The Final Hours ?

A world convulsed by crises

From WSWS

Over the past month, the world has been gripped by a proliferation of crises—economic, geopolitical, social—erupting on a daily basis, interacting with each other, and raising the spectre of a global calamity.

On the economic front, international financial markets have swung wildly between massive gains and losses, as governments and central banks have sought desperately to counter the impact of a gathering slump in production and investment that threatens to topple the financial house of cards built up since the Wall Street crash of 2008.

The Chinese economy, world capitalism’s premier cheap-labor platform, which provided the bulk of economic growth after the financial crash, is foundering, along with a host of other so-called “emerging market economies.”

On the geopolitical front, tensions between the major capitalist powers are sharpening under the impact of social disasters produced by imperialist wars that have ravaged entire countries, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and large parts of Africa. The ruination of much of Central Asia and the Middle East by US imperialism and its European and Gulf allies has unleashed a flood of desperate refugees on a scale not seen since the end of World War II.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants pouring into Europe have exposed the chasm between the solidarity and support for the refugees felt by broad masses of people and the indifference and inhumanity of governments both inside and outside of Europe. The crisis has simultaneously intensified the conflicts that are tearing apart the European Union.

Washington has escalated its diplomatic and military pressure on Russia and China amid new calls for all-out war to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Around the world, the traditional parties of bourgeois rule, both right and “left,” are collapsing under the pressure of unprecedented levels of social inequality and mounting popular anger and discontent. The ruling elites cast about for new means to suppress the class struggle and preempt the development of an independent political movement of the working class. They increasingly rely on pseudo-left parties—Syriza, the German Left Party, the French New Anti-capitalist Party, the International Socialist Organization in the US—to politically disarm the working class and provide them time to impose their reactionary policies.

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