In sharp contrast to the millennium hullabaloo which ushered in the year 2000, this issue of Internationalist Communist is a stark reminder of the real situation facing humanity at the turn of the century.

Far from heralding an era of universal peace and prosperity, over a decade after the end of the Cold War capitalism is still exacting its toll of human misery. Over the past year there has hardly been a publication of the International Bureau which has not mentioned the growing impoverishment of the working class both on the periphery and in the heartlands of the system. While bourgeois academics and journalists discuss the meaning of poverty and split hairs over the distinction between its “absolute” and “relative” form, a Marxist analysis points rather to the similarity of the condition of the working class throughout the world when capital is bent on driving down the cost of labour power to offset falling profit rates.

There is no doubt that many workers on the periphery of capitalism are now being paid less than the value of their labour power (or less than subsistence wages) and that this is a consequence of the capitalist crisis and the globalisation which has accompanied it. This is the point of the statement we distributed during the demonstrations against the WTO last November. As with imperialism itself, globalisation is not a policy of the richest capitalist states (although the WTO is trying to create rules for the US and her rival powers to operate by) and the situation of the working class cannot be altered by 'democratising' or even getting rid of the WTO.

Despite the introduction of new technology and the ejection of hundreds of thousands of workers from former key industries in the capitalist metropoles, the age of the internet and the so-called “knowledge economy” has not brought the leap in productivity that would bring world growth rates back to capitalism's pre-crisis levels of the 1950's-1960's. Even in the US, where financial journalists are acclaiming a jump in productivity and putting it down to the impact of new technology, wage rates remain low and the average working week is longer than twenty-five years ago. As the first article indicates, the recent “surge” in US economic growth can be traced to the realm of finance and the dollar's continuing role as the main medium of international exchange rather than any miraculous domestic transformation in an economy which is, as a point of fact, the world's highest debtor state.

This latest in a series of articles on today's globalised economy and the role of finance capital shows that US control of oil markets and pipeline routes is both a reflection of its position as world “superpower” and a means of maintaining it. If it is to continue having the greatest share of the surplus value produced by the world working class - an increasing part of which is in the form of lucrative parasitic financial rake-offs - the US must keep up the value of its currency. It therefore must be able to control the price of what is still the world's most important raw material: oil. In this context the full significance of the emergence of an alternative international currency - the Euro - to challenge the dollar is clear. It marks a stepping up of the imperialist rivalry between Europe and the US, a rivalry which lay behind the war in the Balkans last year, even if it was hidden by the masquerade of the NATO alliance. As yet Europe is not in a position to directly challenge US military-economic might but behind the show of a mutual fight to defend democracy and “freedom” throughout the globe there is the fiercest economic competition, not least over oil and the routing of pipelines in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea areas.

At present most of the oil that reaches the West from the Caspian still comes via Russia - even though Russia is obliged to use a railway diversion round Chechnya to get oil from Baku to its Black Sea port of Novorossisk. The US is desperate to take control away from Russia [and keep Iran side-lined] and has recently extracted promises from the Caspian states to supply oil for its massively expensive proposed pipeline by-passing Russia to Turkey. Meanwhile, the EU has financed the construction of a 515 mile pipeline from Baku to the Georgian port of Supsa on the Black Sea - the terminal was opened in April last year, right in the middle of NATO's Balkan war. The Supsa scheme comes under the EU's stated ambition to revive the “Great Silk Route” between Asia and Europe - part of the overall transport network for the Caucasus and central Asia that the EU is principally financing under the TRACECA project mentioned in the article. Again, the US has been obliged to go along with this and has muscled in with its own “Silk Road Act” but behind the scenes it is promoting its own options, at least for oil. However much the specific internecine feuds amongst Russia's mafia-like ruling class are responsible for the present war in Chechnya, the fact remains that the ex-Soviet states of the Caucasus once again find themselves embroiled in a new version of the old imperialist Great Game, this time involving the US, the EU and Russia. It is a game which presages sharper and bloodier rivalries to come.

Like the recent war in the Balkans, the working class will have absolutely nothing to gain from these inter-imperialist conflicts but we can neither console ourselves that such wars are merely “local” or isolated affairs nor reassure ourselves that a 3rd World War is now off capitalism's agenda. On the contrary, the history of the past decade confirms that the world economic crisis which has dogged capitalism since the beginning of the Seventies, which led to the collapse of the USSR and the Russian bloc, which has spurred on the process of technological restructuring and financial and industrial globalisation, has not been overcome. The world wars of the 20th century were capitalism's answer to previous crises. The same inexorable logic applies today as the debts pile up and the financial rake-offs from the transactions of fictitious capital multiply beyond belief, dwarfing the surplus value that is being produced in the “real economy”.

From a revolutionary and working class political perspective therefore the question of how to oppose capitalist war looms large. If we can say that Lenin's principle of revolutionary defeatism - a plague on both your houses - remains the bedrock we also know that only when the working class is prepared to fight en masse for its own interests can the principle become a concrete political reality. The question of how to oppose war cannot be divorced from the question of establishing a revolutionary organisation which can put forward a clear and concrete analysis of the way forward for the working class. The statement in this issue is an attempt to define the basis for revolutionary defeatism in today's circumstances when revolutionaries are largely divorced from the mass of the working class and the only realistic goal for revolutionary minorities can be to strengthen the nuclei of the future world communist party.

As we have said before, the working class today is in many ways having to relearn how to struggle for itself. The article on Sylvia Pankhurst's revolutionary years is a poignant reminder that the historical repercussions of the lost revolutionary opportunity at the beginning of the 20th century are still with us. One of the tasks of the up and coming generation will be to keep alive the lessons of that experience. In one sense the slate is being wiped clean - Stalinism is dead and a host of academic “marxists” and fellow-travellers have gone to ground or simply taken up new careers in accordance with the new, “no alternative to democratic capitalism” paradigm. The ruling class of course would have the whole of working class revolutionary history erased but that would not alter capitalism's own trajectory towards barbarism.

For revolutionary marxists, however, the millennium celebrations are a reminder that civilisations come and go, flourish and decline. Capitalism is no exception. We have not reached the end of history but in historical terms the decline of capitalist civilisation and the capitalist mode of production are well advanced. Whether or not capitalism self-destructs and reduces the world to a new kind of barbarism or whether a higher form of civilisation, the first classless civilisation, comes into existence will depend on whether the class which produces the wealth is able to overthrow the capitalist state and establish the beginnings of a new mode of production: a world community of freely associated producers who decide collectively what is produced according to social need. Socialism or barbarism! There is still no third road.