Remind Us Of The Origins Of Political Power

Something to do w/ a gun & its barrel, if we recall.

More broadly, the ongoing turmoil in global financial markets and the world economy is being accompanied by warnings from the spokesmen of international finance capital that there is no prospect of pre-crisis conditions returning. Their demands are for increasing austerity measures directed against the working class.

Announcing a 38 percent profit increase this week, the head of the ANZ banking group in Australia, Mike Smith, warned that Australian businesses had been structured for a “bull market and constant growth. What has happened is that, after the crisis, we have an adjustment where certain sections of the economy have suddenly become globally uncompetitive and the models they had operated with are no longer sustainable.” It was “unrealistic,” he said, to expect a return to “pre-crisis times.”

These warnings of a “paradigm shift” underscore the fact that the financial crisis of 2008-2009 was not a cyclical downturn but the start of a massive restructuring of economic and social relations on a global scale, aimed at driving down the social position of the working class to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The global corporate and financial elites are pressing forward with the imposition of this program. The working class must respond by initiating the struggle for political power as the first necessary step towards ending the profit system and implementing a socialist economic program on an international scale.

Waiting for something, workers of the world?