The need to present an overview of this issue of Internationalist Communist draws sharply into focus the gravity of the situation faced by the world's workers. As the longest economic crisis in capitalism's history continues on its downward spiral there is no let-up in the attacks on the people who produce the world's wealth. Profit - the search for the highest possible return on capital invested - has always been the motive force of capital. Today, when returns on manufacturing investment are at a post-war low, capital's response has been twofold. On the one hand it is ruthlessly paring down production costs, above all the cost of labour power - both direct (jobs and wages) and indirect (pensions, health and welfare). (See the article on Korea and our statement on unemployment.) On the other, it is putting more and more of its money capital into the booming financial sphere. Here there are higher returns on offer, the highest of all involving the highest risk. It is a sign of the rottenness of capitalism as a social system that even the sphere of finance capital has gone beyond the picture drawn by Hilferding. Today this most parasitic of all capital is not principally concerned in getting paid for recycling surplus value from the metropoles to more profitable manufacturing and infrastructure investments abroad. Aside from good old stock market gambling and lending out to overspent governments ($595 bn of US treasury bonds are in the hands of foreign banks) it is increasingly involved in the sort of short term speculation that contributes nothing at all to the accumulation of surplus value in the “real economy”. From currency speculation to futures and derivatives, through to outright swindles, all the respectable (and not so respectable) bourgeois banks and investment houses are playing the game - and getting their fingers burnt. Sooner or later the whole precarious international network built up on this parastitic fictitious capital will come tumbling down and the Alabania savings scam will appear trivial by comparison. (British pension funds alone have 500bn invested in finance markets.)

Part and parcel of these desperate attempts to improve the rate of return on capital is the process of pulling down barriers - legal, socio-cultural, political - to where and how it can invest. This is a global process and we make no apologies for devoting our attention again in this issue to the question of globalisation. To anyone who thinks that “globalisation” is a way out of the crisis for capitalism, or that it is just a new name for the old capitalist imperialism (simply a myth concocted by the bourgeoisie to get workers to accept horrible working conditions), we recommend “The Two Dimensional State”. Together with its predecessor in the last issue (“Capitals Against Capitalism”) it puts globalisation firmly in the context of the ongoing development of the crisis and establishes a framework to understand the basis for the revival of imperialist power blocs.

For the tendency towards a global economy has not brought an end to imperialist machinations, even if the individual powers, especially in Europe, are not sure where their main interests lie. We can see it in the wider political sphere (as with the US push to extend NATO to Eastern Europe and pre-empt the strengthening of Germany's influence); in the continuation of proxy wars (as in Zaire where French influence has been ousted by the US and its ally, the UK). We can even see it in Albania where, apart from the differences over whether or not to support Berisha, the first incidence of German troops opening fire in a “real situation” since the 2nd World War has been hailed in Germany as a sign of the country's full return to international statehood. (“A watershed in the rehabilitation of the German military” as the Guardian put it.) And now, in the shape of the International Confedertion of Free Trades Unions (ICFTU) we also have the trades unions being used as a direct instrument of imperialism. The tawdry sight of the UK ex-union boss, Bill Jordan, touring the globe making speeches about “labour standards” is being presented by the media as a modern version of the struggle by workers in the 19th century against child labour and appalling working conditions. It is nothing of the kind. As the article on Korea explains, it is part of US and Western European capital's attempts to conserve its own competitive edge and maintain its political influence. The latest example of this is in Burma where the European Trade Union Confedertion and the ICFTU are recommending the removal of “tariff privileges” for Burmese goods in the EC (so much for free trade) as a lever against the Burmese military junta which they want out. At the moment this hasn't happened because France is opposed since its biggest multinational, Total has $1.2bn invested in a gas pipeline project there. A third world war may no longer be at the top of capitalism's agenda but the material force of the economic crisis continues to propel it inexorably towards preparing this “final solution”.

The only alternative is to get rid of the system altogether and use the industrial and technological power it has created as the basis for a humane system controlled by the producers themselves and which directly serves human needs. Perhaps the bourgeoisie sense this themselves. At any rate the apparent need to lie about the Communist Left (especially in France) and lump us with the neo-fascists by saying we have denied the existence of the Nazi extermination camps indicates that capital is not quite so universally confident as it makes out about the “death of communism”. However, it is not relatively obscure propaganda such as this which is preventing the revival of a movement devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of capital inside the working class. Before that can happen the weak forces who are at present defending the communist programme will need to have unified their efforts to create the basis for an international organisation capable of providing an effective leadership in the struggles ahead. The present period should be utilised by us all (here we refer to the attitude of Programma Comunista - see p.16 - and the polemic with the ICC) to resolve political differences and to strengthen our capacity to fight for a new world.