Behind the scenes lies only exploitation and environmental degradation

A devastating social and economic crisis, a land tormented by natural disaster but made worse by speculative construction, where politicians who have put people and places hit by the earthquake under military control in order to carry out their so-called reconstruction without too many prying eyes. All this forms the backcloth to the hundreds of millions of euros thrown away to stage the nth parade of the world’s greatest powers. Such is the scenario in the Abruzzo where the last thing the population need is this filthy display.

To the heads of the greatest imperialist powers have been added those of the emerging imperialisms, who are claiming a greater say in sharing out the loot from the exploitation of the world’s wage labourers, poor peasants, and an enormous number of the planet’s dispossessed.

These representatives of imperialist brigandage will make solemn declarations which no-one, and certainly not they, believe. Behind the group photo the ferocious competition of their various interests remains, as will the huge problems which are shaking the very structure of the capitalist system. The consequences of these rivalries are a steady worsening in the living conditions of billions and an increased threat to the Earth’s environment.

These problems all have the same root cause, the difficulty of realising satisfactory profit rates in relation to the capital invested. The “solutions” to this problem can be summarised in an increase in the rate of exploitation, in economic, social and political oppression and in the increasing number of conflict “hotspots”:

• job insecurity, lay offs, direct wage cuts as well as the theft of “indirect” wages (via cuts in the welfare state where it still exists), in a competitive reduction in global wage rates;
• a destruction of natural resources and of the environment, an increase in poverty and in the number of the starving, not only in the so-called developing countries, but also in the developed world;
• abnormal financial speculation as they attempt to create money arising from the productive sphere by appropriating the savings and pensions of the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie.

But neither this greater exploitation, nor speculation and despoliation of the environment, nor even the worsening of the living conditions of the mass of the people, have been able to resolve the capitalist crisis, of which the bursting of the sub-prime bubble is only the most obvious manifestation.

The only reason for capitalism’s existence is profit, to which everything else is subordinated. This is why safeguarding the environment will only be taken seriously if it become a real going concern; this is why the struggle against poverty in Africa is just a smokescreen, because it is only by increasing poverty that capitalism can develop; this is why any attempt to reform the capitalist system is an illusion, despite the good faith of the many who rightly hate it but remain mixed up in unlikely projects to humanise the system. The market is a wild beast which cannot be domesticated and will always remain so.

Only class struggle, a real one which opposes co-existence with the bosses, which overcomes the union-government matrix that protects the system, that suffocates wildcat struggles {the only kind which frighten the bosses) at birth, surrounds them and isolates them. Only a class struggle which tears off the cloak of resignation and apathy that weighs on the consciousness of the workers can at first hinder, and later halt, the mechanisms of exploitation of which the G8 is only the theatrical outward expression.

Only a revolutionary party rooted in the class - a party which has always rejected Stalinism and its heirs - can pick up and carry forward the deep, but until now, latent social unease as well as the different manifestations of the class struggle. And, as we sincerely hope, such a political party will finally emerge with the single aim of overthrowing this inhuman social system.