The Middle East volcano is in a permanent eruption producing new imperialist wars and national rebellions. Latin America, the backyard of Yankee imperialism, is shaken by tremendous upheavals, from Venezuela and Ecuador to Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico. In Europe, unprecedented mass youth mobilizations in France and in Greece as well as the Sarkozy election mark a new phase of major social confrontations. Political regime crises erupt in Italy, Turkey, Spain, Britain, above all in the United States. Tensions rapidly grow between Russia and the United States reminding the Cold War. Fiscal crises, financial bubbles and enormous economic imbalances function as time bombs in the world capitalist economy. Hundreds of millions all over the planet, both in the center and in the periphery, face mass impoverishment, unemployment, over-exploitation, and deterioration of all living conditions. Class war is on the agenda.
World Capitalism is shaken by convulsions constantly disrupting all relations among classes and between States, breaking all social, political or economic equilibrium and making re-stabilization precarious and temporary.
World developments are characterized in the current period above all by spasmodic, sharp zigzags.
The stalemate of US imperialism in Iraq and the recommendations of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton report for a staged withdrawal from the Iraqi swamp were answered by Bush-Cheney's bellicose "surge", the sending of 30.000 supplementary troops in Baghdad - and the obvious failure of this escalation to achieve its aims.
The defeat of the Zionist Israeli Army in Lebanon in 2006 was followed by the deepest crisis and political-moral disintegration of the Zionist regime and then, with new attempts to destroy the Palestinian national cause by barbaric attacks on the scattered Palestinian civilian population, the acceleration of building of the apartheid Wall and the mobilization of Fatah forces under Abbas to destroy Hamas and popular resistance in Gaza, an attempt that has failed.
In Europe, the feverish zigzags of the situation are manifested above all in its political heart: in France. The biggest youth movement after May '68, the mass mobilization in February-March 2006 against the CPE (Contract of First Employment) that obliged the right wing government to retreat was followed by the electoral victory of the right wing populist Sarkozy who pledged to "terminate the legacy of May '68".
This over all instability and sudden turns to the left and to the right are manifestations of a social system, world capitalism, in its historical decline and crisis. Its material bases are undermined by the accumulation and exacerbation of all the contradictions of the capital system.
Finance capital globalization associated with the process of capitalist restoration in China and Russia did not open a long term way out from the systemic crisis but created an ocean of debt covering the entire planet, functioning as real time bombs. Some of the innumerable bubbles of the recent period, a decade after the 1997 Asian crash, for ex. the greatest housing bubble in US history are already in the process of bursting. In its annual report the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bankers' bank, sounded the alarm that "the conditions which led up to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Asian crises in the 1990s were reflected in the current environment." (Daily Telegraph, London, 26 June 2007). Over-accumulation, as showed by the monstrous developments of fictitious capital, is turning from a blessing for the speculators and the financial oligarchy of bourgeois parasites into their worst nightmare.
The axis connecting a rapidly expanding China as the most important center of accumulation of global capital with an over-indebted US economy burdened with huge deficits, while it worked in the years after the financial shock of 2000 as the driving fore of recovery, is starting now to be shaken by tremors such as the meltdown of February 27 in the Chinese stock markets and later on May 30, 2007.
As the CRFI previously has stressed, the infamous "war on terror' launched by the Bush Administration with the pretext of the 9/11 attacks, first against Afghanistan, then against Iraq and now threatening to be extended in more countries, was driven by the urgent need to find a way out of the global crisis of the system in the post Cold War chaotic world. US imperialism above all needed to reshape the political map of the oil producing Middle East and Central Asia to establish under new terms US world supremacy against its present or potential rivals.
Six years later, this world-wide imperialist war campaign has miserably failed and has backfired producing regime crises both in belligerent and non belligerent countries.