2023: The global capitalist crisis and the growing offensive of the international working class

1. The celebration of the beginning of the New Year will be brief. The old year has passed into history, but its crises persist and will intensify. As 2023 begins, the COVID-19 pandemic is entering its fourth year with no end in sight. The US-NATO war against Russia continues to escalate. The world capitalist economy is afflicted simultaneously by ruinous inflation and recession. The institutions of bourgeois democracy in the advanced capitalist countries—first and foremost, in the United States—are breaking down. The American political system is grappling, with little success, with the aftershocks emanating from the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Right-wing and neo-fascist movements are steadily gaining ground throughout the world. As living standards for the laboring masses plunge globally, the class struggle is intensifying and breaking out of the control of the official trade unions.

[wsws.org]

{11. In response to these economic and geopolitical pressures, beginning in November the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abandoned Zero-COVID. In the span of one month, it ended all lockdowns, mass testing, contact tracing, quarantine and isolation protocols, and travel restrictions.

12. In just the first three weeks of December, it is estimated that 248 million people were infected with COVID-19 in China, 100 times the number infected in the first three years of the pandemic. The majority of China’s 1.4 billion people are expected to be infected by March 2023. Estimates of the number of people who will die range from 1 million to 2 million.}

And what was the response from western nations? More demonization towards the Chinese government. When the vast amount of the population understanding nature towards social concerns and willingly complying to lock downs to benefit their society best interest, western governments demonized the Chinese government unjustly. Then after applying hyperbole interferences from within to produce widespread protest, further pushing the Chinese government to relax it's measures, they responded with more demonization for the very same outcome they delivered to their own populations. China took the bait and the world will pay heavily for it now.

{16. The US-NATO war against Russia is a milestone in the progression to World War III. The essential cause and nature of a war is not determined by what country “fired the first shot,” but by the socioeconomic and geopolitical interests of the classes controlling the countries engaged in the conflict. Ukraine has been placed by its corrupt capitalist oligarchy at the disposal of US and European imperialism in a proxy war. Its aim is the defeat of Russia, for the purpose of 1) dismembering this vast country and securing control over its immense supply of critical natural resources, 2) removing all obstacles to imperialist domination, under the aegis of the United States, of the Eurasian subcontinent; and 3) completing the encirclement of China and its subordination, through a combination of economic and military measures, to American imperialism.}

That's the separation from the delusional reality that most live in. However, I would argue it's more of a realm of the international ruling elite rather than just American imperialism. Currently we're witnessing the European country's betraying their own citizenship again as was done in WWll. As they fund and support the fascist Nazi's of Ukraine while their economies self destruct within the manufactured cancel culture of Russia, which was a significant supplier of stability in regards to energy cost and food resources. While this fascism is growing worldwide, it will inevitably come to light within the US. Where the media is allowing it to slip under the radar.

{18. The United States viewed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an opportunity to utilize its military power to establish unrivaled domination throughout the world. It was glorified by the propagandists of imperialism as a “unipolar moment” in which the US would dictate a “New World Order” in the interests of Wall Street. A 1992 Pentagon strategy document proclaimed that US strategy had to be based “on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.”}

In other words. As the US growingly became the worlds policing element after WWll, as slaves to the ruling elite, the vision is now of one of replacing Brussels as the city at the heart of Europe? The US becoming the heart of the world. The US is seemingly orchestrating the collapse of Europe at the behest of the elite. As the UK did during the lead up to WWll with the help of the US bank and its select corporations. I've been warning that the signs were all present of a recycling of that era. And they keep becoming clearer. It's fascist nature growing stronger every day. It's deeply entwined into our governments and a compliant media. Who owns the vastness of the worlds MSCMs? It provides the only relevant path to acknowledgment if you correctly read between their deceptive delivery of information.

As WSWS goes on to outline the vast list of resources in Russia, one only needs a minute to review other regime changes to understand the real reasoning we have a war in Ukraine. Pick your poison. You're quite naive not to understand this, a fool, or of an ideology that accepts white anglo warring for plundering and genocide agendas to achieve world dominance. Democracy and freedom are not present within these agendas! They are truly poisons. For great army's have been attempting to plunder Russia for century's. And they've all had their asses handed to them. Even after reaching far into her. And many in the world today rely on her and understand what her collapse would mean. Lets talk about waking a sleeping giant now.

The January 6 coup and the crisis of American democracy

{35. The recklessness of US foreign policy cannot be understood solely in relation to the geopolitical interests of American imperialism. A central factor is the extreme domestic crisis within the United States itself. For all its dreams of global conquest, the American ruling class presides over an increasingly dysfunctional political system. As far back as the Clinton impeachment crisis of 1998-99 and the Supreme Court’s intervention in 2000 to suppress the counting of votes and award the presidency to George W. Bush, the International Committee has warned that the American ruling class was moving toward dictatorial forms of rule.

36. This protracted process of anti-democratic degeneration culminated on January 6, 2021 in Donald Trump’s attempt to carry out a fascistic coup to block the transfer of power and establish a presidential dictatorship. This coup had the support of the majority of the Republican Party and significant elements within the ruling class and the military-state apparatus.

37. Trump by no means represents the only threat of fascistic authoritarianism in American politics. The Republican Party largely rejects traditional democratic norms and seeks to create an authoritarian state which will ruthlessly suppress political opposition, as shown by the emergence of such figures as Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida. The Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has unleashed a wave of anti-democratic state laws criminalizing abortion. Local police continue to kill more than 1,000 people every year. And underlying all these manifestations of the erosion of democracy there is continuous growth of the machinery of domestic repression: massive agencies of surveillance and repression like the NSA and FBI, and their counterparts in every state and major city.

38. Throughout Europe, fascist parties have been politically legitimized, providing critical political support for the promotion of militarism, the abandonment of public health measures, the attack on immigrants and refugees, and, above all, preparations for a confrontation with the working class.

39. In the present situation, the pressure of the objective crisis drives the ruling elite to abandon democratic forms of rule and strike a preemptive blow against the emerging movement of the working class.}

The economic crisis of American and world capitalism

44. The extreme political instability is driven, in the final analysis, by the increasingly unstable economic and financial situation. The central element of ruling class policy over the last three decades has been the infusion of ever greater sums of liquidity into the markets. This began in the aftermath of the “Volcker Shock” of 1979—the period when the US Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker sharply raised interest rates to manufacture a recession and drive up unemployment. A sustained period of low interest rates that followed, beginning in the 1990s and extending through the first two decades of the 20th century, funneled money into the financial markets and fueled rising share values.

45. The American ruling class responded to the 2008 economic and financial meltdown with a bailout of Wall Street. The national debt was doubled virtually overnight to finance the purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars in speculative assets by the Federal Reserve. This was repeated on an even greater scale in 2020 during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, propelling share values to record levels amidst mass death and social misery.

46. The policy of the ruling class, led by the United States, was to inflate financial assets through the printing of money, while keeping wages low through the suppression of the class struggle. Wealth—of the corporate and financial elite, but also significant sections of the upper-middle class—was increasingly divorced from the actual process of production.

47. From the standpoint of the ruling class, the impact of interest rate hikes on the stock market is seen as a necessary evil to achieve the more important strategic aim: beating back resistance in the working class to the staggering decline in its standard of living over the past year. In August, when Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced that there would be no let-up on interest rate rises, he stressed that it was necessary to create “softer labor market conditions”—that is, create mass unemployment—which would “bring some pain to households and businesses.”}

Lay offs in banking and tech corporations are in the news virtually daily now. It will reach lower waged jobs at higher levels eventually. The rest of the article goes on to detail economic conditions globally. What our MSCM doesn't fully deliver to us. If you're in the US be slightly glad. For now. The rate of inflation we're witnessing, while tough for so many in poverty and lower class, isn't shit compared to a wide range of the world. Eventually it will come home to roost. To a boil. Europe is inflamed with their governments for their support and funding of the Ukraine war off their backs while in dire straights. Those in the US need to better inform themselves of the reality and get on parr with our world citizens over there. Before we get thrown under the bus also. The longer we allow this atrocity keep happening on a world scale, the more the potential of a world war become inevitable.