By PROF. JOSE MARIA SISON
Chairperson, International League of Peoples’ Struggle
1 May 2010
On this glorious day of the international proletariat, we, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, join the workers and peoples of the world in celebrating their struggles, sacrifices and victories. It is of the greatest importance to raise the banner of proletarian unity and struggle against exploitation and oppression by imperialism and all reaction. Once again, we renew our resolve to dismantle the monopoly capitalist system and replace it with a just, democratic and peaceful new world in which socialism prevails.
Crisis of Global Capitalism Continues to Worsen
The enemies of the working class and the oppressed peoples do not cease to demonstrate their contempt for the masses with their lies and their violence. The mouthpieces of the monopoly bourgeoisie are busy proclaiming the end of the global economic and financial crisis, and celebrating the so-called beginnings of recovery. Not only is this claim of recovery patently false, it actually signals a heightened offensive against the workers and peoples of the world.
Bourgeois economists are prating about rising GDP figures, rallies in the stock market, the “stabilization” of the financial system, increasing bank profits and more business activity. In reality, the so-called recovery is artificial and temporary as it is solely reliant on trillions of dollars handed out by the state to the biggest banks and failing conglomerates as bailout money. This is the largest-ever simultaneous raid of public treasuries by the wealthiest stratum of the capitalist class which uses the money to rake in more profits from speculative investments.
Conditions in the real economy remain grim, especially in terms of rising unemployment and the dismal living conditions of the working masses.
Tens of millions have lost their jobs or livelihoods since 2008 when the worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s erupted in the heartland of the global capitalist system. Millions more have been kept employed but on a part-time basis, with lower wages and ready to be axed at the bosses’ say so. In the US alone, millions of families are set to lose their homes in the coming year. The monopoly bourgeoisie is seizing on mass unemployment and profound social insecurity to cut costs, take back hard-won workers’ benefits and boost profits.
In the underdeveloped countries, the social consequences have been more devastating to those economies most deeply penetrated by international monopoly capital as foreign investments, credit, so-called aid, export revenues and remittances have fallen along with the economies of the advanced capitalist countries. Chronic economic depression is compounded by the multiple crises generated by the monopoly capitalist system including the food, water and ecological crises.
While the masses face a bleak future, the managers of finance oligarchy responsible for the crisis continue to raise their share of the loot. The top 25 managers of US hedge funds took home a record $25.33 billion in 2009 — greater than the GDP of about 100 nations combined. They “earned” these obscene sums not from production but from mere speculation, specifically by correctly betting that the US government under Obama would shore up Wall Street at virtually any cost.
Obama certainly did not disappoint his financiers. Not only has he continued to funnel trillions to the finance sector, his administration has also scuttled any attempt to apply restraints on the predatory operations of finance capital, despite calls even from reform-minded bourgeois economists. He is generating the biggest kind of bubble in the form of public debt and is engaged in deficit spending that promotes monopoly profit-taking but not employment and economic recovery.
