The last few months have given rise to a succession of local crises of astonishing magnitude. These crises are the occasion for mass movements within which we hope wiil evolve in ways that attack the system.
The Venezuelan election, hijacked by Maduro, is causing welcome clarifications on the left, which could lead to the emergence of an alternative to the right and the bureaucracy. In Bangladesh, the mass movement against quotas has overcome the autocratic power of Sheikh Hasina, who had been in power for 15 years, opening a phase in which a left-wing protest could finally exist. Similarly, the victory of Masoud Pezeshkian in Iran is a symptom of the regime’s difficulties in maintaining its rule.
In major imperialist powers like the United States, Britain, France and even Germany, the situation is very unstable, with surges of the far right, illustrated by the anti-immigrant pogroms in Britain and the very high scores of the far right elsewhere – the National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany, in first place with 32.9 per cent of the vote in the state of Thuringia. Faced with this threat, counter-trends exist: anti-racist mobilizations in Great Britain, the surge of the left with the New Popular Front in France, the pressure that led to the replacement of Biden by Kamala Harris for the US presidential election, etc. This does not mechanically produce anti-capitalist alternatives, but it contributes to renewing debates on the left and mobilising working classes that have long remained passive.
The Permanent Crisis
What is increasingly apparent is that there is very significant instability in many countries around the world. In the background, there is the deep crisis of the system, and in particular its economic dimension, which is getting worse every month. Thus, in Saxony – a German state where the far right has also obtained very high scores – the electronics giant Intel is expected to freeze or even abandon its project for a giant factory. Sales of electric cars fell by 37 per cent in Germany in July, and Volkswagen is considering closing factories to cope with the very significant decline in its profit margins. Registrations have fallen in France, by 24 per cent compared to August 2023.
More generally, productivity is stagnating or even shrinking in the European Union, a hundred countries in the global south are close to ceasing payments and growth in China and India can no longer exceed 5 or 6 per cent.
The budgetary consequences were not long in coming: the French Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, recommended making immediate savings of 16 billion euros on the current budget, while the European Union had launched an “excessive deficit” procedure against the country, whose public deficit had reached 5.5 per cent of GDP.
The System’s Margins Disappear
In this context, the management of the various national economies are becoming more and more problematic, class divisions are exacerbated and there is sharper confrontation between increasingly authoritarian bourgeois currents and the workers’ movement. This sometimes leads to the workers’ movement becomiing reenergized. For revolutionaries, the challenge is to combine different dimensions: the construction of broad democratic unitary dynamics, the development of self-activity and the organization of the working class, and an alternative project to capitalism.
The difficulties are significant because in many countries there are no independent working-class political currents, for historical or democratic reasons. Thus, even in Great Britain or the United States, it is difficult, for example, to build a left that is independent of the Democratic Party or Labour when the electoral system eliminates dissenting voices. In France, we see with the New Popular Front the challenge of combining this broad, anti-fascist front with the construction of a more radical left, more independent of the institutions that manage capitalism, along with the need to bring together unitary revolutionaries to prepare for the confrontations that lie ahead.
Ultimately, in rapidly changing situations where conflicts are exacerbated, it is a matter of working jointly to build class independence, through militant activity, along with the construction of organizations that have a revolutionary project that they discuss and argue for within the left.
Source >> International Viewpoint
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