May Day 2010

[Hannah Bell]

May Day 2010 takes place amid unmistakable signs of the resurgence of the class struggle. In country after country, workers confront rising unemployment, the evisceration of essential services such as health and education, the erosion of working conditions and attacks on basic democratic rights....

The economic turmoil that broke out on Wall Street has entered a second, more virulent stage. The trillions of dollars pumped by administrations around the world into the major banks and corporations to prevent their collapse now appear on government books as massive sovereign debts. The universal response in ruling circles is that working people must be forced to pay for a crisis for which they bear no responsibility.

Initial attention is focused on Greece... But with Spain and Portugal already under pressure from financial markets, economic commentators are nervously speculating where the “contagion” will spread next...

The fundamental contradictions of capitalism — between socialised production and the private ownership of the means of production, and between the global economy and the outmoded capitalist nation state system — first identified by Karl Marx more than 150 years ago, have burst to the surface of economic and political life...Class tensions are rapidly sharpening...At the same time, the economic crisis is exacerbating tensions between the major powers as each seeks to extricate itself at the expense of its rivals...Inter-imperialist rivalries are fuelling the rise of militarism and war...

Workers in every country confront the same enemies—the globally organised corporations, banks and financial institutions...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/pers-m01.shtml



Consider the extent of what has occurred. Between July 2007 and March 2009, equity prices of global banks fell by 75 percent, a loss in market capitalisation of $5 trillion.... the loss of global wealth was over $25 trillion or almost 45 percent of global GDP.

...state actions have restored the position of the banks. But they have not boosted the economy...The figures on the rise in government indebtedness give an indication of how much has to be extracted from the global working class to pay for this bailout operation. In 67 countries, the IMF has forecast that public debt to GDP ratios will rise from 80 percent in 2007 to 125 percent by 2014...

Now we come to the significance of these figures for the political economy of the next period. We can see more clearly the meaning of the fiscal crisis of the state. All government spending on social services, health, education etc. is, in the final analysis, a deduction from the surplus value available to capital. The cuts in social spending now being implemented by capitalist governments around the world, together with attacks on the social position of the working class, are the means by which the state will appropriate the surplus value needed to fund the bailout of the banks and financial institutions.

This process is creating the objective foundations for a new period of revolutionary struggles. The confrontation cannot be averted — there is not some new technology, or fresh source of cheap labour, that can pump the vast quantities of surplus value into the capitalist economy needed to match the wealth already handed to the banks. The capitalist state must claw back massive amounts of surplus value previously appropriated for social spending. In short, we have the emerging objective conditions for social revolution. The capitalist state cannot continue to rule in the old way and the working class cannot live under the new regime...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/bnrt-a12.shtml

[Hannah Bell]

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