hegemonic deterioration and regression.

Biden is failing to gain ground in the polls and sees an electoral defeat approaching in November. Despite the different subsidies granted, social deterioration is growing. Like in Argentina, those subsidies do not solve the structural impoverishment of many people (…). Trump’s right-wing maintains a strong electoral weight and acts by reassembling its positions in the international arena: he has taken a picture with Macri, etc.

However, Ukraine war instrumentality is also a Biden’s attempt to resume a strategic initiative. He has succeeded in unifying all the European imperialist powers in support of the confrontational NATO policy that is advocated by the US. He has brought nations that declared themselves “neutral” together, such as Sweden and Finland, which are also contemplating joining NATO. He has convinced European “public opinion” to defend “the sovereignty of Ukraine” against Russian imperialism. This has been possible thanks to Putin’s reactionary policies.

We adopted the following stance “War on war. No NATO in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Dissolution of fascist paramilitary groups in Ukraine. NATO dissolution. We reject Putin’s invasion. Immediate halt to bombardements. Russian troops withdrawal. For an independent, unique, and socialist Ukraine, the only possible form of its self-determination. Freedom for Russian political prisoners for being opposed to war. For the right to demonstrate and create independent and political workers’ organizations both in Ukraine and in Russia. Let us oppose the fratricidal war promoted by NATO and Moscow and build unity, solidarity, and fraternization between Russian and Ukrainian peoples to stop the war carnage and to put an end to its perpetrators and local agents.” It is necessary to promote these claims throughout the region and in all its areas, including the battlefields. For workers’ governments in Ukraine and Russia. For the internationalist unity of the working classes throughout Europe. The main enemy is imperialism and the reactionary regimes that rule us in every country. For the Socialist Unity of Europe, including Russia.

Foundations of the imperialist wars

Ukraine’s war outbreak proved some people wrong: those who said that thanks to the capitalist restoration, the cold war and the possibility of a hot war between the former workers’ states and imperialism would be definitively driven away. Or those who proclaimed that imperialist globalization would definitively put an end to wars of all kinds because the world economy would be integrated and interdependent. This approach is based on the assumption that a kind of monopole “world government” – an ultra-imperialist one – could regulate socio-economic development and avoid conflicts and wars. But this is a utopian idea and serves as a propaganda weapon for imperialist plans. Imperialism does not eliminate competition among capitalists, but concentrates it, elevates it, and makes it much more dangerous because imperialism transforms it into a competition among monopolies and armies never seen before in human history. The two world wars of the twentieth century are proof of this, they are the mere expression of an inter-imperialist dispute over the world’s distribution. Other examples are imperialist wars against the semi-colonies that many times end up being proxy wars in which, although not directly, different monopolies that are supported by different imperialist powers end up clashing against each other – Lybia: where the Italian ENI and the French TOTAL, both with several capitalist allies, support different governments for oil control.

The foundation lies in the world capitalist crisis that has exhausted the possibilities of the capitalist system’s progressive development. It is a crisis of capitalist overproduction, where there is a “surplus” of commodities, capital, and labor. It is also a crisis of the difficulties verification of capital valorization, which is beset by the tendency of the profit rate to fall.

The financial crisis of 2008 was a leap in quality in the exhaustion process of the capitalist system. It was compared to that of 1929 which originated the “Great Depression” from which capitalism could only “get out” through World War II.

War is an inevitable part of the process of capitalism’s historical exhaustion and the tendency to its decomposition and explosion.

China and capitalist restoration

The capitalist restoration did not lead to a path of progress and development, either for the former workers’ states of Eastern Europe or for Russia. The former has been transformed into IMF and NATO colonies and has been dragged along with the imperialist warmongering policy against Russia. Nonetheless, some analysts, particularly on the left, argue that China has not only managed to overcome national backwardness (which the bureaucratized workers’ state was unable to resolve) but has transformed itself into an imperialist power, which is struggling to surpass the US in world hegemony.

Indeed, China has had an extraordinary development, particularly in the last 20 years, which has led the country to have a share in the global GDP of 7.9% in 2001 and has reached 19.2% in 2019, second only to the US. Not only that, but it has ventured into technological development and has also developed other areas, which has led to greater confrontation and clashes with the US.

But an understanding of China’s place in the international arena cannot be limited to a superficial or impressionistic view and must delve deeper into a concrete analysis. The assertion, for example, that China ranks first in foreign trade does not convey the fact that more than 80% of this foreign trade is carried out by private companies and that more than 70% is accounted for by transnational corporations. In turn, the main export destinations are the USA, Japan, and Korea, among others. It means that in many cases it is an exchange of the same imperialist company located in China, with its central house (or country) installed in the metropolis. Imperialist companies settle in China to exploit the highly cheap salaried labor that exists there ( which has been decreasing due to wage improvements and which is leading to new capital relocations towards cheaper countries in terms of wages: Vietnam, etc.) and to increase capital appreciation. And even to use it to blackmail and impose wage reductions and conquests on the metropolitan workers. Likewise regarding the essential characteristic of imperialism’s capital exportation. In the first semester of 2021, the direct imperialist investment in China was around 900 billion dollars – almost a trillion dollars! – and destined for key productive sectors. China’s capital exports, on the other hand, are generally directed towards the financing of public works (within the framework of the “silk road” plan) and/or in some commodity sectors: grain exports, etc.

China’s publicized growing technological superiority is being abruptly halted by the control measures and economic warfare developed by the USA.

The US company Apple is currently the main smartphone and mobile device seller in the Chinese market, ahead of Huawei, the People’s Republic’s flagship company. Exports from the US soared to over 50 million units, leaving Huawei behind by almost 10 million.

Due to Trump’s trade persecution, Huawei reduced its global market presence by more than 30%. The greatest instrument of US dominance over Huawei is the absolutely hegemonic control it exercises over the global market of semiconductors (“chips”), which are the essential input for the smartphone equipment manufacturing in the global economy.

The US banned Huawei from having access to US-patented chips anywhere in the world, a policy that has proved to be remarkably effective, demonstrating at the same time that Huawei was an armory in key sectors.

Huawei has faced this offensive, concentrating on the lower value-added and lower-priced segments. While Huawei is being hounded all over the world by US imperialism, Apple is fully established in China. Apple has acquired a virtual monopoly in the world’s most profitable mid- and end-tier smartphone market.

Of course, Apple is not the only case. Tesla, the leading U.S. electric car manufacturer, sold in the Chinese market nearly 500,000 electric cars built at its Shanghai plant in the last five years. This large factory has become Tesla’s main export center to the world. Tesla is a 100% American-owned company in China and operates with full autonomy and on an equal footing with other companies in China.

The Chinese automotive market has opened its doors to competition and foreign capital in the last three years, marked by a phenomenal boom in the presence of German, Japanese, and U.S. companies.

“Foreign multinationals are redoubling their investments in China, establishing thousands of new companies and expanding existing ones. Despite economic and financial tensions and several foreign restrictions on technology transfer to China, China continues to attract record amounts of both foreign direct investment and portfolio investment flows in Chinese listed shares and Chinese government bonds…” (Santander Bank research paper based on a report made by China’s Ministry of Commerce, November 2021). For The Economist launched on September 5, 2020, “China is creating opportunities [that foreign capital did not expect, at least not as fast].” The magnitude of U.S. capital

inflows into China is difficult to estimate because “many Chinese companies that issue shares have subsidiaries in offshore tax-havens.” According to a July 13, 2021, ñ{Investment Monitor report, China has more subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands than any other country “after the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan.”

As a military power, China is far behind the US. The U.S. military budget is 770 billion dollars. China’s is 250 billion. The US nuclear warheads are 3750, and the Chinese are 272. The Chinese have 2 aircraft carriers, the Yankees 11; etc. Regarding military bases, Americans have about 260 around the world (4 in Spain, 6 in Japan, etc.), while the Chinese have about 4 (one of them unarmed, declared as a tracking-radar station for space satellites, in Neuquén). In geopolitical terms, despite economic advances, it has not achieved hegemony in its own zone. Moreover, we are witnessing an imperialist escalation of regional military alliances against Beijing, which brings together the powers of the region, on the one hand, and a renewed promotion of Taiwanese separatism on the other, spurred on by Washington. From a theoretical point of view and by projecting statistics, China could become an imperialist power. That is what the bureaucracy of the degenerated Soviet workers’ state in the times of Stalin and Khrushchev was doing: projecting how long it would take to surpass imperialist productive forces and then declare the triumph of socialism. Let us not forget that the USSR was also the second world power and first in several sectors (aerospace, etc.). Maoism characterized it then as “Russian social-imperialism”.

But we cannot take statistics in the abstract.

Trotsky explained that imperialism overcoming the productive plane in a workers’ state could not be achieved through economic growth alone. The imperialist domination of the world market could hit the isolated workers’ state hard, with the burden of its superior productivity, cheaper prices, and better goods quality – and, of course, with world financial management and control. Imperialist “globalization” has accentuated this domination as has just been demonstrated by the economic sanctions applied to Russia – exclusion from the SWIFT interbank exchange, etc.

This has already been applied to other enemies that American imperialism wanted to subdue. Having been forced to withdraw from Afghanistan, the Biden administration seized more than 7 billion dollars from the country’s monetary reserves. He determined that those monetary reserves should be deposited in foreign banks under imperialist control and he has directly confiscated a considerable part of those funds to subsidize victims of the attack on the Towers, relieving the government of that burden. As a result, the Afghan masses are being condemned to starvation. But the “solidarity” of the great capital looks the other way on this ongoing genocide. Self-determination advocacy has been shelved for Afghanistan.

In international finance, the distance separating China from the most advanced nations is sidereal. The renminbi currency accounts for barely 2% of the international payments and a meager 1% of the world central banks’ reserves and has been on a declining trend. Despite the US decline, 75% of transactions are still carried out in dollars. This is a contradiction whose solution requires a financial system reorganization that cannot be painless. China’s expansion along the Silk Roads, in turn, should not overshadow the fact that 80% of trade is carried out by the sea. Although Beijing has progressed in this area, the major metropolises continue to enjoy considerable supremacy.

World market domination by imperialism poses war or revolution, not a peaceful evolution of economic accumulation.

The Ukrainian war makes it possible to confirm the above with certainty. A study published in Clarín newspaper, before the war began, pointed out that Russia was at its best economic moment: full of reserves well above its foreign debt, high prices on its exportable raw materials – hydrocarbons, grains, metals, etc. – which guaranteed a constant flow of foreign currency surplus for the next period, etc. Yet the sanctions taken by the various imperialisms following the US directive against Russia, reduced at a stroke Russian large foreign exchange reserves by half, blocked its exports and decreed a stampede on capitals.

The growing state interventionism in China cannot be absent from the analysis. Xi Jing Ping’s government unveiled regulations to eradicate monopolistic practices aimed primarily at reducing corporate influence, such as Alibaba, Tencent, and other leading technology companies. These announcements tie in with a renewed push for partisan interference in the business world, extending also to the private enterprise universe where CCP’s presence was reduced compared to the state-owned one.

The preceding panorama corroborates that the bourgeoisie has not yet been able to consolidate itself as a ruling class. It continues to play the second fiddle in a scenario in which the Chinese state continues to take the main decisions in the country. The process of capitalist reconversion is extremely unequal and is still in its infancy in the countryside, where pre-existing social and property relations predominate. All these facts show the unfinished nature of the capitalist restoration.

When it comes to characterizing whether China is an imperialist country, we cannot disregard the fact that the imperialist powers acquired this condition at a stage of capitalist upswing. On the other hand, China began this process with a statified economy where capital was expropriated and within the framework of a historical capitalist decadence. In this context, capitalist restoration is bound to be peculiar; it will in no way be a replica of previous experiences. The international context, in the framework of a saturated market and with a capital overabundance, limits the emergence of a new hegemonic power – which implies a total, generalized and violent restructuring of the entire capitalist system that cannot be compared with previous cases in which leadership passed from Holland to Great Britain and then to the United States. In short, theoretically, China’s transformation into an imperialist country cannot be discarded, but it would not be painless but rather convulsive, with confrontations not only in the economic but also in the military sphere. The international war scenario opens a terrain for the Chinese and world working class to break through and burst in. China’s fate, in short, is conditioned by the class struggle within the Asian giant and on a global scale.

Those who proclaim that China is imperialist take these pitfalls and contradictions for granted. In reality, without realizing it, they end up assigning to capitalism a capacity for regeneration and overcoming its impasse when it is precisely the contrary. If China were able to complete its capitalist development and transform itself into an imperialist country in a relatively peaceful way, capitalism, in its own way, would have succeeded in removing the obstacles that hinder the capitalist accumulation process and that acts as a brake on the development of the productive forces. China’s emergence as a U.S. substitute would express the vitality of a social regime and not its decadence. The Asian giant would be the anchor for new capitalism blossoming. However, this economic premise is at odds with the capitalist reality we face.

International capital initially had the Chinese state as an ally to integrate the Asian giant into the world process of capitalist accumulation; the same can be said of the native Chinese bourgeoisie that grew in the shadow and under the protection of the CCP ruling elite. But over time, it has become a stumbling block for both sectors. Imperialism, on the one hand, and the national bourgeoisie, on the other, whose aspirations, interests, and appetites do not always coincide – and in many cases are antagonistic – have been struggling to put into practice the reforms that would put an end to the regulations and current state protectionism and, in this way, accelerate the capitalist restoration. One of its aspects is to strengthen legal certainty in the area of property rights, which in many cases is subject to the Chinese government’s discretion.

“The (economic) dynamism still coexists with the tentacles of an all-encompassing Communist Party. China has about 150,000 state-owned enterprises. This is a tiny number compared to the total number of companies in the country, but their power is overwhelming. They operate in a near-monopoly regime in key industries, from telecommunications to energy, and despite being less efficient and less productive, no one can compete against them under the Party’s protection” (El País, 1/8/20).

State-private capital tensions dominate the economic and political life of the country. This situation is reinforced by the fact that capitalist restoration is not taking place in a colonial country, but in a state that is a residual product of a social revolution and that managed to preserve China’s national unity. This circumstance gives the CPC ruling elite room for maneuver and autonomy incomparably greater than any other peripheral country.

The Chinese state is not only subject to the pressures of imperialism and the native bourgeoisie, but it is also potentially subject to the presence of the numerous and concentrated working class that has been demanding its rights against super-exploitation. The imposing capitalist development has been accompanied by spectacular working-class growth. This circumstance conditions all the steps of the bureaucracy, which oscillates between adapting itself to the greater economic opening demands, on the one hand, or resorting to state interventionism to avoid an economic collapse and to prevent the social situation from getting out of control, on the other. The capital pressure in favor of liberalization clashes with the well-founded fear that a climate of greater relaxation of the rigid regimentation, which dominates the political life of the country, could be the trigger for the Chinese proletariat irruption. Trade union conflict, however much it may be concealed, is growing.

The factors we have pointed out once again reaffirm Trotsky’s characterization: capitalist restoration will not be completed without great social upheavals and wars. Tiananmen’s repression helped to consolidate the Bonapartist government, but it did not close the painful restorationist process.

The arbitration capacity of Xi Jinping’s Bonapartist regime, which has concentrated exceptional power in his hands, will be put to the test. We are entering a new convulsive stage of Chinese history, its outcome will be marked, as in the past, by the national and international class struggle.

What is the current stage of the capitalist economic crisis?

After having emerged from the great crisis of 2008, bourgeois politicians and economists claim that the pandemic has plunged the capitalist world back into recession. In reality, the recession began to develop before the pandemic outbreak. The anarchic intervention of the capitalist powers and governments in the pandemic crisis deepened the health crisis and also the recession. Now it is once again claimed that having overcome the pandemic (which is not true), we are definitely emerging vigorously from the world economic contraction.

According to IMF data, the recession started at the end of 2019 and, stimulated by the Covid pandemic since the end of February 2020, produced a global economic contraction of 3.5%. UN reports indicate that 2021 will end, instead, with global growth of 5.5%. But this has been totally uneven for different countries. An OECD report shows that out of 44 nations, 17 have grown but have not yet managed to resume the pre-pandemic economic level.

Is there light at the end of the crisis tunnel?

UN forecasts speak of a “stagnation” of world economic activity in 2022. According to their study – from the beginning of the year – the economic activity would grow by 4% in 2022 – lower than the 2021 growth – and would drop again to 3.5% in 2023. For Latin America, it is more worrisome for it would go from 6.5% in 2021 to 2.2% in 2022.

Evidently, we are not facing a consistent reactivation of the capitalist world economy, but a natural rebound from the strong contraction of 2020. We must add the consequences the Ukrainian war will generate, which will deepen the setback.

The slowdown in the global economic upturn is combined with inflation, which has soared worldwide and has no prospect of abating.

Inflation in the US in 2021 was 6.8%, the worst figure recorded in 39 years. But Bank of America now reports that it will exceed 7% this year. It revises its forecast that it would fall from 2021’s to 6.3%. The Economist reports that in February the consumer price index in the US stood at… 7.9% year-on-year growth.

The same trend is evident in the Euro Zone: inflation is expected to rise to 6%, up from 4.9% in 2021 (and from its initial forecasts for 2022 of 4.4%). Even for Japan, a powerful country that has been mired in deflation for a long time, inflation is expected to rise above 2% this year.

Rising energy prices – oil, gas, coal – and food prices were at the forefront of this inflationary escalation.

The Ukrainian war will have a direct impact on accelerating the increase in food and energy prices, two of the increases that have the greatest impact on workers’ pockets. The IMF warns that this “is a hard blow for the world economy and Latin America especially”. Inflation in its five most important economies (Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil) is expected to exceed 8%. Argentina is the “exception” because it is already on the verge of hyperinflation with an inflation rate of 53%.

Russia being one of the world’s largest producers of hydrocarbons, the imperialist boycott on its exports has already pushed the oil barrel price past the 100-dollar barrier. Gas prices have more than tripled in Europe, which is boosting the price hike that is devastating the popular consumer ( Argentina will also be affected by the importation of gas ships when winter begins). But, the food problem is generating a real-world crisis. The war and the imperialist boycott on Russian exports – and the impossibility to export from Ukraine – strongly raise the price of wheat – and its direct product: flours – and other food grains and/or fodder grains.

According to FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), in February, food prices broke the historical records for the first time in 61 years. They rose even higher than the previous record in February 2011. Then these increases in grains and fuels and the capitalist limits of North African governments that did not have the funds to import them, triggered a stormy wave of mass struggles known as the Arab Spring that overturned governments and developed revolutionary processes (Tunisia, Egypt, etc.).

Today, similar scenarios are on the horizon. Egypt is on the verge of famine and a popular outbreak. Being a net importer of food grains, despite high government subsidies, the prices to be paid by the working people have risen by up to 50%. The same picture is depicted in Tunisia, Syria, Algeria, and Morocco.

The popular uprising in Sri Lanka – where the organized working class is greatly involved and the government has declared a default and has no foreign currency to buy foodstuffs – indicates a tendency towards chaos that will be produced by the war and a scenario in which the masses will be its main character.

Who is responsible? Is it Capital or Labor?

Capitalist economists and their financial institutions claim that the price hike is caused by excess demand. Under the pandemic, a part of the working population saved their incomes because they had nothing to spend it on, being in quarantine. Now they would have flooded the market with their savings and as the capital was not prepared, this price inflation has been provoked. The excessive and sudden demand would then be the cause of the price increase.

But this is not the case. The current inflation does not come from the demand, but the supply. Even before the pandemic, there was a fall in supply, as we entered the recession, with its downward curve across world trade and production. What we call the capitalist “investment strike” is one of the fundamental causes of the supply shortage that drives up prices at the beginning of a slight economic revival.

The reason for this lack of productive capitalist investment is to be found in the overproduction crisis and the fall in the rate of capital’s profit. This puts a brake on investment – and consequently on economic growth – whose main driving force is capitalist profit.

The scarce perspective of a sustained revival of economic growth and the overabundance of invested capital that is semi-idle makes it “unprofitable” to build new enterprises or expand production capacity for transitory and conjunctural demands. This is the reason why a great mass of idle capital turns to speculation, not only in the repurchase of its shares on the stock exchange, artificially increasing its “profits”, but also with the accelerated creation of new financial instruments – commodity futures markets, etc. – which “valorize” capital without intervening directly in the product development. The increasing ” adjustments ” of catastrophic falls in stock values on the stock exchanges and then, in many cases, new spectacular rises indicate their speculative character and the threat of a financial crisis.

Given the lack of “supply” that is caused by the lack of investment, the monopolies prefer to make profits by increasing prices, taking advantage of the relative shortage of the required goods, and centralizing important branches of production.

Even before the war outbreak, hydrocarbon prices rose rapidly. This is due to the oligopolistic control of the oil octopuses, which have decided in OPEC to self-limit their production quotas to dump on the market. In our magazine En Defensa Marxismo #58, we published an example of how oil investments have fallen from $750 billion in 2014 to an estimated $350 billion by 2021.

The current investment strike is an expression and consequence of the overproduction crisis. Capital has put a brake on production that does not meet the expected profitability prospects. There is “too much” capital, and “too much” capital in relation not to social needs but to the profit possibilities. The decline in the rate of profit we have been witnessing (and which is now accentuated) acts as a hindrance to the productive forces’ development. And it is the basis of the present capitalist impasse.

The overproduction crises are not due to underconsumption, or insufficient demand – as Keynesians and neo-Keynesians propose. The classic overcoming of capitalist overproduction crises is ” settled” by eliminating “surplus” capital and opening up new opportunities for capitalist investments. Paradoxically, however, this classic mechanism was relatively inhibited and neutralized by employing draconian measures put in place by the capitalist states, fearful of the economic, social, and political consequences that such a cleansing could provoke.

The pandemic also contributed to the decline in capitalist supply. The interruption of productive activity resulting from the spread of the virus was enhanced by the pitfalls inherent in the very organization of production that prevails in the capitalist market. The capitalist chains, which in many cases are part of the same monopolistic group, operate more and more, without stocks, under the premise of “just in time”. In this way, they lower costs and slow down, ultra partially, the fall in their rate of profit. But… when one of the elements of the chain short-circuits, entire branches of production come to a halt. This is what is happening now, once again, with the re-emergence of a new coronavirus strain in China, which has led entire cities to quarantine and close their export ports (Shanghai, etc.).

Capitalists that were on the verge of bankruptcy have been saved thanks to the governmental gigantic monetary issuance. The subsidized purchase of bankrupt assets by the U.S. Federal Reserve has gone from $1 trillion in 2008 to $9 trillion today. Along with cheap credit obtained by reducing the central bank rate to almost zero, this is one of the current crisis’s main causes. It is one current inflationary escalation main causes as well. It has led to public resource depletion and a monstrous State indebtedness.

It is worth mentioning that the speculation that fed on public funds not only ended up in financial assets but also shifted to the commodities market and it is responsible for the rise in commodity prices even before the war broke out.

These factors, which feedback on each other, have broken the existing balances: it is causing a devaluation of the dollar, which added to the international political commotion (war in Ukraine, etc.) and may precipitate an outflow of this and other currencies to seek refuge in gold or other assets that function as reserves of value. Cryptocurrencies are an attempt to buck this trend since they would not be regulated by central banks. But for now, they have played a great speculative role and threaten to become great frauds.

If this trend is confirmed, we would be facing a monetary, market, and world economy dislocation and a qualitative leap in the capitalist crisis.

As The Economist magazine noted, economic sanctions will have consequences: “the more they are used, the more countries will seek to avoid dependence on Western finance. That would make the threat of exclusion less powerful. It would also lead to a dangerous fragmentation of the world economy. In the ’30s, fear of trade embargoes was associated with a race to autarky and economic spheres of influence.”

China “will be carefully examining the Russian sanctions’ implications, because in a war, or even a conflict over Taiwan or some other issue, the U.S. and Western powers could freeze their $3.3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. Other countries, such as India, may worry about being more vulnerable to Western pressure,” according to The Economist (excerpted from WSWS, 3/20).

The war scenario could accelerate the search for US currency substitutes. It places at the debate’s center the dollar’s sustainability and consistency as an international currency, which emerged from the Bretton Woods agreements.

Unlike the 2008 crisis, China is not only failing to act as a “locomotive” for a reactivating exit with its exceptional world demand for raw materials but is also slowing down its production. The recent crisis of the Evergrande real estate monopoly in China is the tip of an over-indebtedness iceberg for numerous Chinese companies.

To face these inflationary trends, the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates. The initial increase was already announced, but it was surprisingly modest because it was limited to only 0.25 percentage points when market expectations were higher. This “expectation” was finally confirmed: the FED increased 0.50 points again, at the beginning of May (and there is a hint of a new increase in June). This indicates concern about the continuing inflation in the imperialist metropolises. But at the same time, it is feared in the circles of political and economic power that an increase in the interest rate could end up accelerating a recession that is already rearing its head with the economic activity deflation, which is all the more evident with the war outbreak and the effects of the pandemic that is far from being over. We cannot ignore the so-called “zombie companies” which, with their profits, are unable to pay the interest on their debts and which are maintained and refinanced with almost free funds from the state. An increase in interest rates would lead them directly to bankruptcy.

Moreover, let us add that the mere fact that interest rate hikes have been arranged and new increases are announced has already been enough to provoke great financial turbulence. Recent successive stock market crashes have “evaporated” trillions of dollars of capital. This indicates the extreme volatility of the international economy.

Not to mention the effects on emerging countries.

The interest rate hikes already in place, plus those being analyzed by the central banks of the imperialist powers, have a direct repercussion on the coming increase in the amounts to be paid by the backward countries for their “foreign debts” and the capital flight towards the metropolis. This destabilizes these economies even more profoundly, in many cases placing them on the verge of default and forcing them to carry out adjustment policies against the living conditions of their people (tariff hikes, labor reforms, etc.). These IMF-driven “adjustments” are at the root of the popular rebellions in Latin America and the world.

Paradoxically, these interest rate hikes are likely to have all these disastrous effects, but they will not stop inflation. Even with the staggering interest rate adjustments that FED foresees for the whole year, rates will remain negative (well below the expected increase in prices). On the other hand, the monetary tightening’s effectiveness is hampered by the immense amount of fictitious capital in circulation. Thus, the most likely scenario is a mixture of recession and inflation.

This scenario poses a violent and convulsive situation. The secular stagnation advocates -who also have their followers in the Marxist ranks- argue that, instead of collapsing, there will be a more serene decline that would reduce the surplus capital. But it is impossible to avoid the crisis – when it has reached this extreme – without provoking the destruction of part of the installed capital through its means: collapses, defaults, and bankruptcies. It is the breeding ground for major national and international political upheavals and wars, such as the Ukrainian one, and popular uprisings.

Who pays for the crisis?

By blaming inflation on “demand”, that is, on the “extra” expenses of the middle class and the workers’ savings, the capitalists are trying to slow down the wage recovery that should go hand in hand with a reactivation, even a limited one. All the financial entities and their economist spokesmen have already demanded prudence in wage claims to avoid fueling inflation. This economic “ideology” has penetrated sectors of the trade union bureaucracies which claim to be in favor of “price and wage agreements,” agreements with the employers, and, at the most, state controls over unjustified price increases. They claim that large wage increases are eventually passed on to prices and create an inflationary spiral. We must reject these pro-employer fallacies. Wages are not responsible for rising prices. Wage increases affect the capitalist’s profit, not the commodity price. It is the capitalist who raises the price to compensate for the wages he has had to pay.

To face inflation and dearth, workers must demand not only wage increases but also the automatic indexation of wages following the cost of living: the sliding wage scale, as proposed in the Transitional Program of the Fourth International.

War sharpens the crisis unloading on the workers’ shoulders. Inflation is creating an increasingly explosive social picture. The increases in fuel and food will drastically stimulate strikes for wage increases – in the imperialist metropolises inflation is a new phenomenon for they were accustomed to price stability or deflation. In the United States, a teachers’ strike in Minneapolis for a wage increase (also in defense of public education, etc.) has been going on for two weeks, with great parental and public support. It is part of the strike wave that has been going on at Volvo, John Deere, Dana, Kellogs, nurses, etc. Many of these struggles are being carried out outside the union apparatus which, due to years of starvation imposed by the bureaucracies, has fallen sharply in the number of members. People are reacting to the low wages and precarious labor conditions, especially among the youth. A particularity has arisen of what has been called “the big strike”: the complete work abandonment of thousands since they cannot bear to receive such low wages and be under such slave labor conditions. On the one hand, it indicates the weakness of the workers’ organization as it has not fought against this wage reduction. But the government and the bosses are worried because it is an indicator of the strong social unrest in the most exploited workers’ core. This could turn into a volcano of struggles. In consonance with this rise of the workers’ struggle, unionization in the US stands out. The Washington Post notes that “many movement leaders are in their early 20s; they go by the nickname ‘Generation U,’ for Union [union]. Union approval is the highest since 1965, with a 68% popularity rating, rising to 77% among Americans aged 18 to 34, according to a recent Gallup poll.” In this framework, the government itself seeks to encourage the constitution of a certain union movement to take the initiative of having bureaucracies capable of containing a radicalization of the youth and workers’ struggle (Walmart, etc.).

In Europe, the strikes are still small, but the shortages have created a great popular agitation that foreshadows strong radicalization struggles. Also in Great Britain, there is an exodus from work of those who do not want to work for miserable wages (chauffeurs, etc.). The great 10-day general strike of the Cadiz steelworkers was actively accompanied by pickets and popular participation that confronted repressive forces. In Italy, the Florence GKL struggle, a medium-sized metallurgical factory (500 workers), has gained great popularity since the end of 2021 because it has appealed to militant class-conscious methods ( factory occupation against closure, permanent assemblies, etc.). And it has stirred up the workers’ and trade union vanguard (plenaries, events, marches) to mobilize in support of this struggle – against the auto parts closure and relocation somewhere in the EU with lower wages and gains – and to coordinate the militant currents.

The shortage will lead to a class struggle revival that will push to place the workers at the center of the political situation. The visceral repudiation of the subjectively and objectively pro-employer union bureaucracies has developed massively within workers. Many struggles will likely be built on the constitution of independent factory committees. But we cannot decree the death of trade unionism, but rather propose the expulsion of the bureaucracies from them and recover the unions, using them as a weapon of organization and independent workers’ struggle. Instead of allowing itself to be bound by the bureaucratic corset, by a trade union fetishism. It is necessary to be open to all the struggle initiatives and independent organizations created by workers in their combative needs. It is necessary to propose workers’ and trade union congresses with representatives elected by the rank and file as a way of grouping the workers to overcome the trade union bureaucracies’ paralysis. It also goes hand in hand with the demand for the leadership to call assemblies and plenary meetings of delegates to break with class collaborationism so that the workers can pronounce themselves and vote on the policy and plans of struggle to be followed.

One of the difficulties encountered by the workers’ movement in breaking with the paralysis of its unions is that a large part of these has historically been linked to social-democratic, Stalinist, or bourgeois nationalist parties involved in the defense of the bourgeois state under class-collaborationist policies. The crisis accentuation makes these trade union bureaucracies more conservative and repressive. In Great Britain, the Labor Party, which was historically formed based on the trade unions, has just expelled thousands of activists and has taken a more direct turn to the center-right.

The Brazilian Confederation of Trade Unions (CUT) has not led a general strike for years and has abandoned those that have emerged (Post Office, oil workers, etc.). It has let the reactionary labor and pension reforms pass. It is submissive to the PT and concentrates its energy on obtaining votes in favor of Lula in October. Raising the struggle for the political independence of the working class and its organizations is strategic.

The crisis has been fuelling the rise of right-wing parties, some of them fascistic, especially in Europe, but also in India and other countries. In Europe, many of these fascistoid formations declared to be in favor of breaking with the EU and declaring national “autonomy”. This has limited open support from big capital sectors that see the EU and its Central Bank as the European IMF, as something that can be used to vote bailout packages for the capitalist groups in crisis that, logically, will have to be paid by the peoples. Spain and Italy are among the most dependent on these bailout packages. Spain has received a large Euro transfer which implies carrying out the labor and pension reform and other adjustment measures – which the PSOE government, squeezed by its popular-union base, has been delaying to apply it fully. Periodically the ECB -just like the IMF in Argentina- will evaluate the progress of the adjustment.

The emergence and development of these right-wing and/or fascistic parties are part of the capitalist crisis and decomposition and a direct product of the historical attrition of the traditional political formations. But these too, after a first rapid rise, have begun to be eroded since their threatening declarations “against the system” could not be materialized. Le Pen, in France, abandoned his proposal to break with the EU and replace Euro with a national currency.

They also weigh the middle class and even the working-class sectors attracted by a verbose approach towards action and defiance of the liberal state. In France, the traditional right-wing formation led by Le Pen is competing with the emergence of the “ultra-right” candidacy of Zemmour. In the right-wing camp, for the second electoral round, Le Pen prevailed with her moderate proposals and her demagogic flirtation with the working masses’ demands against the Macron government. In Spain also the right-wing advance is slowing down. The existing division (Popular Party, Vox, etc) has allowed a PSOE to win the election with Unidas Podemos (integrated by Izquierda Unida-PC, Podemos).

In Italy, the right-wing front broke up. The populist 5 Stars opened up and joined a center-left government. The ultra-right front that threatened to become a majority is divided: Salvini de la Liga is part of the “national union” government with Prime Minister Mario Draghi, a non-partisan “technician”, directly suggested by the ECB, of which he was president for many years. On the other hand, the “Fratelli d’Italia” did not want to join and have been left out in minority.

Germany’s ultra-right, AFD, also lost in the last elections. Whether or not to integrate the EU is the problem that has slowed down the growth of the ultra-right. The big capital of each country is mostly “Europeanist” and opposes, for the time being, any “nationalist” adventure that would lead to a break with the EU. This leaves the ultra-right alone, which can only raise its racist, anti-worker and repressive positions.

Britain’s exit from the European Union (Brexit, January 2020) – in search of a “privileged” alliance with Trump’s U.S. – has aggravated the economic-social backlash. In recent elections, the ruling Conservative Party suffered a heavy blow, losing 300 municipalities it led. And in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein, the party representing IRA, the armed organization that confronted the British government fighting for the independent unity of Ireland, triumphed in parliamentary elections for the first time. In Ireland, as in Scotland, there are strong movements to leave Brexit and return to the EU.

This stalemate-failure -which is trying to be reversed through a greater protagonism in the NATO war against Russia- is what has also deflated the progress of the “autonomic” right-wing.

In Latin America, the right-wing has also been beaten in the streets and electorally. Añez’s coup in Bolivia was defeated first by the general strike and then by the elections.

Keiko Fujimori’s attempt to win the presidential elections was defeated by the surprising appearance of Pedro Castillo’s populist candidacy, which was taken as a popular opposition channel against the fascist grouping’s rise. Keiko is dictatorship Fujimori’s daughter.

In Chile, Piñera was beaten with the powerful uprising of October 18, 2019, first and then with the right-wing attempt to regroup behind the Pinochetist Kast was defeated by the candidacy of Boric from Frente Amplio.

Now in Brazil, polls indicate that Bolsonaro would not be reelected in the October elections, with Lula, of the center-left PT, winning. Forecasts also indicate that the combative popular uprising in Colombia, although contained by strong repression, was not crushed. The recent internal elections to choose the candidates for the presidential elections at the end of May granted a comfortable victory to the “left-wing” candidate against the right-wing and center candidates. This was a foretaste of the presidential elections and Gustavo Petro is expected to win, probably in the first round.

Taken as a whole, the international situation has shown the limits of an ultra-right-wing rise. At present, big capital does not privilege this variant, but this circumstance should not make us overlook the novelty it represents – instead, we should render the political attention it deserves. The emergence and development of new right-wing sectors (Milei in Argentina, Kast in Chile, Zemmour in France, etc.) that carry out an “anti-systemic” criticism (on the political caste, etc.) with ultra-liberal and fascistic positions aims at promoting themselves as an alternative to overcome the failure and disrepute of the political system and the traditional parties.

It is necessary to bear in mind that the bourgeoisie makes use of all containment methods, not only those of the trade union’s bureaucracies that restrain and dislocate actions. A strong political-ideological struggle is posed against the bourgeois state’s instruments and the propaganda and agitation promoted by the bourgeoisie and its parties, which is strengthened through its mass media domination (press, networks, etc.).

In this context, the churches are playing an important role in the disciplining of the masses in Latin America – the evangelical church is doing this with great dynamism. They are at the forefront of the battle against abortion rights and any progressive change (LGBT rights, etc.). They are systematically postulated as a factor of people’s ideological domestication and of deviation and blockage in the radicalization that is registered in the struggle movements that are opening their way. And they support different political attempts on the left or on the right that are making their way in a framework of very acute deterioration of the traditional political regimes.

The Latin American cauldron

Is a new “pink wave” coming in Latin America, predominating in the bourgeois nationalist and class conciliation populist-front governments?

Given the popular uprisings that have been developing (Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, etc.), US imperialism has accepted in Latin America its coexistence and association with bourgeois nationalist governments. It had already done so with AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) in Mexico in 2018, who was accepted because he appeared as an escape valve given the decomposition-corruption of the right-wing parties. He also helped contain the growing popular mobilizations against corruption and the crimes of right-wing governments. AMLO committed himself to keep Mexico integrated into the Free Trade Zone where the US monopolies make their super-profits. He efficiently played the role of gendarme repressing the access of Central American immigrants to the U.S. border. The fight against corruption and crimes against the people (the Ayotzinapa massacre, etc.) has not advanced. AMLO uses democratizing demagogy to try to maintain a progressive image. He had a referendum voted to prosecute the right-wing ex-presidents, a process that will be more political than legal. This is a typical center-left maneuver: Alfonsín went further with the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) and made it possible to prosecute those responsible for the dictatorial repression that led to the imprisonment of several of them. AMLO is working hard to co-opt union and social leaders and even sectors on the left. Proposals for “energy sovereignty” were parliamentarily blocked -as foreseen- by the right-wing. AMLO did not enable anti-imperialist transformations, avoiding popular mobilization (a substantial difference from the nationalism of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 30s of the last century, who expropriated the imperialist oil companies).

The American government gave the thumbs up, so that the unknown Pedro Castillo, presented as a candidate for Peru Libre (a small center-left party that claimed to be Marxist), could assume the presidency, which he won by a narrow advantage in a polarized election against the candidacy of a group that represented the entire Peruvian right-wing. But he assumed the presidency under terrible conditions: recognized representatives of financial liberalism were appointed as director of the Central Bank and Minister of Economy. Castillo respected and strengthened the entire repressive structure of the Armed Forces and the police. He did not take any measure that would harm the interests of the powerful mining octopuses. He acted in a pusillanimous manner: he broke with the Lima Round Table formed by Trump and the right-wing governments of Latin America against Venezuela, and immediately, in the face of criticism from the right, made the Minister of Foreign Affairs resign and placed himself in a pro-imperialist position once again.

The possibility of Lula’s ascension to the Brazilian presidency is not frowned upon by imperialism. Lula has just come from touring the European metropolises, where he was received as a statesman and next president. He has opposed Bolsonaro in a lukewarm discursive way, while the PT and the CUT have blocked any workers’ and/or popular mobilization. He has chosen Gerardo Alckmin, a recognized right-wing politician who facilitated the coup that ousted PT president Dilma Rousseff, as his candidate for vice-president – this constitutes a signal to imperialism and big capital. He has announced that anti-worker reforms, such as the labor reform, will not be repealed, but revised and “updated”, taking the PSOE in Spain as an example, which preserved the core of this anti-worker legislation.

Gustavo Petro, the center-left presidential candidate in Colombia, conciliated and demobilized the masses that were leading historic confrontations against the government of the right-wing Duque. His platform is a string of “intentions” with no commitment to any radical change.

Boric and Lula are two emblematic exponents of this appeasement policy. He made an agreement with the right-wing President Piñera on a planned schedule to block the struggle for his overthrow and to demobilize the massive confrontations -which the repression did not succeed in turning back- through a prolonged process of successive elections. He has declared that he will not release all the political prisoners, a large part of them detained in the multitudinous days of struggle of 2019/21 and/or of the resistance of the Mapuche people to the expropriation by force of their lands – that meant to be taken over by oligarchies that exploit the natural goods (wood, etc.) of the Chilean south. He has reinforced the repressive forces that continue to take savage actions against the popular sectors that fight for their demands. In a difficult situation, considering that the possibility of large popular mobilizations is still in force, he is trying to disarm the popular demands (cancellation of the private pension, free state university, etc.). And the Constituent Assembly in the hands of a bourgeois government ( first Piñera’s, now Boric’s) proves to be a leopard ambit that maintains all the basics of the capitalist domination system.

In Bolivia, the new Arce government, which came to power after the right-wing coup defeat, has not taken any progressive initiative – of an anti-imperialist character – remaining within the boundaries that exhausted the regime of Evo Morales.

This new “pink wave” is bringing to power bourgeois nationalism and class conciliation in the form of “popular fronts”, in its most conservative historical terms. They have not been at the forefront of the popular uprisings, on the contrary, they have worked to demobilize them (Boric, Lula, Petro). They have been involved in the peoples’ struggles with containment programs, with small and cosmetic reforms. All of them are going to put into practice the adjustment plans negotiated with the IMF, guaranteeing the payment of the foreign debt.

The Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez and Cristina Kirchner is executing the adjustment against the living conditions of the masses that the right-wing Macri could not achieve. And it has just signed a pact with the IMF (with the support of the entire bourgeoisie and its parties) to impose a bigger adjustment, transforming the Argentine government into a puppet of international finance capital.

But Latin America is a social powder keg. The crisis has led to economic stagnation and a reprimarization of its commodity-exporting economy. The industrialization has receded, while investment in extractivist mining is on the rise. This is accompanied by an increase in structural poverty and social polarization.

The fundamental problem for Latin American workers and their political and struggle vanguards is to become independent and revolutionary leftist alternatives to these governments that bow down to imperialism. The political danger does not come, in the immediate future, directly from the right, but from the containment policies carried out by the center-left and bourgeois nationalist governments that exploit the illusions that the masses place in them and carry out an adjustment. We propose to develop a strong delimitation and criticism of these “pink” formations to defend with a class program the political independence of the working class from the bourgeois parties and governments. It is a question of recovering the unions and workers’ centers as an instrument of workers’ independent struggle, expelling the union bureaucracies. It is also a matter of building workers’ parties – socialist, internationalist- of militant action. May we not forget that the failure of conservative bourgeois nationalism and the populist center-left, which are incapable of confronting the capitalist crisis that is being unloaded on the Latin American peoples, threatens to bring back to power the rightists and fascists given the lack of workers’ and revolutionary alternatives. This is what threatens Pedro Castillo in Peru, less than a year after his assumption in power, with a parliament dominated by the right-wing that constantly forces the resignation and change of ministers and calls for the “vacancy” of the president.

Argentina’s experience is an example of how these class-containment governments can evolve. The Peronist-Kirchnerist government executes -with difficulties- the reactionary reforms that Macrism could not carry out. Kirchnerism lost the mid-term elections and the Macrist right-wing won (with a strong drop in votes for both). But there is also a left-wing opposition that fights for workers’ political independence, and ended up as the third electoral force. Well, following the international and Latin American panorama, there has also emerged an ultra-liberal right wing with a fascist discourse (Milei).

The historical political parties of the bourgeoisie are sinking or retreating, and new alternatives are emerging – on the right and the “left” and they even present themselves as anti-system.

The capitalist crisis worsening will push a new mobilization wave at the continental level against the IMF-monetarist adjustments. This will encounter more difficulties in structuring itself because now it will have to confront the adjustments not of the right-wing governments, but of those that claim to be national, popular, progressive and/or anti-imperialist.

The tendencies toward popular insurgency arise from the worsening of the capitalist crisis. Cuba joins this process, on July 11 there was also an insurrection against the anti-popular measures taken by the Diaz-Canel government. This was the first demonstration with a dominant presence of combative popular sectors, which had great repercussions on the island and the continent. The government responded with strong repression. Now it declared “guilty” about twenty demonstrators of that mobilization. A strong debate has sparked on the steps to be taken to set up a left-wing Trotskyist opposition. Cuba joins the struggle for social revolution against the pro-restorationist bureaucracy.

Reaction all along the line

The war is empowering all the reactionary aspects of imperialist capitalism.

The boycott on Russian gas and oil exports in Europe has reactivated the coal exploitation (the most harmful energy input for the environment) and, in a general way, it has also reactivated all the polluting energy sources such as fracking as well as the proliferation of dangerous nuclear energy projects.

This is the final lethal blow to all the “plans” in defense of the environment. Let us not forget that the “summits” of climate leaders have failed. Even their weak and verbose resolutions have not been fulfilled. The budgets committed by developed countries to address the fight against environmental change in backward nations have not been fulfilled. And the environmental massacre continues to accelerate. It has been verified that the increase in global temperature continues, with its sequel of climatic disasters (floods, droughts, etc.). The Arctic and Antarctic ice is melting. But capitalism, instead of confronting this attack on the environment, is thinking of how to develop new investment and profitability processes for its capital (shipping routes linking Europe and Asia through the thawing Arctic, exploitation of oil and minerals in that area, etc.).

The environmental movement is going through a crisis. The great international mobilizations against environmental depredation, instead of increasing against the war and its consequences on the environment, have ebbed away. The bourgeois governments have been co-opting part of the environmental movement leaderships that, in a general way, have folded to the NATO camp.

This goes hand in hand with the integration of the “green parties” into the center-left popular fronts in defense of the capitalist social order. In France, the “greens” have just joined the popular front with Melenchon, the nationalist of France Insoumise.

It is not a question of raising a vulgar “ecosocialism” (closure of all the productive branches which pollute the environment), but of seeking an alliance with the working class to impose a transitional program under workers’ control. The struggle against worker exploitation and capitalist aggression against the environment is closely linked. Today, the anti-capitalist left must consider this terrain of battle that will impose itself in line with the evolution of the struggle against the capitalist crisis. Including, especially, the youth in a battlefront against capitalist barbarism.

A similar situation occurs in the women’s struggle movement. The illusion that under capitalism the situation of women and LGBTI people will progress is an unfounded expectation. Today we see how the right to abortion is being questioned in the USA, a country that had conquered it decades ago. And how LGBTI rights are rejected in European countries. There are no “permanent” rights within the capitalist society in crisis. The situation of working women has worsened. It is the most exploited sector of the working class. The developing crisis exponentially increases their super-exploitation. It is necessary to re-strengthen the working women’s movement in its struggle against exploitation and patriarchal-capitalist persecution of their democratic rights, uniting independent organizations to the struggle for workers’ governments and socialism.

In turn, racial persecutions and discriminations in Europe are not a matter of the Nazi-fascist past. This is evidenced by the persecution of Muslim workers and youth, who are the most exploited sector of the working class for they are used for the hardest and worst paid jobs. Without them, in France, Germany, etc., the capitalist class would not have enough wage earners to keep its production active. Their organizing their rebellion will be a terrain of great struggles in which we revolutionaries must intervene on the front line. Trump was overturned electorally because he was first beaten by the great American mass mobilizations against police repression and the super-exploitation of the black “minority”. This is not a problem in the developed countries only. It is also reproduced in the semi-colonial countries: in Brazil where the black population is the majority (49.6%) and is also the sector most persecuted by the police “order” repression; in Peru where the pollution created by the uncontrolled exploitation of the mining companies is unloaded on the indigenous peasant communities; in Chile against the Mapuche; etc. Not to speak of Palestine, where the Zionists have locked up in ghettos and super-exploit (and savagely repress) the people, with the active support of U.S. and world imperialism.

Revolutionary socialists must intervene in all these areas of struggle against capitalist barbarism, which has taken a new leap with the Ukrainian war, a sine qua non-condition to win its influence among the working masses with a socialist program

Challenges of the left

The assertion that great popular uprisings did not result in the triumph of a socialist revolution due to the non-existence of a revolutionary party that would have gained mass influence has become almost a crutch of the left-wing parties. This is a plain truth, an “empirical truth”. But it does not advance in explaining why there is not such a thing. It does not provide an orientation to its overcoming.

What prevails in the majority of the left is a democratizing tendency, which expresses an accommodation to the current social order. Although the strategic struggle for a workers’ government is sometimes formally claimed, the orientation and daily political practice are based on progress in the shadow of the capitalist state. Of course, the organizations’ spectrum is very wide and varied, but, in a general way, a common denominator is electoralism and parliamentarism.

An emblematic case, by the way, is that of the Brazilian PSOL. It is a party of tendencies that brings together a large part of the left. It merely functions as an electoral label, alien to direct working-class action and organization. PSOL even includes those sectors that claim to be critical of the orientation of the political formation which was born out of a rupture with the PT but has undergone a long evolution towards the right.

The PSOL calls directly to vote for Lula in the next elections (and its leadership is even preparing to participate in an eventual Lula government). Sectors of the left within the PSOL have coordinated against this policy. They proposed a PSOL candidate, Glauber Braga, who quickly followed the orientation of the PSOL leadership and changed his presidential pre-candidacy for that of deputy. The PSOL course has been decided by its recent executive meeting: merging front with RED (a bourgeois party that actively supported the coup against the government of Dilma Roussef), voting for Lula in the first round of elections, and supporting his ticket with Gerardo Alckmin as vice-president (right-wing opposition leader and coup leader of the former PT government). This has already been sanctioned, all the leftists know it, but, anyway, they do not kick over traces. They remain in the PSOL, negotiating candidacies. This behavior is prolonged in time, becoming a way of political adaptation, dressed up as a critical approach, which has already been going on for 18 years. What explains the permanence in the PSOL is the speculation and the calculation to scratch some positions in the distribution (much of their concern revolves around the candidacies for deputies and councilmen). In Peru also, IS (IWU-FI) militated for a long period the central-left Frente Amplo (Broad Front) of right-wing nature.

This “international” confrontation with the democratizing left is also directly reflected in Argentina. In the recent unitary act of the Left and Worker’s – Unity Front (LW-UF) on May 1st, the Socialist Workers Movement (MST) openly proposed the dissolution of the front for a ” Unique Party of Tendencies” that should be opened to “new realities” (personalities, etc.)

Electoralism runs through the LW-UF itself in Argentina. The struggle the Worker’s Party has taken up aims at extending LW-UF’s camp of action, not only in the electoral field but in all terrains of the class struggle. The recent initiative of calling all the forces to a common action to confront the government’s pact with the IMF broke with the paralysis that dominated -with our opposition- since its foundation. But the turnaround is partial and fundamental divergences remain. Worker’s Party’s proposal to call an LW-UF Congress was rejected by the other three currents. What is under discussion is whether the Left and Worker’s – Unity Front should be a channel that aims at the political irruption and a protagonist intervention of the working class in the national crisis – and that involves and organizes the workers in that struggle – or remain confined as an electoral coalition. The Socialist Workers’ Party (Left Voice in the USA) is characterized by its hostility to the picketers’ movement, which they do not build. This represents a very serious divergence since it is not possible to project the LW-UF as an alternative pole if it turns its back on the most vigorous and dynamic struggle movement in the country.

In turn, the MST is the one that has gone the furthest in a democratizing orientation. Its proposals were clearly for the LW-UF’s dissolution in favor of a class collaboration front with the center-left. It is a new twist in the construction of a “broad left”. The MST has never disavowed this and accuses those parties that do not want to go in that direction of sectarianism.

We are dealing with a key debate of extraordinary relevance if we bear in mind that the institutional and electoral exits have become the most common resource used by the bourgeoisie to divert, deactivate and channel the social outbursts and popular uprisings. The revolutionary left has the enormous challenge of contributing to neutralizing and destroying these maneuvers to defend the continuity of the struggle and popular mobilization in course to lead them to victory.

The war outbreak has highlighted strategic divergences within the left that claims to be revolutionary on an international scale. The position regarding the war has always been a touchstone for the organizations of the workers and the socialist movement on the international terrain. The current war in Ukraine reframes the debate on what should be the workers’ revolutionary political camp and action.

A broad sector of the left has focused on denouncing the condemnation of the Russian invasion. In such orientation, a public “Call” has been issued, signed by international currents that claim to be fourth internationalists – the IWU, of which Socialist Left is a member, the IWL in whose ranks is the Brazilian PSTU, and the International Revolutionary Communist Current (CCRI) that fights for a fifth international. They place themselves in the camp of the “resistance” to the Russian invasion, in a common objective front with the Zelensky government and NATO. They criticize imperialism for not developing a greater punitive action. They advocate “for the severance of diplomatic relations with Russia on the part of all governments”. This is an incitement to all the countries of the world -imperialist and semi-colonial- to join NATO’s war against Russia. It thus converges with the proposal of the Macrist opposition in Argentina: “Because of the invasion, the opposition wants the Government to cut ties with Russia” (Clarín, 15.3)

The organizations that sign this appeal do not oppose, of course, NATO’s arms shipment to Zelensky’s government and army. Rather, they demand it loudly.

These positions of the left are on the same level as the mobilizations taking place in Europe, which supports NATO’s military onslaught against Russia and calls for even more punitive measures. This is quite an involution of the European left which has historically mobilized against NATO military bases on its territories (Spain, Germany, etc.). Now that demand has been replaced by pressure on NATO to increase its war intervention. The left renounces one of the central tenets of revolutionary Marxism against imperialist wars: placing the workers’ enemy within the ruling classes of their own country.

Such a “call” encompass the main position of the international left. It is shared -with variations- by the so-called Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International, by the ISL (which the Argentine MST integrates), and by the current Socialism or Barbarism (which the Argentine MAS integrates), the French NPA, the Brazilian PSOL, etc.

There is a tendency that is repeated in most of these currents.

They make common cause with the right-wing and imperialist offensives against regimes that imperialism wants to overthrow to establish its colonial domination more openly. This is what happened in Venezuela, Syria, and even in Ukraine with the right-wing coup of the Maidan in 2014. And it was also hinted at in Bolivia through the initial support imperialism had for the coup of Añez. Even in Brazil, where they participated in the process that led to the coup that overthrew Dilma Rousseff and opened the way for Bolsonaro’s inauguration. Imperialism takes some isolated elements such as the fight against repression or corruption and transforms them into absoluteness, regardless of the real process of the class struggle. Imperialism has successfully taught us how to use the struggle for democracy – against authoritarianism, against terrorism, against chemical weapons, etc., – as a justification to undertake its reactionary militarist adventures.

There is a minority of the international left (the Rascovsky Center, which includes the EEK of Greece, the DIP of Turkey, Russian organizations, etc.), which is on the opposite side of the aisle. That is, in Russia’s camp, supporting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. They argue that, in doing so, Putin would be confronting the NATO coalition. Directly or indirectly, they liken Putin’s invasion to an anti-imperialist crusade. Both the NATOism and the Putinism of the left are satisfied-justified by publishing in some texts a generic criticism of NATO or Putin. But they directly embroil themselves with one of the two reactionary camps.

Characterizing an imperialist war has very clear practical and political implications, which differ from dealing with the tasks posed in a war of national liberation. The latter is a just war, and it is necessary to support, without hesitation, the oppressed country. But in contemporary warfares, the fundamental enemy of each people is inside its own country. In this case, achieving national liberation in Ukraine is a task that requires not only fighting Putin’s army but also putting an end to the Zelensky government, which acts as a direct agent of Nato. The left must call for a struggle against the war and against the governments that lead it through the international unity of the workers, of Ukraine and Russia in the first place. Russians and Ukrainians must be called to overthrow their respective governments and build workers’ governments. It is necessary, in turn, to develop an energetic international campaign against the military escalation of the major powers, which has objectively put on the agenda the question of a new world war.

It is not a question of raising pacifist and/or abstract disarmament positions. In Germany, it is necessary to demand the repeal of the 100 billion euro extra budget for military spending. And so on in all countries. Withdrawal of all NATO bases in each country, rupture with NATO and the IMF. No payment of the foreign debts that force “adjustments” against the workers are used to finance the NATO war. We must demand the lifting of all economic sanctions and blockades against Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and other countries attacked by imperialism.

War as such, and even more the perspective of a world war, has been absent in several international analyses of the left. At the Latin American Conference held in 2020, which brought together more than 50 left organizations and parties, the IWU-FI explicitly rejected the prospect of war, pointing out the validity of the ” linkage ” between the U.S. and China. It is not only a question of insufficiency or errors of characterization on the part of the democratizing Left (on whether Russia is or is not an imperialist power, etc.) but rather conveying and adapting to the imperialist pressure on the field of “progressivism” and the Left (as happened at the beginning of the capitalist restoration with “glasnost”, etc.).

War is the most forceful corroboration of the era’s catastrophic character, contrary to the characterizations most of the left have been raising while scornfully branding as catastrophists those of us who vindicate this position. What has predominated is a biased vision of the capitalist crisis, underestimating its scope and magnitude, ignoring or overshadowing the capitalist contradictions’ explosive character and the inevitable tendency of capitalism to resolve them through force. The capitalist catastrophe paves the way for wars, but also for social revolution. Far from making way for stability, what lies ahead is a convulsive period, prone to the creation of revolutionary situations. This brings to the order of the day the creation of combat parties that are a tool to intervene in all facets of the class struggle and that aim at transforming the working class into an alternative of power. This is a different and opposite path to the current politics of the left in which movementism has prospered – that is, broad parties and diffuse political formations in which class frontiers are erased. “In opposition to the projection of mere referents or electoral figures, we promote the formation of political working-class cadres. Rather than just publishing left-wing propaganda, we promote the creation of party political organs, which will be a means to carry out revolutionary agitation and propaganda. The next stage calls for a party struggle – that is, a struggle that must be waged through agitation, propaganda and organization of the workers and youth vanguard” (“A revolutionary program and strategy for intervening in Latin America and the United States”).

These premises extracted from the contribution presented by the Worker’s Party and several other Latin American organizations at the Latin American Conference are still valid.

We are aware of the pitfalls and difficulties we have encountered.

We have not remained immune to the impact of the left crisis in our own ranks. The crisis of the CRFI was analyzed and characterized in our congresses and materials. We vindicated the resolution adopted by the 27th Congress (“The CRFI and the struggle for the Revolutionary International”). The regrouping that we achieved on the occasion of the Latin American Conference has refluxed. The organizations that attended have not been able to emerge from marginality and some of them have abandoned the field of class independence. They have not been exempt from the pressures of bourgeois nationalism, of the center-left and, in a general way, the pressure exerted by the capitalist state.

We are aware of these limits, but at the same time, of the opportunities and potentialities of the situation. We will replicate the same method with which we are intervening in our borders (united front, direct action, class independence, the frank debate, and clarification and delimitation of positions) in the international work and action in the opening stage given a regrouping of forces of revolutionary character, that is, the re-foundation of the IV International.

The 28th Congress, both its previous deliberations and the Congress itself, are a field to develop this task in which we bet to arouse the interest of the workers and youth vanguard of the country and to engage currents and tendencies with which we have been having an exchange and taking political initiatives in common, in Latin America and at international level.

Unanimously voted

National Committee, 05/21/22

 

Translated by Sofía Caruso

Versión en español