The League for the Fifth International have published this draft call to shut down the G8 and are circulating it amongst anti-imperialist organisations and networks. The G8 protests will take place in Germany between the 2nd and 8th June.
The G8’s war against the People of the World
Hiding behind their 15 km long and 2,5 meter high “fence,” guarded by hundreds of special security forces and 12.000 to 15.000 ordinary cops, with warships cruising offshore and the air-force maintaining an exclusion zone above them– the leaders of the most 8 most powerful countries in the world will meet from the 6th to 8th June. It is no surprise that every year, they prepare for their summit like a war. That is because they are waging war – against us the working people and youth of the world.
Since the turn of the century their wars have increased both in number and in the tally of thousands killed and maimed.
The US – British led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US- armed and aided Zionist attack on Lebanon
The imperialist interventions in Africa – the US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia The EU intervention in Congo.
The ongoing EU and US occupation of Kosovo.
Bush and his allies intend to add to this list in the months and years ahead.
The assembly of forces for an air-war against Iran is underway. The targets will be not only nuclear power research centres but the country’s military installations and infrastructure as well.
The US, the EU and Israel have joined forces to demand the removal of the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine
Syria and North Korea have also been threatened with attack if they fail to do the bidding of the USA and EU powers.
There are plans for a UN/NATO intervention in Sudan/Dafur.
Bush is attempting “one last push” to crush the Iraqi resistance, Blair is transferring his troops to Afghanistan in the fond belief that “this war is winnable.”
Despite having its hands full in the Middle East, the White House continues to threaten Venezuela and blockade Cuba
The war “at home”
This ongoing war to establish an imperialist new world order has been declared to be decades long – even “unending”. This war has “come home” too in the form of massive attacks on civil and democratic rights. The lists of “terrorist organisations” include dozens of national liberation movements fighting dictatorships or occupying powers.
Thus the EU, the US and their allies target organisations like the FARC, the Basque resistance, the Palestine liberation movements, Turkish and Kurdish left wing organisations. All resistance against oppressors and occupiers, whether armed or not, is termed terrorism. Its most horrendous expression is the “extra-ordinary rendition” of prisoners of war or mere suspects to countries where they will be brutally tortured. Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp outside the reach of national or international law.
In the front line of repression in the imperialist “democracies” are long term resident communities from abroad as well more recent immigrant workers, asylum seekers, the Muslim communities, all of which can be smeared as terrorist suspects, subjected to detention or deportation without normal rights.
But this is not the only aspect of our rulers’ war “at home.” In every country they are waging a war on all the economic, social and political gains of the working classes, the peasants, and the unemployed. Indeed through the pressure of the international financial institutions and their agents, the capitalist ruling classes, even in the countries exploited by imperialism the same neoliberal offensive is underway.
Privatisation, “off-shoring”, de-regulation, wage reduction, increasing unemployment and insecure working, form the main thrusts of the neoliberal offensive. The Doha trade round has opened a new round of “liberalisation” of world trade, a new round of forced selling off of state assets, of opening up the natural resources of the so-called third world to imperialist multinationals.
A system in growing crisis
For all their talk about a “better future”, the G 8 stand for a system which will lead to an environmental disaster in the decades ahead, if they and their system are not stopped.
The European Union under its German presidency has set the agenda of a reopening the so-called “constitutional process”, i.e. pushing through the neo-liberal constitution rejected in France and Holland in 2005. They are speeding up the process of fulfilling the Lisbon Agenda to make capitalist Europe the most powerful and dynamic capitalist block, i.e. a real challenger to the US Empire in the strive for world dominance.
The G8 represent the rulers of the world. But their rule, almighty as it might appear, is increasingly wracked by its own inner contradictions and crises. An ever smaller number of huge, multi-national corporations –Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Siemens, Nissan, ExxonMobil – all driven to ever sharper competition in the hunt for profits, seek pull down all barriers to exploitation: the independence of states, protective legislation, state social welfare and education systems.
The stagnating profit rates in America, Europe, Japan, have led to massive outflows of capital to China, India, Eastern Europe, in search of “cheap” labour, raw materials and new markets. But this has not reversed the over-accumulation of capital in the heartlands of the system. On the contrary is sharpening the inner contradictions of the capitalist system: the competition between the large monopolies, the attacks on semi-colonial countries and the growing rivalry between the imperialist powers. The unimaginable wealth for the few and increasing impoverishment of the mass of the world’s population go hand in hand.
Women have been in the firing line of globalisation. Neoliberal reforms have slashed social welfare systems, public provision of nurseries, education and healthcare which women caring for children and the elderly in the family home depend on. In Africa and Asia AIDS and other epidemics have thrown huge burdens on women, with collapsing public health services Globalisation however has drawn many millions more women into the workplaces in China and South Asia, albeit to work long hours at bare subsistence wages, i.e. sweated labour. In “civilised” Europe Muslim women and young girls are hounded for wearing Islamic dress. In countries where patriarchal and religious authority is strong they are denied social and political equality in the name of religion.
In the imperialist heartlands, in good times at least, tax cuts and privileges for the skilled élite of the labour force and the professional strata create a “mass base”, a fake public opinion favourable to their reforms and wars. On this stratum the reformist socialist, communist and labour parties rest. But these parties mass membership is fast shrivelling and they are becoming discredited to their electors by their subservience to neoliberalism and imperialist war, especially when they are in government.
Africa – a continent, constantly on the agenda of the G8, the IMF and other imperialist institutions – is being poisoned by the neoliberal medicine of the IMF and the European and North American “aid donors”. In reality they are pumping valuable mineral and agricultural resources as well as debt repayments of the poorest continent.
Even where the world economy is rapidly expanding as in China and India, it does so on the basis of super-exploitation of the working class, going hand in hand with a “surplus population” of millions and the massive destruction of soil, the pollution of rivers and the emission of toxic gasses.
In Europe mass unemployment, low paid work, destruction of social security systems, cruel racism, the creation of a “fortress” Europe – are a daily experience for millions, even in the “upswing” of the present economic conjuncture.
Only the cynical media hacks of the capitalists can see a rosy future for such a system, can discover the forward march of “democracy” in Iraq or Afghanistan. Only the Social Democratic and Labour parties and the NGOs can imagine this system can be “humanised” and civilised by appealing to the G8 and other imperialist institutions to ”make poverty history.”
No. Global capitalism, imperialism, is a system of increasing exploitation, of permanent wars, torture and occupations, ever more barbaric methods to secure the world dominance of a handful of imperialist powers. Its failure to seriously address the issue of environmental degradation, which through climate change threatens the peoples of the world with increasing “natural” catastrophes – hurricanes, flooding, desertification, epidemics, etc. will ensure a terrible fate for coming generations unless power is taken from the billionaires by the billions.
The resistance is growing
But today’s global capitalism also is a world of struggles, of mass resistance, of revolutions; ones which increasingly challenge the imperialist and capitalist world order.
In Europe, the 2005 referenda in France and Netherlands on the neolibeal EU Constitution opened a political crisis of the imperialist unification of Europe. The struggles of the French youth in the banlieus, the struggles against the CPE, the internationally co-ordinated strikes of the dockers against the neo-liberal port package showed that victories are possible – if we use methods of class struggle. If we press on from partial victories to challenge the very rule of the bankers and business tycoons.
In this resistance women have played a role right in the forefront of struggles. In South Asia women workers in the textile industries and sweatshops have organised and fought back heroically. In Latin America women have played a vanguard role in the mass popular movements against neoliberal governments, privatisation of water and IMF programmes. In every struggle on every continent a new generation of young fighters is rebuilding the forces of revolution.
The armed resistance and defence in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan have lead to important political defeats for the US and their Zionist gendarme, Israel. They have demonstrated again that even the most powerful armies and high-tech weaponry can be defeated by determined resistance rooted in the masses.
The revolutionary situations in Latin America over the last years – from Argentina, to Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico – have not only shaken US-hold over its supposed “backyard” in an manner unforeseen a decade ago, it has also seen the development of mass movements of workers, peasants, indigenous people, the rural and urban poor, putting the need for a “socialist project”, for a co-ordinated world wide struggle against imperialism and for a new international openly on the spot.
What we can do in Heiligendamm
At the G8 summit in Heiligendamm from 6-8 June, the presidents, prime ministers or chancellors of the most powerful capitalist countries will certainly promote themselves as “saviours of the world”. What they want to secure, however, is their own ownership and domination over this world, the huge profits of the large multi-national capitals, their free access to the world market and their “right” to enforce this by any means.
That is what they mean by “improving the financial stability”, “freedom of investment” and “securing of energy resources”; that is why the Middle East, Afghanistan, Sudan are the hot spots where the imperialists want to “secure” their rule.
When they speak of “security”, they mean their security and how to prevent our struggles from being successful, how to destroy our gains and movement, how to defeat us.
Therefore we want to mobilise as many workers, youth, migrants, women, activists from all countries against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm. We call an international mass demonstration on 2 June and we build for a massive anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist internationalist contingent at the demonstration. We also call for mass participation in the days of actions, the attempt to blockade against the summit and the military air base near Rostock, a major NATO base in northern Europe.
We will actively participate in the actions and debates, promoting the need for struggle.
Our struggle against the G8 and the system they defend does not start with the mobilisation against the summit, nor will it end at the summit.
The G 8 are an international co-ordination of the ruling classes of the major imperialist powers, where they try to reconcile their own conflicts, define their common goals, work out a strategy to increase exploitation and plunder in search of further profits.
We – the workers, the youth, the oppressed – lack such a coordination. Despite the successes of the last years, our struggles are too often miss-lead, sold out or lost because they remain isolated.
Over the last decade, many efforts have been made and started to bring our struggles together, to coordinate them – for example., in social forums on a world or continental level.
But, despite the hundreds of thousands which participated in them, they have remained talking shops because they are dominated by reformist and left-bourgeois politics and not by the rank and file. At the G8, just as they did in Edinburgh in 2005, they will try to direct the mobilisation into dead end of giving neoliberal capitalism a human phase, calling on them to reform or enlarge the G8, rather than fighting to break up this thieves kitchen and the system they stand for.
These misleaders within our ranks – trade union bureaucrats, leaders of the European Left Party or the Brasilian PT, chief executives of the big NGOs, academics from Attac or populist leaders in the semi-colonial world – are politically responsible for obstructing and frustrating resistance against capitalism becoming more coordinated, determined and international in character. Today we face the prospect of a new war and a new neoliberal offensive within the EU in almost the same state of unpreraredness as we did in 2001-02. Once again we will have to improvise. Once again it will be the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist forces that will take the lead. But this time we need to create more permanent and more democratic fighting organisations
To bring about these changes, we call on all those forces committed to class struggle politics, to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle to unite—
– to build co-ordinations of struggles on a global, continental or regional, on a national level.
– to build fighting organs, which draw in all sections of the exploited and oppressed and which are under their control – like action committees of the French youth in their struggle against the CFE or like the commune of Oaxaca.
But in order to take on the imperialist system, to resist the imperialist offensive – we need not only better organisation and co-ordination, we also need a clear positive alternative to capitalism as a system – and not just neoliberalism. Capitalism in its imperialist stage will not solve a single one of the problems facing mankind, including the mounting threat of a global environmental catastrophe.
Only, if we overcome this system based on the scramble for profit, on merciless competition, a system inseparably linked to war, hunger, poverty and environmental destruction, and replace it with one based on conscious planning. We can organise life so as to meet the essential needs of all, abolish classes and eradicate all forms of social inequality based on gender, racism, national or ethnic identity.
If we will this end we must will the means to bring it about. We need the political tools capable of destroying the old world and building up the new: a new Youth International, an International Working Class Women’s movement and above all a new mass working class International, worthy of its predecessors, fighting against imperialism and for socialist revolution!
Another world is possible – a socialist world. We can reach it only through world revolution.