A historical crisis and a crossroads

The worst economic crisis of the capitalist system so far does not mean that it is the last. In any case, it serves to clarify some issues in this regard.

The first point is that this mode and its production relations are exhausted. We already described its deterioration in the last 50 years in an article from the year 2014, that continues to deepen even in countries such as China (which entered the world market at the end of the 20th century) or India and they were that supported some growth in the last years. From 2011 to 2018, the world economy grew an average of 3.4% thanks to the average maintained by China and India.

Second, this current crisis is the product of an impossible race in which the driver accelerates the pace, leaving the Quantitive Easy and raising the interest rates of the FED, which may lose control and cause an acute crisis in the global economy or slow it down because the same fears of recession return. This schizophrenia measured in recent years obtained the same general result, the economy is in recession, the gap between rich and poor is growing and economic concentration is deepening. In other words, stunning wealth in a few hands and enormous poverty for many others.

We were few…

As if this were not enough, the covid-19 and its pandemic appear. According to the OECD, the forecasts made in 2019 plummeted.

Third, the total world debt, that is public plus private (divided in turn into corporate and home) is according to an article by Alfredo Zaiat de Pagina12 (March 29) of 253.2 trillion dollars, that is to say 322% of world GDP which in 2019 was 78.63 trillion dollars. World GDP in 2012 was $ 71.28 trillion. That is, it grew only 10% from 2012 to 1018.

Debt + coronavirus raises a scenario of "defaults" everywhere. The debt crisis has reached such a point that even the IMF itself states that the debts of the poorest countries must be forgiven with that body and the World Bank.

Fourth, in this situation, all the other variables fall apart. The price of oil and commodities, trade in general and wages are sinking, while poverty and great concentration are growing.

They lost the compass

But what is most striking is how the whole of the bourgeoisie that owns the most concentrated financial capital has lost its way. She has a financial derivative (fictitious) of 600 trillion dollars according to the Doctor in Economics Javier Ortega in an article on Pagina12 (May 9) that have maturities over the years. Anyway, this could not be cancelled by 7 global GDPs according to what it says there.

This sector is the one behind Trump, Boris Johson, Bolsonaro, Macri, Lenin Moreno, Vargas Llosa and all etc., etc. that follow them. In Argentina they reached the ridiculous height of stirring the ghost of communism and threaten an invasion of Venezuela. They are those who do not accept the backward movement of the USA as the main world power and try to attract a sector of the mass movement to create a critical mass that allows them to stick well to the right with a McCarthyist speech. They are the ones who want to save capitalism with the cane where they can or prepare for it where they are still weak.

There is another sector to which the Pope and progressive governments and many major economists capitalists in the world subscribe and even and part of the IMF, who propose a way out of the crisis in which all would pay for the crisis, the workers in first place and with a little less profit the most concentrated sectors. They are the firefighters of the system. Let's say in passing that this is a game where the ground moves and each other can change places.

Right now - with more force than in the first decade of this century - the Keynesian sectors resurface along with those who propose greater state intervention, which ultimately saves the financial sectors and the big bourgeoisie. This position strengthens China and Russia, which by being born from the old bureaucracies and establishing strong bourgeois bureaucratic states (see article All roads lead to Putin) end up strengthening their arguments.

This weakening of the Yankee and European imperialisms occurs for objective reasons and China, along with Russia, take the opportunity. This huge WORLD RIFT is a great opportunity for those of us who want to get rid of the capitalist and patriarchal system. And it is reflected in each country with its particularities.

The USA and its hypercentralized world regime

The imperialist regime is not the regime that exists only in the United States, it is a world regime, with a high degree of centralization. In their heyday they had military dictators who guaranteed them. We have explained this in several previous articles. Today that regime is hanging by a thread and this is the cause of his desperate political intervention in each country where it continues to grow the "rift" between them and those who do not respond directly them.

The weaker it is, the more it threatens and the more it raises its "anti-communism". Their acts of arrogance and intimidation show nothing but their enormous political weakness. It is for this reason alone that we are facing a possible fact that would have enormous consequences in the lives of the peoples of the world, that is, that this debacle would definitely become their complete defeat and stop being the "owner" of the world.

China today does not have that capacity for centralization, for having a world regime capable of producing policies for its own domain. For the moment, but it is so. His gradual rise as a global influencer is obtained through trade and investment, but he does not yet have that network of multinationals and the financial system of the western world. His entire policy must be studied in depth, because although the theory of socialism in one only country has failed as a way to overcome capitalism as a world system, the Chinese bureaucracy set out to overcome capitalism on its own ground with a large bourgeois bureaucratic apparatus. . Will we see a world capitalist phase led by bourgeois bureaucrats? This can give air to the petty bourgeois mentalities in large layers of the political leadership of that social extract in the world. But that could not happen without a defeat of the capitalist big bourgeoisie, especially financial, international. We must not discard this hypothesis and it would be important that it be studied. It would be similar to that exception that Trotsky raised about the possibility that petty bourgeois leaderships are forced by the pressure of imperialism and defensively to expropriate the bourgeoisie in a country, although now no need to do so.

But beyond from this hypothesis, the important thing is that between the debacle of Yankee and European imperialism and the supposed seizure of control worldwide by another power, there will be a vacuum in various parts of the world in which there will be enormous struggles for control of the state and revolutionary crises as well. We cannot rule this out even in the very heart of imperialism, the United States.

The revolutionary Left at a crossroads

Anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal forces worldwide have to seriously consider what would be the best policy in this situation. There are a great many forces, scattered, unrelated, some with fledgling international organizations, revolutionary socialists, anti-capitalists, and anti-patriarchal. But none of them alone can rise to be a revolutionary leadership with international weight. Unfortunately there is a huge weakness in them that some recognize but it is not enough with that.

The mass movement has shown enormous capacity for struggle and mobilization throughout 2019 throughout the world and even begins to mobilize during this pandemic. This objective reality collides with the revolutionary leadership's crisis.

The need of the moment forces us to look for all possible ways to build or rebuild the international that we need. To me that is to understand that we need build a Unique Revolutionary Front at the international level between all the socialist, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal revolutionary forces. To make the necessary efforts, at least starting among those currents that have a common political tradition and root.

Without critical mass, it is impossible to obtain a force of gravity sufficient to consider the idea of ​​even addressing the working masses and all sectors oppressed, starting with the struggle of women, oppressed for more than 5000 years.

Although during this pandemic we have the need to observe social distancing so as not to be infected, a virtual meeting should be held between the leaderships face to the militancy and sympathizers, in which a policy for the present can be discussed, leaving aside the disagrees of the past which has been the cause of a constant division. If we are going to press our finger on the wound of the mistakes made, we are not going anywhere. Today's struggles unite different currents on the street, it is imperative to go one step further and try by all means to achieve an international force that intervenes in this global rift. If we do not succeed, each force will be just one more testimony to a stage of the class struggle and the potential revolutionary policies that could have taken place.

Fabio Marucci