Asian Marxist Review – Editor’s Note – Winter 2007-08

The staggering collapse of the dollar has sent shock waves throughout stock markets around the world. The dollar's decline already amounts to the biggest default in history, having wiped far more off the value of foreigners' assets than any emerging market has ever done. The turbulent waters towards which the world economy is heading has exposed the fragility and internal decay of the capitalist system. The nervous and worried bourgeois economists are in a state of doom and gloom.

In the last twenty years there has been hardly any stability and respite for the masses of this planet, even in the epoch of a so-called "non-cyclical" boom of world capitalism. The downturn and prospect of a deep recession is opening up a period of even greater storms and stress on a world scale.

The basic contradiction of capitalism - the social character of production and private character of appropriation - is exploding with an unprecedented severity. The so-called Asiatic boom and growth is miserably exposing its contradictory nature and is creating an enormous gap among the classes.

The deafening blare and bluster of the growth rates in India, China and other Asian countries has become a stigma and a curse for teeming millions being subjected to this rapacious capitalist growth. The social tremors are beginning to reverberate within the billionaire Mandarins of the Chinese bureaucracy, which masquerade as "Communist Party" leaders. It is neither communist nor a party but a bureaucracy which has now become the tool of the richest gangsters in the world. The tremors within the Chinese society are bound to erupt into an earthquake which will bring the whole edifice of Chinese Capitalism crumbling down. The degree of the diversity and unevenness of growth in China is shown by the fact that 90% of this growth is based in just 26 of the thousands of cities and towns of China. Paradoxically this investment has been instrumental in creating the largest proletariat in the world, the vast majority of which is forced to work in atrocious conditions. When this huge force takes the revolutionary path, with the awakening of this China, the whole world will tremble.

The devastation of Indian society by the "free market economy" and its astronomical growth rates is unprecedented even by Indian standards. However, according to an article in Newsweek, out of a population of 1.1 billion, barely 200 million are involved in this economic humbug. Nine hundred million deprived souls in India are plunged into an abyss of misery, poverty and disease. From their rotting shantytowns and dying villages they watch with disdain the fireworks of this economic "miracle" so much admired and celebrated by the Western imperialist media and financial institutions.

Vulture Capitalism is now piercing the already unstable social fabric of India: From the frying pan into fire! And the irony is that the most favourite chief ministers of India for the Ambanis, Tatas, Birlas, Mittals and other leeching dynasties of Indian bourgeois, are from the two opposite extremes of the so-called political spectrum of India, Nirandra Modi, the obscurantist Hindu fanatical monster from Gujarat and the CPI (M)'s wily poet of West Bengal adorned by western capitalism. The horrendous brutalities of Modi have been exposed. Nandigram is one instance that has exposed the real nature of the economic doctrine of present-day Stalinism.

The (SEZ's) special economic zones when first created by the Left Front government in Bengal were dubbed as the "Special Exploitation Zones". Now, after the massacres in Nandigram and Singhur they are being named as "Special Extermination Zones" on the placards in the demonstrations against this repression. The irony is that the SEZ being set up in Nandigram by the CPI (M) government is for an Indonesian petrochemical multinational, the Salim Group. This is the company of Indonesian brutal dictator General Suharto who carried out the genocide of the Communists Party of Indonesia, in which 1.5 million communists and their families were massacred in the1960s.

In spite of all this India is in the throes of various revolts. Apart from the proletarian and peasant struggles, 30% of Indian districts are now under the control of the Maoist and other guerrilla groups. Cracks in the left-wing parties are also clearly discernible.

The debacle of America in Iraq, yet another failed attempt at resolving the Palestinian question by imperialism, the unrest in Egypt, the intensifying crisis of the reactionary monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the sharpening turmoil and increasing fundamentalist oppression in Iran, NATO's futile war and grotesque brutalities in Afghanistan (the leaked NATO map reveals half of Afghanistan is dominated by the Taliban), the stark reality of Talibanisation in Afghanistan and the adjoining areas of Pakistan, the crushing of the workers' movement in Malaysia , the Burmese quagmire and widespread, poverty deprivation and ruin across Asia cannot go on forever.

This raging lava will explode sooner or later. A revolutionary movement in any country will ignite a revolutionary storm reminiscent of the 1950s and 1960s, albeit on a higher plane. All these societies are now in throes of extreme strain and stress. The masses are seething with revolt.

The two million toiling masses who came to Karachi Airport on Benazir's arrival on October 18, 2007, were there not to get a glimpse of her, but to express their will and determination to change this agonizing system. If Benazir fails them, yet again they will burst into revolutionary upheaval, the ferocity of which will overshadow the 1968-69 revolution throughout the land. A socialist victory in Pakistan will ignite the flames of revolutionary upheavals far and beyond.