At no time since the end of the last world war and great depression has the world been so convulsed by the uprisings of the masses as in the eighties. Huge strikes going over to general strikes and then the setting up of barricades in the streets and pitched battles with the police, army and company goons have broken out spontaneously in Belgium, France, Britain, and here in the US, in New Mexico and Wyoming, At this very moment the whole Northern coal district of England is under police occupation and bloody battles an everyday events. This struggle, as in most of the cases, is due to the attempt of the employers directly, or thru their State (“socialist” or otherwise), to close down “unprofitable” heavy industry and throw the workers into the streets forever – smashing their strong unions and hard fought-for conditions and wages – leaving them to find whatever minimum-wage jobs they can in the collapsing economy.
In the neo-colonies and weaker capitalist countries, the fighting has taken the form of general popular uprisings against the price and tax increases ordered by the international banking cartel and its IMF (International Monetary Fund) for the purpose of bleeding more plunder from these countries to try to stave off the collapse of the major imperialist states a little longer. The masses of the “borrower” countries are ordered to pay for the crisis brought on by the steady fall in price of the raw materials and basic! industrial products they export. And to pay still more to the very countries that benefitted from that fall in price of commodities and from the rise in price of the “high-tech” products that flow in the other direction. The IMF has one invariable solution to the dilemma: the poor should be made to pay more, the subsidies on the prices of basic necessities in those countries should be ended. Faced with starvation, the peoples of many countries including the Dominican Republic, Tunisia, Poland, Bolivia, and so on, have gone out into the streets and fought against even the most heavily-armed forces, erecting barricades and continuing their struggles for days, frequently until the reactionary traitor governments were forced to relent and rescind the price increases.
In a number of countries, these struggles have been merged with the general fight against the fascist and military governments installed by the imperialists to screw the maximum profits out of the people. The recent struggles in Azania (S. Africa), Brazil, Chile, etc. are examples and show the masses going to the verge of the revolution. And in Nicaragua, Iran, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Eritrea, Guatemala, and so on, the revolution itself has broken out to save the homeland and bring the masses to power.