Editorial from Kommunistisk Politik, No. 11, May 24, 2003
When the G8 countries, headed by US president Bush, meet in the French city of Evian, June 1-3, it will be the 28th time since 1975 that the leaders of the richest and most powerful countries – the big imperialist powers – meet in order to plot a course for the future of the world, or rather, to plot their course for maintaining and extending the dominance of imperialism and for pushing forward their globalization in order to ensure giant profits to the multinationals.
What is this forum, which has gradually gained international authority? It is a self-appointed organ whose influence stems from the economic, political and not at least military strength of the participating countries. One could also call it the US selective club of partners and rivals for the coordination of new imperialist campaigns. It is a forum without any legitimacy in international law, and, more importantly, it is a forum with still less legitimacy in the eyes of the peoples because they are realizing that it makes decisions which are against their interests and attack them.
Rightly, the anti-globalization movement ATTAC calls the G8 forum "the inner circle of the leaders of the dominating countries, of the richest and most powerful leaders, of the syndicate of the main share holders of the world economy."
The bourgeois media are not questioning the G8 forum. To them, the club of the rich countries will get together for saving the world from this or that crisis, for ensuring new global growth and progress and mutual peace and friendliness, not at least after the revealing split on the war on Iraq between the powers that will meet in Evian. These powers are trying to heal the wounds so their common exploitation of the rest of the world can continue, benefiting them and harming all others.
In the streets, anti-globalization demonstrators, anti-war activists and anti-imperialists, protesting the powerful, neocolonialist and neoliberal club and the decisions made by it, are calling the legitimacy of the forum in question. The G8 plays a key role in imposing the doctrines and practices of neoliberalism on the world, in removing all obstacles to the unrestrained operations of the multinationals on the global scale and ensuring the access of capital to all markets in the shape of “international investments”, in adjusting the world market and world trade to the needs of the companies, in reducing the influence of the states on the economy and cutting the public expenses, in privatising all public assets, and in undermining the position of the public employees and the trade union movement. The world economy shall not be regulated by the states, but by the global capital market. That has been the top priority of the G8 for many years.
The G8 will hold its meeting in the light of a deepened world economic crisis shaking the economies of the G8 member countries, from the US to Germany and Japan, and they will meet after the war on Iraq which showed the US demand for building a global empire. The US wants its rivals and partners to accept and submit to its new world order. The others are fighting for getting more than just the crumbs that the US offers to leave for them. First and foremost, they are all united by the efforts for ensuring their multinationals the most favourable conditions.
In reality, the G8 summits show that the whole set of neoliberal thinking, policies and practice has failed. Neoliberalism has neither created social progress nor greater wealth; it has made the millionaires even richer and immensely increased the impoverishment and misery among the billions of poor in the world. It has been and continues to be incapable of overcoming the crises of capitalism or finding a way out of the current world economic crisis. Increased militarization and expensive wars, as the war on Iraq, have not overcome the crisis. The neoliberal economic measures have increased the crisis and multiplied its negative social consequences.
Therefore, the message in the street is: Your system is not working! Neoliberalism and its solutions to the crises have failed. Another world is possible, and another world is necessary.
As the Evian joint declaration of a number of Marxist-Leninist parties states:
"The
world that we are aiming at and fighting for has a name: socialism. The way
leading to it is the revolutionary struggle of the working class
and the peoples."
May 20, 2003