RCEP with China and India

The RCEP is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership sponsored by China to create an Asian sphere of interest separate from the US dominated TPPA. We can view it as an enlarged BRICS for Southern Asia but which includes South Korea and Japan, the other regional imperialist power, as well as Australia and New Zealand (see graph above).

Is it an instrument of Chinese imperialism? Yes, but Japan and South Korea are trying to act as stalking horses for US imperialism in inserting corporate investor provisions into the RCEP.

NZ has already capitulated to the TPPA as a semi-colony of the US. Now the NZ ruling class wants to join the RCEP. Like the TPPA we need to add the RCEP to the list of imperialist attacks on NZ economic sovereignty and fight to reject it as a tool of Chinese corporate dominance of the region. We need to take our cue from India the largest semi-colony in the region that is already subordinated to China in the BRICS.

India is holding the line against imperialism rejecting the role of Corporates dominating national sovereignty. If the ‘investor protection’ rules are included then big pharma will attempt to stop India being the main provider of generic drugs eating into their profits. 

So we have here an insight into the relative roles of China and India in the world economy. Obama has just visited India to promote a ‘strategic partnership’ with the US. So India as a oppressed country is increasingly subject to rival pressures from the two big imperialist blocs to plunder its resources and extract superprofits.

We can see this reflected in the politics of the ruling Modi Government which is using rabid Hindutva nationalism to divide and rule the masses. As we argued in our last issue the pressure to solve the crisis of imperialism at the expense of the semi-colonies is transmitted downwards by the national bourgeoisies onto the working people.

One of the main demands of the labor movement in all the countries subjected to TPPA and RCEP type ‘partnerships’ must be the rejection of all such agreements as tools of either, or both, US and Chinese imperialism, and a determination to mobilise and coordinate international strike action to stop them! 

For a Socialist United States of the Asia-Pacific!

Brexit: a diversion from the revolution

French workers strike against EU labor law

Marxist economist Michael Roberts has commented on what is at stake in the British referendum on membership of the EU; nothing, compared to the damage to the EU that the coming global crash will cause. That’s a dose of Marxist realism.

Greek fake Marxist Yanis Veroufakis wants Britain to stay and save EU imperialism from itself! He is only the latest of a left social democratic tradition supporting ‘social Europe’- the figleaf covering German imperialism.

One of Veroufakis’ mates who blogs at The Automatic Earth disagrees and says voting for Brexit is the way out for all states as the EU breaks up. This he says is a symptom of the global economic crisis. But he does not explain falling profits as the ultimate cause of this crisis and why workers should take sides and vote for the profits of one or other imperialist power.

The EU is certainly breaking up as a result of the structural crisis of imperialism. The EU was the project of the US to unite Europe under its hegemony. But this was always a futile plan. German imperialism is screwing the Southern periphery of the PIIGS and the other larger imperialist members like Britain and France pushing them towards the exit.

Germany as the dominant imperialist power has emerged at the expense of both the peripheral semi-colonies such as Greece and Ireland, and the declining imperialist powers, Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Increasingly their ruling classes are poised to exit to escape the death grip of German imperialism.

Whether the British bosses (or the bosses of France, Italy, Spain or Portugal etc) exit the EU, it makes no difference to the working class. Workers have no class interest in voting for one or other fractions of their imperialist bourgeoisies.

Backing one fraction of the national bourgeoisie as ‘progressive’ diverts the working class from taking independent action against their own imperialism. It also diverts it from supporting the struggles of workers in the semi-colonies to break away from the EU.

European workers must unite across borders to struggle against the attacks of workers by all the imperialist powers. Workers must oppose the ruling class enemy at home, and mobilise to defend the struggles of the semi-colonies to break with imperialism.

For a United Socialist States of Europe!