We call on all comrades, as well as all workers, students and intellectuals who are striving across the world to oppose wars, tyrannies and poverty.
Today, we are placed in the middle of a world-historical upheaval where one era ends and another begins.
After its first outbreak in Wuhan, China, the new coronavirus swept across the world in no time, riding on the free movement of 'people, goods and money' across borders, on a tide of the so-called global economy. Those who were frightened at this pandemic were state rulers and capitalists, who had been intoxicated until quite recently with a global expansion of the capitalist economy. In a flurry, rulers closed borders and locked down cities, while capitalists stopped production. Then, with inexcusable cruelty, they sacked and abandoned workers to save their profits.
The world economy has frozen up instantly. What has become tangible amid this 'pandemic depression' is a cruel class division in a classic, 19th century form, together with impoverishment. This means that a death convulsion of late capitalism has started. In the words of Karl Marx, late capitalism is producing its gravediggers every day.
This is not all. Amid the ongoing pandemic, today's world has turned all at once to the 'US-China cold war', which may cause a fire of war at any moment. Its active element is the one that shamelessly displays the anti-Marxist flag of 'market socialism', i.e. neo-Stalinist China. 'The COVID-19 pandemic has brought an end to the American century' is an undisguised expression that appeared in a Chinese official newspaper. The Xi Jinping government of China, witnessing American imperialism writhing in agonies from the rampant coronavirus infection, started to accelerate its political and military offensives, as much as to say 'The time has come', towards the achievement of 'China's dream' to become the ruler of the world in place of US imperialism by the middle of the century. 'The 21st century's Tiananmen repression' against the Hong Kong people, or the strangling of 'one country, two systems', is the signal gunfire that shows this ambition of the Chinese bureaucracy. With this as an impetus, the real possibility of the outbreak of a Third World War is increasing.
We call on workers and people all over the world. War begets poverty, and poverty begets war. Now is the time for the world working class to unite and develop an antiwar struggle to break through the crisis of war created by the US-China cold war, simultaneously with a politico-economic struggle to beat up the government and the ruling class who are dumping all their troubles on the working class amid the pandemic depression.
We are holding the 58th International Antiwar Assemblies on August 2nd
in Tokyo and six other cities in Japan. We call on people across the world
who are suffering from wars and poverty. With one heart and mind, let us
launch a struggle aimed to change the 'dark 21st century' into a brilliant
proletarian century! '
(Continued.)
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