Comrades!

Globalisation is a term dear to the bourgeoisie and its mass media but we’d prefer to call it what it really is - imperialism. With this term we means the present mode of existence of capitalism which sees the undisputed domination of finance capital on the one hand and the capacity to distribute throughout the entire planet the different stages of the process of production (from tinned tomatoes to cars or toys) on the other. ⁽¹⁾

Domination of finance capital is not the command of an unique centre, because the financial capital is made of many capitals that link up with centres of imperialist interests and aggregations of States that are competing and fighting each other.

The present phase of capitalism coincides with, and is also a response to, the crisis of the cycle of capitalist accumulation, or rather the process of valorisation of capital.

That means that capital is able to extort even lower profit rates out of production processes and the exploitation of the working class.The only way for saving the profit rates is the increase of the exploitation by means of the squeeze of the wages and/or the shift of the productions where the wage is lower. There are no alternatives to these processes, while remaining inside the capitalist mode of production. The only alternative known by the capital is the imperialistic war. And as in all crises of the cycle of accumulation, even this one, it reopens the perspective of the historic alternative: imperialist war or proletarian revolution.

Of the two previously competing blocs, NATO an the Warsaw Pact, the latter has disappeared.

The implosion of the Soviet imperialist bloc, misrepresented as the collapse of ... socialism, has thrown the line up of the former into confusion, opening up the possibility of a reshuffling of the cards which is fatally leading to the formation of new blocs on the basis of a rupture in the former NATO front.

If anyone thinks that the G8 Summit is to make an agreement for the government of the world in a hypothetical super-imperialism they are making a big mistake. In every summit the Big Eight always end up arguing. This time at Genoa the Europeans appear a little stronger thanks to the agreements reached in Gothenburg on apparently key issues such as the environment and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as on those less trumpeted but equally important issues such as the world steel trade.

Comrades!

A big new trap is looming, through which the American and European bourgeoisie - independently of any splits, even in Europe - will call on their respective proletariats to form up around them against the enemy in order to defend “sacred national interests” or the equally sacred ideologies. The strength of the present anti-globalisation movements is linked to their ability not to break the line-ups which imperialism is preparing. Bush has already sounded his siren-call to the AFL-CIO and the American steel industry. Their anti-globalisation demands , he claims, coincide with the need to protect US steel and the trade balance. The condition for a large civil movement to resist imperialist divisions would be the adoption of a class viewpoint. It must be transformed into a real anticapitalist movement for the communist revolution. Only a strong revival of working class initiative, even if only against the very heavy attacks of capital can drag these movements of so-called civil society onto a solidly anti-capitalist terrain.

And for this the priority for revolutionaries is to contribute - as far as possible to the subjective forces - to revive proletarian struggle autonomously from the trades union policy of class collaboration and from the unionist logics.

But even the class revival cannot have any prospect of victory without a political organisation equipped to lead the titanic struggle of the future: the international party of the proletariat. Too many times we have seen the objectively class movements (from the Poland of August ’80 to the British miners movement...) to surrender to the sirens of the reformism and to the flatteries of the political radical bourgeois market, cause of the showy absence of an adequate political force, organized on the revolutionary programme. The necessity of the international revolutionary party of the working class is even more imperative.

And this is why we call on the vanguard of the working class to join and strengthen the sections and sympathising organisations of the IBRP.

(1) We would also remind confusionists that imperialism is no more than a

phase of the capitalist mode of production. It is not a... policy.