Greek workers light the fuse

The general strike that got under way in Greece today, bringing the country to a standstill, is a foretaste of the struggles to come throughout the capitalist world as the global financial crisis moves from the banking system to debt-ridden sovereign states.

Stock on markets around the world from Europe to Brazil, to the US and Canada fell as the horrible truth dawned on the hedge fund managers that gamble with peoples’ lives. And the truth? It’s a two-headed monster.

Head 1: Greek workers aren’t prepared to accept the pain for a crisis not of their making, including savage wage and pension cuts and tax increases.

Head 2: Greece is just one of the many countries caught up in the consequences of the worsening global crisis and the only “solutions” available will trigger revolt throughout the world.

Spain is reported to be talking to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) about its own bail-out. Iceland remains paralysed after a referendum showed its population overwhelmingly opposed to the terms of the rescue of its banks. None of the major parties contending for votes in Britain’s fraudulent election tomorrow can admit the scale of the assault on the electorate that will follow immediately a government is cobbled together.

According to the Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Munchau, the bailout funds needed for Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and possibly Italy could add up to “somewhere between €500bn ($665bn, £435bn) and €1,000bn”. The demand for new credit from all those countries will drive up interest rates “at a time when they are either in recession or just limping out of one”.

His conclusion? “The private sector in some of those countries is simply not viable at those higher rates.” It’s a prescient conclusion. In other words it means capitalist production is no longer sustainable. But that doesn’t stop them trying to fix it.

The turmoil in Greece began when the Greek government, led by the “socialist” PASOK party, found it impossible to pay the interest on loans made to cover the country’s soaring budget deficit. But even the three-year bail out package totalling nearly £100 billion, funded by the Eurozone countries and the IMF, may be inadequate for the purpose, such is the level of indebtedness.

Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou, looking both ways, said Greece had been called on to make a "basic choice between collapse or salvation". He said: "It is not going to be easy on Greek citizens, despite the efforts that have been made and will continue to be made to protect the weakest in society." But he then acknowledged the real intent – to win back the trust of the lenders: “The whole idea of the programme is … return to markets as soon as possible, so we’re hoping that next year we’ll be doing that.”

New emergency legislation authorising the cuts and tax rises is now being drafted and is due to be put before parliament for approval by the end of the week in time for the IMF’s Board meeting on Sunday to consider Greece’s application for help. It’s there and in the boardrooms of the capitalist corporations and financial markets that the key decisions are made affecting the lives of ordinary people in every country.

No one anywhere in the world voted for the bail-out of the global banking system funded by colossal sums of government debt. The “choice” in the British general election is non-existent. Only pain, pain and more pain is on the ballot form, in the form of the three major capitalist parties. Greek workers have lit the fuse of resistance which will spread like wildfire over the coming months. It’s time for a new kind of democracy. Join us on the revolutionary road. Sign up for our conference on May 22^nd.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Dump this 'climate justice' model now

The world is facing an unprecedented crisis in food production. Driving the potential calamity is rapid industrialisation in three decades of corporate-led globalisation and the consequences of intensive agriculture across swathes of Asia.

In the driving seat of the crisis is China, which is struggling to feed 22% of the world’s population with just 10% of its arable land. Speaking in Beijing yesterday, Han Jun, an expert on rural policy, said that maintaining “food security” was now a major challenge. In 30 years, urban residents would rise from the current 47% to 75% of the population, using more land for industry and infrastructure. In the cities, an increasingly meat-based western diet is replacing the more sustainable grain and vegetable-based rural diet.

“The deterioration in soil quality is now a very important problem,” Han told reporters. “I believe improving the quality [of soil] is of equal importance to protecting the amount of arable land.” His warnings come at a time, however, when twice as much nitrogen fertiliser is used on the average hectare of Chinese farmland compared with the global average. And more than a tenth of farmland is polluted by factory waste, including heavy metals and other toxins.

In effect, the wholesale adoption by the Chinese ruling Stalinist elites of corporate, profit-driven development, is creating a crisis for the rural and urban poor, while the bureaucrats get rich quick. They are in the forefront of buying up potential development land and selling it at vast premiums, for example.

Han’s plea for a more scientific use of fertilisers, including the use of organic fertiliser from human waste is a much more sustainable approach. But his appeal contradicts the latest decisions of the Chinese government.

It has approved two new strains of genetically modified rice, threatening indigenous strains and forcing farmers to buy seed from corporations. And, Beijing is also supporting “agricultural entrepreneurs” in buying up plantation land in neighbouring Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

It is even possible it could become profitable to export to China food grown on the thousands of hectares of African plantations now owned by Chinese agri-businesses. Initially the aim was to grow food for local sale but that could change. Taking this food out of the African market would increase prices and undermine food security even further.

So the notion that carbon emissions should be cut in the developed economies in order that China, India and Indonesia can increase theirs while continuing down this well-worn and disastrous profit-driven road, is not “climate justice” or justice of any kind.

Fair and equal development can only be achieved within an international model, which challenges the right of the corporations and their client governments – wherever they are in the world – to go on destroying land, people and eco-systems in pursuit of profit.

As we say in our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions: “The concept of climate justice, which underpins the ‘contraction and convergence’ idea, needs to be expanded to include justice within countries and not just between them...

“A new kind of international co-operation would bring together the peoples of the planet in a democratic forum to plan together to halt the growth in emissions and to mitigate the impacts that are now inevitable. They would draw on all the expertise represented by climate scientists, world food and health experts and support each others’ development towards self-government and economic independence.”

Join us in helping to win people over to this truly revolutionary idea, with a view to putting it into practice with some urgency.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Constructing a new world

History has, of course, seen many manifestos come and go. But the social transformation needed to lift societies out of crisis do not simply appear spontaneously. It is vital to break free from received wisdoms and stereotypes and work out solutions to problems that until now have appeared insoluble.

So we are proud to announce that our draft Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions goes live online today. The manifesto points to the contradictions with the capitalist system of production as the real causes of the ecological, economic and political crises that overshadow our world while proposing far-reaching solutions.

Revolutionary changes in history have been inspired by manifestos and declarations of one kind or another. You only have to think of Protestant reformer Luther’s 95 Theses nailed to a church door in 1517, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France in 1789, the Communist Manifesto of 1848 by Marx and Engels and the April Theses put forward by Lenin in 1917, to name but a few.

Thus, it is a happy coincidence that the life and work of a man who helped to instigate a cultural revolution in Europe is being celebrated in a major exhibition opening at Tate Modern this week. Theo Van Doesburg, who launched the magazine and the movement called De Stijl in 1917, was a Renaissance man. He was not only a painter, architect and designer, but also a writer and poet. Above all, he created an international network to change the course of art and life.

Van Doesburg, along with fellow painter Piet Mondrian, and other collaborators, worked for the possibility of a “deepened artistic culture” in which artists working in different fields would realise that they shared a common language. Tate Modern director Vicente Todolì and Edwin Jacobs, the curators, note that Van Doesburg “advocated collective enterprise rather than individualism”.

The Dutch artist sought to change not only the face of art, but the world itself. For him as for other avant-garde artists, what counted was how their art could promote new visions for life and society. Unlike Mondrian who has overshadowed him, Van Doesburg “saw art not on a singular course, but opening to multiple possibilities, as a bridge from the present to the future”.

Constructing a New World shows how the years between 1916 and the mid-1920s saw an unparalleled cultural flowering, spearheaded by a host of avant-garde magazines, sweep through Europe as designer-artists like Van Doesburg, El Lissitsky and Moholy Nagy travelled extensively, cross-fertilising each other’s countries and movements with innovations in all branches of the arts, including film, music and sculpture.

Modernism, just like the notion that revolutionary change is possible, has been much maligned and rejected over the past decades. The exhibition is a welcome chance to reassess it. Naturally, there was plenty of chaos, conflicts, falling outs and rows as different tendencies asserted themselves.

But the spirit of inquiry and collaboration, a multi-disciplinary approach towards human life and culture, the desire to use technology to provide a better life for the whole of society, a profound internationalism, the enthusiasm for scientific knowledge, the rejection of dogma and political censorship remain totally relevant.

It is in that same spirit that we ask you to participate and help widen the discussion about the Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions so that it becomes a real instrument to inspire political, social and cultural change.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary