Franz J.T. Lee, February, 2009
World corporate imperialism cannot offer any lasting solution to the current crisis without annihilating itself
Economic recession, not only threw Iceland into the throes of bankruptcy, political protests against the social crisis, now even are toppling its government. Obviously, because of structural recession, elsewhere this type of economic collapse will continue.
Will Ukraine be next? And finally, who?
According to various international press agencies, currently Caterpillar, Philips, Pfizer, Microsoft and other transnational corporations are beginning to launch massive ill-fated, gigantic, global layoffs, a disastrous shock wave for the international working classes. The capitalist owners and managers of these giant corporations are not concerned about the cost of living of hundred thousands of their wage slaves, about the lost or dwindling salaries which fling whole lower social classes into adverse poverty and dire misery.
These finance moguls are just worried about the deceleration of the accumulation of capital and profits on a world scale, stagnation of economic growth ... that is, of the merciless economic exploitation of nature and society ... which directly produces recession, depression, bankruptcy, falling rates of profits, merging, concentration, brutal genocide, labor uprisings and mass protests; in short, social, political and economic class struggles and world wars.
At the moment the metropolitan working and middle classes are feeling the brunt of world recession, of layoffs. Some individual members of the capitalist classes are becoming paupers overnight; at last, they could also enjoy bourgeois 'democracy', however, instead of experiencing labor hell on earth, by joining the starving armies of billions of 'wretched of the earth', they rather prefer to commit suicide.
Let us just
mention a few examples of the economic attacks on the global working
classes.
In Europe, what happened to Philips in the
electrical industry? Its current account showed that it lost 1,500
million euros ($1,900 million); since 2003, this did not occur in any
quarter of a year. What was the immediate reaction, to save capital
and costs? 6,000 jobs were eliminated. For similar reasons, ING, also
in the electrical industry, and the steel maker Corus followed suit.
The former sacked 7,000 of its 130,000 workers; the latter plans to
eliminate 3,500 globally, including 2,500 in Britain alone.
In the USA, the same is happening.
Alone this week major US corporations sacked approximately 75,000 workers nationally and internationally.
This year Corning Inc. which produces fiber-optic equipment will cut 3,500 jobs, abut 13 percent of its total labor force. In the field of construction Caterpillar sacked 20,000 workers; Pfizer is absorbing its rival Wyeth, but it already announces that by 2011, 10 percent of its current labor force will be eliminated.
The
rearrangement plan of Sprint Nextel eventually will cost 8,000
workers their jobs, their means of existence.
(See:
Similarly,
the other big construction firm Home Depot will sack 7,000 of its
employees by March 2009. General Motors still in a technical 'strike'
also plans to get rid of 2,000 workers; even Microsoft and
Harley-Davidson will sack thousands of laborers within the next
months.
(See:
http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n127737.html )
President
Barack Obama, more precisely, the Democratic Party can not and will
not offer any viable solution to the current recession. Its $825
billion stimulus package will only serve the economic class needs and
interests of the United States financial elites.
In
fact, according to Robert Stevens, also the Fed cannot stop the fast
economic deterioration:
(See:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/econ-j28.shtml )
Capitalism
has survived quite a few structural recessions and depressions, could
adapt itself again at a cost of colossal destruction of
infrastructures, capital and human lives. In mesocosm, in the past,
in quantitative geographic expansion, in imperialist conquest, that
is, in ransacking and plundering the whole planet, this was still
possible, however, now, in its qualitative realization, in the
globalization of its French Revolution (and of its Industrial
Revolution), capitalism is confronting its alpha and omega.