As we mark May Day 2025, we are in the midst of an unfolding capitalist crisis.
Where things stand
The Paris climate targets are in the rear-view window. Last year world temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
The war in Gaza is undoubtedly a genocide. Israel has torn up the ceasefire, cut off all essential supplies and returned to its war of extermination upon the Palestinian people.
In the United States, Donald Trump leads a fascist movement and is actively building an authoritarian regime. Trump is seeking to re-order the political system in the United States, and the position of the United States within the world.
This poses a dire problem for Australian capitalism. Australia remains a sub-imperial power within the US imperial system which Trump regards as obsolete. Australian capitalism relies on the threat of the United States to exert power within its region. Australia is now stuck begging for preferential treatment from an increasingly unpredictable Trump.
Trade wars lead to shooting wars
Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were squarely aimed at China. US capitalists have squealed, and Trump has since announced a stay of execution on most tariffs, except almost all those on China, his main target.
The United States engineered the “age of globalisation” in its own interests. Free trade agreements allowed US companies to move production offshore, pay lower wages to workers, and increase the rate of profit. But this “spatial fix” was only temporary. Profits and growth stagnated, China industrialised and US power declined in the face of increasingly broad global competition.
Trump’s trade war is an attempt to reverse US decline by executive order. The problem is that trade wars all too often develop into shooting wars as states seek to break out of the resulting political and economic crisis.
The way forward
The working class must not pin its hopes on one global power or another. All capitalist economic policy is at the expense of workers and at the expense of our long term survival on this planet.
More than ever we need independent working class power that can fight in the interest of workers, and we need working class solidarity across global borders.
We need to rebuild a fighting union movement, one that can coordinate internationally to place bans on warmongers and shut down polluting industries. To do this we must defeat the collaborationists and bureaucrats who tie our movement to capitalism and the state. We need to build a rank and file movement that can fight and win.
The movement to do this is anarchism. We have announced the Anarchist Communist Federation on May Day because we know that anarchist ideas and methods are essential if we are to rebuild the workers movement as a movement of revolutionary class struggle.
To work comrades, we have a world to win!