Foreword
In mid-August, Wall Street and also European stock markets indicators collapsed, fearing that a new recession will break out in the United States. Many analysts attribute this fall in the markets to Trump’s ‘trade war’ with China. We, revolutionary socialists, think the opposite. That the underlying cause of this collapse of the world stock exchanges and of the dispute with China itself lies in the failure to overcome the acute crisis of the capitalist economy unleashed in 2007. The stock market crashes are only an expression of that underlying crisis.
Precisely this new issue of International Correspondence is largely devoted to the so-called “trade war” of Trump and China and its relationship with the global crisis of the capitalist economy. Of course, the friction with China pours more fuel in the crisis’s fire. But it is a global crisis of the capitalist-imperialist system. That is why Germany’s economy, the head of European imperialism, is also slowed. The German GDP contracted in the second quarter by 0.1 per cent. But the great concern of imperialism is that a new recession be confirmed in the United States. In our previous issue, we said that, although its GDP had grown 2.9 per cent in 2018, “those positive numbers show clay feet. The American economy has grown under the artificial impulse that meant the cut of taxes to the rich and the companies (…) that Trump launched at the beginning of his mandate. The large corporations took advantage of this to launch an authentic speculative feast (…)”. In general, in all the continents of the world, Europe, Asia, Latin America, have already entered into recession or are on that path. The United States would be close to joining this global trend.
The crisis and decline of the capitalist-imperialist system also express themselves in the catastrophe of climate change and the crisis in Argentina, topics that we develop in this edition.
Imperialism and its allied governments want the workers and the exploited sectors to pay the capitalist crisis. This is the fight open all over the world for workers and popular struggles.
