Daily Times

Greece has been in the headlines for weeks now. It has proved to be the weakest link of European capitalism. There are more: Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and others are condemned to the same fate. The debt crisis, default and economic decline in Greece have proved beyond any doubt the failure of capitalism to sustain a social welfare state and develop society. The agreement signed at the EU Summit on July 13 is a brutal one, which will force the left wing Syriza government to carry out further attacks on pensions, wages, a massive programme of privatisation, allowing employers to dismiss workers and escalation of indirect taxation (sales tax). This is nothing short of a total submission to the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and Merkel, and a slap on the face of the millions who voted no in the referendum on July 5.
The radical left, reformist government and the leading group in Syriza capitulated to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), EU bankers and capitalists. The working people and youth are not going to do the same. We have witnessed the entry of the masses onto the stage of history — the beginning of the beginning of a revolution. This is beyond the IMF and, more importantly, US imperialism’s current thinking on the Greek agreement. This also explains why the IMF, the third member of the troika, has dropped a bombshell and ripped the agreement to shreds and the notion that Greece will be able to deliver on the promises it has been forced to make. The US is finding it hard to control its frustration at Europe’s insistence on pursuing failed policies that Washington believes could push Greece out of NATO, overthrow capitalism and usher in the dawn of socialism in Greece.
The rising interest in socialism is a worldwide phenomenon: with Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the leadership of the Labour Party in the UK, Pablo Iglesias and the rise of Podemos in Spain and with the US with its anti-Communist McCarthyism past (without a traditional mass workers’ party), we are witnessing a dramatic transformation spearheaded by the youth. The mass pressure and outrage at the murder of innocent blacks in South Carolina have compelled the Senate to remove the Confederate flag from the state’s capitol. Consciousness is rapidly catching up with objective reality as it was thrown far backwards over the last 30 years. The awakening of the US working class will inevitably be prolonged and contradictory; the revival of the US working class has not yet been expressed in a focused way through the unions, as a result of the rotten pro-capitalist policies of the current trade union leadership. Instead, conscious workers are found in movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Fight for $ 15. Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, is competing with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. His call for a political revolution and for democratic socialism resonates with millions of US citizens disappointed with Obama’s false promise of change. After years of anaemic ‘recovery’, austerity and outrageous inequality, his railing against the “billionaire class” has struck a chord from Minneapolis to Maine.
Most people first entering political life tend to look for the path of least resistance and socialism cannot be won through one election, or by electing a single individual, or through a capitalist party. The Democrats cannot serve both the workers and the capitalists. In the final analysis, as a party funded by a corporate US, it will always do its bidding. Even if Sanders were to win the Democratic nomination or the presidency itself, without a mass base and independent party of the working class fighting to go beyond the limits of capitalism, his would be a presidency of crisis, of managing capitalist austerity, savaged by the press and sabotaged by big business. Despite these dangers and limitations, Sanders’ campaign legitimises socialism in a way perhaps never before seen in the US. Had he run as an independent, Sanders could have established the foundations for such a party. Perhaps he will do so in the future. Only time will tell. A recent poll found that ‘only’ 47 percent of US citizens would elect a socialist president. In a three-way race between an independent socialist candidate, a Republican and a Democrat, 47 percent would be more than enough to carry the day. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected with just 39.7 percent of the vote. He went on to wage a revolutionary war against slavery.
It is one of history’s rich ironies that the ongoing debate around the Confederate flag is the only reference being made to the titanic battle between those who depended on slavery to make their profits and those requiring availability of labour for their profit from wage slavery. It should come as no surprise that the bourgeois media and politicians have said very little about the US Civil War on the sesquicentennial of that bloody but necessary conflict. The US capitalist class is so decrepit and fearful of anything even hinting at revolution or class war that they dare not celebrate their own revolutionary past. The reason for this is clear: 150 years after the fall of slavocracy, their system has hit a brick wall and the economic preconditions for a different kind of revolution are now present.
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating and, for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. Without struggle there cannot be any progress. At the beginning of the 21st century, the struggle against all forms of exploitation and oppression was the struggle for socialism.
A new epoch is dawning. The revolutionary tides ebb and flow. We saw the radical left wing resurgence in Latin America from Venezuela to Bolivia. Anti-austerity movements in Europe and Turkey followed by the Arab revolution that swept across the Middle East in 2011 to transform the socio-economic system coercing the lives of the ordinary people of the region. This was followed by the Occupy Wall Street revolt in the US and now the class struggle is on in Europe again. In a world more interconnected than ever before, any revolutionary change in any one country will spread rapidly. The US will not be the last country to be caught up in this class struggle to overthrow a system that inflicts misery and torment on the vast majority of the human race. From Athens to Charleston, the workers of the world are collectively learning and waking up to the realisation that “we have nothing to lose but our chains, and have a world to win”.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com